"What's that?" Ivan asked.

"Up there." He pointed. "Look at that mirror array. It's all coming from up there."

Ivan leaned forward, straining to see the dark vault overhead.

"The motion detector? Looks like it's shielded pretty good," he said. He glanced at Sinjira and said, "You getting all this, Chippie?"

"Every second," she said with a totally neutral voice.

She's like Jordan. Ice water in her veins when she's doing what she likes best.

Ivan realized that the motion detector had to be shielded from every corner of the room so it wouldn't get blasted. There was a narrow opening directly beneath it.

Must use a prism there to scatter the light and mirrors amplify the blasts.

Ivan slowly raised his arm, aiming his pistol at the ceiling, hoping he didn't break one of the now-invisible laser beams as he moved. Taking careful aim, dead center, he squeezed the trigger.

The gun hissed, and the pulse hit something.

But not the aiming or the firing mechanisms above them.

A bright beam of light and a dense puff of smoke spilled down.

"Hold on. Stop!" Jordan said.

Moving as slowly as Ivan had, Jordan took off his backpack and unzipped a side pouch. He reached inside and took out a small, metal tube. An emergency flare.

"Packed for every occasion, huh?" Ivan said with a chuckle. He already realized what Jordan was planning to do.

"Always," Jordan said without emotion.

Ivan watched as Jordan twisted the small metal cover.

A brief scratching sound, and then the flare started spewing out bright red light and a dense billow of white smoke.

Kneeling down, Jordan rolled the burning flare into the center of the room. Everyone waited and watched, fascinated, as the smoke expanded to fill the room. It stung their eyes, but the straight red lines of laser lights-the trip wires-became clearly visible.

"Everyone okay?" Ivan called out. "All right then."

How long will our luck hold up?

"Don't break any of the beams," Jordan said. "You should be okay."

He pointed up, indicating the apex of the chamber. The web of red laser lines all emanated from it.

Easier said than done.

"Everyone," Jordan said, "stay where you are."

Before anyone-even Ivan-could react, Jordan darted forward. He ran in a low crouch, nimbly dodging and jumping over the red beams until he was about three meters from the exact center of the room.

There, the web of laser light became too dense for anyone to avoid.

But he didn't stop moving.

He dropped down to the floor and then rolled once ... twice ... three times, until he was on his back, directly under the apex.

He raised his pistol and shot.

Once.

A loud crackling sound filled the room, as if someone had dropped a container of glasses. A bolt of blue light shot straight down at him, searing the floor inches from his head, but he moved fast enough to avoid it.

But even as the dust was settling, Jordan flipped over onto his stomach and jackknifed to his feet.

Ivan was grinning at him.

"Impressive."

The red laser beams and their numerous reflections-not to mention the pulses of deadly light-had vanished in an instant.

Jordan was panting.

Drops of sweat carved streaks in the dirt on his face as he walked back to them.

He and Ivan locked eyes for a moment. Then: "You spend your downtime practicing those moves?" Ivan said.

Jordan smiled and said, "I didn't want you to get all the glory."

Ivan laughed and slapped him on the back.

"Great work, Jordan. Really. Took balls."

Jordan didn't even nod. Then he said: "Lead on."

Ivan turned, ready to take them as far into this alien cave as they would have to go.

37.

NOISE.

"Got a question for you," Annie said as she and Ivan walked side by side down the wide cave passageway. The air was dusty and dry. Ruth walked on his other side, brushing up against him every now and then ... accidentally or on purpose, he wasn't sure.

"What's that?" Ivan said.

"So you didn't know about any of this?"

"The lasers and mirrors?"

Annie nodded.

"Never got this far in. The cave mouth was blocked up." He took a breath. "All new to me."

"What is it, then?" Ruth said. "Who do you think made it-that mirror room and those lasers?"

Annie watched Ivan turn to Ruth, then back to her.

"Good question," Annie said.

Like Ivan, she had her gun at the ready and kept looking around. Their voices echoed oddly in the tunnel.

"Not the miners. Not the Runners. No way they made this. Way too sophisticated, even for Kyros," Ivan said.

"And there may be more," Annie said.

"Bound to be," Ivan said.

The passageway narrowed and widened and then narrowed again until they entered another wide room.

"No mirrors here, at least," Ivan said.

He held up his hand to get everyone to halt.

He had a feeling.

Something ... was ahead.

"This is weirding me out," Sinjira said, unable to mask her anxiety.

She had been recording all along, and she knew she had some killer content. But now something wasn't right.

"That..."

She pointed to one side, and everyone looked at a far corner of the room. The light was weaker there, but she could make out a splotch on the ragged rock wall about ten meters to their left.

Darker than the stone, and not moving.

Not anymore, anyway.

The others followed a few paces behind her as she entered the darkened area and approached whatever it was.

Everyone except Jordan.

"We got no time for this. We have to keep going," he said.

Sinjira noticed how different his voice sounded in the cavern. Not muffled, really, and it didn't echo. But it sounded altered.

Dead.

Stopping less than a meter from the thing on the wall, Sinjira fixed it in the beam of her flashlight. Cocking her head from side to side, she looked at it ... studied it ... but, most important, listened ... and recorded.

Something definitely isn't right here.

The others, milling around behind her, shuffled their feet impatiently, getting frustrated at the delay.

Try as she might, she couldn't figure out what it was.

"Sinjira. We don't really have time for any sightseeing," Jordan called out.

But she didn't move. She wanted to-she had to-figure out what was going on here.

"This ... I think it's alive," she finally said. "At least it used to be."

It wasn't any kind of creature, though, no cave bat or other life form that nested in the recesses of the cave.

But she was positive it had once been alive.

And there were more.

"God," she whispered as she shifted her light beam into the deeper recesses and saw more splotches. Ten ... twenty ... easily more than thirty. And all of them irregular, some crusted with dried blood of various hues.

"What the hell-" Ivan said, moving behind her.

Now that she looked around, Sinjira saw evidence everywhere of something that had died and was now part of the wall.

"Okay. Let's have a look," Rodriguez said, coming up next to her. He took a small instrument from the breast pocket of his jacket and held it up to the splotch.

Lights flashed and the tiny machine made a faint clicking sound. Then there was a short beep.

Rodriguez looked at the instrument, then at Sinjira.

"Hang on," he said. "This is similar to protoplasm but it's not human or any other known species tissue. It's not a living organism."

"Maybe just a piece of it?" Sinjira said as she directed her flashlight beam upward at the ceiling as if expecting to see some hideous nightmare creature lurking up there ... preparing to pounce.

Without warning, the lens of her flashlight shattered. The light flared and then went out. Shards of broken glass made faint tinkling sounds as they fell to the floor at her feet.

"What just happened?" Ivan asked, but Sinjira could only shake her head, confused.

"Can you hear that?" she asked.