Labyrinth of Night

by Allen Steele

  It now seemed to many Americans still suspicious of Russian motives as if the CIS was about to swipe a major scientific discovery from the hands of the United States. The Cooties and the City became a sore point for the man in the street. A national boycott of Russian products was begun by the Republican Party, and the archaic-sounding ‘Mars Is Not Red’ bumper-sticker began appearing on cars across the country.

  The nationalistic backlash reached its peak in November, 2028, when the ultra-conservative George White was elected President. During his first State of the Union address to Congress, White alluded directly to the emerging American-Russian disagreement over the salvage rights to Cydonia artifacts (even though, as his critics pointed out, none had yet been discovered within the City). Referring to an ‘American manifest destiny in space,’ President White also made the highly dubious claim that the City belonged to the United States because it had first been spotted by an American space probe in 1976.

  The Russian leadership in Minsk was furious with White’s rhetoric. President Andrei Nasanov, a Labor Party protectionist who took the traditional view that Russian space efforts constituted manifest destiny for his own country, struck back with an even more ludicrous claim that, because the old USSR had accomplished the first landing of a space probe on Mars in 1971, the red planet was rightfully Russian territory. All mention of the United Nations Space Treaty, which forbade national claims to heavenly bodies, was lost in the subsequent squabble.

  If the City had been found to be merely a cluster of abandoned, empty dwellings, the feud might have eventually collapsed in the usual sullen name-calling between the economic superpowers. But then, for better or for worse, the Labyrinth was discovered…

  2. Ultimatum

  AN ABRUPT JAR woke Cassidy from his doze. For a moment, he wondered if the lander had turned around and redocked with the Shinseiki. When the spearhead-shaped spacecraft had departed from the cycleship and commenced its final approach, Jessup had told him that it would take fifteen or twenty minutes until aerobraking and atmospheric entry.

  Cassidy had taken the opportunity to close his eyes; the less he had to deal with zero-gee, the better he liked it. There was another hard bump and a slight fishtailing of the stern, like an airliner hitting turbulence at high altitude. No, he had not landed, and this was not something through which he could sleep.

  He opened his eyes as he instinctively gripped the arms of his couch. In the forward cockpit, he saw first officer Massey’s head above the back of his acceleration couch. The varicolored lights of the instrument panels were overwhelmed by hot-pink light which surged through the narrow slit windows of the flight deck. ‘Are we there yet?’ he murmured.

  ‘Just hitting the upper atmosphere,’ Jessup said from the couch next to him. Cassidy glanced over at him; the NASA man looked as confident as a frequent-flyer businessman riding out a thunderstorm on a Chicago-to-New York shuttle. He peered at Cassidy. ‘How’re you doing there?’

  ‘Superb.’ Another swerving jar as if the lander had been drop-kicked. Cassidy felt his stomach curdle. ‘How much longer till we’re on the ground?’

  ‘Ten, maybe fifteen minutes,’ Massey said. The Shinseiki’s first officer didn’t look away from his controls; his hands gripped the yoke, his dark skin hued red by the light through the cockpit windows. ‘Altitude two-hundred-forty-four kilometers, entry angle fourteen-point one degrees, velocity about sixteen klicks per hour. Things will get bumpy for a few minutes when we hit Mach Two. Just relax and enjoy the ride.’

  The lander skewed left-right-left-right again. ‘Bumpy?’ Cassidy asked. ‘Things will get bumpy?’ He let his head sag against the padded backrest of his couch, then decided that such indirect contact with the fuselage of the lander wasn’t so comforting after all. Atmospheric friction must be causing the outer hull to blister like Texas asphalt…but you don’t cruise down Route 82 at twice the speed of sound, nearly 800,000 feet above the ground.

  Just considering it made his guts lurch. So don’t think about it, he told himself. Pretend it’s a roller coaster at Six Flags. Cassidy shut his eyes again and clutched the armrests, feeling a momentary respite, a little bit of calm. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out, as the fuselage shuddered and the deck jumped beneath his feet. It felt as if the lander were plummeting down an abyss a million miles deep.

  Presently the violence subsided; for a few serene moments it seemed as if the tiny vessel were floating on an air-cushion, suspended in time and space. ‘L-minus six minutes,’ Massey reported. ‘UAMS off, coming up on main chute deployment in four minutes, twenty-two seconds…’

  Much better now. There were still small tremors running through the hull, but nothing serious. He could hear Massey murmuring radio instructions into his headset mike. No sweat, dude. You can make it…

  ‘You still have that relief bag I gave you?’ Jessup asked abruptly.

  Ben opened his eyes. Now there was a weak purple light suffusing the cockpit; everything in the spacecraft seemed to have been tinted with its lovely glow. The airline-style vomit bag was still beneath Cassidy’s right thigh; he had been sitting on it since the lander had undocked from the Shinseiki. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think I…’

  ‘Velocity six hundred-fifty meters per second, altitude five kilometers,’ Massey said. ‘Chute deployment countdown. Five…four…three…’

  He felt Jessup pull the folded bag out from under his ass and shove it into his right hand. ‘Get ready,’ Jessup said. ‘Drogue chutes first…’

  Then the lander was grabbed by God’s own fist, wrenched into a vertical position and shaken angrily; the three drogue chutes had fired to brake the biconic spacecraft. A second later there was another hard yank as the main chutes opened, but by then Cassidy’s guts had given their final revolt.

  He belched agonizingly and clawed at the bag. He barely managed to rip open its adhesive seal and plunge his face against the paper maw before he vomited like never before.

  ‘L-minus fifty seconds,’ Massey reported. ‘Velocity two-hundred-seven klicks, altitude one-point-five klicks. Main engine ignition in ten seconds. Coming up on touchdown at Cydonia Base. Welcome to Mars, gentlemen…’

  Terrific. Cassidy hated the joint already.

  Suspended beneath the giant main chutes, guided by short thrusts from the RCRs, the lander floated like a silver dandelion seed the last mile to Cydonia Base. At fifteen hundred feet, the chutes were jettisoned and the descent engines ignited to slow the craft for touchdown on the base’s landing pad, which was little more than a circle of sand near the habitat which had been cleared of boulders and large rocks.

  Richard Jessup couldn’t see the base because the cockpit windows now faced skyward, but he could imagine what lay below: eleven modules arranged in a row and buried under the red topsoil, the vehicles parked nearby and, not far away, the quadrangle of ancient pyramids which was the Lost City of Mars…

  The lost city of Mars. He wondered how such a romantic term crept into his mind, and then remembered. The day the City had been found by the Burroughs survey team, a few of the boys from NASA headquarters had gone over to the Hawk and Dove, a favorite watering hole on nearby Capitol Hill for government pen-pushers. They had spent the better part of the night celebrating the discovery of ETI so close to Earth; in fact, Jessup had surrendered his car keys to the bartender and had taken a cab back to his place in Georgetown. It had been one of those evenings.

  At one point during the festivities, someone who had read a lot of science fiction—it must have been old Joe Quinlan since he was the only one among them who touched the stuff—had mentioned an old pulp-era story written by Ray Bradbury and Leigh Brackett. ‘“The Lost City of Mars,”’ Joe had cackled as he reached for the third or fourth or fifth pitcher of beer which the bar girl had brought to their table. ‘Man oh man. If they were still around, we oughtta send ’em tickets to Mars just because they outguessed us. Can you friggin’ believe it? A lost city on Mars…’

&nb
sp; Jessup smiled at the memory, then quickly shook his head. No. Cut it out. There was no time for science fiction dreams. He had to think of Steeple Chase first.

  Mars would have to wait. He had a more important job in front of him.

  Within a few minutes of touchdown on the landing pad, Jessup walked away from the spacecraft and headed for the half-buried cluster of modules. White mists of fuel were steaming from the lander’s vents; the ground crew was already moving in with fuel lines to drain the rest of the propellant from the tanks.

  Behind him, Ben Cassidy was being helped down the ladder by Massey. Jessup told the musician to remain by the lander until someone came for him, and for once Cassidy appeared to be in no mood to argue; in fact, he seemed to be having trouble simply walking, taking tentative baby-steps in the lesser gravity. It was just as well, as far as Jessup was concerned; he was getting tired of Cassidy’s lip. He left the musician in Massey’s care and strode off, glad to be rid of his burden for a few minutes.

  Two of the base’s co-supervisors, Miho Sasaki and Arthur Johnson, had been at the landing pad as a sort of informal reception committee. They now followed Jessup, all three clad in the lightweight Mylar skinsuits which had recently replaced the more cumbersome hardsuits of the first expeditions. The white fabric overgarments of their skinsuits were soiled with red dust, and every few seconds, short steamy-cold plumes of vapor vented from their backpacks: waste carbon-monoxide, expelled from the open-loop life-support systems which extracted oxygen from the native carbon-dioxide and fed into the skinsuits’ zero-prebreath environment. It rendered obsolete the frequent oxygen-tank rechargings of the older hardsuits, but it made everyone give off fumes as if they were old-style automobiles.

  Sasaki and Johnson had been effusive in their greetings—quite understandably, as it had been almost ten months since the last cycleship lander had touched down at Cydonia Base—but Jessup had brusquely demanded that they accompany him to the habitat. He shut out the expressions of astonishment glimpsed through their helmet faceplates, just as he consciously excluded all other sensory input: the strange pull of lesser gravity, the crimson boulder-strewn landscape with its short horizon, the weird pink sky and the odd feeling that, if it wasn’t for the colors and the data on his heads-up display, this could all be a hot desert somewhere on Earth.

  As they marched towards the habitat, Jessup paused to look at the City: four enormous, eroded stone pyramids, eerily reminiscent of the Egyptian pyramids at Giza, towering above the flat red landscape. The necropolis cast long late-afternoon shadows across the ground, their tips almost touching the habitat itself; even from here, he could see the cracks and fissures which ran across their flanks, the ravages time itself had made upon these living-rock hills which the aliens, through some undetermined means, had managed to carve into pyramids. Their sheer size was overwhelming; it almost caused the eye to play tricks upon itself, making it seem as if they were somehow miniaturized instead of hundreds of feet in height.

  In the distance he could see the great mausoleum of the D & M Pyramid, the largest of the Cydonia artifacts. Even several miles away, its peak loomed over the tops of the two easternmost City pyramids. He couldn’t see the giant crevasse in the southeastern side of the pyramid, but he knew it was there. And, farther off, out on the edge of the eastern horizon, was the Face itself, a stark profile blindly staring up into the red sky.

  The lost city of Mars…

  Then, as Jessup watched, one of the Russian autotanks clanked into view in front of Pyramid C-l. Twelve feet tall, the AT-80 Bushmaster was as ugly in its design as it was in its purpose; a robot that strode upright on two backward-jointed legs, its revolving upper turret containing a 20mm recoilless machine gun. As it walked past them, its turret swiveled towards Jessup and the autotank halted for a moment, its cyclopean eye briefly scanning the newcomer.

  ‘Stop,’ Johnson’s voice said in his headset. ‘Keep your hands in sight and don’t move.’

  Jessup froze. A quick burst from the machine gun could easily chop him in half, but apparently the Bushmaster’s AI system determined that none of them constituted an immediate threat. The huge war-robot lumbered away, kicking up little spits of sand with its immense flat foot-pads.

  Jessup let out his breath; as he did so, he felt a chill surge of anger. He could almost thank the robot; it had reminded him why he was here in the first place.

  Fuck romance, he thought. This is war…

  ‘So,’ Johnson began as soon as they had walked into Module Nine, ‘do you mind telling me what…?’

  Little had been said amongst them during the long cycle-through in the Module One airlock. Since the airlock could accommodate only two people at a time, the two men had allowed Miho to have her privacy while they waited in the depressurized garage. When it was their turn, Johnson and Jessup decontaminated and climbed out of their skinsuits, dressing in the blue standard-issue jumpsuits which were in the airlock lockers. Sasaki had been waiting patiently for them in the access corridor; at Jessup’s insistence, she had led them down the tunnel-like corridor to Module Nine at the other end of the habitat, where the science lab and infirmary were located.

  ‘Just a second.’ Jessup carefully shut the hatch behind them. Then, without preamble or apology, he unzipped a breast pocket of his jumpsuit, pulled out a sealed envelope and handed it to Johnson. The astrophysicist turned the envelope over once in his hands, grunted noncommittally, unsealed the flap and unfolded the letter within. He quickly scanned the terse instructions and noted the signatures of the President and the NASA Chief Administrator, then handed it to Sasaki and looked at Jessup.

  ‘So…’ He paused, pursing his lips and gazing at the glassware on the chemistry bench. ‘Is this permanent, Dick?’

  ‘Only until the crisis is resolved,’ Jessup replied. ‘You’ve got to believe me when I tell you that it’s not my choice or decision. Everyone has complete confidence in your ability to lead this mission…’

  ‘Except that they don’t want someone who’s so chummy with the Russians.’ Johnson, a squat man with frizzled grey hair, chuckled derisively and shook his head. ‘Christ. I was in first grade when the Berlin Wall was torn down. I remember when they called it the end of the Cold War. Now that asshole President of ours wants to start it up again.’ He shook his head once more. ‘Jesus and Mary, save us from the politicians.’

  ‘Art…’ Jessup sighed and rubbed the back of his head, feeling the bump he had received during aerobraking. At least this was all he had suffered; Ben Cassidy had been violently sick on the way down. ‘I don’t like it either, but this thing can’t function as long as we’ve got a loaded gun pressed to our heads.’

  ‘Then what do you intend to do about it?’ Miho Sasaki folded the letter and gave it back to Johnson, then absently shook her long, straight black hair over her shoulders. ‘This says that you’ve relieved Arthur of command because of “military considerations.” What does that mean?’

  Jessup had read Sasaki’s dossier. A doctorate in astrophysics from the University of Nagoya Institute of Plasma Physics by the time she was twenty-five, a NASD A research scientist on Mars by her thirtieth birthday. Shin-ichi Kawakami’s protégée. She spoke English with barely any accent. A very beautiful woman, and sharp as a tack. No demure geisha girl here. He would have to be careful of her.

  ‘I can’t tell you that right now…’ he began.

  ‘Of course you can tell us that right now.’ Arthur Johnson feigned breeziness. ‘Why, Dick, the two of us go back a long way. Junior year at MIT, if I remember correctly. There’s nothing you can’t tell an old frat brother about, is there?’

  ‘Okay, then, I won’t tell you about it,’ Jessup replied. ‘First I want Sasha and Oeljanov in on this, and I want to give them a chance to remove the Bushmasters and the CAS voluntarily. That’s my decision, not George White’s.’

  ‘What a hero,’ Johnson said sourly. ‘What do you have up there, a nuke?’

  Jessup ignored him. ‘I would
like for the two of you to be here when I confront them. If and when…if they refuse, I want the two of you to quietly spread the word for everyone to take cover. Inside the City would probably be the best place…’

  ‘That’s the worst place…’

  ‘Then at least within the habitat, just as long as they’re out of range of the Bushmasters. Who’s piloting the Burroughs these days? Is it still W. J. Boggs?’ Johnson slowly nodded his head. ‘Okay, then, get Boggs to take the Burroughs up and out of here—way out of here, at least twenty klicks—and to make sure Cassidy’s on it when he leaves.’

  Johnson stared at Jessup for a moment, then nodded his head. ‘Aye-aye, sir,’ he muttered. ‘You’re in charge. Right, Miho?’

  ‘Does this mean there’s going to be a military strike?’ Sasaki asked.

  Jessup looked at her but said nothing. The slender young woman stepped closer to him. ‘Who do you think you are, Jessup? Japan and the ESA are neutral parties to this mission. What gives you the right to attack without our permission?’

  ‘Miho, your government and the Europeans have been consulted at the highest levels.’ Jessup met her gaze and forced himself to remain calm. ‘You may think you’re uninvolved, but you know as well as I do that those weapons can be used against anyone and everyone here. Paul, Shin-ichi, Art, yourself…you’re all potential hostages. Your government recognizes this as well. That’s why the Shinseiki is being used as the staging vessel.’

  ‘For what?’ she demanded. ‘Is it a tactical nuclear strike?’

  Jessup hesitated. It worked to his advantage to hold his cards close to the vest, but if Miho Sasaki erroneously believed that a nuke strike was in play, this could work against him. Sasaki’s great-grandparents had been hibakusha, survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima during World War II; distrust of American nuclear forces was traditional, but it ran deep in her family. If she spread word that the Shinseiki had a warhead aboard, it would not only spread unfounded hysteria, but could also prompt Oeljanov to take hostages.