She took off her helmet and smelt the tiny cabin’s air. It was a lot fresher than the recycled atmosphere the suit had been feeding her. Her first priority had to be her ankle. Half her exovision was filled with medical displays, most of which were red or amber.

The suit released its grip on her, and she wriggled out with a distinct lack of elegance. It was cramped in the little craft, and the straps didn’t help. Elbows, knees, head, feet – they all bumped into some part of the walls or port or consoles.

When she finally rid herself of the suit, it was an effort not to wince at the sight of her ankle. Released from the suit’s grip, the flesh was swelling badly. She did have to cut the shoe free and slice the trouser leg open. The Swiss army knife would have been really useful for that, she acknowledged grimly. Fortunately, the medical kit had an old-style scalpel blade. What it lacked was a decent selection of medicines and treatment packs. Not that she would have trusted the packs in the Void anyway. It really was a basic emergency pack, intended to triage wounds until the exopod returned to the main ship where there would be a hospital and doctors who knew how to program biononics properly.

So she had to make do with anti-inflammatories and a large dose of coagulants to stop any further internal bleeding. Thankfully, her nerve blocks were still functional. She didn’t like to think what the pain levels would be like otherwise. And she had no idea what to do once she had landed. The bone needed setting properly, and the fluid draining.

There were files in her storage lacuna that showed how to deal with such an injury using only primitive equipment. It was like a text left over from the twenty-first century. Laura had no idea if she could self-operate even with one hundred per cent pain blocks.

Once the medicines were administered, she ordered the exopod’s sensors to scan for the Vermillion’s beacon. Even if – and you’re being ridiculous here, she told herself – she had somehow travelled back in time, the Vermillion would be approaching the planet. Captain Cornelius would be preparing to launch a science mission to the Forest. And somewhere deeper in the giant starship, medical staff would be tank yanking her and Ayanna, and Joey, and Ibu, and Rojas.

The exopod completed three scans and reported no beacon signal of any type or at any strength. Not in space. Not coming from the planet, either.

‘Bollocks! Bollocks, bollocks.’ Where the hell were they? Three starships that size couldn’t simply vanish.

Unless they haven’t arrived yet, a traitorous part of her mind whispered. So she did what she should have done as soon as she left the Forest and switched on the exopod’s own beacon. It made her feel better, even though it didn’t exactly help her situation.

She ran a quick inventory. There was enough food for two weeks. That’s if you counted dehydrated packets as food. They’d all have to be rehydrated. Water wasn’t a problem. The exopod carried ten litres – and a recycle filter system. Laura wrinkled her nose up at that, but there wasn’t much choice. Only eighty-nine hours left.

A day later, she wasn’t sure she would make it. Her ankle was the size of a football, the skin dark purple, and a fever was taking hold. She was shivering with cold as her flesh burnt. More worryingly, there were odd moments when she was losing lucidity. Lapses of time when she thought she was talking to Ayanna. Twice she woke up shouting at Joey not to open the airlock.

Every time it happened, she cursed herself for being so weak. She was afraid to take any more drugs for fear of making the delirium worse. She knew she had to drink more, but couldn’t bring herself to suck on the tube. Her mind started to drift, constructing terrible scenarios of the world she was heading for. That the surface would be nothing but mounds of the dark alien globes. That the exopod would sink into them. That they’d penetrate the hull from every direction, and contract around her. She’d be stuck to six different globes at once, and they’d each start tugging at her, trying to be the one that consumed her –

‘Where are you?’ she shouted as the sensors reported there was still no beacon signal from Vermillion.

By the end of the second day she had withdrawn into a perfect storm of misery and self-loathing. There was so much she could have done to help Ayanna. If she wasn’t such a coward. If she had a shred of human decency. Joey too could have been saved if she hadn’t been so totally self-absorbed.

Maybe Joey had the right of it, she wondered. Accept bodyloss and get re-lifed when the Vermillion escaped the Void. She just wished she could believe that would happen.

She had to take some drugs ten hours out from the planet. Even in her wretched state, she acknowledged the next trajectory correction burn had to be performed correctly. If the exopod was going to aerobrake, it had to hit the outer atmosphere at a precise angle. There was little margin for error.

It was a fifty-two-second burn, aligning the exopod to graze the top of the atmosphere. Too long, and she would shoot past the planet, to be lost in Voidspace. Too short, and the exopod would hit the atmosphere at a steep angle, overloading the thermal protective coating.

There were so many factors involved, so much that could go wrong. No Commonwealth citizen was used to this level of uncertainty any more; technology simply worked. Aerobrake entry was the ultimate safety fallback, a capability provided almost as an afterthought. Nobody ever expected an exopod actually to do this. And as for using parachutes to land – she had to pull that file out of her lacunas, all the while praying that the explanation of the chute system too was some kind of Void-derived glitch. Her life was going to depend on a bit of fabric and strings? Seriously?

Fear began to supplant Laura’s misery. Perhaps bodyloss isn’t such a good idea after all?

The burn lasted its pre-programed time, and cut off. Sensors measured her new vector and reported she was on track for a correct aerobrake insertion.

‘Wow, something went right.’

She forced herself to eat on the final approach phase. She hydrated a tube of pasta. As always, it tasted of nothing, a gooey paste with spaghetti chunks blocking the nozzle every time she squeezed. She drank water to wash it down, mildly grateful she couldn’t taste that, either.

An hour out from the atmosphere, she fastened herself back in the webbing. There was no way she was going to risk any weight being placed on her ankle. By now, the skin colour around the broken tibia and fibula bones had darkened considerably, although she managed to convince herself that the swelling had gone down slightly.

The exopod hit the atmosphere. It was only the sensors which told her that to start with, showing the increased density of ions outside. Then the exopod started to tremble. That soon evolved into a pronounced shaking. A ruby glow crept in through the pod, overwhelming the bright white radiance of the clouds far below.

Laura’s hands tightened on the straps holding her upright as gravity began to reassert itself. A rumble began to penetrate the hull insulation as the exopod tore its way down at hypersonic speed. Her weight increased, straining the straps. The exopod reached four gees, and Laura’s nerve blocks began to fail. Her ankle was a throbbing mass of red-hot pressure. She cried out – a sound that was lost amid the tormented howl of air being shredded by the little craft’s deceleration.

Incandescent sparks were starting to zip past the port as unprotected systems vaporized off the hull. Sensor coverage was non-existent now. Not that she could have concentrated on anything they showed her. The exopod was shaking so much she couldn’t focus.

Gradually the shaking began to ease off. The shriek of obliterated air faded away and the red glow of the thermal coating died out. Bright sunlight shone into the cabin. It was a glorious sapphire blue outside. Sky!