For every few hundred metres the flock slid along the tree, they would lose another. Sometimes two or three would fail within seconds of each other. There was no pattern.

‘There won’t be one left by the time they reach the exopod,’ Ayanna grumbled.

Laura ignored her. Shuttle Fourteen was also suffering an increased number of glitches. The network was having trouble maintaining its integrity, so many subsystems were dropping out. She watched in dismay as several primary flight systems went off line – forward reaction-control thrusters, one of the fusion tubes, three of the regrav drives, main passenger cabin and environmental systems.

‘Dammit,’ Laura grunted when the passenger cabin systems went down. ‘We can’t afford to lose environmental.’

‘There’s enough oxygen on board for three of us,’ Joey said.

‘To do what?’ Laura snapped. ‘And there’s going to be five flying down to that planet.’

‘Calm down,’ Ayanna said. ‘Worst-case scenario: we can wear pressure suits.’

‘If they work,’ Laura said, hating herself for letting her anxiety show. But . . . The prospect of asphyxiation was firing her imagination into overdrive. Seeing herself in a pressure suit with every red light flashing, clawing feebly at the windscreen just as Fourteen approached the planet, so near . . .

‘Flock’s approaching the exopod,’ Ayanna said in a level voice.

Laura tried to clear her mind and focus on the hologram which was showing the imagery from the flock. There were only eighty-seven of the little drones left now. They had rearranged themselves back into their ring formation, gliding over the tapering end of the distortion tree. The folds meandered in sharp curves, merging and becoming shallower as they neared the tip. Long moiré phantoms slithered about erratically inside the crystal, though even their intensity was reducing. Large sections would remain dark for some time between visitations.

‘There!’ Ayanna said. The exopod was floating twenty metres from the side of a narrow curving valley just over a hundred metres from the tip. Dark globes were sprouting from the crystal all around it.

Laura couldn’t see Ibu anywhere. She ordered the image to rotate, checking the other clefts in the crystal around the tip. They were all covered in the dark globes, ranging from acorn size up to the full three metres in diameter. Ibu wasn’t in any of them, either.

‘The flock is relaying a signal from the exopod,’ Ayanna reported, ‘but I’m not getting any reply from Rojas.’

‘What about their suit transponders?’ Laura asked.

Ayanna pursed her lips and shook her head.

‘Focus on the exopod, please,’ Joey said.

Ayanna’s hands flicked several toggles, and the image jumped up through magnification factors until it was centred on the exopod.

‘Hatch is open,’ Joey said. ‘Can you get some drones closer?’

Ayanna started steering a couple of the Mk16bs over to the exopod.

‘As close as I can get,’ she announced eventually.

The hologram was showing the pod in high resolution. It hung above the forward cabin’s couches like a chunk of collective guilt. They could all look in through the open hatchway and see the coloured graphics flashing across the display panels inside. Web straps floated lazily, their buckles weaving about through the empty space as if they were chrome snake heads.

‘He’s not in there,’ Laura whispered. It felt as if her space sickness was returning; certainly she was light headed. Her skin was chilling down rapidly.

‘Where the fuck is he?’ Joey asked.

‘The flock would see the suits if they were anywhere within fifty kilometres,’ Ayanna said.

‘You know where they are,’ Laura said, forcing herself to say it. ‘Inside.’

‘Inside what?’ Joey said. ‘Inside the tree or inside the globes? Are they like an airlock?’

‘We haven’t picked up any cavity inside the crystal structure,’ Ayanna said.

‘Scan the globes,’ Laura told Ayanna. ‘I don’t care if you have to smash the drones into those bastards and crack them open. We’ve got to find them.’

‘Right,’ Ayanna nodded abruptly, and set about redirecting the flock.

The wrinkled surface of the globe was some kind of carbon, but the interior was impervious to any scan. Ayanna had eight drones poised in a bracelet formation around one of them, but their sensor radiation hit the surface and got no further.

Laura took control of a drone and sent it racing at the globe. The rest of the flock showed them a perfectly clear image of it striking – and rebounding, spinning away erratically.

Refusing to give up, Laura took control of another, over-rode the tiny ion drive’s safety limiters, and accelerated it from five hundred metres’ distance. It was travelling at four metres per second when it struck. The impact killed half its systems, but the globe didn’t even have a scratch.

‘Zero effect,’ Ayanna said levelly; there was an implication of censure in the tone.

Laura flew a third probe two kilometres out from the tree, then accelerated it in. This one reached twenty-eight metres per second when it hit a globe. Its casing shattered and the fragments went tumbling off into space. The globe was unscathed by the impact.

‘What the hell are they made of?’ she demanded. ‘They must open somehow, like a clam shell. Ibu and Rojas must have been taken inside.’

‘Laura, there is no inside,’ Ayanna said.

‘Bollocks to this! The drone flock sensors aren’t good enough. They’re inside! Where the hell else can they be?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I’m suiting up. I’m going to take the other exopod over there, and I’m going to cut—’

‘No,’ Ayanna didn’t speak loudly, but it was definite, and her thoughts made it very clear she meant it. ‘You’re not taking the exopod anywhere. Not until we know what happened to them and have some kind of recovery plan.’

‘You heard Rojas,’ Laura said heatedly. ‘The exopods have powerblades that can cut the globes open.’

‘Then why didn’t he do that? Laura, just stop and think. Please! We’re in Voidspace, which is weird enough; the tree is an alien mechanism operating at a molecular and quantum level we cannot comprehend, and two of our people have vanished and we don’t know how or where. Charging over there all angry isn’t going to resolve anything, and it certainly won’t help Ibu and Rojas. We need information, a lot more information.’

‘She’s right,’ Joey said. ‘Rojas is smart and experienced, and he knows exploration mission protocol better than we do. And now he’s just as gone as Ibu.’

Laura knew they were right, but . . . ‘Ah, bollocks,’ she said. Admitting she was wrong, behaving like some hothead young first life, was painful. She hadn’t acted on wild impulse for centuries. ‘I’m not thinking straight. Sorry. Must be the tank yank.’

‘No,’ Joey said. ‘The Void is getting to all of us. It’s not natural.’

‘We’re going to get them back,’ Ayanna said earnestly. ‘We just have to figure out how.’

‘I don’t think this is entirely a physical problem,’ Joey said. ‘Remember, Ibu said they were amazing. Where did that come from? He’d just finished telling us he couldn’t use his ESP to see inside the globes. What else, what new piece of information, could make him say that? He’s as smart and as rational as the rest of us. He’s not going to blurt that out without a reason. Same goes for Rojas.’

‘That’s really awesome,’ Laura said, pensively. ‘That’s what Rojas said. And you’re right; it’s a complete disconnect from everything that was happening. A colleague stuck to an alien artefact – all he’d be thinking about was what to do, what procedure to follow.’

‘Something got inside their heads,’ Ayanna said. And once more the terror was leaking out of her own mind. ‘It pulled them in.’

‘Bee to pollen,’ Joey said. ‘Shark to blood.’

‘The distortion tree is sentient,’ Laura said. There was no reason to doubt the notion of mental compulsion; she could remember when narcomemes emerged into the gaiafield back in 3025. The first ones were simple product placements, amplifying the pleasure effect of various beers and aerosols. Modifying the memories available in the gaiafield to produce enhanced enjoyment was a trend that lasted for several years, almost wrecking the fledgling gaiafield concept entirely, until counter-routine filters were developed for the confluence nests. Having experienced those, Laura could well believe in more forceful variants of telepathy working in the Void.