Labyrinth of Night (1992)
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Allen Steele's science fiction novel, published by Ace in 1992, is set around the alien structures at Cydonia on Mars, where something has gone wrong with the operation of Captain Terrance L'Enfant. August Nash, an operative of the private firm Security Associates, is sent by the Skycorp company under the cover name Andrew Donaldson to find out what is going wrong there. (Open Library)
Watches
- Seiko (unidentified model)
- On the way to Mars Nash opens the attaché case the shuttle pilot Massey has handed him. In a small padded box is a Seiko wristwatch with the aperture of an autofocus lens concealed in its LCD face; pressed twice in quick succession, the microfilm camera inside takes a flashless picture, seven exposures to a disc. L'Enfant later glances at it and tosses it on a counter: "Seiko. How cheap." Nash straps it over the sleeve of his skinsuit and uses it to photograph what he finds. The camera is the novel's spy device, not a Seiko product. The maker is named; the model is not.
Source text: A small padded box held a Seiko wristwatch; concealed in its LCD face was the tiny aperture of an autofocus lens. When pressed twice in rapid succession, the microfilm camera inside the chronometer would take a flashless picture. (Allen Steele, Labyrinth of Night, scan cataloged as Ace Books, 1992, p. 136; L'Enfant mocks the watch on p. 214, and Nash uses it on pp. 249 and 251; Internet Archive scan OCR)
- Rolex watch
- To wear the camera watch Nash has to give up his own: he regretfully unstraps his Rolex Oyster and slides the Seiko onto his left wrist with the lens facing out. The text names the Oyster case line, not a model or reference.
Source text: Nash regretfully unstrapped his own Rolex Oyster and slid the Seiko onto his left wrist, making sure that the chronometer was facing out. (Allen Steele, Labyrinth of Night, scan cataloged as Ace Books, 1992, pp. 136 to 137, a sentence that runs across the page break, with the OCR's line-break hyphen in "unstrapped" closed up; Internet Archive scan OCR)