28

It had been a long night for Fletcher Christian. They’d kept him chained to the altar with electricity coursing through him while the madness whirled all around. He’d seen Dexter’s followers chopping up the beautifully crafted wooden model of St Paul’s which Sir Christopher Wren had built to show off his dream, throwing splintered fragments into the iron braziers which now illuminated the building. The silent slaughter as people were dragged up to the altar where Dexter waited with the anti-memory weapon. Fletcher wept as their souls were destroyed in readiness for their bodies to be replenished by those from the beyond, personalities more compliant to the dark Messiah’s wishes. Salty tears leaked into the runes mutilating his cheeks, stinging like acid. Courtney’s crazed shrieking laugh as Dexter ravaged her until blood flowed and skin blistered.

Sacrilege. Murder. Barbarism. It never stopped. Each act pounding away at the few senses he had remaining. He recited the Lord’s Prayer over and over until Dexter heard him, and the possessed closed in, screaming some obscene chant in counter. Their cruel words slipped into him with the force of daggers, their joy in evil tormenting him into silence. He feared his mind would snap from the pressure of such depravity.

Throughout it all, the font of energistic power increased along with their numbers, spreading out to engulf mind and matter alike. This was not the shared longing he’d known on Norfolk, the genuine appetite to hide from emptiness. Here Dexter absorbed what strength his followers offered and forged its shape with his own damned desires.

As the sullied red light crept through the open door, mocking the night, Fletcher finally heard the cries of the fallen angels. On top of everything else, their diabolical poignancy nearly broke his resolve. Surely not even Dexter could think of letting such beasts loose upon the earth.

“No,” Fletcher wailed. “You cannot bring them forth. It is madness. Madness. They will consume us all.”

Dexter’s face slid into view above him, coldly radiant with satisfaction. “About fucking time you understood.”

 

Lady Macbeth emerged from her jump deep in interstellar space, one thousand nine hundred light years from the Confederation. The sensation of isolation and loneliness among those on board was nothing to how small that distance made them feel.

Star tracker sensors slid out of their recesses, gathering up the faint harvest of photons. Navigation programs correlated what was there, defining their position.

Joshua triangulated on their target, an unremarkable point of light only thirty-two light-years away now. Their next jump coordinate sprang into his mind, blinking purple at the end of a long neuroiconic tube of orange circles. The star was slightly to one side of it, a distance that represented relative delta-V. Starship and star were still moving at very different velocities as they orbited the galactic core.

“Stand by,” he said. “Accelerating.”

There were groans across the bridge. They dried up soon enough as he activated the antimatter drive. Four gees pushed everyone down into their couches except for Kempster Getchell; the old astronomer had gone into a zero-tau pod after the second jump. “Too much for my bones,” he’d complained gamely. “Fetch me out when we get there.”

Everyone else stuck it out. Not that the crew had a choice. Seventeen jumps in twenty-three hours, each one fifteen light-years long. In itself, probably a record. Nobody was counting now; they’d devoted themselves entirely to keeping the systems functioning smoothly, a professionalism not many could match. Pride had increased to accompany an edgy anticipation as the Sleeping God star grew closer.

Joshua remained in his acceleration couch, piloting them to each coordinate with his usual sublime competence. Nothing much was said as the Orion Nebula shrank away behind them. It was smaller in every star tracker scan, dwindling down to a diminutive fuzzy patch of light the last familiar astronomical feature left in the universe. Every fusion generator was running at maximum capacity, recharging the nodes fast. That was why Joshua used high gees between coordinates, instead of the usual one tenth. Time. It had become the most precious commodity left to him.

Instinct drove him on. That enigmatic, bland star holding steady at the apex of the sensor lock was giving out the same siren song as those strikes in the Ruin Ring once had. So much had happened on this flight. So much of his own hope had been invested now. He couldn’t, didn’t, believe that it had all been for nothing. The Sleeping God existed. A xenoc artefact, powerful enough to interest the Kiint. They’d been right all along, the discoveries made throughout the flight continually emphasising its importance.

“Nodes charged and ready, Captain,” Dahybi reported.

“Thanks,” Joshua said. He automatically ran a vector check. The old girl was performing well. Three more hours, two more jumps, and they’d be there. The flight would be over. That was the part he found hard to credit. There were so many roots elevating the Lady Mac to this encounter. Kelly Tirell and the mercs back on Lalonde. Jay Hilton and Haile (wherever they were now). Tranquillity escaping the Organization fleet. Further back than that, a single message being passed across 1,500 light-years of empty space, loyally relayed from star to star by a species that never should have escaped their sun’s expansion in the first place. And Swantic-LI, finding the Sleeping God originally. Improbable chances in an event chain 15,000 years long linking that single unlikely meeting to the fate of an entire species.

He didn’t believe in odds that long. That just left destiny, divine intervention.

Interesting, given what they were supposedly flying towards.

 

Louise awoke in some confusion. A young man was lying on top of her. Both of them were naked.

Andy, she remembered. It was his flat: small, grubby, cluttered, and so warm the air itself seemed to have thickened. Condensation had licked every surface to glisten in the dark-pink light of dawn that drizzled through the fogged window.

I will not regret what we did last night, she told herself firmly. I have no reason to feel guilty. I did what I wanted to. I am entitled to do that.

She tried to ease him to one side and slip out from underneath, but the bed simply wasn’t big enough. He stirred, frowning as he focused on her. Then he flinched in shock.

“Louise!”

She gave him a brave smile. “At least you remembered my name.”

“Louise. Oh God.” He lurched back into a kneeling position. His eyes stared down greedily at her body, and his mouth twisted into a beatific smile. “Louise. You’re real.”

“Yes. I’m real.”

His head darted forward, and he kissed her. “I love you, Louise. Darling, my darling, I love you so much.” He lowered himself against her, kissing her face urgently; his hands cupped her breasts, fingers teasing her nipples exactly the way she’d cherished last night. “I love you, and we’re together at the end.”

“Andy.” She shifted round, wincing at how sore her breasts were. For someone so skinny, he was surprisingly strong.

“Oh God, you’re so beautiful.” His tongue was licking over her lips, desperate to be inside her mouth.

“Andy, stop.”

“I love you, Louise.”

“No!” She pushed herself up. “Listen to me. You don’t love me, Andy, and I don’t love you. It was just sex.” Her mouth parted in a small smile, softening the blow as much as she could. “All right, it was very good sex. But nothing else.”

“You came to me.” His pleading voice came close to cracking, there was so much hurt in the words.

Louise’s guilt was awful. “I told you that everyone else I know has either left the arcology or been captured by the possessed. That’s why I’m here. As for the rest . . . well, we both wanted that. There’s no reason not to now.”

“Don’t I mean anything to you?” he asked in desperation.

“Of course you do, Andy.” She stroked his arm, and leaned in closer, making the contact more intimate. “You don’t think I’d do that with just anyone, do you?”

“No.”

“Remember what we did?” she whispered in his ear. “How bad we were?”

Andy blushed, unable to look at her. “Yes.”

“Good.” She kissed him lightly. “This is one night we’ll keep with us forever. Nobody can ever take it away from us, no matter what happens to us now.”

“I still love you. I have ever since I saw you. That’ll never change.”

“Oh Andy.” She cradled him against her chest, rocking gently. “I didn’t want to hurt you. Believe me, please.”

“You haven’t hurt me. You couldn’t. Not you.”

Louise sighed. “Funny how different life could be, so many things that make you take one route instead of another. If only we could live them all.”

“I’d live them all with you.”

She hugged him tighter. “I think I’m going to envy the girl who winds up with you. She’s going to be so lucky.”

“Won’t happen now, will it?”

“No. I suppose not.” She gave the opaque window a resentful look, hating the day outside, the way time was advancing and what it would invariably bring. There was something else coming through the glass, riding the crimson light: a sense of rancour. It made her uneasy, almost fearful. And that red light was very deep for a dawn sun, it reminded her of Duchess.

She let go of Andy and padded over to the high window. Standing on one of the boxes brought her face up level with it. She smeared the condensation away.

“Oh dear Jesus.”

“What’s the matter?” Andy asked. He hurried across and peered over her shoulder.

It wasn’t dawn shining in, that was still two hours away. A large circular swirl of red cloud hung in the centre of the Westminster dome, a few hundred yards above the ground. Its malign glow glimmered off the geodesic crystal above, turning the struts to a lattice of burnished copper. The underside shone a blood-red light down on the roofs and walls of the city, staining them all an unhealthy magenta. Its leading edge was less than a mile away from the tenement, undulating gently.

“Shit!” he hissed. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“There’s nowhere to go, Andy. The possessed are all around us.”

“But . . . Oh shit. Why isn’t somebody doing something? New York is still holding them off. We should organize ourselves and fight back like them.”

Louise walked back to the bed and sat down carefully. After last night, some movements were quite difficult. She used her neural nanonics to run a physiological review, making sure the baby was all right. It was, and she had nothing worse than a few tender areas. The medical nanonic package infused some biochemicals into her bloodstream which should help. “We did try to do something,” she said. “But it failed last night.”

“You did?” Andy was standing in front of her, sweat pricking his skin. He rubbed his forehead, brushing damp hair from his eyes. “You mean you’re involved in this?”

“I came to Earth to warn the authorities about a possessed called Quinn Dexter. I needn’t have bothered, they already knew. He’s the one behind all this. I was helping them to find him, because I’ve seen him before.”

“I thought the Capone Organization had infiltrated us.”

“No, that’s just what Govcentral told the media. They didn’t want anyone to know what they were actually up against.”

“Bloody hell,” he groaned, badly downcast. “Fine excuse for a net don I make. Can’t even find that out for myself.”

“Don’t worry about it. GSDI is a lot smarter than people think.” She stood up, the reminder of B7 making her restless. “I need the bathroom. You said it was at the end of the hall?”

“Yes. Er, Louise.”

“What?”

“I think you’ll need something to wear.”

She looked down at herself, and grinned. Totally unselfconscious standing naked in front of a boy, and not just any boy, a casual sex partner. Maybe I have lost some of my Norfolk past after all. “I think you’re right.”

Her own clothes were in the pile where she’d thrown them, still damp and badly crumpled. Andy leant her a pair of grey jeans and a smartish navy-blue Jude’s Eworld sweatshirt, pulling them out of a box where they’d been partially protected against the humidity.

When she got back he’d just finished wiring a couple of power cells into his air conditioner. The galvanised box started shuddering as the motor spun up, then sent out a clammy stream of cold air. Louise stood in front of it trying to get her hair dry.

“I’ve got some food stockpiled,” Andy said. “Do you want breakfast?”

“Please.”

He pulled some preprepped meal trays out of a box and slid them into the oven. Louise started examining the flat in detail. He really was an electronics fanatic, just as he’d claimed at the Lake Isle restaurant. None of his wages had been spent on furnishings, or even clothes by the look of it. Gadgetry lay everywhere: ageing tools and blocks, spools of wire and fibre, microscopic components in lens cases, delicate test rigs; one wall was a rack of fleks. When she peeked into the other room, it was jumbled high with ancient domestic units. He scavenged them for components, he said. Repair work brought in some handy cash. She smiled at the familiar dinner jacket which was hanging up on the back of the door in its own plastic sheath, so obviously out of place.

The oven ejected their meal trays. Andy pushed a flat orange juice carton into the nozzle on his water dispenser; bubbles gurgled up through the big glass bottle. The carton expanded outwards as the juice constituted itself.

“Andy?” Louise stared at the conurbation of electronics, suddenly cursing herself. “Have you got a working communications block here, something that can reach a satellite?”

“Of course. Why?”

 

“Louise, my God, I thought we’d lost you,” Charlie datavised. “The sensor satellite says you’re at a tenement on Halton Road. Ah, I see, that’s Andy Behoo’s address. Are you all right?”

“I survived,” she datavised back. “Where are you?”

“I’m up in the Halo. It was a bit of a mad dash, but I thought it expedient after last night’s debacle. Do you know if Fletcher got out?”

“I’ve no idea. I didn’t see anyone else once I started running. What about Ivanov?”

“Sorry, Louise. He didn’t make it.”

“There’s just me, then.”

“Looks like I underestimated you again, Louise. My one consistent error.”

“Charlie, there’s a red cloud under the dome.”

“Yes, I know. Clever move on Dexter’s part. It means the SD electron beams can’t strike it unless they blow the dome as well. It also means I’ve got virtually no sensor coverage underneath now. I tried sending my affinity-bonded birds and rats through to see if they could pinpoint him for me, but I lose contact with them every time. And we all thought their energistic power didn’t affect bitek.”

“Fletcher says they’re aware of everything that happens under their cloud. Dexter probably kills the animals.”

“Very likely. That doesn’t leave us with much, does it.”

“This red cloud is different,” she datavised. “I thought you should know that. It’s why I called, really.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was under one in Norfolk as it was gathering together, that was nothing like this. I can feel this one, it’s like a really low vibration, one that you can’t quite hear. It’s not just here to shut away the sky, it’s really evil, Charlie.”

“That’ll be Dexter. He must have gathered quite a few possessed together now. Whatever he intends to do, it started with that cloud.”

“I’m frightened, Charlie. He’s going to win, isn’t he?”

“Can you and Andy get to one of the outer domes? I have operational agents in place there. I can get you out.”

“The cloud’s growing, Charlie. I don’t think we’ll make it.”

“Louise, I want you to try. Please.”

“Guilty, Charlie, you?”

“Perhaps. I did get Genevieve to Tranquillity. The blackhawk captain swears he’ll never accept another charter from my company.”

Louise grinned. “That’s my sister.”

“Will you leave the tenement now?”

“I don’t think so. Andy and I are happy where we are. And who knows what’ll happen when Earth is taken out of the universe? It might not be so bad.”

“It won’t happen, Louise. That’s not what Dexter’s about. He wants to obliterate the universe, not leave it. And there are people on Earth who can stop him from doing anything at all.”

“What do you mean? You’ve never been able to stop him.”

“The red cloud’s appearance has finally given our wondrous President some backbone. He’s worried it means the possessed are ready to take Earth out of the universe. The senate have now given him approval to use SD weapons against the arcologies, and eliminate the possessed. It’s the new fatalism, Louise. The Confederation abandoned Arnstat and New California so they could be rid of Capone. The President will sacrifice a minority of the republic’s citizens to save the majority. Not that history will remember him kindly for it, though I expect the survivors in the other arcologies will be quietly grateful.”

“You have to stop it, Charlie. There are more people in London than there are on the whole of Norfolk. You can stop it, can’t you? B7 can’t let them all die. You rule Earth. That’s what you said.”

“We can stall the order for a few hours, at most. Crash the command communication circuits, have SD officers refuse to carry out their orders. But ultimately, a direct order from the President will get through and be obeyed. The platforms will fire gamma-ray lasers into the arcologies. Every living cell inside the domes will be exterminated.”

“No. You have to stop them.”

“Louise, get yourself to one of the outer domes. You’ve got the anti-memory. You can use it against anyone who tries to stop you.”

“No!” she yelled out loud. Her hand smashed down on the table, making the meal trays and glasses bounce. “No. No. No.” She picked up the communications block and hurled it against the wall. Its casing cracked, sending plastic splinters skittling along the floor. “I won’t.”

Andy had frozen in his chair, staring at her in consternation. She whirled round to face him. “They’re going to kill everybody. The President’s going to fire SD weapons into the dome.”

He got up and put his arms round her, trying to calm her angry shaking. Even in bare feet she was half a head taller, he had to look up to see the dismay in her eyes.

“We have to stop him,” she said.

“The President?”

“No, Dexter.”

“The possessed one? The maniac?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. Tell him. Warn him! Get him to dispose of the red cloud. He’ll understand that if he has no followers left alive then he’s nothing.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know!” she shouted. “But it will stop everyone from being killed, isn’t that worth something to you?”

“Yes,” he stammered.

She went over to her pile of clothes and dug out the anti-memory weapon. “Where are my shoes?”

Andy took one look at the neat black tube she was holding with such determination, and realized just how serious she was. His first thought was to lock the door, prevent her from leaving. He was too scared even to do that. “Don’t go out there.”

“I have to,” she snapped back. “None of those monsters care about people.”

Andy dropped to his knees. “Louise, I’m begging you. They’ll catch you. You’ll be tortured.”

“Not for long. After all, we’re all going to be slaughtered.” She pushed her foot into one shoe and fastened the side clips.

“Louise. Please!”

“Are you going to come with me?”

“That’s London out there,” he said, waving an arm at the window. “You’ve got a couple of hours to find one person. It’s impossible. Stay here. We’ll never know when it happens. Not an SD weapon, they’re so powerful.”

She glared down at him. “Andy, haven’t you followed any news? You have a soul. You’ll know exactly when it happens. There’s a good chance you’ll be stuck into the beyond.”

“I can’t go out there,” he moaned. “Not where they are. Don’t go.”

She pulled her other shoe on. “Well, I can’t stay here.”

Andy looked up at her as she stood over him, tall, beautiful, and resolute. Utterly glorious. He’d spent all night making love to her, punishing his body with a dangerous level of stimulant programs so she would be completely overwhelmed. And it meant nothing to her. She would never be his, for she’d seen the real him. They were further apart now than they had been before he knew she lived.

His hand wiped over his nose, an attempt to cover up his sniffling. “I love you, Louise.” He heard the pitiful words come out of his mouth, and despised himself for everything he was, everything he could never become.

Exasperation mingled with embarrassment. Louise didn’t know if she wanted to shove him aside or kiss him. “I still enjoyed last night, Andy. I wouldn’t want it any different.” A pat on his bowed, trembling head would be too awful. She moved round him, and went out of the door, closing it quietly behind her.

 

Loud voices and banging doors woke Jay. She sat up in bed and yawned extravagantly, stretching her arms wide. It was night outside, she could just hear the gentle windrush sound of waves rolling onto the beach above the noises in the chalet. People were moving through the rooms, talking in excited tones. Footsteps trundled up the creaky wooden steps to the veranda, and the front door banged again.

She found Prince Dell and tiptoed into the short hallway. There’d never been such a commotion in the chalet before, not even when the old-timers were planning the new colony. Whatever was going on must be terribly important, which could make eavesdropping interesting.

The voices stopped.

“Come in, Jay,” Tracy called from the lounge.

Jay did as she was told. It was impossible to get away with anything when Tracy was around. Seven of the ancient adults had joined Tracy, sitting and standing round the lounge. Jay kept her head down as she hurried over to the big armchair Tracy was sitting in, too shy to say anything.

“Sorry, poppet,” Tracy said as Jay slithered up onto the cushions beside her. “Did this noisy rabble wake you?”

“What’s the matter?” Jay asked. “Why’s everyone here?”

“We’re trying to decide if we should petition Corpus for intervention,” Tracy said. “Again!”

“Something’s happening on Earth,” Arnie said. “We didn’t realize it at first, but Quinn Dexter might be about to do something extremely dangerous.”

“Corpus won’t intervene,” Galic said dejectedly. “There’s still no reason. You know the rules: only if another, unaware species is endangered. Quinn Dexter, according to the textbooks, qualifies as human. Therefore this will be self-inflicted.”

“Then the textbook should be rewritten,” Arnie grumbled. “I wouldn’t classify him as anything close to human.”

“Corpus won’t intervene because the President will use SD weapons, that barbarian.”

“Not in time to stop Dexter, he won’t,” Tracy said. “Especially if B7 intervenes and delays the fire command.”

Jay snuggled up closer to Tracy. “What’s Dexter going to do?”

“We’re not absolutely sure. It might be nothing.”

“Ha,” Arnie grunted. “Just you wait and see.”

“Are you watching it?” Jay asked, suddenly not at all sleepy.

Tracy glared at Arnie. There was a mental exchange, too. Jay could feel it even if she couldn’t make out individual words. She’d been getting good at that lately.

“Please!” Jay begged. “It’s my world.”

“All right,” Tracy said. “You can stay up and watch for a little while. But don’t think you’re getting to see any gory bits.”

Jay beamed at her.

The adults settled down on the other chairs, packing three onto the settee. Tracy’s television was switched on, showing a deserted street of ancient buildings. A tight tapestry of red clouds were glowing overhead. Jay shuddered at the sight. They were just like the ones on Lalonde.

“That’s London,” Tracy said. She handed Jay a mug of hot chocolate.

Jay propped Prince Dell up against her tummy so he’d have a good view, and took a contented sip of the creamy drink. Someone was walking down the middle of the street.

 

Lady Mac emerged a hundred million kilometres out from the F-class star, five degrees above the ecliptic. As it was an uncharted system, Joshua ordered the combat sensors to deploy and conduct a fast preliminary sweep. Their response time was quicker than the more comprehensive standard array, if there was anything out there on a collision course, they’d hopefully discover it soon enough to jump away.

“Clean space,” Beaulieu reported.

For the first time in thirty hours, Joshua managed to relax, sagging back into the cushioning. He hadn’t realized how tight his neck and shoulder muscles had become, they were lines of hot stone under his skin.

“We did it!” Liol whooped.

Amid the noisy round of self-congratulation, Joshua ordered the flight computer to extend the standard sensor booms. They slid out of the fuselage along with the thermo-dump panels. “Alkad,” he datavised. “Get Kempster out of zero-tau, please. Tell him we’ve arrived.”

“Yes, Captain,” she replied.

“Beaulieu, Ashly, activate the survey sensors, please. The rest of you, let’s get Lady Mac into standard orbital configuration. Dahybi, I still want to be able to jump, we’ll keep the nodes charged.”

“Aye, Captain.”

“Fuel status?” Joshua asked.

“Sufficient,” Sarha told him. “We have forty per cent of our fusion fuel left, and fifty-five per cent of the antimatter remaining. Given we burned fifteen per cent of the antimatter to move Lalarin-MG, we’ve got enough to get us back to the Confederation. We can even jump around this system, providing you don’t want to explore every moonlet.”

“Let’s hope we don’t have to,” he said. The Swantic-LI message hadn’t mentioned where in the system the Sleeping God was; in orbit around a planet or orbiting the star by itself.

The crew loosened up as Lady Mac changed from flight mode to her less demanding orbital status. They drifted around the bridge, used the washroom. Ashly went down to the galley and fetched a meal. Prolonged exposure to high gees was severely tiring. And eating anything substantial during the acceleration was unwise. The mass put a lot of pressure on internal organs, even with artificially strengthened membranes. They devoured the spongy pasta cakes eagerly, chasing runaway squirts of hot cheese sauce round the bridge.

“So if it sees the whole universe,” Liol said, talking round a mouthful, “Do you reckon it knows we’re here?”

“Every telescope sees the whole universe,” Ashly said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean they can all see us.”

“Okay, it detected our gravitonic distortion when we jumped in,” Liol said, unperturbed.

“Where’s your evidence?”

“If it knows about us, it’s keeping quiet,” Beaulieu said. “Sensors haven’t found any electromagnetic emissions out there.”

“How did the Tyrathca find it then?”

“Easily, I would think,” Dahybi said.

Under the direction of Kempster and Renato, Beaulieu launched their survey satellites. Sixteen of them were fired, racing away from Lady Mac at seven gees. They were arranged in a globular formation, keeping the starship at their centre. After two minutes their solid rockets jettisoned, leaving them flying free. The main section was an omniphase visual-spectrum sensor array, a giant technological fly’s eye, looking every way at once. Between them, they formed an ever-increasing telescope baseline, capable of huge resolution. Its only real limit was imposed by the amount of processing power available to correlate and analyse the incoming photonic data.

The sweep was conducted by registering every speck of light with a negative magnitude (in standard stellar classification the brightest visible star is labelled magnitude one, while the dimmest is a six—anything brighter than a one has to be a planet and is assigned a negative value). Their positions were then reviewed five times a second to see if they were moving.

Once the planets had been located, the telescope could be focused on them individually to see if the extensive spatial disturbance Swantic-LI had referred to was in orbit around them. They were assuming it was a visible phenomena; the Tyrathca didn’t have gravitonic detector technology. If nothing was found, a more comprehensive sweep of the system would have to be conducted.

“This is most unusual,” Kempster datavised after the first sweep was completed. He and Renato were using the main lounge in capsule C, along with Alkad and Peter. Their specialist electronics had been installed, transforming it into a temporary astrophysics lab.

Joshua and Liol swapped a look shading between surprise and amusement. “In what way?” Joshua asked.

“We can only detect a single negative-magnitude source orbiting this star,” the astronomer said. “There’s simply nothing else out there. No planets, no asteroids. Lady Macbeth’s sensors can’t even find the usual clouds of interplanetary dust. All matter has been cleared away, virtually down to a molecular level. The only normal occurrence is solar wind.”

“Cleared away, or just sucked into the spatial disturbance,” Sarha muttered.

“So what is the source?” Joshua datavised.

“A moon-sized object, orbiting three hundred million kilometres from the star.”

Joshua and the rest of the crew accessed the sensor array. It showed them a very bright point of light. Completely nondescript.

“We can’t get any sort of spectral reading,” Kempster said. “It’s reflecting the sun’s light at essentially a hundred per cent efficiency. It must be clad in some kind of mirror.”

“You did say: easy,” Ashly told Dahybi.

“That’s not easy,” Joshua said. “That’s obvious.” He loaded the object’s position into the flight computer and plotted a vector to a jump coordinate which would bring them out one million kilometres away from the enigmatic object. “Stand by. Accelerating in one minute.”

 

The impulsive anger which had pushed Louise out of Andy’s flat had faded by the time she reached Islington High Street. Walking down the empty streets had given her far too much time to think, mainly about how headstrong and stupid this idea was. At the same time that original reason held fast. Somebody had to do something, however futile. It was the getting captured and facing Dexter part that was making her legs all wobbly and recalcitrant.

Her neural nanonics crashed when she started off along St John Street. Not that she really needed her map file any more. He wouldn’t be far from the centre of the red cloud; all she had to do was walk straight down to the Thames, only a couple of miles. She knew she’d never actually get that far.

The edge of the cloud, a frayed agitated boundary, was still creeping slowly out towards the skyscrapers behind her. It had already reached Finsbury, barely a quarter of a mile ahead of her now. A gruff sonorous thunder reverberated down from its quaking underside, echoing along the deserted streets. Leaves on the tall evergreen trees trembled in disharmony as erratic gusts of warm air blew out from the centre. Birds rode the thermals high overhead. She could see the tiny black flecks streaming together into huge flocks, all of them heading in the same direction: out.

They were smarter than people. She was amazed that she hadn’t encountered anyone fleeing the cloud’s advance. The inhabitants were all staying barricaded behind their doors. Was everyone paralysed by fear like Andy?

She passed under the cloud, the sleet of redness closing in on her like a perverted nightfall. It wasn’t just the humid air blowing against her now: the feeling of dismay strengthened, slowing her pace. The rumbles of thunder above her thickened, never quite dying away. Forked slivers of blackness crackled between the roiling tufts: black lightning, draining photons out of the sky.

When they’d said goodbye, Genevieve had offered her Carmitha’s silver pendant of earth. Louise had refused. Now she wished she hadn’t. Any totem against the evil would be welcome. She decided to think about Joshua, her real talisman against the harsh truth of life beyond Norfolk. But that just made her slip into the memory of Andy. She still didn’t regret that—quite. As if it mattered.

Louise had made it down Rosebery Avenue and turned into Farringdon Road when the possessed walked out into the street in front of her. There were six of them, moving with unhurried indolence, dressed in austere black suits. They lined up between the pavements and stood facing her. She walked up to the one in the middle, a tall thin man with a flop of oily brown hair.

“Girl, what the fuck are you about?” he asked.

Louise pointed the anti-memory weapon straight at him, its end barely a foot from his face. He stiffened, which meant he knew what it was. It wasn’t much of a comfort to her; somebody else had one. She knew who.

“Take me to Quinn Dexter,” she told him.

They all started laughing. “To him?” the one she was threatening said. “Girl, are you twisted, or what?”

“I’ll shoot if you don’t.” Her voice was very close to cracking. They would know that, and the reason why, them and their devilish senses. She gripped the weapon tighter to stop it shaking about.

“My pleasure,” he said.

She jabbed the weapon forward. His head recoiled in synchronization.

“Don’t push it, bitch.”

The possessed started walking down the road. Louise took a couple of hesitant paces.

“Follow us,” the tall one told her. “The Messiah is waiting for you.”

She kept the weapon up, not that it would do much good, they all had their backs to her now. “How far is it?”

“Close to the river.” He glanced back over his shoulder, lips stretched into a thin smile. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”

“I know Dexter.”

“No you don’t. You wouldn’t be doing this if you did.”

 

The pictures transmitted from Swantic-LI had been accurate after all. From a distance of a million kilometres, the shape of the Sleeping God was quite unmistakable: two concave conical spires end to end, three and a half thousand kilometres in length. The perfectly symmetrical geometry betrayed its artificial origin. The central rim was sharp, appearing to taper down to an edge whose thickness was measured in molecules; its tips had an equally rapier-like profile. There wasn’t anyone on board Lady Mac who didn’t have an uncomfortable vision of the starship being impaled on one of those sleek spikes.

Beaulieu launched five astrophysics survey satellites towards it. Fusion-powered drones with multi-discipline sensor arrays, they arched away from the starship on trajectories that would position them in a necklace around the Sleeping God.

Joshua led the whole crew down to the lounge in capsule C where Alkad, Peter, Renato, and Kempster were gathered to interpret the data from the satellites and Lady Mac’s own sensor suite. Samuel, Monica, and one of the serjeants had also joined them.

Studio-quality holographic screens sprouted from the consoles installed to process the astrophysical data. Each one carried a different image of the Sleeping God, they were tinted every shade in the rainbow, as well as providing graphic representations. Their main AV projector showed the raw visual-spectrum picture, materializing it in the middle of the compartment. The Sleeping God gleamed alone in space, sunlight bouncing off its silver surface in long shimmers. That was the first anomaly, though it took Renato a full minute of puzzled study to see the obvious.

“Hey,” he exclaimed. “There’s no darkside.”

Joshua frowned at the AV projection, then accessed the console processors directly to check. The satellites confirmed it: every part of the Sleeping God was equally bright, there were no shadows. “Is it generating that light internally?”

“No,” Renato said. “The spectrum matches the star. Light must be bending round it somehow. I’d say it has to be a gravitational lens, an incredibly dense mass. That ties in with the Tyrathca observation that it’s a spatial disturbance.”

“Alkad?” Joshua asked. “Is it made out of neutronium?” That would be the final irony if a God was made from the same substance as her weapon.

“A moment, Captain.” The physicist seemed troubled. “We’re getting the data from the gravitational detectors on line.” Several hologram screens flurried with colourful icons. She and Peter read them in surprise. They turned in unison to stare at the central projection.

“What is it?” Joshua asked.

“I would suggest that this so-called God is actually a naked singularity.”

“No fucking way!” Kempster said indignantly. “It’s stable.”

“Look at the geometry,” Alkad said. “And we’re detecting a torrent of gravitational wave vacuum fluctuations, all of them at very small wavelengths.”

“The satellites are picking up regular patterns in the fluctuations,” Peter told her.

“What?” She studied one of the displays. “Holy Mary, that’s not possible. Vacuum fluctuations have to be random, that’s why they exist.”

“Ha,” Kempster grunted in satisfaction.

“I know what a singularity is,” Joshua said. “The point of infinite mass compression. It’s what causes a black hole.”

“It’s what causes an event horizon,” Kempster corrected. “The universe’s cosmic censor. Physics, mathematics—they all break down in the infinite, because you can’t have the infinite, it’s unobtainable in reality.”

“Except in some very specific cases,” Alkad said. “Standard gravitational collapse in stars is a spherical event. Once the core has compressed to a point where its gravity overcomes thermal expansion, everything falls into the centre from all directions at once. The collapse finishes with all the matter compressing into your infinity point, the singularity. At which time its gravity becomes so strong that nothing can escape, not even light: the event horizon. However, in theory, if you spin the star before the event, the centrifugal force will distort the shape, expanding it outward along the equator. If it’s spinning fast enough, the equatorial bulge will remain during the collapse.” Her finger indicated the projected image. “It will form this shape, in fact. And right down at the very end of the collapse timescale, when the star’s matter has all achieved singularity density, it will still be in this shape, and for an instant, before the collapse continues and pulls it into a sphere, some of that infinite mass will project up outside the event horizon.”

“For an instant,” Kempster insisted. “Not fifteen thousand years.”

“It looks as though someone has learned how to freeze that instant indefinitely.”

“You mean like the alchemist?” Joshua datavised to her.

“No,” she datavised back. “These kind of mass-densities are far outside any I achieved with the alchemist technology.”

“If its mass is infinite,” Kempster recited pedantically, “it will be cloaked in an event horizon. Light will not escape.”

“And yet it does,” Alkad said. “From every part of the surface.”

“The vacuum fluctuations must be carrying the photons out,” Renato said. “That’s what we’re seeing here. Whoever created this has learned how to control vacuum fluctuations.” He grinned in wonder. “Wow!”

“No wonder they called it a God,” Alkad said in veneration. “Regulated vacuum fluctuations. If you can do that, there’s no limit to what you can achieve.”

Peter gave her a private, amused look. “Order out of chaos.”

“Kempster?” Joshua queried.

“I don’t like the idea,” the old astronomer said with a weak grin. “But I can’t refute it. In fact, it might even explain Swantic-LI’s jump to another star. Vacuum fluctuations can have a negative energy.”

“Of course,” Renato said. He smiled eagerly at his boss, catching the idea quickly. “They’d be exotic, that’s the state which holds a wormhole open. Just like a voidhawk’s distortion field.”

Samuel had been shaking his head as the discussion ploughed onwards. “But why?” he said. “Why build something like this, what is it for?”

“It’s a perpetual source of wormholes,” Alkad said. “And the Tyrathca said it assists the progress of biological entities. This is the ultimate stardrive generator. You could probably use it to travel between galaxies.”

“Christ, intergalactic travel,” Liol said dreamily. “How about that.”

“Very nice,” Monica retorted. “But it hardly helps us to deal with possession.”

Liol gave her a pained glance.

“Okay,” Joshua said. “If you guys are right about this being an artificially maintained naked singularity, there must be some kind of control centre for the vacuum fluctuations. Have you found that yet?”

“There’s nothing out there except the singularity itself,” Renato said. “Our satellites are covering all of the surface. Nothing hiding on the other side, nothing in orbit.”

“There has to be something else. The Tyrathca got it to open a wormhole for them. How do we do that?”

His neural nanonics reported a new communication channel opening. “You ask,” the singularity datavised.

 

The cloud’s luminosity remained constant, but its shading had shifted a long way down the spectrum as Louise approached its epicentre. When she walked across the paved plaza outside St Paul’s cathedral every surface was toned a deep crimson. Stone carvings embellishing the beautiful old building cast long black shadows down the wall, ebony jail bars gripping it tightly, squeezing away the last remnants of sanctity.

Her escort pranced around her like insane Morris dancers, inviting her onward with mocking gestures. The snarls of thunder ended as she reached the large oaken doors, leaving an onerous silence. Louise walked into the cathedral.

She took a couple of steps forward, then faltered. The doors closed behind her with a ululation of cold air. Thousands of possessed were standing waiting along the nave, dressed in elaborate costumes from every era of human history and culture, each one completely black. They were all facing her. The organ began to play, blasting out a harsh hard-rock version of the wedding march. Louise put her hands over her ears, it was so loud. All the possessed turned to face the altar, leaving a narrow passage clear down the very centre of the nave. She began to walk down it. It wasn’t a conscious thing, her limbs did as they were commanded by the massed will of the possessed. Her anti-memory weapon fell from numbed fingers after she’d taken the first few steps, clattering away over the cracked tiles.

Ghosts drifted towards her, hands held out to implore. They swept past her as she carried on walking, shaking their heads in sorrow.

The music ended when she reached the front row of the possessed. They were standing level with the cathedral’s transept wings; ahead of them, the floor underneath the vaulting central dome was empty. Iron braziers with foul-smelling fires were lining the walls, their black smoke smudging the pale stonework. She couldn’t actually see the apex of the dome, it was obscured by a pall of grey fug. There was a gallery high above her. Several people leaned on its rail, looking down at her with mild interest.

Her compulsion ended, and she tottered forward.

“Hello, Louise,” Quinn Dexter said. He stood in front of the defiled altar, no part of him visible within the black robe.

She took a couple of unsteady steps. Fear was tightening every muscle, turning her body stiff. She wasn’t even certain she could stand for much longer. “Dexter?”

“None other.” He moved to one side, allowing her to see a man’s body spread-eagled across the altar. “And now God’s Brother has brought the three of us together again.”

“Fletcher,” she squeaked.

Quinn held out an arm towards her and extended a swan-white hand. A claw finger beckoned, granting her permission to approach.

The lacerations and dried blood coating his skin made her afraid. But as she drew closer she saw his muscles were bunched and trembling. An unfamiliar face was contorted with distress, sucking down air in fast pain-filled gulps.

“Fletcher?”

Quinn waved his hand, and the electricity was turned off. The body slumped down onto the stone, panting in shock. Slowly, Fletcher’s face emerged to replace the blooded features. The chains and metal bands securing him dropped away. All of the wounds were banished from sight as his customary naval uniform materialized. He climbed down gingerly from the altar.

“My dearest lady. You should not have come.”

“I had to.”

Quinn laughed. “Your call, Fletch. You can walk out of here with her now if you make the right decision. If not, she’s all mine.”

“My lady.” Fletcher’s face was riven with anguish.

“Why can you walk out?” she asked.

“He’s just got to sign up for the army of the damned,” Quinn said. “I won’t even make him do it in blood.”

“No,” she said. “Fletcher, you mustn’t do that. I came here to warn you all. This has to stop. You have to disperse the red cloud.”

“Is that a threat, Louise?” Quinn asked.

“You’ve frightened Govcentral with the red cloud. They think you’re going to take the Earth away from the universe. The President won’t let that happen. He’s going to use Strategic Defence weapons against London. Everyone will die. Millions and millions of people.”

“I won’t,” Quinn said.

“But they will.” Louise waved an arm back at the silent ranks of his disciples. “Without them you’re nothing.”

Quinn glided up to Louise. His face slipped out of the robe’s shadows to show her his furious expression. “God’s Brother, I hate you!” He slammed his hand across the side of her head, using energistic power to amplify the strength of the blow.

Louise screamed at the pain, flying back to crash into the altar. She crumpled forward onto the floor, whimpering as blood pumped into her mouth.

Fletcher made a start forwards, finding the end of Quinn’s anti-memory weapon pressed against his nose. “Back off, fuckhead,” Quinn snarled. “Back!”

Fletcher retreated, breathing heavily.

Quinn glared down at Louise. “You came here to save people. People you’ve never seen. People you’ll never know. Didn’t you?”

Louise was sobbing from the pain, holding a hand to her face. Blood ran out of her mouth, dripping onto the floor. She looked up at him, devoid of understanding.

“Didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she wept.

“I hate that decency. This assumption you have that you can connect with me on some level, because underneath I’m human too, that I have a heart. And in the end I’m going to be reasonable. That of course I’ll back down and talk things out with the supercop fucks who’ve been shooting at my ass ever since I got back to this stinking garbage dump of a planet. That’s why I hate you, Louise. You are the end product of a religion which has systematically set about shackling the serpent beast for over two and a half thousand years. Religions, all religions, forbid our true nature to shine through, they waken us so that we’ll spend our whole lives grovelling in front of the false Lord. That’s the path you embrace, Louise, that’s what you are: kind hearted. Just by existing you are the enemy of the Light Bringer. My enemy. I hate you so badly I’m in pain from it. And you’ll pay for that. Nobody hurts me and goes off to laugh about it with their friends. I’ll make you the army’s whore. I’ll make every one of my followers fuck you. They’ll keep on fucking you until your mind shatters and your heart bursts. Then when there’s nothing left but a lump of insane meat bleeding its life away into the gutter I’ll use the soul-killer to eradicate what’s left of you from the universe, because there’s no way I’ll ever share a single night in hell with you. You’re not that worthy.”

Louise shrank away from him, crabbing across the floor until she was backed up against the altar. “You can do all that, you can hurt me until I denounce everything I believe in. But you will never change what I am right now. And that’s all that matters. I’m true to me. I’ve already had my victory.”

“Dumbass bitch. That’s why you and your false Lord will always lose. Your victory’s in your head. Mine is physical. It’s as motherfucking real as you can get.”

Louise looked defiantly at Quinn. “When evil rules, then it will be goodness which corrupts you.”

“Total bollocks. The likes of you won’t be able to corrupt the army I’m bringing onto the field. Tell her Fletcher, be honest with her. Is my army going to win? Is the Night coming?”

“Fletcher?” she appealed.

“My lady . . . I . . .” His head drooped in abject despair.

“No,” Louise gasped. “Fletcher!”

Quinn watched her, grinning in ferocious satisfaction. “Ready to watch the bad part, now?” He reached down, and grabbed her shoulder, hauling her to her feet.

“Unhand her,” Fletcher demanded. A ball of solid air slammed into his belly, its impact firing pain down every nerve in his host body. He was thrown off the ground and sent tumbling backwards. Even when he landed hard on the tiles he kept skidding as if the surface was ice. When he stopped moving and regained his wits, he found he was directly under the apex of the dome.

“Don’t move,” Quinn ordered.

A pentagon of tall white flames burst into existence around Fletcher to emphasise the point. He watched helplessly as Quinn dragged Louise along into the south transept. They went through a door.

There were stairs inside, spiralling upwards. Louise had to run to keep up with Quinn. The curving stairs went on and on, making her feel dangerously dizzy; and the pain from the side of her head was so intense she thought she was going to vomit.

They came out through a narrow archway onto the gallery ringing the dome. Quinn moved round it until he was facing down the nave. He thrust Louise towards a young girl in a leather waistcoat and pink jeans.

“Look after her,” he said.

At first Louise thought Courtney was a possessed; her hair was bright emerald, all of it standing on end and twirled into flame-like spikes. But there were scabs all over her cheeks and arms, unhealed and starting to fester; one eye was swollen almost shut.

Courtney giggled as she held Louise tight. “I get you first.” Her tongue licked round Louise’s ear, hands closing tight on her buttocks.

Louise moaned as her legs gave out.

“Shit.” Courtney pushed her back onto the low bench which ran around the gallery.

“We won’t live long enough for that,” Louise said harshly.

Courtney gave her a puzzled look.

Quinn put his hands on the rail and looked down on his silent obedient followers packed into the nave. Fletcher Christian stood still at the centre of the flaming pentagram, head bent back so he could observe the gallery. Quinn gestured and the prison of white flames vanished, leaving Fletcher alone on the floor.

“Before the Night dawns, there’s one person missing from our gathering,” Quinn announced. “Though I know he’s here. You’re always here, aren’t you?” The silken tone of displeasure made his followers stir uneasily.

Quinn signalled the acolyte on the gallery, who led Greta round to him. She was pushed hard against the rail, almost going over. Quinn grabbed her by the scruff of her neck, tipping her head upright. Lank hair dangled down over her face as she drew a shaky breath.

“Say your name,” Quinn told her.

“Greta,” she mumbled.

He took the anti-memory weapon from his robe and shoved it against her eye. “Louder.”

“Greta. I’m Greta Manani.”

“Oh Daddy,” Quinn called out. “Daddy Manani, come out, come out wherever you are.”

The possessed crowded into the nave began to look round. Murmurs of confusion seeped out among them. Quinn scoured their heads for someone moving.

“Get out here, fuckhead! RIGHT NOW. Or I kill her soul. You hearing me?”

The sound of lone footsteps echoed through the cathedral. The hushed possessed parted in a smooth tide to allow Powel Manani through. The Ivet supervisor looked exactly the same as the last time Quinn had seen him back on Lalonde, a brawny man dressed in a red and green checked shirt. He walked out under the dome, put his hands on his hips and grinned up at Quinn. “I see you’re still a total loser, Ivet.”

“I’m not a fucking Ivet!” Quinn screamed. “I’m the Messiah of Night.”

“Whatever. If you harm my daughter, Messiah of dickheads everywhere, I’ll personally finish the job Twelve-T started on Jesup.”

“I have been harming her. For a long time now.”

“Bet it isn’t as bad as what we did to your friends Leslie and Kay, and all the other Ivets we caught.”

For a second Quinn contemplated vaulting over the rail and swooping down on the supervisor, feeding his serpent beast. The peak of rage subsided. That was what Manani probably wanted. Quinn could sense how strong the man’s energistic power was. Using him as the sacrifice to the summoned dark angles was going to be much more satisfying.

“If you kill her,” Powel said, “you have no protection from me. And if you blast this body to pieces, I’ll just come back again like before. I’m going to keep on coming back until this is settled between us.”

“I’m not going to blast you out of your body, not after the grief you’ve caused me. I’m not that nice, remember. Now you stay exactly where you are, or I will kill your daughter’s soul.”

Powel looked round the empty expanse of floor under the dome as if he was viewing an apartment. “Guess you’re on his shit list too, huh,” he said to Fletcher.

“I am, sir.”

“Don’t worry, he’ll make a mistake. He’s not smart enough to pull off something like this. And when it all goes pear-shaped, his balls are mine.”

Quinn spread his arms wide in an open embrace to the assembled possessed below. “Now that everyone’s here,” he said, “we’ll begin.”

 

Joshua managed to suppresses his shock without any help from programs. He knew the importance of this moment was too great for anything other than perfect clarity. “Are you the Tyrathca’s Sleeping God?” he datavised.

“You know I am, Captain Calvert,” the singularity replied.

“If you know who I am, then the Tyrathca were correct saying that you see the universe.”

“The universe is too large for that, of course, but to reply in context, yes, I observe as much of the universe as you are aware of, and a great deal more besides. My quantum structure enables an extensive interconnection with a large volume of space-time and other realms.”

“Not one for small talk, is it,” Liol muttered.

“Then you know my species is being possessed by the souls of our own dead?” Joshua asked.

“Yes.”

“Is there a solution to this problem?”

“There are a great many solutions. As the Kiint have hinted to you, each race comes to terms with this aspect of life in its own way.”

“Please, do you know of one that’s applicable to us?”

“Many are. I am not being deliberately obtuse. I can list them all, and I can and will assist you in applying them where relevant. What I will not do is make the decision for you.”

“Why?” Monica asked. “Why are you helping us? It’s not that I’m ungrateful. But I am curious.”

“The Tyrathca were also correct when they said I exist to assist the progress of biological entities. Though the particular circumstances humans are currently facing were not the reason I was created.”

“Then what were you made for?” Alkad asked.

“The race which created me had reached their evolutionary pinnacle; intellectually, physically, and in their technology. A fact which should be self-evident to you, Dr Mzu. My sentience resides within a self-contained pattern of vacuum fluctuations. This provides me with an extensive ability to manipulate mass and energy; for me thought is deed, the two are one and the same. I used that ability to open a gateway for my creators into a new realm. They knew little of it, other than it existed; its parameters are very different to this universe. So they chose to embark on a new phase of existence living within it. They left this universe a long time ago.”

“And you’ve been helping various species progress along evolution’s track ever since?” Joshua said. “It’s your reason for existing?”

“I do not require a continuing reason to exist, a motivation. That psychology is a descendent of a biological sentience. My origins are not biological; I exist because they created me. It’s that simple.”

“Then why do you help?”

“Again, the simple answer would be because I can. But there are other considerations. It is an amplification of the problem your species has encountered millions of times during its history, almost daily in fact. You were even subject to it at Mastrit-PJ. When and where not to intervene? Did you believe you did the right thing by giving the Mosdva ZTT technology? Your intentions were good, but ultimately they were governed by self interest.”

“Did we do the wrong thing?”

“The Mosdva certainly don’t think so. Such judgements are relative.”

“So you don’t help everybody all the time?”

“No. Such a level of intervention—shaping the nature of biological life to conform with my wishes, however benevolent—would make me your ruler. Sentient life has free will. My creators believe that is why this universe exists. I respect that, and will not interfere with its self determination.”

“Even when we make a mess of things?”

“That would be a judgement again.”

“But you are willing to help us if we ask?”

“Yes.”

Joshua looked at the projected image of the singularity, vaguely troubled. “All right, we’re definitely asking. Can we have the list of solutions?”

“You may. I would suggest they would be more useful if you understood what has happened. That way, you would be able to make a more informed decision on which one to apply.”

“Seems reasonable.”

“Wait,” Monica said. “You keep mentioning we have to make a decision. How do we do that?”

“What are you talking about?” Liol asked. “Once we’ve heard what’s on offer, we chose.”

“We do? Are we going to put it to a vote here in the ship, do we go back to the Confederation Assembly and ask them to decide? What? We need to be certain about this first.”

Liol looked round the cabin, trying to identify the mood. “No, we don’t go back,” he said. “This is what we came here for. The Jovian Consensus thought we were up to the job. So I say do it.”

“We’re deciding the future of our whole race,” she protested. “We can’t just leap into this. And . . .” she indicated Mzu. “Bloody hell, she’s hardly qualified to be passing judgement on the rest of us. That’s the way I see it. You were going to use the Alchemist against an entire planet.”

“Whereas the ESA is an organization of enviable morality,” Alkad snapped back. “How many people did you murder just tracking me down?”

“You people have got to be fucking kidding,” Liol said. “You can’t even decide how to decide? Listen to yourselves! This kind of personal stupidity is what dumps humans into the shit every time. We just discuss it and make a decision. That’s it. Finish.”

“No,” Samuel said. “The captain decides.”

“Me?” Joshua asked.

Monica stared at the Edenist in astonishment. “Him!”

“Yes, I agree,” the serjeant said. “Joshua decides.”

“He never doubted,” Samuel said. “Did you, Joshua? You’ve always known this would end in success.”

“I hoped it would, sure.”

“You doubted this flight,” Samuel told Monica. “You didn’t fully believe it would end in success. If you had, you would have been prepared to make the decision. Instead, you have doubts, that disqualifies you. Whoever does this must have conviction.”

“Like yours, for instance,” Monica said. “A subset of your famous rationality.”

“I too find myself unqualified for this. Although Edenists think as one, to make a decision of this magnitude I find myself wanting the reassurance of the Consensus. It would seem Edenism has a flaw after all.”

Joshua gazed round at his crew. “You’ve all been very quiet.”

“That’s because we trust you, Joshua,” Sarha said simply, and smiled. “You’re our captain.”

Strange, Joshua thought, when you got right down to the naked truth, people actually had faith in him. Who he was, what he’d achieved, meant something to them. It was quite humbling, really. “All right,” he said slowly. He datavised the singularity: “Is that acceptable to you?”

“I cannot take responsibility for your decisions, collective or otherwise. My only constraints are that I will not permit you to use my abilities as a weapon. Other than that, you have free access.”

“Okay. Show me what happened.”

 

The possessed in the nave had dropped to their knees, concentrating hard on producing the stream of energistic power which the dark Messiah demanded from them for his summoning. Up on the gallery facing them, Quinn’s robe evaporated into pure shadow and began to flow out from his body, filling the air around him like a black spectre. At the heart, his naked body gleamed silver. He accepted the offering from his followers, and directed it as he pleased. It spilled down across the floor below the cathedral’s dome, prying at the structure of reality, weakening it.

Powel Manani and Fletcher Christian looked down at their feet in consternation as the tiles around them sprouted a luminous purple haze. The soles of their shoes became enmeshed with the surface, making it hard to lift their feet up.

“I need to get near him,” Powel said.

Fletcher glanced up at the swarthy occultation looming above. “I wish to be as far from this dread place as possible. But I will not leave without her.”

Powel exerted his own energistic power to yank his feet clear of the tiles. Even then it took considerable effort to move them. He shuffled right up in front of Fletcher, the two of them almost touching. The bottom of his sweatshirt was lifted a couple of centimetres, revealing Louise’s anti-memory weapon shoved into the top of his waistband.

“Very well,” Fletcher said. “But it will be no easy endeavour. I hear the fallen angels approaching.”

The haze was thrumming, issuing a howl of lament and greed. Below that, the fabric of the universe was thinning in accordance with Quinn’s desire. They could both feel pressure being exerted from the other side, a desperate scrabbling.

“Not good,” Powel said. The tiles were becoming insubstantial. He pulled his feet out again; they’d sunk several centimetres below the surface.

“I will make a stand and distract him,” Fletcher said. “You may have time to reach the stairs.”

“I don’t think so. This stuff is getting worse than quicksand.”

The purple haze vanished. Fletcher and Powel looked round wildly. A drop of ectoplasm dribbled up in a crack between two tiles, making a soft blup. A patch of dense white frost solidified around it.

“Now what?” Powel grunted with apprehension.

More ectoplasm was bubbling up. Sluggish rivulets began to form as it ran together. The tiles left uncovered had all turned sparkling white from frost. Fletcher could feel cold air rushing off the sludgy fluid. His breath had become hoary.

“Welcome, my brothers,” Quinn’s voice boomed across the cathedral. “Welcome to the battlefield. Together we will bring down the Night of our Lord.”

The entire area of floor underneath the dome had become a pool of burping and foaming ectoplasm. Fletcher and Powel were hopping from foot to foot, frantically trying to banish the excruciating cold from their legs. They suddenly stood still, tensing as a V-shaped ripple moved across the pool. Waves of hot, lustful emotion were surging up from the dimensional rift in counter to the physical cold. A curving spike lifted up out of the floor, ectoplasm flowing along its length. It was over three metres high.

Fletcher watched it rise in horrified awe. Another one was emerging at the side of it, ectoplasm gurgling loudly as it lapped against the base.

“Lord Jesus protect your servants,” he whispered. He and Powel backed away from the twin spikes as a third one budded.

The ectoplasm was bubbling energetically now. Smaller tendrils were writhing up, erupting all over the pool like a fur of rapacious cilia. One started to curl round Powel’s leg. With a cry he managed to stumble away from it. The tip blossomed into a snapping five-talon claw. He pointed a finger at it and flung a slim blast of white fire. The claw shuddered, and large ripples of ectoplasm surged towards it.

“Stop!” Fletcher shouted hoarsely. The ectoplasm licking its way up his legs was doing far more than freezing his flesh, he realized. His mental strength was reducing, and with it his energistic power.

The claw’s talons had almost doubled in size under the impact of the white fire. Powel snatched his hand back, watching anxiously as the claw groped round blindly.

Quinn laughed in delight as he watched the desperate antics of his sacrificial victims. There were five of the huge spikes now; they started to lean over. He wondered if they were the tips of some creature’s fingers.

Moans of alarm were coming from the possessed down in the nave as they realized what they were witnessing. The first signs of panic were evident as the front rank pressed back from the edge of the ectoplasm pool.

“Hold fast!” Quinn thundered at them. The opening into darkness wasn’t yet complete, it fluctuated as those below hurled themselves against it. Quinn concentrated his mind on the area where reality was distorted to breaking point.

A huge bubble of noxious fumes burst from the centre of the ectoplasm, releasing an undulating spume of smaller ones. Powel and Fletcher ducked as a spray of ectoplasm splattered outwards. Tendrils of the stuff were wriggling against their legs now. Moving had become almost impossible, the agonising cold was squeezing in against their limbs and chests.

A dark mass slowly shrugged its way out of the subsiding froth of bubbles. It was a metallic sphere with boxes and cylinders jutting out at odd angles. Streaks of molten nulltherm insulation were running down its sides, mingling with the wreath of ectoplasm that drooled away in slippery ribbons.

“What the fuck is that?” Quinn demanded.

Explosive bolts cracked loudly, and a circular hatch flew away from the sphere. A fat man in a grubby toga jumped down, splashing into the ectoplasm pool without any noticeable discomfort.

Dariat looked round at his surroundings with considerable interest. “Bad timing?” he asked.

Tolton walked straight through the escape pod’s walls. He stood in the ectoplasm and let out a grateful sigh. Fletcher watched in fascination as the ectoplasm flowed up him, turning the ghost solid. He seemed so much more vital than any of the other entities struggling to fruit from the ectoplasm.

Powel Manani’s deep laugh rocked the air. “These are your terrifying warriors?” he mocked.

Quinn yelled in fury and sent a white fireball ripping down at the derisive Ivet supervisor. A couple of centimetres from Powel it fractured into screeching webs of energy that never quite managed to touch him. The ectoplasm heaved enthusiastically as the crackling tips plunged into it.

A long frond of the stuff leapt up to whip round Powel’s chest. Thicker, blunt tendrils were embracing his legs, knitting together. They began to pull him downwards. “How do we kill this stuff?” he shouted at Dariat. It had taken a worrying amount of effort to deflect Quinn’s firebolt; his strength was draining away rapidly.

“Fire,” Dariat called back. “Real fire works against them.” Something was lumbering up out of the pool next to Tolton, a creature five times his size, seven limbs unfolding from its flanks. He looked at Dariat, and the two of them linked hands. They sent a single bolt of white fire streaking into the base of the escape pod. The last two solid rocket motors ignited.

 

The events into which Joshua plunged had a form similar to a sensevise. They were real enough as they unravelled around him, but he witnessed them all simultaneously. At the same time, he could stand back and evaluate what was happening. That wasn’t an ability the human mind could perform.

“You are using my thought processing ability,” the singularity informed him.

“Then I’m no longer human. It will be you who makes the decision.”

“The essence of what you are remains unchanged. I have simply expanded your mental capacity. Consider this a supercompressed history didactic.”

So Joshua stood at Powel Manani’s side on Lalonde as Quinn Dexter performed the sacrifice and the Ly-cilph opened a gateway into the beyond, allowing the first souls to pour through. The possessed multiplied their numbers and spread down the Juliffe. He watched Warlow talking to Quinn Dexter at Durringham spaceport and accept the payment for Lady Mac to carry him to Norfolk.

Ralph Hiltch took flight to Ombey and unleashed the possession of Mortonridge. The liberation followed on, with Ketton island vanishing into another realm.

“Are you the instrument that transferred the crystal entities there?” Joshua asked.

“No. That was another similar to myself. I am aware of several within this universe, though all are in superclusters very distant from here.”

Valisk and its descent into the melange. Pernik. Nyvan. Koblat. Jesup. Kulu. Oshanko. Norfolk. Trafalgar. New California. André Duchamp. Meyer. Erick Thakara. Jed Hinton. Other places, worlds and asteroids and ships and people; their lives wound together into a cohesive whole. Jay Hilton’s unauthorised escape to the Kiint home system. Their remarkable arc of planets, housing the retired observers who gathered in front of Tracy’s television, dunking chocolate biscuits into their tea as they watched the human race falling apart.

“Dick Keaton,” Joshua said with mild jubilation. “I knew there was something odd about him.”

“The Kiint use many specially bred observers to gather data on different species,” the singularity said. “For all their scientific prowess, they do not have my perceptive faculty. Corpus still utilises technology to amass its information. Such methods can hardly be absolute.”

“Did they find you?”

“Yes. I could do nothing for them, and told them so. One day they will be able to build my like by themselves. Not for some time, though. There is no need. They have achieved an admirable harmony with the universe.”

“Yeah, so they keep telling us.”

“Not to taunt you. They are not a malicious species.”

“Can you show me the beyond as well?” Joshua asked. “Can you tell me how to travel through it successfully like they do?”

“It has no distance,” the singularity said. “It only has time. That is the direction in which you must travel.”

“I don’t understand.”

“This universe and all it is connected with will come to an end. Entropy carries us towards the inevitable omega point, that is why entropy exists. What is to be born next cannot be known until then. This is the time when the pattern of that which replaces it will be created, a pattern which will emerge out of mind, the collective experience of all who have lived. That is where souls go, their transcendence brings all that they are together into a single act of creation.”

“Then why do they get stuck in the beyond?”

“Because that is where they want to be; like the ghosts wedded to the place of their anguish, they refuse to discard the part of their life which is over. They are afraid, Joshua. From the beyond they can still see the universe they have left behind. All they have known, the condition that they were, everyone they have loved, is still obtainable, so very very close to them. They fear to leave that for the unknown future.”

“All of us are frightened of the future. That’s human nature.”

“But some of you venture into it with confidence. That’s why you are here today, Joshua, that’s why you found me. You believed in the future. You believed in yourself. That is the most precious possession any human can ever own.”

“That’s it? That’s all there ever was? Faith in yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Then why in God’s name didn’t the Kiint tell us that? You said they weren’t malicious. What possible reason can they have for denying us that? A few simple words.”

“Because you have to implement that knowledge as an entire species. How you do that is your own decision.”

“It’s a bloody simple decision. You just tell them.”

“Telling someone not to be afraid is one thing. To have them believe it at an instinctive level is quite another. In order not to be afraid of the beyond you must either understand its purpose, or have the naked conviction to move on once you encounter it. How many of your race are uneducated, Joshua? I don’t mean those of you alive now, I mean throughout history. How many have lived unfulfilled lives? How many have died in infancy or in profound ignorance? You don’t have to tell the rich and the educated, the privileged, they are the ones who will begin the great journey through the beyond of their own accord. It is the others you must convince, the ignorant masses, yet paradoxically, they are the ones hardest for you to reach. Theirs are the minds which, thanks to circumstance, have set and hardened against new concepts and ideas from an early age.”

“But they can still be taught. They can learn to believe in themselves, everyone can. It’s never too late for that.”

“You speak of high idealism, but still you have to implement your ideals in the real, practical world. How will you reach these people? Who will pay to provide every one of them with a personal tutor, a guru who will advance their inner spirit?”

“Jesus, I don’t know. How did other races do it?”

“They developed socially.”

“The Laymil didn’t, they committed suicide.”

“Yes, but by that time they understood the nature of the beyond. Every one of them took the leap forward knowing that they still had a future. Their suicide was not racial extermination, a method of simply thwarting their possessing souls; they carried what they are to the omega point as one. That is what their communal society permitted them to do.”

“I get it. The Laymil possessing souls were from a time before they reached that communal society.”

“Yes. As most of your possessed are from earlier times. But not all, not by any means. Your race has not eliminated poverty, Joshua. You have not liberated people from physical drudgery to develop their minds. If you have a flaw in your nature, then it is that. You cling to what is comfortable, the old familiar. I suspect that is why humans have a slightly higher than average percentage of souls lingering in the beyond.”

“We’ve done pretty well in the last thousand years,” he said, irked. “The Confederation is one vast middle-class estate.”

“The parts you travel to are. And even there ‘comfortable’ does not equate to ‘satisfactory.’ You are not animals, Joshua. Yet the entire population on some of your planets perform mundane agrarian tasks.”

“It costs to build automated factories. Global economies have to develop to a level where it becomes affordable.”

“You have the technology to travel between the stars, and all you do when you get to your fresh world is start the old cycle over again. Only one new type of society has emerged in the last thousand years, the Edenists; and even they participate and perpetuate your economic structure. The nature of society is governed by economic circumstance; and for all of your vast collective wealth, for all your knowledge, you remain stagnant. Throughout your voyage here you and your crew discussed how the Tyrathca were so slow to change compared to humans. Now you have seen the Kiint home system, how far ahead of you do you think their technology lies? It is a small gap, Joshua. Molecular-level replicator technology would bring about the end of your entire economic structure. If you wanted to, how long do you think it would take the combined scientific resources of the Confederation to build a prototype replicator?”

“I don’t know. Not long.”

“No. Not long. The knowledge is there, but you lack the will. Although there is one final inhibiting factor we haven’t incorporated yet into your knowledge base. And it’s an important one.”

“I have my suspicions about you,” Joshua said. “You with your avowed non-interventionist policy.”

“Yes?”

“How did I get here?”

“By chance.”

“A very long chance. A Tyrathca arkship is damaged while entering a star system devoid of any mass. Thousands of years later during the possession crisis we hear about something which might be able to solve the crisis for us. Would you like to compute the odds of that happening?”

“There are no odds, there is only cause and effect. The Tyrathca didn’t inform you of the Sleeping God when you first encountered them, because until the human possession crisis started they had no need to pray to it. You found me because you looked, Joshua. You believed I existed. Quinn Dexter has found his army of darkness, because he too has conviction. Greater than yours, I would suggest. Was he led to them by omnipotent entities playing chess with lives?”

“All right. But you’ve got to admit, having you this close to the Confederation is a hell of a coincidence given there’s only one of you per galactic supercluster.”

“That is not a coincidence, Joshua. I am aware of everything, because I am connected to everything. When you search for me, and have sufficient faith that you will find me, then you will succeed.”

“Okay. Well, if I haven’t said it before: thank you. I’ll do my best to see your faith isn’t misplaced. Now, what was that last factor?”

The singularity showed him, delivering his awareness to the orbital tower down which he rode down to Earth, with B7, Quinn Dexter, and . . .

Joshua’s eyes flicked open. His crew broke off their conversations, looking at him in anticipation.

“Louise,” he said. And vanished.

 

Thick smoke and blinding yellow flame exploded out of the escape pod rocket motors. The noise was a sheer wall of energy that sent Fletcher and Powel flailing backwards. Light punched down into Fletcher’s eyes as he used the remnants of his energistic power to ward off the blast.

The escape pod wobbled upwards, gathering speed. Flame splayed out from its base, scouring the surface of the ectoplasm pool. Embryonic shapes melted away under the incendiary heat. A cloud of clammy fumes billowed out, hurtling down the nave and both transepts. Brittle, ancient stained-glass windows shattered under the tremendous pressure. Horizontal jets of smoke and ectoplasm smog roared out over the deserted plaza.

The escape pod smashed into the top of the cathedral dome and crashed through into the pre-dawn morning. Its trajectory was given a savage kick by the impact, sending it racing away in a low curve underneath the red cloud, out towards Holborn.

Down on the floor of the cathedral, it was impossible to see anything. The air was coagulated with icy particles and vile acidic smoke. Fletcher sloshed about in the raging ectoplasm pool, trying to find anything that would give him his bearings. His mind could sense the possessed in the nave: their fear-ordered discipline was starting to crumble. Apart from them, nothing was clear. Chunks of debris were whistling down from above, splattering down into the turbid fluid where they immediately cracked open from the cold.

“Anybody left standing?” Powel shouted somewhere in the murk.

A vermilion glimmer began to pervade the churning mist as the light from the red cloud shone in through the gaping windows. Folds of darkness slipped across Fletcher’s vision. He stood still, not daring to move.

Powel bumped into him. Both of them jumped.

“I’ve got to get up to the gallery,” Powel said. “This is our chance, he’ll be as blind as us.”

“I think the door is this way,” Fletcher told him. Even using his energistic power to bolster his legs, they moved reluctantly. He could feel nothing below his knees.

The mist began to scintillate with white light. It abruptly turned heavy, sighing as it sank to the ground. The rumpled upper surface descended around Fletcher, leaving him totally exposed. A wide beam of red light shone down through the hole in the dome, illuminating the whole ectoplasm pool. On the other side, Dariat and Tolton were caught in the act of trying to reach the north transept.

“Going somewhere?” Quinn asked. “There’s nowhere to run. The warriors of the Light Bringer are here.” With a theatrical motion, he gestured at the pool, conjuring its inhabitants up.

A vast upwelling of ectoplasm sent waves of the fluid pouring lazily down the nave and transepts. The crown of an Orgathé slipped smoothly upwards, emerging into the crimson light.

Quinn laughed uproariously as the monster rose into the universe. Possessed fled screaming through the cathedral doors. Powel and Fletcher were drowning in undead sludge that sent out eager pseudopods to smother their heads. At his feet Louise and Greta lay broken and defeated, shedding tears for the torment to come. It was Night as he’d always dreamed it would be.

Something happened far above him. His head jerked up. “Fuck!”

 

Andy Behoo had spent the whole time pressed against his window, watching the ugly red cloud creeping across London. Hot air helped to magnify the incursion with awful clarity. Above the arcology’s crystal dome, the stars shone down with cold beauty through a storm-free sky. It would have been a lovely dawn.

Now he knew he wouldn’t even see that. His neural nanonics had crashed. The front edge of the cloud was less than a quarter of a mile away. Underneath it, the eerily pervasive red light helped to illuminate the vacant streets.

He’d clung to this window when she left, staring after her mutely; so he knew which street she’d taken. If she came back, he would be able to see her. That alone would give him the courage to leave the tenement. He would go out and fetch her home. Louise would make the end liveable.

The crimson light inside the cloud flickered and died. It was so sudden Andy thought there was something wrong with his eyes. All that remained of the frightened city were outlines so faint he could be imagining them. He scoured them for signs that the SD weapons had begun their slaughter.

Nothing moved in the dead silence. He looked up.

There were no stars anymore.

 

The wormhole interstice opened a million kilometres above the sun’s south pole. Its edges immediately expanded. Within three seconds it was over one and a half billion kilometres in diameter, greater than Jupiter’s orbit. Fifteen seconds later it reached the size Joshua had designated: twelve billion kilometres across, just wider than the entire solar system. It moved forwards, enveloping star, planets, asteroids, and comets alike.

The interstice contracted to nothing.

All that remained was a single human figure in a black robe, tumbling wildly through space.

 

In Tracy’s lounge, Arnie got up and thumped the top of the television. The picture didn’t return.

“What’s happening now?” Jay asked.

“Corpus doesn’t know,” Tracy said. Her hands trembled at the revelation.

 

Over seventeen million possessing souls in various arcologies were exorcised from their captive bodies as Earth moved into the wormhole. Joshua arranged its internal quantum structure in a fashion similar to the conditions Dariat and Rubra had used to expel the possessors from Valisk. There was one difference: they didn’t become ghosts, this time they were torn cursing in anguish straight back into the beyond. From Earth, orbiting thirty thousand light-years from the centre of the galaxy, the glorious blaze of the core stars had never been visible. There was too much dark mass spread throughout the spiral arms, interstellar gas clouds and dust storms absorbing the light spun off from the densely packed supergiants. Astronomers had to turn their telescopes outwards, studying other starpools to see what such a spectacle might be like.

You had to be a lot closer in towards the centre to see the core’s corona starting to expand over the shielding plane of dark matter. Even then, it would only be an exceptionally bright crescent nebula stretched across the night sky. To witness its full glory, a planet needed to be perched right at the root of the spiral arms where the core appeared as an iridescent cloak of silver-white light across half of space, outshining the local sun. Regrettably, such a place was lethal; a fierce outpouring of intense radiation from the tightly clustered stars would immediately sterilise any unprotected biological life.

No, to gain a full appreciation of the galaxy’s native beauty, it had to be observed from outside. Above the spiral arms, and away from the radiation.

Joshua chose a location 20,000 light-years out from the core and 10,000 to the north of the ecliptic. The solar system emerged there to be greeted with the sight of a majestic bejewelled cyclone shining fiercely against a blackness devoid of any constellations.

The Kulu system was the next to arrive. Then Oshanko. Followed by Avon. Ombey. New California. They no longer emerged one at a time. The singularity was capable of creating wormholes simultaneously. Joshua shifted his participation to the executive, selecting what was to be taken. Gateways were opened into the realms where the possessed had fled with their planets. Lalonde, Norfolk, and all the others were returned to their stars, then moved out of the galaxy.

The Confederation soon formed its own unique, isolated stellar cluster sailing serenely through intergalactic space. Eight hundred stars orchestrated into a classic lenticular formation with Sol at the centre, and the rest never more than half a light-year from each other.

Other, more subtle, astronomical modifications were made, seeds of the changes to come.

 

Quinn didn’t understand why he was still alive. During the cataclysm, Edmund Rigby’s pitiful soul had been wrenched from the prison he’d forged at the centre of his mind. He no longer had any contact with the beyond, no interdimensional rift to bestow his fabulous energistic power. No magical sixth sense. And he was floating through empty space, with air to breathe.

“My Lord,” he cried. “Why? Why did you take the victory from me? Nobody has served you better.”

There was no answer.

“Let me go back. Let me prove myself. I can make Night fall. I will ride the dark angels into heaven, we will tear it down and sit You upon the throne.”

A human figure appeared in front of him, bathed in gentle starlight. Quinn drew in an excited breath as he drew closer. It was spat out in disgust as he recognized the face. “You!”

“Hi, Quinn,” said Joshua. “Ranting won’t do you any good. I resealed the opening to the dark continuum, the fallen angels aren’t coming to rescue you. Nobody is.”

“God’s Brother will win. Night will fall with or without me at the head of His army.”

“I know.”

Quinn gave him a suspicious glare.

“You were right all along, though not in a way you imagined. This universe ends in darkness.”

“You believe that? You accept the gospel of God’s Brother?”

“Your gospel is a load of shit, and you’re the only arsehole to squirt it out, Quinn.”

“I will find your soul in the beyond. When I do I will crush your pride and—”

“Oh, shut up. I have an offer for you. In words you’ll understand, I want you to lead the lost souls to your Lord.”

“Why?”

“Many reasons. You deserve to be erased from time for what you did. But I can’t do that.”

Quinn started to laugh. “You’re an angel of the false Lord. That’s why you have the power to snatch me away from Earth. Yet He won’t let you kill me, will He? He is too compassionate. How you must hate that.”

“There are worse things than death and the beyond. I can deliver you to the fallen angels. Do you think they’ll be happy to see someone who failed to free them?”

“What do you want?”

A circular opening in space expanded behind Joshua. “This leads into Night, Quinn. It’s a wormhole that takes you straight to the time of God’s Brother. I’ll allow you to go through it.”

“Name your price.”

“I’ve told you, lead the damned souls out of the beyond and into your Night. Without them, the human race will stand a chance to grow. They are a terrible burden on any species who discovers the true nature of the universe. The Kiint, for instance, cloned mindless bodies to house their lost souls. It took them thousands of years, but every one was brought back, and loved, and taught to face the beyond as it should be faced. But that’s the Kiint, not us. We’re going to have a big enough task helping the living over the next few decades. There’s no way we can deal with all those billions of lost souls, not for centuries. And all that time, they’ll be suffering and inhibiting our development.”

“My heart bleeds.”

“You don’t have one.” Joshua drifted to one side. There was nothing between Quinn and the opening now. “Now tell me, do you want to meet God’s Brother?”

“Yes.” Quinn stared greedily into the absolute blackness revealed by the opening. “Yes!”

The souls who had been cast back into the beyond brought with them a devastating tide of bitterness and fury as they raged impotently against the atrocity. Freedom existed, it was possible to regain a life. Now there was only purgatory again. No chink existed in the barrier between them and reality. They screamed their wrath, at the same time pleading with those they could dimly sense moving on the other side. Begging to be let back, for just one last taste of sensation. None of the living heard them any more.

A fissure opened. One small precious gap leaking the most gorgeous human sensations into the cursed void. They flocked around it, rejoicing in its magic. And there was enough for all to feast upon. Every lost soul knew the touch of air upon skin, saw myriad constellations shimmering against the night sky.

Quinn screamed himself raw as he was possessed by a hundred billion lost souls. Their violation was total, devouring the import of every single cell that was him.

His body soared through the opening, carrying the burden of humanity with him. The wormhole closed behind them, cutting off the sight of the stars which humans had always known as their own.