‘If it works,’ Joey said. ‘I think he’s balancing the risk about right. If we make it to the Forest, we might just contribute something that’ll help us find a way out of the Void. If we don’t . . . Well, face it, the likes of us aren’t going to be missed on a pioneering world where the only machines that work belong to the twentieth century.’

‘Twentieth century?’ Ibu challenged. ‘Another raving optimist.’

‘I grew up on a farm,’ Ayanna protested. ‘We worked the land.’ She pulled a face. ‘Well, I helped Dad program the agribots.’

‘I’ll get my list together, then I might just go check on my secure store,’ Laura declared. ‘Not that any of us will ever be getting a re-life clone in the Void. Looks like we’re back to having one mortal life again.’

*

Time was short, and there were a lot of preparations to be made, all of which were more problematic than they should have been, thanks to glitches in the Vermillion’s network and command core. But Laura found a few spare minutes to go back to the suspension bay. Her sarcophagus was still open, the mechanisms inside cold and inert. She’d half expected engineeringbots to be swarming all over it, but nothing disturbed the tranquillity of the long compartment. There was a simple personal locker at the foot of the suspension chamber. Thankfully it opened when her u-shadow gave it the code. It didn’t hold much – one bag of decent clothes, another of sentimental items. That was the one she unzipped.

Inside, there was the hand-made wooden jewel box Andrze had bought her on their honeymoon on Tanyata, its colourful paint faded now after three centuries. The rust-red scarf with aboriginal art print she’d picked up in Kuranda. Her flute with its wondrously mellow sound, made in Venice Beach – and she couldn’t even remember who she’d been with when she acquired that. The phenomenally expensive (and practically black-market) chip of silver crystal from the ma-hon tree in New York’s Central Park. A bag of sentiments, then, a little museum of self more important than any secure store holding memories her brain no longer had room for. Strange how these physical items gave her a more comforting sense of identity than her own augmented, backed-up, reprofiled neurones. She picked up a ridiculously thick, and impractical, six-hundred-year-old Swiss army knife, with something like twenty different tools and blades. A gift from Althea, she recalled, the artist who made a virtue of rejecting all the technological boons which the Commonwealth provided for its citizens.

Althea, who would have sneered at the very concept of a flight to another galaxy – if Laura had ever gained the courage to tell her she was going. Laura grinned at how her old friend would greet the news that they were trapped in the artificial weirdness of the Void. ‘Hubris!’ she’d no doubt shout gleefully. And now the penknife was probably the most functional possession Laura owned. Althea’s smugness would turn supernova at that knowledge.

Laura put the ancient penknife in her shipsuit’s breast pocket. The weight of it was a comfort, something whose simplicity wouldn’t let her down. It belonged in the Void.

*

Shuttle Fourteen had a basic delta planform, with smooth rounded wing-tips giving it a slightly organic appearance – an unusual halfway machine between an old-fashioned aircraft and the flattened ovoid shape of the Commonwealth’s standard regrav capsules. As well as ferrying passengers down to a planet, it was designated a mid-range preliminary exploration vehicle, able to hop around the planets of a solar system, launching detailed observations, delivering researchers and scientific equipment. Examining a space-based artefact was well within its capabilities.

Inside, Laura could easily believe she’d just stepped back five centuries to the aircraft era. The forward cabin wasn’t quite cramped; there were ten large acceleration couches, in two rows, which seemed to fill a lot of it. Up at the front, the pilot’s couch was solo; overhung by the big curving windscreen. There was a nominal horseshoe console of glossy dark plastic, which usually displayed a few basic craft functions. As with everything in the modern Commonwealth, Shuttle Fourteen was controlled by a cognitive array with the human pilot as a (mainly psychological) safety fallback.

Today Rojas had pulled every emergency manual control out of the console, cluttering it in a bewildering assortment of clunky switches and ergonomic toggles. Flight trajectory graphics slithered about inside the windscreen like holographic fish. Smaller panes that had popped up out of the console glowed with complex system-status symbols.

Laura eyed them suspiciously as she strapped herself into her seat. The colourful 3D glyphs were ominously similar to those she used to see on wall posters at primary school when she dropped her first batch of children off in the morning – and that was three hundred and fifty years ago. Haven’t they come up with anything more advanced since then?

Rojas was sitting comfortably in the pilot’s couch, studying the ever-changing holograms and flicking switches like a twentieth-century astronaut, his voice a low-level murmur saturated with confidence as he talked to the array.

‘Looks like our glorious leader has the right stuff,’ Ibu said quietly as he settled into the couch next to Laura. ‘It makes you feel grand to be alive, doesn’t it, putting your life in his hands?’

She grinned back at him. Ibu had the kind of phlegmatic outlook on life she approved of. He was a good choice for the team. She still hadn’t made her mind up about Joey. If anything, the spasms afflicting his facial muscles had increased. It was pure prejudice on her part, she knew, but it did make him look as if he had some kind of bad neurological problem rather than just some damage from the tank yank, which he kept assuring them was inconsequential. Aside from that, the emotions which did escape from his guarded mind indicated disapproval of the mission. His heart wasn’t in it.

As for Ayanna, she acted like a consummate professional, interested only in the science. The problem with their newfound mental abilities was that everyone could sense the sheer terror leaking from her mind.

‘Two minutes,’ Rojas announced.

Five metres in front of the shuttle’s stubby nose, red warning lights began to flash around the docking bay’s inner doors as they slid shut. Laura made a face and pulled on her padded cap, then used the backup straps to stop herself floating out of the couch, clicking them together in the way she just about remembered from her childhood. Nobody was relying on the couches’ plyplastic cushioning to hold them.

With the straps pressing into her shoulders, she tried to steady her breathing. Apart from the two mandatory emergency training sessions before the colony fleet left Commonwealth space, she hadn’t spent any real time in zero gee for decades. Some people loved it for the freedom of movement. Every time she was weightless, she’d needed her biononics to help suppress the nausea. Andy Granfore had given her some drugs he promised would help, but she didn’t hold out much hope. Besides, she was still so full of tank yank suppressors, her biochemistry would probably register as alien if she was given any decent kind of scan.

‘Fusion chambers active and stable,’ Rojas announced. ‘Onboard systems ninety-four per cent functionality. Umbilical links closing.’

A large purple star flared in one of the console displays. ‘You’re looking good, Fourteen,’ Cornelius Brandt’s voice boomed from the cabin’s speakers.

‘Bollocks to this,’ Laura muttered. It was just a shuttle launch, for crap’s sake. All these reassurances were really starting to crank her tension up.

‘I just wanted to emphasize that your mission is important, but not worth taking any dangerous risks for,’ the starship’s captain continued. ‘Once we’re established on the surface, we’ll be able to turn every resource into finding a way out of the Void, and there are a lot of very smart people in suspension. Any information you can provide will be valuable, even if it is negative.’