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
