and talking to Peter McCowan somewhere in the far distant future. It sounded as though everything that ever was or ever could be had been condensed and refined into a simple cadence of unearthly beauty.
Part of Kendrick wanted simply to stand and listen to it. Instead, he finally cut the connection and ran along the corridor to find a door that led back into the cavern.
He pushed through to find that the cavern itself had become filled with a commingling of dust, leaves, grass and filaments. Many of the threads were now distinctly golden. He bent himself into the howling wind that had arisen out of nowhere and looked up to try to locate the breach in the hull.
Amid so much chaos it was almost impossible to see far ahead. More people, Kendrick was now certain, were going to die. He wondered how much abuse the Archimedes itself could take before it lost its structural integrity and simply fell apart.
Heavy vibrations rolled through the hull beneath his feet.
Something about the light in the chamber had changed. It was getting brighter.
Everything was getting brighter.
Kendrick saw that this light came from the filaments, which had by now lost most of their silver lustre. They were glowing with a kind of internal radiation. The light had a pale, translucent quality to it.
A golden light.
He ran through the door by which he'd first entered the facility. Something flew past his head, carried in a swirling maelstrom of air that lifted him off his feet before slamming him into the ground again. He watched as a twisted rope of filaments, as thick as a giant redwood tree, tore loose from the soil outside and smashed itself against the foyer windows, sending the glass exploding inwards.
All this happened in an eerie half-silence as Kendrick's ears popped painfully and his lungs laboured to draw in what little air remained.
He scrambled up and ran into the foyer, past some of Sabak's men who had suited up and were now trying to help one of their number whose helmet had been smashed open. They barely glanced Kendrick's way.
He pounded through the far doors of the foyer, heading for the canteen where earlier he'd seen two of Draeger's men slaughter themselves.
He reached frantically for their blood-slicked suit helmets, pulling each one in turn over his head before discarding it. Neither would fit onto his suit. He ran back to the room where Leigh's corpse lay slumped. But her suit was torn, her helmet lying nearby with its visor shattered.
Despair and hopelessness finally settling over him like a great black cloud, Kendrick ran back into the corridor, almost colliding with Buddy who stared back at him. He'd never be able to find a usable helmet in time.
But then, as he reminded himself, perhaps he no longer really needed to breathe. The idea that breathing might be something he could switch off or on at will had simply never occurred to him.
As if responding to this thought, something heavy, wet and translucent slid down over Kendrick's pupils from under his eyelids. He jerked his hands up to his face and touched the membrane, probing gently with his fingers.
What's happening to me?
Now he felt as if he were viewing everything through a very faintly tinted screen.
Touching the skin on his face, Kendrick realized that the ridges left there from his visit to the Maze had now mostly faded. But the skin itself felt hard and smooth in a way that it never had before.
How long could he survive like this? Was there a limit? Or would he be able to survive like this indefinitely? Son of a bitch, I'm still alive.
Where did the energy come from, he wondered, to keep him going without the constant replenishment of oxygen in his bloodstream? Had some kind of internal reservoir of energy, perhaps some new organ that hadn't been there before, appeared inside him? He had a sudden mental image of his stomach muscles peeled back to reveal large copper-coloured batteries where his heart, liver, kidneys and lungs should have been.
Buddy was still staring at him, his mouth working uselessly behind his visor, as if Kendrick could somehow hear the transmissions through his comms channel.
Surrounded by this vacuum, Kendrick experienced a silence more absolute than he could ever have imagined. He pushed his way past Buddy, the glow that filled the cavern now patterning the walls around him with a pale gold light.
Kendrick wrestled himself out of his spacesuit. If he didn't need it he could move a lot quicker without it. He looked down at his wand, checking which way he had to go.
He stepped into a side room to find what he was looking for. Wrenching open a floor hatch, he hurriedly pushed himself down the ladder bolted inside the narrow shaft below. A few minutes later he came to a passageway with a ceiling so low that he was forced to crouch. He moved like a ghost past walls bearing rack after rack of semi-organic circuitry prominently labelled with warnings about contamination.
A sign informed him that he was now in the central AI core. He saw a door ahead and quickly stepped up to it. He'd found his way inside the internal transport system. Stepping through, he found a narrow tunnel and a rail- mounted platform like an old-style railway handcar.
The door that Draeger had disappeared through earlier led directly here, so he had to have come this way.
Kendrick's wand informed him that the tunnel connected to the external endcap of this chamber. He climbed on board the car and found several handholds, mounted with safety buckles, but no seats – passengers were obviously required to stand. He tinkered with the small control panel mounted on a short pillar and after a few moments the car moved off.
A minute and a half later Kendrick arrived at the terminus and found himself facing yet another airlock door. He hit the 'open' button and, to his surprise and great relief, the barrier swung wide open without further effort.
He looked inside to see fine golden threads everywhere, pulsing gently with ethereal light. As he sensed something moving behind him he turned and saw the rail car automatically returning to its point of departure.
Kendrick's bare hand still rested on the keypad, also coated in golden threads. He felt a faint sting as-
Cool blades of grass touched his skin, his fingers digging unexpectedly into damp soil. He was back in Scotland, back in the Tay Hills. He clung to the soil desperately, initially unable to comprehend the sudden transition from the Archimedes. The shock of it had dropped him to his knees.
A few moments later he managed to raise himself onto unsteady feet. Beyond the familiar damp hills, covered with gorse and rough grass, the land stretched on quite literally for ever, broken by unfamiliar rivers and forests. Distant mountain ranges became hazy with sheer distance, rather than disappearing out of sight beyond the curve of the horizon.
Kendrick turned and saw Peter McCowan waiting there beside him.
'Kendrick, I want to thank you for getting me here.' There was a slight smile on McCowan's lips. 'Buddy and the rest of them might not appreciate it, but I'm the only reason the Bright will be able to successfully negotiate the opening of the wormhole.' A familiar grin spread over his face. 'It's been bad enough as it is with that mad little shit running fucking riot with hobnailed boots over the Bright's collective intelligence.'
'I'm glad for you, Peter, I really am. But Draeger's already detonated a nuke, and if I don't go after him right now he's going to get away from us.'
McCowan nodded slowly as if this were old, old news. 'You don't really imagine that Draeger would blow the station up out of mere spite, do you?'
'For Christ's sake, he already has!'
McCowan smiled, then shook his head. 'Ken, you clearly don't get it. That wasn't Draeger. That was Robert Vincenzo.'
Kendrick shook his head, appalled. 'Robert?'
'He's dying. The nuke was on board one of the Los Muertos shuttles. Detonating it was a tactic born of his desperation. My biggest worry right now, however, is you.'
'I don't understand.'
'You figured out that Draeger had got his hands on one of the remote detonators, didn't you?'
'We found three nukes, but no detonators. The only possible reason for that is that Draeger picked up at least one of them.'
'So what are you going to do – assuming you ever catch Draeger? What do you reckon is going to happen
