As a cadet, I’d participated in a number of wilderness survival exercises. I knew how to live off the land, and how to find food in some of the most inhospitable and godforsaken climes. But those exercises had taken place outdoors, where plants, lichen and other sources of nutrition were readily available to those who knew how to look for them. Here, the sterile white walls and floor offered little in the way of hope. I hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours and, unless I found a way out and contrived to be rescued within the next couple of days, I would start to lose the energy and willpower to carry on.

As an experiment, I tried stepping in and out of the little room I had just left, half hoping the door would snap closed and return me to my starting point. However, after three tries, the blue light remained resolutely lit and the doors remained open, leaving me no choice but to follow the corridor and search for another exit.

I took a couple of deep, steadying breaths, and then edged away from the door, one foot at a time, all the while keeping my right fist pulled back and ready to fly at the first sign of an attack.

Forty-Three: Sal Konstanz

FORTY-THREE

SAL KONSTANZ

Acting on my orders, the Trouble Dog shut off its engines as it crossed the Gallery’s heliopause—that tenuous border region on the ragged edge of the solar system, where the outward pressure of the solar wind had attenuated to the point it could no longer hold back the winds from the surrounding stars, and interstellar space began. Still travelling at great speed but now unpowered, the ship began to drift down through the higher dimensions until it fell from the hypervoid altogether, and remerged into the universe.

Falling into the system on a ballistic trajectory, the Trouble Dog kept only its most vital systems online, and only the most passive of its sensors in operation. Eighteen billion kilometres ahead of us, the Gallery’s sun resembled little more than a reasonably bright star against a backdrop of other stars, and the Objects themselves were specks rendered all but invisible by distance.