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from his fat utility belt. It was a simple green circle the size of his gauntleted hand.
    She gripped the cushioned edge of the couch as Ibu triggered his harness and slowly glided forwards. She could see his arms stretched out ahead. The actual surface of the crystal was hard to
make out in the odd shifting light glowing within.
    His fingertips touched, and he rebounded slightly. Then the gas jets were puffing, holding him in place.
    Laura let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding.
    ‘It’s practically frictionless,’ Ibu reported. ‘My suit’s stkpads aren’t holding.’
    ‘That’ll be the increased valancy,’ Laura told him. ‘That crystal is going to have fewer surface irregularities than ordinary matter.’
    ‘Okay. Applying the package now. See if that attaches.’
    Laura wasn’t sure what kind of adhesive was on the deep-scan package, but when Ibu pressed it to the surface and applied a short burst from the harness jets to push it down, the glue
seemed to work.
    ‘Tactile contact confirmed,’ Ibu said. ‘Telemetry good. Moving to second location.’
    ‘Well done,’ Ayanna told him.
    ‘We have a problem,’ Joey’s telepathic voice claimed.
    Laura blinked her eyes open, banishing Ibu’s visual feed to a small ancillary icon in her exovision. She looked round the forward cabin, but everything seemed to be okay.
‘What’s wrong?’
    Joey’s eyes stared at her from his twisted-up immobile face. ‘I’ve been using the shuttle’s optronic sensors to try and find
Vermillion
. I can’t.
It’s vanished.’
    ‘What?’ Ayanna snapped, and there was no shielding strong enough to guard against the flash of alarm in her thoughts.
    ‘I can’t find it,’ Joey said. ‘Look, there’s something seriously wrong about losing contact with the drones and
Vermillion
just because of dopplering. It
doesn’t matter how much the link frequency shifts, we should still be able to pick up the signal.’
    Ayanna’s expression was edgy. ‘Yeah. I know.’
    ‘Okay. So. It bothered me – a lot. I started reviewing visual data. The
Vermillion
is thirteen hundred metres long, for fuck’s sake. You should be able to see it with
the naked eye from this distance. The kind of optronics Fourteen is carrying are capable of reading the damn serial number. We know the orbital track, we know where to focus the search. I’ve
run the basic scan five times now. There’s nothing orbiting that world. Not
Vermillion
. Not
Viscount
and not
Verdant
. None of them is in orbit any more.’
    ‘That can’t—’ Laura started. ‘Oh, bollocks. They couldn’t all crash.’ She gave Ayanna a desperate look. ‘Could they?’
    ‘They were in a thousand-kilometre orbit,’ Ayanna said. ‘We confirmed that before we entered the Forest’s temporal shift zone. I cannot imagine what kind of power could
pull them out of orbit.’
    ‘The same power that slows time in here,’ Laura said. ‘Joey, we are slower in here. Any chance they’re all on the other side of the planet and they’re just taking a
long time to track round into visual range?’
    His misshapen face showed no emotion, but his thoughts dripped scorn. ‘Oh, yeah. Really never thought of that. Come on! Their spacing was equidistant round the orbital track. One of them
is always in view. Most of the time, two of them are.’
    ‘Those spheres we tracked heading down to the planet,’ Ayanna said. ‘Perhaps they’re weapons.’
    ‘And we didn’t see the explosions?’ Laura asked. ‘No. Something else has happened.’
    ‘If they were pulled down from orbit, they’d create the devil’s own crater,’ Ayanna concluded. ‘Right now there’ll be megatons of rock vapour spewing up into
the atmosphere. The planet’s entire climate system will be wrecked. Joey, any sign of that?’
    The hyperspace theorist managed to blink. ‘No. But I’ll run a decent scan. Maybe they didn’t crash, maybe the ingrav held out long enough.’
    ‘Do it,’ Ayanna