The Daedalus Incident

by Michael J. Martinez

  “I met Cagliostro seven years ago. He was brilliant, a most gifted alchemist, and I admit I was blinded as to his character by his talent. I took him on as an apprentice, hoping that his unconventional thinking would help me unlock the secrets to finding the Philosopher’s Stone—the very essence of the planet Earth itself.

  “We were indeed successful, producing the Stone not two years later. But Cagliostro soon became sullen, for I guarded the stone carefully, concerned that others might take this accomplishment and use it for their own ends. He became more erratic in behavior and temperament, and soon after, it became clear to me that we could no longer work together effectively. I ended his apprenticeship and told him to be on his way. I felt that I had kept enough of the Stone’s creation from him that he would not soon easily replicate it.”

  St. Germain looked down at the floor as he continued. “Indeed, it seemed as though he could not, so he opted instead for mere theft. I awoke one morning to find my mystic defenses breached, the Stone missing. He even left me a note, mocking my limited appreciation for his skills and the potential of my Work. And he said that his new master—one called Althotas—would teach him far more than I could.”

  St. Germain turned to address the Xan directly. “Althotas is the warlord you speak of, is he not?”

  “Yes,” the creature intoned. “And it would seem that he works now to free himself. The rituals used to create his prison are lost to us. We turned our back on the darker arts millennia ago. It is possible that time, and the growing aptitude of humanity’s alchemists, has lessened the power of our working. It may be that he has projected his consciousness into our world, and has found a means of freeing himself entirely, with help from Count Cagliostro.”

  “And yet you let him walk out of here not long ago,” Morrow said, entering the conversation after long minutes of rapt silence. “Have you not issued chase?”

  “We have, but his vessel is too rapid, and his ascent to the Void too fast. Furthermore, it is forbidden for us to follow him beyond Callisto,” the Xan said. “We have sworn to remove ourselves from the worlds you occupy, and we shall continue to do so.

  “However,” the Xan added, pausing. “Should Althotas effect his release, we may be forced to take action. There are those among our people who would welcome the return to our old, violent ways. And in the ensuing battles, the cost to Earth itself may be dear.”

  The creature raised its arm, revealing a dark pink, three-fingered hand—more pincer-like than human—and pointed at the group. “It falls to you to stop Cagliostro from unleashing Althotas. In doing so, you may prove your mettle upon the larger stage, and earn the gratitude of our people. That is the will of our leaders.”

  Franklin coughed a moment before stepping forward. “Then we had best be on our way. But I must ask this question: We know so little of your city here, and less of your homeworld. How would Cagliostro know that such a treasure was housed here?”

  The creature paused before answering, its harmonies laced with a slight dissonance. “You are perceptive, Dr. Franklin. We do not know, but any potential answer we may explore is disconcerting at best.”

  “Indeed,” Morrow said. “It would seem our quarry may have had assistance from quarters other than this Althotas fellow. Whatever the case, I promise you, we shall tend to our affairs and bring this villain to justice. I respectfully suggest, however, that you tend to yours as well. As you said, there are those among you who would welcome a return to your warlike past,” Morrow concluded.

  “Again, perceptive,” the Xan replied. Another door opened along the right wall. “You are forbidden from walking among our people, or those who live beyond our walls. This tunnel will take you back to the city gates, and your vessel. Now go, with our wishes for success.”

  Morrow nodded and, gathering his delegation with a sweep of his arm, led them from the temple.

  “Captain,” Weatherby whispered as he walked along, his chest feeling better even as his mind grew more troubled. “If Cagliostro’s ship can ascend to the Void from anywhere, and outrun the Xan as well, how are we to catch him?”

  Morrow frowned. “I do not know, but we had best find a solution quickly. It seems the very Earth itself is now at risk.”

  July 27, 2132

  It was past dinnertime before Shaila Jain managed to return to the Hub, tossing her helmet in the equipment locker with tired satisfaction. It took the better part of three hours for her and the rescue team to cut through the hull of the now upside-down Giffords to get the crew and passengers out, and there were still a few tons of cargo to contend with. But everyone was alive, and that’s what counted.

  She slowly slid the pressure suit off her tired body, feeling every second of the past seventy-two hours in her bones. She lost count of the odd mishaps McAuliffe had endured, though three remained foremost in her mind—the wall in the cave, the book writing itself, and Heath’s death. As she saw the miners gathering in the Hub to welcome—and perhaps warn—the newcomers, she added potential rioting to the list. During the rescue ops, she learned that the two injured JSC officers were pummeled in the mess hall by at least six miners, and that four of them had to be taken down with zappers, in addition to the one Diaz personally thrashed.

  Shaila could easily see that the diggers still didn’t look happy, but the loss of the Giffords and the AOO sensors was enough to make them more scared than pissed. Scared would make them more pliable—theoretically. Either that, or they’d really go batshit. On the bright side, more than a few of them gave her a nod as she passed through the Hub. There were a handful of smiles. And someone gave her a friendly pat on the shoulder too. That didn’t mean they still wouldn’t go batshit, of course, but perhaps Shaila’s rescue—and Diaz’ gamble—bought them a bit of goodwill and time.

  Thus, Shaila couldn’t help but feel pretty good as she cautiously climbed the stairs to the command center; her knee was better, but it would occasionally send a pang or two up her leg to remind her all was not well. She was learning to ignore it.

  “How we doing, ’Rico?” she asked Finelli as she entered the command center.

  “MarsSats and sensors still down. Dr. Hiyashi told me to tell you there’s no new activity, but I have no idea what she means,” Finelli said. “Do you?”

  “Yeah,” Shaila smiled weakly. “Need-to-know, Lieutenant. Where’s Diaz?”

  “She’s in with Harry and Dr. Durand,” Finelli advised, nodding his head toward Diaz’ office.

  Shaila nodded and knocked anyway. “Come,” Diaz said, her voice muffled by the door.

  Inside, Harry was sitting in Diaz’ guest chair, looking mightily pissed, while Stephane scowled at him as he leaned against the bulkhead. “What do you mean, we’re not going back outside?” Harry was saying—shouting, really.

  Shaila tried not to smirk. “Sorry to interrupt, ma’am. All hands aboard Giffords secured. No major injuries, but we’ll pack ’em off to Levin to be sure.”

  “Thanks, Jain. Sorry, Harry, you were saying?”

  “I was saying that you can’t shut us down!” Harry said after a sharp glare toward Shaila. “Those guys out there rioted this afternoon because of the shit going down here. You got two of your guys in sickbay and six of mine knocked cold with zappers. And now you want to tell them to sit on their hands and play nice?”

  “I hear they rioted for other reasons, no matter how much you want to turn this on us,” Diaz countered, fixing Harry with a hard stare. “And no, I don’t want them sitting around. I want them sent home.”

  “All of them?” Harry cried. “You can’t be serious.”

  Diaz turned to Stephane. “Dr. Durand, your assessment of the safety of mining ops?”

  Stephane shifted his stance along the wall, clearly uncomfortable with being put on the spot. “When you see what happened in the lava tube, and the ravines, and now at your Site Six, you see none of the usual triggers for seismic activity. You do not see tremors, tectonic shifts, any of it. They are very localized and t
hey should not be so. The quake that killed Mr. Heath should have been felt all the way here at base. And it was not.

  “So,” Stephane said, drawing a deep breath. “The quakes are not confined to one area, and there is no way to tell when or where they may appear. My official report is that it is unsafe to mine anywhere in our area of Mars.”

  Before Harry could argue further, Diaz leaned forward and called up a pair of images on her computer screen, both maps, and started pointing at the first one. “OK, you know that device I told you about? Here’s where it was found, Harry. Here’s the suit-beacon logs showing where you and your people were hanging out, which coincides with the EM ring we believe is out there.” She then pointed to the second one. “And here’s our sensor outage. Coincidence?”

  “Right, and your suit-beacon data is totally infallible.” Harry groused. “I mean, when Jain had me fucking arrested in the middle of an accident….” He paused to try to contain his anger. “I didn’t have my suit beacon on. I didn’t notice it was missing.”

  Diaz seemed to consider this. “Jain, how easy is it to tamper with a suit beacon?”

  Shaila had to think back to the manuals she skimmed on the topic when she first arrived. “Taking them off would be easy. Switching them with another suit? Probably not too hard. I mean, you’d need to play with a few different suits, and someone might see you do it and start wondering. But it’s possible.”

  Harry held up his hands in faux supplication. “If that’s not at least reasonable doubt, I don’t know what is.”

  Diaz was about to reply when she was cut off by a loud voice from outside the door. “I don’t give a damn who’s in there, kid, she’s gotta see this now!”

  Diaz slid a tired hand across her face. “Kaczynski.” She hit a button on her desk. “Finelli, let him in.” The colonel nodded to Shaila, who rose and went to the door, ready to let him in—or knock him out, as needed.

  A moment later, Kaczynski hustled into the room as respectfully as his bulky frame would allow. He was followed by someone else; Shaila recognized him as one of the miners that came in aboard Giffords.

  “Sorry to disturb you, Colonel,” Kaczynski said, “but you really gotta see this.” He held out a small data chip.

  Diaz reached over and took it, eyebrows raised. “Holovid?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he replied. Shaila thought he was being unusually respectful. Or maybe it was something else altogether. “Tony here—this is Tony, by the way—he shot this as he was incoming on Giffords.”

  Diaz slid the chip into a reader on her desk. “OK, but this better be good.”

  A holo image sprang to life, hovering a half-meter off Diaz’ desk. It showed the view out the Giffords window as it entered the Martian atmosphere. The sky lightened, and the familiar geography of Mars unfolded.

  “Pretty. Nice angle,” Shaila quipped.

  “Keep watching,” Kaczynski said.

  The image continued, with more Mars, more landscape. There was some chatter about finding booze on base.

  Then the screen went white for a second—exactly the same way Greene’s holocam blanked when it hovered over the EM lines outside.

  When the holoimage refocused, Shaila could hear the Giffords alarms going off, the passengers starting to ask questions, shouting. The camera panned to the interior of the craft, where she could see at least one of the passengers assuming the useless tuck-and-cover position. The camera panned back to the window.

  “Oh….” Diaz quickly hit pause.

  The frozen image was wholly unfamiliar. It showed a very long trench, at least five meters wide and several kilometers long. A series of other trenches branched off it at 45 degree angles, stretching off to the edges of the frame.

  And at the head of the main trench was a pyramid.

  “Three guesses where that is,” Kaczynski said. When Shaila looked up, she saw his eyes were wide, his face drawn.

  “Our cave,” Shaila said.

  “Far as I can tell. Check out the foothills over to the left,” Kaczynski said, pointing at the little screen. “And that’s the access road. It fits.”

  Shaila nodded as everyone studied the pyramid. The image was a little pixilated, but she could see the structure clearly—a full six tiers. The lava tube itself looked completely collapsed, which would explain the ditch…in part. That ditch looked a hell of a lot longer than the lava tube was.

  In fact, it reminded her of a canal.

  A Martian canal.

  And the other ravines that had inexplicably appeared near the lava tube were transformed into other canals. They all pointed toward the pyramid.

  Diaz stared hard at the image, then zoomed in on it. “Looks like…wow. Like Chichen Itza or something.”

  They stared for a few moments longer. The resolution was crap, but Shaila could still make out the fact that the pyramid’s bricks were large—far larger than the stones in the cave had been. They also seemed to be intricately decorated—carved, maybe, or even painted—with images that she couldn’t quite make out. The four-sided pyramid was topped with an odd circular structure that gleamed in the weak Martian sunlight. There were also various places on the walls that caught a similar gleam. Maybe it was gold?

  Harry broke the silence and looked over at Shaila. “And you’re sitting there thinking I had something to do with that?” he asked, with a touch of reverence completely outside his usual bombast.

  Shaila ignored him and turned to Diaz. “I think Ed’s right. We’d need sensors back to confirm it, but that…structure…appears to be right where the lava tube was. And that canal, or whatever, would roughly correspond to the length of the cavern. Right, Steve?”

  Stephane was staring intently at the image, eyes wide and a slight smile on his face. “I recognize the landmarks. Mon dieu, it is incredible.”

  Shutting down the holoprojector, Diaz leaned back in her seat and signed. “Well, we don’t have sensors. We don’t have overhead coverage, either. Houston’s already having kittens. Now this?”

  “What are you going to tell them?” Shaila asked. It wasn’t exactly protocol to ask, but hell, there was a pyramid out there. What’s normal?

  “At the moment? Just sensors and sats,” Diaz said. “They’d see that anyway. The rest, well…I want to chat with Harry here first.”

  “And I’m telling you, I’m not involved in this, and neither are my people,” Harry protested.

  Kaczynski and Tony looked around and shifted slightly. “Maybe we ought to go,” Kaczynski grumbled quietly.

  Diaz smiled. “Tony, thanks for the vid. Why don’t you get yourself some dinner? Ed, I’d like you to stay, if you don’t mind.” Tony quickly hurried outside, leaving Kaczynski fumbling with his hands next to Stephane. “Ed, I need you to be frank with me,” the colonel said. “I assume some other folks have already seen this vid?”

  “Yeah, and the rest probably heard about it by now,” he said.

  “How much of a shitstorm am I looking at?”

  Kaczynski barked out a little laugh. “Between all the crap so far today and this thing? Ain’t no regs say we gotta work under those conditions. Look, your girl here”—Kaczynski nodded toward Shaila—“did some fine work. I don’t think anybody’s ready to start something big now. But with this shit? A pyramid? If I were you, I’d lock down those transports good.”

  Diaz nodded. “I’ll do one better than that,” she said, turning to Harry. “You’ve just had a mining collapse. Someone, whether it’s you or someone else, has been tampering with suit beacons, which is a big deal around here. And someone, again you or someone else, managed to place a ring of linear EM fields around my area of operations that took out half our sensor grid and three of our satellites. It’s going to take us months to deal with just those issues, let alone a giant fucking pyramid of unknown origin—which, by the way, is totally unofficial and is not to be discussed. But until all that’s dealt with, you’ve got no mining ops here.”

  Harry’s mouth opened to protest, b
ut closed after a second or two as Diaz continued. “I’m ordering an emergency evacuation of all Billiton personnel. No matter what happens in the next few days, nobody’s going to let you back outside. So your people are going home. And I’m sure JSC is going to debrief each and every one of them when they get back to Earth.”

  “I’d like to stay,” Harry said weakly. “Someone has to keep an eye on the company’s interests.”

  Diaz frowned. “Honestly, I’m not sure I trust you around here right now, Harry.”

  “You can cut off my comms. Monitor computer use. Kick me out of my office. Whatever. Someone needs to stay here,” he said.

  Diaz looked over at Shaila. “What do you think, Jain?”

  Shaila thought about it for a moment. The old maxim about keeping your enemies closer seemed apt. “He stays in the JSC corridor. All his passwords are revoked. He gets nothing from his office from this point forward, and he has zero access to any computer, workstation or datapad. Not even a calculator. He gets e-mail privileges once a day, under supervision.”

  “Agreed,” Diaz said. “Harry, you stay. Your people are gone.” She turned to Kaczynski. “I know your guys are scared, pissed, whatever. I really need you to do your best to keep them in line as best you can while we get ’em out of here. If not, I’ll zap all y’all to hell and back again. Got it?”

  Kaczynski nodded. “I’m more than happy to get off this rock and let you talk to the little green men. Doubt you’ll get much argument from anyone else, either.”

  “Good. Thanks, Ed. Harry, get moving. I’ll be sounding the order in a few minutes.”

  Harry gave Shaila one final, withering stare before leaving the office, Kaczynski in tow.

  “What a bastard,” Diaz muttered. “Be sure to relay that bit about his comms and computers. And be sure to tell everyone that Greene and Yuna aren’t part of the evac. We’ll need them.”

  Shaila was already tapping out orders on her datapad. “On it. At last count, we have 58 Billiton employees, including the eight guys that just came in, and three 20-seat transports. Oh, and we have Greene’s cameraman and producer, making sixty. That means when they leave, we’re stuck here at least another four weeks.” While Mars figures out whether it wants to tear itself apart or not, she thought.