The Abyss Beyond Dreams

  ‘Yes. So, you see, no more Heart.’

  ‘But Slvasta’s soul!’ she gasped.

  ‘Yes, I know. But while the Void exists, there’s a very small window to rescue him.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Hold my hand. I’ll take you to a place where he’s still alive.’

  Her thoughts were in turmoil from the grief, from the pain. Nothing made sense. Everything that had happened, everything she’d just been told – it was all just too much to comprehend right now. But this was Coulan’s brother. And he said there was a chance . . . She clung to that single notion. There was nothing else left.

  Bethaneve gripped his hand as if it was the only solid thing remaining in the universe.

  ‘This is going to feel funny,’ he said, ‘but hang on in there. It’s not for long.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Oh, about five minutes should do it.’

  Somehow the world was fading from sight. She thought she was falling away from it, but inwards. Her perception altered weirdly so she could see shapes behind everything solid, but they were the same shapes. Then they shifted, multiplying, flashing past. And she was one of those elusive silhouettes herself. Kneeling on the ground saying something to Demitri. Curling up into a ball. On her knees staring in horror at Slvasta’s murder. Horse racing backwards towards her – Everything stopped, then swept back in at her from all directions.

  She hit the ground hard as her horse charged away. More horses galloped past. Hooves flashing frighteningly close to her head.

  Bethaneve groaned in shock and refreshed pain. Somewhere in the sky above, a dazzling flame was streaking upwards once more. On the ground, the neat farm compound buildings had been reduced to a wasteland of smashed, smouldering wood. ‘What happened?’ she yelled.

  Demitri crouched down beside her; his stern ’paths and firm teekay guiding the stampeding horses clear of them. ‘We went back in time.’

  All she could do was give him a vacant look. ‘What?’

  ‘Look,’ he said, and pointed. The last of the horses cantered off across the fields, scattering regiment troops onto the soil behind them. And there, on the road down below, a battered and bloody Slvasta was lying motionless, but alive. Her gaze swept up the road. Captain Philious was clambering to his feet. He staggered about, regaining his senses, then his teekay lifted a carbine from a stunned regiment trooper. His ex-sight probed round, and found Slvasta. He started off along the road.

  ‘Destiny is a strange thing,’ Demitri said. ‘Normally there is no avoiding it. But here and now you have a chance to alter what you know is about to happen.’

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked the machine man.

  ‘We used you and I’m sorry for that. This is our way of saying thank you. But the decision must be yours.’

  ‘Yes! Oh, great Giu, yes.’

  ‘Of course. But understand this: the future you face after today will no longer be variable. From now on, destiny cannot be circumvented. You must live with what you have done, no matter the consequences.’

  Bethaneve stared at Captain Philious with supreme hatred. ‘I accept my future, whatever it is.’

  ‘Very well.’ Demitri levelled the sniper rifle, took careful aim, and blew Captain Philious’s brains out.

  *

  Pain meant Slvasta was alive. He hadn’t known pain this extreme since the day Quanda had captured him. A pitiful whimper escaped his mouth as he tried to move. Even the slightest motion amplified the pain. His ex-sight probed round weakly, discerning a woman looming over him.

  ‘Bethaneve?’

  ‘Yes, my love. It’s me. Don’t worry, you’re alive, and everything is going to be fine. Now.’

  Slvasta forced his eyes open. A thin grey mist swirled energetically across the valley, the remnants of the flying machine’s mercurial steam cloud. Standing proud amid the whirling vapours, Bethaneve smiled down at him.

  ‘What happened?’ Slvasta asked.

  ‘We won, my love. We won life. We won the future. We crudding won everything.’

  ‘The Fallers?’ he demanded.

  ‘No more.’

  ‘What?’ He tried to lift himself up, and snivelled at the pain. It was the strangest sight. In every field he could see, the farm’s mod-apes and mod-dwarfs were wrestling with the regiment troopers, hundreds of them, squirming round in the mud, holding them in headlocks and arm-twists, pinning them down. ‘Are we in Uracus?’ he asked. ‘It looks like I imagine Uracus to be.’

  ‘No, this is no Uracus. Javier survived, like we did. Yannrith, Tovakar and Andricea are on their way. They’re fetching a cart for you to ride on. We can get away from here before the regiment escapes from the mods, then we’ll go back to Varlan. The people there need us. They need you.’

  ‘A cart? Not one pulled by mod-horses. No mod-horses, Bethaneve. You know that.’

  ‘We’ll see, my love. We’ll see.’

  *

  Laura Brandt unwound her arm from the strap and pushed herself through the cabin’s hatch. The Forest whirled round her. Shuttle Fourteen was performing a lazy nose-over-tail flip every two hundred seconds, with some yaw thrown in just to make the sight even more disorientating.

  Stkpads on her wrists and soles adhered to the fuselage, allowing her to crawl along. With the nerve blocks effectively paralysing the lower half of her right leg, she could only use her left foot.

  She made her way down the side of the forward cabin until she was clinging to the belly, then began the long haul to the tail.

  Peel a wrist stkpad off with a roll – ignore the fact that you’re now only attached by two stkpads and if they fail the shuttle’s tumble will fling you off into Voidspace – and extend the free arm as far as you comfortably can, then press down again. Apply a slight vertical pressure to make sure the stkpad is bonding correctly, then twist the sole’s stkpad free. Bring the leg up as if you’re going into a crouch, press down. Check.

  Repeat, and repeat, and repeat –

  Her u-shadow reported a link opening from an unknown net. ‘Hello, Laura.’

  ‘Who the fuck is this?’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m not a Faller.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘One of the alien-duplicated Ibu and Rojas entities.’

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked in trepidation.

  ‘Nigel Sheldon.’

  ‘What the fuck?’ She could feel Joey’s surprise spilling through the gaiafield to swill round her mind.

  ‘Turn round.’

  Laura froze. Monsters were everywhere. Monsters in the dark. Monsters lurking in places you thought were free of them.

  She peeled a wrist stkpad off the grey fuselage, and contracted her already overtaxed abdominal muscles. Shock was like an electric current charging across her skin. A hundred metres away, a triangular-shaped spaceship, smaller than Shuttle Fourteen, was holding station. In her reference, it was the one spinning.

  ‘Where did you come from?’ she asked.

  ‘I came into the Void to find you. It’s taken a while; I’m sorry about that. But I’m here now.’

  ‘Oh, bollocks. The Commonwealth knows we’re here?’

  ‘The Raiel told me. Look, I’m going EVA to help you, so just don’t panic. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’ She saw a small silver-grey figure float away from the spaceship. It was wearing a neater version of the free-manoeuvre harness that the exopods carried. Tiny puffs of vapour squirted from nozzles as it approached.

  ‘You can tell Joey he’s right. Time is badly screwed up in here.’

  ‘What?’ Laura said.

  Joey’s jolt of incredulity pulsed through the gaiafield.

  ‘Did he really just say that?’ Joey asked.

  The gas jets fired again, seemingly slowing the figure’s rotation. ‘Joey is stuck to the alien sphere; the Rojas and Ibu copies did that to him,’ Nigel told her. ‘It’s drawing him in.’

  ‘Joey!’ she cried. ‘Joey, no. He’s lying, isn’t he? He’s lying.
This is part of their trick.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Joey told her with a sensation of guilty relief. He expanded their gaiafield union to include Nigel.

  ‘Joey,’ Nigel said, ‘after you open the hatch, I’m going to extract your secure memory. When you’re re-lifed, you’ll have complete continuity.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘What do you mean, open the hatch?’ Laura asked.

  ‘He’s overridden the safeties,’ Nigel said. ‘He’s going to let you in so you can use the exopod, but he won’t survive. It was a smart move, Joey. You don’t want to be consumed by the alien. It’s a particularly nasty nanotechnology bioweapon.’

  ‘Cool,’ Joey said. ‘So if you know all this, we’re not travelling backwards, are we? We have to be in a temporal loop, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Wow. Shit, how many times?’

  ‘I’m here now, Joey. This is the last time. I promise.’

  ‘Okay. Thanks.’

  Gas poured out of Nigel’s free-manoeuvre harness. He stopped a metre away from Laura. There was a short tether in his hand. He clipped it to her suit’s utility strip. ‘We’re secure. You can disengage your stkpads now.’

  ‘Oh, bollocks.’ Laura had just realized what they’d been talking about. A temporal loop. That was the Forest’s peculiar quantum signature. Some weird traitor part of her mind had been hoping this was a trick, that the Rojas and Ibu copies were outsmarting her, big time. Again and again and again . . . But they would never know to create a crazy myth of Nigel Sheldon arriving to save everybody – and if they did, then she had no chance of survival anyway. She twisted the remaining stkpads off and drifted free from Fourteen’s fuselage.

  ‘Got you,’ Nigel said. And his arms closed round her. Gas jets fired, moving them away from the shuttle. ‘Joey. Whenever you’re ready.’ They began gliding slowly along the shuttle’s long belly.

  ‘I’m on it. Here we go.’

  Laura looked towards the flat trailing edge of the delta wings, just in time to see a massive fountain of gas streaking out into space as the airlock doors peeled back. Shuttle Fourteen began to move, propelled along a weirdly erratic course, the escaping plume of atmosphere exaggerating its original tumble. Nigel’s free-manoeuvring harness fired continuously, trying to match the shuttle’s gyrations, keeping pace with it.

  There seemed to be an incredible amount of atmosphere in the EVA hangar. Then the furious vent was finally over. A cloud of twinkling ice crystals swarmed around the end of the whirling shuttle, expanding fast.

  Nigel flew them over the lip of the wings, and into the open EVA hangar. Blue emergency lighting cast everything in sharp relief.

  ‘That worked, then,’ Joey said. ‘But I guess you knew it would, right?’

  ‘Yes,’ Nigel said.

  Laura could feel Joey’s emotions through the gaiafield link, satisfaction and fatalism combined. Also fright. He was allowing that to show for the first time. Pain was starting to colour his thoughts now, a dull ache spreading out from his empty lungs. She detached Nigel’s safety line and grabbed a handhold. As soon as she’d steadied herself, she looked at Joey, knowing what she’d see and willing it not to be. ‘Oh, bollocks, Joey. No, no, no.’

  He was stuck to the alien globe. One leg, an arm, and a third of his torso had sunk into it. The side of his head was up against the wrinkled black surface, an ear already absorbed.

  Laura used the handholds to propel herself over to him.

  ‘Don’t touch him,’ Nigel warned.

  ‘Why didn’t you say? Oh, bollocks, Joey, why?’

  Explosive decompression had ruptured capillaries under his skin, turning his flesh scarlet. Blood oozed through his pores and wept out from around his eyeballs. His mouth was open, also emitting a spray of fine scarlet droplets with every heartbeat. ‘Didn’t want you all messed up with sentiment. I was bodylossed the moment the fake Rojas grabbed me. And now Nigel’s here. It’s over before it begins, this time. Everything we did is worthwhile now.’

  ‘Joey . . .’

  ‘Say hi to my re-life clone. Remind me how noble I am.’

  ‘Joey—’

  The gaiafield connection faded out. Laura stared at Joey’s awful ruined face as the blood droplets started to vacuum boil. It was only when the swelling scarlet mist started to smear her helmet that she backed away.

  ‘What now?’ she asked numbly.

  ‘You get into the other exopod,’ Nigel said. ‘I have to extract his memory store.’ He moved past her, taking a medical pack from his utility belt. As she hauled herself over the second exopod, she glimpsed Nigel applying the pack to the back of Joey’s neck. She concentrated hard on pulling herself into the exopod. Inside, the webbing floated about in a tangle, which she sorted out, clicking the buckles together to hold her in place. Power-up was a simple sequence. She watched the basic displays come alive.

  ‘Here,’ Nigel said. His head and shoulders had come through the hatch. He held out a small plastic box. There were smears of blood on it.

  She took it from him, holding it tight. Then the exopod displays were changing. ‘What—?’

  ‘I’m loading some navigation data into the pod’s network,’ Nigel said. ‘I don’t want you landing in the middle of a desert. Not this time. That would just be one irony too many. I’m not giving fate the benefit of the doubt.’

  ‘I thought we were going back to your ship,’ she said.

  ‘No, I have one last thing to do. You take this exopod down to Bienvenido. Don’t worry; it’s an uneventful trip. If everything goes well, there will be a huge recovery operation in a few weeks. Stay safe till then, okay?’

  ‘Wait. What?’

  ‘Trust me.’ He backed out of the exopod.

  ‘But—’

  ‘Go. Hurry. We don’t want fake Rojas and fake Ibu to crash this party, not now, do we?’

  ‘Oh, bollocks.’

  The hatch swung shut.

  Piloting wasn’t exactly Laura’s talent set, but there were some basic files in her storage lacuna. They ran as secondary routines in her macrocellular clusters, and she managed to steer the little craft out through the open airlock, only scraping the sides twice as she went.

  Sensors showed Nigel gliding out behind her. Then he was flying back towards his starship. She realized it was triangular because it had wings. Why?

  The exopod’s sensors locked on to the planet one and a half million kilometres away. Laura loaded that fix into the network, which incorporated it into Nigel’s navigation data and began to plot a vector for her. The first burn, lasting three minutes, took her out of the Forest.

  As she passed through the edge of the distortion trees, a time symbol flicked up into her exovision. It had been twenty-seven hours thirty-one minutes since Shuttle Fourteen had actually entered the Forest.

  *

  Nigel waited until the exopod was clear of the Forest, then targeted Shuttle Fourteen. A burst from an X-ray laser sliced the fuselage apart. Gas and debris belched out of the big rupture, sending the craft spinning chaotically. The port wing snapped off. Nigel fired the X-ray laser again, chopping the fuselage into smaller sections. One pulse struck a fuel tank, and the explosion ripped the remaining structure to tatters. A giant shrapnel cloud spun out.

  ‘Okay,’ Nigel told the Skylady’s smartcore. ‘Take us to the centre of the Forest.’

  The starship’s ingrav drive powered up to nine per cent.

  ‘Really?’ he asked.

  ‘Best available given the environment,’ the smartcore told him. ‘It is strange outside.’

  Giving the smartcore his own voice was a mistake, he decided. But changing that now was somewhat pointless. ‘And how are we doing with nailing that environment?’

  ‘Analysis of the quantum signature is progressing effectively.’

  ‘Or, as we say in plain English . . .’

  ‘We have enough data to initiate an identical distortion effect for the quantumbuster detonation. However, you were ri
ght: the pattern is progressive.’

  ‘I knew it.’ He couldn’t help the flash of satisfaction. No battle of this nature could remain static. The assault the Forest’s trees mounted against the Void’s structure was constantly in flux as the Void strove to override the damage to itself. As he suspected from examining Laura’s original data, the pattern fed in to the quantumbuster for initiation would have to be real time. Skylady ’s sophisticated sensors had to be linked directly to the warhead. ‘No remote detonation, then?’

  ‘No.’

  He sat back in the chair and looked round the circular cabin. His u-shadow was accessing the hull’s visual sensors, revealing the constellation of glimmering enigmatic distortion trees they were sliding between. Bienvenido’s bright crescent was visible in the distance.

  ‘She would have loved this, flying through space. Seeing her world from afar.’

  ‘She will know it. And with you, too.’

  ‘As long as it’s not with Ozzie.’

  ‘Jealous?’

  ‘I just don’t want her hurt out there. That’s why I’m in here doing this. When the Void goes, she’ll meet the real me.’

  ‘You are real.’

  ‘Yes, but there can’t be two of me. And I am just a copy, no matter if I’m physically superior to the original. She mustn’t be given a confusing choice. That wouldn’t be fair.’

  ‘I am sure she will cope. You taught her a lot. You should be proud.’

  ‘I am. How big is the delay between pattern lock and detonation?’

  ‘I estimate nine picoseconds.’

  ‘That’s quite a gap.’

  ‘Again, best I can do.’

  ‘It’s hardly a certainty, though, is it?’

  ‘There are no certainties.’

  ‘True. So – let’s dump Paula’s fallback package.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. Load Joey’s memories into it for safe keeping, and do it. Just in case.’

  The sensor feed showed him the package slipping behind Skylady – a sphere curiously similar to a Faller egg. Its ingrav drive powered it away gently. Nigel concentrated inwards. And I mustn’t tell Paula, he thought to himself. She’ll think I’m insecure. Can’t have that.