‘By the action of watching, the observer affects the reality of that which is watched,’ she whispered.

Cornelius raised an eyebrow. ‘Neatly understated.’

‘So how do we get out?’

‘Good question.’ Cornelius indicated one of the large holographic images behind him. It showed her space with very few stars and a number of exotic and beautifully delicate nebulas. ‘We can’t see an end to it. The inside of the Void seems to be some kind of multidimensional Möbius strip. In here, the boundary doesn’t exist.’

‘So, where are we going?’

Cornelius’s mind emitted a sensation of desperation and despair that made Laura shiver again. ‘The Skylord is taking us to what it claims is an H-congruous planet. Sensors are confirming that status now.’

‘The what?’

Cornelius gestured. ‘Skylord.’

With a stiff back, Laura turned round. The high-res image behind her was taken from a sensor mounted on the forward section of the starship, where the ultradrive unit and force-field generators were clustered. The bottom fifth of the image showed the curving carbotanium hull with its thick layer of grubby grey thermal foam. At the top of the hologram was a small blue-white crescent, similar to any of the H-congruous worlds in the Commonwealth – though its night side lacked any city lights. And between the hull and the planet was the strangest nebula Laura could have imagined. As she stared, she saw it had some kind of solid core, a long ovoid shape. It wasn’t truly solid, she realized, but actually comprised of sheets of some crystalline substance warped into an extraordinary Calabi-Yau manifold geometry. The shimmering surfaces were alive with weird multicoloured patterns that flowed like liquid – or maybe it was the structure itself that was unstable. She couldn’t tell, for flowing around it was some kind of haze, also moving in strange confluences. ‘Serious bollocks,’ she grunted.

‘It’s a kind of spaceborne life,’ Cornelius said. ‘Three of them rendezvoused with us not long after we were pulled into the Void. They’re sentient. You can use your telepathy to converse with them, though it’s like talking to a savant. Their thought processes aren’t quite like ours. But they can fly through this space. Or at least manipulate it somehow. They offered to lead us to worlds inside the Void where we could live. Ventura, Vanguard, Violet and Valley followed two Skylords. Vermillion is following this one, along with Viscount and Verdant. We decided that splitting the starships gives us a better chance of finding a viable H-congruous planet.’

‘With respect,’ Laura said, ‘why are we following any of them to a planet at all? Surely we should be doing everything we can to find the way out? All of us are on board for one reason: to found a new civilization outside this galaxy. Granted, the inside of the Void is utterly fascinating, and the Raiel would give their right bollock to be here, but you cannot make that decision for us.’

Cornelius’s expression was weary. ‘We’re trying to find an H-congruous planet, because the alternative is death. Have you noticed your biononic function?’

‘Yes. It’s very poor.’

‘Same for any chunk of technology on board. What passes for spacetime in here is corroding our systems a percentage point at a time. The first thing to fail was the ultradrive, presumably because it’s the most sophisticated system on board. But for the last year there have been fluctuations in the direct-mass converters, which were growing more severe. I couldn’t risk leaving them on line. We’re using fusion reactors to power the ingrav drive units now.’

‘What?’ she asked in shock. ‘You mean we’ve been travelling slower than light all this time?’

‘Point nine lightspeed since we arrived, nearly six years ago now,’ Cornelius confirmed bitterly. ‘Thankfully the suspension chambers have remained functional, or we would have had a real disaster on our hands.’

Laura’s first reaction was, Why didn’t you get me out of suspension back then? I could have helped. But that was probably what everyone on board would think. And from what she understood of their situation, the captain had done pretty well under the circumstances. Besides, her specialist field of molecular physics probably wouldn’t be that helpful in analysing a different space-time structure.

She was drawn to the bright crescent ahead. ‘Is it H-congruous?’

‘We think so, yes.’

‘Is that why you tank yanked me? To help with a survey?’

‘No. We’re six million kilometres out and decelerating hard. We’ll reach orbit in another two days. Heaven alone knows how we’ll cope with landing, but we’ll tackle that when it happens. No, you’re here because our sensors found something at the planet’s Lagrange One point.’ Cornelius closed his eyes, and the image shifted, focusing on the Lagrange point one and a half million kilometres above the planet’s sunlit hemisphere, where the star’s gravitational pull was perfectly countered by the planet’s gravity. The area was filled with a fuzzy blob that either the sensors or Laura’s eyes couldn’t quite focus on. It seemed to be speckled, as if it was made up from thousands of tiny motes.

‘What is that?’ she asked.

‘We’re calling it the Forest,’ Cornelius said. ‘It’s a cluster of objects that are about eleven kilometres long, with a surface distortion similar to our Skylord friend.’

‘More of them?’

‘Not quite; the shape is wrong. These things are slim with bulbous ends. And there’s something else. The whole Lagrange point is emitting a different quantum signature to the rest of the Void.’

‘Another quantum environment?’ she asked sceptically.

‘So it would seem.’

‘How is that possible?’ Laura’s shoulders slumped as she suddenly realized why she’d been tank yanked – her and the other science staff sitting in the bridge. ‘You want us to go and find out what it is, don’t you?’

Cornelius nodded. ‘I cannot justify stopping the Vermillion in a possibly hostile environment to conduct a scientific examination. My priority has to be getting us down intact on an H-congruous world. So you’ll command a small science team. Take a shuttle over to the Forest and run whatever tests you can. It might help us, or it might not. But, frankly, anything which can add to our knowledge base has to be considered useful at this stage.’

‘Yeah,’ she said in resignation. ‘I can see that.’

‘Take Shuttle Fourteen,’ he said.

Laura could sense that the shuttle had some kind of significance to him. It was the sensation of expectation running through his thoughts which signalled it, but her brain still wasn’t up to working out why. She told her u-shadow to pull the file from her storage lacuna. Data on the shuttle played through her mind, and she still didn’t get it . . . ‘Why that one?’

‘It has wings,’ Cornelius said softly. ‘If you have a major systems glitch, you can still aerobrake and glide down to the surface.’

Then she got it. ‘Oh, right; the shuttle doesn’t need its ingrav units to land.’

‘No. The shuttle doesn’t.’

Laura’s blood seemed to be chilling back down to suspension levels again. The Vermillion, over a kilometre long, and not remotely aerodynamic, was utterly dependent on regrav to slow to zero velocity relative to the planet and ingrav to drift down to a light-as-a-feather landing. Of course there were multiple redundancies built in, and no moving parts, making failure just about inconceivable. In the normal universe.

‘Once we’ve confirmed H-congruous status, I’ll be launching all twenty-three shuttles from orbit,’ Cornelius said. ‘As will the Viscount and Verdant.’

Laura told her u-shadow to recentre the bridge display on the planet. It still couldn’t interface with the starship’s net. ‘Uh, sir, how did you load your orders into the command core?’