“Any second now.” Damon was so excited he was wheezing and dripping with sweat. “Any moment. It’ll be beautiful, so new and different—”
He could no longer see Mozart or Vance; both had disappeared into the escape tunnel and Damon couldn’t help feeling rather proud of her, in a twisted, fatherly sort of way. Besides being the sole woman to face Mozart and a bioscientist with no survival training at all, she had the distinction of being only the second human who’d made it to the tunnels—quite a feat, considering not all of her predecessors were junkies or drunks. When he’d cut the power to her Electrostun rifle, Damon had been convinced the combat would be over immediately. But still she had succeeded, surprising Damon as much as she had startled Mozart by throwing the weapon at the creature and striking it on the head.
But Damon’s concern had nothing to do with the visual aspects of this ultimate of Mozart’s kills; he didn’t need to see Darcy Vance die or watch the alien itself perform the deed. Damon lived for the sound, for the music, and now he quickly returned to the mixer console and jammed the volume slides to the maximum to ensure that the slightest, most elusive thing would not escape the microphones so carefully inset within the ceilings of the tunnels. Every bass, midrange and tweeter, all the amplifiers, everything went to the limit as Damon held his breath and waited for Mozart to give his most magnificent scream ever—
There was a humming, then a distant, metallic thud as the sound system circuit breakers overloaded and tripped. Wired on their own circuits, the medical consoles around the lab kept glowing cheerfully. Only Damon’s recording console was thrown into powerless darkness.
A two-second span of utter silence, then—
“No!” Damon bellowed. “Damn you to hell and back, not now!” He rammed a fist against the console, but of course it did no good; the machine sat there, its power cut, its magical abilities destroyed. Damon spun indecisively, fingers opening and closing so fast they began to cramp. The circuit box—where was it? Where? Brangwen had tried to tell him once, and he had waved the older man away impatiently, not wanting to be bothered with such trivial details; now Damon wanted to punch himself for his stupidity. The apiary itself was huge, with miles of metal-coated electrical wires and junction boxes that led to more junction boxes—he’d never identify the proper one on his own. And he couldn’t very well call the maintenance department and ask now, could he, with Darcy inside Mozart’s enclosure and the object of the alien’s less than desirable attentions at any second? What would he say? “By the way, could you get down here quickly before the alien kills her so I can get the sound on tape?” The creature’s pen was silent now, but undoubtedly Darcy’s screams would soon fill its tunnels.
There—on the table next to the plastic dishes and trash still left from their meal, was Brangwen’s portable syndisc player/recorder. He’d left it behind, knowing the Presley Hall entrance scanners would pick it up and confiscate it. A crude tool and outdated, too, barely fit to use… but unfortunately all that was available. Damon was desperate enough to resort to primitive methods, and there might be enough time to actually pull it off—
Damon raced to the table and snatched up the recorder, checked quickly to make sure the device worked and that there was a disc in place that could be recorded onto. The handheld microphone that Damon used to make vocal notes on his demo discs was dangling off the recording console and he jerked it free and plugged it into the portable recorder, sped to the feeder cage and—
Stopped cold.
The music was there, waiting for him as it had always been; but Damon abruptly realized that the only way to get Brangwen’s syndisc recorder inside Mozart’s cage to capture those elusive sounds was to…
Open it.
He stood outside the glass feeder cage as precious seconds ticked past, staring through the unbreakable panels at the yawning entry to Mozart’s realm. It would be so easy to do: just raise the feeder cage, walk to the open door and step inside, hold the recorder and the microphone out, and step back out when it was over, lower the feeder cage, and lock it up.
“So easy,” Damon repeated hoarsely, not realizing he was speaking out loud. “I’ll just step in and hold out the microphone so it catches the music. He’ll be… busy with Darcy in the tunnels, and I’ll… I’ll hear him screaming, hear him singing. He’ll never even see me, never know I’m there.”
Teetering on the edge of decision, swaying back and forth like the alien occasionally did inside his cage, first one way, then the other. It was dangerous, too dangerous, but… this was him, after all; Damon Eddington. He wasn’t like the others, the junkies and drunkards, or even the ignorant MedTech man that Ahiro had brought in for a reason known only to the Japanese man and those to whom he reported. Even Vance was different—she was there for him to use in his project in whatever way was necessary for him to deliver the results he had promised Synsound… hence the reason she was in there at Mozart’s mercy, and Damon was out here, on the controlling end. In this room, in his situation, Damon Eddington was the controller, the one in charge. The god.
Taking a deep breath, Damon carefully pressed the button to raise the glass feeder cage, knowing the well-lubricated hydraulics would raise the cage smoothly and quietly, without the screech of metal that always accompanied the sliding-back of the metal door that led directly into the alien’s enclosure and separated it from the glass feeder cage. There was a low, nearly soundless hum and Damon stared fearfully through the exposed entryway. Everything was quiet—there was no scrabble of chitinous nails against the slippery, curving tunnel walls that signaled Mozart’s advance, no telltale escalating hiss that marked the beast’s breathing. Damon let his air out in relief, still mindful of the sound his exhalation would make. A few cautious steps forward and he was bathed in the smell of Mozart’s corrupted meals, flesh turned putrid by the pseudo-tropical climate in which aliens were most comfortable. Best not to stay, Damon decided. I’ll just tuck the recorder into the corner where the wall and steel door meet, roll the microphone and its wire just past the threshold and into the alien’s cage. When the music was finished and Damon closed the door, the metal would sever the wires and then he could safely retrieve the recorder and its precious contents.
Damon was still bending down when Mozart catapulted from the entrance to the tunnel, his mouths snapping in fury, his only sound a hissing more filled with rage than any the alien had ever voiced.
“No!” Damon’s voice was hardly more than a drawn-out rasp of denial. He turned to run and his feet slipped, then slipped again, dragging against his weight as though they were glued to the floor and stuck within that gaudy rectangle of red warning tape by a gooey dose of royal jelly. “Not me—NO!”
He made it out of Mozart’s enclosure and rammed the side of his hand against the button that would lower the feeder cage, then stopped its descent by panicking and slapping at it again, inadvertently toggling it off. The third time got it going and he tried frantically to hasten the descent of the glass enclosure into the locking grooves on the floor, hanging off the side as he used his weight in an idiot attempt to increase the drop speed. It was nearly down when Mozart’s terrifying, tooth-filled head filled Damon’s vision. Damon instinctively released his grip on the top edge of the feeder box and sprang backward, shouting in terror as Mozart’s dark, double-shelled fingers found enough room to slip under the edge of the glass cage before it could settle into the grooves in the floor and lock in place.
The cage, built on an open-close cycle for safety purposes, obligingly switched directions when the creature tried to heft it upward.
“Wait!” Damon screamed. “Not me, not ME! I’m the musician—”
He hardly felt it as the alien bounded from beneath the still rising glass box and lifted him until Damon’s chest was even with his huge, dripping mouth. Hissing swelled in his ears, his brain, his heart, blotting out everything but the thunderous beat of his heart. “No.”
Pain then, white hot and enough to make him scream beyond what he could have ever believed he was capable of, slamming through a rib cage that was nothing more than a fragile lace spiderweb against the teeth that split him from breastbone to gut and twice as deep. Writhing in agony in the grasp of the genius child-beast he had nurtured and hated and loved—
—Damon’s last, desperate hope was that the antiquated syndisc recorder still functioned, that its cheap, portable microphone somehow managed to chronicle his final, beautiful death cry.