Free The Source by Brian Lumley

Ahead and below, the far end of the shaft was a white disk of glaring brilliance, with its lower rim blacked out by the walkway’s platform. Jazz shielded his eyes, saw a young Russian soldier in uniform leaning against the curved wall. The man at once came upright, snapped to attention, slapped the stock of his Kalashnikov rifle in salute.
    â€œAt ease,” said Khuv. “We need some glasses.”
    The soldier leaned his rifle against the wall, groped in a satchel slung over his shoulder. He produced three pairs of tinted cellophane spectacles with cardboard rims, like the glasses Jazz had once been issued to view a 3-D film.
    â€œFor the light,” Khuv explained, though there was hardly any need. “It can be blinding until you’re used to it.” He put on his glasses.
    Jazz did the same, followed Khuv down the stairway built through the glass-smooth cylindrical shaft. From behind them came a clatter as the soldier’s rifle toppled over when he went to pick it up, then Karl Vyotsky’s husky, threatening voice hissing: “Idiot! Dolt! Would you like to do a month of nights?”
    â€œNo, sir!” the young soldier gasped. “I’m sorry, sir. It slipped.”
    â€œYou damn well should be sorry!” Vyotsky rasped. “And not only for the rifle. What the hell are you here for anyway? To check passes for security, that’s what! Do you know that man in front, and me, and the man with us?”

    â€œOh, yes, sir!” the young soldier quavered. “The man in front is Comrade Major Khuv, sir, and you too are an officer of the KGB. The other man is … is … a friend of yours, sir!”
    â€œClown!” Vyotsky hissed. “He is not my friend. Nor yours. Nor anyone’s in the whole damned place!”
    â€œSir, I—”
    â€œNow hold that rifle out in front of you,” Vyotsky snapped. “Arm’s length, finger through the trigger-guard, finger under the backsight. What the hell … ? Arm’s length, I said. Now hold it, and count to two hundred, slowly! Then get back to attention. And if I ever catch you slacking off again, I’ll feed you into that white hell down there dick first, got it?”
    â€œYes, sir!”
    Following Khuv toward the white glare at the end of the shaft, Jazz murmured sourly: “A disciplinarian, our Karl.”
    Khuv glanced back, shook his head. “Not really. Discipline isn’t his strong point. But sadism is. I hate to admit it, but it does have its uses …”
    At the end of the shaft there was a railed landing where the stairs levelled out and turned to the left. Khuv paused on the landing with Jazz alongside. Waiting for Vyotsky, they gazed down on a fantastic scene.
    It was like being in a cavern, but there was no way it could be mistaken for any ordinary sort of cave. Instead, Jazz saw that the rock had been hollowed out in the shape of a perfect sphere, a giant bubble in the base of the mountain—but a bubble at least one hundred and twenty feet in diameter! The curving, shiny-black wall all around was glass-smooth except for the wormholes which riddled it everywhere, even in the domed ceiling. The mouth of the shaft where Jazz and Khuv stood pointed downward at ninety degrees directly at the centre of the space, which also happened to be the source of the light. And that was the most fantastic thing of all.

    For that central area was a ball of light some thirty feet across, and it was apparently suspended there, mid-way between the domed ceiling and the upward curving floor. A sphere of brilliance hanging motionless within a sphere of air, and the whole trick neatly buried under the foot of a mountain!
    Narrowing his eyes against the glare, which was powerful even through the tinted lenses of his spectacles, Jazz slowly became aware that the spherical cavern contained other things. A spidery web of scaffolding had been built half way up the wall and all around the