“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 antimemory 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 foulsmelling 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 swanwhite 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.”