by Allen Steele
‘Lay down suppressive fire and hold them in place.’ L’Enfant was bent over Kawakami, balancing himself on the back of his chair. Kawakami glanced up at him; the commander’s face was completely stoical. ‘Let the civilians get out of there, then…’
On the screens, they could see the first minotaur take a lumbering step forward; its armor almost seemed to absorb the bullets, like an ebony sponge soaking up water. ‘They’re not staying put!’ Marks’ voice rose in panic, his matter-of-fact tone suddenly gone. ‘I’m giving them the works, but they’re not…!’
‘Sergeant!’ L’Enfant snapped. ‘Your suit’s ECM will keep them at bay. Now hold your position and lay down more fire. Lieutenant Swigart has lifted off in the Hornet and she can take them out with her cannon. Just…’
‘Goddammit, Commander, the ECM isn’t doing shit to them!’ The robot took another step forward; its long arms were rising menacingly, almost as if to embrace the CAS in a bear-hug. ‘I can’t…!’
‘Hang in there, Ah’ The new voice belonged to Swigart. ‘I’m coming in for a strafing run right this minute, so just…’
‘Commander L’Enfant!’ Now it was Tamara Isralilova on the comlink. ‘Motion detectors have picked up movement near the periphery of the base! It’s coming our…!’
‘Not now, Dr. Isralilova,’ L’Enfant said. ‘Keep monitoring its movements.’
‘Holy shit, Megan!’ The minotaur almost filled the lens of the CAS camera. ‘Get in here and save my ass! This fucker’s about to…!’
‘Hold your position, Sergeant,’ L’Enfant insisted. ‘That’s an order.’ He paused, then added with absurd calm, ‘And both of you…watch your language.’
‘Watch my…? Sweet Jesus, sir, it’s only six feet away!’
‘That’s far enough. Just keep your…’
‘Madman!’ Kawakami’s temper, held under tight rein until this moment, snapped in that second. He slapped his headset lobe and shouted, ‘Get out of there, Sergeant! The ECM will not deter them! They’re too big for the…!’
‘Shut up!’ L’Enfant screamed. ‘Shut up!’
He grabbed the back of Kawakami’s chair and wrenched it upward, and Kawakami was suddenly spilled to the floor. As the Japanese scientist hit the carpet, his headset was torn off his head, breaking his radio contact. Stunned, his breath knocked out of him, Kawakami looked up to see that L’Enfant had already taken his place in front of the console. ‘Sergeant, this is Commander…!’
Kawakami mercifully could not hear the rest; lying on the floor and staring up at the screens, though, he could still see everything.
In a single, violent thrust, the minotaur hurled its right claw straight through the transparent canopy of Marks’ CAS.
‘Marks…!’ L’Enfant howled.
As one screen went blank, the other monitor continued to function, displaying the horror of the moment: frosty oxygen-nitrogen, tinted scarlet by the sergeant’s blood, exploding from the shattered canopy as the massive exoskeleton fell backward, its arms and legs twitching either from shorted-out servomotors or Marks’ death-throes.
As the CAS collapsed, the minotaur withdrew its arm from the wreckage; its claw was bathed in blood…
‘Swigart!’ L’Enfant shouted. ‘Get in there and waste ’em!’
In that second, Kawakami caught a glimpse of something on the remaining active TV screen. The robot which had destroyed the CAS was already lurching onward, passing out of range of the camera. But then, the second minotaur—which, up until now, had done little more than advance behind the first one—strode to the ruined CAS and stopped.
Then, incredibly, it bent over slightly, grasped the thick armored ankles of the CAS, and began to drag it backwards towards the doorway of the pyramid.
All at once, as a white-hot flash of insight burned through his mind, everything became clear to Shin-ichi Kawakami.
His eyes locked on the screen, he fumbled for the lost headset, found it, slapped the mike against his face. ‘Lieutenant Swigart!’ he shouted. “This is Kawakami! Do not fire on the second robot! I repeat, do not open fire on the…!’
‘What are you doing?’ L’Enfant whirled on him; his face was a mask of anguish and rage as he reached down to grab a handful of the scientist’s jumpsuit. Before Kawakami could speak, he ripped the headset from his head and threw it aside.
‘I thought I told you to shut up!’ L’Enfant snarled, hauling the elderly man upward as his right arm pulled back into a fist. ‘Do you see what you did? You killed my men, you fucking…!’
‘Look at the screen!’ Kawakami shouted, pointing at the console behind the commander. ‘Don’t you see? Look at the screen! The other one, it’s…!’
He stopped. On the screen, he could see the first minotaur being kicked backward, its carapace splitting open as high-caliber bullets pounded into its armor. Arms flailing spasmodically, it staggered for a couple of seconds before it fell like Marks into the red sand as an inert mass of metal.
In another instant, the second minotaur was similarly riven by a long burst of 30mm shells; its claws released the CAS as it was violently thrown backward by the bullets. If it could ever have been described as being alive in the first place, it was now dead.
‘It’s over,’ L’Enfant breathed, his tantrum suddenly leaving him as he watched the display. ‘It’s over…’
He carelessly released Kawakami from his grasp, letting the scientist crumple back to the floor. His rampage halted, he let out his breath and blindly stumbled backward, finally collapsing into a chair as he capped his right hand over his headset. His face seemed to have lost all its blood; the man looked older now, no longer invincible.
‘Swigart, how did it go?’ L’Enfant rasped. He listened, then nodded his head. ‘Confirm two kills. Good job. Okay, you may stand down. We can…’
Then he stopped, listening intently to something through his headphones. He leaned forward in his seat. ‘Dr. Isralilova,’ he said impatiently, ‘I don’t think you’re…’
Then his mouth gaped open, and Kawakami caught a rare expression of astonishment and utter speechlessness on the commander’s face. ‘Oh my God…’ he whispered.
Kawakami crawled across the floor, reaching for his headset. As he groped for it, he suddenly heard a high-pitched scream.
Not from the headset…
From the other end of the habitat.
He jerked his head up. ‘Tamara!’ he shouted.
‘It’s attacking the base!’ L’Enfant bellowed as he lunged out of the chair toward the windows at the end of the module. ‘Swigart, take out the other robot! No, the third one! It’s attacking the…!’
The rest was lost in a sudden loud bang! from within the habitat and the module shook as if the base had been rocked by an earthquake. L’Enfant was thrown backward, less by the force of the explosion than by his own surprise, as decompression alarms squalled and all the flatscreens flashed red-alert signals. He hit the floor, still conscious, clamping his headset against his ears as his eyes went wild in terror. Kawakami instinctively threw his arms over his head; from somewhere not far away, he briefly heard another insane cry, now blotted out by a louder cyclonic roar.
‘Tamara…!’ he screamed.
Triggered by the main computer, candy-striped ceiling panels automatically opened as oxygen masks fell downward on their plastic hoses; the aluminum emergency hatch irised shut in front of the module doorway, sealing them off from the access corridor. ‘Fire! Fire! Fire!’ L’Enfant was shouting…
Something had just broken through the habitat’s hull.
20. Boot Hill
IT WAS THE saddest and most lonely place on Mars: a row of grave-markers, made of scrap sheet-metal and parts of old cargo containers, held erect by small cairns of rock. Each was marked by dust-scoured paint with a name: Moberly, Bronstein, Hoffman, Oeljanov and Kulejan.
And now there were four new markers.
The graveyard had been established on a small hillock behind the habitat. It was not pr
actical to bring the dead back to Earth for burial; the space taken up by a corpse aboard a cycleship, plus the penalty paid for transporting what was essentially inert mass, could be used for more valuable payload. And since cremation was also ruled out in the carbon-dioxide atmosphere, the only recourse was to bury the deceased where they had fallen. The Cydonia Base cemetery had been nicknamed Boot Hill, but it was not the first graveyard on Mars; that dubious distinction belonged to Arsia Station, where more than a dozen men and women were buried.
Yet the population of the boneyard at Cydonia had been almost doubled today; alongside the markers of Hal Moberly, Valery Bronstein, William Hoffman, Maksim Oeljanov, and Sasha Kulejan had been added three fresh graves: the remains of Charlie Akers, Alphonse Marks and Tamara Isralilova.
‘The way I figure it,’ Boggs commented as he pounded a fourth marker into the ground with the flat of his entrenching tool, ‘The Russians are way ahead of us.’
Nash looked up from his own work of shoveling sand over Isralilova’s grave. The fourth marker bore Paul Verduin’s name, although there was no body beneath it; like Sasha Kulejan before him, he was missing and presumed dead. At least there had been something left of Hal Moberly to be buried. ‘Right now,’ Boggs continued, ‘the Russians are running four-to-three over the Americans up here, with one each for the Brits and the Dutch. The Japs are running way behind. Enough for a half-decent baseball team, but the Americans are going to have to do some catching up before…’
‘If you’re trying to be funny,’ Nash said, ‘you’re not succeeding.’
Boggs gave Verduin’s marker a final whack, folded his entrenching tool, and tossed it on the ground. ‘I’m trying to be funny because if I allowed myself to take it too seriously, I just might lose my mind.’ He dusted his gloved hands against each other as he gazed at the row of markers. ‘I’ve helped dig more than half of these holes and most of these people were my friends. That, plus the one at Arsia where I planted Katsu. Makes me feel more like a part-time gravedigger than a pilot.’
He turned and looked back at Nash. ‘Four in one day. Jesus Christ. So you’ll excuse me if I make a joke or two. Sorta takes the edge off things, y’know what I mean?’
Nash threw a last handful of gravel on Tamara Isralilova’s final resting place and folded his own shovel. ‘Sorry. My apologies. I guess you’re right.’
He turned and let his eyes travel to the nearby pyramids and, further away near the eastern horizon, the Face. Regardless of the terrible violence of that morning, it was actually turning out to be a pretty day. The clear sky, the still-calm winds, the long shadows of the pyramids across the placid red desert…indescribable beauty. One could almost imagine a slow caravan of camels emerging from the City, devout Muslims embarking on a long pilgrimage to Mecca.
‘Not a bad place to be buried, though,’ he murmured. ‘Great view.’
‘It sucks.’ Boggs followed his gaze to the City. ‘You ever hear of King Tut’s curse?’
‘Funny you should mention that. I was just thinking it looked…’
‘Like Egypt. Yeah, everyone says that. But I’m beginning to wonder if the Cooties copied more from the Egyptians than their architectural style.’ Boggs sighed and shook his head. ‘In case you missed the news, buddy, you and me almost bought a lot on this friggin’ hill ourselves today.’
Nash didn’t have to be reminded of how close they had come to being killed—or, for that matter, how close it had been for everyone else who had been inside the habitat. The third and last of the minotaurs—as Kawakami had dubbed them—had ripped apart Module Eight before Swigart had used the last of the Hornet’s ammo to destroy it in a final strafing run. Had she failed, the robot might have demolished the rest of the habitat.
Even then, she had been too late to save Isralilova’s life. Locked inside the monitor center, the Russian scientist had been killed when the module had suffered explosive decompression; her final scream, as near as anyone could determine, had been when she had glimpsed the black leviathan outside the module’s window in the instant before it had punched through the glass.
Swigart was now standing at the bottom of the hill, an assault rifle cradled in her arms. As Nash watched, she looked over her shoulder again at Kawakami and Sasaki, who were kneeling beside the remains of the minotaur where it had fallen next to the ruins of Module Eight. If the lieutenant had anything on her mind, she’d kept it to herself. Indeed, after she’d landed the Hornet back at the base, she had done nothing more than to take L’Enfant’s next order: escort Nash and Boggs while they retrieved the corpses of Akers, Marks and Isralilova and took them up to Boot Hill for burial. There had not been a word from her since, not even when they had found Akers’ headless body near the D & M Pyramid.
As for L’Enfant himself, he had not been seen or heard from by anyone except Swigart in the last two hours. As far as anyone knew, he was still inside the command module. No one knew what was going on inside his head except that he’d ordered Swigart to keep the surviving civilians together and at gunpoint.
‘Hey!’ Boggs called out. ‘Lieutenant!’ Swigart slowly looked around at them again. ‘We’re done up here. You wanna ask the Commander if he wants to say any last words?’
Behind her, Kawakami and Sasaki paused in their examination of the minotaur and gazed expectantly at Swigart. ‘He’s the boss around here,’ he went on, ‘and there are a couple of his guys up here, so maybe he’d care to…y’know…’
Swigart simply stared up at the two men, her right hand never straying far from the trigger of her rifle. Nash wondered if she was playing the role of a good soldier; it was possible that she was shell-shocked, having just seen two of her fellow officers wiped out in combat. Either way, she said nothing…
And if L’Enfant was listening in on the exchange, his voice remained unheard over the comlink.
‘Guess not,’ Boggs murmured. ‘Damn flathead.’ He put his hand on top of Paul Verduin’s marker and gave it a fond pat. ‘Rest easy, dude, wherever you are.’ He picked up his entrenching tool and walked slowly past Tamara Isralilova’s grave. ‘See you ‘round, sexy. Hope you and Sasha are having a good ol’ time.’
Ignoring the graves of Marks and Akers, he then gave Nash’s arm a slap and began to trudge down the hill toward the habitat. ‘C’mon. Let’s get out of this place.’
Nash paused to take a last look at the graves he had just dug, then followed Boggs down off Boot Hill. He felt sick over the four lives that had been snuffed out today…even for Marks and Akers, strangely, although they had beaten the hell out of him the day before. No one deserved to die in such a miserable place, so far away from home.
But if he had his way, there would be a tenth grave up here today. It was difficult for him to imagine Terrance L’Enfant’s name on the marker.
‘They’ve got a bomb in the garage,’ Nash said. He paused to sip his squeezebulb of orange juice and added, ‘A nuclear bomb. Anyone want to make bets on what they intend to use it for?’
He was in the Module Nine lab/infirmary, sitting on the same examination table where, only twenty-four hours earlier, Isralilova had sought to heal his wounds from the beating he had taken. Sitting or standing around him in the cramped module were Boggs, Sasaki and Kawakami. The hatch was shut, but Swigart was standing guard just outside; after he and Boggs had completed the burial detail, she had escorted the four of them back into the habitat, where they had been confined together in the lab module. Nash had little doubt that L’Enfant was eavesdropping on their conversation, through the bugs which were still hidden in the module. Everyone’s cards were on the table now, though; there were virtually no secrets left for anyone to hide.
‘If it’s a nuke,’ Boggs replied, sitting on a stool next to a computer terminal, ‘then all bets are off…but is it a nuke?’ He looked around at the others. ‘I mean, I’ve never seen a nuke up close, have you? Maybe it’s a…I dunno, a laser-powered pogostick or…’
‘I saw it too, Waylon.’ Miho Sasaki was
leaning against a bulkhead, next to where Kawakami sat beside a lab bench. On the bench was a large piece of the minotaur which they had collected from the wreckage and wrapped in a thermal blanket before carrying it inside. ‘I’ve never seen a thermonuclear weapon either, but if August says it was a nuke…’
‘Believe me,’ Nash interrupted. ‘I know what I’m talking about. Simply put, it’s a small two-piece plutonium core surrounded by a cadmium sphere, with conventional explosives mounted on either side of the shell…probably plastique shape-charges, if it follows the usual form.’ He held up his hands, a few inches apart from each other. ‘The whole thing’s rigged to a timed electronic detonator. When the timer goes off, the plastique explodes and drives together the plutonium inner core, causing instant critical-mass and…’
He clapped his hands. ‘Believe me, W. J., I know one when I see it. I was briefed on the things when I worked for the CIA. It’s a standard-issue nuclear mine, similar to the type developed for use during Gulf War II. From the size of it, my guess is that it’s a low-yield tactical nuke. Ten kilotons, maybe.’
Boggs shrugged. ‘Ten kilotons isn’t much,’ he murmured. ‘Shit, I could blow my nose with it.’
No one laughed, Sasaki glared at him. ‘My great-grandparents were hibakusha of the Hiroshima bombing,’ she said softly. ‘That was caused by a ten-kiloton warhead. It did more than blow their noses.’
Boggs looked down at the floor in embarrassment. Shin-ichi Kawakami diplomatically cleared his throat. ‘It certainly makes this operation…what did you call it, Mr Nash? Kentucky Race?’
‘Kentucky Derby,’ Nash corrected him. ‘That was the code name L’Enfant told me last night. Sort of makes sense, considering that the first covert US military operation here was called Steeple Chase. It’s upping the stakes a little.’
‘Yes, whatever.’ Kawakami gave a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘It begins to make more sense now. The commander wished to have Paul reconnoiter the catacombs in advance of planting this bomb. Once this was accomplished, he intended to have Sergeant Marks penetrate the area in the new CAS and place the bomb. They were counting on the suit’s internal ECM to allow Marks entry into the underground tunnel system without being harmed.’
