by Allen Steele
She closed her eyes, shaking her head within her helmet. ‘L’Enfant was right. This is a trap…but not for the reasons he believed.’
As she spoke, Nash’s gaze wandered back to the pit next to them. Already the nanites were busily constructing something in its depths. Nearby, he could see another crowd of pseudo-Cooties hauling a completed hullplate out of the adjacent pit; sanguine liquid seeped off it as it was tugged into view—a few hundred nanites who had remained fixed to their end-product. If all this had been made from raw native materials…
Abruptly, he realized where all the men and human-made items that had been lost in the Labyrinth and Mama’s Back Door had gone. The combat armor, the Jackalope, the various probes, the bodies themselves: all dumped into the pits and reduced to their most elementary substances. Oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nickel, zinc, copper—there were many useful trace-elements to be found in a corpse, if one only knew how to extract and refine them.
His stomach lurched as the full horror hit him. Somewhere up there, within the innards of that vast machine, were the decomposed remains of Hal Moberly, Sasha Kulejan and Paul Verduin—now scattered parts of an alien vessel.
‘When the first ship landed here, they dismantled it completely,’ Sasaki went on. ‘They had to, in order to survive for as short a time as they did. That’s why we never found it. But this is a duplicate of that vessel, constructed from natural resources by the pseudo-Cooties. They might have…’
She suddenly stopped talking as she stared up at the vast ceiling. Nash looked back in the direction of her gaze. For a moment, he couldn’t see what had caught her attention. Then the beam of his helmet-lamp landed on the outstretched claws of one of the tripods, and what he saw grasped between them caused his heart to freeze.
The tripod held the unmistakable, elongated shape of the Kentucky Derby nuke. It was being carefully raised toward the shaft in the center of the outer hull.
Of course.’ Sasaki’s voice was a monotone within his helmet. ‘Plutonium…an element which doesn’t occur in nature. Uranium ore they can find on Mars, even refine in the pits, but if they needed plutonium to get off the ground…’
‘What are you trying to…?’
‘They’ve built an Orion ship,’ she murmured.
‘I don’t understand,’ Nash said, although he was beginning to get a hunch. ‘If they have uranium, then why would they want…?’
‘Uranium they could use for reaction-mass once they’ve gotten off the ground, but they needed a more potent fuel-source for liftoff. All this time, they’ve been waiting for plutonium.’ Miho seemed to be not so much talking to him as thinking aloud. ‘The Face was intended to attract us here, the City to contain the remains of the original passengers…they instinctively knew that we would have to possess advanced nuclear technology if we were capable of achieving interplanetary flight. So they built their new vessel for the voyage home, and waited for us to deliver what they needed the most, yet couldn’t find on Mars—plutonium.’
Within the hull, Nash could see the tiny figures of spiders as they reached down to grasp the nuke with their long legs and pull it up into the vessel. Transfixed by the sight, Sasaki shook her head in wonderment. ‘Thousands of years, waiting for just one thing to take them back from where they came. Maybe if our landers had used nuclear engines, they would have stolen them and stripped out the fuel cores, but instead they had to wait a little longer. Biding their time, building their new ship, watching us from a safe, protected distance. Finally, L’Enfant brought a nuke here to Mars and we delivered it to the catacombs. They don’t even need to construct the engine to…’
‘Cut it out,’ he said as he gave her a hard shake. ‘What do you mean by an Orion ship?’
Miho blinked, her trance broken. ‘Something a group of American scientists dreamed up in the last century,’ she said. She looked back at him, her eyes wide with mixed elation and fear. ‘An absurd idea…or at least it seemed so then. If you could build a spaceship with an immense pusher-plate at the end, then detonate a hydrogen bomb of sufficient kilotonnage beneath it…’
‘It’d lift the ship off the ground,’ Nash finished. ‘Give it escape velocity, by brute force.’
He suddenly perceived the source of the indirect sunlight which illuminated the cavern. The pseudo-Cooties were disassembling its roof, making way for the launch of their ship and using the nanite-processed rock as material for the final pieces of the vessel. And if they were this far advanced, to be clearing the way for lift-off…
He felt a surge of panic. ‘We’re getting out of here,’ he said coldly as he glanced again at his chronometer. A little less than thirty minutes remained until the Akron was scheduled to fly, but that was now the lesser of his concerns. In approximately one hour and a half from now…
He grabbed her wrist. ‘C’mon, let’s go. I’m not sticking around to see if you’re right about all this.’
Miho didn’t protest as he tugged her away from the nanite-vat and began to haul her back the way they had come. It was too late to seek out the entrance to Mama’s Back Door; even if they located it and successfully found their way to the D & M Pyramid, they would emerge several miles from the base. The side-tunnel to the surface was their only real chance of escape.
Nash hustled Miho toward the mouth of the main tunnel, running past the pit where the pseudo-Cooties had just brought forth a new hullplate. All he wanted to do now was get the hell out of there before…
He felt something slide beneath his boots, as if he’d suddenly stepped into a shallow rain-puddle; he slipped backwards, instinctively jerked himself forward, lost his balance and came down on one knee. He hissed in pain—another bruise!—and almost fell over completely before Sasaki grabbed his arm and hauled him erect.
Nash glanced down at his leg, alert for a rip in his suit, and saw that he had stepped into a puddle of the nanite-liquid. The soles of his boots and the lower left calf of his skinsuit were stained with the blood-colored liquid.
If Sasaki said anything, he couldn’t hear her. He studied the blotches for a moment, but nothing seemed to be eating through his boots or the fabric of his overgarment. There had to be something about the taste of skinsuits that aliens didn’t like.
It didn’t matter. He dismissed the accident from his mind as he took Miho’s hand again and they resumed their run toward the tunnel mouth.
23. Pikadan
W. J. BOGGS watched the digital chronometer mounted above the pilot’s seat: the green-lit display told him it was now 1725 hours. His gaze shifted down to a status board next to his left elbow, to a single LED which stubbornly remained dark. He stared hard at the tiny light, willing it to blink, but it defied his silent admonition to come alive.
C’mon guys, he thought, you can still make it…
The indicator next to the one in question suddenly flashed red, fooling him for a moment until he realized that it was the main airlock light. He let out his breath and looked over at L’Enfant; the commander was sitting in the left-hand co-pilot’s seat, apparently watching the last scarlet glow of sunlight fading over the western horizon. Although L’Enfant’s mind seemed to be focused elsewhere, the palm of his right hand still rested on top of the gun in his lap.
‘Has Lieutenant Swigart come aboard?’ he asked without looking away from the sunset.
Damn, but the bastard hardly missed a trick. Boggs prayed that L’Enfant hadn’t noticed his attention to one particular idiot-light. ‘She’s cycling through the airlock now,’ Boggs replied. L’Enfant didn’t say anything, but a corner of his mouth twitched downward and his hard eyes darted toward him. ‘Sir,’ Boggs added.
‘Hmm. Very well. You may initiate lift-off as soon as she’s with us.’ L’Enfant’s gaze moved back to the gondola windows. ‘You know,’ he said conversationally, ‘it has always amazed me how the autumn sunsets here are so much like those on Earth. Just as there, the sun goes down a minute earlier each day as the winter solstice grows closer, until we begin to see darkne
ss in late afternoon. All we miss are the leaves changing color…’
He looked towards Boggs again. ‘Quite a bit of synchronicity between the two worlds, isn’t there, Mr Boggs?’
‘If you say so, sir.’ Boggs glanced up at the chronometer again. 1727 now. ‘We ought to wait until the sun’s completely down, y’know, before we take off. The wind picks up quite a bit right at sundown, so taking off before it gets calm could be tricky. I had sort of the same trouble a few days ago when we were leaving Arsia. The ship bucked like a…’
‘No.’ L’Enfant’s response was cold and flat, leaving no room for argument. ‘We lift off at seventeen-thirty precisely, as we agreed earlier. No later. I’m certain you’ll be able to manage the wind-shear, Mr Boggs.’
Boggs silently nodded his head, pretending to study the checklist in his lap. L’Enfant’s eyes moved away once more; Boggs surreptitiously checked the status board again. The indicator had yet to flash red.
Goddammit, Nash, get in there! Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten already…!
He heard footfalls on the gangway leading down into the gondola, then a heavy weight was dropped into the passenger seat behind him. Boggs looked around to see Megan Swigart—still wearing her skinsuit sans helmet and gloves—pushing an airtight aluminum attaché case the rest of the way into the seat. ‘I’ve gathered the remaining records, Commander,’ she said. ‘All the CD-ROMs from the command module are in the case and the mainframes have been scrubbed.’
‘Good work, Lieutenant,’ L’Enfant said distractedly, still watching the sunset.
‘Nothing to it.’ Swigart smiled casually as she tugged the strap of her Steyr off her shoulder and carefully propped the assault rifle against an armrest. ‘Piece of cake.’
Boggs clamped his jaw together as he forced his eyes away from the attaché case. The bitch had just destroyed all the hard data gathered by the science team over the past three years, and she called it a piece of cake. All records of their labor were collected in the attaché case. Although only L’Enfant knew what he intended to do with the CD-ROMs, Boggs could well imagine their final fate: a small cache of information, classified Top Secret and hidden within some Pentagon AI system, where the names of Kawakami and Isralilova and Verduin and all the others would appear only as minor footnotes and indices.
Perhaps that was the whole point of Kentucky Derby, the hidden agenda of those who had sent L’Enfant to Mars in the first place: to steal information, carrying it off in the night like a half-ass thief snatching gold-plated candlesticks from a church altar. All this, just to gain a temporary advantage over imaginary enemies…
‘Very well.’ L’Enfant sat up straight in his seat, shifting the gun around in his lap as he began to buckle up for takeoff. He paused halfway through pulling down the harness straps and glanced over his shoulder at Swigart. ‘And, ah…just to be on the safe side, did you…?’
‘Yes sir, I checked the base perimeter.’ Swigart was seating herself behind L’Enfant, obviously to keep Boggs within gun-range in case he had any homicidal notions. ‘Nothing moving in the vicinity. All clear.’
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Just checking.’ Was it his own imagination at play, or did Boggs detect the slightest hint of relief in L’Enfant’s voice? The commander buckled his waist and shoulder straps, then looked over at the pilot. ‘Mr Boggs, it’s now seventeen-thirty hours. Please take us out of here.’
Oh, Christ. Miho…
For an instant, Boggs was tempted to reach across the aisle, grab the smug asshole by the throat with both hands, and ram his balding skull straight through the cockpit windows. Even if he or Swigart managed to plug him during the act, at least he’d have the satisfaction of seeing the sick fuck die before instant decompression snuffed out all their lives. If Boggs was going to hell, he might as well take this raving maniac down with him…
‘Yes sir,’ he murmured instead. He let out his breath and swiftly buckled his own seat harness. The blind obedience of a coward who wanted to stay alive just a little while longer.
The Akron was already refueled and powered-up; all he had to do was sever the mooring cables, vector the engines and throttle up. Boggs deliberately forced all thoughts of Miho Sasaki from his mind as his eyes swept across the myriad gauges, screens and LCDs, automatically checking to see that all systems were flight-ready. Everything was copacetic, except for the stone in his chest.
As he grasped the yoke in his left fist and curled his right hand over the throttle, he stole one final glance at the aft maintenance-hatch indicator near his left elbow…
The LED was pulsing a vivid, bright red.
He stared at it, blinked…and, just as suddenly as it had appeared, the indicator went dark again.
Someone had opened the aft maintenance hatch in the lower stern of the Akron and closed it again. Just like all those times at Arsia Station when he had to bug the ground crew about making sure the damn thing was latched. Except, this time, there was no flight crew on hand to resecure the hatch.
Nash was alive…and he had remembered.
And if Nash had made it out of the Labyrinth, there was a good chance Miho had escaped as well. There was no way to make sure that they were both aboard, though, without tipping off L’Enfant and Swigart. All he could do was hope.
Nonetheless, it was difficult to refrain from grinning. Boggs quickly coughed into his fist to hide an involuntary chuckle, then wrenched his attention back to his controls. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Everyone strapped in? Okay, let’s hit it…’
He reached up, grasped the cable-detach bar, and yanked it down.
There was a sudden lurch as the airship freed itself from its mooring lines. Nash had already anticipated it, but Sasaki was unprepared for the abrupt motion. Caught off-balance, she was thrown across the catwalk railing; it caught her in the stomach and she nearly toppled over before Nash grabbed her by the hips and hauled her back. Through her helmet, he caught a glimpse of her blanched face.
No wonder. If she’d gone over the rail, Miho would have fallen twenty feet until she ripped through the skin of one of the internal gas cells…and then it would have been another fifty-foot drop through the cell itself until she smashed against the Akron’s internal skeleton, or even hurtled through the Mylar outer fuselage.
She grasped the opposite railing with both hands and placed her feet firmly on the gridded catwalk. Already they could hear the drone of the engines as they were throttled up; there was the familiar rising sensation as the Akron began its ascent. Miho started to place her helmet against Nash’s, but he signaled for her to reactivate her comlink, raising three fingers to indicate the third channel.
They had deliberately continued radio-silence even after they had reached the top of the secondary tunnel and climbed through the partly-disassembled roof of the great cavern. As Miho had predicted, they had emerged from the catacombs in the City Square, amidst the four major pyramids. It hadn’t been difficult to climb through, since most of the groundcover had already been removed by the pseudo-Cooties. Even then, however, they had barely been able to reach the Akron in time; they had been forced to hide behind a corner of the C-4 Pyramid until almost the last minute, when Swigart finally boarded the airship and enabled them to make a frantic dash for the maintenance hatch beneath the dirigible’s stern.
Sasaki hesitated, then tapped her fingers against her skinsuit’s right gauntlet. ‘Are you certain we should be doing this?’ she asked.
It was a relief to be able to hear her voice distinctly again, without the muffling effects, of helmet-to-helmet communications. ‘Positive,’ Nash said. ‘They won’t be using the comlink themselves while they’re down there, and I doubt they’ll wander up here.’
She still looked worried. ‘What about Waylon?’
‘If he’s been paying attention, he must know we’re back here. He won’t get them to make an inspection.’ Nash could only hope this assumption was true; they were running thin on luck already. ‘C’mon, we have to get to the bl
ister. Just make sure you always keep one hand on something firm.’
She shook her head, completely grim-faced. ‘Don’t worry. One lesson was enough.’
It was dark inside the envelope, but not completely opaque; the luminescent fiberoptics that lined the central catwalks and ladders radiated an orange glow across the mammoth gas cells. Nash led her down the center of the Akron, retracing the path he had taken during his previous in-flight inspection of the envelope, pulling against the railings to compensate for the upward tilt of the deck. The airship shuddered as it gradually ascended to cruising altitude, its engines moaning on either side of them. It was the second time in the last hour that they had been forced to make such a steep climb; first the upper galleries of the Cootie underworld, now this. Again, Nash felt his battered stomach muscles cry in pain. He clenched his teeth and forced himself onwards.
He located the central ladder and began to make the long climb to the upper gangway, pausing now and then to look down and make certain that Sasaki wasn’t running into any more trouble. If she was having any problems, though, she didn’t show it. She carefully clung to the ladder rungs, never once looking down. She paused on the ladder, resting for a moment, and glanced up at him.
‘Much further?’ she asked, her exhaustion plain in her voice. Her breath was coming in ragged gasps; the woman had been through a lot today.
‘Not much.’ Nash was whipped as well. He waited another few seconds until they had both caught their breath, then continued to scale the ladder. ‘We’ve only got a little further to go. Then we can relax.’
They reached the upper gangway several minutes later; once they were there, Nash gave Sasaki a few minutes to get her wind again before he retraced his steps to the topside observation blister. There was room enough for both of them to squeeze inside comfortably; unfortunately, though, it wasn’t pressurized. Nash regretted that omission. The inside of his skinsuit was already beginning to smell, and he had no doubt that Miho’s suit also had the odor of stale sweat.
