‘Copy that, Vermillion,’ Rojas said. ‘And thank you. Fifteen seconds to launch. Umbilical disconnect confirmed. Five greens on clamp release. Regrav units on line. Initiating lift.’

The red docking bay lights turned purple, signalling vacuum, and the outer doors slid back, to reveal a midnight-black universe outside. The shuttle wobbled slightly as it rose from its docking cradle. Rojas eased it out through the airlock.

Despite herself, Laura craned forward for a better view through the windscreen. The weird space she’d only seen on Vermillion’s holograms unveiled for real as Fourteen emerged from the bay. Somehow, Void space managed to appear darker than ordinary space. It was the contrast, Laura reasoned. On the Commonwealth worlds there were always so many stars visible at night, from the faintest wisps of the Milky Way up to the sharp specks of white giants. They were all around and forever. Here there were so few stars visible, probably no more than a couple of thousand. But the nebulas made up for their absence. There must have been hundreds, from the great smears of luminous plasma dust sprawling over lightyears to fainter smudges glowing in the unknown depths.

Gravity fell away over a long moment as they glided clear of the Vermillion. Fourteen began a slow roll, and Laura saw the massive cliff of foam-coated metal slide past as if they were falling parallel to it. It wasn’t an elegant structure, more like heavy-duty industrial modules bolted together and sprayed in the ubiquitous foam, which had bleached and pocked from its long vacuum exposure. Things poked out of the coating on spindly poles: sensors, comlinks, molecular force screen nozzles . . . Bright orange-neon lines glowed in deep fissures that were the seams between modules, the thermal-dump radiators energetically beaming the starship’s excess heat out into the vacuum. Regrav and ingrav propulsion units were clusters of stumpy cylinders as big as the shuttle, made out of dark glass shot through with green scintillations. Vermillion’s rear third was all segmented cargo tubes, like a geometrical intestine. They contained everything you needed to establish a technologically advanced human civilization on a virgin world.

All useless here, Laura thought bleakly.

Rojas applied power to Fourteen’s main regrav drive units, and the shuttle started accelerating away from the Vermillion. Laura’s sense of balance shifted rapidly as the gravity built to one third standard. To her perception, the shuttle was now standing on its tail, putting her flat on her back in the couch while the floor had now become the wall. Rojas was above her, his couch creaking as it absorbed the new weight loading.

‘Are you all right?’ a smooth mental voice asked her.

Laura didn’t need to be told this was the Skylord. The mentality she could sense behind the thought was massive and intimidatingly serene.

‘Er, yes, thank you,’ she replied, instinctively tightening her own thoughts so her emotional leakage was minimal. Judging by the stiff postures all around her, the others were taking part in identical telepathic conversations.

‘You are leaving,’ the Skylord said with a tinge of concern. ‘Is my guidance no longer acceptable? We are so near a world where you will flourish and become fulfilled.’

Rojas held up a hand, stalling anyone else’s reply, and opened up his own telepathic voice. ‘We thank you for your guidance, and anticipate joining our friends on the world you have brought us to very soon.’

‘I am glad for you. But why do you delay?’

‘We wish to explore the nature of this world and everything close to it. It is the way we reach our fulfilment.’

‘I understand. Your current trajectory will take you close to our parturition region.’

‘Do you mean this clump of objects?’ Rojas sent a mental picture of the Forest.

‘Yes.’

‘Is this where Skylords come from?’

‘Not this parturition region. We came from another.’

‘What are the objects in the parturition region? Eggs?’

‘The parturition region creates us.’

‘How?’

‘It does.’

‘Do you object to us going there?’

‘No.’

‘The region is different to the rest of the Void. Why?’

‘It is a parturition region.’

‘Are they important to you?’

‘We come from a parturition region. We do not return. We guide those who have reached fulfilment to the Heart of the Void.’

‘Where is that?’

‘It is at the end of your fulfilment.’ The Skylord’s presence withdrew from the cabin.

Rojas shook his head and sighed. His thoughts were showing a degree of frustration. ‘Thus ends every conversation with the Skylords,’ he concluded. ‘Enigmatic shits.’

‘That’s a fantastic discovery,’ Joey said. ‘The distortion trees birth them or conjure them into existence, or something. This is where they come from. Our mission is half complete and we’ve only been going two minutes.’

‘If you believe it,’ Rojas said. ‘They’re slippery little swines.’ He flicked a switch to open a channel back to Vermillion and began reporting the conversation.

*

Three hours seventeen minutes accelerating at point seven gees, then Shuttle Fourteen flipped over and decelerated at the same rate. Six and a half hours after launching from Vermillion, Rojas performed their final velocity match manoeuvres and the delta-shaped shuttle was left hanging in space, two and a half thousand kilometres out from the Forest.

Laura stared at it through the shuttle’s windscreen – a huge patch of silver speckles that gleamed brightly, blocking off half of space. Her eyes fooled her into thinking each speck was drifting about, while in fact it was just the bizarre patterns of their surfaces that flickered and shimmered. Sensors zoomed in, giving them a decent image of the distortion trees on the edge of the Forest.

‘They don’t have that fog around them that the Skylords do,’ Joey slurred. His facial twitches were growing progressively worse. Now that they were in freefall, drool was slipping out of his open lips to drift round the cabin. Laura didn’t like the way his problems were developing. Shuttle Fourteen had a medical capsule, but it wasn’t as sophisticated as any of the ones on Vermillion. Not, she admitted to herself, that she’d like any medical capsule to run a procedure on her right now. Fourteen’s systems glitches were steadily increasing.

In tandem with Joey’s affliction? she wondered.

‘Other than that, there’s not a lot of difference,’ Ayanna said. ‘These are smaller.’

‘Narrower,’ Rojas said. ‘And they are rotating very slowly around their long axis. Nine-hour cyclic period.’

‘A thermal roll?’ Laura asked.

‘Looks like it. That’s the easiest way to keep a stable temperature in space.’

‘So something’s making them roll,’ Laura said.

‘Nothing visible. It’s not a reaction-control system.’

‘Magnetic?’ Joey asked.

‘I’m not picking up any significant magnetic field,’ Rojas said. ‘They’re almost inert.’

‘What about the anomalous quantum signature?’ Laura asked.

Ayanna studied several of the displays, a frown growing. ‘It is very strange. The temporal component of spacetime is different in there.’

‘Temporal?’ Ibu queried.

‘I think time is progressing at a reduced flow rate inside. It’s not unreasonable; our wormholes can manipulate internal time flow in a similar fashion. We can even halt temporal flow altogether inside exotic matter cages if they’re formatted correctly.’

‘You mean things happen slower in there?’ Rojas asked.

‘Only relative to outside the Forest.’

‘So are the trees made out of exotic matter?’ Joey asked.

‘I’ve no idea. But negative energy is the only way we know of manipulating spacetime, so there’s got to be something like it in there somewhere.’

‘We have to go in and take physical samples,’ Laura said.