The Abyss Beyond Dreams Read Online Free PDF Page A

on a farm,’ Ayanna protested. ‘We worked the land.’ She pulled a face. ‘Well, I helped Dad program the agribots.’
    ‘I’ll get my list together, then I might just go check on my secure store,’ Laura declared. ‘Not that any of us will ever be getting a re-life clone in the Void. Looks
like we’re back to having one mortal life again.’
    *
    Time was short, and there were a lot of preparations to be made, all of which were more problematic than they should have been, thanks to glitches in the
Vermillion
’s network and command core. But Laura found a few spare minutes to go back to the suspension bay. Her sarcophagus was still open, the mechanisms inside cold and inert.
She’d half expected engineeringbots to be swarming all over it, but nothing disturbed the tranquillity of the long compartment. There was a simple personal locker at the foot of the
suspension chamber. Thankfully it opened when her u-shadow gave it the code. It didn’t hold much – one bag of decent clothes, another of sentimental items. That was the one she
unzipped.
    Inside, there was the hand-made wooden jewel box Andrze had bought her on their honeymoon on Tanyata, its colourful paint faded now after three centuries. The rust-red scarf with aboriginal art
print she’d picked up in Kuranda. Her flute with its wondrously mellow sound, made in Venice Beach – and she couldn’t even remember who she’d been with when she acquired
that. The phenomenally expensive (and practically black-market) chip of silver crystal from the ma-hon tree in New York’s Central Park. A bag of sentiments, then, a little museum of self more
important than any secure store holding memories her brain no longer had room for. Strange how these physical items gave her a more comforting sense of identity than her own augmented, backed-up,
reprofiled neurones. She picked up a ridiculously thick, and impractical, six-hundred-year-old Swiss army knife, with something like twenty different tools and blades. A gift from Althea, she
recalled, the artist who made a virtue of rejecting all the technological boons which the Commonwealth provided for its citizens.
    Althea, who would have sneered at the very concept of a flight to another galaxy – if Laura had ever gained the courage to tell her she was going. Laura grinned at how her old friend would
greet the news that they were trapped in the artificial weirdness of the Void. ‘Hubris!’ she’d no doubt shout gleefully. And now the penknife was probably the most functional
possession Laura owned. Althea’s smugness would turn supernova at that knowledge.
    Laura put the ancient penknife in her shipsuit’s breast pocket. The weight of it was a comfort, something whose simplicity wouldn’t let her down. It belonged in the Void.
    *
    Shuttle Fourteen had a basic delta planform, with smooth rounded wing-tips giving it a slightly organic appearance – an unusual halfway machine between an old-fashioned
aircraft and the flattened ovoid shape of the Commonwealth’s standard regrav capsules. As well as ferrying passengers down to a planet, it was designated a mid-range preliminary exploration
vehicle, able to hop around the planets of a solar system, launching detailed observations, delivering researchers and scientific equipment. Examining a space-based artefact was well within its
capabilities.
    Inside, Laura could easily believe she’d just stepped back five centuries to the aircraft era. The forward cabin wasn’t quite cramped; there were ten large acceleration couches, in
two rows, which seemed to fill a lot of it. Up at the front, the pilot’s couch was solo; overhung by the big curving windscreen. There was a nominal horseshoe console of glossy dark plastic,
which usually displayed a few basic craft functions. As with everything in the modern Commonwealth, Shuttle Fourteen was controlled by a cognitive array with the human pilot as a (mainly
psychological) safety fallback.
    Today Rojas had