Macao Station

Chapter One

Darkness, cold, an echoing icy tomb without air. The man moved slowly, suited and clumsy, floating down the tunnel. He didn’t know why he was there. But he had been drawn. . . compelled. It made no sense.

Onwards into an impenetrable world of shadow. His suit-light flowed over shiny rock, a hostile microcosm of frozen stone. The suit respired clouds of rolling vapour that streamed around him like ghosts. He dragged himself across the rock, drawn onwards into that midnight abscess. His mind was calm and empty. He knew no fear.

He emerged into a larger space where his light didn’t even touch the far wall. The darkness was so deep as to be almost deliberate — a velvety, living medium in which anything might grow. His own breathing filled the universe.

He floated there, suspended, a drifting angel alone in the whole of creation. Immense mass hung poised around him, waiting to crash down, a held breath of darkness. He looked around, seeing nothing. He floated in a tank of purest void — weightless, singular, at peace in isolation.

He was alone. Yet something else was in there with him.

He felt a living wave that oozed from the frozen matter around him, a radiation, a thing that lived inside the folds, woven into the fabric of space itself. It was there. He could feel it. His skin was tingling. His heart began to race. He knew now why he had come. He cast his light around, but the space in which he floated was like a sensory deprivation chamber. There was nothing.

But within that nothing, within that blackness, there was something. . . A pattern. . .

And then it spoke to him.

‘My emissary. You have come to me. . . Listen. . .’