Labyrinth of Night Read Free

toned like burnished copper, were intricately patterned, interlaced with whorls and swirls as if cut by a jigsaw. Very strange. Other chambers in the Labyrinth contained wall designs, but none as complex or extensive as these. The camera swiveled to the far wall and stopped. ‘Hey!’ Moberly yelled. ‘Do you see that?’
    ‘Yes, we see it,’ Verduin replied excitedly. Isralilova turned to look at the monitor. After staring at the screen for a moment, she cast a rare smile at Kawakami.
    What they saw of significance in the last wall of the new chamber was nothing at all. There was no door in the far wall.
    ‘That’s it,’ Kawakami whispered. ‘The end.’
    Then Verduin glanced down at his console and stopped grinning. Cupping his left hand over his headset mike, he pointed at his screen. Kawakami looked and felt his elation vanish.
    ‘Electromagnetic surge,’ Verduin whispered. A computer-generated red line in a window on his screen had suddenly spiked in its center. Before Kawakami could ask, Verduin answered his next question by pointing at a more regular blue line underneath the red spike. ‘That is his suit voltage. The red line indicates an exterior source. The surge happened the moment he stepped in the room. I cannot isolate the source, but it is definitely from inside C4-20.’
    They heard a familiar grinding sound in their headphones, picked up by the armor’s exterior mike. Everyone looked up. ‘The door’s closing,’ Moberly said. ‘There it goes.’ The TV image on the monitor screen shifted sharply as Moberly turned around, now showing the door to the corridor quickly shutting itself. Moberly lurched forward a step, but the door was sealed before he could reach it.
    Everyone in the module took a deep breath. Although it had been anticipated that the new room would reseal itself once Moberly was inside, there was still a palpable sense of foreboding. Hal was obviously keeping his own fear under tight rein—the professional cool of a scientist-explorer, typical of a man who had hung a framed picture of Sir Richard Burton above his bunk—but the people at the other end of his comlink were at the edge of their nerves.
    They remembered what had happened to Valery Bronstein…and they were all too aware of the solitary grave that lay on the small hill behind the base.
    Still, Kawakami thought, it’s not going to do Hal any good if we begin to panic. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘It knows he’s in there.’ His fingers found the keypad in his lap and punched in two digits. Arthur Johnson and Miho Sasaki, the American and Japanese co-leaders of the expedition, were on standby in the corridor outside C4-20. ‘Team Lima-Two, do you copy?’
    ‘We’re here, Shin-ichi.’ Arthur Johnson’s voice was stressed. ‘The door just shut. What’s going on in there?’
    Kawakami was about to answer when another sound overrode the comlink: not static, not the usual crackle of electromagnetic interference from the Pyramid. Something formed and rhythmic, as natural and yet unexpected as a coyote howl in the midnight desert. ‘Listen,’ Isralilova said. ‘Do you hear that!’
    ‘Shh!’ Kawakami hissed. Music. Formless and random, even grating, but undeniably it was music, lifting from the alien caverns like the sullen riffs of a subway jazz player, as if an avant-garde musician were lurking somewhere inside the chamber. Weird, yet somehow appropriate…and nonetheless threatening.
    ‘Are you getting this?’ Hal Moberly quietly asked.
    Kawakami glanced at the CD-ROM deck above his console. ‘We’re recording it, yes, Hal,’ he replied. ‘Stand by. Wait for our next signal.’
    The team’s senior scientist had no doubt what the sounds signified. In some way, this was the Labyrinth’s final test. Yet this was something entirely new. Before now, everything beneath Pyramid C-4 had related to equations and common sense. How can anyone ask a piece of music, alien or otherwise, to explain itself as an obvious