The Abyss Beyond Dreams (6 page)

‘Are you catching this?’ she asked abruptly. Secondary routines pulled another datastream into principal interpretation. It wasn’t from the Mk24 drones. The shuttle’s
main radar was showing a kilometre-wide circular formation of small objects. They were already seventeen thousand kilometres away from the blunt apex of the Forest, and receding at one point eight
kilometres a second. Each object was globular and measured about three metres in diameter. Visual imaging was showing nothing; their surfaces were dull. She flicked the shuttle’s thermal
imaging to tracking them, which registered an interestingly high infra-red emission.

‘Thirty-five degrees?’ Ibu muttered in surprise. ‘What are they?’

‘Whatever they are, radar shows eleven of them,’ Laura said. ‘They’re holding that circular formation, too, with minimal separation drift. Zero acceleration. Something
flung them out like that.’

‘Heading straight for the planet,’ Rojas said. His mind flared a peak of alarm. ‘I’m calling
Vermillion
, warning them something’s approaching.’

‘Baby Skylords?’ Joey asked. ‘This is the parturition zone, after all.’

‘Reasonable guess,’ Ibu said. ‘I wonder what their lifecycle is. Grow up on the planet then jump back to space when they’re mature?’

‘They’re inert,’ Laura told them. ‘No gravitational or spacetime distortion registering at all. They’re not Skylords.’

‘Skylord eggs?’ Ayanna said.

‘The Skylords said they didn’t come from here,’ Ibu said. ‘They’re not exactly clear speakers, but I don’t think they could even grasp the concept of
lying.’

‘
Vermillion
will send a shuttle out to rendezvous,’ Rojas said. ‘If they can afford to.’

‘We can always study them in situ if not,’ Joey said. ‘This is where they came from, after all.’

The third Mk24 flew past the outer layer of trees and lost contact less than a minute later. The fourth lasted for seventy-two seconds before the datastream dopplered down to zero.

‘Just so we’re straight,’ Rojas said. ‘Slow time isn’t fatal, right, Ayanna?’

‘It’s only slow inside the Forest relative to the Void continuum outside,’ she replied with growing annoyance.

‘So now we just need to know if that quantum signature affects living tissue,’ Ibu said.

‘Okay,’ Rojas said. ‘I’ll launch a Laika drone.’

Laura knew that, on an intellectual level, she ought to be having some kind of conflicted sentiment, maybe with a small sense of moral disapproval thrown in. But, frankly, after so many
centuries of witnessing genuine death (as opposed to bodyloss) in both animals and humans, it didn’t bother her any more. Besides, it was hard to work up much sentiment about a gerbil.

The little rodent was nestled in the centre of the Laika drone, which had almost identical sensors to the Mk24, with the addition of a tiny life-support globe at its core. They all observed
through the sensor datastream as the Laika drone glided past the outer distortion trees. Through its waning telemetry link, they saw the gerbil twitching its nose, heart rate unchanged, breathing
regularly, trying to suck water from the nozzle by its head. Muscles and nerves were all performing normally. The link dwindled to nothing.

‘The Forest interior doesn’t kill you,’ Ibu said. ‘Doesn’t even affect life.’

Joey grunted – a nasty twisted sound more like a hoot. ‘Not for the first minute.’

‘The data has dopplered down beyond detection because of the temporal environment,’ Ayanna said. ‘We lost it, that’s all. The Laika didn’t fail. That gerbil is
still alive in there.’

‘That’s your official recommendation?’ Rojas asked.

‘Yes. I believe it’s safe for us to go inside. The only thing I don’t know is the rate which time progresses in there. If we’re inside for a day, it may be a month that
passes outside. It may be more. It may be less.’

‘Thank you. Joey?’

‘We’ve come this far.’

‘Laura?’

‘I
need
to have samples of those trees. Whatever mechanism they’re using is way outside anything we’ve encountered before. And I desperately want to know what their
energy source is. You don’t change temporal flow without a phenomenal amount of power. That’s got to come from somewhere, and we’re not seeing the neutrino activity to indicate
direct mass energy conversion, or even fusion. It can’t be solar. So, where . . . ?’

‘Where does the energy come from for our telekinesis?’ Ibu asked immediately. ‘I don’t think you’re using the right references here, Laura. The Void continuum is
different.’

‘You mean the trees are
thinking
time to be slow?’

‘Thinking. Wishing. Who knows?’

‘All right, settle down,’ Rojas said. He stared at Ibu. ‘I take it you’re happy to go inside?’

‘Not happy, but I don’t object. Laura’s right: we need to get a good look at whatever processes are going on in those trees.’

Rojas exhaled loudly. ‘All right, then, I’ll tell the
Vermillion
we’re going inside. I’m assuming once we’re in there, we’ll lose our link with them.
I don’t want them to launch a rescue mission just because we can’t talk for a few days.’

Ibu opened a private link to Laura’s u-shadow. ‘Why do I get the notion a rescue mission isn’t going to be featuring heavily on the captain’s agenda?’

*

Rojas kept the manual controls active as he piloted Shuttle Fourteen forwards, heading for a large gap between distortion trees. Laura preferred to watch the approach through
the windscreen rather than access the shuttle’s sensor suite. However, her exovision display did provide a secondary interpretation, detailing their exact progress.

Acceleration was a tenth of a gee, enough to keep them in their couches. Laura used the time to quickly munch down some chocolate wafers. Even the small amount of gravity allowed her stomach to
digest food without complaining.

‘Somehow I feel we should be making preparations,’ Ibu said.

‘What kind?’ Laura asked.

‘I’m not sure. Putting on some kind of protective suit? Carrying a personal oxygen tank? Inoculation?’

‘I’ve got a force-field skeleton web on under my shipsuit,’ Ayanna said. ‘Does that count?’

‘That only helps if it doesn’t glitch.’

‘I thought you were the optimist.’

Laura rapped a knuckle on the cabin’s padded bulkhead. The beige cushioning was arranged in squares; nearly half of them were the doors to small lockers. ‘There are emergency
pressure suits stowed in every cabin. You’ll be fine.’ She broke the seal on a carton of orange juice and started sucking at the straw.

Ibu glanced at the wall of trees that stretched across Voidspace outside the shuttle’s windscreen. ‘You called us rats in a lab maze. More like bacteria under a microscope. Our
feelings are irrelevant. The only thing that’s going to keep us alive in here is competence and logic.’ He smiled round the cabin. ‘Thankfully we’ve got both. Can you
imagine what this mission would be like if we only had a bunch of fifty-year-olds for company? A rollercoaster of panic and tears the whole way.’

‘Link to
Vermillion
is dopplering,’ Rojas said.

Laura checked her exovision displays. Fourteen was now thirty kilometres from a distortion tree, and closing. Rojas cut their acceleration to zero. Everyone fell silent as they glided past the
slimmer end of the tree, which was oriented planetwards. Its shadow enveloped them. Rojas flipped the shuttle, and accelerated at half a gee to kill their velocity relative to the Forest, leaving
them stationary inside. Laura’s u-shadow noted the time. She was intrigued what the difference would be when they emerged out into ‘ordinary’ Voidspace again.

‘I am showing a slight blueshift from several baseline stars,’ Ayanna said. ‘We’re inside the altered temporal flow.’

‘And still alive,’ Ibu said.

‘The link to
Vermillion
has gone,’ Rojas said.

‘I wasn’t expecting that,’ Ayanna said. ‘I thought we might still receive them, but at a higher frequency.’

Rojas pulled a face. ‘Nothing, sorry.’

‘What about the Mk24s we sent in ahead of us?’ Laura asked. ‘Shouldn’t we be picking them up again now we’re in the same timeframe?’

‘Nothing yet,’ Rojas said. ‘I’ll run another scan.’

‘Nothing from the Laika,’ Ayanna reported.

‘The Mk24s aren’t showing up on the radar, either,’ Ibu said.

‘That’s not right,’ Laura said. ‘Fourteen’s radar is good enough to pick up a grain of sand from two hundred kilometres away. Even if the Mk24s’ power
glitched completely, they should register.’

‘They must be behind another tree,’ Joey said.

‘All of them?’ Laura said sceptically. ‘After their link antennae failed and they went inert? Bollocks to that.’

‘So how do you explain it?’

She glanced at the huge crystalline fissures of the nearest distortion tree. ‘Something pulled them in.’

‘We didn’t detect any anomalous gravatonic activity,’ Ayanna said. ‘I don’t know what else could divert their trajectory.’

‘Telekinesis,’ Rojas said. ‘If those trees are alive by any standard, they’ll have a big old brain buried somewhere inside.’

They all fell silent again. Laura gave the tree outside a mildly concerned glance. ‘If it’s alive, it’s not talking to us.’

‘This is where you’re in charge,’ Rojas told her. ‘What do you want to do next?’

‘Get closer to one. Run some density scans, see if we can get an image of its internal structure, then apply some sampler modules above the more interesting sections.’

‘Close enough and we can use our ESP on it,’ Joey said.

‘Whatever gives us a clearer idea of what is going on inside the trees,’ Laura told him without irony.

Shuttle Fourteen approached to three kilometres of a distortion tree; Rojas locked its position halfway along the crystalline behemoth, using tiny puffs of cold gas from the shuttle’s
reaction-control nozzles. A flock of AISD (Advanced Interlinked Sensor Drone) Mk16bs burped out from a fuselage silo. Two hundred and twenty of the glittering fist-sized drones swirled into a wide
bracelet that surrounded the distortion tree. With their formation locked, and datastreams unified, they slowly slid along the tree’s nine-kilometre length, deep scanning it.

Laura tried not to show too much disappointment with the image that built up in her exovision. The intricate curves and jags of the creased crystalline structure were mapped with millimetre
precision, revealing the exact topology of fissures that extended for over a kilometre below the meandering ridge peaks. But the sensor flock couldn’t resolve anything beneath the
surface.

‘Like a mountain range scale fingerprint,’ Ibu described it.

Laura closed her eyes, immersing herself in the sensor imagery. ‘The quantum distortion is strongest along the ridges,’ she said. ‘But that’s not telling me where the
generating mechanism is.’

‘There’s definitely some kind of negative energy effect going on in there,’ Ayanna said. ‘The trees are the source of the temporal flow change, all right. That
illumination within the crystal must be this continuum’s variant on Cherenkov radiation.’

Under Rojas’s guidance, the drone flock split into two and slipped down into the gaps on either side of a crystalline ridge, sinking out of the sunlight to be illuminated by the eerie
ever-shifting phosphorescence.

‘We can keep in contact with the flock but not the Mk24s,’ Ibu said. ‘Curiouser and curiouser.’

‘They’re closer,’ Rojas pointed out.

‘If the Mk24s are just drifting around in the Forest, one of them would be out from the radar shadow of the trees by now.’

‘Okay, so what do you think happened to them?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said solemnly.

‘Definitely some carbon in the tree mass,’ Laura said, reading the fresh batch of data from the flock.

‘It’s a diamond?’ Joey asked in delight.

‘No, sorry. There are traces of other elements in there as well, nothing too elaborate. But this is interesting: valency bonds seem stronger than we’re used to, and matter density is
certainly higher than normal. I don’t suppose there’s much vacuum ablation. But I still can’t get a reading more than a few millimetres deep.’

‘So that means you have to go out there and chip a few bits off, right?’ Ibu said.

Laura reviewed the density results again. ‘I think the filaments on the sampler modules should be able to cope.’

‘Damn, I was hoping to hit it with a hammer,’ Ibu said with a grin. ‘Can you imagine it? A single tap, and this one tiny little crack starts to multiply . . .’

‘The Commonwealth First Contact Agency would fine you to death,’ Laura told him.

‘Let’s just allow the flock a little more time,’ Rojas said.

‘I’m reading some interesting fluctuations in the quantum signature inside the fissure,’ Ayanna said. ‘I’d like the flock to complete a full scan down the whole
length of the tree, find out where it’s strongest.’

‘That’ll help me,’ Laura admitted. ‘But we are going out there, aren’t we?’

Rojas sighed. ‘We’ll run some functionality tests on our equipment while we wait for the flock to finish this run.’

*

The shuttle’s service compartment was sandwiched between the forward cabin and the main passenger cabin. It contained the boarding airlock, a small galley and washrooms,
along with a hatch which led down to the payload bay running the length of the fuselage beneath the passenger cabin.

Laura floated after Rojas, keeping a respectable distance between her head and his feet. Even though her biononics were slowly recovering, she still wasn’t terribly proficient in freefall.
The risk of getting kicked in the face was always on her mind.

She allowed herself to float down the hatch, occasionally using one of the handholds that bristled from every bulkhead. The first quarter of the payload bay was a narrow corridor with walls of
equipment lockers. That opened out into a larger metallic cavern, where the thick tubes of the drone silos formed twin rows. Laura grabbed the handholds and hauled herself along its length, trying
not to bang her elbows into anything. At the far end of the silo compartment was an airlock hatch into the EVA hangar. Two spherical exopods were secure in their cradles – two-person
spacecraft with a cluster of electromuscle tentacles on the front; retracted, the tentacles were coiled in a fashion that somehow managed to look faintly obscene. Spacesuits were stored in small
cabinets, together with three sets of personal-manoeuvring harnesses. A long array of tools and science sensors were clipped to the bulkhead, opposite a row of inert zero-gee engineeringbots half
the size of a human. At the far end was an airlock chamber big enough for an exopod.