The Abyss Beyond Dreams Read online

  With a groan, she lumbered up out of the hatch again and scuttled round to a small panel in the base of the exopod. The emergency planetary survival kit was inside, but streaks of molten metal from some sensor or antenna had solidified over the panel, practically welding it shut. She tried prising at it with her telekinesis, but she certainly wasn’t strong enough to shift the metal bonds. She looked round, and found a sharpish rock. Flakes of the blackened metal broke off as she hammered away. The irony made her grin fiercely: a rock hammer to open a spaceship, surely the ultimate clash of primitive against sophistication.

  She was sweating profusely by the time she finally managed to clear the panel and tug it open. The case slid out, containing basic supplies – four water bottles with built-in purification filters, another medical kit, a couple of array tablets with high-power transmitters, two insulated one-piece suits (which would be useful in this heat, she admitted), some simple tools, including an axe and multifunction knife not dissimilar to the Swiss army knife, two force-field skeleton suits (their processors didn’t even respond to her u-shadow’s ping), a pair of high-density power cells and an amazingly thin photovoltaic sheet that just kept unrolling. She spread that out, holding it down with rocks on each corner, and plugged it in to the high-density cells, then plugged them into the exopod’s power circuit.

  Back inside, she gulped down a litre of water after her exertions. The photovoltaic sheet alone was producing enough electricity to keep the environmental unit going. Her exposed skin was starting to smart from sunburn, so she slathered on some salve. She spent a long minute staring at her damaged ankle. It hadn’t got any worse, but sun exposure definitely hadn’t helped. If she was going to put an insulated suit on she’d have to cut the trouser leg open first.

  She turned to the two array tablets. They had black solar cases that would recharge their cells. So she set them to broadcast a distress signal at full power for ten minutes then charge up for fifty minutes before signalling again. As they were solid state, they should be able to maintain that cycle indefinitely.

  After she’d set them outside she ate another tube of pasta and checked the sensors. There was no trace of the Vermillion or the other starships. The sky was clear of any signal. It made her wonder how far she’d travelled into the past. Not that it was possible. But if . . .

  Four hours later the sun dropped below the horizon. After another hour it was cool enough for her to turn the environmental unit off. She looked out of the hatch without venturing outside. Above her, the Void’s nebulas dominated the sky. Below them, the desert was perfectly still – a silence that was unnerving now the environmental unit had stopped its wheezing and rattling. Looking at that vast unyielding stretch of grainy sand, she knew there was no way she could get across it on her own. The solar sheet would supply power long after her food and water ran out. All she could do was stay put and keep alive until Vermillion arrived. There was nothing else. Just wait and pray that, against all logic and science, Joey had been right.

  *

  In the morning she started an inventory of food. She refused to cut down on her water intake. That would be dangerous, but she could afford to eat fewer calories, especially as she planned on doing nothing.

  She settled back in the tiny cabin and began reviewing the science data she’d assiduously stored in her lacuna. The molecular pathways inside the distortion tree were truly extraordinary. Mapping them properly was going to be a serious task. But it would stop her thinking about Ayanna and the others.

  Seven hours after dawn, the environmental unit packed up. Laura just laughed at the silence. ‘What’s next? A tsunami?’ She was beginning to believe the Void’s controlling intelligence was taking a personal and very macabre interest in her. This catastrophic mission was her very own rat maze. And I can’t find the cheese.

  She’d got the top of the environmental unit open when a sonic boom hit the exopod.

  The harsh sound made her jump. She dropped the tools and stuck her head out of the hatch, searching the sky.

  High above her, a small black speck was falling at terminal velocity, producing a grubby vertical contrail filled with twinkling embers. The contrail shrank away to nothing, and the speck fell in silence. Then a couple of drogue chutes shot out.

  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 perm
anent 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?’

  ‘The managers think the smartcore has been compromised.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked in genuine puzzlement. The Sheldon Dynasty’s McLeod facility had been tasked with building a hundred and fifty huge exospheric stations that would float just outside Earth’s atmosphere, ultimately providing the entire planet with a T-sphere, allowing practical teleportation anywhere on the surface. It wasn’t a controversial project; ANA: Governance had only commissioned it after a long and no doubt tediously parochial debate amid the many political factions that flourished within humanity’s downloaded personalities.

  ‘Production hasn’t been disrupted, so it wasn’t sabotage,’ Anine said. ‘Admiral Kazimir believes it may be the Knights Guardians movement.’

  One thousand two hundred and ninety-six years old he might have been, and possessing all the phenomenal emotional control only a life so long could bring, but Nigel still let out a sigh of dismay. ‘Not Far Away again? Will that planet never stop being a problem?’

  ‘Apparently not.’

  ‘What do they want with the McLeod smartcore?’

  ‘Navy Intelligence suggests the Knights Guardians want to build their own T-sphere.’

  ‘Why don’t they just ask us for one? ANA hasn’t restricted the technology to the Central worlds. It’s just horribly complex. I can barely understand the operational theories myself.’

  ‘Probably because we wouldn’t give them one that’s weaponized.’

  ‘Oh, that goddamn psycho woman. She’s been in suspension for six hundred years already, and she’s still casting a paranoid shadow.’

  ‘Never mind, darling. Three more years and our colony ships will be ready.’

  ‘Yeah.’ It had taken him long enough, but five years ago Nigel had finally decided to do what so many others had done, and leave the Commonwealth behind to start a fresh civilization a long, long way away. The Sheldon Dynasty had sent out transgalactic colonies before, and Nigel had almost gone with them. But there was always one more problem to deal with, one more political fight, one more . . . Until now. Now he was finally going to turn his back on it all for good and find time for himself. This time . . .

  ‘I’ll see you in a few days,’ Anine said.

  ‘Good.’

  Nigel’s u-shadow ended the link. As the capsule raced away from Port Klye, he saw one of the airbarges lumber up into the sky and fly towards New Costa Junction. It would be using the zero-end wormhole at the station, which opened in deep space, the most convenient and safest place to dump radioactive waste, or some other industrial contaminate material. These days it was used almost exclusively to dump Augusta’s toxic legacy where it would do no harm. That hadn’t always been the case. The zero-end was originally built for discreet disposal to assist the commodities market. Back in the day, surplus harvests or an excess of rare minerals had been quietly shoved out into oblivion, assisting the market price, reaping bigger profits for the financial sectors at the expense of the consumer.

  ‘What were we doing?’ Nigel murmured as he visualized millions of tonnes of golden grain streaming off into the interstellar night. Cheap food that could have made ordinary people’s lives just that little bit easier and reduced the wealth of people like himself by micro-percentage points.

  Those economics were thankfully over. At least in the Central worlds, almost all of which had switched to Higher culture. So many of the External worlds continued to follow the old-style economic and financial patterns. Their politicians claimed it gave them freedom – which Nigel just laughed at. Fortunately, there was a steady migration of citizens inwards, firstly to lead calm and easy lives on the Central worlds before inevitably downloading their minds into ANA, which was the closest the human race had come to a technological version of heaven. So maybe those conniving politicians did have a point. He was too much of an individualist to contemplate a download. It was interesting that most people retreated into ANA after three or four centuries knocking about the Commonwealth, whereas those who pressed on over six or seven hundred years tended to stay in their (heavily modified and enriched) bodies, almost as if ANA was some kind of illicit temptation and if you avoided it you could reach true maturity.

  The capsule curved inland, following the main airborne traffic stream for the Cromarty Hills. Other capsules formed a fluid matrix around
him, shiny metallic ellipsoids ploughing through the hot clear air, shining so brightly under the star’s blue-white glare that they appeared to have their own halos. Beneath him was the long serpentine ribbon of the ten-lane Medani freeway, standing above the slender river on thick pillars as it followed the floor of the shallow meandering valley all the way back to the hinterlands. Most of the road had been converted now, mutating from a sturdy grey and black ribbon of enzyme-bonded concrete to a weird botanical symbiot colony. With the advent of regrav capsules, New Costa had been quick to abandon its roads. Roads needed annual maintenance dollars spent on them. Air traffic only needed a smartcore controller.

  Now bots crawled along the Medani freeway, laying a complex weave of biological arteries around the concrete. More bots tunnelled into the ground below the support pillars, creating a root network to feed the modified freeway. Nutrients pulsed along the new arterial plexus, supporting an incredible diversity of vegetation. The native plants from hundreds of worlds had been genetically adapted so that they could all be sustained by the same nutrient fluid. The end creation was a wild river of jungle winding its way through the shrinking city, curving down to parks along the old off-ramps and intersections in a strangely exotic three-dimensional growth curve that nature could never produce.

  Nigel could still remember meeting with the bunch of crazy artists who’d begged him for the opportunity to do something other than the standard flatten-and-replant policy that gripped so many of the Central worlds’ shrinking cities. He’d agreed, not just because such a revamp might well be a truly spectacular art statement, but as a kind of acknowledgement of how different their environment could become. It was also an oblique tip of the hat to the enigmatic Planters, who had left behind truly huge hybrid organic constructs on the worlds they’d visited. Nigel’s Dynasty had finally cracked their nanotech inheritance, adapting it into the biononics which the Commonwealth knew. Biononics gave any and every user command of the very molecules which made up their own bodies, as well as making new generations of replicators possible. Ironically, the technology incorporated within the bots was now also rendering whole swathes of New Costa obsolete.