Little spurts of cold gas coughed out of the nozzles on the harness extremities, like puffs of white dust. ‘Function good. Heading over.’

He drifted slowly round the bulk of the exopod. The tree rose round the curving grey-white globe like planetdawn on a gas giant’s moon. This close it was massive. Just seeing it through human eyes made Laura shiver. Something that big, quite possibly alive, and thoroughly alien, was somewhat intimidating. Curiously, it disturbed her more than the Void itself.

‘I don’t think the trees are part of the Void,’ she murmured. ‘I think they were pulled in, just like us.’

‘What makes you say that?’ Ayanna asked.

‘If they were part of it, they wouldn’t be trying to change Voidspace. They’re prisoners, like we are. That’s bad.’

‘How so?’

‘Their control over mass and energy is clearly more advanced than ours, and they’re still here.’

‘If they are from outside,’ Ayanna said hastily.

With her eyelids still closed, and her vision still coming directly from riding Ibu’s eyes, Laura smiled. ‘They are.’

Ibu was gliding slowly along the top of the ridge which the drone flock had scanned. The data feed from his suit was undergoing micro-second dropouts, making the vision flicker every few seconds.

‘Going inside,’ he said.

The little jets of gas puffed again. Then the crystalline wall was sliding past his helmet. He held his course level, staying a constant fifteen metres away from the side of the vast fold that opened into the tree. His entire silver-white oversuit shone with the weird radiance that slithered through the crystalline structure. Laura was aware her heart rate was increasing, and she wondered if it was some kind of telepathic feedback from Ibu.

‘You’re approaching the zone I designated,’ she told him, reading the inertial coordinates from an exovision icon.

‘Yeah. Noticed that.’

Laura grinned. ‘I also have some eggs I’d like to show your grandmother how to use.’

‘I’m sure she’d welcome it.’

Ibu halted close to the bottom of the ride. Fifty metres away, the crystal curved sharply to form the base of a narrow valley. The other wall of the ridge was only seventy metres behind him. ‘Beginning phase one,’ he announced.

Laura’s relayed vision wobbled as he reached down and removed a deep-scan package from his fat utility belt. It was a simple green circle the size of his gauntleted hand.

She gripped the cushioned edge of the couch as Ibu triggered his harness and slowly glided forwards. She could see his arms stretched out ahead. The actual surface of the crystal was hard to make out in the odd shifting light glowing within.

His fingertips touched, and he rebounded slightly. Then the gas jets were puffing, holding him in place.

Laura let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding.

‘It’s practically frictionless,’ Ibu reported. ‘My suit’s stkpads aren’t holding.’

‘That’ll be the increased valancy,’ Laura told him. ‘That crystal is going to have fewer surface irregularities than ordinary matter.’

‘Okay. Applying the package now. See if that attaches.’

Laura wasn’t sure what kind of adhesive was on the deep-scan package, but when Ibu pressed it to the surface and applied a short burst from the harness jets to push it down, the glue seemed to work.

‘Tactile contact confirmed,’ Ibu said. ‘Telemetry good. Moving to second location.’

‘Well done,’ Ayanna told him.

‘We have a problem,’ Joey’s telepathic voice claimed.

Laura blinked her eyes open, banishing Ibu’s visual feed to a small ancillary icon in her exovision. She looked round the forward cabin, but everything seemed to be okay. ‘What’s wrong?’

Joey’s eyes stared at her from his twisted-up immobile face. ‘I’ve been using the shuttle’s optronic sensors to try and find Vermillion. I can’t. It’s vanished.’

‘What?’ Ayanna snapped, and there was no shielding strong enough to guard against the flash of alarm in her thoughts.

‘I can’t find it,’ Joey said. ‘Look, there’s something seriously wrong about losing contact with the drones and Vermillion just because of dopplering. It doesn’t matter how much the link frequency shifts, we should still be able to pick up the signal.’

Ayanna’s expression was edgy. ‘Yeah. I know.’

‘Okay. So. It bothered me – a lot. I started reviewing visual data. The Vermillion is thirteen hundred metres long, for fuck’s sake. You should be able to see it with the naked eye from this distance. The kind of optronics Fourteen is carrying are capable of reading the damn serial number. We know the orbital track, we know where to focus the search. I’ve run the basic scan five times now. There’s nothing orbiting that world. Not Vermillion. Not Viscount and not Verdant. None of them is in orbit any more.’

‘That can’t—’ Laura started. ‘Oh, bollocks. They couldn’t all crash.’ She gave Ayanna a desperate look. ‘Could they?’

‘They were in a thousand-kilometre orbit,’ Ayanna said. ‘We confirmed that before we entered the Forest’s temporal shift zone. I cannot imagine what kind of power could pull them out of orbit.’

‘The same power that slows time in here,’ Laura said. ‘Joey, we are slower in here. Any chance they’re all on the other side of the planet and they’re just taking a long time to track round into visual range?’

His misshapen face showed no emotion, but his thoughts dripped scorn. ‘Oh, yeah. Really never thought of that. Come on! Their spacing was equidistant round the orbital track. One of them is always in view. Most of the time, two of them are.’

‘Those spheres we tracked heading down to the planet,’ Ayanna said. ‘Perhaps they’re weapons.’

‘And we didn’t see the explosions?’ Laura asked. ‘No. Something else has happened.’

‘If they were pulled down from orbit, they’d create the devil’s own crater,’ Ayanna concluded. ‘Right now there’ll be megatons of rock vapour spewing up into the atmosphere. The planet’s entire climate system will be wrecked. Joey, any sign of that?’

The hyperspace theorist managed to blink. ‘No. But I’ll run a decent scan. Maybe they didn’t crash, maybe the ingrav held out long enough.’

‘Do it,’ Ayanna said curtly.

‘Do we tell . . .?’ Laura waved a hand at the titanic alien artefact glowing beyond the windscreen. The exopod’s strobes were still flashing regularly.

‘No,’ Ayanna said quickly. ‘Let them get back here before we hit them with this. I don’t want anything to distract them out there.’

‘Okay.’ A slow shiver ran down Laura’s spine. It seemed to generate its own chill. ‘Even if the ships were pulled out of orbit, that doesn’t explain what happened to all the drones.’

Ayanna gave a quick nod. ‘I know.’

Laura watched Ibu fit the remainder of the deep-scan packages. They started to reveal the amazing molecular substructure within the tree’s crystal edifice: millions of distinct layers interwoven in the most incredibly complex patterns. Each band possessed a different energy level, many of which dipped into negative functions.

‘This is some seriously impressive bollocks,’ Laura said faintly. Her secondary routines were trying to map the pathways which the packages were exposing, but her macrocellular clusters simply didn’t have the processing capacity to hack it. Even with Fourteen’s array working on the problem, it would take weeks. ‘And we’re only seeing a tiny fraction. The whole thing is a giant solid state circuit that manipulates negative energy – and that’s just the part I do understand. It must be generating its own valency differences, too, which is practically in the realm of perpetual motion.’

‘So there has to be a control mechanism somewhere,’ Ayanna said. ‘Perhaps a section that runs its routines?’

‘Somewhere. Yes. But we’re dealing with cubic kilometres here.’

‘Logically it would be at the centre of the bulbous section at the other end.’