The Armourer leaned forward abruptly, studying a door-shaped design in the cliff face before him. It was huge, some thirty feet tall and maybe half as wide. Definitely not built to any human scale. The Armourer placed one golden palm flat against the brick-red surface. Dust fell in jerking rushes from the outlines of the door, and there was a sudden sense of movement and purpose to the door shape. As though we’d disturbed, or awoken, something. Molly lowered her feet to the ground and stood beside me, ready for action. The door seemed to stand out before us, more definite than ever, as though taking on a role. It slid suddenly, smoothly upwards, revealing a dark opening. Utterly dark, impenetrable even to my mask’s augmented vision. I tried infrared and ultraviolet, and still couldn’t make out anything beyond the door.
“Don’t worry,” said the Armourer. “I have powerful lights built into my armour.”
“Of course you have,” I said.
Two large lenses rose up out of my uncle Jack’s shoulders, and blasted great beams of pure white light into the doorway. They blazed brightly, pushing back the dark, revealing a tunnel of dark red, almost organic material. Like staring into the body of some enormous beast. The white light was subtly comforting, after so much red everywhere. The Armourer strode into the tunnel, blasting his white light ahead of him, and Molly and I followed him in, sticking close behind. We didn’t want to be left outside the light. The moment we were all inside, the door slid silently shut behind us. Locking us in.
The Armourer just kept walking, counting his steps under his breath. He moved his shoulders just enough to keep the lights ranging back and forth. The tunnel soon opened out into a huge, overpoweringly massive chamber. The sheer size of it was unpleasantly oppressive to merely human senses. The light from the Armourer’s suit showed only brief glimpses of our surroundings. No human could ever be comfortable in such a place. The sense of scale was off the chart. They were bigger people, here. Back then.
The floor was made up of pale yellow squares that didn’t look like stone or metal. Some kind of crystal, perhaps. Flat and smooth, they seemed to swallow up the sound our footsteps made as we trod on them. For all its antiquity the floor was completely unsullied and unmarked, with not a speck of dust anywhere.
“Is there nothing left here to tell us who and what the Martians were?” Molly said softly.
“No,” said the Armourer. “Not a trace. They were long gone, millions of years gone, before the first Human set foot on Mars. Long and long before we found the Tombs. Of course, we haven’t been able to explore much. The Tombs don’t allow us to travel beyond this chamber. But as far as we can tell, nothing remains to even suggest what manner of creature the Martians were.”
“Bigger than us,” I said. “And, they built to last.”
We were all talking quietly, respectfully. As though we didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves. The darkness outside the Armourer’s white light was still complete, and unfathomable.
“Why do you call this place the Tombs?” Molly said suddenly. “If you’ve never found any bodies?”
“Because that’s what this place feels like,” said the Armourer. “A place of the dead.”
“And Louise was here on her own?” I said to Molly. “Your sister must have been scared out of her wits.”
“Oh, nothing bothers Louise,” said Molly. “Not if it knows what’s good for it. If she really was here . . . I mean, she didn’t leave any traces. Nothing missing, nothing broken. Which is not like Louise . . .”
The Armourer was still moving steadily forward, counting steps, or maybe panels, under his breath. And we went with him, to stay in his light. He finally stopped counting, knelt down and placed one golden palm on the floor, covering one particular crystal square. It lit up immediately, pouring out a pale yellow light, strangely unpleasant, like stale urine. The Armourer stood up, and shut down his shoulder lights. Crystal squares lit up all around us, pouring more light into the massive chamber. Great rumbling sounds started up deep beneath the floor. I could feel slow juddering vibrations through the golden soles of my feet. The whole floor suddenly blazed with yellow light, and then the walls, and the ceiling far above. The huge chamber made itself known all around us, appallingly large and entirely unsympathetic. The three of us stood close together, desperate for human contact and feeling, in the face of such . . . inhuman vastness. You could have stuck the whole of Drood Hall in this chamber, and it would have looked small and lost.
There was something wrong with the yellow light, something subtly disturbing, as though it was meant for a different kind of eye, or sensibility. It was like being underwater, though I could make out every detail clearly enough. The light pulsed endlessly, moving in slow rolls or waves from one end of the huge chamber to the other, and then back again. It took me a moment to realise I wasn’t casting a shadow. Neither was Molly, nor the Armourer. That spooked me, on some deep primal level. I wanted to ask the Armourer to put his lights back on, to have some sane white light to look at. But I didn’t. First rule of a Drood in enemy territory: never do anything that might make you look weak. I craned my head back to look up at the ceiling; it had to be three, maybe four hundred feet above us. I felt a kind of reverse vertigo, as though I might fall upwards at any moment. I looked away.
There were no markings, no lines of alien symbols, on any of the walls. Just more flat crystal squares, like those on the floor and the ceiling: smooth and untroubled.
“Why did this place react to your touch?” I asked the Armourer. Just to be saying something. “Did you . . . ?”
“Hell no,” said the Armourer. “None of this is anything to do with me. The Tombs created this room, for us. To serve our needs. Don’t ask me why. It’s a mystery. Ah, there! Can you feel that? Earth gravity has been established. That means this room now has Earth normal conditions. It’s safe to armour down. In the sense that nothing in this room will actually try to kill us.”
“You sure about that?” I said.
“Don’t mess around, Eddie,” said the Armourer, not unkindly. “I have done this before.”
He armoured down, and the golden strange matter disappeared back into his torc in a moment. He was still wearing his messy lab coat, over his rude T-shirt, and looked extremely out of place. But then he always did, anywhere outside his beloved Armoury. He peered interestedly about him, apparently completely unconcerned, so I armoured down too. The air was flat and tasteless, and though I breathed deeply, I couldn’t smell anything. The air was cool, and completely still. I turned to Molly just as the bark surrounding her disappeared. She shuddered briefly, despite herself, and then her head came up and she glared about her. Molly didn’t believe in being impressed by anything. She shot me a quick grin.
“The wild woods I brought with me aren’t gone, I just shifted them sideways. I can call them back at a moment’s notice.”
I looked at her, and then at the Armourer. “Her explanations are even worse than yours, Uncle Jack.”
“What an appalling place this is,” said Molly. “I have been in travel lodges with more character. Whole place looks like one big toilet.”
“Don’t you dare!” I said immediately.
She sniffed loudly. “It’s all right for you. You can do it in your armour. Knew I should have gone before we left.”
“What do you want me to do?” I said. “Extrude a golden chamber pot for you, from out of my armour?”
“You can do that?” said Molly.
“Well,” I said, “I’ve never tried . . . but I suppose, in an emergency . . .”