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

visitations.
    ‘There!’ Ayanna said. The exopod was floating twenty metres from the side of a narrow curving valley just over a hundred metres from the tip. Dark globes were sprouting from the
crystal all around it.
    Laura couldn’t see Ibu anywhere. She ordered the image to rotate, checking the other clefts in the crystal around the tip. They were all covered in the dark globes, ranging from acorn size
up to the full three metres in diameter. Ibu wasn’t in any of them, either.
    ‘The flock is relaying a signal from the exopod,’ Ayanna reported, ‘but I’m not getting any reply from Rojas.’
    ‘What about their suit transponders?’ Laura asked.
    Ayanna pursed her lips and shook her head.
    ‘Focus on the exopod, please,’ Joey said.
    Ayanna’s hands flicked several toggles, and the image jumped up through magnification factors until it was centred on the exopod.
    ‘Hatch is open,’ Joey said. ‘Can you get some drones closer?’
    Ayanna started steering a couple of the Mk16bs over to the exopod.
    ‘As close as I can get,’ she announced eventually.
    The hologram was showing the pod in high resolution. It hung above the forward cabin’s couches like a chunk of collective guilt. They could all look in through the open hatchway and see
the coloured graphics flashing across the display panels inside. Web straps floated lazily, their buckles weaving about through the empty space as if they were chrome snake heads.
    ‘He’s not in there,’ Laura whispered. It felt as if her space sickness was returning; certainly she was light headed. Her skin was chilling down rapidly.
    ‘Where the fuck is he?’ Joey asked.
    ‘The flock would see the suits if they were anywhere within fifty kilometres,’ Ayanna said.
    ‘You know where they are,’ Laura said, forcing herself to say it. ‘Inside.’
    ‘Inside what?’ Joey said. ‘Inside the tree or inside the globes? Are they like an airlock?’
    ‘We haven’t picked up any cavity inside the crystal structure,’ Ayanna said.
    ‘Scan the globes,’ Laura told Ayanna. ‘I don’t care if you have to smash the drones into those bastards and crack them open. We’ve got to find them.’
    ‘Right,’ Ayanna nodded abruptly, and set about redirecting the flock.
    The wrinkled surface of the globe was some kind of carbon, but the interior was impervious to any scan. Ayanna had eight drones poised in a bracelet formation around one of them, but their
sensor radiation hit the surface and got no further.
    Laura took control of a drone and sent it racing at the globe. The rest of the flock showed them a perfectly clear image of it striking – and rebounding, spinning away erratically.
    Refusing to give up, Laura took control of another, over-rode the tiny ion drive’s safety limiters, and accelerated it from five hundred metres’ distance. It was travelling at four
metres per second when it struck. The impact killed half its systems, but the globe didn’t even have a scratch.
    ‘Zero effect,’ Ayanna said levelly; there was an implication of censure in the tone.
    Laura flew a third probe two kilometres out from the tree, then accelerated it in. This one reached twenty-eight metres per second when it hit a globe. Its casing shattered and the fragments
went tumbling off into space. The globe was unscathed by the impact.
    ‘What the hell are they made of?’ she demanded. ‘They must open somehow, like a clam shell. Ibu and Rojas must have been taken inside.’
    ‘Laura, there is no inside,’ Ayanna said.
    ‘Bollocks to this! The drone flock sensors aren’t good enough. They’re inside! Where the hell else can they be?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘I’m suiting up. I’m going to take the other exopod over there, and I’m going to cut—’
    ‘No,’ Ayanna didn’t speak loudly, but it was definite, and her thoughts made it very clear she meant it. ‘You’re not taking the exopod anywhere. Not until we know
what happened to them and have some kind