by Allen Steele
For a few long moments, L’Enfant studied the four persons in the module, scowling as he appeared to size them up one at a time. When he finally spoke, his voice was a taut, harsh rasp.
‘No more games,’ he said. ‘No more subterfuge. You all know about Kentucky Derby now, what we were intending to do with the nuke. That plan is still in effect.’
‘Pardon me?’ Boggs looked simultaneously amused and perplexed, as if someone had just suggested that he perform an unnatural act with a farm animal. ‘You and who else, pal? Your CAS is scrap metal now. You can’t…’
‘Shut up, Mr Boggs.’
Boggs winced. ‘Aw, man, I wish people would stop saying that to me,’ he muttered, his eyes rolling upward. ‘I’m beginning to think my first name is “Shut Up”.’
L’Enfant made a small gesture toward Swigart. ‘Lieutenant, if he speaks again, shoot him.’ As she raised her rifle and trained it on Boggs, he added, ‘In the leg, though, please. We will still need him to pilot the Akron once we’re done here.’
Boggs opened his mouth to say something, but he carefully reconsidered whatever retort he had been about to make. For once, he shut up. Everyone else froze in position, not daring to move or utter a word. L’Enfant was not fooling around; it was clear that Swigart would unquestioningly obey an order from him to open fire on Boggs or anyone else in the lab.
‘There. That’s better.’ L’Enfant straightened his back a little. He pulled his right hand out of his pocket, and now they could all see that he was holding Nash’s gun. ‘Mr Boggs has raised a salient point. Sergeant Marks had been intending to use the CAS to carry a thermonuclear mine into the catacombs. That option, of course, is no longer open to us. However, the basic plan is still in effect.’
L’Enfant raised the gun to his hip and pointed it at Nash. ‘Seaman Nash, I’m afraid your role in this affair has been changed. You will carry the weapon through the Labyrinth.’
His eyes shifted to Miho. ‘Since the device is quite heavy, though, you may need some help. Dr. Sasaki, you will assist him.’
Miho stared at him, her mouth agape in disbelief. ‘We would never survive,’ she protested. ‘The pseudo-Cooties will…’
‘The enemy will tear you apart as soon as you enter Room C4-20. Yes, I know,’ L’Enfant smiled condescendingly at her. ‘But that’s close enough for the purpose of planting the device. What little usefulness you’ve had for me in the past is at an end, but for this single function you’ll serve rather well. I need Boggs, and Dr. Kawakami is a little too frail for this task.’
Nash carefully cleared his throat, if only to telegraph his intent to speak. ‘It’s a nice try, Commander,’ he said calmly, ‘but it’s not going to work. If either of us refuses, what are you going to do? Shoot us?’ He shrugged. ‘Then there’s nobody left to carry the bomb down there. As you just said, Shin-ichi’s in ill health and you need W. J. to fly the Akron.’
L’Enfant barely blinked at his argument. ‘I said that Dr. Kawakami is too ill to help you carry the device,’ he replied. ‘I didn’t say he was entirely useless.’
He slowly lifted the SIG/Sauer, steadied it with his right hand, and deliberately aimed it straight at Shin-ichi Kawakami’s face. The physicist blanched and his hands trembled, but he said nothing. ‘If you refuse,’ L’Enfant said, ‘I will kill him. Plain and simple’
‘No!’ Miho shouted. She jumped off the table and rushed protectively toward Kawakami. Nash grabbed her by the arms and pulled her back. ‘You can’t kill him!’ she yelled, fighting against Nash. ‘I won’t allow you to…’
‘Miho!’ Kawakami snapped. ‘Hush now!’
He looked over his shoulder at her, calming her with a single glance, then returned his steady gaze to L’Enfant. Kawakami seemed shaken; his hands were trembling, and when he took a breath it came as a soft rattle from somewhere deep in his emaciated chest. He stared back at L’Enfant, seemingly ignoring the gun which was aimed directly at his forehead, then he closed his eyes and shook his head in disgust.
‘Commander L’Enfant,’ he said in a measured tone, ‘you are an ignorant man after all. You can’t blackmail someone if he refuses the role.’
He then began to walk toward the commander, heading for the hatch. ‘And I refuse to play along with your stupidity.’
For a moment, L’Enfant appeared completely startled; as if caught in indecision, he allowed the gun in his hands to dip downward a little. He gazed at the floor, apparently humbled by Kawakami’s inescapable logic. Swigart raised her gun and spread her legs slightly, blocking the exit from the compartment. Kawakami paid no attention to her. He strode past the workbench, stepping around L’Enfant as he headed for the door…
Then L’Enfant looked up again, and in that instant Nash caught a glimpse of absolute madness in his eyes.
‘Shin-ichi!’ Nash yelled. ‘Stop…!’
Then L’Enfant whipped around, jammed the gun against the silky white fringe of hair covering Kawakami’s right ear, and squeezed the trigger.
The roar of the gunshot was still reverberating off the metal walls as Sasaki, screaming in horrified anguish, tore away from Nash and hurled herself across the compartment.
Unmindful of L’Enfant, she threw herself over Kawakami’s limp body, kneeling in the pool of dark cranial blood and sobbing hysterically. Swigart had already rushed forward to guard L’Enfant as she covered Nash and Boggs with her assault rifle. Boggs was completely petrified; his mouth worked silently as his eyes flickered back and forth from the blood-drenched ichor splattered across the bulkhead wall to L’Enfant and back again.
L’Enfant’s hands, his sleeves, the front of his jumpsuit—all were soaked with blood. He stood stiffly erect next to Kawakami’s corpse, the gun still clasped in his hands. Somewhere in the compartment, there was the tinny metallic sound of a spent cartridge-shell rolling across the floor. His eyes—wild, totally lunatic—were locked unblinkingly on Nash.
‘Last chance, Nash!’ he shouted. ‘The Jap didn’t believe me! You want to make it two?’
Without taking his eyes from Nash, he placed the gun barrel against the back of Sasaki’s skull. She didn’t notice the slight pressure on her head; she was still crying uncontrollably, hugging Kawakami to her chest and rocking back and forth as she murmured something in Japanese.
‘I’m not shitting, Nash!’ he shouted. All his earlier pretense and posturing—the role-playing of the erudite gentleman-soldier, the perfect Annapolis graduate—had completely vanished. A raving maniac had taken his place. ‘I’ll blow her brains all over the place and you’ll still have to carry the fucker down there…by yourself if you have to!’
Boggs seemed to awaken from his trance. ‘Christ, August,’ he whispered, his eyes now fixed upon Miho. ‘You can’t let him…’
‘Shut up, Boggs,’ Nash said.
‘He means it, man. He’ll do it. He’s…’
‘Just shut up!” He took a deep breath and gazed unwaveringly back at L’Enfant. It took all his willpower to keep from flinging himself at his former captain; at that moment, he would have sold his soul to get his hands around the maniac’s neck.
‘You didn’t need to do that, Commander,’ he said softly. ‘He was just trying to make a point. You could have…’
‘Gimme a yes or a no!” L’Enfant snarled. ‘I’m not interested in anything else!’ He thrust the gun more firmly against Miho’s head. ‘Do it now!’
Nash took a deep breath. He had no choice.
‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘I’ll do it.’
21. Kentucky Derby
THE STONE DOOR leading to Room C4-20 was propped open with a pneumatic jack, as were all the chamber doors in the Labyrinth. Under the beams of their helmet lanterns, they could see the scratches and abrasions on the rock walls of the corridor where a portable airlock had once been inserted, before it had been dismantled by the pseudo-Cooties. Beyond the doorway lay a deep, fathomless darkness: the anteroom of the catacombs.
Lieutenant Swigart knelt on
the floor of the corridor next to the nuke. Several pages of scrolled computer printout were resting on her upraised right knee; she meticulously consulted the single-spaced rows of instructions as she entered the arming codes into the bomb’s keypad. She was taking her time, double-checking each step of the procedure, and for obvious reasons. Any slip-ups, and the nuclear device would fail to detonate. Or worse, explode prematurely.
Such as in the next second.
‘You know you’re not going to get away with this,’ Miho Sasaki said. ‘Don’t you, Commander?’
She was standing between Nash and Boggs in the corridor on the other side of Swigart and the nuke, directly in front of the entrance to Room C4-20. They were so close to one another that the exhaust from their skinsuits’ backpacks clouded the faceplates of one another’s helmets. Her hysteria of less than an hour ago had been replaced by cold implacability; were it not for the fact that L’Enfant had continually kept his gun pointed at her during the entire trip from Module Eight to this place deep beneath the C-4 Pyramid, Sasaki might have hurled herself upon the commander.
‘Don’t be melodramatic, Dr. Sasaki,’ L’Enfant replied. ‘Of course I’m going to get away with it.’ He was standing behind Swigart, blocking escape from the Labyrinth with the Steyr he kept trained upon them. L’Enfant had recovered his air of arrogant condescension, but he had not lowered his guard for a single instant since they had left the lab. Even their suitup had been done with extreme caution; he had forced the three civilians to climb into their skinsuits together in the open Module One airlock, before he and Swigart had taken their own turns, one at a time while the other maintained a gun on the prisoners. Nothing had been left to chance; once they had all cycled through the airlock and left the habitat, L’Enfant had ordered Swigart to search their overgarments, making certain that no useful items had been surreptitiously concealed in their suits.
‘She’s correct,’ Nash said. ‘When the nuke goes off, Marsat-2 will detect the explosion from orbit. Even if you get out of here in time, there’s nothing you can do to stop people from asking all the right questions.’
He paused, hoping to let the facts soak in. ‘Especially about what happened to us and the rest of the science team,’ he added, ‘not to mention your own men.’
Swigart seemed to hesitate in her programming; her fingers hovered above the keypad as she glanced up at him. ‘Keep going, Lieutenant,’ L’Enfant said easily. ‘He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’ As Swigart returned to her painstaking work, L’Enfant went on. ‘Mr Nash, we had already taken this into consideration when Kentucky Derby was planned, long before your interference. We were counting on a seasonal dust storm to occur at about this time of the Martian sidereal year and had made our plans accordingly. In about an hour, Marsat-2 will develop an on-board glitch which will render its cameras totally inoperative. A small computer virus, effective only for the next forty-eight hours, but long enough for the explosion to occur. By the time the dust storm dissipates, the base will have ceased to exist, buried beneath tons of wind-borne sand. Any fallout from our underground explosion will have been dispersed throughout the northern hemisphere.’
‘And the City?’ Miho asked. ‘How will its destruction be…?’
‘Oh, no no no…’ L’Enfant shook his head within his helmet. ‘You overestimate the power of this bomb, Dr. Sasaki. Think of the sheer mass of the edifice above us. This explosion will be deep underground, within the catacombs. According to computer projections, Marsat-2 will detect a new pit within the center of the City, yes…but the pyramids themselves will remain intact. Shaken a bit, but not destroyed. This is why a tactical nuke is being used for this mission. Only the Cooties will suffer.’
‘Besides Miho and me, of course,’ Nash said.
‘If it helps to ease your mind,’ L’Enfant continued, ‘my guess is that your demise will be quick and relatively painless. The enemy will kill you as soon as they’ve detected your presence, then seize this strange thing you’ve brought with them and take it deeper into their catacombs. So you’ll be long-dead by the time the device detonates.’
‘Imagine my relief,’ Nash replied drily.
Swigart looked up from the nuke again. ‘Timer setting, Commander?’ she asked.
L’Enfant considered the question. ‘Two hours…no, make it three. Just to be on the safe side.’ He hesitated again. ‘Mr Boggs, can you have us out of here in two hours and at a safe distance within three?’
Boggs didn’t say anything for a few moments. ‘Yeah,’ he reluctantly muttered, ‘I can get you…’
L’Enfant cleared his throat meaningfully. ‘Pardon me, captain Boggs?’ he asked.
‘Yes sir, Commander L’Enfant,’ Boggs amended. His stiff tone of voice suggested that he was on the verge of grinding his teeth. ‘The Akron can be ready to leave in two hours.’ He paused, then added, ‘Call it seventeen-thirty hours, sir.’
Nash glanced up at the illuminated heads-up display inside his helmet. It was now 1515, local time: mid-afternoon in the central Mars meridian. Perhaps Boggs was only conveniently rounding it off a bit, but it was possible that the pilot was trying to buy them a little more time. As if it mattered; as soon as they entered Room C4-20, he and Sasaki would be at the mercy of the pseudo-Cooties. Mercy was one trait that was in demonstrably short supply among the alien mechanisms.
Even so, those extra fifteen minutes might make all the difference…
L’Enfant appeared to be mulling it over, and Nash didn’t want him to notice the slight discrepancy. ‘You still haven’t answered the question, captain. What about Kawakami and Verduin and Isralilova and the others…?’
‘And us?’ Miho added. ‘What will be your alibi for our absence when you get back to Arsia?’
For a moment, L’Enfant seemed to be distracted; through his helmet faceplate, Nash could see his eyes unblinkingly locked onto some point midway between the floor of the tunnel and the ceiling. Swigart’s right hand remained poised above the keypad as she gazed up at him expectantly, awaiting a final order. Nash was wondering if he should risk a last-ditch attack on the commander when L’Enfant appeared to shake himself out of his reverie.
‘Yes, that’s fine,’ he said absent-mindedly, as if a consensus agreement had been reached while he was woolgathering and he was making the final call. ‘Arm the detonator for eighteen-thirty hours, Lieutenant.’ As Swigart bent over the nuke once more, carefully tapping the parameters into the digital timer, he went on, ‘I hardly need an alibi, Dr. Sasaki. During the dust storm there was an accident…say, a piece of rock was hurled through the window of the wardroom. Because everyone was in there having an early dinner, they were all killed in the blowout. Only Lieutenant Swigart, Mr Boggs and myself were spared, since we happened to be aloft in the airship, surveying the Chryse Planitia…’
‘Aw, c’mon…!’ Boggs blurted out, before he remembered the precariousness of his own position and shut up.
‘He’s right,’ Nash said. ‘It’s total bullshit. No one will believe you for a second.’
‘True, it’s not a likely story…but then, it hardly matters how implausible the fabrication may be.’ There was gloating in L’Enfant’s voice now. ‘Much like the Takada Maru, isn’t it? Since it is the cover-story for this operation, the Pentagon will support my allegations, and the contrary evidence will have been buried by natural forces. Everything else is circumstantial. Nothing will happen to us, at least in the long run.’
He chuckled. ‘Besides, this sort of tragedy has happened before on Mars, has it not? If anything, the anti-space movement will make it into one more reason for us to get off this planet. A disastrous waste of lives and so forth. That’s fine with…’
‘The timer has been set, sir,’ Swigart interrupted, glancing up from the nuke. Looking down at the bomb, Nash noticed that the top LCD read 1830; below it, a second chronograph displayed a row of zeros. ‘Awaiting your command.’
‘You may arm the device, Lieutenant.’ L’Enfant gave t
he order without hesitation, yet for a moment Swigart’s hand lingered over the keypad. She stared at the two people she was condemning to death; for the briefest of instants, Nash thought he glimpsed an expression of remorse through her helmet faceplate. Then her face hardened again, and as she entered the final code sequence into the nuke’s detonator, the bottom LCD blinked and a new string of digits appeared: 03:14:59:00.
The countdown had begun.
Swigart closed the access panel and resealed it with a portable electric screwdriver; they could hear a faint whine as the screws were driven back into place. ‘If you’re thinking of prying open the shell and deactivating the bomb, L’Enfant added, ‘I should warn you in advance that it has…’
‘An auto-destruct override that will detonate the bomb if the proper codes are not entered,’ Nash finished. ‘Yes, I know. I’ve been briefed on this sort of mine.’ He felt sweat drooling down the inside of his skinsuit as he watched Swigart finish her work and stand up. ‘And that’s it? You’ve got nothing more to say to us?’
‘Brave to the very end. I respect that.’ L’Enfant mulled over the question for a few seconds. ‘You should consider what you’re doing not a sacrifice, but a service,’ he said solemnly. ‘Not just for your respective countries, but for the entire human species. For this, I salute you.’
‘Yes,’ Nash replied. ‘And fuck you, too…Captain.’
L’Enfant made no verbal response, but his right forefinger twitched near the trigger of his assault rifle. Swigart silently stepped away from the nuke, unshouldering her own rifle and aiming it at Boggs. ‘Mr Boggs, you’ll come this way, please,’ she said.
Boggs started to step forward, then halted and turned back to Nash and Sasaki. Their suit lamps cast a harsh glare over his helmet faceplate, so they couldn’t see his face, but his voice over the comlink was choked. ‘Hey, man, I’m sorry it worked out this way,’ he said to Nash. ‘I didn’t think…’
‘Don’t sweat it,’ Nash replied. ‘You didn’t know. Just straighten up and fly right, okay?’
