“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.”