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 Orgathe 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
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
