The world beyond the light flexed and rippled like a pool disturbed by a stone. The darkness of the tunnel fell away into forever, and Lee was looking into the distorted mirror of another place. It was vast, that place, and it was cramped, a warren of interconnecting galleries, pipes and low-ceilinged rooms that were swarming with motion. To look upon it almost broke her eyes, because she was seeing too much of it at once. She was looking simultaneously upon multiple vistas intended by the organization of their geometry to be sequential. The view was focusing, though, narrowing the perspectives, reining in the multiplying spaces until she could see just one: a room crowded with masked, rubber-armoured weasel-rat monsters. Dozens of them were crammed so close together that they were practically on top of one another. There seemed to be a clear barrier in the air, between Lee and them. But they were armed, gripping a selection of nasty shotgun-looking devices. They were very still too, save for twitches of their artificial whiskers and their lashing, naked tails. She saw sharpened incisors bared, saw them braced as there and here were shunted unceremoniously closer. They were a boarding party, she saw. They were about to board her reality.

Bizarrely, her chief impression of them, past the horror and her Kenneth Grahame-related phobia, was that they looked terrified. She’d had a friend at university who kept rats, and she remembered the same frozen stillness when their cage had been knocked or a car had backfired outside.

The robed Mrs. Stig said something to Stig-the-original that sounded like “Umunmallinainungamnugulunuh-uh,” too fast and fluid to divide into words.

Stig clearly didn’t like that and argued back, while retrieving a knuckleduster gun from his filthy coat. Meanwhile, Dr. Khan was staring at the massed rodents. Or perhaps she was watching the clear meniscus that shuddered and clenched between them and the rodents, clearly working its way towards drawing back like a curtain for the main event.

“The space…” Khan said, and maybe what she saw wasn’t the monsters at all, but the equations that must be governing this intrusion. “It’s true,” she choked out. “Fuck me sideways, it really is true. This is the way the world ends.”

From a purely personal viewpoint, that would seem to be true. But robed Mrs. Stig stood up suddenly, obviously in charge and cutting off original Stig with a snarled “Unugramung!” She had a weapon of her own too, a stubby rod almost lost in her big hands. And for a moment Lee thought the pair of them were just going to sell their lives dear against the weasel host.

Then she twisted the rod decisively. Stig pushed past Lee, knocking her onto her backside, and his weapon barked out murderous silence into the darkness—because of course there had been a vermin problem back that way as well.