Darya’s only certainty was the walls of the chamber. She could sense their solidity, even if she could not see them through the mist. She was sure that she was still moving relative to them, and convinced that ahead of her lay the opening that would lead to the next room. The range sensors on her suit confirmed what she already knew, deep inside her.
The fog disappeared as they entered the second chamber. It was dark, but when Kallik, still leading the way, switched on her flashing suit lights the whole chamber turned into a meaningless kaleidoscope of colors. Again, Darya understood why perhaps there had been no recordings made here. The chamber walls formed perfect mirrors, light reflecting and re-reflecting a thousand times. She tried to visualize how light leaving their three suits would appear when it at last returned to them. It was impossible. A dark spot, dead ahead, pointed the way into the next chamber.
In that chamber, their experience diverged again from what had been reported by Quintus Bloom. The walls showed curving lines of light, running from where they had entered to converge and surround a dark circle at the far end. This was certainly the third chamber. There was, however, no sign of a portal leading to another of the many interiors. Labyrinth had changed, or more likely the one-in-thirty-seven long shot that they had entered Labyrinth at the same place as Quintus Bloom had not paid off.
Kallik paused at the entrance to the fourth chamber. Coming up level with her, Darya saw why. The whole inside was filled with a driving orange sleet, tiny pelting particles that blanketed the interior and ran from the entrance down toward the far end.
While Darya stood dismayed, Kallik and J’merlia backed up along the passage between the chambers. After a little more than forty meters, they halted and Kallik made small adjustments to their final positions. While J’merlia remained stationary, Kallik then drove forward and shot past Darya with her suit set to maximum thrust. At the moment of entry into the new chamber she turned off the suit’s power and sailed on in free fall. Her rate of progress matched that of the storm of orange particles. J’merlia watched closely, and at last he nodded.
“Perfect.” He beckoned to Darya. “Come, if you please, Professor Lang, and we will proceed together. With respect, it is better if I control the moment when we turn the suits’ power on and off.”
Darya was in a daze as she floated by J’merlia’s side and allowed him to control her movements as well as his own. However, she did not lose her instinct as an observer. As they moved through the fourth chamber she examined the orange particles closest to her helmet, and saw that each one was like a tiny blunt dart, a miniature rocket pointed at the forward end and fluted into a four-part tail at the other. Just before they reached the tunnel at the far end of the chamber, the orange darts disappeared. They did not hit anything, but simply seemed to vanish. Darya and J’merlia went coasting on in darkness, toward the gleam of Kallik’s suit lights.
Darya paused as the three met, and she took a long, deep breath. Could anything be more unpleasant than what they’d just been through?
Maybe. By the look of it, the fifth chamber was a candidate.
The space ahead was filled with transportation entry points, hundreds and hundreds of them. The ominous black vortices did not remain at rest, but skated through and past each other, rebounding from the chamber walls in a complicated and unpredictable dance. Darya did not even try to count them, but she shuddered at the prospect of weaving a way through. Hovering at the entrance, she watched in disbelief as Kallik and J’merlia set off to run the gauntlet.
Didn’t anything scare the two aliens? Sometimes she wondered if humans were the only beings in the universe with a sense of cowardice (be charitable, and call it an instinct for self-preservation).
The swirling vortices blocked a view of the other end. It was impossible to tell if Kallik and J’merlia had made it through the chamber. It was also impossible for Darya to remain forever where she was, poised nervously at the entrance.
She took a long last breath, waited until she could see a space which for at least a moment was clear of the dark whirlpools, and plunged forward. In what felt like milliseconds the open space ahead had gone and vortices came crowding in on her. Darya envied Kallik, with her rings of eyes that could see in all directions. She jigged to the right, waited another moment, shot forward, waited again for a heartbeat, then did a quick combined up-and-left maneuver. A vortex zooming up from behind was almost on top of her before she knew it. She could feel the sideways drag of its vorticity as she spurted away, down and to the left again.
The biggest danger of all would be to be trapped close to the chamber wall, with her freedom to move automatically halved. She had been moving mostly to the left, so the wall might be near. She glanced that way, just in time to see a monster vortex bouncing straight at her. She had no choice but a maximum thrust, forward and to the right. She dived that way, then gritted her teeth when she saw yet another dark shape immediately ahead.
It was too late to change direction. The new vortex was going to get her. When it seemed just inches away she was grabbed by both her arms and a violent jerk pulled her clear. There was another dizzying moment, a spinning out of control. Then in front of her she saw a dark opening.
It was the exit to the chamber. Kallik and J’merlia floated on each side of her, holding her as she sagged against the safe and solid tunnel wall of the next chamber.
“A unique experience,” said a thoughtful voice. “And an exhilarating one.”
It was not clear whether Kallik was talking to her or to J’merlia, but Darya made no attempt to respond. Her own unvoiced comment, This had better be the last damned chamber, no longer seemed appropriate. She could already see that this was the last room. Instead of a sphere she was facing into a hexagonal pyramid. It narrowed at the far end to a closed wedge, and Darya saw no other exit. Looking at it positively, they had made it unharmed all the way to their destination. Their suits would support them for many days. Looked at otherwise, the only way out of this place would be to go back through the terrors they had just left. The orange hail of the fourth chamber, if nothing else, would make a return doubly difficult.
The other two were moving forward. Kallik, Darya noticed, was even cracking open her suit.
“Breathable air,” she said, before Darya could protest. The Hymenopt gestured to her suit monitors.
Darya glanced at her own and saw that Kallik was correct. The final room held breathable gases, at acceptable pressure — in spite of the fact that the five previous chambers had shown on the monitor as hard vacuum, and there was no sign of any sealing barrier between them and this. Well, there had also been no sign of a barrier that could stop or absorb the sleet of orange darts, but they had vanished just the same.
Darya opened her own suit, with just two thoughts in her head. The first was that Builder technology would be forever beyond her. The second was that she was not cut out to be a bold and brave explorer. If she escaped from this alive, she would go back to doing what she did best: analysis and interpretation of other people’s wild leaps into the unknown.