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.
They moved on, spotting another group of buildings up ahead: the research facility. Buddy tapped Kendrick on the arm and pointed to the ground.
'Something's happening,' he muttered.
The silver fibres beneath their feet rippled as if a sudden wind had whipped swiftly through the chamber. Except, of course, there was no discernible movement of air beyond a barely perceptible breeze produced by the natural circulation of atmosphere through the huge chamber.
'Forget about it. We need to get moving.' Kendrick was trying not to let his fear show. They started forward again. As the facility moved slowly down the giant curving wall to meet them, a great twisting column of threads rose high above them, rooted in the soil nearby. It stretched across the width of the cavern, joining itself to the opposite side of the hull.
Their gaze picked out glistening bulbous shapes on the silver column's surface as they approached. Kendrick didn't want to wait around and see what might emerge from them.
As they came closer they heard a high-pitched scream from the direction of the facility itself.
'Ken, that sounded like-' Gunshots now: several noisy detonations, one after the other, in rapid succession.
Something rumbled through the hull under their feet. Cold sweat sprang out on Kendrick's skin as he imagined someone detonating a nuclear device -perhaps in the previous chamber, perhaps somewhere outside the station. It was far too easy to speculate on the hull ripping apart beneath them, sending them both spinning out into the endless cold vacuum of space.
But the rumbling faded a few moments later. Kendrick glanced down at the read-out on his arm and found a message icon blinking up at him.
He lowered his arm and headed rapidly towards one of the buildings directly ahead. A sign mounted in front identified it as the primary section of the research facility. Draeger was in there somewhere. He had to be.
'Kendrick, wait. Before we go further we should check back with the others and see if they have any idea what just happened.'
'Bad idea. Whatever they say won't make any difference, so let's just get this over with.'
The low-roofed buildings making up the facility had been tastefully designed from glass and wood. A wide balcony overlooked a pool fringed with pebbles, the water overgrown now with pond scum and silver filaments. It looked like something from an eerily deserted university campus.
Kendrick slowed, wary of running straight into Draeger's men. But there were no more screams and no more gunshots. Buddy kept pace with him, reluctantly.
'Listen, Kendrick, I've got an idea. We're heavily outnumbered, right? We can't just walk right in there among them.'
'I know that, but there isn't time left to try anything else. We'll just have to work it out as we go along.' He carried on towards the entrance.
'If you march in and they see you they'll have no compunction about killing you. Look, let me talk to Draeger.'
Kendrick stopped and faced Buddy. 'Talking to him isn't on the agenda. He used us to get here and the instant we looked like showing him any resistance he ran – but only because he couldn't kill all of us.'
'Those men in there with him are professional soldiers, maybe Augments. You don't stand a chance against them. Negotiation is the only way.'
'Someone is already dead, thanks to Max Draeger's negotiating skills. All I'm saying is, if we don't try and stop it now-'
'Maybe we can find a way to reason with him.'
'Reason with him?' Kendrick glared at Buddy. 'What exactly is your problem? When he blew that guy's head off, did that strike you as reasonable?'
Buddy's mouth worked silently for a moment. 'I suppose what it comes down to is that – I don't trust you as much as I thought I did.'
'Meaning?'
'Meaning maybe I had you wrong. I thought that once you were up here with us you'd understand.'
'What, you're worried I might jeopardize things for you?'
'Look, ever since we found those bombs I've been thinking that if Draeger does have one the last thing we want to do is give him any excuse to set it off. Right?'
'Well,' said Kendrick. 'That depends.'
Buddy looked incredulous. 'On what?'
'On whether or not that means we let him get away.'
Flinging his hands out in a gesture of despair, Buddy made a strangled sound. 'You see? Can't you hear yourself? How fucking monomaniacal do you have to get? One way or another, if Draeger has one of those nukes, he's also got us by the balls – or can't you understand that?'
Kendrick spoke quietly and carefully. 'Buddy, let me explain something. He's got you by the balls. He's got Sabak by the balls. But he hasn't got me, because I don't care about his threats. I'm going to nail the fucker. I want the world to know what kind of man he is. Otherwise everything that happened to us down there in the Maze isn't going to mean a damn thing.
'And it's not even that which really worries me. I don't know how he's going to do it, but I'll bet every last penny that he's had a way out of here figured for a long time. And if he does somehow manage to find something
