‘Nigel Sheldon.’

‘What the fuck?’ She could feel Joey’s surprise spilling through the gaiafield to swill round her mind.

‘Turn round.’

Laura froze. Monsters were everywhere. Monsters in the dark. Monsters lurking in places you thought were free of them.

She peeled a wrist stkpad off the grey fuselage, and contracted her already overtaxed abdominal muscles. Shock was like an electric current charging across her skin. A hundred metres away, a triangular-shaped spaceship, smaller than Shuttle Fourteen, was holding station. In her reference, it was the one spinning.

‘Where did you come from?’ she asked.

‘I came into the Void to find you. It’s taken a while; I’m sorry about that. But I’m here now.’

‘Oh, bollocks. The Commonwealth knows we’re here?’

‘The Raiel told me. Look, I’m going EVA to help you, so just don’t panic. Okay?’

‘Okay.’ She saw a small silver-grey figure float away from the spaceship. It was wearing a neater version of the free-manoeuvre harness that the exopods carried. Tiny puffs of vapour squirted from nozzles as it approached.

‘You can tell Joey he’s right. Time is badly screwed up in here.’

‘What?’ Laura said.

Joey’s jolt of incredulity pulsed through the gaiafield.

‘Did he really just say that?’ Joey asked.

The gas jets fired again, seemingly slowing the figure’s rotation. ‘Joey is stuck to the alien sphere; the Rojas and Ibu copies did that to him,’ Nigel told her. ‘It’s drawing him in.’

‘Joey!’ she cried. ‘Joey, no. He’s lying, isn’t he? He’s lying. This is part of their trick.’

‘Sorry,’ Joey told her with a sensation of guilty relief. He expanded their gaiafield union to include Nigel.

‘Joey,’ Nigel said, ‘after you open the hatch, I’m going to extract your secure memory. When you’re re-lifed, you’ll have complete continuity.’

‘Thank you.’

‘What do you mean, open the hatch?’ Laura asked.

‘He’s overridden the safeties,’ Nigel said. ‘He’s going to let you in so you can use the exopod, but he won’t survive. It was a smart move, Joey. You don’t want to be consumed by the alien. It’s a particularly nasty nanotechnology bioweapon.’

‘Cool,’ Joey said. ‘So if you know all this, we’re not travelling backwards, are we? We have to be in a temporal loop, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Wow. Shit, how many times?’

‘I’m here now, Joey. This is the last time. I promise.’

‘Okay. Thanks.’

Gas poured out of Nigel’s free-manoeuvre harness. He stopped a metre away from Laura. There was a short tether in his hand. He clipped it to her suit’s utility strip. ‘We’re secure. You can disengage your stkpads now.’

‘Oh, bollocks.’ Laura had just realized what they’d been talking about. A temporal loop. That was the Forest’s peculiar quantum signature. Some weird traitor part of her mind had been hoping this was a trick, that the Rojas and Ibu copies were outsmarting her, big time. Again and again and again . . . But they would never know to create a crazy myth of Nigel Sheldon arriving to save everybody – and if they did, then she had no chance of survival anyway. She twisted the remaining stkpads off and drifted free from Fourteen’s fuselage.

‘Got you,’ Nigel said. And his arms closed round her. Gas jets fired, moving them away from the shuttle. ‘Joey. Whenever you’re ready.’ They began gliding slowly along the shuttle’s long belly.

‘I’m on it. Here we go.’

Laura looked towards the flat trailing edge of the delta wings, just in time to see a massive fountain of gas streaking out into space as the airlock doors peeled back. Shuttle Fourteen began to move, propelled along a weirdly erratic course, the escaping plume of atmosphere exaggerating its original tumble. Nigel’s free-manoeuvring harness fired continuously, trying to match the shuttle’s gyrations, keeping pace with it.

There seemed to be an incredible amount of atmosphere in the EVA hangar. Then the furious vent was finally over. A cloud of twinkling ice crystals swarmed around the end of the whirling shuttle, expanding fast.

Nigel flew them over the lip of the wings, and into the open EVA hangar. Blue emergency lighting cast everything in sharp relief.

‘That worked, then,’ Joey said. ‘But I guess you knew it would, right?’

‘Yes,’ Nigel said.

Laura could feel Joey’s emotions through the gaiafield link, satisfaction and fatalism combined. Also fright. He was allowing that to show for the first time. Pain was starting to colour his thoughts now, a dull ache spreading out from his empty lungs. She detached Nigel’s safety line and grabbed a handhold. As soon as she’d steadied herself, she looked at Joey, knowing what she’d see and willing it not to be. ‘Oh, bollocks, Joey. No, no, no.’

He was stuck to the alien globe. One leg, an arm, and a third of his torso had sunk into it. The side of his head was up against the wrinkled black surface, an ear already absorbed.

Laura used the handholds to propel herself over to him.

‘Don’t touch him,’ Nigel warned.

‘Why didn’t you say? Oh, bollocks, Joey, why?’

Explosive decompression had ruptured capillaries under his skin, turning his flesh scarlet. Blood oozed through his pores and wept out from around his eyeballs. His mouth was open, also emitting a spray of fine scarlet droplets with every heartbeat. ‘Didn’t want you all messed up with sentiment. I was bodylossed the moment the fake Rojas grabbed me. And now Nigel’s here. It’s over before it begins, this time. Everything we did is worthwhile now.’

‘Joey . . .’

‘Say hi to my re-life clone. Remind me how noble I am.’

‘Joey—’

The gaiafield connection faded out. Laura stared at Joey’s awful ruined face as the blood droplets started to vacuum boil. It was only when the swelling scarlet mist started to smear her helmet that she backed away.

‘What now?’ she asked numbly.

‘You get into the other exopod,’ Nigel said. ‘I have to extract his memory store.’ He moved past her, taking a medical pack from his utility belt. As she hauled herself over the second exopod, she glimpsed Nigel applying the pack to the back of Joey’s neck. She concentrated hard on pulling herself into the exopod. Inside, the webbing floated about in a tangle, which she sorted out, clicking the buckles together to hold her in place. Power-up was a simple sequence. She watched the basic displays come alive.

‘Here,’ Nigel said. His head and shoulders had come through the hatch. He held out a small plastic box. There were smears of blood on it.

She took it from him, holding it tight. Then the exopod displays were changing. ‘What—?’

‘I’m loading some navigation data into the pod’s network,’ Nigel said. ‘I don’t want you landing in the middle of a desert. Not this time. That would just be one irony too many. I’m not giving fate the benefit of the doubt.’

‘I thought we were going back to your ship,’ she said.

‘No, I have one last thing to do. You take this exopod down to Bienvenido. Don’t worry; it’s an uneventful trip. If everything goes well, there will be a huge recovery operation in a few weeks. Stay safe till then, okay?’

‘Wait. What?’

‘Trust me.’ He backed out of the exopod.

‘But—’

‘Go. Hurry. We don’t want fake Rojas and fake Ibu to crash this party, not now, do we?’

‘Oh, bollocks.’

The hatch swung shut.

Piloting wasn’t exactly Laura’s talent set, but there were some basic files in her storage lacuna. They ran as secondary routines in her macrocellular clusters, and she managed to steer the little craft out through the open airlock, only scraping the sides twice as she went.

Sensors showed Nigel gliding out behind her. Then he was flying back towards his starship. She realized it was triangular because it had wings. Why?

The exopod’s sensors locked on to the planet one and a half million kilometres away. Laura loaded that fix into the network, which incorporated it into Nigel’s navigation data and began to plot a vector for her. The first burn, lasting three minutes, took her out of the Forest.