by Allen Steele
The tunnel was sloping gradually downward; as they walked, he was increasingly aware that it was taking them further away from the surface. After several hundred yards, they came to a junction where another, seemingly smaller tunnel to their right converged with the first one. More tracks led from that junction. Miho stopped, consulted the compass on her wrist and matched it against the larger line of tracks; she decided to stick with the main tunnel since it led directly south-east, where the D & M Pyramid lay. After another hundred feet, they came upon a second convergence where another branch intersected the tunnel. Again, after studying the tracks and her compass, Miho decided to remain on the present course.
‘I think those are secondary tunnels,’ she said. ‘They may once have been tributaries in a subsurface river system that the Cooties…’
‘I figured as much,’ Nash interrupted, and she gave him a sharp look. ‘I’m not totally stupid, Miho. I just want to make sure that we don’t get lost in this maze. We don’t have time to backtrack if we do.’
She shook her head. ‘I understand…but those seem to be secondary arteries, and even if they might lead to one of the other pyramids, there’s a chance they could branch into even smaller veins before we reach an opening.’ She pointed toward the larger set of tracks leading into the main tunnel. ‘There has been much recent motion this way. They probably carried the nuke in this direction, and corresponds with the seismic activity we’ve already detected. It is our best hope.’
Nash checked the REM counter on his heads-up display. No clues there; it showed only the nominal background radiation typical of any place on Mars. It figured; the Kentucky Derby nuke was well-shielded, so there was no telltale gamma trace of its passage through the catacombs.
‘If you think you’re right,’ he said.
Sasaki said nothing. She stepped away from him, pointed straight ahead, and continued the long march. They were in completely unknown territory, unmapped by humankind. Nash could only hope that she remembered this, and prayed that they didn’t get confused. He glanced up at the rock ceiling above them and felt a brief chill; he didn’t want to be beneath all that mass when the nuke detonated. They had to find their way out of the catacombs, or remain sealed in here forever…
Buried alive, beneath a city of the dead.
The convergences became more frequent as the main tunnel grew more serpentine, winding downward into the rocky mantle. Each time they came to a junction, Sasaki had to stop and check the compass. After the fourth intersection, however, the width of each tunnel and the tracks in the dusty floor began to look almost identical, until it was impossible to differentiate between the main artery and its tributaries except for the south-eastern compass reading. The disassembled machinery was left behind by the time they passed the fourth convergence; the tunnels were now vacant of anything except the furrowed places where extraterrestrial footprints now lay. A claustrophobe would have been shrieking in terror.
As they rounded a bend and came upon the seventh junction, they saw something completely unexpected. The new tributary converged from above, and from it flowed a steady stream of pseudo-Cooties. Two streams, rather: one coming down from the new tunnel, heading for the main artery, and the other marching in the opposite direction, into the tributary
Nash stopped and grabbed Sasaki’s arm as soon as they saw the alien robots. ‘What’s…they’re…?’ he stammered, tapping his helmet against her own.
‘I think I know.’ Her voice was almost inaudible, yet strangely calm. ‘Look at the ones coming down from the secondary tunnel. See what they’re carrying?’
Nash’s helmet lamp flashed across the pseudo-Cooties. The ones emerging from the tributary each held a large rock between their pincers. Rock. Nothing apparently more significant than that…yet the ones headed back into the tributary were empty-handed. As Nash watched, it seemed to him that each pseudo-Cootie that emerged from the secondary tunnel was replaced by another from the main branch. He was reminded of something Kawakami had said, comparing the pseudo-Cooties to driver ants. They had that sort of innately mechanical, inhuman precision.
‘They’re miners,’ Sasaki said. ‘Raw materials being dredged out of the planet’s crust. All they do is select and bring back what they need.’ She paused. ‘But why from above…?’
Her voice trailed off into an unconscious flow of Japanese. Nash glanced at her; through his faceplate, he could see that she was transfixed by the pseudo-Cooties. He grabbed her arm and gave her a hard yank. ‘Can we get through them?’ he said.
Sasaki’s eyelids fluttered as if she were coming out of a trance. ‘I don’t know…yes, maybe we can, but I don’t…’
‘Only one way to find out.’ Nash broke away from her. He took a deep breath, then strode forward and, one careful step at a time, walked into the midst of the pseudo-Cooties.
For an instant, the metallic creatures were bewildered; they swarmed around his legs, bumping into him and against each other, some prodding and touching his calves with their antennae and pincers. Watching them carefully, Nash prepared to leap free in case one of them attempted to slice through his skinsuit. Yet nothing happened; in a few moments, the pseudo-Cooties docilely accepted him as an unforeseen obstacle in their path. They began to move around him, avoiding contact with his legs.
Nash sighed with relief, then gestured for Sasaki to join him; she hesitated for a second, then timidly stepped into the swarm. Again, there was confusion as they jostled against her legs for a few moments, then both the incoming and outgoing ranks parted on either side of them.
She touched her helmet against his. ‘They’re like worker-ants in an anthill,’ she said. She pointed at the pseudo-Cooties who were just now entering the junction. ‘Notice how the ones who weren’t here at first are also avoiding us. The message must have already passed through the ranks. Paul was right. They’ve developed a collective consciousness which allows them to instantly communicate with each other and…’
Her voice trailed off as her face suddenly paled. ‘The minotaurs!’ she snapped. ‘They could already be on their way! August, we’ve got to get out of here!’
Sasaki started to bolt, but Nash grabbed her shoulders and held her close. ‘Don’t run!’ he yelled. ‘They’re not coming! Nothing’s coming this way!’
He could see her panic-stricken face inside her helmet; she fought to wrench herself from his grip, but he held on tight. ‘Miho, think!’ he demanded. ‘Just stop and think for a minute! If there were any minotaurs left, they would have been sent to the base with the rest of them. Right? If there were any more, why weren’t they in the Labyrinth when we came down? Right? Right?’
She stared back at him as mute comprehension crept into her eyes. ‘Trust me!’ he shouted, giving her a ruthless shake. ‘There’s no more of them! They’re all gone!’
Then her muscles relaxed as her anxiety attack faded away. Almost limp, she swayed against him; Nash wrapped his arms around her, feeling her tremble. He thought he heard her say something in Japanese, but he didn’t ask for a translation. ‘It’s okay,’ he said, clumsily patting the life-support unit on her back. ‘It’s all right, it’s okay…’
He waited a minute until she had calmed herself, then he gently pushed her away. ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’ He glanced at his chronometer. ‘We’ve only about an hour left until the Akron takes off. We need to hustle now.’
‘Yes. You’re right.’ Sasaki quickly nodded her head, then unexpectedly smiled at him. ‘Thank you, August. If we weren’t wearing helmets, I’d give you a kiss.’
‘Save it for your redneck boyfriend,’ Nash replied. He dropped his hands from her shoulders and pointed toward the upward-leading tributary tunnel. ‘If they’re coming from above, then it might lead straight to the surface.’
‘Possibly.’ Miho checked her compass again. ‘At a rough guess, I’d say we’re beneath the City’s center, the open area between the pyramids. It might take us up there…or we could get lost.’
‘S
o do we try it or not?’
She gazed at the new tunnel for a moment, then slowly nodded her head. ‘Yes, perhaps we should…but I still want to see what’s down there. We’re getting close.’
Nash hesitated, then nodded his own head. ‘Okay, I’m with you. We’ll check it out…so long as we make it quick.’ He turned towards the main tunnel, heedless of the pseudo-Cooties which mindlessly moved on either side of them. ‘C’mon, let’s go. I want to see what’s so important to these little guys.’
Even before they reached the end of the tunnel, they could feel vibrations running through the stone floor. The tunnel had now widened to the point where it could have accommodated two freight trains. Nash was reminded of the rail yards outside his hometown in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, where his father had sometimes taken him when he was a kid to see the trains come and go. He could now hear vague noises through his helmet, as if great forces were working just ahead of them; indeed, the pseudo-Cooties around them seemed to be moving with greater speed, impelled to operate with more alacrity toward their mysterious objective.
They passed another bend and suddenly saw weak, diffuse light seeping from a large opening just ahead. The pseudo-Cooties were marching in and out of the tunnel mouth, yet they could make out no details beyond that point. Walking between the metallic insects, they stroke quickly toward the tunnel’s end…and abruptly halted in their tracks, dumbfounded as they saw what lay before them.
‘Oh my God…’ Nash heard himself whisper.
They were in the bottom of a vast bowl-shaped cavern, easily the size of an enclosed baseball stadium on Earth.
The sloped rock walls were hundreds of feet high, extending outward as far as their lamplight could reach. Above them stretched a smooth, yet irregularly dappled, concave ceiling, as if they were looking up at the bottom of a great opaque lens. The cavern vaguely resembled the enclosed crater at Arsia Station where the Akron was hangared between flights, but it was much larger; the Percival Lowell could have been dropped in here, with plenty of room to spare.
Yet the circular edge of the ceiling didn’t quite touch the walls of the cavern, as if the ceiling were hanging free above the floor. It was from that fissure that sunlight indirectly penetrated the cavern, from an unseen opening far above the floating ceiling, as if from an obstructed skylight.
Multitudes of pseudo-Cooties scurried across the stone floor in the shadowy half-light, moving between what at first appeared to be great triple-trunked trees—or maybe stalagmites—which grew randomly from various places on the bottom of the cavern. The miniature robots were dwarfed by the huge structures; many of them were drawing large metallic-looking objects from big round pits near the walls of the cavern and passing them to each other, pincer to pincer, as if they were in an old-style fire-bucket brigade.
Not just the pseudo-Cooties, either. Larger spider-like creatures, vaguely resembling immense daddy-long-legs except that they were the size of cattle, carried larger objects away from the pits. Many of them scaled the cavern walls toward the curved ceiling, their fragile-looking legs clinging precariously to minute cracks and crevasses in the rock, hauling their cargo toward the mysterious ceiling.
Then, all at once, something lowered itself from the nearest stalagmite-tree, which towered above them like a mutant redwood: a three-clawed arm, similar to that of one of the minotaurs except much larger. Startled, Nash took a step backward, but Sasaki remained still; they watched the arm as it moved to a flat plate-like object held aloft by a dozen pseudo-Cooties. The claw clasped the edges of the plate and, as it raised it, Nash was astounded to see one of the three trunks take a step forward.
His breath caught in his chest, Nash peered upward, following the progress of the great arm as it hauled the object toward the ceiling. At the apex of the three trunks—which, he now realized, were mobile legs—was a saucer-like centerpiece, from which two giant arms extended. As the left arm brought up the plate, the right arm steadied it and, with careful ease, pushed it into place against an opening in the ceiling which matched its dimensions precisely.
It was a machine. All of them: machines. Nash didn’t know that he was mesmerized until he felt Sasaki’s hand close around his left wrist and pull him closer to place the side of her helmet against his own.
‘H. G. Wells was right,’ she said. ‘There are tripods on Mars.’
He could now see, through the diffuse light filtered from above, that each of the tripods was taking flat plates from the pseudo-Cooties and raising them to the high ceiling of the cavern. His mind reeled from the notion that something so immense could be mobile; he swallowed hard, feeling his mind teeter on the edge of imbalance.
‘It looks like they’re building something,’ he said, and was instantly aware of the stupidity of his remark. ‘They’re…I don’t know. Assemblers. They can barely move, but that’s what they are. Like big mobile cranes, specially built…grown, I mean…for one purpose.’ He pointed toward the nearest spider, which was halfway up the wall of the cavern. ‘Like that one there, taking something up to the ceiling. It’s as if it was designed for this job.’
‘I agree,’ Sasaki said. ‘Like the pseudo-Cooties and the minotaurs, each has a specific function.’ She paused, then added, ‘Look up. Tell me what you see.’
He stared at the ceiling again; the beam of his helmet lamp danced across its irregular surface. He now noticed, in its exact epicenter, the round opening of a narrow shaft. He also saw that the ceiling was not made of rock, but of metal; it was composed of platework, almost as if it was…
‘A hull,’ he said aloud.
‘Yes. An outer hull.’ Sasaki’s awestruck voice was barely intelligible. ‘We’ve been looking for their starship…and here it is.’
They began to cautiously make their way across the cavern, skirting the sides of the vast chamber to avoid contact with the pseudo-Cooties or the tripods in the center of the floor. Their subterfuge barely mattered, though; the pseudo-Cooties and spiders they encountered paid absolutely no attention to them as they single-mindedly scurried back and forth, carrying parts from the pits, and they were beneath the notice of the tripods.
Although Nash was in a hurry to return to the tunnel from which they had come, Sasaki insisted on checking out the pits. The first one they came upon was completely empty; shining his helmet lamp down into it, Nash saw that it was a smooth round bore, made of polished red stone, about twelve feet wide and twenty feet deep. He noticed that its walls were lined with tiny, pinprick-size holes, but if the pit itself had ever served a purpose, it was apparently obsolete now.
Yet, fifty feet away, was another pit; dodging the pseudo-Cooties gathered around it, they went closer. The second pit had the same dimensions as the first, but this one was filled with a viscous scarlet fluid. Unsettlingly enough, it resembled an enormous vat filled with blood; Nash supposed that if it could be smelled by human nostrils, it might also smell like blood.
Yet the fluid was not still; it swirled of its own accord, subtle eddies and currents flowing through the dense mixture as if something deep within the pit was alive. Miho knelt next to the lip of the pit, staring intently down into the morass; she suddenly reached up and, grabbing Nash’s wrist, hauled him down next to her so that their helmets connected again.
‘Micro-assemblers!’ she exclaimed, jabbing an excited finger at the mixture. ‘It only looks like liquid, but it’s not! Those are millions of nanites!’
Nash gazed into the vat; upon closer examination, he now saw the fluid had an almost granular texture, somewhat similar to quicksand. He remembered what Kawakami had postulated about the construction of the minotaurs. ‘Are you trying to tell me…?’
He stopped and studied the pit. ‘You’re trying to tell me that something’s being grown in there?’
‘Yes!’ Miho eagerly replied. ‘Exactly! If it was a true water-based liquid, it would have been instantly evaporated by the lack of atmospheric pressure. No, those are microscopic, self-replicating robots…the largest m
ay be no bigger than a rice-kernel.’
She stood up and strode quickly toward the next pit. Several pseudo-Cooties were dropping chunks of rock—probably dredged from the near-surface quarries from whence they had earlier seen the robots carrying the stone—into a three-quarters-full pit of the same fluid. Here, the pit was churning more rapidly, as if tiny piranhas were devouring the rocks. Heedless of the pseudo-Cooties, Sasaki approached the edge of the pit and watched for a minute before she turned back to Nash.
‘Raw materials are being fed into the vats,’ she said quickly, her words coming out as a breathless rush, ‘which in turn are being broken down into their basic elements by the nanites and reassembled into solid-state components for the starship.’
Sasaki pointed toward the immense hull above them, where the tripods were sealing more plates into position. ‘Everything in this cave…the pseudo-Cooties, the tripods, the vessel itself…is a product of nanotechnology, yet one so far beyond the grasp of our species that we’ve only theorized these possibilities.’
Nash followed her gaze. ‘Then…this is not the original ship?’ She shook her head. ‘So the junk we saw in the tunnels…’
‘Unsalvageable scraps of their first starship,’ she finished. ‘Things they either couldn’t break down or didn’t need to copy. It hardly matters. If Shin-ichi was right, then the Cooties came here in a sub-light-speed vessel which was only intended for a one-way voyage across the galaxy. In order to get home, they’ve been forced to build another like it.’
‘But the Cooties are all dead!’ he snapped.
‘Yes,’ Miho said, ‘but that doesn’t matter to them.’ She stared straight at Nash’s face. ‘Don’t you see? They’re obeying a biomechanical tropism…programming, if you want to call it that, but it’s far more complex. When the Cooties went into hibernation, they told their slaves what to do and how to do it. Everything they’ve done…everything we’ve done…must have been thought out and anticipated thousands of years ago. They don’t care if their programmers are now dead. This single purpose is all that matters to them.’
