Laura’s heart thudded hard. ‘It can’t be,’ she murmured. ‘I killed you. I killed you, damn it! I killed you.’

It was as if her own memory was false. She closed her eyes and saw the tumbling wreckage of Shuttle Fourteen, its rear quarter shredded. It had happened. She knew it had.

But the drogues pulled out the main chutes. Three big red-and-yellow striped circles bloomed across the clear sapphire basin. An exopod hung underneath them, floating gently to the ground.

‘No,’ Laura said numbly. ‘No no. This can’t be right. This isn’t my cheese.’ Even to her own ears she sounded as if she was cracking up. Then she noticed her time display. Twenty-seven hours, forty minutes since she’d landed. Which was weird, because the descending exopod probably had about a couple of minutes before touchdown.

She shielded her eyes and frowned up at it. It was coming down close. Very close. Directly above now, and –

‘Shit!’ Laura heaved herself out of the hatch and started crawling frantically across the hot grainy sand. She’d made probably nine metres when there was a soft pop of impact bags inflating out of the base of the exopod. It landed smack on top of hers and tilted sharply sideways, thudding to the ground. The main chutes fluttered away.

Laura’s time display read twenty-seven hours and forty-two minutes since she’d landed. Exactly.

‘No way,’ Laura said, too stunned to move. Out of an entire planet, it lands on top of my exopod. Precisely on top! ‘What the fuck do you want from me?’ she yelled into the empty sky.

She started crawling back to the two exopods, snarling as the grainy sand scratched her knees and wrists raw. She didn’t care. She had to get to the exopod, to face down whatever fresh horror the Void was taunting her with.

The newly arrived exopod was lying on its side. Laura picked up the axe from the planetary survival kit and clawed her way up to the hatch which was at shoulder height. Putting all her weight on her good foot, she pulled the lever. There was a hiss of pressure equalling, and she swung the hatch back. She raised the axe, expecting to see the copy-Rojas or the copy-Ibu – most probably both. But it wasn’t them.

A perfect Laura Brandt hung in the webbing straps, squinting against the brilliant sunlight flooding in. She was flawless, even down to the discoloured, badly swollen ankle and slit shipsuit trouser leg.

Laura screamed long and hard.

The other Laura screamed back at her.

Laura brought the axe down with manic strength, burying the edge in her doppelganger’s skull.

BOOK TWO

Dreams from the Void

July 9th 3326

Nigel Sheldon woke up. He was immediately aware of feeling warm and cosy, exactly how it should be after a good night’s sleep. Then he remembered the last thing that had happened—

His eyes snapped open. There was a face looking down at him. It was his own.

‘Welcome to the world,’ said the grinning Nigel at the side of the bed.

‘Oh, hell,’ Nigel groaned.

‘Yeah. ’Fraid so.’

Two Months Earlier:

May 17th 3326

New Costa: a megacity that once sprawled for more than four hundred miles along the coastline of Augusta’s Sinebar continent, then extended almost as far inland. At its peak, home to a billion people, all of them devoted to one ideal: making money. In those days, the city boasted over a million factories, producing every consumer product the human race had ever dreamt up. The heavy industrial plants consumed the minerals ruthlessly strip-mined from Augusta’s other continents, spewing their contaminated effluent out into the oceans. Its wormhole station, New Costa Junction, with its strategic connection back to Earth, boasted fifty wormhole generators creating permanent gateways to the thriving, ambitious new H-congruous planets still further away from the old homeworld. Gateways that were the perfect export routes, enabling those Halcion worlds to develop cleaner greener societies by transferring their industrial pollution debt to Augusta, where no one cared. Multiplanetary corporations, entrepreneurs, financiers – all of them spent their work-addict life in New Costa’s endless, centreless chequerboard of industrial districts and residential zones. And when it was all over, when they were burnt out and prematurely aged, they’d re-life and do it all over again – and again – forcing themselves a little further up the corporate ladder each time in a way that would have made Darwin shudder.

Augusta’s commercial expansion was performed with a ruthless imperial nonchalance, conquering all it reached out to. That was back in the era of the Starflyer War, nine hundred years ago: the Commonwealth’s first and, to-date, only interstellar conflict. Victory came in no small part thanks to the terrible and sophisticated weapons developed, then mass-produced on Augusta.

All of which made New Costa as rich in history as it was poor in culture. If you looked down on the ramshackle old road grid and chaotic layout of neighbourhoods, it was a history that could be read like the rings of a terrestrial tree.

Flying away from New Costa Junction, Nigel Sheldon had a perfect view of all that living archaeology as he turned his capsule’s forward fuselage transparent. For all that the megacity was in a period of drastic reduction, the old CST (Compression Space Transport) station was still as busy as ever. The three ancient terminus buildings were still standing, each one with a roof that spanned a square mile. Today it was mainly people who used the wormholes that knitted the Central worlds together. When he’d started the company, it was trains that zipped through the wormholes, carrying freight and passengers between disparate planets. Nowadays, with fabricators and replicators reproducing most things, including themselves, consumerism was effectively dead on the Central worlds. Anybody could assemble whatever they wanted in their own home. In practice, though, there were limits. Large or sophisticated machines were still built in New Costa. The megacity had even held on to its lead in starship manufacture, accounting for nearly thirty per cent of the Commonwealth’s total.

The capsule headed north, keeping parallel to the coast, its ellipsoid shape pushing through the air at just below subsonic speed. Right on the shore he could see the big airbarges hovering above the waves, with dozens of smaller earthmover bots loading them up with soil. It was the Port Klye peninsula – now crater, he acknowledged wryly. In the good old days there had been thirty-five massive nuclear fission reactors sited there, providing cheap energy to almost ten per cent of the city. Today the clean-up was almost complete. Before long, the giant hole would be filled in and turned into a wildlife park. Not that Augusta had much native vegetation or animal life, which was one reason he’d chosen it as the ideal location to build his corporate fiefdom.

His u-shadow told him he had a call from his wife. ‘I’m not going to make it tonight,’ she told him.

‘Why not?’ He tried not to make it sound petulant. He and Anine Saleeb had been married for eighty years now, a record – for both of them. She was only four hundred and thirty, while he was now close to his one thousand three hundredth birthday. That meant that being together all of the time wasn’t as important as it had been even six hundred years ago, back when he still had a harem and lived a ridiculously lavish multi-trillionaire’s lifestyle to the full. But they had been apart for a month now. He missed her.

‘There’s been some hanky-panky going on at our McLeod facility,’ she told him.

Nigel blinked in surprise. ‘Hanky-panky?’