It had all the impact of hitting him with a feather.
He snapped her ankle. She heard the bone break with a terrible crack, and her leg went numb for a glorious instant. Then the incredible pain fired into her brain. Secondary routines damped down the impulse, reducing it to a manageable level. But Ibu slowly and deliberately rotated her foot. The fractured bone made a fearsome grating sound. Her macrocellular clusters cut the nerve impulses altogether.
Laura felt sick. But manic strength allowed her to cling on to the hatchway. Through watering eyes she looked back at Ibu, whose face was impassive. He was simply waiting for her to let go, so he could—
What?
Laura couldn’t understand any of this. Rojas had now subdued a frantic Joey, putting him in some kind of submission lock.
Ibu bent her ankle again. Laura knew she only had seconds before she lost her grip and was drawn back. Then Ayanna was back in the hatch, her telekinesis jabbing at Ibu’s face.
Now he grimaced, his own attention diverted, a counter telekinesis parrying her attack. But he didn’t let go of Laura.
Hanging on grimly to the hatch rim, Laura directed her telekinesis to her breast pocket. The Swiss army knife wriggled free, and she flicked the longest blade out. It rotated in mid-air to point at Ibu. Laura shoved it forwards with all the power she had.
The blade sliced down Ibu’s cheek and stabbed into the gap between his suit’s helmet ring and his neck. He froze. Ayanna gasped.
Laura’s ESP perceived the blade penetrate a good six or seven centimetres into his flesh just behind the clavicle bone. A dark blue liquid began to pour out along the side of his neck. For one confused moment, she thought her knife had cut through some kind of coolant tube in the suit. Then she finally acknowledged it was blood – or whatever the Ibu-copy used for circulatory fluid.
With a yell, she twisted the blade, pouring all her savagery and determination into the thought.
The Ibu-copy snarled as the knife turned, scraping against his clavicle. Laura jerked her ruined foot free of his grasp and tugged herself up through the hatch, with Ayanna helping heave her along. The pair of them tumbled into the silo compartment. Laura banged into one of the metal silo tubes, rebounded, and grabbed at the first handhold she could see, steadying herself. ‘Move!’ she bawled. And reached for another handhold.
Ayanna raced along the other side of the compartment, heading for the equipment lockers.
The Ibu-copy squirmed through the hatch, his collar still spitting out blue globules.
Laura was barely thinking. Survival instinct had cut in. She just had to get away. At the back of her gibbering mind was the notion of her and Ayanna barricading themselves inside the forward cabin. Nothing else mattered apart from getting some kind of secure reassuringly physical barrier between herself and the alien things.
She swept past the lockers and dived up the ladder to the service compartment, slapping the rungs as she went, adding speed and stability to her flight. For once she performed the manoeuvre with a decent amount of agility. Ayanna was right behind her.
A hysterical scream tore through the shuttle.
Laura turned in fright, and shock locked every muscle. Ayanna was halfway along the ladder. The Ibu-copy had caught up with her. One hand gripped her thigh, allowing him to bite her calf. Not some angry streetfight snapping of jaws. He had sunk his teeth in, penetrating the shipsuit fabric, and closed his jaw around the calf muscle. As Laura watched, his head wrenched back so he tore out a chunk of Ayanna’s flesh. He began chewing it.
Ayanna wailed in helpless dread. Blood was pumping fast out of her ragged wound, scarlet globules forming a sickly galaxy around her leg. The Ibu-thing lowered his head again and took another bite.
Laura threw up.
The Rojas-copy arrived at the ladder. He swarmed over Ayanna, opening his jaw wide. His strength tugged her arm away from the ladder, and forced her fingers into his mouth.
Ayanna’s screaming was deafening, blotting out the sound of her knuckles breaking as they were bitten through. Her mental voice was an incoherent yell of pain and utter horror. It was like an assault on Laura’s senses, battering her as violently as any physical blow. Yet still the survival instinct was strong enough to goad her into action. She grabbed her way along the service compartment floor and into the forward cabin, her own piteous wailing like a soprano whistle, tears wrecking her vision. Her hand thumped down on the hatch button. The malmetal closed.
ESP showed her a dozen conduits and power lines around the hatch. Her telekinesis reached out and clawed at every one of them, shredding the insulation and the conductors, ripping them apart. The lights went out. Alarms sounded as short circuits blew safety cutoffs. The background whining of several fans faded to silence. Red lights flared on the console.
Laura pushed herself away from the hatch. Ayanna’s screams had stopped before it was closed. Something hit the other side of the hatch. Another strike. Another and another. Then silence.
She curled up into a foetal ball and began sobbing.
*
It was a feeling that took a long time to register. Not a compulsion, but a sensation akin to recognizing a smell.
Laura blinked in confusion. It was her gaiamotes gently apprising her that someone was wanting to talk to her. Joey – that was the mental scent.
Very cautiously, Laura opened up the gaiamotes’ sensitivity.
‘Laura?’
‘Joey?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know if it’s really you. They . . . Oh, bollocks. This can’t be happening. They ate her, Joey. They ate her! And I left her behind.’ The shame was so overwhelming, she wanted to bodyloss – re-life herself free of all this. Vermillion would break out of the Void somehow, and everyone left behind would be re-lifed using memories in the starship’s secure store. Her life would go on without any memory of Shuttle Fourteen or the Forest. No knowledge of what Ayanna had endured.
‘It’s me, I swear it.’ The surge of emotion that slipped through the gaiafield connection from him was profound, and utterly sincere.
Laura started crying again. ‘Oh, Joey, Joey. What are they?’
‘I don’t know. Some kind of copies.’
‘Where are you? What happened?’
‘I’m still in the EVA hangar – look.’
When she closed her eyes and accepted his vision through the gaiafield, she saw the EVA hangar from an off-kilter angle. She/Joey was looking at it from the airlock end. The emergency blue lighting was on, and there was no sign of the alien human-copies.
‘They fastened me in place. But I did it, Laura. What I said – the same thing you did. While they were busy with Ayanna, I closed the hatch with telekinesis, then screwed up the power cables, shorted everything out. They can’t get to me.’
‘Can you move?’
A wash of stoic regret came through the connection. ‘No. My telekinesis isn’t strong enough to break the bond. It’s some kind of tough polymer wrapped round my wrists and ankles.’
‘Can you manipulate a tool? Cut through it?’
‘Laura, please. I’m not sure I’m that accurate. You have to get back here.’
An involuntary tremor ran the length of her body. She let out a pitiful squeak of fear. ‘No. No, I can’t.’
‘They will come for you. You know that. They will find tools. They will cut through the hatch.’
Just the thought of it made tears well up again. Without gravity, the liquid simply swelled up on her eyeballs, distorting her vision. ‘I left her, Joey,’ she confessed. ‘I just left her with them. I didn’t even try to help, I was too scared. How awful am I? She was all alone with them. And she died like that. She died alone, Joey, with those things eating her. Nothing could be worse than that. Nothing! Maybe I deserve them coming for me.’
‘Stop it. They’re strong – much stronger than us. You couldn’t have done anything. It would have happened to you, too.’
‘Have they . . . ? Did they . . .
? To you?’
‘No. I’m intact. I just can’t move, that’s all. Laura, you have to get down here. You won’t have much time.’
‘I can’t get through the hatch; I screwed it up pretty good. But even if I could get it open again, I wouldn’t ever get past them.’
‘I’ve been thinking about that. Don’t even try to fight your way past them. You have to EVA.’
‘What?’
‘There are emergency suits in the forward cabin. Put one on and break the windscreen. I control the exopod airlock; my telekinesis can reach the control panel. I’ve already opened the outer hatch ready for you. I wouldn’t have suggested this otherwise. Check the network if you don’t believe me.’
It took a long time for Laura to make herself move. Her macrocellular clusters were still blocking the terrible pain from her ruined ankle. Exovision icons were flashing up constant warnings about tissue damage and internal bleeding, which she’d ignored along with everything else as she dropped into a dangerous denial state. She hauled herself along the couches to the curving console under the windscreen. There were several system schematics up and running. They confirmed it: the EVA hangar airlock’s outer door was open.
‘I see,’ Laura said.
‘Then come and collect me,’ Joey said. ‘We’ll fly the second exopod down to the planet and find Vermillion.’
Laura gave the windscreen a long look. The remaining hologram graphics blinking inside the glass were mostly warning symbols. ‘Joey, how the hell am I going to break the windscreen? It can withstand aerobrake entry into an atmosphere, and the shuttle is rated for gas giant work. The damn thing is tough – probably tougher than the rest of the fuselage.’
‘Yeah, but any chain is only as strong as the weakest link, remember? Take a look at how it’s fastened to the main structure.’
Laura took a breath and sent her ESP into the fuselage itself, examining the layers and material, the seal all around the super-strengthened glass. Her mind’s eye revealed the coloured shadows that were stacked against each other like strata in rock – the same as a crude hologram display, she thought. There didn’t seem to be many weak points. Her perception ranged wider, probing the rest of the forward cabin. ‘I’m not coming through the windscreen,’ she told him. ‘There’s an emergency rescue panel in the roof.’ She pushed off the console, and reached out for the rectangle above the second couch. When she squeezed a small recessed handle, it allowed her to pull it away. The metre-wide circle it exposed was covered in warnings about having equal pressure before triggering. ‘There’s a lot of safety locks,’ she reported.
‘Bureaucrats should never be allowed anywhere near aerospace design teams.’
‘True.’
‘Now put your suit on.’
‘Joey, this is a bit—’
Something started buzzing intermittently against the hatch to the service compartment. Softly at first, the way a bee knocks against glass. But then the frequency began to rise and became continuous.
‘A bit what?’
‘Nothing.’
She tugged one of the emergency pressure suits from its overhead wallet. There was a moment of hesitation as she bent her knee, ready to push her foot into the baggy clump of silver-white fabric. Her ankle had swollen dramatically. The small gap between the hem of the shipsuit trouser leg and her shoe exposed skin that was a nasty purple red. She was pretty sure she wouldn’t be able to get the shoe off. The sight of it made her nauseous again – not that there was anything left to throw up. For a moment her nerve block seemed to fail, that or she imagined the pain. It practically overwhelmed her.
Nothing, she told herself with miserable fury. You’re feeling nothing compared to Ayanna. She forced her numb leg into the spacesuit, then pushed her arms into the sleeves. Her u-shadow managed an interface with the spacesuit processor, and the fabric contracted around her.
The intense buzzing from the hatch rose towards ultrasonic. A blue-white point appeared along the edge of the hatch, shining like an arc spot.
Laura grabbed the helmet and jabbed it onto the thick metal collar. It sealed immediately, and dry air hissed in, cutting off most of the buzzing sound. Molten droplets were spraying out from the hatch. They glowed like embers as they swarmed along the central aisle. She pulled down the quick-release lever on the overhead rescue panel. Alarms sounded, and the rim of the hatch turned scarlet. Two safety latches clicked out from the lever, warning her of a one-atmosphere pressure difference. She flicked them back with her thumb, and the alarm grew even louder.
With one hand wrapped round a couch strap to hold her in the cabin, Laura twisted the lever round ninety degrees. The hatch immediately blew out amid a fast, violent blast of air. It pummelled her hard, shunting her around so her knees slammed into the cabin ceiling. More pain poured into her brain as she was spun round by the howling stream of air, to be quickly damped down by the nerve blocks.
It took only seconds to evacuate the forward cabin’s atmosphere. Laura found herself flailing about on the end of the strap, engulfed by a muffled silence. The distortion tree had vanished from view. The rest of the Forest was a smear of motion as the shuttle lurched from the impetus of the abrupt gas vent. All she could hear was her own ragged breathing.
She checked the service compartment hatch. The blue-white light had dimmed to a patch of glowing crimson metal. A tiny jet of white vapour was shooting out from a hole in the centre of it.
‘Was that it?’ Joey asked. ‘I felt Fourteen jolt round. Was that the cabin air blowing?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You need to get down here. They’ll realize they need the exopod to escape alive.’
‘Ah, bollocks. Okay, I’m coming.’
She unwound her arm from the strap and pushed herself through the hatch. The Forest whirled around 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 shuttle’s 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. Even so, it was easier than she’d expected. It probably helped that she didn’t look round at the Forest trees tracing their glowing arcs across Voidspace. Her eyes were focused hard on the grey thermal shielding that was the outer layer of the fuselage. 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—
‘I know what it is,’ Joey told her through the gaiafield.
‘What?’
‘I told you I was seeing something wrong with the planet. I know what it is.’
Laura brought her head up to check she was crawling in the right direction. Fourteen’s tail was about twelve metres away now, and she was veering off line slightly. She pushed her arm wide to compensate and pressed the stkpad down. ‘Go on, then. At this point, I seriously doubt that knowing will make anything worse.’
‘You sure about that?’
‘Bollocks, Joey! What is it?’
‘I’m telling you because you need to know.’
The crawl was becoming harder. Her body was feeling the strain. She could hear her heart pounding away; she didn’t need the exovision medical graphics to know that, nor see she needed more oxygen. How can zero gee be so exhausting? ‘Joey, either tell me or shut the fuck up.’
‘All right. The planet is spinning the wrong way.’
‘What?’
‘It??
?s reversed. When we were in Vermillion, the continents were turning east to west. Now we’re in the Forest, they’re going west to east. That’s what I saw, the continents going the wrong way round. Which is why it took a while to figure out – it’s almost too big to grasp.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘We’re seeing the planet going backwards. There’s only one thing that could cause an effect like that. Now do you get it?’
The shuttle’s tail was about seven metres away. Laura had to pause to give her over-exerted muscles a rest. ‘No,’ she whinged. ‘Joey – just, what is it?’
‘Time,’ he said, accompanied by a wash of wonder and dismay. ‘Ayanna said the trees were distorting time, and she was right, but they’re not slowing it down inside the Forest, they’re reversing it.’
‘Reversing?’
‘The Forest is travelling back in time, Laura. That’s why we can see the planet spinning backwards. Vermillion didn’t vanish; we’re travelling back to a time before it arrived.’
Laura let out a distraught groan. She didn’t need this, not on top of everything else. She rolled her stkpad and moved her arm, resuming the punishing crawl. ‘Time travel is impossible. You know this. Causality. Paradox. Entropy. They can’t be beaten, Joey.’
‘They can’t be beaten in ordinary spacetime,’ he said. ‘But we’re in Voidspace.’
‘And Voidspace exists within spacetime,’ she said. ‘The fundamentals are unchanged.’
‘The planet’s spin is reversed,’ he told her stubbornly. ‘We’re travelling back in time.’
‘Whatever.’
‘You need to know, Laura. Once you leave the Forest, all you have to do is wait for the Vermillion to show up and warn them about the globes.’
‘Which isn’t going to happen,’ she retorted almost angrily. ‘Because I didn’t show up, I didn’t meet me and I didn’t stop us from coming here. Did I?’ She reached the flat trailing edge of the delta wings and started to clamber up around them. The blunt end of the fuselage swung into view. Clamshell doors had hinged up and to one side, exposing the wide circular airlock which made up the end of the EVA hangar. Its outer door was open. It made her let out a small whimper of relief; Joey had been telling the truth about that at least. She was starting to worry the tank yank malady was affecting his brain.