by Allen Steele
‘Slight change of flight plan,’ Boggs said. ‘They’ve asked us to make our first landing at the D & M Pyramid instead of at the base camp. Seems they want to get that MRV off-loaded and ready to go ASAP.’ He shrugged slightly. ‘Makes good sense, since we would’ve had to double-back to the D & M Pyramid anyway. Saves us a touchdown, so that’s fine with me. Our present ETA is oh-six-thirty tomorrow, shortly after local sunrise. Shin-ichi and Paul are going to be there when we arrive, so Miho’s going to have her reunion a little sooner than she expected.’
Before Sasaki could say anything, Boggs raised his hand. ‘That’s the good news. Now here comes the bad.’ He unzipped a breast pocket of his vest and pulled out a folded sheet of computer printout. ‘This just came over the mojo from Arsia,’ he said as he handed the flimsy to Nash. ‘Read it and weep.’
Nash unfolded the fax and laid it out on the table. Printed across the top half of the page was a Mercator projection of the Martian northern hemisphere; on the left side of the map, above the Arcadia Planitia due north of Olympus Mons, was a large dot-matrixed swirl. Arcane bar-graphs of meteorological data were printed below the map, but Nash didn’t need to interpret them; the message on the lower half of the page spelled it out succinctly:
ARSIA STATION TO USS.
*** URGENT ***
NOWCAST CENTER UPDATE FROM MARSAT-2 REPORTS SEVERE REPEAT SEVERE DUST STORM DEVELOPING IN ARCADIA PLANITIA (MAP REF. 145 DEGREES NORTH X 43 DEGREES WEST) STOP BEARING EAST TOWARD ACIDALIA PLANITIA STOP ESTIMATED PRESENT WINDSPEED 55 KILOMETERS AND INCREASING STOP STORM ETA AT CYDONIA BASE BY 1800 MCM 8-31-32 AT VERY LATEST STOP NO KIDDING BOGGS THIS IS A KILLER STOP RETURN TO ARSIA ASAP STOP END MESSAGE
8-28-32 1411:17:10 END TRANSMISSION
Nash looked up from the printout at Boggs. ‘It’s your call,’ he said softly. ‘Are you turning us around, or are we still landing in Cydonia?’
‘Oh, we’re still making touchdown in Cydonia tomorrow, all right.’ The pilot picked up the flimsy and shoved it back in his pocket. ‘The storm’s still on the other side of the planet, so the leading edge won’t hit Cydonia until late Tuesday afternoon. But I’m not taking any chances with it. We’re out of there by Monday evening…Tuesday morning at the very latest, and by then we’ll be skinning the cat.’
‘Pardon me?’ Miho asked. ‘Skinning the cat…?’
Boggs’ lips pursed into a grim smile. ‘Southern expression, darling. Put another way, it means we’ll be fucking with the gods if we stick around here very much longer.’
He looked at Nash again. ‘Do whatever you gotta do there in a hurry, pal, and get back on the ship. I’m serious.’
Boggs then turned and started walking back to the gondola.
13. L’Enfant
THE TERRAIN CHANGED overnight as the Akron flew out of the Chryse Planitia; in the first light of dawn, the sun’s amber rays fell across the craters and etched sharp shadows on the crested hills of the Cydonia region. It was a rugged, inhospitable land, as unearthly as any landscape on Mars…yet no more alien than the D & M Pyramid which loomed before them.
At first glance, seen on the distant horizon, the pyramid looked like a natural mountain; Nash was initially unable to distinguish it from the surrounding highlands, even after Boggs pointed it out to him through the flight-deck windows. Then, as the airship gradually grew closer and the pyramid began to take on form and detail, he was stunned not only by its sheer enormity, but also by the increasingly apparent fact that the mountain was the result of intelligent labor.
Like everyone else, Nash was familiar with the thousands of photos which had been taken of this area. During the past decade, the pyramids of Mars had become engraved on the collective public psyche as a symbol of all that is mysterious and unknowable. Photos of the City had been used to the point of cliché by ad agencies to sell everything from cars to deodorant to the rock ‘n roll superstar of the month. Even so, nothing quite prepared Nash for the D & M Pyramid; it possessed a terrible magnificence which transcended familiarity with its photographic image.
The pyramid was almost one thousand feet tall. Even after millennia of wind erosion, which had pitted and scoured the once-smooth red walls, it still retained much of its original shape as when it had been carved out of a pre-existing mountain by the Cooties. Three of its four sides were sharp and even-planed, rising at thirty-degree angles to its distant summit. Around its base, vaguely resembling buttresses, were great piles of stone, the discards of the original construction work.
The northeastern side of the pyramid lay in ruins. As the Akron approached the pyramid, the great cavity in the northeastern slope became more apparent. Rubble from the ancient disaster rested in massive heaps around the lip of the dark gap, thrown there by the violence of the meteor strike. Sunlight gathered around the lip of the jagged crevasse, but didn’t penetrate the darkness which haunted the depths below. Long after the Cooties had completed their work and entombed themselves within the giant edifice, a large meteor had struck the northeast wall, collapsing part of the pyramid and giving it a vaguely five-sided appearance. If the aliens had indeed been in some sort of long-term hibernation within the pyramid, then the meteor had been their killer; its impact had violently decompressed the vast interior chambers, ripping open their cell-like sarcophagi and exposing the aliens to the hostile Martian environment.
Why the Cooties had sealed themselves in the great pyramid was still a mystery, but the final outcome was clear: they had perished in the D & M Pyramid, perhaps without ever regaining consciousness.
The Akron cruised past the pyramid, making a fly-around before starting its final descent. As the airship circled the pyramid, Nash forced himself to look away; he scanned the northwestern horizon. Several miles away, he could see the four smaller pyramids of the City…and there, due north of the D & M Pyramid, he could see the Face itself, starting up into the pink sky.
‘It’s beautiful,’ he whispered.
‘Yes, it is,’ Miho said softly from behind him. Like Boggs, she had been quiet during the entire approach; Nash was startled to hear her voice. He looked around and saw that she had followed his gaze to the Face.
‘I spent almost a year here,’ she continued, staring at the human-like profile which had been carved into the mesa. ‘I thought I would get used to seeing it, but I never did.’
‘You can’t get used to something like that,’ Nash said. She glanced at him and he shook his head. ‘Not when you know it wasn’t made by us.’
Sasaki slowly nodded her head as her eyes shifted again to the D & M Pyramid, but she said nothing. Nash gazed at the Face until it moved out of sight past his starboard window, then reluctantly returned his attention to the D & M Pyramid.
‘Okay, gang, we’re coming in on our final approach.’ Boggs ignored the familiar scenery, focusing completely on the controls as he concentrated on making a safe landing. The ground was closer now as the Akron cruised around the western side of the pyramid; its cold shadow was thrown through the cab windows. He inched the yoke forward, gently playing the elevators and rudder to give the airship the proper pitch and yaw, while he gradually throttled back the turboprop engines. The early morning wind gently buffeted the airship as it rounded the pyramid, coming into the light again. ‘May be a little rough here, so make sure those seat belts are tight.’
Nash gave his harness a perfunctory tug. ‘Heard anything from our reception committee yet?’
‘Only for the past couple of minutes.’ Boggs had a headset clamped over his baseball cap. ‘They’re waiting for us down on the northeast side. We passed over them a few minutes ago.’ He glanced over at Nash and tapped a finger against his lips; he was on a live mike and couldn’t make any comments which he might regret later. ‘When I give you the go, drop the mooring lines and get ready to vent.’
Before Nash could do anything, though, W. J. toggled the switches which opened the vent doors and prepped the lines for drop. Despite what Boggs had just
said, Nash’s role as first officer was camouflage; when Boggs was in the flight deck, everything having to do with the operation of his ship was strictly in his hands. The remark was just for the benefit of anyone listening on the comlink. ‘If you gotta use the head, you ought to do it now,’ he added with an elaborate dour wink.
Nash understood. He slid his left hand into his lap, slipped his right hand into the cuff of his shirt and touched the stud on his wristwatch which advanced the first frame of microfilm into the hidden camera. It was an almost useless preparation, however; once he was in a skinsuit, the camera lens would be obscured.
He looked again through the flight-deck windows; as the Akron completed its fly-by and slowly dropped toward the northeastern base of the pyramid, the engines tilting vertical for touchdown, he could now discern a number of skinsuited figures waiting near a clear patch of ground beyond the buttresses. The true meaning of Boggs’ remark became clear.
They were now in enemy territory.
Once the mooring cables were caught by the people on the ground, they were dragged back and lashed to stakes which had been pounded into the soil. While Boggs safed the engines and went through the post-landing checklist, Sasaki and Nash donned their skinsuits. Nash let Miho go into the airlock first to put on her suit, but it wasn’t entirely out of chivalry. Once he was alone in the passageway, he opened his attaché case and transferred the SIG/Sauer automatic into the right thigh pocket of his skinsuit’s overgarment; as an afterthought, he put a couple of the electronic bugs into another pocket. Neither Miho nor Boggs saw him make the transfer, and he hid the attaché case inside a galley cabinet.
Once Nash had suited up, he and Miho cycled together through the airlock, yet the first step wasn’t to open the outer hatch and lower the ladder. Instead, once they had dogged shut the inner hatch and decompressed the cargo bay, they entered the compartment to unload the MRV. Nash unlocked the cargo bay doors and used the handcrank to open them. He had barely opened the cargo hatch, though, before Miho wordlessly snatched a dangling wrench cable, dropped it through the hatch, then grabbed the cable with both hands and slid down to the ground.
Nash hesitated only long enough to pat the thigh pocket in which he had hidden his gun. Not that he was expecting trouble immediately, but he wanted to make certain that it made no obvious bulge in the skinsuit’s overgarment. Then he grasped the cable and skidded down after her.
Four men stood as a group beneath the wide shadow of the Akron; Miho had already run toward the smallest one of the group and had clumsily wrapped her arms around him, their chest units and helmets clunking as they hugged each other. Nash couldn’t hear anything at first until he switched his comlink to Channel One, then he heard a fast chatter of Japanese: Miho’s voice, and an older, male voice. Another man was standing nearby; after a moment, he reached out and touched her arm, addressing her in uncertain, hesitant Japanese. She turned toward him, and Nash caught her addressing him as Paul-san before she hugged him only slightly less enthusiastically than the first man.
They would be Shin-ichi Kawakami and Paul Verduin; that much was easy to figure out, despite the fact that they were a little too far away for Nash to see either their faces or the handwritten names on strips of white tape affixed to their suits. The other two men, who hovered on either side of them, were neither welcomed into the reunion nor entirely ignored.
Pretending to study the landscape, Nash quickly sized them up and found himself not regretting the fact that he was packing a gun. The one to the left, the taller man, had a Steyr assault rifle slung over his shoulder. The other man, standing to the right, was unarmed, but his companion seemed to be deferential to him, occasionally turning his way as if seeking orders.
A cold tingle surged down Nash’s spine, as at that very moment the unarmed man shifted his feet slightly and turned directly toward him, as if noticing Nash for the first time. There was something familiar in his stance, the way his arms hung rigid next to his sides. A subtle presence of accustomed command. He could only be…
Boggs’ voice suddenly came over the comlink. ‘Hey, Andy! You still in the cargo bay or what?’
Irritated by the distraction, and yet also relieved, Nash turned toward the Akron again. He couldn’t see Boggs through the windows of the control cab. ‘Negatory, Cap. Dr. Sasaki and I are already on the ground. We…uh, went down the fast way from the aft hatch.’
‘Well, don’t do that again. You could skin your gloves or bust a leg or something. Was it Miho’s idea?’
‘Roger that. She was in a hurry to see some old friends down here.’ He could still hear Japanese cross-talk over the comlink. ‘The MRV looks fine,’ he added. ‘We’re ready to wrench it down.’
‘Belay that for a few minutes, bubba. The engines are safed and I’m suited up in the airlock, but I’m having a little trouble with making the ladder work. I think we got some grit in the hydraulics. If you could lower the gangway from out there, it sure would be appreciated.’
‘I’m on it, Cap. Hold your horses.’ It didn’t sound likely; the idiot lights on the airlock status panel hadn’t registered a foul-up of the gangway ladder. Whether Boggs was faking a minor problem and if so, why, was not his primary concern at the moment, yet Nash had no choice but to comply.
He started walking toward the outer airlock hatch, intending to manually unlock and crank down the gangway from beneath the hatch, when he felt a hand grasp his left forearm from behind. A voice which he had not heard for almost twenty years came through his headset:
‘Having a problem there, sailor?’
‘Naw,’ Nash replied as easily as he could. ‘Not at all.’
He turned around and found himself looking at Commander Terrance L’Enfant, late of the USS Boston.
It was unmistakably the face of his former captain, the same face which had appeared on the computer screen back on the Lowell. Yet it was not quite the same. Even distorted by background reflection on the helmet faceplate, he could see that L’Enfant had recently grown a thin, neatly-trimmed mustache which traced his upper lip but didn’t reach the bottom of his nostrils or the corners of his taut mouth. There was a subtle puffiness around L’Enfant’s normally thin cheeks, a weary darkness on the waxy skin under his eyes, as if he hadn’t been sleeping well.
But these changes weren’t as striking as the eyes themselves. There was a disturbing hollow depth in L’Enfant’s eyes, a lack of emotional clarity, a vacant look of…deadness.
Not death; there was a fine distinction between the two. Nash had seen the eyes of men who had been suddenly killed, those who had been snapped from this life into the unknown too fast for them to make peace with themselves: the wide-eyed, disbelieving shock of the ones whose lives had been snatched from them.
No, it wasn’t like that. L’Enfant’s eyes held the cold, unblinking stare of a man who has accepted Death as a brother of the road: a dark companion with whom he can curl up at night, telling strange tales about sailors who had lost their way at sea. Dead eyes. The fathomless gaze of an unhinged mind.
‘You look a little tired,’ L’Enfant said.
‘It’s been a long trip,’ Nash said, bringing himself back to the dangerous here-and-now. ‘Who are you?’
For a second, L’Enfant didn’t respond. His eyes seemed to search Nash’s face, and there was an instant in which Nash thought he caught a glimmer of recognition. L’Enfant opened his mouth and Nash waited for what he was almost certain would come—Don’t I recognize you? Didn’t you once serve under my command? Weren’t you once a seaman on my old sub?—and he thought again of the pistol concealed in his thigh pocket.
‘L’Enfant,’ he said. ‘Terrance L’Enfant. I’m the commander of this base. You must be Boggs’ new co-pilot…’
‘Andy Donaldson. Yeah, that’s me.’ Nash held out his gauntleted hand: L’Enfant either failed to notice or declined to shake it. Nash noticed that the fourth man in the reception committee had walked closer to them. The tape on his suit read Akers; this would
be Charles Akers, one of L’Enfant’s two goons. Nash did his best to ignore him. ‘It’s my first trip up here, so…’
‘Mr Donaldson, are you normally insubordinate to your commanding officer?’ L’Enfant’s voice was smooth yet imperious. ‘The way you addressed Mr Boggs—telling him to hold his horses and so forth—was hardly respectful.’
Before Nash could formulate an answer, L’Enfant stepped back, shaking his head slightly within his helmet. ‘Never mind. I should have learned by now that Skycorp’s fly boys are usually rude. And if you fly with Boggs, you’ve got to be a loser.’ He started to turn away, then stopped and looked back at him. ‘Nonetheless, Donaldson, while you’re staying at my base, you’ll be so kind as to address me as Commander L’Enfant. Understood?’
Not American co-supervisor, Nash noted, but Commander. He wondered if anyone in the Pentagon—or on Earth, for that matter—was aware of this unofficial change of status.
Again, L’Enfant didn’t wait for a reply. ‘I’ll be returning to the base now. Dr. Kawakami and Dr. Verduin will be joining me. Charlie here will help you get that hatch open and unload your cargo. Once you’re done, I expect you to supply him with a lift back to the base camp. Correct?’
There was a six-wheeled, wire mesh-tired rover parked nearby. Apparently L’Enfant expected to drive it back to the base himself, leaving Akers to hitch a ride aboard the airship. ‘Yes sir, Commander.’ Nash found himself gritting his teeth as he replied. ‘We’ll…’
‘Excuse me, Commander.’ Unexpectedly, it was Shin-ichi Kawakami who spoke up; Nash realized that he and the other two scientists had been silent throughout the entire exchange. The elderly exobiologist walked closer to the two men. ‘Paul and I will need some time to check out the MRV before we head back, if that’s all right with you. We can ride back to the base in the airship, if necessary. Perhaps if Mr Akers could escort you back to the base…?’
