‘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.

‘I’ll power up one of the exopods,’ Rojas said, ‘if you’d like to check the suits.’

‘Sure,’ Laura told him. The suit was simple enough, a slippery one-piece of silver grey fabric lined with elecromuscle threads. It expanded like a loose sack so the wearer could pull it on, then the elecromuscle would contract, making it cling to the body like a second skin. Pores and capillaries harvested sweat, while a thermal-conductor web dissipated the excess heat a body generated, keeping temperature constant and comfortable. The helmet was a classic transparent globe, with a multitude of filter functions and sensors built in. The suit collar adhered to it easily. Oxygen regeneration was handled by a small package at the top of the spine. Usually, a force-field skeleton was worn on top, but Laura didn’t trust them right now. She checked some of the other lockers, relieved to find thick protective outer suits that would be almost as effective at shielding the wearer from micro particle impacts. Exactly the kind of thing Ibu had talked about putting on. I should take one back up to him.