by Allen Steele
Kawakami said nothing for a few seconds…then he haltingly nodded his head and, after a final glance at Miho, turned his chair back around to his console. Isralilova reluctantly went back to her own work; Boggs remained stock-still, daunted by the bore of Marks’ assault rifle.
As Nash was stepping through the hatch, following Miho and with Swigart’s rifle barrel almost jabbing him in the back, he heard L’Enfant address him one more time. ‘You’ve been stupid twice since you’ve been here, Mr Nash,’ L’Enfant said. ‘As the old saying goes, three times is enemy action. Don’t push your luck.’
Nash didn’t look back or make a response. He simply let Swigart goad him out into the corridor.
Module Five, the females-only bunkhouse which Sasaki was sharing with Isralilova, was located at the other end of the access corridor from the monitor center; Module Three, the storeroom, was directly adjacent to it. Once the three of them were out in the corridor, Swigart wordlessly motioned Nash and Sasaki to walk in front of her; she let a quick thrust of her rifle barrel do the talking for her.
As they marched down the corridor, Nash heard the hatch of Module Eight slam firmly shut. Good; they were alone in the corridor now. Even without Sasaki’s timely interruption, this was exactly what he wanted. Everyone else was either in the monitor center or out on the surface, and the main tunnel was reasonably soundproof.
He hastily calculated his chances of getting the drop on Swigart once Sasaki was in Module Five. The odds didn’t look good—Swigart was armed, alert and undoubtedly trained in hand-to-hand combat—but since the only alternative was remaining at L’Enfant’s mercy, he realized that this would probably be his only opportunity for a breakout. If he could somehow get Swigart to step just inside the storeroom with him, perhaps he could kick the hatchcover against her and…
‘I’m not going in there,’ Miho said suddenly.
She came to an abrupt halt and, turning to Nash, grabbed his forearm. ‘No, I’m not going in there,’ she insisted, her eyes wide and frightened. ‘Paul needs me now. I can’t let him…’
‘Keep going!’ Swigart snapped. She also stopped walking; standing a few feet behind them, her Steyr was leveled from her hip at Sasaki, but her eyes kept darting from Miho to Nash. ‘Down the hall! Move!’
‘No!’ Sasaki didn’t even look at her; she grasped Nash’s shoulders and shook him. ‘I’m a scientist! I’m supposed to be in the monitor center now! Paul’s my friend, he needs me!’
Nash glanced at Swigart, then back into Sasaki’s wild eyes. ‘Miho, you’re not doing him or us any good,’ he whispered urgently. ‘If you fight them, they’ll take you in there and give you the same treatment they gave me. C’mon, just go into your…’
‘No!’ All at once, Sasaki turned around and began striding purposefully back the way they had come. ‘I have to help Paul! He needs me to get out of there alive! I’m the only one who can…!’
Swigart appeared to be startled. Her rifle lifted slightly, but not to shoulder height, as she took a single step forward. ‘Ma’am,’ she ordered, ‘you will turn around and…’
‘Get out of my way!’ Sasaki unexpectedly grabbed the barrel of Swigart’s rifle and angrily shoved it aside as if it were a toy. Swigart was thrown off-balance, both mentally and physically, by Sasaki’s reckless move; in that instant, she turned her back on Nash as she moved to block the Japanese scientist from stalking past her.
Now!
Nash whipped around and kicked his right leg upward, slamming his boot straight into the woman’s stomach just above her groin. Swigart didn’t see it coming; she gasped and doubled over as the blow knocked her against the corridor wall. The rifle barrel dipped slightly…
Ignoring the sharp pain in his battered gut, Nash leaped on Swigart while she was still helpless. He grabbed the rifle with both hands, wrenched it upwards, and pinioned Swigart against the wall with its stock. Swigart’s face twisted in rage; with eyes squinted and teeth clenched together, she clutched at her weapon, pushing it back against Nash.
Her left knee lashed upward toward Nash’s groin, but he turned sideways and caught the blow on the side of his thigh. A good countermove, but it hurt like hell where her knee had connected, and the dodge left him off balance. Swigart captured the moment; with an animalistic snarl, she shoved him backwards with the rifle, causing Nash to fall against the opposite wall of the corridor.
His bruised muscles screamed in pain and his hands jerked free of the rifle. The lieutenant tore it from his grasp. He glimpsed the rifle barrel sweeping around to aim straight at his face, Swigart’s finger darting within the trigger-guard…
Sasaki’s right hand, her knuckles curled into the palm, hammered a ruthless karate chop on the side of Swigart’s neck. The lieutenant staggered, her knees crumpling as the Steyr sagged in her hands. Nash surged forward and slammed a right-hook into her jaw, then followed it with a vicious punch to her solar plexus. Sasaki added another blow to her neck for good measure; Swigart fell face-forward to the floor, her rifle clattering from her hands.
Nash glanced down the corridor. The hatch to Module Eight remained shut; no one had overheard the fight. Luck was finally on their side. He immediately knelt beside Swigart and gently laid his fingertips against the carotid artery under her right ear. He felt a slow pulse, telling him that she was unconscious but still alive. Good enough; he had no personal score to settle with Swigart, as he did with Marks and Akers.
He looked up at Sasaki. ‘Nice moves there, kid.’
Miho was already scooping up the rifle. ‘Get her out of here,’ she whispered, wasting no time on comebacks. She checked the corridor again, then pointed toward Module Three. ‘In there. Hurry.’
Nash grasped Swigart under the arms and hurriedly dragged her down the passageway to the storeroom. He flinched at the sight of the dry bloodstains on the floor, but there was a certain poetic justice to be found; also on the floor were the same bungee cords that Marks and Akers had used to tie him up. Nash pulled Swigart’s hands behind her back and knotted them together with the cord; he felt no remorse when Sasaki gagged the lieutenant with the ripped-up T-shirt which Akers and Marks had used to bind their fists. Turnabout was fair play.
‘Okay,’ Miho said as she stood up from her work. ‘We’re out. What do we do now?’ She looked in the general direction of the command module across the corridor from the storeroom. ‘If we go in there, we could try taking control of the base. Shut down the airlocks, take out the AI mains…’
‘We could.’ Nash picked up the Steyr and checked the clip. Fully loaded. ‘But we could also get cornered that way. Besides, first I want to see what L’Enfant’s got stashed in Module One. Then we figure out what’s next. You still have the keycard decoder?’
Miho nodded; she unzipped her left thigh pocket and pulled out the small plastic case. Nash smiled. ‘Good deal,’ he said. ‘It’ll take us a couple of minutes, but we need to see what their ace is. Still with me?’
‘No argument,’ she replied. Nash stepped over Swigart’s inert body and started toward the hatch, but she placed a hand on his chest to stop him. ‘But I wasn’t kidding about Paul,’ she added. ‘After we’re finished in the garage, we stop them from harming Paul Verduin. Do you understand me?’
Nash remembered the enormous armored hulk of the Jackalope; the MRV looked as if it could take every round from the assault rifle he now held and still keep coming. ‘If you ask me, I think Paul’s the least of our worries right now.’
Sasaki shook her head. ‘No, he’s not,’ she said gravely. ‘Not even Commander L’Enfant is the most of our problems.’ Before he could ask what she meant, she turned toward the hatch. ‘Quickly now. We have no time to lose.’
18. Mama’s Back Door
THERE WAS NO need to switch on the infra-red lamps to avoid detection; the pseudo-Cooties were aware of his presence almost from the moment the MRV’s legs touched the floor of the tunnel.
Bar graphs on the cockpit’s secondary flatscreen arched upwar
ds. ‘Strong EMF pattern approaching from the north-east,’ Verduin said. He switched on the floodlights; on his main screen, the tunnel ahead of him was suddenly awash in their white glare, lending a pinkish hue to the smooth-bored walls. ‘I anticipate their arrival in only a few moments.’
‘We copy,’ Kawakami’s voice said in his earphones. ‘Is the ECM still operational?’
‘Yes, Shin-ichi,’ he sighed, ‘it is quite functional, thank you.’ It was only the third time that Kawakami had inquired about the Jackalope’s electronic counter measures. Verduin had switched on the system before the Jackalope had been lowered into the pit, but Kawakami was still worried that it might have been damaged in one of the many slight collisions the Jackalope had suffered with the shaft walls during the descent. ‘Have Lieutenant Akers give me a little more slack on the cable, please.’
There was a long pause, then Verduin saw the loop of wrench-cable slide a little further down the side of the starboard porthole. The cable was still attached to the top of the MRV; when his exploration was finished, Verduin would return to the bottom of the shaft and Akers would haul the Jackalope back up to the surface. Until then, the MRV would drag the cable behind it as an umbilical cord. He hoped that the cable wouldn’t get tangled with one of the machine’s legs.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’m beginning my reconnaissance.’ Gently pushing down the throttle bar, Verduin pressed his foot down on the right pedal, then followed it with pressure on the left pedal.
One ungainly step at a time, the semi-robotic vehicle stamped forward into Mama’s Back Door. He heard a harsh scrape across the top of the canopy and glanced through the portholes; the tunnel ceiling was precariously close, but he wasn’t in any immediate danger. Besides, there was nothing he could do about it now except pray that the tunnel didn’t narrow very much more before he entered the catacombs.
‘Your telemetry remains nominal,’ Tamara said, ‘but we have just lost the image from one of your cameras. Are you having problems?’
‘Oh, it’s a tight squeeze,’ Verduin replied, ‘but I think I’ll make it.’ The scraping must have been one of the TV cameras being sheared away. ‘Don’t worry. I have more where that came from.’
He was fifty yards down the tunnel now, and it was still empty. He was struck again by how much it resembled a wormhole…or perhaps it had once been an underground river channel? He was about to comment to that effect when he glanced again at the secondary screen and sucked in his breath. The EMF surge had almost filled the graphic display; he switched to radar and immediately saw a blur of white dots inching down from the top of the screen.
‘Here they come,’ he murmured.
One moment, the tunnel in front of him was vacant. An instant later, it was filled with a solid, scuttling wave of pseudo-Cooties. Rank upon rank of huge metallic insects, sweeping toward him like a column of driver ants, clambering over each other, their antennae and sharp pincers flashing in the harsh floodlights…
Heading straight for him.
Until now, Paul had been surprised at his own calm; he had been anticipating this moment for so long, he had almost forgotten the deadly peril he now faced. Now his feet froze on the pedals as his pulse hammered in his ears and his mouth gaped open. Once again, he mind-flashed to those who had died down here, their armored suits ripped apart by these same creatures. He heard Shin-ichi and Tamara both shouting through his headset, but his tongue was a numb muscle in his dry mouth. His hands instinctively jerked up…
And then, quite suddenly, the pseudo-Cooties stopped.
It was as if they had run straight into an invisible barrier only five feet in front of the MRV. The ones at the head of the column halted dead in their tracks, as if paralyzed; the ones in the rear comically piled into the leaders, then backtracked a little. As far as the floodlight beams could reach, there was a solid carpet of the metallic-red creatures, twitching and moiling as if they were a single organism…
But they didn’t come any closer than the five-foot line.
‘Paul!’ Kawakami was shouting. ‘Paul, are you all right? Do you copy?’
Verduin slowly lowered his hands. He took a deep breath and let it out, feeling his heart thudding against his chest. ‘I hear you, Shin-ichi, ah…’
He licked his dry lips and smiled despite himself. ‘The ECM works. The Cooties have stopped their charge.’
He heard cheers and shouting through his headphone, loud enough to make him tone down the volume. ‘I’m going to see if this takes complete effect,’ he said. ‘Two steps forward…’
Verduin pushed down on the foot pedal and the Jackalope took a tentative step forward. The pseudo-Cooties in the front of the column retreated a few feet, inching backward until they collided with their brethren just behind them. All the way to the rear echelons he could see the little robots scuttling backward. He took another step forward; the pseudo-Cooties seemed to be in gradual retreat, pulling back to keep away from the Jackalope.
‘They seem confused,’ he observed. ‘They’re still functional, and I think they’re still communicating with one another, but they obviously don’t like the jamming.’ Paul shook his head. ‘I’m not sure I understand why. Since they’re not organic creatures, I can’t imagine how they could feel pain, so it must botch their internal homing systems to some degree so that they can’t…’
‘Don’t look a gift in the horse’s mouth,’ Kawakami scolded, and Verduin almost laughed. An avid fan of American slang. Shin-ichi must be thoroughly rattled to curdle a cliché like that. ‘We can analyze it later. For the time being, continue going forward. Make it slow enough to give them time to retreat, but keep going forward.’ There was a pause, then he added. ‘Be careful, please.’
‘Never charge blindly into a gift horse’s mouth,’ Verduin replied, snickering slightly. If Kawakami had a retort in mind, he kept it to himself. ‘All right, I’m going again.’
He carefully took two more steps forward; it felt as if he was pushing the invisible curtain in front of him, steadily forcing the pseudo-Cooties back down the tunnel as he advanced. Verduin heard more scraping from above as the top of the MRV’s canopy scraped against the rock ceiling, but he chose to ignore it. The cab was unpressurised, so he didn’t have to risk a blowout if the hull was punctured.
Three more steps forward. The pseudo-Cooties continued to fall back, practically fighting each other to stay out of his path. Verduin remembered a vintage, pre-Green Revolution TV commercial he had once seen, of cartoon bugs fleeing in screaming panic from the spray of an American household insecticide; if he had known it would be like this, he would have painted over the Jackalope on the MRV’s fuselage and replaced it with a can of Raid. It’s too easy, he thought as he continued to march forward.
He was a hundred yards down the tunnel now. By his own reckoning, Verduin estimated that he was directly beneath the D & M Pyramid. Akers was continuing to feed him slack from the cable; no indication of tangling with the MRV’s legs. So far, so good. Watching the main screen, it now seemed to him as if the rear echelons were in full rout; they had turned and were scurrying back the way they had come.
Just within range of the floodlights, though, he could see that the tunnel made a sharp forty-five degree turn to the left; nothing could be seen beyond that point. This was a feature that had not been detected by any other robotic sorties into Mama’s Back Door—but then again, no man or man-made mechanism had ventured so far into the alien lair.
‘Approaching a bend in the tunnel,’ Verduin said. ‘Might be the start of the catacombs.’ He glanced down at the secondary screen. Damn, the radar didn’t penetrate the bend; it was too sharp to get a return signal. ‘Radar doesn’t give us anything, but…’
Verduin looked up at the main screen again and was stunned to see that the pseudo-Cooties were now in full retreat. Even the front tanks had done an about-face and were streaming up the tunnel, racing away from the Jackalope as fast as they had come. He felt a chill race down his back and shuddered w
ithin his suit.
‘Looks like our little friends have given up,’ he said.
‘We see that,’ Kawakami said. ‘Do you have an EMF signature beyond that point?’
Verduin switched back to the original display on the secondary screen; it showed the same bar graph he had seen when the pseudo-Cooties had first arrived, although he noted that it seemed to be fluctuating more strongly now. ‘Strong trace,’ he said, ‘but it’s probably my reception committee on their way home.’
The tunnel was almost deserted now. The ceiling remained high enough for the MRV to walk under; Verduin’s way ahead was now unhindered. He heard a soft rasp through his headphones—a hand covering the mike?—then Kawakami’s voice returned ‘Recommend that you proceed with caution.’ he said almost formally. ‘Repeat, with extreme caution.’
Verduin frowned as he heard the emphasis in Kawakami’s warning; again he wondered what was occurring in Module Eight. There had been some sort of argument in the monitor center just before he was lowered into the pit, but he had been unable to tell what was happening. Was L’Enfant forcing a decision of some sort? For the first time, he also realized that he hadn’t heard a word from Miho Sasaki; she had been in the module when he’d first signed on, and it wasn’t like her to remain mute…
No. He couldn’t worry about that now. After almost three years of studying the pseudo-Cooties, they were close to getting a definitive answer to so many unsolved mysteries. His suit felt close and binding; sweat trickled down from his armpits. Verduin took a sip of cool water from the straw inside his helmet. ‘All right, Shin-ichi,’ he replied. ‘With extreme caution.’
He pushed down on the throttle again and walked the Jackalope down the tunnel. The searchlight danced across the grooves and shallow hollows of the walls; he could feel the tremble of the MRV’s motors behind his seat. Abruptly, he imagined a crowd of black-tie dignitaries in Stockholm rising to their feet in a standing ovation as he walked to the podium to accept his Nobel medallion…
