Against Gravity

TO THE ARCHIMEDES

Kendrick woke deep in the night and found that he had stopped breathing again. He lurched upright, panic blighting his thoughts. This is what it's like to be dead, he thought: no heartbeat, no breath of life. A terrible silence filled the cavity of his chest, like a void.

He had been asleep for several hours on a cot in one corner of the house. Crickets chirruped outside a window nearby. It was hard to believe, listening to the sounds of nature, that he'd see nothing but desolation if he raised his head to look outside.

No heartbeat, no breath of life. Am I even alive?

Slowly, deliberately, he once again sucked air into his lungs. It heaved his chest out and he felt a nitrate-like rush, expanding like a bubble through his brain. He exhaled again.

In, then out – after several seconds Kendrick didn't have to think about it any more. He could feel his hands shaking, his thoughts clear and adrenalin-tinged.

Kendrick looked down again at the fine threads coating his skin. All of them were gold now, and the filaments appeared to be dissolving into his flesh. Slowly, his appearance was returning to normal.

He brushed one cheek with a fingertip and felt that it was smoother than several hours before. A huge wave of relief swept through him.

So far, Audrey and Buddy were the only ones there who had made any effort to speak with him, although his relations with Audrey were still distinctly on the edgy side. He'd even seen some of them huddled together, watching him from a distance and speaking in low whispers once they were sure that they were out of range of his augmented hearing.

Yet Kendrick could have listened to what they were saying if he'd really wanted to, and he was sure that many others in this place shared the same ability. But a house full of Labrats was a house with no privacy whatsoever and, in accord with the special etiquette that had evolved to suit such circumstances, he avoided listening to their conversation, despite overwhelming temptation.

It was clear by now that he wasn't going to get any more sleep for a while, so he pulled himself out of the cot and started to get dressed.

He felt slow, turgid, his body silent like a mausoleum, yet blood still moved through his arteries by some unfathomable means. He found his way to the kitchen and dribbled some tepid tank-water into his dry mouth. Then he turned to see Buddy watching him from the doorway.

"There were a lot more people around this place earlier," Kendrick observed. "Where have they all gone?"

"Remember when we talked to Veliz? They've gone on ahead. I was surprised to find anyone here at all when we arrived, but we're a little ahead of our own schedule."

"So why didn't we just go with them?"

"We have our own transport, remember? Besides, doing it this way makes more sense than all heading off together. That's why there's flights heading out from several different locations. Safer that way."

Kendrick stepped past Buddy, heading out through the main entrance and into a cool Californian night. He stared upwards at the sky, and after a moment heard Buddy step up behind him.

"I have my reasons for going up there," Kendrick said over his shoulder. "But don't forget that they're not the same as yours. When I went back down into the Maze I learned some things. I don't think it's as clear-cut as you seem to think."

He turned and stared at Buddy. "I think you're putting yourselves in great danger."

Buddy glared back. "You'd better explain that." -

"Robert is part of the Bright, yes, but it's a parasitical – not a symbiotic – relationship."

"Just a minute, listen-"

Kendrick pressed on. "No, you listen to me. Peter was down there, Buddy. Robert was, too. You could feel it, couldn't you?"

"What?"

"What's so hard to believe? That Robert was the only one to achieve some kind of life after death due to his augments? Or wouldn't it seem more likely there might have been others? Peter is still alive, somehow, in the same way that Robert is. He tried to get through to all of you, but Robert managed to prevent that happening with anyone but me. That's because of the treatments Hardenbrooke gave me. But here's the real kicker. If Robert Vincenzo found some way of blocking Peter McCowan's attempts at communication with all of us, what is it that Robert so badly didn't want McCowan to tell you? Something, maybe, that you really ought to know?"

Buddy struggled visibly to absorb this new information. "Hey, first you tell me we're wrong, even though we've all been seeing the same things, and now you want us all to stop because of something – someone – that only you have seen. Maybe you ought to think about that."

"Look, Draeger told me there was a way to reverse the growth of our augmentations – and I actually believe him. If he can find a way, so can other people."

Buddy shook his head. "I've heard all this before."

"Look-"

"We don't know how long something like that could take to be properly tested, and that would be an even better excuse to lock us up in the meantime. You've seen Audrey, you saw Caroline. The Archimedes is our only chance."

"If you believe in the reality of the Omega Singularity," Kendrick said carefully, "then you know it holds out for the actual resurrection, at the end of time, of everyone who ever lived. Even if we do all die, we still all get to live again someday."

Buddy threw his hands up in despair. "Christ, I know it's only a theory. I also know that what's happening up there proves at least part of it. So, no, maybe the whole human race doesn't wake up at the end of time in a far-future Heaven created by minds so advanced that they'd be indistinguishable from God. Maybe most of us just stay here and rot for all eternity, since there's no reason why any such entity should even bother.

"But now we have a chance, one that nobody else has, to give something back to ourselves when the rest of the world would rather see us conveniently dead. We'd never have to feel pain again – we can be anyone or anything we want to be, for ever. And maybe we'll even be the only human beings lucky enough to experience that."

"Hallelujah," Kendrick observed sourly.

Buddy gave him a sharp look, then headed over to his helicopter. Kendrick gazed after him for several minutes, wondering which of them was crazier.

The next time Kendrick woke, dawn was just beginning to break.

He'd dreamt that he'd been deep in conversation with Marlin Smeby, lost in some primeval tunnel full of twisted, hallucinatory carvings. He couldn't remember anything they'd spoken about.

Hearing something clatter outside, he sat up and looked around the darkened room. Empty sleeping bags were scattered across the floor and, since almost all the rest had gone on ahead, he was alone there. He felt racked by a thousand aches and pains.

Buddy planned to fly to the offshore launch site within the next few hours. Meanwhile, Kendrick had needed all the rest he could get.

He got up and stepped outside again, looking over to where the 'copter still sat. Beyond it stood a tall wooden gate leading onto the broken tarmac of a nearby street. Part of the tarpaulin had been flipped back, and a shadowy figure was kneeling next to the machine, surrounded by tools and equipment.

"Hey, how you doing?" Audrey greeted him with a grin as he approached the craft.

"I didn't know that you knew how to handle one of these things."

"Commercial rather than military, though," she explained. The black streaks of her augment-growth were vivid under the dim red light of the dawn that was creeping over LA's broken rooftops. "Buddy's catching some zees, so I'm doing a little maintenance. Couldn't sleep, then?"

"Not any longer." Kendrick glanced around. "Is it just us left?"

Audrey shrugged. "You, me, Bud – rest are all gone." She squinted at him. "You feeling okay?"

"Fine – just got up."

She shrugged again. "Don't wander off and get lost, now. Remember, not much in the way of law around here, so stick to the compound, okay?"

Kendrick nodded. "Got it."

Audrey smiled uncertainly, then turned her attention back to the 'copter's exposed innards. Soon Kendrick heard the sound of a bolt being unscrewed followed by a muttered expletive. He stepped back inside the hut, aware of the woman's eyes constantly glancing after him.

Had someone called his name? He tensed and peered out of a window through which he could see nothing unusual. Maybe it had been Buddy he'd heard.

No: he came across Buddy in another room, curled up in a cot and fast asleep. Of course, he could have muttered something in his sleep…

There it was again: the faintest whisper, barely the suggestion of his name. Kendrick wondered if it was McCowan. Without really thinking about it, he slipped quietly through the ramshackle building until he found another door at the rear, which opened without a sound. The high fence surrounding the compound made it impossible for casual passers-by – had there been any – to spy on them.

He noticed another gate in the fence, presumably leading out onto a different street.

"Kendrick," whispered a voice somewhere nearby. He stopped, motionless. Nobody was visible.

He stepped out onto the street, moving as quietly as he could. Not McCowan: someone else? In either direction he could see rows of broken buildings, barren and lifeless.

Perhaps this was a bad idea. He should go back inside the fence.

Then Kendrick noticed the car, deep in the shadows of one building that had survived the atomic blast largely intact. His augmented senses picked the vehicle out in vivid detail, and he could see that its windows were silvered. It stood several blocks away from the compound where Audrey was still working on the 'copter.

The car looked shiny and new, incongruous amid so much devastation. Beside it stood Smeby.

Kendrick glanced over his shoulder and caught a strange movement, as if a distorting lens had passed in front of some scrubby bushes growing out of the cracked pavement. He realized with a start that it was someone wearing camouflage like that built into the skin of Buddy's helicopter. The hazy motion halted, resolving itself into a figure holding a rifle pointed at Kendrick's head.

Kendrick glanced towards Smeby again, catching a glint of light on a lens from a glassless window in the building looming up behind the car. Another soldier was undoubtedly positioned there, his gun trained on Kendrick.

The compound was surrounded – and only three of them were left to defend it.

Perhaps they'd traced him by some arcane means that didn't require tracking his wand; perhaps they could still trace him through the lingering Trojan nanites that Hardenbrooke had inserted in his augmentations. In which case, it was conceivable that they knew nothing about Buddy, Audrey, or any of the recently departed Labrats.

Somehow, though, Kendrick suspected otherwise. As he turned to retreat towards the gate, a bullet slammed into the ground and noiselessly kicked up a puff of dust in front of him.

Realizing that he was cornered, he stepped back onto the road and moved slowly towards the vehicle.

When he reached it, Smeby was leaning against the hood with his arms folded. "I don't know what you want," Kendrick snarled, "but I'm not interested."

"I haven't even said anything yet." Smeby smiled. "But Mr Draeger has a fresh proposition for you."-

"I already told you-"

"Just hear me out, okay?" Smeby snapped. "We've decided to forget about what happened last time – Mr Draeger feels there's too much at stake."

Kendrick sensed a movement around the corner of the nearby building. He stepped away from the car, Smeby's gaze following him. At least a dozen more men were standing in a loose group beside a truck parked in the adjacent street. Although dressed in civilian clothes, they certainly looked like soldiers.

A cigarette butt glowed in the dim dawn light like a firefly as one of them drew smoke into his lungs. Their keen eyes studied Kendrick emotionlessly.

"Doesn't look like much of a welcoming committee to me," muttered Kendrick, returning his gaze to Smeby. "Who are those guys, anyway? Los Muertos?"

"Of course not," Smeby said impatiently. "If we wanted to cause you that much trouble, you'd have known about it long before now. Don't you even want to know what we want – or would you rather go through all this blind?"

Kendrick glanced back towards the fenced-off compound. Then he spat on the ground in front of Smeby's feet.

"Fine," he said. "Tell me what you want."

Smeby swung the car door open and gestured for Kendrick to get in. Kendrick stared back at him, his expression wary.

"Mr Draeger is in the fucking car, Gallmon. I'm not trying anything."

Kendrick bent down and looked inside. Draeger was indeed in the car, sitting back on a long couch that took up a large amount of space within the vehicle. With considerable misgivings, Kendrick climbed in.

Smeby slid in after Kendrick and took a seat beside him, both of them facing towards Draeger. The car had no manual control and therefore lacked a driver's seat, which allowed them extra room.

Draeger leaned forward. "Mr Gallmon, I'm a fair-minded man. I'm as fascinated as you are by what's happening far above our heads."

"You should have become a Labrat yourself, then," said Kendrick. "But maybe you wouldn't have liked it so much."

"Oh no, I would have," Draeger replied. "I have a disease of the nervous system. Neurological damage in the womb that affected millions of unborn children, a by-product of the environmental excesses of previous generations. The nanotechnology that created your augmentations would kill me within hours. It's an irony that I therefore can't get to see the Promised Land that it seems so many of you have already glimpsed."

"The experiment that Sieracki carried out on me and three others," Kendrick replied. "That's why you're so interested in me, isn't it?"

"I already warned you that the Archimedes is a privately owned vessel," Draeger continued, ignoring him. "Any attempt to land there constitutes trespassing. The offshore launch facility you're using is extremely vulnerable to attack. You should remember that?

"Fuck you. Just don't you threaten me-"

"The danger isn't from me, Mr Gallmon. It's from Los Muertos. They are as aware of your plans as I am. I'm offering your friends my protection."

"Your protection?" Kendrick laughed. "They need someone to protect them from you."

"It's a sincere offer. It would be very stupid of you not to take it seriously."

Kendrick gazed soberly at Draeger. He didn't doubt his sincerity at all. Rather, it was what the man didn't say that worried him.

"Taking an offer like that seriously is one thing. It's not the same as agreeing to it."

"I can help Caroline Vincenzo."

Kendrick was thunderstruck. "She doesn't need your help," he said numbly. How did Draeger know?

"You might be interested to learn that she visited a Labrat-friendly clinic in Glasgow. Friendly enough not to contact the police and inform them of her visit. Nonetheless, we managed to obtain certain records, which show that the rogue growths in her body are accelerating rapidly. She may not live long enough to survive the trip to the Archimedes. But I can help her."

"In return for my cooperation?"

Draeger smiled gently. It wasn't the smile of a winner, of someone who believed they held the upper hand. Rather, it was the smile of someone who believed completely in the rightness of what they were saying and doing. Someone who was waiting for the rest of the world to recognize the logic of their actions. It was the smile of a madman.

"Is that why all those men are out there? In case I don't agree to cooperate?"

"I don't need to coerce you, Mr Gallmon. Once you reach the launch facility you'll have no choice but to cooperate. Without my help, you won't get even a hundred feet into the air."

"That's a threat?"

"It's an observation."

"Why me, Draeger? Why not try and persuade Buddy or any of the others?"

"None of them are as important as you. Surely you understand that now? The growths within your body have the greatest affinity with the nanite intelligences on board the Archimedes. And now you have been blessed with gifts from the intelligences still residing within the Maze, which will grant you access to the space habitat concerned."

Remember he's crazy. Kendrick didn't want to disabuse Draeger of his delusions, not while there might just be some chance of turning this to his advantage.

He glanced at Smeby, who sat with one leg crossed over the other, his expression as non-committal as if they were sitting in a restaurant discussing the relative merits of the wine list.

Kendrick sat back. "All right, what now?"

"You can tell me now if you accept, on behalf of your friends, my offer of safe escort to the Archimedes.'"

"In return for which, they and I allow you to retrieve any scientific data you like from the Archimedes, along with whatever records still exist up there, without our interference." Kendrick was careful to emphasize whatever records. He wanted Draeger to understand that he knew there were incriminating documents on board the space station.

Draeger nodded carefully. "That would be correct."

Kendrick smiled back, reached over and clicked the car door open. "No."

"You're making a mistake," Smeby said, a clear warning in his voice.

"Am I?" Kendrick couldn't keep the anger out of his voice. "The way I see it, you need us a hell of a lot more than we need you. You want something that's on board the Archimedes, but you can't get it without us. You should know by now that the others would never agree to anything if they knew it was coming from you."

He climbed out into the street and glanced back inside the car. "If we need you, we'll let you know. But, frankly, don't wait around."

He slammed the door shut on them. But Draeger just looked quietly serene, as if he held some precious secret that the rest of the world knew nothing about.

Kendrick walked quickly back to the compound, feeling the skin between his shoulder blades burning every step of the way. But no shots rang out.

Buddy stirred groggily from his cot. "You're sure about this?"

"Very sure."

Buddy pressed the palm of one hand against his forehead and swore softly, still half asleep.

"I don't know how rational Draeger is likely to be," Kendrick told him. "He's fighting for his survival."

Next he turned to Audrey, who stood, looking worried, in the doorway. "How long before we head off?"

"Took most of the night to take care of refuelling and maintenance. You've come a long way in that 'copter, so it's best to check everything twice so we don't have any nasty surprises after we're airborne." Her eyes half closed as she became momentarily deep in thought. "But give me twenty minutes, tops, and she'll be ready."

"Can you make it ten?"

Audrey nodded hesitantly, then slipped away, looking pale.

"Jesus. So Draeger really is here?" Buddy sounded more awake now. He started to pull on a pair of boots. "How long you think we got?"

"Hard to say. He has a small army with him back there."

Several minutes later they heard the steady drone of choppers approaching, fast.

Kendrick had stepped outside to see if anyone was trying to enter the compound. He turned in time to see Buddy emerge from the doorway, still zipping up his fly.

"The tarpaulin," Buddy urged him. "Help me get it off."

Kendrick nodded, and they unveiled the helicopter, its now-exposed skin gleaming black in the early-morning light. Kendrick saw Audrey staring off towards the east, and glanced in the same direction. Small shapes, rapidly growing larger, were heading towards them in a line across the sky.

Time's up.

Kendrick was surprised that the attack came from the air. Draeger's men, after all, had moved on foot. But then, he remembered, Draeger wasn't the only hostile force they had to deal with. The approaching aircraft could also belong to Los Muertos.

Buddy was now in the pilot's seat. The helicopter's rotors whined into life, producing a steady, deafening wail within seconds.

Audrey was nowhere to be seen as Kendrick pulled himself on board, the rotors beating at the air inches above his head. Buddy mouthed her name and Kendrick jabbed a finger towards the nearest building.

He saw Audrey emerge from a doorway. She was carrying some sort of weapon, a wicked-looking black thing with a snub nose. Kendrick started to climb back out of the 'copter, feeling that he should help her in some way.

Buddy placed a gloved hand on his shoulder and shook his head. Kendrick hesitated, realizing what Buddy was saying: it wasn't likely he'd be much use.

Audrey had slung the weapon over her shoulder on a strap before leaping up in an augmented blur to grab the lower edge of the building's roof with both hands. She pulled herself up effortlessly onto the sloping surface, running up to its apex just as out of nowhere a roar of rotors beat deafeningly down around them.

Buddy pulled back on the 'copter's stick until they were hovering several feet above the ground. There was a flash of light and the sound of gunfire. Buddy took the aircraft higher as bullets streaked through the air around them.

"We have to get Audrey inside," Kendrick yelled in Buddy's ear. "She'll get herself killed."

"You think I don't know that?" Buddy yelled back. "What am I supposed to do, jump out and get her?"

Audrey was returning fire now, her weapon spitting bullets at an astonishing rate. An enemy helicopter jerked up and away, swerving and ducking as she aimed for it.

Kendrick didn't allow himself the luxury of thinking about what he did next. He slammed open the door next to him and fell for several metres, hitting the ground rolling. Keeping low, he ran towards the shelter of a nearby shed.

Something hot zinged past his ear and he found himself taking cover behind a stack of concrete blocks, which looked like they'd been salvaged from nearby ruins. Puffs of dust suddenly spurted from the hard-packed dirt only inches away.

The attack was coming, Kendrick could see now, as a new helicopter appeared from an entirely different direction. He pulled himself up onto the roof, as he'd seen Audrey do. He watched in amazement as she jumped up onto one of the struts of the attacking helicopter and ripped open the door on the pilot's side.

The helicopter rapidly spiralled upwards. He saw a body tumble out, arms and legs flailing. Not Audrey -the pilot.

He saw her leap away from the craft as it spun end over end. Audrey landed back on the building roof, feet first, the movement almost ballet-like.

Kendrick started to move towards her, seeing what she hadn't yet spotted. As the helicopter twisted in the air above her, instinct made Kendrick roll away fast, dropping off the shed roof onto the ground.

The 'copter ploughed down on top of the building, and Audrey vanished in a great plume of flames and smoke that swallowed the structure, turning it into a huge pyre.

Kendrick turned, dumbstruck, just in time to see another helicopter sweeping over the burning roof towards him. He ducked away, ready to run, before he realized that it was Buddy.

He could see the fear etched on Buddy's face through the canopy. The aircraft dipped close enough to the ground to let Kendrick get on board.

He hurled himself back into the co-pilot's seat and, in the next instant, Buddy pulled back on the stick and they shot upwards.

Below them the ground fell away with alarming speed. "Can we make it?" Kendrick yelled.

"There's six other choppers coming this way fast. That's going to be a problem." Streets of broken buildings flashed by below.

To the east, the sun continued its slow climb into the sky, its rays reflecting off their pursuers and making them look like burning insects.

"They're keeping their distance," Buddy announced, "I don't know why. They could bring us down if they wanted to. We're outnumbered, but they're just following us."

"You know," Kendrick said carefully, "that it's me they want, not just you. They seem to think I'm important."

Buddy looked straight ahead and nodded. "Yeah, you could say that."

"If I hadn't come along, if Erik Whitsett hadn't been able to find me – if I hadn't come to Loch Awe that time. Is there any reason why you might not have been able to go ahead with all of this, your launch to the Archimedes?"

Buddy sighed, his eyes flickering over the screens that displayed the pursuing helicopters. "Look, it was clear from the start that Los Muertos thought you were important. Maybe they knew something we didn't, something we'd missed somehow when the Bright showed us what they could give us. Then you went to visit Draeger and that made us think, yeah, maybe you were vital to the whole operation in some way that we couldn't figure."

"So really you were hedging your bets. That's why you wanted me here."

"Ken, you're one of us – that's why I wanted you here. So please don't write us off as a bunch of self-serving pricks like Draeger. Some of us are 'more' like the Bright than others, sure, but in the end I don't know if it makes any damn difference. Ask the Bright – maybe they know."

So much had changed. In the beginning, Kendrick had wanted nothing to do with Buddy's plans: now he understood that the only way to halt the plans of Draeger or Los Muertos lay on board the Archimedes space habitat.

And then there was the question of the presumed evidence that could destroy Max Draeger. The thought that Peter McCowan was lying about such evidence -was engaged in some vast deception in which Kendrick had all too willingly played his part – had occurred to him more than a few times.

Yet, despite all his worries and doubts, he found himself believing McCowan. Or is that just my own guilt talking?

The landscape below revealed occasional oases of generator-powered activity where the post-Nuke reconstruction work had started. For the first time, Kendrick understood just how much he was prepared to sacrifice to bring Draeger down. More than he might ever have suspected, or admitted to anyone else.

"They're getting closer," Buddy muttered, his face turning stiff and expressionless.

A screen displayed the pursuing 'copters against a blue sky, most of the detail lost in the glare of the sun shining down on the Santa Monica hills. Kendrick studied the screen and saw tiny pulses of light appear from the helicopters, moving fast. Buddy dived suddenly, almost running their helicopter into the ground, and a missile streaked past them to plough into the soil in an explosive burst of flame and smoke.

Buddy twisted the stick again so they were climbing, the ground falling away once more in a rush as more streaks of light came uncomfortably close.

Kendrick's head spun with vertigo. Buddy was pushing the aircraft to its limits.

Buddy grunted in surprise and Kendrick looked up to see a string of tiny lights hanging in the air barely a klick ahead, directly in their path. Something about the way they hovered suggested balloons of some kind – they didn't appear to be moving, so perhaps they were tethered to the ground.

"This could be some kind of trap," Kendrick said. "They might have set it up in advance, if they knew we'd be heading west."

Buddy shrugged. "Yeah, well. Maybe, maybe not. Can't turn back now. Shit."

Bright sparks sailed past them again, and again the helicopter spun to one side. Kendrick hung on as if for dear life.

"Fuck!" Buddy bellowed, gripping the stick with both hands and twisting hard. Kendrick felt his gorge rise and he choked as the aircraft wheeled over. "Okay," he heard Buddy yell, his voice verging on outright panic. "Now that's just too fucking close for comfort!"

The points of light in their path had now resolved themselves into distinct yellowish and cylindrical-looking shapes. They started moving of their own volition, appearing to part in order to allow Buddy's 'copter to pass between them. Tracer fire from one of the pursuing helicopters grazed one of the cylindrical shapes and it blossomed in a ball of flame and tumbled slowly downwards.

Kendrick felt his throat start to close up once he saw just how close the other craft were. They were never going to get away from them.

In an instant, though, they were through and past the hovering shapes. Kendrick caught a fleeting glimpse of one: an unmanned helicopter drone, several feet in diameter, shaped like a fat doughnut. It wobbled in the air and, because it was slightly below and to the side of them as they flew past, he could see that at its centre was a rotor device to keep it aloft.

But what was it doing here? Was it Draeger or Los Muertos who had positioned them? It rapidly became clear that the drones were not floating idly: now they were moving with clear purpose towards their pursuers.

"What the hell are those things?" yelled Buddy.

"Absolutely no fucking idea," Kendrick replied. "But – Jesus! – look what's happening!"

Behind them they could see a series of bright flashes, followed by a succession of long, distant booming sounds. Burning shapes tumbled to the earth, trailing streaks of liquid flame as they spiralled downward.

Three of the pursuing helicopters were already down. The three survivors appeared to be playing a complicated game of tag with the remaining unmanned drones.

Buddy's expression was frenzied. "Somebody did that. Somebody helped us get away. Who the fuck was it? Who did that?"

Kendrick couldn't think of an appropriate reply.

27 October 2096 Over the Pacific

Most of the next hour and a half was spent flying over water, hugging the coastline as they travelled northwest. Kendrick surprised himself by falling asleep, and found that he was actually getting used to airborne dozing despite the constant thundering drone of rotor blades.

He woke – bleary-eyed, stiff-necked and with a bad headache – to gaze out on something very like an oil platform marooned in an infinity of bright blue water. Whether or not that had been its original role Kendrick didn't know but it had clearly gained a new purpose.

Its upper deck housed a gantry supporting a shuttle like those he had seen taking off from the Los Muertos base. The shuttle itself was painted pale blue, with wide strips of a darker blue angling across its body from the nose. Vapour was already emerging from its base in dense clouds before descending to meet the waves licking the platform's supporting columns far below. A ship the size of a large frigate, its upper decks strewn with radar and comms towers, floated in the water only a short distance away. As Buddy circled in towards the ship's landing pad, Kendrick recognized Veliz and some of the other Labrats from LA waiting below.

Kendrick glanced down at his hands where they rested in his lap. They still didn't look anywhere near normal, but at least they were no longer as nightmarish in appearance as when he had recently emerged from the Maze.

Kendrick stepped down from the helicopter and onto the landing pad. The ship's deck stretched out ahead of him, rising to a forest of communications dishes and radar equipment mounted just above the bridge. He enjoyed the sensation of the fresh wind against his face, the taste of salt on his tongue.

When Buddy clapped him on his shoulder, Kendrick could see how much the past several days of stress had taken out of him. A man in a naval-style white uniform stepped up onto the landing platform, followed by several others similarly attired.

"Captain Arnheim," the leading man introduced himself. "Mr Juarez, it's good to see you again. Mr Sabak would like to speak with you urgently."

"Thank you, captain."

Arnheim was a hawk-faced man in his fifties who had a look that Kendrick had come to recognize: of not being sure quite who or what to believe. He could almost read the naval officer's thoughts as his gaze settled on Kendrick. Did he need to be placed in containment? Did he represent a danger not only to the other Labrats on board but also to his own crew and the scientists?

"It looks a lot worse than it feels," Kendrick said evenly "I'm not infectious. I don't represent any danger."

Arnheim studied him with bright, hard eyes. Kendrick knew that the man would have no hesitation in flinging him overboard if he deemed it necessary to protect his crew and passengers. "You should know that we have a containment facility in case of extreme emergencies. If your condition worsens significantly prior to the launch, we may have to make use of it."

"I understand," Kendrick replied.

They let Arnheim's officers guide them both down below, proceeding along clanging metal corridors where technicians and crewmen swarmed around them. Kendrick couldn't help but notice how Arnheim's men surrounded him at a safe distance, thus effectively isolating him from everyone they came in contact with.

Someone stepped through a door and headed towards them. He shook Buddy's hand with a strong grip. As he turned to Kendrick he faltered, then – in an impressively humane and generous gesture – reached out and shook his hand just as firmly.

"Gerard," Buddy greeted him. Gerard Sabak was one of the owners of the launch facility, and a Ward Seventeen Labrat himself.

"We have a lot to talk about," Sabak began. He was a large, hearty man, the sides of his neck distended and scarred with rogue nanite growth. His accent sounded Austrian or German, via California.

"Mr Gallmon, it's a pleasure to meet you," he said, turning now to Kendrick. "Buddy radioed ahead that you'd need medical attention. Are you able to-?"

"Even if your medical staff could do something about this, I really don't think there'd be time before… you know." Kendrick angled his gaze upward to the ceiling. "I think we need to talk about some other things first."

Sabak studied him uncertainly. "Are you… in pain? Or-?"

"I know this may sound ridiculous but it's really not as bad as it looks."

Buddy spoke up. "Gerry, this isn't the result of rogue bio-augmentation. It's a lot more like the kind of condition you pick up near the Maze – like the Los Muertos people I told you about."

Sabak sighed. "I guess I'll just have to take your word for it. Let's have something to eat in my office and discuss things there." He turned to Kendrick and studied him with a worried expression. "To be honest, Mr Gallmon, if we took you into one of the mess rooms I think we'd have a staff riot on our hands."

Sabak took a seat behind a mahogany desk in his office. Fresh food and coffee arrived moments later, and the aroma made Kendrick feel giddy. He wolfed down a steak and salad while listening to the other two and nodding at appropriate intervals. By the time he'd finished, fatigue was tugging at his senses again. He felt as though he could sleep for a thousand years.

Buddy had been telling Sabak about their trip to the Maze. "Look" – Sabak turned now to Kendrick – "what you undertook is… remarkable. But I don't understand why you did it. What did you expect to find down there in the Maze?"

Buddy glanced at him as if he was ready to speak in his stead. But Kendrick wanted to explain for himself.

"I've been looking for proof that will link Draeger, absolutely and incontrovertibly, to the Labrat experiments."

"And you found such proof? Down there?"

Kendrick rubbed at his face. "Not exactly. I… what I found down there tells me that the proof exists on the Archimedes. I don't really want to go into the details now, but I needed to go to the Maze in order to learn where to look for that information once I get up there."

Sabak shot Buddy a look that bordered on the incredulous. "What makes you think that any such information would even be up there?"

"Look, neither Max Draeger nor anyone else can access, not even remotely, any records of his activities, physical or otherwise, that still exist on the Archimedes, and I have information that suggests they do still exist. If I can find real evidence against him it would finally bring him down. Completely."

"So you're going to track down this stuff, then join us when we go with the Bright?"

"I'm not sure about that part, no."

Sabak's expression became stony. "I know about you. I remember all the work you did during the Trials. All the shit you dug up. I was impressed. There are one or two people think you're a hero for that. You were in Ward Seventeen, though, so haven't you been seeing the same things as the rest of us?"

"I did see something," Kendrick admitted. "But not necessarily the same thing that the rest of you apparently experienced. Not enough to convince me personally of what you and the rest of them believe."

"I guess not," Sabak replied after an uncomfortable pause. "Otherwise you'd know already."

He leant forward, his voice lowering as if inviting Kendrick into a conspiracy. "Are you aware that there are only just over a hundred of us left from Ward Seventeen?"

Kendrick went numb with shock. "A hundred?" He felt his skin flush. "I didn't realize-"

"There were considerably more who escaped the Maze, yes. But it's been a while since then. The ones who didn't survive – well, not many of them died through anything you'd call natural causes. Whether or not you feel we're right in this venture, just remember, Kendrick, there's nowhere else now for any of them to go-"

Caroline's eyes glittered, and for one terrible moment Kendrick thought that she might turn and look at him. Instead she stared, unseeing, at the ceiling of the containment unit. Her clothes had been replaced by a blue paper smock that reminded him with a chill of the clothes they had been forced to wear in the Maze. A woman stood at a respectful distance behind him, lips pursed in the centre of a round face. A tag on her jacket identified her as Doctor Maria Numark.

Something had distorted Caroline's skull. The bone around her right ear appeared to be puffed out, thick, rigid lines contorting the flesh there. Her lips were parted slightly, as if she had been about to speak before she died.

Nothing. Kendrick could feel nothing. It was as if his emotions had been sucked out of him, leaving only a shell of semi-organic augmentation that had mistaken itself for a human being.

"I'd like to see her, for real." He turned to Doctor Numark. "Let me in there."

Maria Numark shook her head and gestured at the elaborate precautions set up around where Caroline lay on the other side of the glass. Kendrick wondered if eyebrows had been raised among the non-Labrat crew when Sabak and his colleagues had installed a secure biological containment room. "I'm afraid that's impossible."

Kendrick licked his lips. "When?" he asked. "I mean, when did she…" He gestured towards Caroline.

"Just before you arrived on board. We did everything we could." He could see where some of the augments had broken through her flesh, vague shapes that pushed up her paper smock here and there. He looked away, sickened, then stepped back.

"We'll need to arrange for a funeral service," he mumbled.

The doctor glanced at a wall clock. "To be honest, I'm not sure there's time for that, Mr Gallmon. I'm sorry."

"She looked as though she was getting better the last time I saw her."

Doctor Numark nodded sympathetically. "According to the literature, that's often the case. Outward appearances, however, when it comes to this kind of thing, can be extremely deceptive." She stepped forward. "Perhaps… I could leave you alone out here for a few minutes, if you wish."

Kendrick pressed his forehead against the glass, feeling numbing waves of exhaustion wash over him. Did he imagine those faint flecks of light where her hands touched the metal pallet on which she lay? As if something metallic extended downwards, from her fingertips. Something threadlike.

He heard Maria Numark step up behind him, gently placing fingers on his arm. He began to turn and almost lost his balance. He reached out and caught himself on the edge of a table.

"You need some rest now," the doctor told him, her voice firm. "You'll do yourself an injury if you don't get some sleep."

"No-"

"Rest."

Kendrick dreamed.

He opened his eyes. He was back on the Archimedes.

A great silver cloud filled the air far above his head. Moments later it broke up into a rippling mist of winged shapes that spiralled down towards him.

The last thing he remembered was Buddy helping him to a spare cabin after being called to the surgery by Doctor Numark. Buddy had looked ashen-faced, having only just found out himself about Caroline's death. If Buddy had said anything of consequence to him, he didn't remember it.

Kendrick had put his head down on the pillow, his mind and emotions still full of the memory of Caroline lying still and lifeless, and now he was here again.

Like he'd always been here, waiting.

The creatures came closer, flitting through the turgid air, their tiny faces ugly and distorted. No wonder it had taken him so long to recognize their origin.

"Robert," Kendrick said at last as a thousand winged shapes hovered in the air around him.

One of them spoke, its voice clear and full, unexpected from something so small.

"You shouldn't be here," the tiny Robert-homunculus said. "We don't want you here."

"I'm coming anyway," said Kendrick. "I'm bringing Peter McCowan with me."

The creature's companions beat chaotic patterns in the air as Kendrick spoke.

"Peter told me you wouldn't let him get free from the Maze," he continued. "You kept him down there, blind and deaf."

The rapid motion of the tiny creatures became even more frenzied as they swirled and dived with renewed vigour. He thought again of shoals of fish darting through deep ocean waters.

"Peter is an abomination," squealed the same creature as before, hovering momentarily in front of Kendrick's face. "You must not bring him here!"

"I need to find something that's on board the Archimedes. I can-"

"You must not bring him here! You must not bring him here!" another of the creatures buzzed angrily – or was it the same one? It was impossible to tell as they darted around him. "I can see him hiding inside you!"

Kendrick's mouth felt dry. What did Buddy or Sabak or any of them see and hear in their visions, to think that this thing was sane?

The creatures all around reminded him of nothing so much as locusts preparing to swarm. He ducked and shielded his face as they buzzed around him in uncountable legions. Their sheer weight of numbers forced him to kneel on the ground, shielding himself with his arms. He spoke again, raising his voice to a yell. "It's you that the Bright use to communicate with us, right? You were the first. You became a part of them. Something went 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."

"You mean you're getting used to it."

"Christ, I hope not." Kendrick let out a bitter chuckle. "Numb to it, more like." The image of Caroline lying dead in the containment room wouldn't leave his mind's eye. He couldn't stop himself imagining what it must have been like for her in her last moments. "Listen, I need to know something," he went on quickly, hoping to banish those thoughts. "Where do I go once we're on board?"

"The main research facility," said Peter, his voice fading. "In the second chamber."

There was still more that Kendrick wanted to ask. But now he could almost sense the confines of the ship's cabin around him again, the hillside fading like little more than a particularly vivid dream.

He woke in the small cabin as klaxons filled the air with a loud whooping that sent dull vibrations through the frame of his bunk.

He glanced at the clock mounted on the wall, his mind still reeling from revelation and mystery. Only six hours to launch time.

Twenty minutes later, Kendrick found Sabak up on the ship's bridge, conferring with Arnheim. Buddy and Veliz were there too. The sirens had finally shut off several minutes before, but Kendrick hadn't failed to notice the strained expressions on the crew members he'd passed in the narrow corridors or the way some of them glanced away at his approach. He hadn't had time to check in a mirror, but he reckoned he could assume that he still looked pretty gruesome.

Buddy glanced over when he arrived. "Looks like we're under attack." A look of concern crossed his face. "Look, you've just lost someone important to you. Are you sure you-?"

"I'm fine. I'm not an invalid." Kendrick glanced over at Sabak. "What sort of attack?"

Sabak looked at him as though he was about to tell him that he shouldn't be there. "Hard to say," he finally said, shrugging. "They're holding off for now. But it's not looking good." He turned to look back out towards the horizon.

Kendrick stepped up beside Sabak. From here he could see across the whole of the ship and a large expanse of the ocean beyond. At first he thought the dark line separating sea and sky was a distant shore. Then he saw that it was in fact another ship, but one that apparently stretched across a daunting expanse of the horizon.

Next he glanced over at the launch platform, a hundred or so metres away. Four helicopters were hovering around the shuttle, keeping their distance but clearly presenting a considerable threat. Kendrick could see the missile tubes bulging from their undercarriages.

"Draeger," Sabak informed Kendrick sourly.

"How can you be sure?"

Sabak looked over at Arnheim, who nodded to a bank of screens displaying high-res images of the ship on the horizon. Kendrick could see it was an oil tanker, and it didn't take much to guess that this was where the 'copters had come from.

"We've checked the records," Sabak explained. "The tanker is owned by one of Max Draeger's subsidiary companies."

"Okay, so do we know what he wants?"

Buddy stepped up beside Kendrick. "You were the last one to talk to him. If anybody knows the answer to that question, it's you."

"I told you, he says he wants us to take him or his men up there with us when we go."

Arnheim stabbed a finger out at the four aircraft still buzzing around the shuttle. "Or what? He's going to blow us up? Is that what he wants?"

"He offered us some kind of protection from Los Muertos."

Arnheim turned to Sabak. "Is it worth considering?"

Kendrick stepped towards Arnheim. "No, it's not. Not under any circumstances."

"Sir." A young man stepped over from a bank of terminals on the far side of the bridge. "We've got a message incoming."

Arnheim turned to him. "Is it from the tanker?"

"Yes, sir, they want to talk to the, uh…" He glanced nervously at Kendrick and the other Labrats. "To the passengers."

"That's fine, Stan." Sabak spoke to Arnheim. "Reroute the signal to the back-up comms room and we'll take it in there."

Sabak stepped over to join Kendrick, Buddy and Veliz while gesturing towards the exit.

"If you please," he said quietly. "It's just on the next deck down. No reason to get the crew or the launch staff any more worried than they need to be."

A few minutes later they found themselves in a long low-ceilinged room furnished with office chairs and banks of terminals similar to the ones that Kendrick had seen on the bridge itself. A crewman glanced over his shoulder as they entered, his gaze lingering on Kendrick for a little longer than might have been considered polite under normal circumstances. Kendrick watched as the crewman finally remembered how to close his mouth. Sabak dismissed the man and slid into the vacated seat. He began rapidly tapping at a touchscreen.

As Kendrick and the rest stepped up behind him, a variety of views of the surrounding ocean sprang to life on the wall-mounted screens. Kendrick could see that the tanker had drawn nearer, approaching the launch pad at an angle. It had probably been braking for some time.

Another screen sprang to life, fizzing with static before resolving into an image of Max Draeger talking to someone off-camera. He turned, his eyes looking slightly to one side as he focused on the lens of his display screen.

Sabak addressed Draeger's image. "Mr Draeger, we have you on a secure line. You're speaking directly to me and some witnesses here aboard the launch-control vessel. I'm a director of the company that owns this facility. Is that approaching tanker yours?"

"Yes, it is." Draeger's voice sounded calm. "I have a proposition to make to you."

"Just a minute," said Sabak, shooing Buddy away with a wave of his hand as he leant forward to speak. "I have to ask, are those helicopters around our launch pad also yours? Because if they are, you're currently in violation of enough internationally recognized regulations to bury you in a ton of shit from now till doomsday. Those 'copters are armed, and that in itself is considered an act of piracy."

"The helicopters are there for your own protection,"

Draeger replied. "You have only a few hours left before your launch window closes. I'm offering my own security services as a protection against interference."

Kendrick bent forward towards the screen. "What do you want now, Draeger?"

Draeger smiled tightly. "Were you aware that a squadron of Los Muertos-piloted fighter jets is currently flying north-west from Panama to blow you out of the water?"

Kendrick blinked. "I don't have any reason to believe you."

Draeger shrugged. "In that case, maybe you should wait until they arrive."

Sabak put a hand on Kendrick's shoulder but he shrugged it off. "Stop fucking around," he said to the screen, "and just tell us what you want."

"If you agree to carry a selection of my own men on board the Archimedes, I will guarantee to use all my available resources to prevent any hostile attacks on your ship and facility during and after the launch itself."

Sabak motioned silently to Kendrick and they stepped away from die screen.

Sabak spoke in a low voice. "You're supposed to know the guy inside out. That's what Buddy told me. Is he telling the truth?"

"Probably, but no guarantees. He's likely bluffing us at the same time."

"You're going to have to explain that to me."

"I don't believe for one moment that he'd just stand by and let us be wiped out by those supposed jets if we refused his help. We're his only ticket on board the Archimedes. If we wait long enough, I'm sure he'll give us protection regardless of whether or not we accept his offer, even to have the slimmest chance of persuading us to help him get on board."

"What if we accept his offer anyway?"

"Remember who this is," Kendrick said. "This is Max Draeger. We don't have any proof that those fighter jets even exist – or, if they do, that they aren't his."

"Shit." Sabak stared into space, thinking hard, then shook his head. "Look, assuming he's telling the truth about those fighter jets, then turning him down still means taking an enormous risk, whether or not he's bluffing. If he really did stand by while we came under attack, then hundreds of lives that myself and Captain Arnheim are supposed to be responsible for would be put at risk. No." He shook his head again. "I'm not taking any more chances if I can possibly help it."

Kendrick felt a wave of defeat wash over him. "If we come to any agreement with him, we're going to be sucked into something we're going to regret. We're dealing with the devil here."

"Look, I need all the advice I can get, I admit. But if there's any truth in what he's saying I don't have any choice but to agree to his terms."

Kendrick shook his head angrily, fighting to keep his temper. "That's your decision," he said tightly. "Just remember, he's as responsible for Caroline Vincenzo's death as if he'd put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger."

"I know that," Sabak said. "Just don't make the mistake of thinking that I like this any more than you do."

Sabak stepped hack over to the monitor and addressed Draeger. "We're going to need evidence before we accept anything whatsoever from you. Can you prove any of what you've told us?"

An icon flashed on the screen below Draeger's image. "I'm uploading the information you need right now," Draeger stated.

Buddy leant over Sabak and tapped the icon. "This is a live satellite feed," he explained. He nodded at Draeger's image. "Can he hear us?"

Sabak tapped another icon. "Not now, he can't."

"Look, this is the same kind of sat-recon info and telemetry we used to get back in my army days. Live feeds of plane and ship movements and likely intercept points."

"I know about these things just as well as you do," said Sabak. "They can be faked."

Buddy shook his head. "No, not these. Look at the satellite ident information. That's coming straight from pre-war orbital platforms that can't be hacked into. You'll never, ever get those idents on any kind of civilian GPS networks. At the most, Draeger might have hacked into a transmission from one of the sats in order to siphon off this information, but it's legit all the same."

"So you're saying we have to take this stuff seriously."

Buddy nodded emphatically. "I am, yes."

Numbers scrolled up on the screen as Kendrick watched. Latitudes and longitudes, air speed and distance. Buddy tapped a finger on a series of tabled figures. "And if this is anything to go by, those fighter jets will get here just about the time we're due to launch."

Sabak put out a finger, letting it hover over the voice icon for several moments before touching it. "Mr Draeger, you believe that you can't get on board the Archimedes without us. Correct?"

"Every salvage expedition carried out by myself – or by others – has always ended in disaster. That's a matter of public record."

"What makes you so sure that you'll succeed with our help, then?"

"I know about the Bright, Mr Sabak. Indeed, I know as much about what is happening here as you do, except I haven't shared the… experiences that you and the other Augments have. Besides, once I get on board the station I will require only a limited amount of time to extract the information that interests me. It's my belief that I have a much greater chance of success if I accompany those with whom the Bright clearly share a powerful affinity."

"What's on the Archimedes that you want so badly?"

"I created the Bright, therefore I should be the one to communicate with them. There is certain information on board the station that is wired to my direct command, meaning that it can only be accessed by me in person. I wish to retrieve it." Draeger paused. "The benefit to humanity of the knowledge harvested by the Bright may be immeasurable. That alone justifies my participation in this expedition."

Draeger turned his attention to Kendrick next. "Mr Gallmon, do you remember when you left Los Angeles and came under fire? Do you remember the aerial drones that attacked your pursuers?"

"So that was you," Kendrick heard Buddy behind him.

Draeger nodded. "Think of it as a goodwill gesture. If not for that, neither of you would be here today."

"Is this true?" asked Sabak, addressing both of them.

"We did come under fire as we left LA," Buddy confirmed. "Something got in the way of the 'copters chasing us."

"Remember, without me you won't get off the ground," Draeger stated. "Will you accept my offer?"

"We'll be back in touch," Sabak replied. Then he looked around at the others. Nobody said anything, so he reached out and touched the screen. Draeger faded to black.

"Now that is one slippery bastard," said Sabak. But he sounded impressed.

"There's something about Draeger actually saving our lives that makes me feel ill," muttered Veliz. "He doesn't even try to deny he's manipulating us to get his own way."

"We don't have long now before we go up," Buddy reminded them. "This late in the game, I don't know if we have any choice but to accept his terms." Sabak nodded his agreement at this.

Kendrick felt a cold horror creeping into his belly. This was wrong, all wrong. "Don't ever make the mistake of taking him at his word. Once we're up there, that'll be another matter entirely. If he tries anything, it'll be him against us. But we're Labrats – We'll still have that advantage."

Kendrick found his way to the deck, unable to remain in the comms room while Sabak contacted Draeger to agree to his terms. He wondered if Draeger intended to return to Earth with whatever information he gained. Or was it possible that he believed he could travel through the wormhole to the Omega along with the rest of the Labrats?

Once Kendrick was out in the open the sea air made him feel light-headed. The waters, as expected, were calm: if it had been otherwise the launch would have been disastrously delayed. The sky was cloud-free, the ocean in front of him disappearing into limpid blue depths as clear and smooth as crystal.

He looked over to the tanker, which had now stopped moving. Its upper decks looked as though they had been modelled after an aircraft carrier, and a dozen sleek-looking military-style jump jets stood alongside more missile-carrying armoured helicopters. Dozens of figures, insect-like at that distance, moved across its acres of steel. Kendrick thought again of Angkor Wat and wondered if the huge vessel was some kind of mobile secondary base of operations for Draeger.

He gazed up at the early-evening sky, the first stars revealing themselves as the light began to fade. The Archimedes was orbiting somewhere far above his head, and the reality of his decision to go there was only just beginning to sink in. He turned his attention to the shuttle, sleek and powerful-looking, resting on its launch platform. As he watched, Draeger's helicopters moved away from the platform, returning to the tanker. Clearly, Sabak had come to an agreement with Draeger.

Buddy came for him a while later, clapping him on the shoulder.

"This is it," he said. "You ready to go?"

Kendrick turned and looked at his old friend. "Are we really going to do this?"

"Sure we are. Still full of misgivings, aren't you?"

Kendrick looked back over the sea. "Can you really leave all this behind?"

"I probably wouldn't survive more than another few years here before my augments killed me," Buddy said calmly. "You seem different – care to share?"

"I experienced something like a vision, Buddy. I think it was what you saw. As though I was taken on a carnival ride through the history of the universe."

"All the way?"

Kendrick nodded. "All the way."

Buddy cocked his head at him. "But you still don't really believe it, do you?"

Kendrick sighed and turned away from looking at the launch platform. He remembered his conversation with McCowan. "Not like you do: no revelation, no firm sense that this is absolutely the right thing to do."

"Kendrick, for most of the people going with us there is no other way. Even if they felt they were just taking a chance they'd still take it. It's either that or stay here on Earth, hated and despised, and wait for a long and lingering death. It's not much of a choice. Remember, I hate Draeger just as much as you do. I want you to find the proof you're looking for. I just don't like the thought of staying here and dying slowly, maybe locked up in a secure ward somewhere."

Kendrick shook his head. "Look, the one thing I know about Draeger is that he doesn't lie. He could stab you in the back, but he's too proud of his achievements to ever make claims that are unsupportable."

"You're talking about that cure he offered you, right?"

"I met someone out at Angkor Wat who assured me that his rogue augments had been stabilized by Draeger's treatments. The same treatments that I was receiving from Hardenbrooke."

Buddy regarded him sceptically. "So you're saying that you'll return from the Archimedes with evidence to incriminate Draeger, but then you'll still take his cure?"

"If Draeger's really found a way to control the Labrat augments, then other people can develop the same techniques. But even if there were no cure yet, I'd still want to come back. There's always hope."

"Maybe for you, Kendrick, if you want to take that chance." Buddy shook his head. "But I already told you, I've got more faith in the Bright than I have in any number of spurious claims about curing something that I don't believe can be cured."

The funeral service never happened, because Doctor Numark had felt constrained to incinerate Caroline's remains immediately as a precautionary measure. Kendrick felt his temper rise when she told him that he couldn't even keep the ashes for a ceremony later as she wanted to keep them isolated. To Kendrick, the need to mark Caroline's passing in some way felt vital, necessary.

It was in case, Doctor Numark argued, there was even a slight chance of a containment breach. Kendrick almost laughed in her face, insisting that since he himself constituted a walking containment breach it wasn't likely to make much difference to him. She replied stonily that unfortunately there wasn't much she could do about him.

In the end, he dragged Buddy back out onto the deck, since he was the only other Labrat still alive who had really known Caroline. They took sips from a bottle of whisky that Buddy had acquired from a crewman and stared silently out to sea. There really wasn't much either of them could bring themselves to say.

Within the hour they were ferried by boat to the launch platform and each of them was given a lightweight spacesuit to wear, marked with the colourful logo of Sabak's private launch company. A hundred or so Labrats trooped onto the platform, looking not so different from the kind of rich tourists who'd spend an afternoon orbiting the Earth as an alternative to skiing in the Alps.

Kendrick soon found himself inside a steel-walled hut set high up in the gantry, from where he and the rest could look down the length of the shuttle, to its engines far below.

27 October 2096 Cocha Canyon offshore launch platform

The evening skies above them were still clear, the sea still calm. Ancillary launch technicians wearing jumpsuits and hard hats carefully inspected each of the space-suits three times. Kendrick could hear continuous, incessant systems checks crackling over a nearby intercom.

Just as the checking procedures were completed, the attack finally came.

First, there were dark spots on the horizon. Then, just as Kendrick and the rest were being guided through the gantry and along an elevated platform towards a door set in the side of the shuttle, three sleek silver shapes rocketed past the platform, moving over Draeger's ship in a flash and continuing onwards in a long, curving trajectory.

At the same time, Kendrick noticed a helicopter lifting from the deck of Draeger's ship. It landed on the launch platform's landing pad barely a minute later and he watched as several small figures stepped out and looked around, half bent over under the whirring blades, before stepping quickly to one side. He could see Draeger among them, and the others, he was sure, were the men he'd seen waiting in the shadows of the ruined buildings of LA. They all wore spacesuits modified with black Kevlar body armour.

A moment later another figure stepped out of the helicopter just before it lifted to return to the tanker. This time it was Smeby.

"Jesus Christ," he heard someone mutter. Kendrick turned to see Sabak standing nearby. "Will you look at that?"

They all turned to look as one, as three simultaneous explosions of light shot upwards from the main deck of the tanker. Something flared, arrowing in towards the three jets which were now twisting round in their trajectory to take another pass over the launch platform. This time, Kendrick was sure, they would fire on it.

He glanced around, seeing how utterly exposed they all were on the gantry. There would never be enough time to get them all inside the shuttle, and even that was far from the safest place to be.

Then he saw the jets veer in a curve that would bring the shuttle directly into their line of fire. A moment later two of the aircraft twisted away in a high-speed manoeuvre as the missiles launched from Draeger's ship rapidly closed in. Kendrick felt his heart crawl into his throat as two of the pursuing missiles sped into the ocean in an explosion of salt spray.

The third missile, however, zeroed in on the third jet, whose pilot had veered too close to the waves, and as he pulled up and away from the ocean the missile gained on him. The two met in a blossoming ball of fire a few hundred metres away from the launch platform. People yelled and screamed around Kendrick as shredded pieces of the jet's fuselage shot overhead. A deep shudder ran through the platform's structure.

He gazed, dry-mouthed, at the shuttle. That had been far too close.

"We've got to launch now," Kendrick yelled at Sabak who was standing just a few feet away. "For Christ's sake, get everybody on board!"

Sabak shot him an angry look. "What the hell do you think we're already doing?"

Kendrick looked around to see the remaining two jets swoop off into the far distance, half a dozen of Draeger's choppers in pursuit of them.

There was a sudden altercation at the head of the line. Kendrick watched silently as an elderly couple, their faces distorted and ugly from runaway augmentation growth, refused to get on board. He could easily understand, since he had his own doubts about boarding a flying bomb while it was coming under attack. He watched as they hurried back past him: the old woman weeping, her partner stony-faced but clearly frightened. Kendrick turned and watched one or two people at the rear of the line break away and go towards them, presumably to attempt to persuade them not to turn back.

"Is this going to be safe? Are those planes going to come back?" asked the woman standing in front of Kendrick. She was wide-eyed with fear. Like the rest, she carried her helmet in a knapsack over her shoulder, but she wore an incongruous brightly coloured scarf that covered most of her neck where it was exposed under the heavy rim of the spacesuit's neck ring.

"I think we'll be just fine," Kendrick lied, his voice tight. "We'll get on board, and then…"

She nodded. Kendrick could see how badly she was trembling. He looked up and down the line, shocked by how many of those around him were obviously in the later stages of rogue augment growth. These, then, were the ones who had nothing to lose, who possessed only the belief that, in some far-future place, they might have everything to gain.

Kendrick looked again towards the horizon but could see nothing from where he was standing. If the choppers were still in pursuit, they were far away on the other side of the platform.

Kendrick duly arrived at the front of the queue where a technician guided him speedily on board through an airlock inserted into what had originally been a pair of cargo-bay doors. He turned around just before he entered to see that the high-capacity elevator that had lifted them into the gantry was rising again. Draeger stepped out, dressed in a grey-blue spacesuit with racing stripes on the arms, a lightweight helmet tucked into the crook of his arm. Marlin Smeby appeared by his side, followed by the rest of Draeger's entourage.

Kendrick spoke for a moment to the technician who was processing everyone on board, then waited until Draeger and his men, queuing dutifully, reached the shuttle. Sabak was talking quietly to Draeger, and he glanced over at Kendrick with a wary expression when he noticed him waiting. Everyone else was already on board.

Draeger studied them both in turn with dark, hard eyes before smiling tightly. "I appreciate your help in this matter," he said to them both. "There are wonderful things happening just a few thousand miles above our heads. We may soon be witnessing things that very few people are ever likely to, at least in this life."

Kendrick glanced over at Smeby who gazed back levelly. Smeby, he knew, was the one he really had to worry about. Smeby was Draeger's right hand.

Draeger smiled disingenuously. Kendrick turned away from him to enter the shuttle.

Three more technicians guided them into a tall vertical bay filled with seats, all facing upwards. Kendrick tried to ignore the feeling of vertigo but with minimal success. He was led to his seat via a complicated array of ladders and strapped carefully into place. Buddy was positioned nearby. They nodded to each other.

"I'm sure there were more people than this," Kendrick called to Buddy over the tumult of voices. Some others nearby were weeping, not without reason. One or two were even praying, although Kendrick couldn't help but wonder to what or to whom their prayers were directed.

Buddy looked pointedly over his shoulder at Draeger and his men who were being helped into seats at the very rear of the passenger bay. It occurred to Kendrick that the only reason there were any seats for them was because of the Labrats who had turned back or who had died before they could make it here. He thought of Erik, dying by a frozen northern shore, and of Audrey, back in LA. And Caroline. He stared over again at Draeger and nursed the hate that burned deep within him.

Then, finally, even the technicians were gone and the passengers were alone. The air was filled with nervous muttering and the incessant litanies of the few people who were praying.

The same image played over and over in Kendrick's mind: the third Los Muertos shuttle barely getting off the ground before exploding, its sides rupturing and splitting, liquid fire spewing out, anything alive inside it obliterated instantly… he gripped the armrests of his seat so hard that sharp spikes of pain radiated through his hands.

Instinct told Kendrick to get himself out of the shuttle, to run, to throw himself into the Pacific and start swimming. But just then a deep pulsation rattled through the craft, building to a powerful and steady roar. The craft lurched violently, and he let out a yell. People around him screamed, clearly believing as he did that the attacking jets had returned, or that the whole platform had been holed and was sinking. For a moment he imagined that the shuttle had been blown free from its gantry and was falling towards the ocean. Powerful vibrations made his teeth rattle.

Very gently, the shuttle swayed. Panicked, Kendrick glanced over at Buddy, and to his consternation saw him grinning happily. Turning in Kendrick's direction, Buddy gave him a thumbs-up.

Next followed a terrible lurch, and the whole craft: began to tremble with furious energy. An enormous invisible hand seemed to press down on Kendrick's face and chest and he writhed desperately.

"When are we taking off?" someone shouted over the tumult.

"We already have," Kendrick heard Buddy yell. Barely audible, there were a few half-hearted cheers and whoops.

They were off.

Fifteen minutes later Sabak unstrapped himself and floated over to Buddy, conferring with him briefly. Kendrick gripped his armrests, convinced he was falling, knowing it was only the lack of gravity that made him feel that way. Most of the other passengers would remain strapped in for the duration of their short flight to the space station. He still couldn't quite believe they had not been blown out of the skies.

He found it wasn't quite so difficult to adapt to free fall as he might have expected. In fact, once he was out of his seat it was kind of fun.

Buddy unstrapped himself next and floated over to Kendrick. "We need to talk further with Sabak about Draeger, and we don't have much time to figure out what we're going to do once we get to the Archimedes."

"All that really matters is that nobody makes the mistake of trusting him."

"Those guys with him…"

Kendrick glanced carefully to the rear of the cabin where Draeger had unstrapped, as had Smeby and the rest of them. They still remained carefully apart from everyone else.

"You might want to assume that his men are Augments, too," Kendrick replied.

Buddy looked at him quizzically. "You mean Labrats? They don't look-"

"Not Labrats. Black-market work – at least one of them. I've met others, too, including a woman employed by Draeger. She was also an Augment but I'd be surprised if she was ever within a thousand miles of the Maze."

Buddy frowned. "There's a shitload of international laws against…" He stopped, and pressed one hand against the side of his head. "Jesus, just listen to me. So you've dealt with these guys before?"

"Only Smeby." Kendrick nodded at the man in question. "He's not to be trusted under any circumstances."

There was a commotion, and they glanced over to see that Sabak had opened a hatch. Behind it lay a tiny porthole, and Draeger had floated over to stare out through it.

Looking around at the other passengers, Kendrick could see from the consternation and anger on their faces that they were now well aware who their unwelcome guest was.

Sabak floated over and put a hand on Kendrick's and Buddy's shoulders. "Gentlemen, I want you to come and see exactly where we're going."

As he guided them forward, Kendrick flailed about uncertainly for a moment but Buddy kept a firm grip on his shoulder as they eased through a pressurized door into the cockpit area.

There was a crew of four, and Kendrick suspected that one or two of them might turn out to be Labrats. But it was impossible to tell since they were all wearing spacesuits.

Beyond them he could see stars, the bright curve of the Earth visible over to one side, and something else in the far distance: a dark grey cylinder floating against a sea of black velvet.

Sabak moved forward to chat to the pilots. They all looked relaxed and happy, and Kendrick wished that he could feel the same.

Sabak returned to their side shortly. "We're coming in for an approach pretty soon."

"How close did it get down there?" asked Kendrick.

Sabak raised his eyebrows. "Pretty close. I find this difficult to admit, but Draeger's the only reason we got this far." He shook his head. "I think he must be obsessed with the Archimedes, wanting to come here in person. That does take a certain kind of guts."

Buddy nodded. "Yeah, but he's only going to stay friendly for as long as we serve his purpose. We've got to start being real careful."

"Sir?"

Sabak glanced over at the crew member who had spoken.

"We've got visual contact with the two Los Muertos shuttles."

Kendrick peered forward intently to where the Archimedes was growing visibly larger. He saw a rough-hewn tube covered in fragile-looking gantries and docking facilities. Kendrick noticed that one of the shuttles was still locked into an external gantry, its nose pointing inwards towards the main body of the station. The other shutde, though, appeared to have ripped itself free and only dozens of powerful-looking cables kept it connected to the station. They were twisting and writhing slowly like snakes, and the hull of the shuttle looked battered and broken, presumably from repeated impacts with the hull of the Archimedes. As they came even closer, they could see an intermittent sparkle of light inside a deep wound in the shuttle's structure.

Sabak spoke up. "Looks like they've got something burning inside. Wouldn't be possible unless something was feeding it – probably broken fuel and air lines. Can we get a zoom on that?"

"Sure," said one of the pilots, and a screen displayed a close-up of the damaged shuttle.

"It looks like one of its engines exploded," said Buddy. "Something blew up on the inside and ripped through the hull."

"What the hell could do something like that?" Kendrick asked.

"There's no other ships in the vicinity," replied the pilot, turning a little in his seat to give Kendrick and the rest a significant look. "If I didn't know better, I'd say it looks like they tried to get away from it."

The second pilot glanced over her shoulder with an expression clearly saying Tell me what in God's name is going on here. Kendrick caught her eye and shrugged feebly. She frowned at him and turned back.

Kendrick continued to study the Archimedes with interest, as Sabak consulted with the two pilots about docking strategies. After a few minutes' discussion they settled for another gantry that was positioned a little further around the circumference of the station. They were closer now to the exterior of the Archimedes and Kendrick gazed at the ripped-apart shuttle in horrified fascination. Nobody could have survived that sort of damage, he thought.

Their view changed further as they approached their selected gantry, the Archimedes' speed of rotation slowing to an apparent nil. Sabak guided them both to the rear of the cockpit where a row of tiny plastic seats were attached to the bulkhead.

They buckled in and waited. Soon a heavy, clanging reverberation rattled through the hull, as gravity returned.

The sudden change was jarring. Kendrick pictured the shuttle being whirled around now by the station as it rotated, providing artificial gravity as it tried to fling the incoming ship loose. They'd docked with the shuttle's underbelly facing outward, allowing them to walk around inside the shuttle without feeling as though they were the wrong way up.

Sabak unstrapped himself and motioned to Kendrick and Buddy to do likewise. Then he led them back into the short corridor connecting the cockpit to the main passenger bay.

"Wait just one second," Sabak told them, pulling open a section of the wall to reveal a deep cabinet. There were weapons stored inside – rifles, pistols and what appeared to be grenades. There were also bricks of plastic explosive.

Sabak extracted a pair of side arms and handed one each to his companions. Buddy handled his with practised efficiency, nodding with apparent satisfaction.

Kendrick stared down suspiciously at the gun in his own hand.

"Just hold on to it," Buddy advised him. "I don't think it's likely that you'll have to use it. Give it here." He took the weapon from Kendrick and slotted in an ammunition clip. "This catch here on top is the safety, so just leave it where it is unless you feel you need to use the gun. Got that?"

"I think so."

"Meanwhile keep it out of sight. We don't want Draeger's men knowing that we're armed. Any small advantage we have can only be good for us."

Kendrick caught Sabak's eye. "Draeger and his men -did anyone check them for weapons?"

"There was neither the time nor the opportunity," Sabak replied sourly. "Which is another good reason for making sure we're ready for anything."

The flight crew caught up with them and Sabak doled weapons out to them as well, keeping a cautious eye on the door to the passenger area. Several Labrats – the only one Kendrick recognized was Veliz – slipped through from the passenger bay, and Sabak armed them too.

"What about all the rest of them?" said Buddy, nodding towards the door. "None of that lot came up here expecting to be combatants."

"I'm well aware of that," Sabak replied darkly. "We should split into two groups once we're further in. Some of us will move ahead and deal with any Los Muertos who may have been left behind. The other group can stay near the docking area and guard the rest of our lot."

"And Draeger?" asked Kendrick.

"The question is whether he's likely to try anything once we're inside."

"I'm sure of it. But then there's the matter of whether we're really going to let him have what he wants." Kendrick looked at Sabak questioningly.

"I didn't expect we'd have to deal with Draeger when we got here. Which may have been a glaring mistake on our part." Sabak turned to Buddy. "You've got as much military experience as I have, so when we're in there I want you to help us keep an eye on Draeger and his goons. The question remains: are they likely to be armed?"

Buddy shrugged. "Heavily, I'd be inclined to guess."

Sabak nodded in agreement. "Okay, let's go ahead on the assumption that we'll be dealing with opposition at some point. If we find no survivors from the Los Muertos shuttles, maybe we can step things down a little, except where Draeger is concerned."

"Draeger's going to be searching for the same records that I want," Kendrick reminded them.

Sabak squinted. "The Archimedes is a big place. You'd need a couple of weeks to find something that specific. And a couple of weeks is what you don't have."

Kendrick shook his head. "I need to locate a research facility in the second chamber. That's exactly where I'll find what I'm looking for."

Sabak shook his head slowly. "A research facility?"

One of the flight crew spoke up. "That's where all the station's functions are centrally controlled, sir. The computer systems are evenly distributed throughout the entire shell so that the station can continue functioning in case of serious trauma. But the research facility is the central point where you input data directly and get collated feedback."

"We can't rule out sabotage either," said Buddy. "We don't know what Los Muertos have managed to do while they've been up here ahead of us."

Kendrick was unable to avoid a deep sense of dread about what they might actually find once inside the Archimedes. Everything they knew so far had been filtered through the lens of Robert's fractured, dead mind. When it came down to it, none of them had any idea what they were up against.

They headed through to the passenger area, which had transformed from a vertical cylinder to a long, low-ceilinged room. Buddy, Sabak, and the flight crew checked everyone in turn, making sure they were fully suited up.

By some mutual unspoken decision they left Draeger and his men to take care of themselves. Within minutes, the external airlock opened to connect with a long, flexible tube linking to the Archimedes itself. The tube looked surprisingly flimsy and delicate.

Once Kendrick had his helmet on, the voices all around him were reduced to distant electronic squawks. He joined the queue and was guided by one of the pilots onto a platform with plenty of handgrips, obviously designed to carry them through the tube and into the station.

It took about twenty minutes to get everyone on board via the access tube. Kendrick and the rest found themselves in what had clearly been designed to be a reception area, full of desks and long, low couches. Kendrick studied some of the safety warnings and information posters still mounted on the pastel-coloured walls.

Sabak and his flight crew had gathered by another airlock door at the opposite end of the reception lobby. According to a nearby sign, this gave access to the interior of the main station proper.

Kendrick studied the screen built into the arm of his spacesuit. He played around with the menus, finding something that informed him that the atmospheric pressure outside his suit was currently zero. He wondered how this section of the station had come to lose its air, and if this meant that they were going to find the whole station depressurized.

He rejoined Sabak by the airlock door. One of the pilots had a panel open in the wall next to it and had attached a small device to some wires protruding from the interior. Kendrick wondered briefly why they didn't ask him or some other Labrat to magic the door open. Then he remembered that no one had ever tried that while wearing a bulky spacesuit.

After a little more effort, the airlock slid open to reveal a series of corridors branching off into the distance. Immediately ahead of them lay a wide-open space furnished with low pastel-coloured couches.

"No air, but the lights still work," Buddy observed through his spacesuit's intercom.

"Power runs through solar arrays on the station's exterior," Sabak explained. "Means we don't have to find our way through the dark."

Buddy laughed shakily. "Don't remind me of all that," he said.

A small crowd of Labrats had gathered nearby and one of the flight crew was briefing them, trying to keep them from either wandering off or getting in the way.

Sabak approached Kendrick. "Do you know how to switch over to a private channel? No? Okay, you're broadcasting on a general channel now. If you want to keep the conversation private, just do this."

Kendrick watched as Sabak led him through the necessary sub-menus on his suit's arm-mounted screen.

Draeger and his men were just arriving in the reception area behind them. Kendrick caught the attention of one of the pilots whose suit's name tag read Roux.

"I need to ask you something," Kendrick began over a private link.

"Wait a second," said the pilot. "Okay, we can talk one-to-one now."

"I'm heading back down with you," Kendrick told him. "So when are you flying back – now or later?"

"We're waiting long enough to know that everyone's safe, then myself and one other will pilot the shuttle back home. We're going back to wait on board in just a few moments. Care to join us now?"

Kendrick shook his head. "I've got some things to take care of first."

Roux's face betrayed his feelings: a touch of bewilderment at whatever was happening here, something he couldn't understand even if he tried. Kendrick felt a brief stab of sympathy for the returning flight crew. They must have felt as if they were helping to orchestrate a mass assisted suicide.

"Okay," Roux said. "If we don't see you later you're stuck here. Just remember, we're not sticking around for more than a couple of hours at the most."

"Thank you." Kendrick smiled briefly and stepped away from him. He felt filled with a kind of numb desperation, finding it impossible to convince himself he wasn't indeed committing suicide. There was a very good chance that he wasn't going to get back home at all – and the thought terrified him, to the very core.

28 October 2096 On board the Archimedes

A map of the station was mounted on one wall. It showed several levels, or decks, interrupted by two enormous artificial caverns – one of which Kendrick had already seen, after a fashion, in his augment-induced visions. Near the map were a variety of panoramic photos of the interiors of the caverns. These showed technicians with the good looks of models taking soil samples or carrying out experimental procedures under the vast mirrors designed to reflect sunlight into the station's interior.

This, thought Kendrick, would be what the station's administrators wanted their prospective investors to see as soon as they arrived here. They would be brought to wait here before each tour started.

He began to wonder if the depressurization had been due to some kind of life-support failure. If that were the case, the electrical systems, at least in this part of the Archimedes, hadn't been affected. Panels set along the ceding and walls around them glowed softly with diffuse light.

Kendrick glanced over at Draeger and his men who had continued following behind everyone else at a careful distance. Smeby returned his inquiring look with a hostile glare.

Sabak moved to the centre of the large room and raised his hands for everybody's attention. He swivelled around to look at all of them, while pointing a finger exaggeratedly at the panel on his spacesuit's arm. He was asking them all to switch to the public channel. As Kendrick tapped at his own screen, his ears were filled by a tumult of voices from all around him.

"We made it," Sabak was announcing, his grin just visible through his helmet visor. "We made it here, thanks to the Bright." There were several whoops and a lot of cheering.

"If any of you have started to have doubts, if you've decided there's too much for you to leave behind, then now is the time to say so," Sabak continued. "Nobody will think the worse of you. This is something monumental, but we're only human. If you want to go home, then do so with our blessing."

He turned to scan all the faces around him, but no one spoke out, no one stepped forward. Even the ones Kendrick had seen earlier in floods of tears remained resolutely silent.

"What about him?" somebody called out, pointing at Draeger. Kendrick glanced over at the billionaire, whose face remained impassive behind his visor.

"Mr Draeger has helped us get here in one piece," Sabak explained carefully. "If it wasn't for him-"

"If it wasn't for him," somebody else shouted, in a voice crackling with static, "we would never have got into this shit in the first place! What the hell is he doing here, anyway? We didn't invite him!"

In an instant the mood turned, with more shouting and accusations blending into a tumult. It was clear that Sabak was on the brink of losing control. Draeger and his men numbered barely more than half a dozen, and there were many more times that number of angry Labrats.

Someone suddenly ran at Draeger, their movements clumsy in the low-g environment. Kendrick watched in horror as Smeby reached into a deep pocket and produced a snub nosed weapon that he then gripped tightly in both hands and aimed.

Kendrick began to move forward, seeing a way in which he might calm the situation. Through the protester's visor he caught a brief glimpse of a middle-aged male face, the marks of long-term rogue augmentation extending across the forehead.

As if by magic, holes appeared in the assailant's space-suit. Kendrick watched as the Labrat spun around, almost in a parody of a ballet twirl. He collided with a nearby couch and fell into a lifeless heap.

Kendrick opened his mouth to yell something, but his words were lost even to himself as his ears filled with the distorted sound of people screaming.

"Stay back!" Smeby was yelling over the public channel. The rest of Draeger's men now stood brandishing identical black weapons.

Kendrick stared in horror at the body of the dead Labrat. The man's face had ceased to exist below the nose, and an ocean of red fountained from the ruin of his jaw, spilling out of the shattered remains of his helmet.

Kendrick turned away, sickened. They were heading for a massacre. He found his own weapon and gripped it in one hand, all too aware of the terrible special dangers of getting shot in a vacuum. Sabak's men had produced their own weapons and now faced Smeby and the rest of Draeger's men in a deadly stand-off.

"We're going ahead," Smeby announced tightly. "Anybody tries to follow, we'll shoot to kill. All of you got that?"

Sabak stared past him, looking Draeger in the eyes. "The Bright will kill you all. You know that, don't you?" he warned.

As Draeger gazed back with glittering eyes, Kendrick felt a tingling in his hand, as if a faint electric current was running through it. He felt an overwhelming urge to touch something: a wall, a floor, anything.

"We're going to head through that door," Smeby announced, his voice distorted with static. "Nobody else comes through it for at least another twenty minutes, do you understand me?" Draeger himself remained mute.

There were only four internal exits from the reception area they all stood in, three of them corridors winding out of sight as they followed the curvature of the space station's hull. The fourth exit remained sealed by a pressure door beside which two of Draeger's men were now huddled. The other three, along with Smeby, faced the Labrats, weapons at the ready.

An intensely bright flash briefly blinded Kendrick and the pressure door jerked open, revealing the corridor beyond. Draeger and the rest of his party hustled through, all the while keeping their weapons aimed at the Labrats. The door slid shut again, cutting off Draeger's party from sight.

Sabak ran forward as soon as the door had closed. Others rushed up behind him, one reaching for the control panel. "Stay back!" Sabak yelled. "Don't try anything until I tell you to. Give them time to get away. Everyone, stay back!"

Kendrick thumbed his suit panel until he was on a one-to-one channel with Sabak. "Nobody's letting them get away."

"We have priorities, do you understand me?" Sabak's voice was angry. "At least this way we don't have to watch them the whole time."

Kendrick pushed closer. "What the hell do you think he's going to do in there? Have you even thought about the damage he could do if he finds what he's looking for?"

"Assuming he gets anywhere" Sabak replied. "The Bright haven't shown any lack of aptitude where repelling boarding parties is concerned. And, besides, he can't get back down to Earth without our help."

"Unless he finds a way to reach that one intact Los Muertos shuttle. There's no reason to assume it isn't still functioning. I just don't believe that Draeger would have come up here unless he was pretty sure of finding a way back down again."

"The Bright will take care of him," Sabak replied confidently.

"Or maybe we've all been seriously underestimating him for too long. He could have something planned that we haven't been expecting. Don't you understand yet what's at stake here? Look, myself and a couple of others, we can go in and scout ahead. That'll give the rest of you an opportunity to move somewhere more secure in the meantime."

Sabak looked ready to explode behind his visor. "Jesus – fine, do whatever you think you have to do. But if anything happens I'm not sending anyone to look for you."

Buddy stepped up and broke into their conversation. "Gerry, quit arguing. We need to find somewhere properly pressurized before people start running out of air." He caught Kendrick's eye. "Right now that's our first priority, and we're going to need every hand."

Sabak made the decision to follow a passage leading directly to one of the main caverns, in the hope that they'd find somewhere along the way where they'd be able to breathe without depleting their tanks. Kendrick still felt that overwhelming urge to take off a glove and just touch something.

But that, of course, would result in a fatal loss of air. He'd found himself wondering if he could try repeating his experience in the airbase, when he'd found he had stopped breathing completely, but decided he'd rather not experiment. Not if it ended up with him writhing on the ground, desperately trying to get his helmet back on.

As they entered the wide passage Kendrick noted that wand-nodes were mounted along the walls every several metres. These old-fashioned devices dated the station, giving it an oddly quaint edge. He was suddenly glad he'd retained the wand that Buddy had given him back at the Maze.

As he pointed it at the nearest node, the wand's little screen blinked rapidly, informing him that it had downloaded a station guide. This turned out to include a 3D version of the map he'd first noticed back in the reception area.

Here he was in the middle of a crowd of Labrats, most of whom looked fairly subdued following the death of one of their number. He glanced around, studying the faces visible behind the visors: nobody seemed particularly heroic or brave or adventurous. But the Archimedes had cowed almost all of them, and Kendrick could feel its vast bulk weighing on him too.

This was the place where microscopic monsters lived, a place where the messengers of gods walked in their dreams, a place of empty echoing corridors full of dark, inchoate mystery. Just the fact of being on board the Archimedes was enough to still anyone's tongue, for a while at least.

Kendrick felt a sensation akin to jealousy. The people around him knew what they wanted, had given up everything for one last chance at survival. They had willingly boarded that shuttle, never expecting to see home again.

So what's so different about me? Suddenly he not only wanted to believe too – he felt that he could believe. He'd witnessed the end of everything, and the beginning of something he couldn't even start to comprehend, One tiny corner of something that might, just might, be Heaven.

And, almost in the same instant, Kendrick understood why he found it so hard to believe. He was scared, that was all. Now that he'd felt at least a part of what filled Buddy and the rest with such unwavering conviction, he was scared that it might not turn out to be true, that it was in fact a false dream born of technology. So it was easier, then, not to believe.

He studied further the map of the Archimedes displayed on his wand. They'd be reaching the first cavern soon, and the idea terrified him. Would tiny winged shapes come diving down at him, through air as thick as soup with them?

Buddy came up beside him again, jabbing a finger at the read-out screen on his own suit. Kendrick realized he had his own map displayed there.

"Pressurized area up ahead," Buddy informed him over a private channel.

"How do you know?"

"Green means pressurized, red is depressurized."

Kendrick glanced at his own map and saw the same colour-coding.

The corridor terminated in another airlock. He could see tiny sparkles of light flitting across the several metres of passageway just in front of it.

Tiny silver fibres? A chill gripped his spine. He looked around and saw that he wasn't the only one to have noticed them. His skin crawled with horror as several others reached out with glove-encased hands to touch them. He imagined those threads finding their way through the material of spacesuits, invading the augment-riddled flesh beneath.

Sabak led the way, surrounded by the half-dozen Labrats he had armed on board the shuttle. From the way they huddled together Kendrick guessed they were communicating over a private conference band.

They stopped at the airlock and Sabak appeared to have a heated discussion with some of them. Then he reached forward and touched a panel. The airlock door swung open, revealing a high-ceilinged room beyond, big enough to hold them all. Kendrick trooped inside with the rest, noting a second pressure door on the opposite wall.

The first door closed, sealing them all inside. After several moments a faint but increasingly audible hiss became evident as the chamber began to pressurize. A light flashed above both doors, and Kendrick watched as Sabak took off his helmet to speak. His voice echoing dully in the chamber, he was urging them all to take off their helmets too.

As Kendrick removed his own, the other chamber door opened to reveal light seeping through.

Beyond it he could see trees, and grass.

They crowded through and found themselves in the rear of a very spacious low-ceilinged gallery, with panoramic glass windows overlooking a wooded area. The trees seemed a little too regularly spaced to be natural. The soil outside had been arranged carefully in little hillocks, again attempting to trick the eye into thinking it saw a natural environment. Further beyond the glass, the ground curved steeply upwards.

By now most of the people who'd entered behind Kendrick had removed their helmets.

Kendrick sucked the air deep into his lungs. It smelled so fresh – he'd more than half-expected to find it as polluted as in the Maze. Although the nanite threads had already made their presence known here, there wasn't yet anywhere near the same degree of infestation. He stepped closer to the glass wall and gazed out at the greenery beyond.

Buddy soon joined him, helmet held loosely in one hand. He was positively glowing, his smile radiant, looking happier and more content than Kendrick recalled seeing him ever before.

A sudden, unexpected sound…

Kendrick glanced sideways along the front of the building where a path was visible, winding its way through the trees. "Did you hear that?"

"No, I-"

Something whirred – a machine sound that stirred up deep memories. Kendrick stepped away from the window and headed along until he was about halfway between the airlock exit and the building's entrance.

Out there, something glinted in among the trees. There was something hauntingly familiar about the noise he'd just heard.

Kendrick moved closer to the far end of the huge room, to look further between the building's exterior and the trees beyond where gardens once carefully maintained had grown wild. He cocked his head, listening hard, and heard a series of rapid staccato thumps. At the same instant he glanced over his left shoulder – in time to witness the main entrance of the building explode inwards in a shower of glass.

Kendrick fell to the marbled floor, covering his head with his hands as the windows nearby shattered almost at the same instant. He half-crawled, half-scuttled towards the relative safety of an expanse of wall that separated one large glass panel from the next. There he pressed himself flat against the floor while bullets whined through the air above him. They made a dull thudding sound as they impacted with the inner walls opposite the windows.

Peering down, Kendrick saw a fine tracery of nanite threads rapidly spreading across the marbled tiles under him. The tingling in his hands became urgent, almost unbearable. He longed to scratch his palms, to-

In an instant he understood what was required of him. Rolling slightly onto his side, he started to pull a glove off. Throwing it to one side, he gazed down at the palm of his uncovered left hand, noticing the faintest pattern of gold still etched into his flesh.

Only a few days before, he had witnessed all-out war raging at the molecular level, deep underground. Perhaps this time things would be different.

Kendrick spread his fingers out wide and laid his bared palm flat against the tiles beneath him. He screamed as his flesh united with the cool stone. Searing pain shot into his brain while bullets continued to zip through the air just inches above his head.

He could hear people shouting, and yet more screaming.

Through a haze of agony he became aware of the corpse lying several feet away from him, its head and shoulders reduced to a crimson pulp. He still couldn't prise his hand away from the tiles, so he twisted his head around, trying to see what was happening behind him. Most of the other Labrats, he saw, had retreated to the relative shelter of the pressure chamber.

The walls of the gallery were constructed from alternate panels of glass and columns of concrete: perhaps twenty Labrats had managed to find shelter behind the safety of the concrete. At least a dozen more lay scattered in the stillness of death.

Kendrick gripped his wrist, still trying to pull his hand free. He felt a fresh stab of icy pain as the skin of his palm ripped. While he watched, golden threads crawled out from under the flesh, seeking out the nearest silver filaments. The silver turned to gold within moments.

He finally realized that the firing outside had stopped. "It's me – Kendrick!" he screamed into the sudden silence. "Can anyone hear me?"

"Ken!" It was Buddy. "I thought you were down!"

"Those things are gun turrets," Kendrick yelled. "The same as back in the Maze."

"Stay tight, Ken. We did notice that."

Kendrick twisted his head around enough to catch sight of Buddy crouching low behind a long concrete bench near the centre of the gallery.

He managed to work his hand free at last, leaving a disturbing amount of blood and skin on the tiles. Keeping his injured hand cradled, he worked his way to the edge of a wall column and peeked around it.

He saw a sliver of grassland, then spotted something shiny and man-made visible to one side of a tree ten or twelve metres away, deliberately positioned so that it covered as much of that side of the building as possible. He slowly pulled his head back again.

They had to do something now. Draeger was still somewhere out there.

Moving very slowly again, Kendrick shifted closer to where the window had been, and lifted his head.

"Hey!" a voice yelled. "Hey, stay back!"

He saw Veliz peeking out from the door leading into the pressure chamber. One of the turrets whirred and Veliz dodged back out of range. Another volley of bullets spat into the building's interior.

Draeger could be downloading reams of lethal information and transmitting it back down to Earth while they were trapped here. Or else erasing the proof of his guilt for ever.

Kendrick allowed himself no more time to think. He stood and ran out through the shattered window, still cradling his injured left hand against his chest. He headed towards a copse only a few metres distant. His movements were restricted by the suit he was wearing, making him feel clumsy and slow.

The turret whined again and dirt was kicked up in tiny spurts, tracking after Kendrick as he threw himself into the shelter of the trees. Bullets ripped through the branches above him. He shielded his head as leaves and twigs rained down.

The gun whined into silence as its target disappeared from its sensors.

"Kendrick! Are you there?" Buddy again.

"I'm okay," Kendrick shouted back. "I'm outside here. There's a turret just ahead of me."

He heard a muted argument from somewhere inside the building. "Stay where you are," Buddy yelled back.

Then came the sounds of running feet and more bullets whining and ricocheting. Glancing back quickly towards the shattered window through which he'd exited, Kendrick saw Buddy take cover in the same place he himself had. Buddy gave him a one-handed thumbs-up before ducking back out of sight.

The reality of what he had just done began to hit Kendrick with the force of shock. He could very easily have died. He rolled onto his back and gazed up through the copse's branches.

Buddy called out to him again. "Kendrick, I'm throwing something over."

A small brick-like object landed not too far away, compact enough to fit into the palm of Kendrick's uninjured right hand. The turret whined briefly in response, spitting a few bullets into the air near where the object had landed. Kendrick reached out for it with tentative fingers, ready to snatch them back behind his cover, but the turret didn't respond this time. He picked the object up and recognized it as one of the grenades that Sabak had taken on board the shuttle.

"Do you think you can hit that thing from where you are now?" Buddy yelled.

"I can try – but do we have any more of these if I miss?"

A pause. "Just try and get it first time, okay?"

Great. "How does it work?"

"Touch the screen. Press where it says 'arming'. Got that?"

"Got it."

"When you're ready to throw, press down hard on the plastic button on the reverse side, and then for God's sake just throw the damn thing. You'll have maybe seven seconds before it detonates."

Kendrick nodded. Then he dragged a branch from the soil and tossed it high into the open air. The turret whined, and the chunk of bullet-splintered wood jerked in the air before hitting the ground.

"Listen," said Buddy. "I'm going to draw its fire, then you throw. You got me?"

"I don't know if that's such a good idea. That thing's got a much faster response rate than-"

Buddy moved in an augmented blur, heading for another tree several metres away from where Kendrick sheltered. The turret whirred in response, tracking Buddy's path with fire as he ran.

Damn. Again there was no time to think. Kendrick pressed down on the grenade's activator and stepped out from behind his own tree, hurling the device as hard as he could in the direction of the turret.

As he'd stood he'd glimpsed Buddy diving towards the meagre shelter of another tree. None of the trees on board the station could possibly be more than nine or ten years old but they were already tall and gnarled, with thick trunks. It occurred to him that they'd have been altered genetically to grow much faster than nature intended. They also, he dimly recalled from some documentary, served a vital function in the station's complex artificial ecology.

Far more importantly, they at least provided more shelter than natural-grown saplings.

Buddy dropped down out of sight again and the turret rapidly swung back towards Kendrick. The grenade had landed just a foot from its base.

Kendrick threw himself back behind the tree and stumbled. As he started to pull himself up, he realized that he was still in the turret's line of sight.

He could see the turret zeroing in on him. Desperately, he reached behind himself for the knapsack in which he had stored his helmet. As he flung it away from him the turret's sensors picked up the sudden movement. Kendrick caught a glimpse of the knapsack dancing in the air, giving him the opportunity to slide rapidly back behind the tree.

A moment later the air was filled by a noise like a giant hammer blow. Dirt and splinters rained down on Kendrick's head. He lay exhausted, trembling from the adrenalin still pumping through his veins.

But the turret was dead.

Over the next several minutes, similar blasts were audible from further along the side of the building as Sabak's men managed to take out the remaining gun turrets. As Kendrick lifted himself up and peered towards the one he'd managed to destroy he half-expected it to spring back to life.

He climbed up on unsteady feet and went to retrieve the knapsack. The helmet, he found, was ruined. If he wanted to escape from the station he'd have to find another.

Buddy looked haggard and pale, and Kendrick assumed that he himself probably looked just as bad. He glanced around at the grass and trees, shimmering here and there with familiar pale silver threads.

Buddy followed the direction of his gaze. "Same as the Maze," he muttered.

"Not quite, no." The flesh of Kendrick's hand was still torn and bleeding. The pain felt even greater now that he was less preoccupied with just staying alive.

Kendrick looked back to the building, where the survivors were only just beginning to emerge from hiding. Its walls sparkled here and there with silvery light, but the longer he watched the more the silver took on a distinctly golden hue. He visualized the same change spreading through the entire station, through the soil under his feet, through all those circuits and corridors.

All around them a war was taking place – in absolute silence.

Fourteen people were dead. They were laid out in rows in the centre of the gallery. All around Kendrick the tiles were red with blood where the victims had been caught in a massacre.

Kendrick spotted Sabak and approached him. "Look, time's running out. I'm going after Draeger now and I need your help. I know I can't manage this alone."

Sabak shook his head firmly. "Nobody's going anywhere. None of us are taking any more chances than we have to. So we stay right here. Not one more life is going to be wasted before the wormhole opens."

Kendrick stared at him, his expression revealing his sudden anger. "And Draeger? You're going to let him get away with this?"

Sabak chuckled long and low, glaring back at Kendrick with something like hatred. "You don't get it, do you? You're not in charge of this operation. I know you think we're all crazy. Well then, fuck you. Fuck you and Draeger both."

Kendrick stepped away, appalled. "I can't believe I'm hearing this. You're a Labrat, and you-"

"I'm a human being, Mr Gallmon. I want to be able to choose my own destiny – and this is what I choose. I'm not here to be a hero or to save the human race." Sabak jabbed a finger into his own chest. "The human race can take care of itself just fine."

Kendrick licked his lips. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. He looked around and saw that other people had been listening. But none of them would meet his gaze.

"This isn't right," he said, for the benefit of all of them. "There are people down there who-Ah, the hell with it."

He turned from Sabak without another word and stepped back outside the building.

Kendrick wasn't sure how long he'd been out there in the open when he realized that Buddy was standing near him. No more than a couple of minutes, probably.

"I saw the way you were looking at these threads. I can see they're changing colour. You're going to tell me what's happening here, aren't you?"

"I don't know," Kendrick lied. How could he explain? He was far from sure that he could go out there and find Draeger on his own. He needed Buddy's support – even Sabak's.

Buddy shook his head slowly. "There's something you're not telling me. First that trip to the Maze, now this. It's not right to keep me in the dark."

Kendrick sighed and looked away. "I need to find Draeger. Are you going to help me?"

Buddy glanced back into the building where they could see Sabak in heated conference with several of the Labrat survivors. Things were not going nearly as well as most of them had hoped.

"I'm not sure," Buddy admitted. "We need to take care of things here. Sabak-"

"You heard what he said! This is as far as the rest of them are going. But this isn't the time to discuss or negotiate. We go now, and we find him. I need whatever help I can get."

Buddy rubbed at his face with both hands, gazing off into the middle distance. Meanwhile Kendrick studied his suit's read-out. Nearly an hour and a half had passed since they had disembarked from the shuttle, so his time was running out if he was to have any hope of escaping from the Archimedes.

But did you ever really believe you were going to be coming back home from this?

"See things from my point of view," Buddy pleaded. "There are injured people back there. I'm needed."

Kendrick shook his head in disgust and began to walk further away from the building and from Buddy. "You know why I'm here," he called over his shoulder. "You know what's at stake."

"Ken-"

Kendrick stopped and turned. "Doesn't what we went through matter to you any more? Or do you really want to stand by while Draeger gets away with everything?"

A few moments passed but Buddy still didn't answer. Kendrick turned and resumed walking.

"Wait!" Kendrick slowed his pace and Buddy fell into step beside him. "Okay. Look, we've come this far together, so fine. I'll come with you. Everyone's badly shaken, is all. Nobody was expecting to have to deal with any of this."

Kendrick merely nodded and glanced back over his shoulder. He could see the building behind them rising above their heads now as they moved further up the curve of the cylindrical chamber. He quickened his pace to a trot, and Buddy moved to keep up with him.

There were other buildings hanging above their heads now, open-air offices among gardens that had grown wild. None of it looked as though it had been really designed for people to live in. These vast chambers, with their artificial forests and machine-controlled environments, were really little more than a showcase not just for Draeger's technological achievements but for the sheer amount of money President Wilber had been happy to pump into constructing them.

Kendrick dug out his wand and studied the station map. It would have been a lot easier if they'd been able to use whatever the station's erstwhile occupants had used to move themselves around its interior. According to the map there was a transport system buried in the hull, but its nearest entrance was next to the place they were heading for anyway.

"Here." He jabbed his finger at the map display and turned to Buddy. "This is the research facility that's in the next chamber. It's where Draeger's heading because he can access the central AI memory core from there. We keep moving this way, we should reach an airlock leading to a connecting corridor pretty soon. You got any more of those grenade things?"

"Just a couple," Buddy replied.

Kendrick had the illusion that, even as he walked, he was in fact staying rooted to the spot while the ground rotated under him. The building where Sabak and the others were still sheltering now hung way down behind them. He looked back and saw small figures milling around outside it, perhaps looking for them. All they needed to do was look up.

They found their first corpse by the airlock complex that led into the second chamber. The male victim appeared to have been flayed alive. The stink reached them long before they even set eyes on the ghastly remains. There were enough scraps of clothing left to identify him as one of Los Muertos.

Equipment lay scattered around the grass near the body and Kendrick stepped forward to find weapons or anything else they could use. He tried hard to ignore the overwhelming stench of death in his nostrils but failed completely.

"Jesus," Buddy muttered as he went to help him. Then he turned away, his hand clamped over his nose. Kendrick suddenly remembered the vision he'd had of Los Muertos soldiers torn apart by the creatures with Robert's face.

"He was in the middle of doing something when he died," Kendrick suggested, noticing a heavy backpack nearby that had some oblong metal object sticking half out of it. Fingers half-stripped of their meat reached towards a rifle that lay a few metres away. Buddy pulled the oblong thing free of the backpack before retreating out of range of the reek of putrefaction.

"What is it?"

Buddy didn't answer. He just stared at the box in his hands before lowering it to the grass, his face pale.

The metal casing featured an inset LED display on which a series of numbers appeared. It looked like a countdown, but the display was frozen. Kendrick imagined that the dead soldier had been configuring it in some way but had died before completing his task.

"What is that thing?" he asked. But Buddy simply closed his eyes and gave no answer.

"We don't have time for this shit. What the fuck is it?"

Buddy's eyes were full of pain as he opened them again. "It's a nuke. Those fucking idiots brought nukes on board." He stared down again at the oblong device and shook his head. At first Kendrick thought he might even be weeping. "I hadn't expected this," Buddy whispered.

Kendrick almost didn't catch these hushed words. But he sure felt the urge to say something – like So what exactly did you expect?

Instead he stepped on past the corpse towards the chamber airlock.

According to Kendrick's map, the other side of the airlock was pressurized. Ashen-faced and silent, Buddy followed his comrade into the pressure chamber.

Kendrick asked himself just why Los Muertos would have brought a nuke on board, the obvious conclusion being that they intended to destroy the station. Which led to the next question: why?

But even if that were the case, could just one nuke do the job? Kendrick couldn't begin to guess. Buddy muttered quietly from somewhere behind him, conferring with Sabak over his suit comm, telling him about the nuke.

"Buddy, tell him that the guy carrying the nuke died before he could set a detonation time. The bomb isn't going to go off."

"Yeah," said Buddy, "I already told them that. They're going to come and take a look at it."

He caught Kendrick's expression and shook his head. "Listen, they're not too wild about us heading off on our own like this, but right now they're more concerned about the nuke. We should get moving."

They passed through the far exit of the pressure chamber and into another series of interconnected corridors. They soon found themselves at a second airlock complex, which in turn opened into the second cavern. Buddy said little as they cycled through, for which Kendrick was grateful since he needed to organize his thoughts. The closer they came to the second chamber – the one he'd seen in his visions – the more prevalent the silver threads became.

They found themselves next in a building identical in construction to the one that had led into the first chamber. They moved with extreme caution, but after a few minutes it became clear that Los Muertos had not had a chance – or the desire – to plant gun turrets or rig booby traps.

This was, indeed, recognizably the chamber that Kendrick had seen in his visions – but it had been transformed into something simultaneously wonderful and terrible.

It looked as if the whole interior had been liberally coated with silver fairy dust so that it twinkled like a vast bejewelled grotto. Kendrick stepped forward to see the same wide plain he had found himself standing on during those strange dream-like but utterly convincing episodes. Great ragged-edged columns of compacted silver threads stretched right across the circumference of the chamber, looking as if a million spiders had spent a thousand years spinning them. Every surface was coated in thick layers of glistening silver.

"Oh, my God," Buddy breathed, staring around them as they passed through into the chamber proper. "Oh, my God."

Kendrick looked at these innumerable multitudes of threads and felt as if he were passing through the living, beating heart of some enormous beast. They didn't now need to search for the Bright – they were already in the Bright.

"Buddy, this isn't anything like my visions."

"Mine neither." Buddy grinned like a child who'd just stumbled into Wonderland. "But it's wonderful, isn't it?"

Kendrick remembered his recent ordeal in the Maze and said nothing. He consulted the wand again, trying to ignore how badly his hands were shaking.

Had he…? No. He closed his eyes and felt a surge of relief. For a moment he thought he'd left behind the glove that he'd removed to release McCowan into the body of the station. He dug out both gloves from a thigh pocket and pulled them back on, wincing as he pulled them over his injured flesh. They looked odd, oversized without the spacesuit they usually went with.

"You know what this means, don't you?" He glanced over at Buddy.

"Nope."

"If this is nothing like what we had visions of before we even got here, then there's no way to be sure that anything else the Bright have shown us is true."

Buddy laughed nervously and shook his head. "C'mon, Ken, that's bullshit reasoning."

"Why is it? All that's happened till now is that we've seen pictures in our heads. There's no reason to assume what we see in our mind's eye might be anything like the reality-"

"Kendrick." Buddy stepped in front of him. "Listen to me. What you saw clearly isn't the same as what the rest of us saw. We've been over all that already."

"I saw the whole thing, the… the history of the universe, and I felt every second of it. Peter warned me-"

"No. McCowan was never part of it. Robert-"

"Robert is insane. He lost his mind long before we even got ourselves out of the Maze."

"No, Kendrick, shut up and listen to me. I touched God – do you understand what I'm saying? Whatever you saw, whether it had McCowan's face or whatever, it was standing between you and… and the things that I experienced, and that the rest of those people back there experienced.

"Look. If you've never seen before, or… no, if you've spent your entire life locked in a box, where you can't see anything, hear anything, do anything, and then one day someone opens the box and you're in the middle of the Rio Carnival, then maybe you'd have some idea of what it was like for the rest of us – maybe just an inkling. And if you can't understand that, then try to accept that that's how the rest of us see it. You're in the minority here. You can't understand."

Kendrick found that he couldn't think of anything else to say. As he glanced to one side he noticed the gold had already made its way to this part of the Archimedes, too. He could see faint yellow flecks where there had been none only seconds before.

They came to a small clearing and discovered two more bodies as badly mauled as the first. They too wore the remnants of Los Muertos uniforms. Their jaws, stripped of their flesh, gaped upwards.

"Draeger's been through here," said Buddy, sniffing at the air.

Kendrick was incredulous. "You can smell him? Over this carnage?" The stink of putrefaction wasn't any better the second time around.

Buddy grinned and tapped the side of his nose. "The augments whacked my olfactory sense up a couple of notches a year or two ago. Now I can pick up certain scents." He shrugged. "Well, from time to time, anyway. It's a facility that has a bad habit of coming and going. Sort of useful, though."

"That's why that first corpse affected you so badly when we found it? The stench of it must have been overwhelming."

"Yeah, but I can barely smell these guys now. Guess my augments are already filtering it out."

They had been following a narrow path winding its way through silver-draped trees, aware of the sound of thickly layered filaments crunching underfoot. Kendrick kept a close eye on Buddy, but whatever had affected him during their trip inside the Maze seemed not to be affecting him here.

Kendrick kneeled to peer more closely at the corpses, still managing to keep his distance. "Look – they had backpacks like the last guy, except these are empty."

He stood again and looked around him, then up at the land surface curving away above him, wondering if Draeger and his men might be up there looking down on them.

In the soil just ahead stood a wide concrete cap with a circular door set into its upper surface. Kendrick consulted his wand map again and waved Buddy over to look at it.

"See this?" He pointed to a group of coloured lines.

Buddy nodded. "Yeah, that's where we came on board."

Kendrick tapped the minuscule screen with one finger. "And this is where Draeger and his men split off. There's more than one way to get from there to here. I think they took another route, probably bypassing the first cavern altogether." He gestured at the concrete cap, clearly an access point to the tunnels and corridors riddling the station's hull. "They'd have seen these bodies once they emerged."

"What makes you so sure they didn't go the same way as us?"

"A distinct lack of dead thugs around those gun turrets we ran into."

Buddy looked embarrassed. "Yeah, good point." He nodded towards the two corpses. "So… do you think these two were hauling nukes around as well?"

"Maybe. Maybe not. Probably best to assume the worst, though."

"And if they were, and then Draeger and his men came out and found them lying here…"

They looked at each other. Suddenly things were taking a much worse turn than any of them could have anticipated.

They moved on, spotting another group of buildings up ahead: the research facility. Buddy tapped Kendrick on the arm and pointed to the ground.

"Something's happening," he muttered.

The silver fibres beneath their feet rippled as if a sudden wind had whipped swiftly through the chamber. Except, of course, there was no discernible movement of air beyond a barely perceptible breeze produced by the natural circulation of atmosphere through the huge chamber.

"Forget about it. We need to get moving." Kendrick was trying not to let his fear show. They started forward again. As the facility moved slowly down the giant curving wall to meet them, a great twisting column of threads rose high above them, rooted in the soil nearby. It stretched across the width of the cavern, joining itself to the opposite side of the hull.

Their gaze picked out glistening bulbous shapes on the silver column's surface as they approached. Kendrick didn't want to wait around and see what might emerge from them.

As they came closer they heard a high-pitched scream from the direction of the facility itself.

"Ken, that sounded like-" Gunshots now: several noisy detonations, one after the other, in rapid succession.

Something rumbled through the hull under their feet. Cold sweat sprang out on Kendrick's skin as he imagined someone detonating a nuclear device -perhaps in the previous chamber, perhaps somewhere outside the station. It was far too easy to speculate on the hull ripping apart beneath them, sending them both spinning out into the endless cold vacuum of space.

But the rumbling faded a few moments later. Kendrick glanced down at the read-out on his arm and found a message icon blinking up at him.

He lowered his arm and headed rapidly towards one of the buildings directly ahead. A sign mounted in front identified it as the primary section of the research facility. Draeger was in there somewhere. He had to be.

"Kendrick, wait. Before we go further we should check back with the others and see if they have any idea what just happened."

"Bad idea. Whatever they say won't make any difference, so let's just get this over with."

The low-roofed buildings making up the facility had been tastefully designed from glass and wood. A wide balcony overlooked a pool fringed with pebbles, the water overgrown now with pond scum and silver filaments. It looked like something from an eerily deserted university campus.

Kendrick slowed, wary of running straight into Draeger's men. But there were no more screams and no more gunshots. Buddy kept pace with him, reluctantly.

"Listen, Kendrick, I've got an idea. We're heavily outnumbered, right? We can't just walk right in there among them."

"I know that, but there isn't time left to try anything else. We'll just have to work it out as we go along." He carried on towards the entrance.

"If you march in and they see you they'll have no compunction about killing you. Look, let me talk to Draeger."

Kendrick stopped and faced Buddy. "Talking to him isn't on the agenda. He used us to get here and the instant we looked like showing him any resistance he ran – but only because he couldn't kill all of us."

"Those men in there with him are professional soldiers, maybe Augments. You don't stand a chance against them. Negotiation is the only way."

"Someone is already dead, thanks to Max Draeger's negotiating skills. All I'm saying is, if we don't try and stop it now-"

"Maybe we can find a way to reason with him."

"Reason with him?" Kendrick glared at Buddy. "What exactly is your problem? When he blew that guy's head off, did that strike you as reasonable?"

Buddy's mouth worked silently for a moment. "I suppose what it comes down to is that – I don't trust you as much as I thought I did."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning maybe I had you wrong. I thought that once you were up here with us you'd understand."

"What, you're worried I might jeopardize things for you?"

"Look, ever since we found those bombs I've been thinking that if Draeger does have one the last thing we want to do is give him any excuse to set it off. Right?"

"Well," said Kendrick. "That depends."

Buddy looked incredulous. "On what?"

"On whether or not that means we let him get away."

Flinging his hands out in a gesture of despair, Buddy made a strangled sound. "You see? Can't you hear yourself? How fucking monomaniacal do you have to get? One way or another, if Draeger has one of those nukes, he's also got us by the balls – or can't you understand that?"

Kendrick spoke quietly and carefully. "Buddy, let me explain something. He's got you by the balls. He's got Sabak by the balls. But he hasn't got me, because I don't care about his threats. I'm going to nail the fucker. I want the world to know what kind of man he is. Otherwise everything that happened to us down there in the Maze isn't going to mean a damn thing.

"And it's not even that which really worries me. I don't know how he's going to do it, but I'll bet every last penny that he's had a way out of here figured for a long time. And if he does somehow manage to find something on those computers that he can take back down with him, then I don't believe anyone back home is going to thank us for letting him get away."

Buddy's face looked as though it was carved from stone. "Fuck them" he said quietly.

They were standing almost face to face now, and Kendrick started to turn away. From out of the corner of his eye he saw Buddy move towards him, reaching out to grab his arm.

Kendrick swivelled rapidly, taking hold of Buddy's wrist and punching him hard in the face as he did so. Buddy reeled back in surprise, then slipped and fell to the ground. Kendrick stepped over and clouted him a second time – unable to halt the sudden terrible anger that threatened to overwhelm him.

He became distantly aware that the air around him felt chillier than it had only seconds earlier. A sudden wind rippled through his hair, becoming stronger. Something was happening to the atmosphere in the station.

Buddy still lay flat on the ground, gasping and cursing.

"Don't get in my way," Kendrick yelled at him. "Don't dare come after me." He stepped away, panting. "I wish it didn't have to work out this way."

Buddy stared up at him with angry pain-filled eyes. But he didn't try to move from where he lay.

Kendrick retreated for a couple of metres, keeping Buddy well in sight. Then he turned and ran for the facility entrance. He turned a corner and stopped to make sure that his pistol was loaded.

Buddy was right about one thing: just charging in after Draeger would be like committing suicide. Kendrick had felt sure that by now some plan would have come to mind, some way to thwart Draeger without placing himself in such immediate danger. Unfortunately, his mind remained obstinately blank.

The screaming started again, a ragged and terrible animal sound, drifting from somewhere deeper within the building.

Kendrick was far from surprised to find more bodies inside, lying next to a pair of wide doors at the far end of a hallway. Kendrick gagged again at the stench of blood and viscera until his senses could adjust to filter it out. He noticed that both doors had been partly blown off their hinges.

Stepping closer to the corpses, he recognized them as some of Draeger's men. Marlin Smeby was not among them. At first Kendrick assumed they had been blown apart by the force of the explosives after having made a dangerous error in trying to blast their way into the facility interior. But closer inspection revealed that their flesh had been torn and ripped as if by claws. He nudged one body with his foot, trying very hard not to think about what these injuries signified.

The corpse cradled something in its arms. Another nuke, Kendrick realized, shuddering. It had almost certainly been retrieved from one of the dead Los Muertos whom he and Buddy had come across earlier. Two nukes now located, but still with the possibility of another.

Kendrick passed through the ruined doors into a wide office space scattered with the mouldering corpses of yet more Los Muertos. One even appeared to have raked his own eyes out of his skull, while another had clearly blown his own brains out with his rifle. The wall against which he had propped himself was still liberally smeared with the resulting gore.

Kendrick heard another sound, neither screaming nor gunshots this time. More like a bell gently tinkling, as if far away. He stood stock-still, trying to work out what this was, but it faded away to nothing after several seconds.

As far as he could tell, most of the corpses around him had engaged in what looked like mutually assisted suicide. Some lay twisted together in a deadly embrace, knifes still clutched in their fists. Kendrick could not imagine what demons had driven them to such deaths.

He moved on, through another door and into a room filled with racks of delicate-looking computer equipment. He halted, tensing up, at first thinking that something living was in there with him. He relaxed again on seeing that it was another body, a woman's.

He stepped closer and discovered, shocked, that it was his erstwhile interrogator. Leigh squatted in a corner, her combat rifle propped between her knees, its barrel placed under the shattered remains of her jaw. Kendrick looked away quickly.

He glanced around the room and, though he was no expert, he was prepared to bet that she'd raked the banks of machinery around her with automatic fire before ending her life.

He froze on hearing movement nearby. Then, holding his gun out in front of him, he stepped through a further door into a darkened corridor.

"Hold it right there."

The voice came from an adjoining doorway. Kendrick stopped dead, feeling cold metal press into the side of his neck.

"The gun. Drop it, kick it away."

Kendrick reviewed his options and discovered that he had none. He let the pistol slip from his fingers, then pushed at it with his foot. It skidded across the floor and stopped near a wall.

"Turn around."

He'd expected Draeger, or even Buddy. Instead it was Sabak, accompanied by two armed Labrats.

Kendrick was stunned. How had they got here so quickly? They must have gained access to the transport system. That was surely the only way.

"Whatever you're intending, you're not going to do it." Sabak sounded calm, in control.

"I haven't done anything."

"I was at the door of the transport terminus. I saw you beat the fuck out of Buddy."

"I can explain."

Sabak shook his head. "Forget it. I wouldn't believe you anyway. You're working for Draeger, right?"

Kendrick blinked at Sabak, standing with two tough-looking types immediately behind him. He laughed.

"Me, working for Draeger? That's rich."

Sabak bristled. "You've been very vocal against our whole operation from the start. Did you kill those other men back there?"

Kendrick stared at him, incredulous. "Now you're out of your mind. Most of them have been dead for days."

"I still don't feel convinced."

"I'm not working for Draeger. For Christ's sake, I-"

And there it was again: a sound like wine glasses tinkling gently together. Or moths beating against a light bulb.

They all turned as one. Light flickered at the far end of the darkened corridor, briefly illuminating the outline of a doorway that until now had been lost in shadows. The strange sound grew louder before fading again.

And then they appeared: tiny, frail, dream-like bodies, all with the face of Robert Vincenzo and each of them wrapped in an eerie halo of light. At first just a few, then a dozen, then yet more emerged from the darkness.

Kendrick turned to Sabak. "Those are the things that killed all these people."

But Sabak wasn't listening to him. "I didn't think…" Clearly frightened, he turned to his men. "Get hold of him."

Kendrick was gripped by both arms and dragged back the way he had come. Now he was hustled along a corridor he hadn't yet explored, to a room at the far end. To Kendrick's despair, Sabak had meanwhile confiscated his pistol.

"What do you know about this?" Sabak was pointing to an untidy pile of electronic junk lying in the far corner of the room. Racks of equipment filled the surrounding walls, stretching into unlit gloom.

As Kendrick looked closer, the junk resolved into something else altogether.

He recognized the tiny read-out and the oblong box it was attached to. Plastic explosives were carefully packed around it, and myriad wires linked it all like the serpent-hair of a cybernetic Medusa.

The third and previously unaccounted-for nuke, which he'd been so sure that Draeger had in his possession.

Kendrick licked his lips. "It's a nuclear bomb."

A woman knelt by the device, lost in contemplation. She started gently probing it with some hand-held device. He just hoped she was an expert who knew what she was doing.

She spared Kendrick's arrival the briefest glance before leaning over until the side of her head touched the floor, peering into the narrow space between the nuke itself and the wall against which it was placed.

Sabak spoke to her. "Shirl, is that definitely what he says? No chance it's a decoy or something else altogether?"

She shook her head without even looking at them. "It's the real deal: a field nuke – backpack tactical weapon. Normally used for high-yield radiation effect, but still powerful enough to blow at least a hole in the hull." She paused, as if in contemplation. "No, make that rip the place to shit."

"Okay, then, can you disarm it?"

"Most of these wires have nothing to do with the nuke itself," Shirl explained. "It's all to do with booby-trapping. If we so much as move this thing from where it's currently sitting, there's no guarantee it isn't just going to blow immediately." She shook her head. "We need somebody who knows more about these things than I do. I'm out of my depth."

"Is it on any kind of timer?" Sabak demanded.

She shook her head. "Timer's not working. I think maybe they were about to set it, but then…" She shuddered. "Something happened. You saw those other people back there?"

Shirl stood up, wiping dusty hands on her suit. "These things always come with some kind of a remote detonator, a back-up in case the timer fails or you want to blow it ahead of schedule, or at a safe distance. Something hand-held – like, stick a nuke under a dam or someone's presidential palace, drive a long way off, then hit the button."

Sabak started. "You mean there might still be some kind of trigger round here somewhere?"

Leigh's face sprang into Kendrick's mind. He remembered Buddy telling him that she ranked pretty high in Los Muertos. If anyone had been in charge of their expedition here, it might well have been her. So, perhaps any such trigger would be on or near her body…?

Of course, Sabak wasn't necessarily aware of this. "We're going to have to search all these corpses," Sabak was even then saying with obvious distaste. "And carefully."

"Just listen to me," Kendrick insisted. Sabak gave him an annoyed glance. "Draeger is around here somewhere, and I'll bet you anything he's looking for that detonator, if he hasn't found it already."

"Bullshit," Sabak sneered. "Los Muertos is one thing, but Draeger doesn't have any reason to blow up the Archimedes. He'd be killing himself along with the rest of us."

The sound of screaming resumed, sounding closer now. Sabak stepped away, listening, his face suddenly pale.

"Keep a hold on him." Sabak nodded towards Kendrick. "And bring him along. Shirl, keep working on that thing and let me know if you can figure anything out. Just… be seriously fucking careful."

"Really? I thought maybe I'd just cut the blue wire and see what happened," she deadpanned.

Kendrick's two guards pushed him along immediately behind Sabak as they made their way towards the source of the screaming. The sound, an unending ululation like nothing he had ever heard, raised the hairs on the back of Kendrick's neck. He wondered how anyone could have the physical ability to scream so consistently, and for so long.

They turned a corner and found two more of Sabak's men waiting by an open doorway, their weapons at the ready. Kendrick couldn't yet see what lay beyond.

"They're in there," said one of the men. Kendrick could see how frightened he was. He felt a sudden tightening in his own chest, and didn't want to see what was in there.

As Sabak stepped forward the screaming stopped, to be replaced by a fit of coughing, then by the sound of someone gasping for breath.

Sabak stood for a long time at the doorway, staring at whatever lay beyond,

"Sabak." No response. "Sabak," Kendrick called to him again.

The man finally turned to look at him. "Bring him forward," he ordered, almost under his breath.

Beyond the doorway lay an area that had clearly once served as a canteen. Plastic chairs and tables had long ago been neatly stacked in a corner.

In the empty centre of the room two of Draeger's men were in the gruesome process of killing themselves. One had torn off his spacesuit and was gouging deep gashes in his bare chest with a knife. His shirt hung around his waist in tatters. He appeared unaware of his audience.

The other, however, untwisted himself from the foetus position he had assumed, staring back at Kendrick and Sabak. Then, as they watched, he crouched down on all fours and proceeded to slam his forehead repeatedly and violently against the gore-sticky tiled floor in an apparent attempt to bash his own brains out.

Kendrick saw the bodies of two other of Draeger's soldiers lying nearby, in the shadows. They looked like they'd been shot at point-blank range.

"Listen to me," Kendrick said. "Robert is doing this, do you understand me?"

Sabak shook his head violently. "No, the Bright are -they're just protecting themselves."

"Protecting themselves? Whatever the Bright may be, in essence they're just machines. And machines don't go out of their way to play sadistic games like that." Kendrick could see the uncertainty in Sabak's eyes. "Your mind's been twisted so that you can't see the truth any more."

The soldier smashing his head against the tiles finally slumped over and lay still. His companion sat exhausted, watching his own blood spread across the canteen floor in a widening pool.

"Look," said Kendrick. "Do you see that?"

Sabak stared, mute, as more of the winged shapes emerged from the shadows. They darted here and there, their tiny mouths opening in a piercing ululation that sent spasms of pain shooting into the back of Kendrick's skull.

Suddenly Sabak's henchmen weren't paying so much attention to their prisoner.

"Is this what you came here for, Sabak? Do you think they're going to lead you into Heaven?"

"Just shut up," Sabak snapped back at him.

The ear-splitting wails emerged again from the creatures' throats. Now it felt as though someone had opened up Kendrick's skull and was tossing burning coals inside. He felt the grip on his arms loosen and instantly took the opportunity to pull himself free and run for the shadows and the outline of a door there. Tiny shapes darted at him as he reached it and something soft brushed against his face, feeling like dry cotton sheets. He heard a faint whispering, the kind of sound young children might make when hiding from a playmate in the dark.

Automatic fire thundered behind Kendrick as he pushed through the door and out into a connecting corridor. Angry voices reverberated behind him as he stumbled down a steep stairwell.

When he'd first entered the facility he'd been at ground level. If he was now descending, then he was penetrating the very hull of the Archimedes. Even so, there might be quite a few floors to negotiate before he reached the hull's exterior.

At the bottom of the steps Kendrick found a vast room filled with row upon row of gleaming metal cabinets. He ran on past them to find a stairwell that took him even deeper. He could hear voices clamouring somewhere behind him. He kept going.

Smeby came howling out of nowhere.

Kendrick yelled in surprise as a blade slashed through the air towards his cheek and Smeby slammed into him with his full weight.

Kendrick almost faltered when he saw the other man's face. Smeby had sliced lines into his cheek and brow, turning his features into a demon's mask.

"It's you!" he screamed into Kendrick's face. Then he backed away, tears running down his cheeks, before folding up, his trembling hands pressed against the sides of his head. A high keening noise poured from his lips.

Kendrick's gaze flicked to the doorway from which Smeby had emerged. Dozens of the winged homunculi fluttered in the shadows beyond it.

Now they came spilling through to surround both men, once more filling the air with their howling. Kendrick screamed too, gripping his head as they surrounded him in a vast, flapping storm. His skull was filled with unimaginable pain as incipient madness bubbled up somewhere deep inside his mind.

He stumbled back into the room filled with cabinets, found another door to stagger through and slammed it shut behind him. He was now in a side office with a window overlooking the room where Smeby still crouched helplessly.

More of the malignant creatures poured in from the stairwell till uncountable thousands muffled Smeby's screams with the sheer density of their numbers.

Kendrick stepped away from the glass, sickened. Not real, he reminded himself. Aural and visual hallucinations that burned the sanity out of their brains. Anyone without augments would see nothing.

Of course, that didn't explain the corpses he'd found. But it was easier not to think about that aspect.

Kendrick watched in horror as some of the creatures swirled in the air like living smoke, then rushed forward to smack into the glass that separated them from Kendrick. As the glass began to star, he gaped numbly, unable to accept the reality of what he was seeing. Then he looked desperately around the office. There were other doors at the far end: a sign on the wall announced that one of them was an airlock leading out to the station's exterior, the other door seemed to be an elevator, leading back up to the interior of the Archimedes.

On a metal desk stood a computer terminal. It was active, with several windows of information displayed on the screen. Kendrick stepped towards it, noticing that the dust covering the table had been disturbed recently.

He glimpsed a shadowy movement and heard the click almost too late. Draeger was crouching behind the desk, a gun gripped in both hands. He yelled when he saw Kendrick and fired at him wildly.

Despite the close quarters, Draeger managed by some miracle to miss. Kendrick stumbled away while Draeger, shrieking like an animal, fired indiscriminately into the air before pulling himself upright and fixing Kendrick firmly in his sights.

"What… what the fuck are those things out there?" Draeger shouted, wild-eyed and shaking. His spacesuit was smeared with blood, but somehow Kendrick didn't think it was the man's own.

It was difficult for him to accept that the homunculi were physically real. But if Draeger could see them, and he had no augmentation biotechnology…

"Robert Vincenzo," Kendrick replied. "They're all Robert Vincenzo."

"Who the hell's he?"

"He was down there in the Maze with the rest of us," Kendrick told him. "That's what your augmentations did to him."

Draeger stared at Kendrick with an expression like a floundering fish. "I want to make a deal," he said finally. His voice was cracking.

A deal? Did this man never give up? Kendrick let out a laugh that sounded halfway to a hysterical sob. "It's far too late for that, you stupid bastard."

"I want you to understand something. You do not belong here." Draeger waved the gun at Kendrick. "You do not belong here."

"If that's the case, then neither do you."

Draeger shook his head defiantly. "Move over there and turn around. Put your hands against the wall. I don't know what those damn things are, but nobody's going to have to worry about them much longer."

Kendrick complied, having little choice. "Now stay there," said Draeger.

Kendrick heard Draeger step away behind him.

He twisted his head around slowly and saw the other man move over to a wall panel set next to the airlock. Shadows fluttered beyond the window glass. Kendrick didn't think it could hold for much longer.

Draeger's fingers danced across the panel and the door opened, sliding into the wall. He stepped through, the door immediately sliding shut behind him.

As soon as he was gone, Kendrick went over and studied the same panel. He could try using his augmented abilities to get it open but that might take too much time, judging by the sound of scores of small bodies slamming into the glass just behind him. He tried hitting random buttons in the meantime, but – not surprisingly – that didn't work.

Perhaps there was another way to get out of the station…

His wand crackled into life. "Kendrick? Kendrick, it's Buddy here. I want an explanation." The other man's voice sounded harsh and brittle.

Kendrick slammed open the door of the surface elevator. He could only pray that the thing would work. "There isn't time," he yelled into the wand.

"Tell me now, Kendrick, before it's too late. Tell me you aren't going to-"

Kendrick broke the connection and put the wand back in his pocket. Then he hit a button and the elevator began to crawl laboriously upwards.

Another great shudder ran through the hull around him, much more violent this time. From somewhere not so far away, he could hear a rushing sound again. He glanced at the display on his spacesuit's arm, which told him that the atmospheric pressure in the chamber above him was dropping rapidly. It seemed that the station was venting its air supply.

The rumbling noise grew stronger, rattling the teeth inside his skull. Kendrick had no idea if he'd be able to survive once all the air had been voided.

He pulled out his wand again and hit a switch. "Buddy, did you feel that?"

"Of course I fucking felt it." Buddy sounded distant, distracted. "Someone just blew one of the nukes."

"That's not possible. If one of those nukes had been blown, we wouldn't still be standing here."

"Not if there were other nukes, apart from those we saw." Buddy's voice became very thin, as if he was getting farther away. "Think about it. A station this size, if you wanted a real demolition job, you'd have to plant several of them externally at different points around the hull. You'd need more than one to be absolutely sure the station was fully destroyed, if you were relying on low-yield tactical nukes like those."

"Draeger must have figured that out and found one somewhere. If I can only find him-"

Buddy laughed shakily. "For what? To blow the thing up yourself? It's too late, Ken. It's time you…"

Kendrick stared down at the wand in his hands. Never too late, he told himself.

The elevator ground to a halt with a barely audible electronic ping.

He slammed the door open and stepped back out into the main facility building, immediately breaking into a run. His wand map would tell him where the other external airlocks were.

"Kendrick!"

He gazed down at the wand, his thumb hovering over the button that would break the connection. "Goodbye, Buddy," he shouted into it.

If the air was venting he needed to find a spacesuit helmet soon or he'd suffocate before he could track down Draeger – unless survival without breathing was a real possibility for him now. But how long could he manage? Five minutes? Ten? An hour? Better to get himself a suit and take no chances. Still gripping the wand in his gloved hand, Kendrick stumbled back the way he had come. The winged creatures had vanished, at least for the moment.

"Wait, listen!" Buddy yelled to him.

"I've heard enough."

"No, just listen! There's a satellite array fixed on the outside of the station. If Draeger intends to upload any information to Earthside, he'd need to access that array directly – since the power for half the facility is shorted out. Do you follow me?"

No wonder, then, that Draeger had opted to find his way to the station's exterior. Kendrick suddenly realized that he was starting to hyperventilate, his lungs attempting to suck in air that was no longer there.

"How do you know he has anything he wants to send?" With that computer terminal deep down inside the facility Draeger could have already downloaded everything he needed.

"I don't know. But if he's heading for the array that kind of answers the question."

"I'm still sorry for the way things worked out, Buddy."

"So am I, believe me."

Static began overwhelming the wand, making it nearly useless.

"Can't you hear it?" said Buddy's voice, but it was hard to be sure he was actually addressing Kendrick and not someone else.

"Hear what?" Kendrick yelled over the static.

And there it was. He heard the singing – was that the right word? – which he'd heard while standing on a hill and talking to Peter McCowan somewhere in the far distant future. It sounded as though everything that ever was or ever could be had been condensed and refined into a simple cadence of unearthly beauty.

Part of Kendrick wanted simply to stand and listen to it. Instead, he finally cut the connection and ran along the corridor to find a door that led back into the cavern.

He pushed through to find that the cavern itself had become filled with a commingling of dust, leaves, grass and filaments. Many of the threads were now distinctly golden. He bent himself into the howling wind that had arisen out of nowhere and looked up to try to locate the breach in the hull.

Amid so much chaos it was almost impossible to see far ahead. More people, Kendrick was now certain, were going to die. He wondered how much abuse the Archimedes itself could take before it lost its structural integrity and simply fell apart.

Heavy vibrations rolled through the hull beneath his feet.

Something about the light in the chamber had changed. It was getting brighter.

Everything was getting brighter.

Kendrick saw that this light came from the filaments, which had by now lost most of their silver lustre. They were glowing with a kind of internal radiation. The light had a pale, translucent quality to it.

A golden light.

He ran through the door by which he'd first entered the facility. Something flew past his head, carried in a swirling maelstrom of air that lifted him off his feet before slamming him into the ground again. He watched as a twisted rope of filaments, as thick as a giant redwood tree, tore loose from the soil outside and smashed itself against the foyer windows, sending the glass exploding inwards.

All this happened in an eerie half-silence as Kendrick's ears popped painfully and his lungs laboured to draw in what little air remained.

He scrambled up and ran into the foyer, past some of Sabak's men who had suited up and were now trying to help one of their number whose helmet had been smashed open. They barely glanced Kendrick's way.

He pounded through the far doors of the foyer, heading for the canteen where earlier he'd seen two of Draeger's men slaughter themselves.

He reached frantically for their blood-slicked suit helmets, pulling each one in turn over his head before discarding it. Neither would fit onto his suit. He ran back to the room where Leigh's corpse lay slumped. But her suit was torn, her helmet lying nearby with its visor shattered.

Despair and hopelessness finally settling over him like a great black cloud, Kendrick ran back into the corridor, almost colliding with Buddy who stared back at him. He'd never be able to find a usable helmet in time.

But then, as he reminded himself, perhaps he no longer really needed to breathe. The idea that breathing might be something he could switch off or on at will had simply never occurred to him.

As if responding to this thought, something heavy, wet and translucent slid down over Kendrick's pupils from under his eyelids. He jerked his hands up to his face and touched the membrane, probing gently with his fingers.

What's happening to me?

Now he felt as if he were viewing everything through a very faintly tinted screen.

Touching the skin on his face, Kendrick realized that the ridges left there from his visit to the Maze had now mostly faded. But the skin itself felt hard and smooth in a way that it never had before.

How long could he survive like this? Was there a limit? Or would he be able to survive like this indefinitely? Son of a bitch, I'm still alive.

Where did the energy come from, he wondered, to keep him going without the constant replenishment of oxygen in his bloodstream? Had some kind of internal reservoir of energy, perhaps some new organ that hadn't been there before, appeared inside him? He had a sudden mental image of his stomach muscles peeled back to reveal large copper-coloured batteries where his heart, liver, kidneys and lungs should have been.

Buddy was still staring at him, his mouth working uselessly behind his visor, as if Kendrick could somehow hear the transmissions through his comms channel.

Surrounded by this vacuum, Kendrick experienced a silence more absolute than he could ever have imagined. He pushed his way past Buddy, the glow that filled the cavern now patterning the walls around him with a pale gold light.

Kendrick wrestled himself out of his spacesuit. If he didn't need it he could move a lot quicker without it. He looked down at his wand, checking which way he had to go.

He stepped into a side room to find what he was looking for. Wrenching open a floor hatch, he hurriedly pushed himself down the ladder bolted inside the narrow shaft below. A few minutes later he came to a passageway with a ceiling so low that he was forced to crouch. He moved like a ghost past walls bearing rack after rack of semi-organic circuitry prominently labelled with warnings about contamination.

A sign informed him that he was now in the central AI core. He saw a door ahead and quickly stepped up to it. He'd found his way inside the internal transport system. Stepping through, he found a narrow tunnel and a rail-mounted platform like an old-style railway handcar.

The door that Draeger had disappeared through earlier led directly here, so he had to have come this way.

Kendrick's wand informed him that the tunnel connected to the external endcap of this chamber. He climbed on board the car and found several handholds, mounted with safety buckles, but no seats – passengers were obviously required to stand. He tinkered with the small control panel mounted on a short pillar and after a few moments the car moved off.

A minute and a half later Kendrick arrived at the terminus and found himself facing yet another airlock door. He hit the "open" button and, to his surprise and great relief, the barrier swung wide open without further effort.

He looked inside to see fine golden threads everywhere, pulsing gently with ethereal light. As he sensed something moving behind him he turned and saw the rail car automatically returning to its point of departure.

Kendrick's bare hand still rested on the keypad, also coated in golden threads. He felt a faint sting as-

Cool blades of grass touched his skin, his fingers digging unexpectedly into damp soil. He was back in Scotland, back in the Tay Hills. He clung to the soil desperately, initially unable to comprehend the sudden transition from the Archimedes. The shock of it had dropped him to his knees.

A few moments later he managed to raise himself onto unsteady feet. Beyond the familiar damp hills, covered with gorse and rough grass, the land stretched on quite literally for ever, broken by unfamiliar rivers and forests. Distant mountain ranges became hazy with sheer distance, rather than disappearing out of sight beyond the curve of the horizon.

Kendrick turned and saw Peter McCowan waiting there beside him.

"Kendrick, I want to thank you for getting me here." There was a slight smile on McCowan's lips. "Buddy and the rest of them might not appreciate it, but I'm the only reason the Bright will be able to successfully negotiate the opening of the wormhole." A familiar grin spread over his face. "It's been bad enough as it is with that mad little shit running fucking riot with hobnailed boots over the Bright's collective intelligence."

"I'm glad for you, Peter, I really am. But Draeger's already detonated a nuke, and if I don't go after him right now he's going to get away from us."

McCowan nodded slowly as if this were old, old news. "You don't really imagine that Draeger would blow the station up out of mere spite, do you?"

"For Christ's sake, he already has!"

McCowan smiled, then shook his head. "Ken, you clearly don't get it. That wasn't Draeger. That was Robert Vincenzo."

Kendrick shook his head, appalled. "Robert?"

"He's dying. The nuke was on board one of the Los Muertos shuttles. Detonating it was a tactic born of his desperation. My biggest worry right now, however, is you."

"I don't understand."

"You figured out that Draeger had got his hands on one of the remote detonators, didn't you?"

"We found three nukes, but no detonators. The only possible reason for that is that Draeger picked up at least one of them."

"So what are you going to do – assuming you ever catch Draeger? What do you reckon is going to happen next?"

"I'll find a way to contact the shuttle. Then I can get home."

McCowan cackled, shaking his head. "I can see, even better than you can, how you're thinking. You're like an open book, you know that? With all those things you won't even tell yourself laid bare."

"Okay, then, just tell me whatever it is you're trying to say, then let me find Draeger." Kendrick bunched his hands into fists in frustration. Whatever McCowan now told him, in whatever cybernetic realm he currently inhabited, it still felt to him like they were wasting valuable time.

"You're going to try and destroy the Archimedes," McCowan stated flatly. "You can't even admit to yourself that you never intended anything else."

"That's ridiculous."

"All these years, you've let your hatred for Draeger carry you along. Now here you are, with the chance to destroy the focus of everything he's been working towards. Are you telling me that if you now had such a chance to hurt him, you wouldn't take it?"

"This is me you're talking about!" Kendrick shouted. "I'm not a murderer like he is! This is bullshit!"

"But do you really understand what's happening here? You've doubted everything you've seen all along, regardless of how many others shared those same experiences. But now you think that you have the opportunity to destroy everything dear to the man you hold responsible for the death of your family. It's not like I blame you for that, but that doesn't mean what you're intending to do is right."

Kendrick ran towards him. McCowan stood only a few metres away but somehow that tiny distance became an uncrossable chasm. Kendrick threw himself towards McCowan but landed in exactly the same spot where he'd already been standing. He shrieked with pure rage and began beating at the ground with his fists.

"Ken, stop that."

"Let me go!" Kendrick tore at the stony soil beneath his fingers till shards of pain ran up his wrists. But it still wasn't enough, and he drove his fists harder into the earth, to feel the spike of shock and pain that he knew he should be sensing, to see if he could somehow pry himself away from this hallucinatory place and back to the station, back to Draeger.

"People who've suffered unjustly don't automatically go out into the world to do good deeds," McCowan continued. "They go and do to others what was done unto them, and the whole shitty carnival rolls back to the beginning and starts again. Yes, the worst thing you could do to Draeger is to destroy the Archimedes even before it goes through the wormhole, even with all these people on board, even with me here. But I'm asking you to just think, Ken."

You're already dead, Kendrick thought silently. You died a long time ago.

"The station will enter the wormhole in only a few more minutes," McCowan continued. Now Kendrick tore at his own eyes, feeling blood trickle down his wrists. It wasn't real, none of this was real, so what did it matter? "There won't be any technology for Los Muertos to steal, or anyone else either. Stopping Draeger is one thing, but what then?"

"If you thought I was so dangerous, then why did you bring me all the way to the Archimedes?" Kendrick shouted back.

"Unfortunately," said McCowan, from a thousand miles away, "I did not anticipate that someone would also bring a truckload of nuclear fucking bombs on board."

Kendrick began to smash his head against a rock, cool icebergs of agony crashing behind his eyes with each impact. There was a hard, unpleasant numbness behind his teeth. But what did it matter? What did it matter? What-?

– cheek pressed against the wall next to the airlock, and he was back, he was back. He tore himself away, pain still coursing through him.

It faded after a moment, like suddenly waking after re-experiencing a terrible accident in a dream. Like so much else, a lie, an illusion.

Breathless, his skin smooth and hard, eyes semi-opaque under their nictitating membranes, Kendrick stepped through the door. He pulled it closed behind him and ran the depressurization routine. There was no air to suck out, but still the outer airlock door wasn't going to open until the routine had run its course.

Then he pushed the outer airlock door open and stared off into empty space with naked eyes. He was now at the far end of the station, looking out across the exterior of the chamber's cap. The Earth slid past his view as the station spun on its axis.

Kendrick could see rails on which small platforms were mounted and rungs radiating out from the centre of the endcap. Also at the centre of the endcap was a raised area bristling with communications equipment. The airlock doorway in which he stood was positioned roughly equidistant between the endcap's centre and its rim. The station's spin made the endcap appear to his senses like a vertical cliff. He stepped quickly back from the lip of the airlock, feeling the sudden onset of nausea.

A terrible cold had begun to creep over him and he wondered just how much his body would be able to take of what he was about to put it through. Even though he knew he was running out of time, this gave him more than a moment's hesitation.

Kendrick reached for a handhold positioned just outside the airlock door and pulled himself further out onto the Archimedes' hull. Then he gazed upwards towards the comms array at the centre of the endcap. In the distance he saw a figure in a spacesuit.

It had to be Draeger.

Kendrick gripped on to the rungs and pulled himself slowly upwards, working against the station's spin. He imagined himself as a machine, an automaton incapable of feeling fear or any other emotion. All he had to do was hang on to those rungs and not let go.

All the while a painful numbness gnawed at the edge of his thoughts. There were limits to how long he could survive like this. He kept on climbing, concentrating solely on the rhythmic flexing of his muscles, ignoring the gathering pain as he pushed himself on. Chunks of metal and concrete became visible around him in the inky blackness, some of them spinning wildly. Pieces of the shattered hull, he presumed.

He glanced towards the comms array and saw that Draeger had almost reached it. Kendrick yelled soundlessly, his lungs empty and useless, then pulled himself along faster. Draeger appeared as yet unaware that he was being pursued.

When a shadow passed over Kendrick he almost lost his grip. He managed to hold on and stared up at the underbelly of a shuttle with unfamiliar markings. The craft moved on, disappearing from sight beyond the curved rim of the endcap as it performed a docking manoeuvre.

He'd been right. A man as cunning as Max Draeger would never have come all this way without a carefully planned strategy of escape.

Draeger finally turned his way, perhaps catching sight of the shuttle as it passed overhead. His face was invisible behind the faceplate of his helmet, but it was clear he could see Kendrick.

Now Kendrick knew that he'd become everything Sieracki had intended for him to be: a man-machine built for killing. He felt a distant, almost inhuman sense of satisfaction as he clambered rapidly up towards the spacesuited figure ahead of him.

On the side of the communications tower Draeger had opened a panel behind which lay a display screen showing status lights. As Kendrick rushed towards him, he tried to scramble out of the way and, in doing so, something slipped from his gloved hand. Draeger reached out for it frantically.

Kendrick caught it easily with his uninjured hand and realized that it was a datachip. He could guess only too well what information was contained in it. Though his numb fingers held it clumsily, he continued squeezing it until the brittle plastic snapped and disintegrated.

Now Draeger was trying to get away from him. As he turned for a handhold, Kendrick let the fragments of the crushed datachip spin away. Then he reached out for his adversary.

When Draeger kicked out frantically with one boot Kendrick lost his grip for a moment before grabbing the other's leg and hauling himself on top of him. Draeger struggled and twisted beneath him, letting go of the rungs. He floated away for a moment before returning to hit the surface of the station with a thump after his safety cord had reeled out to its full length.

Kendrick ignored the gloved hands that beat frantically at his face as he reached for Draeger's helmet and released the clasps holding it in place. Draeger continued to struggle desperately for his life but was clearly finding it difficult to manoeuvre inside his bulky space-suit. Kendrick could see the man's mouth working uselessly behind the visor, his eyes wide and full of terror. Then Kendrick twisted Draeger's helmet off its retaining ring and wrenched it away, careful even so not to let go of it.

He watched Draeger's features become puffy, the man's mouth moving soundlessly, his limbs still flailing. After several seconds he grew limp, his lips ceasing to frame dying words that would never be heard. Draeger's face became frozen for eternity in an expression of shock and dread.

Watching an unaugmented human undergoing implosive decompression was far from pretty. Kendrick tried to register some kind of emotion. But he only felt empty, used up. Draeger was dead, but he himself didn't feel any different.

As blackness began to creep across his vision, a desperate, all-consuming need to survive now drove him on. He thought of his wife and daughter, disappearing from the world for ever; of Caroline and her slow, terrible death; then of Peter McCowan.

There were no guarantees that Draeger's spacesuit would fit Kendrick but the two men were of a similar height and body type. Kendrick pulled the suit open and manoeuvred Draeger's corpse out of it. It spun away from him slowly, tumbling end over end.

Carefully, he slotted himself into the suit, first wedging the helmet as best he could between two rungs and praying that it wouldn't work its way loose. The suit felt tight and uncomfortable, but Kendrick suspected that he only had seconds left before he lost consciousness. Then he gripped the helmet with both hands and pulled it on quickly.

With the last of his strength he tapped at the panel on the spacesuit's arm and was rewarded with the sound of hissing air. Overwhelming nausea filled him as his lungs shuddered back into life. He twisted helplessly on the end of the safety line as agonizing spasms racked his body-

After several minutes the worst of it had passed. Kendrick reached into the pockets of the spacesuit – and finally found what he was looking for.

28 October 2096 The Edge of Infinity

Kendrick only realized that he had indeed lost consciousness when he awoke some minutes later.

As he held on to a rung he felt the entire station tremble under him. The stars twisted and flickered as if distorted by a vast lens. A sudden powerful spasm rolled through the hull and finally Kendrick lost his grip. He spun away, the spacesuit's safety cord snapping out to its full length but holding firm. Slowly he drew himself back and took a firm grip again on a couple of rungs. He didn't even want to begin to think of the damage already done to his body tissues during the time he had spent in full vacuum.

Kendrick looked out to the distant curvature of the Earth as it slipped past his point of view and saw a blaze of light appear at the edge of its globe. Sunlight scattered across the Archimedes, and the suit's visor darkened automatically.

"Kendrick, listen to me. Where are you?"

He recognized Buddy's voice coming over a private channel. "I'm outside," he said weakly. "Draeger is dead."

"Jesus, I can't believe you're still alive. I mean… no, I don't know how you did it, but I can see you."

"I've got the detonator, Buddy. And I'm pretty sure Draeger didn't manage to send anything Earthside."

"Just a minute, you've got the trigger? The nuclear trigger? Christ. I…no, wait, Kendrick, listen to me. You're not thinking of doing anything, are you?"

Kendrick floated in the silence of space. Had those cracks visible in the side of the station been there before? No, of course not. Black lines now extended far and wide across the surface of its vast cylinder. He pulled out the detonator and studied it, remembering McCowan's words.

A ghostly light burned from deep within the cracks.

"Buddy?" he said. "Buddy, what's happening inside there?"

Buddy laughed. "You didn't see any of it, did you? I can't begin to describe what it's like… just light, everywhere." Buddy was gasping hard, as if he'd just run a couple of miles. "You can't begin to imagine. Everyone else is safe in a pressurized area, and all we can do is hope it stays that way until we're through. Look, just stay where you are. I'm almost there. I-"

Static crackled across the sound of Buddy's voice, like waves crashing upon a shore, and washed the last of his words away. Kendrick gripped the detonator a little harder, looking back the way he had come. He saw another spacesuited figure moving rapidly towards him across the rungs.

Great chasms of light flickered from deep inside the Archimedes. A gantry broke loose and spun outwards from the space station, trailing fragments of metal. Kendrick pulled himself closer to the hull and watched as the debris spiralled away into the darkness. There was now no sign of Draeger's shuttle.

Space rippled again, and the light from stars older than the universe itself spilled across the hull of the Archimedes.

Buddy pulled himself speedily over the rungs until he and Kendrick came face to face. Visor to visor, Kendrick could see the sweat on the other man's brow. He held up the detonator so that Buddy could see his finger poised just above the button.

"You're not going to do it," said Buddy, more a statement than a question.

"Here's what I've been thinking." Kendrick gripped the detonator hard, terrified of letting go of it. "The Bright were contaminated with Robert Vincenzo's deranged thoughts. Correct?"

"You tell me, Kendrick."

"Then bear with me. Robert's contamination damaged the Bright's chances of successfully passing through the wormhole leading to the Omega."

Buddy waited, mute. Kendrick continued. "McCowan came to me one last time. He knew what I was thinking, what was running through my mind. And, you know what? I thought I was imagining it at first, but I knew what he was thinking too. It wasn't telepathy or anything supernatural. Along with Peter McCowan, I was inside the machine that calls itself the Bright, and I could read McCowan as well as he could read me – maybe not with as much skill."

Buddy waited while Kendrick continued. "The Bright were infected with Robert's insanity. When I looked into Peter's thoughts, what I saw told me that it might be too late."

They rode on a mountain of steel and rock into a great shining chasm of light. The wormhole was preparing to suck them through.

"You can see that it's happening," Buddy implored him. "We'll be there soon. Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

Kendrick laughed shakily. "I only want what's real."

"You could let go of the detonator. You don't need it any more."

Kendrick looked back towards the Earth. "The Archimedes might not go through. Until we know one way or the other, I'm hanging on to this."

Buddy made a move forward and Kendrick jerked away, holding the device out between them.

"The Archimedes will go through," Buddy insisted, his voice hoarse. "For Christ's sake, Kendrick-"

"No, listen to me. If the Archimedes goes through, then that's it – it's gone. You'll have got where you wanted to be, thanks to a man complicit in one of the greatest acts of mass murder of our century, but I guess you aren't worrying about that too much." Buddy's eyes were filled with desperate panic while Kendrick continued. "But if it doesn't go through – if you've got it wrong and there's any chance that Los Muertos or any other pack of lunatics could come here and grab something powerful enough to destroy a solar system, then I hit the button. Do you understand me? I hit the button."

"Fine, okay." Buddy nodded, his expression tense. "But it will go through."

Kendrick laughed, surprised at how ragged the sound was. "Maybe it will, Buddy. Maybe it will."

He pushed himself back a little until he bounced against one of the lower girders of the satellite array, wedging himself there into a narrow space. "Come near me meanwhile," he insisted, "and I'll blow the station anyway. Better that than risk the alternatives, don't you think?"

Buddy stared back, his expression unreadable.

Kendrick glanced towards the Earth, wondering if that view of it would be the last thing he would ever see. Half a dozen tiny lights burned now between the Archimedes and the world below. More shuttles on their way, Kendrick thought, hoping to salvage whatever's left – if there is anything left.

They waited there, suspended between Heaven and Earth.