‘Whatever.’

‘You need to know, Laura. Once you leave the Forest, all you have to do is wait for the Vermillion to show up and warn them about the globes.’

‘Which isn’t going to happen,’ she retorted almost angrily. ‘Because I didn’t show up, I didn’t meet me and I didn’t stop us from coming here. Did I?’ She reached the flat trailing edge of the delta wings and started to clamber up around them. The blunt end of the fuselage swung into view. Clamshell doors had hinged up and to one side, exposing the wide circular airlock which made up the end of the EVA hangar. Its outer door was open. It made her let out a small whimper of relief; Joey had been telling the truth about that at least. She was starting to worry the tank yank malady was affecting his brain.

‘Joey, I’m at the airlock.’

‘Great. Find something to hang on to. You’ll need to be really secure.’

‘What?’ she asked in bewilderment.

‘I’ve overridden the safeties. I’m going to open the inner door, blow the hangar’s atmosphere out. It’ll be quite a blast, so you need to be secure. I don’t want you blowing away, okay?’

‘Joey, what the fuck . . .’

‘You’ll see. And you’ll make it out of the Forest, too. The second exopod’s intact.’

‘What’s happened?’ she sobbed. ‘Why are you doing this?’

‘I can’t come with you. Please, Laura, find something to fasten yourself to.’

‘What have they done to you, Joey?’ she asked in dread. ‘Why are you doing this?’

‘Are you secure?’

She couldn’t argue; she was too exhausted. Besides, the fatalism he was releasing into the gaiafield told her there was no point. She looked round the inside of the big airlock. There were a dozen handholds and several empty equipment racks. She crawled over to one of them and hinged its titanium latches around her. ‘Secure.’

The inner doors began to peel apart. Gas rushed out of the expanding hole, thin white vapour streaking past her. Shuttle Fourteen began to move, propelled along a weirdly erratic course, the escaping plume of atmosphere exaggerating its original tumble. Laura saw the glowing distortion trees whirl round and round as she was shoved against the rack’s latches. The distant planet crescent whipped by once.

There seemed to be an incredible amount of atmosphere in the EVA hangar. It even kept roaring out in a vast hurricane when the airlock doors were fully open. Streams of vapour played across her spacesuit – it was like being caught in a powerful water jet. She could actually hear the noise.

Then it was over. A cloud of twinkling ice crystals swarmed around the end of the whirling shuttle, expanding fast. Laura freed herself from the rack and started to crawl inside where the blue emergency lighting cast everything in sharp relief.

‘That worked, then,’ Joey said.

Laura could feel his emotions through the gaiafield link, satisfaction and fatalism combined. Also fright. He was allowing that to show for the first time. Pain was starting to colour his thoughts now, a dull ache spreading out from his empty lungs. She scuttled past the airlock’s inner door and saw him. Every limb locked rigid in shock. ‘Joey! Oh, Joey, no. No, no, no.’

He was stuck to the alien globe. One leg, an arm and a third of his torso had sunk into it. The side of his head was up against the wrinkled black surface, an ear already absorbed.

Laura used the handholds now, gliding over to him.

‘Don’t touch me,’ he warned.

‘Why didn’t you say? Oh, bollocks, Joey, why?’

Explosive decompression had ruptured capillaries under his skin, turning his flesh scarlet. Blood oozed through his pores and wept out from around his eyeballs. His mouth was open, also emitting a spray of fine scarlet droplets with every heartbeat. ‘I was bodylossed the moment the fake Rojas grabbed me. This way you get to live. And they don’t get to copy me. Worthwhile.’

‘Joey.’

‘Say hi to my re-life clone. Tell me how noble I am.’

‘Joey—’

The gaiafield connection faded out. Laura stared at Joey’s awful ruined face as the blood droplets started to vacuum boil. It was only when the swelling scarlet mist started to smear her helmet that she suddenly moved again.

She hauled her way over to the second exopod and slipped in through the open hatch. The webbing floated about in a tangle, which she sorted out, clicking the buckles together to hold her in place. Power-up was a simple sequence. The hatch closed; air squirted in.

Piloting wasn’t exactly her talent set, but there were some basic files in her storage lacuna. They ran as secondary routines in her macrocellular clusters, and she managed to steer the little craft out through the open airlock, only scraping the sides twice as she went.

The shuttle twisted about, its spin rate increased massively by the loss of the EVA hangar atmosphere. She stabilized the exopod and carefully brought it back as close as she could to the floundering delta shape. The biggest engines she had were three high-density ion rockets in the base of the spherical fuselage, capable of producing a fifth of a gee.

Laura fired the rockets at full thrust. Three plumes of high-energy plasma stabbed down onto Shuttle Fourteen’s fuselage, striking at the port wing root just behind the forward cabin. They punctured the grey thermal shielding and roasted the composite and metal stress structure beneath. Systems vaporized. Tanks ruptured. The pressure hull fractured, blowing out the passenger cabin’s atmosphere.

The exopod was two hundred metres away from the shuttle when Laura switched the ion rockets off. She fired the manoeuvring thrusters, turning the little craft so she could see the shuttle through the wide circular port. It was tumbling even faster now, surrounded by a cloud of scintillating debris. The port wing was badly buckled, with a dark ruptured crater still venting spurts of gas. One of the clamshell doors had broken off. When the tail swung into view, even the EVA hangar’s emergency lights were out. But the centre of the shuttle was still intact; the alien things could still be alive in there.

She flew the exopod back to Fourteen, nudging it as close as she dared. Radar tracked the tumble, showing her the tail swinging around towards her. She fired the ion rockets again, sending the ice-blue spears of plasma slamming into the EVA hangar. They must have scored a direct hit on the other exopod’s fuel tanks. An explosion blew the rear quarter of the shuttle apart. Jagged fragments came whirling past the port, along with a vivid plume of vapour that was alive with snapping static discharges.

When she manoeuvred the exopod to view the results, Fourteen had broken in two. The port wing had ripped free, and the main cabin section was split open along the length of the remaining fuselage. She stared numbly at the wreckage for several minutes as it drifted away. There was no satisfaction, no sense of winning. She’d done what was necessary to survive. That was all. Behind the dwindling shuttle, the vast distortion trees maintained their radiant constellation, unknowing or uncaring about the demise of their creatures.

The exopod’s sensors locked on to the planet one and a half million kilometres away. Laura loaded that into the network, which incorporated it into the existing navigation data and began to plot a vector for her. The first burn, lasting three minutes, took her out of the Forest.

As she passed through the edge of the distortion trees, a time symbol flicked up into her exovision. It had been twenty-seven hours forty-two minutes since Shuttle Fourteen had actually entered the Forest and its altered temporal environment.

Laura shook her head ruefully. She still didn’t believe poor Joey’s theory of time travel.

The second burn lasted seventeen minutes and consumed sixty-eight per cent of her fuel. There would have to be regular corrective burns, but flight time to the planet was calculated at ninety-two hours.