Small icons in Laura’s exovision told her the rest of the team were taking advantage of the shuttle’s return to normality as the glitches faded. But she was concentrating primarily on the quantum environment which the first Mk24 was gliding through. The temporal components were certainly different. There were other abnormalities as well.

‘Do you understand this?’ she asked Ayanna.

‘Not really.’

Laura closed her eyes as the Mk24 passed within seventeen kilometres of a distortion tree on the fringe of the Forest. The image it relayed of the tree was excellent. Its long bulbous structure was made up from the wrinkled folds of some crystalline substance; they were arranged in a much less convoluted fashion than a Skylord. Pale multicoloured shadows rippled vigorously inside, as if there was something deeper within the tree that was prowling about. The image flickered.

The Mk24’s datastream was dopplering down fast. Even with buffering, it was degrading badly. Laura shifted her focus to the second Mk24, which was five minutes behind it, approaching the outer tier of trees. The image was much better.

With that front and centre in her consciousness, she ran a review through the rest of the data construct that Shuttle Fourteen was assembling.

‘Are you catching this?’ she asked abruptly. Secondary routines pulled another datastream into principal interpretation. It wasn’t from the Mk24 drones. The shuttle’s main radar was showing a kilometre-wide circular formation of small objects. They were already seventeen thousand kilometres away from the blunt apex of the Forest, and receding at one point eight kilometres a second. Each object was globular and measured about three metres in diameter. Visual imaging was showing nothing; their surfaces were dull. She flicked the shuttle’s thermal imaging to tracking them, which registered an interestingly high infra-red emission.

‘Thirty-five degrees?’ Ibu muttered in surprise. ‘What are they?’

‘Whatever they are, radar shows eleven of them,’ Laura said. ‘They’re holding that circular formation, too, with minimal separation drift. Zero acceleration. Something flung them out like that.’

‘Heading straight for the planet,’ Rojas said. His mind flared a peak of alarm. ‘I’m calling Vermillion, warning them something’s approaching.’

‘Baby Skylords?’ Joey asked. ‘This is the parturition zone, after all.’

‘Reasonable guess,’ Ibu said. ‘I wonder what their lifecycle is. Grow up on the planet then jump back to space when they’re mature?’

‘They’re inert,’ Laura told them. ‘No gravitational or spacetime distortion registering at all. They’re not Skylords.’

‘Skylord eggs?’ Ayanna said.

‘The Skylords said they didn’t come from here,’ Ibu said. ‘They’re not exactly clear speakers, but I don’t think they could even grasp the concept of lying.’

‘Vermillion will send a shuttle out to rendezvous,’ Rojas said. ‘If they can afford to.’

‘We can always study them in situ if not,’ Joey said. ‘This is where they came from, after all.’

The third Mk24 flew past the outer layer of trees and lost contact less than a minute later. The fourth lasted for seventy-two seconds before the datastream dopplered down to zero.

‘Just so we’re straight,’ Rojas said. ‘Slow time isn’t fatal, right, Ayanna?’

‘It’s only slow inside the Forest relative to the Void continuum outside,’ she replied with growing annoyance.

‘So now we just need to know if that quantum signature affects living tissue,’ Ibu said.

‘Okay,’ Rojas said. ‘I’ll launch a Laika drone.’

Laura knew that, on an intellectual level, she ought to be having some kind of conflicted sentiment, maybe with a small sense of moral disapproval thrown in. But, frankly, after so many centuries of witnessing genuine death (as opposed to bodyloss) in both animals and humans, it didn’t bother her any more. Besides, it was hard to work up much sentiment about a gerbil.

The little rodent was nestled in the centre of the Laika drone, which had almost identical sensors to the Mk24, with the addition of a tiny life-support globe at its core. They all observed through the sensor datastream as the Laika drone glided past the outer distortion trees. Through its waning telemetry link, they saw the gerbil twitching its nose, heart rate unchanged, breathing regularly, trying to suck water from the nozzle by its head. Muscles and nerves were all performing normally. The link dwindled to nothing.

‘The Forest interior doesn’t kill you,’ Ibu said. ‘Doesn’t even affect life.’

Joey grunted – a nasty twisted sound more like a hoot. ‘Not for the first minute.’

‘The data has dopplered down beyond detection because of the temporal environment,’ Ayanna said. ‘We lost it, that’s all. The Laika didn’t fail. That gerbil is still alive in there.’

‘That’s your official recommendation?’ Rojas asked.

‘Yes. I believe it’s safe for us to go inside. The only thing I don’t know is the rate which time progresses in there. If we’re inside for a day, it may be a month that passes outside. It may be more. It may be less.’

‘Thank you. Joey?’

‘We’ve come this far.’

‘Laura?’

‘I need to have samples of those trees. Whatever mechanism they’re using is way outside anything we’ve encountered before. And I desperately want to know what their energy source is. You don’t change temporal flow without a phenomenal amount of power. That’s got to come from somewhere, and we’re not seeing the neutrino activity to indicate direct mass energy conversion, or even fusion. It can’t be solar. So, where . . . ?’

‘Where does the energy come from for our telekinesis?’ Ibu asked immediately. ‘I don’t think you’re using the right references here, Laura. The Void continuum is different.’

‘You mean the trees are thinking time to be slow?’

‘Thinking. Wishing. Who knows?’

‘All right, settle down,’ Rojas said. He stared at Ibu. ‘I take it you’re happy to go inside?’

‘Not happy, but I don’t object. Laura’s right: we need to get a good look at whatever processes are going on in those trees.’

Rojas exhaled loudly. ‘All right, then, I’ll tell the Vermillion we’re going inside. I’m assuming once we’re in there, we’ll lose our link with them. I don’t want them to launch a rescue mission just because we can’t talk for a few days.’

Ibu opened a private link to Laura’s u-shadow. ‘Why do I get the notion a rescue mission isn’t going to be featuring heavily on the captain’s agenda?’

*

Rojas kept the manual controls active as he piloted Shuttle Fourteen forwards, heading for a large gap between distortion trees. Laura preferred to watch the approach through the windscreen rather than access the shuttle’s sensor suite. However, her exovision display did provide a secondary interpretation, detailing their exact progress.

Acceleration was a tenth of a gee, enough to keep them in their couches. Laura used the time to quickly munch down some chocolate wafers. Even the small amount of gravity allowed her stomach to digest food without complaining.

‘Somehow I feel we should be making preparations,’ Ibu said.

‘What kind?’ Laura asked.

‘I’m not sure. Putting on some kind of protective suit? Carrying a personal oxygen tank? Inoculation?’

‘I’ve got a force-field skeleton web on under my shipsuit,’ Ayanna said. ‘Does that count?’

‘That only helps if it doesn’t glitch.’

‘I thought you were the optimist.’

Laura rapped a knuckle on the cabin’s padded bulkhead. The beige cushioning was arranged in squares; nearly half of them were the doors to small lockers. ‘There are emergency pressure suits stowed in every cabin. You’ll be fine.’ She broke the seal on a carton of orange juice and started sucking at the straw.

Ibu glanced at the wall of trees that stretched across Voidspace outside the shuttle’s windscreen. ‘You called us rats in a lab maze. More like bacteria under a microscope. Our feelings are irrelevant. The only thing that’s going to keep us alive in here is competence and logic.’ He smiled round the cabin. ‘Thankfully we’ve got both. Can you imagine what this mission would be like if we only had a bunch of fifty-year-olds for company? A rollercoaster of panic and tears the whole way.’