Here is an extract from The Abyss of Time.

     This planet wants to kill us, he thought grimly. We're intruders. It hates us and it wants us gone, but we're not going anywhere. This is our home now and the planet's just going to have to get used to us.

     "Watch out for the plant that attacked Jaime," he told the others as they prepared to move on. "Matthews described it as having a bulbous base with long, whiplike branches growing from the top. The whole thing was bright yellow. If you see one, keep well away from it."

     "Actually, I don't think it was a plant," said Felgin, though. "I took a good look at the parasite we removed from Jaime's body and I'm pretty sure it was an animal. I think the parent organism was a sessile animal, like a sort of sea anemone..."

     "I don't care what it was," said Miller impatiently. "Just watch out for them and keep well clear of them."

     "We should bear in mind that everything here is potentially dangerous," said Felgin. "If we focus too much on one thing, we risk overlooking something else."

     "Yes, of course," said Miller irritably, but then he looked alarmed as a thought came to him. "What did you do with that parasite?" he asked.

     "It died just a couple of minutes after we removed it," Connie replied, coming closer to join in the conversation. "We threw it away into the jungle."

     Miller relaxed. "Good," he said. He stepped around a mound of soil that was heaving with tiny, black creatures the size of his thumb. Some kind of colony. He kept a wary eye on it as they left it behind, but the creatures seemed content to mind their own business.

     "Incredibly, it seemed to be some kind of bryozoa, as far as I could tell," Connie continued. "Back in our day they were tiny. The largest were just a millimetre or so across. That parasite, though. It's tendrils were tiny, but I was able to see that each one was hollow, with a crown of smaller, hairline structures around its mouth. I suspect that each tendril was a separate organism, that the whole thing was a colony creature. Many of the creatures I've seen so far are the same. This may be the age of the bryozoan, where ours was the age of the chordate. The creatures with backbones."

     Miller nodded politely but he wasn't interested. He was looking around in the jungle, searching for any threats that might suddenly appear. The two scientists, on the other hand, continued chattering as if they were in a laboratory somewhere, the creatures they were discussing safely in cages instead of on the loose all around them.

     "Have you seen any chordates?" Felgin asked his wife. "I've been looking and so far I haven't."

     "I've seen one," Connie replied, "but it seems to be very common. Those white worms we keep seeing? Anywhere the soil's been disturbed?"

     Milled heard the astonishment in her husband's voice. "They're vertebrates? I assumed they were just worms. Annelids."

     Miller heard the smile in Connie's voice even without looking at her. "Nope. They're definitely vertebrates. Possibly descended from moles or snakes. Hell, possibly descended from elephants for all I know. Anything's possible in a billion years."

     Something long and thin shot down from the overhead branches as fast as a cracking whip. It wrapped around Gwent, one of the security men guarding Rogers, and yanked him up into the trees with a startled yelp. The other guards raised their weapons with cries of alarm and started shooting, sending bolts of white fire upwards to explode in sparks against anything they hit.

     "Aim, you fools!" Buford yelled. "You'll hit him. Aim for the body."

     The creature was huge, Miller saw, when his eyes succeeded in separating it out from the tangled vegetable life all around it. It looked as though someone had crammed a hundred anacondas into a large container and tipped them out into a tree, where they'd become tangled in the branches on the way down. Longer, thinner tentacles extended from between the thicker ones and it was one of these that was wrapped around Gwent's waist and neck. The security man was still holding his pulse rifle and was trying to bring it around to shoot at the creature. Another thin tentacle was wrapped around his right wrist, though, and was pulling his hand away. It looked almost as if it knew what the gun was and didn't want to get shot by it.

     The shots fired by the other security men were clearly hurting it, though, and clear fluid was running from the wounds they were making in its body. The creature moved, pulling itself up by its thickest tentacles, while eyes on stalks examined its tormentors on the ground. A thick tentacle reached up to another branch higher up and wrapped around it. Then it pulled, lifting the creature up as its other tentacles let go of the lower branch. It dangled for a moment before its other tentacles also got hold of the higher branch. Together they lifted it up, holding Gwent between it and the men on the ground as if deliberately using him as a human shield.

     "Get me down!" they heard the security man shouting over the shared communications channel. "Help me!"

     "Can't get a clear shot," said Benwell, aiming his weapon upwards. "It's moving him around too much."

     "Shoot anyway," Buford ordered. "He's dead anyway if we do nothing..."