Cadmus glanced at the eye-level digital display of his mask. He had used almost three quarters of the contents of the tank.
“The chamber is open to the dome,” he replied, wondering why he was bothering to have a conversation with a mirage, even one remarkably informed. “The life-support plant will eventually fill the whole labyrinth with air.”
“Whatever,” she snapped. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you!”
Abruptly, the figure was gone. Cadmus stared into the darkness, breathing heavily into his mask and wondering if he really had just been talking to a woman who was maybe also a cat. Yet the dust upon the floor was undisturbed and there was no sign that anyone or anything had been in the passage with him. Eventually, his breathing became more regular. He pushed the strange warning into the back of his mind and stepped forward once more.
The distance between corners was now barely a dozen strides. The passage no longer split away to a lower level and his spirits rose with the thought he was near his goal. The third sharp bend on that level was indeed the last, for beyond the final chalk mark the tunnel curved gracefully into a tall archway that opened into the inky void at the heart of the labyrinth. Cadmus slowly turned to the arch, placed a foot upon the final slope and raised his lantern to the mouth of the pitch-black cavern beyond.
“Oh my word,” he breathed. “Incredible!”
The arch opened into a cathedral-like chamber some twenty metres across that rose into a dizzying darkness far above. The star-shaped ground plan remained, for in the light of his lantern he could see five triangular alcoves ascending like huge grooves to the distant ceiling, with the arch opening into the sixth. Yet all of this received a mere glance. Before him lay a tableau that baffled his archaeologist’s eye.
In the centre of the chamber sat a huge egg-shaped cocoon. It was at least three metres tall with dull green skin, an oval aperture that gave a tantalising glimpse into a dark interior and multiple-jointed spindly legs that sprouted from the top and folded to the floor. The cocoon lay partly-submerged in a dark pool of what looked like oil, which in turn was surrounded by a ring of twelve grey rods that rose to waist height. A narrow tongue extruded from beneath the oval opening and formed a bridge to the solid ground beyond the pool. The bizarre, multi-legged monstrosity looked like the work of a crazed taxidermist who had taken pieces of a giant insect statue and reassembled them into a surreal playhouse for the deranged. The mottled pattern upon its skin suggested a biological origin, but if it had ever been a creature of flesh and blood Cadmus was fairly sure it had breathed its last aeons ago. The archaeologist in him knew he had done wrong to expose the chamber to air, for the lack of oxygen would have preserved it well.
“A shrine, perchance?” he mused. The angular depths of the chamber swallowed all noise, reinforcing the aura of desolation. The idea that a multi-legged giant egg represented a strange alien deity lodged uneasily in his mind.
Curious, he stepped down the slope and into the vault. To his alarm the ground was not solid and quivered beneath his weight as if it were a sheet of stretched rubber. Cadmus cautiously circled the rods and swung his light towards another indistinct shape lying in the shadows beyond. When his eyes fell upon the dark bulbous body and tangle of limbs, an uncontrollable shiver ran down his spine and he gave a little yelp of fright.
“How gross!” he murmured.
Half-submerged in the floor were the remains of a huge spider, with a body a metre long and a tangle of legs that must once have stood nearly three metres tall. The carcass was a tarnished maroon colour, which to his surprise was sheathed in what looked like plates of armour. Cadmus was perturbed by the suggestion that the arachnid had somehow sunk into the floor and he backed away, not daring to take his eyes from the horrible sight.
There was something else behind the weird ancient cocoon. Cadmus stepped past the dead giant spider to get a better look and gasped in disbelief. In the shadows beyond lay a rounded capsule, about the size and shape of a human coffin. The faded emblem upon the white casing was the stars and stripes of the United States of America.
“But that’s impossible!” he muttered.
“Impossible?” came a familiar mocking voice. “Can you not open your heart and mind to the possibility of what you see here?”
The woman leaned casually against one of the upright rods, examining her black-lacquered fingernails with a tiger-like grace. Cadmus had to admit he had a hell of a vivid imagination when it came to creating this particular delusion.
“Oh,” he said, faking a weary nonchalance. “Little Miss Mirage is back to haunt me.”
“You ignored my warning.”
“Call me old-fashioned, but I tend to dismiss advice given to me by random cat women in dark tunnels,” he retorted. He glanced again at his face-mask display, wondering whether it was a lack of oxygen causing him to hallucinate. “As for opening my mind to the impossible, I assume my head must be a tad crowded right now if you’re already in there.”
“That’s the trouble with you humans,” she said and sighed. “Always putting your faith in the wrong thing. Back in the old days you had proper places of worship and would beseech us to walk the Earth. You think this is a temple? It’s no more than a morgue.”
“This alien, err… thing is buried with a human cryogenic survival capsule,” Cadmus said cautiously. “As I recall, the Americans experimented with them in the first half of the twenty-second century, before we had ships with ED drives. Yet this tomb is a hundred thousand years old. Would my dear mirage care to comment?”
“Not really, no.”
“Time travel!” exclaimed Cadmus. “The Americans invented a time machine!”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” she snapped. “You humans have enough trouble getting from one day to the next.”
Cadmus looked at the capsule and knew this was why his Que Qiao paymasters had sent him to Falsafah. Forgetting the cat woman, the egg-shaped cocoon and even the scary spider, he stepped closer to look. His boots kicked up a cloud of dust and for an instant he spotted a thin red line hovering above the ground, stretching from one side of the chamber to the other. Startled, he swept the lantern beam across the room and saw a small orange cylinder next to the entrance archway, fastened to the wall with a thoroughly-modern metal clamp. He was certain the amber warning light it flashed had not been visible before.
“Crap!” Cadmus cursed.
“Booby trap!” cried the woman, grinning. “Humans are so horrible to one another!”
With a surprising turn of speed, Cadmus leaped across the chamber towards the arch but reached it moments too late. The cylinder exploded with a roar and a blinding puff of smoke, punctuated by the cascading clatter of masonry torn from the wall. A shower of glass bricks crashed down and instantly pinned him to the floor.
“Help me!” he gasped. He tried to move, but his oxygen mask had been ripped from his face by the explosion and his struggles were becoming weaker by the second.
“I did tell you that some things are best left buried,” murmured the woman.
Lying in pain, Cadmus’ eyes grew wide as she walked to where he lay and calmly regarded his smashed and dying body, trapped beneath the tumble of rubble. After one last disparaging frown, the woman vanished before his eyes in a cat-shaped blur. Cadmus’ stare of terror froze like the breath upon his lips and he saw no more.
Chapter Four
The deserts of Falsafah
RED DUNES stretched as far as the eye could see. The black gravel road, the only evidence of humanity disturbing the bleak landscape, had long been left behind somewhere beyond the horizon as the stolen transport ploughed through shifting sands from one dry valley to the next. The air was hazy with dust from the ferociously-fast winds that whipped the sands into new shapes, lending an ethereal quality to the pale pink sky.