Like most enterprises mounted by governments and institutions on Nyvan, the Jesup asteroid was chronically short of finance, engineering resources, and qualified personnel. The rock’s major ore reserves had been mined out a long time ago. Ordinarily, the revenue would have been invested in the development of the asteroid’s astroengineering industry. But the New Georgia government had diverted the initial windfall income to pay for more immediate and voter-friendly projects on the ground.

After the ore was exhausted, Jesup spent the next decades limping along both economically and industrially. Fledgling manufacturing companies shrank back to service subsidiaries and small indigenous armament corporations. Its aging infrastructure was maintained one degree from breakdown. Of the three planned biosphere caverns only one had ever been completed, leaving a vast number of huge empty cavities spaced strategically throughout the rock which would have been the kernels of fresh mining activity.

It was when Quinn was striding along one of the interminable bare-rock tunnels linking the discarded cavities that he sensed the first elusive presence. He stopped so abruptly that Lawrence almost bumped into him.

“What was that?”

“What?” Lawrence asked.

Quinn turned full circle, slowly scanning the dust-encrusted rock of the wide tunnel. Dribbles of condensation ran along the curving walls and roof, cutting small forked channels through the ebony dust as they generated fragile miniature stalactites. It was as if the tunnel were growing a fur of cactus spikes. But there was no place for anyone to hide, only the waves of shadow between the widely spaced lighting panels.

His entourage of disciples waited with nervous patience. After two days of slickly brutal initiation ceremonies the asteroid now belonged to him. However, Quinn remained disappointed with the number of true converts among the possessed. He had assumed that they of all people would despise Jesus and Allah and Buddha and the other false Gods for condemning them to an agonizing limbo. Showing them the path to the Light Bringer ought to have been easy. But they continued to demonstrate a bewildering resistance to his teachings. Some even interpreted their return to be a form of redemption.

Quinn could find nothing in the tunnel. He was sure he had caught a wisp of thought which didn’t belong to any of the entourage; it had been accompanied by a tiny flicker of motion, grey on black. First reaction was that someone was sneaking along behind them.

Irritated by the distraction, he strode off again, his robe rising to glide above the filthy rock floor. It was cold in the tunnel, his breath turning to snowy vapour before his eyes. His feet began to crunch on particles of ice.

A frigid gust of air swept against him, making an audible swoosh. His robe flapped about.

He stopped again, angry this time. “What the fuck is going on here? There’s no environmental ducts in this tunnel.” He held up a hand to feel the air, which was now perfectly still.

Someone laughed.

He whirled around. But the disciples were looking at each other in confusion. None of them had dared mock his bewilderment. For a moment he thought of the unknown figure at the spaceport on Norfolk, the powerful swirl of flames he had unleashed. But that was light-years away, and no one else had escaped the planet except the Kavanagh girl.

“These tunnels are always acting erratically, Quinn,” Bonham said. Bonham was one of the new converts, possessing Lucky Vin’s body, which he was twisting into a ghoul-form, bleaching the skin, sharpening the teeth, and swelling the eyes. Thick animal hair was sprouting out of his silver skull. He said he had been born into a family of Venetian aristocrats in the late nineteenth century, killed before his twenty-seventh birthday in the First World War, but only after having tasted both the decadence and blind cruelty of the era. A taste which had become a voracious appetite. He had needed no persuading to embrace Quinn’s doctrines.

“I asked one of the maintenance chappies, and he said it’s because there aren’t any ducts in the tunnels to regulate them properly. There are all sorts of weird surges.”

Quinn wasn’t satisfied. He was sure he’d sensed someone sneaking about. A dissatisfied grunt, and he was on his way once more.

No further oddities waylaid him before he reached the cavity where one of the teams was working. It was an almost spherical chamber, with a small flat floor, acting as a junction to seven of the large tunnels. A single fat metal tube hung downwards from the apex, rattling loudly as it blew out a wind of warm dry air. Quinn scowled up at it, then went over to the knot of five men working to secure the fusion bomb to the floor.

The device’s casing was a blunt cone, seventy centimetres high. Several processor blocks had been plugged into its base with optical cables. The men stopped working and stood up respectfully as Quinn approached.

“Did anyone come through here earlier?”

They assured him no one had. One of them was non-possessed, a technician from the New Georgia defence force. He was sweating profusely, his thoughts a mixture of dread and outrage.

Quinn addressed him directly. “Is everything going okay?”

“Yes,” the technician murmured meekly. He kept glancing at Twelve-T.

The gang lord was in a sorry state. Tiny jets of steam spluttered out of his mechanical body parts. Rheumy crusts were building up around the rim of bone in which his brain was resting, as though candle wax were leaking out. The membrane that clothed his brain had thickened (as Quinn wished) but was now acquiring an unhealthy green tint. He was blinking and squinting constantly as he fought the pain.

Quinn followed the man’s gaze with pointed slowness. “Oh, yeah. The most feared gangster on the planet. Real hard-arsed mother who isn’t gonna believe in God’s Brother no matter what I do to him. Pretty dumb, really. But the thing is, he’s useful to me. So I let him live. As long as he doesn’t stray too far from me, he keeps on living. It’s sort of like a metaphor, see? Now, you going to be a hard-arse?”

“No, sir, Mr Quinn.”

“That’s fucking smart.” Quinn’s head came forward slightly from the umbra of the hood to allow a faint light to strike his ashen skin. The technician closed his eyes to hide from the sight, lips mumbling a prayer.

“Now is this bomb going to work?”

“Yes, sir. It’s a hundred megaton warhead, they all are. Once they’re linked into the asteroid’s net we can detonate them in sequence. As long as there are no possessed near them, they’ll function properly.”

“Don’t worry about that. My disciples won’t be here when Night dawns in the sky.” He turned back to the tunnel, giving it a suspicious look. Again he had the intimation of motion, a flicker no larger than the flap of a bird’s wing, and twice as fast. He was sure that someone had been watching the incident. A spoor of trepidation hung in the air like the scent of a summer flower.

When he stood at the entrance he could see the line of light panels shrink into distance before a curve took them from sight. The gentle sound of pattering water was all that emerged. He was half expecting to see that same blank human silhouette which had appeared at the hangar on Norfolk.

“If you are hiding, then you are weaker than me,” he told the apparently empty shaft. “That means you will be found and brought before me for judgement. Best you come out now.”

There was no response.

“Have it your way, shithead. You’ve seen what happens to people I don’t like.”

The rest of Quinn’s day was spent issuing the instructions that would cause Night to fall on the innocent planet below. He commanded New Georgia’s SD network now. It would be a simple matter for the platforms to interfere with Nyvan’s two other functional networks, and various national sensor satellites. Under cover of this electronic warfare barrage, spaceplanes would slide down undetected to the surface. Every nation would be seeded by a group of possessed from Jesup. And Nyvan’s curse of national antagonism would prevent a unified planetary response to the problem, which was the only response that could ever stand a chance of working.