It was insane and claustrophobic, at least to the human mind. In the many days that they had been exploring it and mapping it out—at least their little corner of it-Bell had realized that there was a symmetry to it. Unearthly perhaps, but it was there. And once he had shut down that awful sense of déjà vu and the superstitious terror that threaded through him, he was able to see this. It made sense to those who built it. It was wholly utilitarian to the minds that conceived of it. No earthly mind, of course, would ever make sense of it or hope to grasp the mathematical concepts it was based upon. The angles were all wrong, the uniformity positively perverse.

But it was there. If your mind could only grasp it.

Thirty minutes into it, the uneasiness and anxiety began to fade and he was able to see the job ahead of them and the path they must take. Even if he himself could not remember the way in or out, his Exosuit did. Its onboard computers carefully guided him via sonar.

Today was the day.

Murphy and he were both lugging the lockboxes of RDX Comtac explosives. If they found the source of the magnetic anomaly—and that seemed a pretty sure thing given that Javonivic and Hubbs had been very close to it two days before—they would activate the explosives and get out.

And this would be their last trip.

They moved down a rectangular passage that was big enough to drive a tractor trailer through. It was thick with marine growths and waving sea grass. Sediment drifted in their lights.

“ETA about fifteen minutes,” Murphy said over the suit intercom. “Shouldn’t be far after that.”

Fifteen minutes would bring them to the hexagonal chamber Javonivic and Hubbs had mapped out. The anomaly couldn’t be much further on.

“Shouldn’t be.”

“Let’s get drunk for a week after this, Chief.”

“I’m with you on that.”

“Keep your eyes open,” Javonivic said over the radio.

“Will do,” Murphy told her. “You hear a sound, it’s just my knees knocking together.”

Of course, Javonivic wasn’t there with them, but she was seeing what they were seeing just as Orr was up in the LSB. Their first few trips into the city, they had gone in blind. No audio, no video. They assumed it was the structure itself or perhaps the density of the water and its unusual atmospheric pressure caused by the glacier above pressing down upon the lake. But it was none of these things. Simply a defective fiber-optic line in the umbilical leading from the Neptune to the LSB on the surface. Orr and his techie had fixed it and now they were no longer alone…even in this place which was lonely as lonely got.