wrong.'
They scattered away from him in an instant in a great storm of flapping. The thick, honeyed air felt full of a palpable menace.
They circled him still, their massed voices roaring as one. Kendrick's head filled with so many alien images and thoughts that he crumpled completely to the ground, unable to absorb even a fraction of the information besieging his skull.
But behind the images and sensations he detected something else, something deeper: regular, rhythmic. Almost… like singing.
No, not singing – talking. But nothing like any language he had ever heard… nonetheless, he felt he might be able to understand it if only he listened harder.
Kendrick summoned the energy to stand again, batting at the tiny shapes now darting towards him, shrieking and flapping. However much he might tell himself none of this was real, instinct said differently.
He moved as if in a dream. The singing-but-not-singing began to build, drowning out even the chaotic menace of the buzzing creatures.
The singing became clearer, suddenly perfectly comprehensible. He understood that this was the Bright, rather than Robert, and that they were now speaking to him directly.
Kendrick found himself floating, caught up in the light now flooding around him. He looked down and saw a grassy plain far below. On it, two men wearing Los Muertos insignia were running for their lives towards the entrance of a low one-storey building.
One of them stopped to point a nozzled device at a vast swarm of Robert-homunculi bearing down on him: flames belched out of it. Kendrick noticed the fuel tank slung over his shoulders.
Regardless of his efforts, the soldier was soon engulfed in gossamer wings. They swarmed around both men in great shimmering masses, eventually drowning and crushing them.
And then, without apparent transition, Kendrick found himself outside the Archimedes itself, the surface of the station slipping past beneath him. He recognized there the two shuttles he'd seen taking off from the desert, their hulls jutting out at right angles from a row of docking bays surrounded by an external gantry threaded with access tubes and pressurized pods.
And then even the Archimedes vanished. It came to him now that this was what Buddy, and Sabak, and Caroline, and all the rest of them had been seeing.
Whatever Hardenbrooke had put inside Kendrick, it was no longer blocking the Bright's signal.
He floated far above the curve of the Earth, a great half-crescent lit by the twinkling lights of cities still shrouded in night. He saw clouds lit from underneath by flashes of lightning somewhere over the Bay of Biscay.
He watched as the nightline slid across the face of the Earth, faster and faster, becoming a blue-green blur within what seemed like seconds.
Faster, and yet faster.
The stars began to move in their positions. A sensation of utter cold filled Kendrick as he looked towards the broad sparkling band of the Milky Way and saw that it too was in motion.
The universe aged around him. Thousands upon thousands of stars swept past, time flying by at a rate of tens of millions of years every second. He saw galaxies arranged in patterns too regular to be natural, connected by what appeared to be beacons of light strung between them.
In his mind, Kendrick felt the strengthening heartbeat of vast empires, and of invasive hive-minds absorbing countless helpless worlds before themselves fading back into obscurity, half-forgotten legends in less time than it took for his eyelids to blink.
He spun on and on until any sense of his physical body had vanished, reducing him to a tiny mote of awareness racing at ever greater speed through the lifetime of the universe. He saw the final darkness approaching, became aware of a vast intelligence surrounding him. And then he understood: they were going all the way to the end.
The end of all things.
The galaxies were crashing together now, and Kendrick imagined that he could hear the cries of worlds dying. He witnessed entire constellations surrounded by vast artificial shells of energy that trapped and retained the light of their stars, banishing them from the visible universe. Throughout the mighty expanse of time and space he could sense what the Bright had found when they had first reached out, a hundred billion years into the future.
The intelligence that he had sensed earlier surrounded him totally now, vast and omnipotent, and tens of billions of years old. It permeated to the deepest level of reality, residing in the weak, hidden dimensions below the quantum soup that constituted the most fundamental level of existence.
The cosmos shrank and darkened and Kendrick was hurled ever onward. All around him the universe rushed towards its conclusion, the galaxies colliding in fiery explosions… faster and faster…
… and then it stopped.
Kendrick sensed that he was not alone.
His cheek rested on damp fragrant grass, soft sunlight trickling down from somewhere far above. He raised his head.
'Sleeping on the job, eh?' Peter McCowan grinned down at him, a cigarette dangling from his stubby fingers.
Kendrick stared at him, stunned. He gathered his wits, then remarked: 'So if you're here, I guess this must be Hell?'
Peter laughed, the sound rumbling from deep in his chest. 'Nah, it's Heaven – that's why the cigarettes taste like shit.' Again, that deep, rumbling laugh; and it was like all those years since the Maze had never happened.
'Where are we?' Kendrick rose, looking up and around him. He found it impossible to react to what had just happened to him: it was too much, too quickly, on a scale he couldn't even imagine. 'It looks like-'
'The Tay Hills is my guess,' said Peter. 'Fucking hell, a realm of infinite possibility to choose from, and this is what your mind picks?' He shook his head and took a drag on his cigarette. 'No imagination, you. But yeah, this is it.'
Clouds scudded low on the horizon. It was so real, so normal, that it was surreal.
'And this… this really is the Omega?'
Peter shrugged. 'I guess so.'
'You guess so?'
Peter raised his hands. 'It's not like I've got some kind of special knowledge, Kendrick. I was trapped down there for years by that bonkers son of a bitch. You don't know what it was like: everything I thought, he heard. Everything he thought, I heard.' He grinned. 'Or at least that was the case until you sprang me. As long as I'm with you, I can help you.'
The sky had begun to darken even as they spoke, revealing a great whirlpool of stars that stretched from horizon to horizon. The stars themselves rippled, as if invisible shapes were darting through the atmosphere, distorting and refracting the starlight with their passage.
A vivid awareness crept into every cell of Kendrick's being. Everything – the grass, trees, clouds, the stars and even the air – was alive, sentient. It was God, after a fashion, but a God born of science and knowledge.
During his long journey here, Kendrick had seen flesh and silicon merge into an intelligence woven into the fabric of the cosmos itself. He could sense it all around him. It enervated him, overwhelmed him.
'The Archimedes,' he managed to say. 'What are you going to do when we get there?'
'You'll see,' Peter replied. 'We won't be speaking again before we arrive. I need to prepare.' He paused. 'I'm sorry about Caroline.'
'Yeah,' Kendrick mumbled. 'Me too.'
'You've not quite taken it in, have you?'
'Not really, no.' Kendrick looked back up. 'I've seen too many people end up dead over the years.'
'Including me.'
Kendrick allowed himself a small smile. 'Including you. Though it feels really weird to say it with you standing right there.'
