‘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.’