Free The Abyss Beyond Dreams by Peter F. Hamilton Page A

the exopod. Do you copy?’
    ‘. . . closer . . .’
    ‘Retain line of sight! Rojas? Rojas, do you copy?’
    Laura pushed herself right up to the windscreen again and stared frantically at the tip of the distortion tree. ‘I can’t see the strobes! Bollocks, the idiot’s gone down into
the fold.’ The communication icon in her exovision showed her the exopod’s signal fading to zero. It ended.
    ‘What’s really awesome?’ Joey’s mental voice asked. ‘What was he talking about? Did he mean Ibu was cutting himself free?’
    Laura gave Ayanna a guilty look, then glanced back at Joey. ‘I don’t know. Yes. Yes, that must be what he meant. We—’ The cabin lights flickered, then dimmed before
coming back up to full strength.
    ‘These dropouts are killing our systems,’ Ayanna snapped. ‘The processors are rebooting each time, then they get hit by another surge before they’ve completed. It’s
not helping.’
    ‘Order the Mk16bs back to the tip of the tree,’ Laura said. ‘We need to see what’s happening out there.’
    ‘Right,’ Ayanna gave a little nod, as if she was dazed. ‘Yes. Good.’
    Laura gripped the rim of the console with one hand, and flicked several switches. A hologram projector slid out of the cabin ceiling above her couch. It started to show a composite picture from
the drone flock. They were moving now, converging on the tip of the tree.
    ‘Lost seven of them. Fifteen more showing functionality reduction,’ Ayanna said.
    ‘No kidding,’ Laura muttered. She couldn’t stop thinking about Rojas.
Really wonderful.
What did he mean? Had he seen something?
    ‘How long?’ Joey asked.
    ‘Twenty minutes,’ Ayanna said. ‘The flock is mapping the other end of the tree.’
    Laura wanted to shout loud and hard – why hadn’t they left some drones close to the exopod? Surely that was procedure? But then, this level of communication failure was inconceivable
in the Commonwealth. It was wrong-footing everyone. Blaming Ayanna wouldn’t solve anything.
    For every few hundred metres the flock slid along the tree, they would lose another. Sometimes two or three would fail within seconds of each other. There was no pattern.
    ‘There won’t be one left by the time they reach the exopod,’ Ayanna grumbled.
    Laura ignored her. Shuttle Fourteen was also suffering an increased number of glitches. The network was having trouble maintaining its integrity, so many subsystems were dropping out. She
watched in dismay as several primary flight systems went off line – forward reaction-control thrusters, one of the fusion tubes, three of the regrav drives, main passenger cabin and
environmental systems.
    ‘Dammit,’ Laura grunted when the passenger cabin systems went down. ‘We can’t afford to lose environmental.’
    ‘There’s enough oxygen on board for three of us,’ Joey said.
    ‘To do what?’ Laura snapped. ‘And there’s going to be five flying down to that planet.’
    ‘Calm down,’ Ayanna said. ‘Worst-case scenario: we can wear pressure suits.’
    ‘If they work,’ Laura said, hating herself for letting her anxiety show. But . . . The prospect of asphyxiation was firing her imagination into overdrive. Seeing herself in a
pressure suit with every red light flashing, clawing feebly at the windscreen just as Fourteen approached the planet, so near . . .
    ‘Flock’s approaching the exopod,’ Ayanna said in a level voice.
    Laura tried to clear her mind and focus on the hologram which was showing the imagery from the flock. There were only eighty-seven of the little drones left now. They had rearranged themselves
back into their ring formation, gliding over the tapering end of the distortion tree. The folds meandered in sharp curves, merging and becoming shallower as they neared the tip. Long moiré
phantoms slithered about erratically inside the crystal, though even their intensity was reducing. Large sections would remain dark for some time between