"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.