by Allen Steele
The lighting in the lab was dim, red-tinted on the same spectrum as the surface outside the habitat to mimic the natural Martian conditions. The AEL was designed to copy outside conditions while preserving dust-free, germless conditions necessary for exobiologic studies. On the other side of the central workbench, Shin-ichi Kawakami was using duct tape to secure a rack of flasks against a bulkhead shelf. ‘Have you got her in?’ he asked without looking over his shoulder. ‘Good! Now shut the hatch!’
Isralilova immediately slammed it shut. ‘Sorry it took a few moments,’ she apologized briskly, ‘but we were busy…’
‘Then you know about the…’ Sasaki began.
‘Of course, Miho.’ Kawakami pulled the tape tight against the flasks, then moved to the computer terminal next to the rack. ‘Arthur put out the warning a few minutes ago. As the Americans like to say, there’s going to be a whole lot of moving going on, so…’
‘A whole lot of shaking going on,’ Miho automatically corrected him.
‘Jerry Lee Lewis,’ Kawakami said impatiently as his fingers darted across the keypad. Nobel Laureate in exobiology, senior scientist of the Cydonia Expedition and secret fan of western rock ‘n roll, he practiced sho, the ancient Japanese art of calligraphy, and collected 1950s rockabilly tapes with equal passion. Miho wasn’t quite sure why she loved the old man…‘Yes, Miho, I know…Now make sure the tent is secure over Hirohito, will you, please?’
Sasaki looked down at the dark form that lay on the long lab bench in the middle of the room, shrouded by a translucent plastic sheet which was clamped to the edges of the table. Hirohito was the scientist’s nickname for the only intact corpse of a Cootie which had been found in the City. It figured that Kawakami gave it the name of one of Japan’s past emperors; ironic now, considering it had been Hirohito who was forced to sign the treaty with the United States which had ended World War II.
But Hirohito the mummified alien was as important to Kawakami as his own life. All the other Cooties were desiccated fragments of chitin-like exoskeleton: a half-collapsed skull here, a foreleg there, part of a thorax from one niche which might, or might not, be matched to another partial thorax from a different part of the vast tombs of the D & M Pyramid. Of all the remains which had been thus-far located, only by freakish and as-yet unexplained accident had Hirohito’s insect-like body survived the catastrophes of time. Miho carefully checked the clamps holding down the shroud and reflected that Kawakami would gladly swap his Nobel Prize medallion for another corpse to match Hirohito. Which was not saying much, considering that the old scientist had been known to make inglorious use of that same medallion as a paperweight in the Module Nine lab…
For no apparent reason, she suddenly thought of another member of the science team. ‘Paul!’ she snapped, looking up from the bench. ‘Has anyone seen Paul?’
Kawakami turned round from the terminal; through the visor of his helmet, his ragged white mustache framed his distracted frown. ‘Verduin? I assumed that you knew where he was.’
Sasaki stared at him, then darted a look across the bench at Isralilova. Tamara looked back at her and shook her head. ‘I last saw him out on the surface,’ she said. ‘He was checking the C-4 scanner when the lander touched down…’
Sasaki hissed and bolted away from the bench; she almost made it to the outer hatch on the other end of the AEL which led directly to the surface, before Kawakami jumped out of his chair and wrapped his arms around her waist. ‘No!’ he commanded, stopping her more with his voice than with his frail strength. ‘You stay here!’
‘Paul’s outside!’ Miho didn’t fight Shin-ichi, although she could have easily knocked the sixty-year-old man to the floor. ‘There’s going to be an airstrike! He’ll be killed if he’s out there!’
‘If he heard Arthur, then he will have taken cover,’ Kawakami said soothingly. ‘There’s nothing you can do for him, Miho.’
Cocooned in his combat armor, Maksim Oeljanov looked through the built-in VR screen and studied the flat landscape separating the habitat from the edge of the City. Digital displays in Cyrillic informed him that the nearest pyramid, the C-4, lay only thirty meters away to the south-east; as he glanced in that direction, he saw someone in a skinsuit standing near one of the scanners, at the western corner of the massive stone edifice. He ignored whoever it was; if he or she was foolish enough to be out in the open like this, there was nothing he could do about it.
He returned his attention to straight-ahead, the north-eastern boundary of Cydonia Base beyond the upthrust bicone of the Shinseiki’s lander. In the far distance, near the horizon, he could see the great profile of the Face, staring bleakly upward into the darkening sky.
When they come, he thought, it will be over the Face…
The Commonwealth’s Central Intelligence Service had known about the secret American effort to build a Mars space-to-surface fighter for quite some time. In fact, the very reason why Oeljanov had been sent to this godforsaken place had been to counteract a possible American takeover of the base. If only the CIS had something like the Hornets…
No. This was wishful thinking. He would have to depend on the autotanks which flanked him on either side. If worst came to worst and he found himself outgunned, he could always command Unit One to train its guns on the habitat’s command module. Then, perhaps, he could dictate terms of surrender by the American pilots.
But that was a coward’s way out. Oeljanov almost automatically ruled it out. This was to be a showdown: Russian cybernetics and armor matched against experimental American spacecraft.
Yes. A showdown…
He noticed his shadow stretching out before him, cast across the red dust by the setting sun at his back, and was reminded of the old American Western movies he openly adored. His fellow cadets at the Russian Military Academy used to call him ‘Cadet Clint’ because of his predilection, and he had not minded the nickname all that much. He was a loyal officer of the Russian Army, but in his fantasy life he always wore a bandolier and two Colt six-guns; in his fantasy-self, there was a knowing squint in his eyes.
Yes, this was going to be much like a Western: he was Bob Wayne…nyet, he reminded himself once again, that’s John Wayne…Gary Cooper, Steve McQueen, Yul Brynner, Clint Eastwood…
‘Okay, pilgrim,’ he said in English, imitating Bob-John Wayne’s drawl, ‘I’m calling yew out…’
As if on cue, the RWS bleeped, alerting him to something which had been picked up within radar range. Two blue crosshatches appeared on his VR screen, overlaying twin white streaks which were rising over the north-eastern horizon. Very good; just as he had predicted.
‘Unit One, Unit Two,’ he said aloud, ‘track and target incoming objects at azimuth fifty-five degrees nine-point-two minutes and lock-on weapons.’
There was a double-bleep in his headphones as the autotanks obediently followed his instructions; he didn’t need to look at his heads-up to see that their guns were armed and following the track of the Hornets.
Oeljanov raised his right arm to point at the sky, feeling his index finger coil around the recessed trigger of his own built-in gun. ‘Continue autotargeting,’ he told his suit. ‘Fire control select on manual.’ He could have allowed the suit to determine the optimum target and automatically fire for him, but that was much too unsportsmanlike. A soldier, or a gunslinger, doesn’t let a computer pull the trigger for him. That’s not the way Clint would have done it…
As the RWS’s beeps rose in cadence, signaling the rapid approach of the enemy, Oeljanov planted his feet wide apart and sucked in a deep breath. When the sun sets, he told himself, I’ll be a Hero of the Commonwealth…
The first indication Paul Verduin had that something was seriously wrong was when he received a terse radio message from Arthur Johnson, telling him to take cover near the City. Then the comlink went silent, leaving the Dutch scientist with little choice but to run for his life.
He’d felt certain that a showdown was inevitable, ever since the Russians had br
ought their weaponry to Cydonia. But he had never expected it to be so fast…
Verduin knew something was coming out of the sky when the C-4 scanner turned its head toward the east. The scanner was a stationary robot: a tall, slender automaton fixed permanently in the ground, with a cluster of cameras, sound and motion detectors, recorders, and transmitters built into a swivel-mounted head on top of its main shaft. It had been set there to act as a sentry to the entrance to the C-4 Pyramid, guarding against anyone making an unauthorized visit to the Labyrinth…or, just perhaps, something coming out of the pyramid.
Crouched behind the western corner of the pyramid, Verduin jabbed a forefinger on the keypad built into the right-hand bracelet of his skinsuit, tapping into Channel Four, the scanner’s frequency. Q: What is coming from the East? he asked.
The reply from the AI system immediately flashed in translucent green letters across his helmet’s heads-up display: 2 OBJECTS / IDENTITY UNKNOWN / NE 55.95 X 1200 M. / EST. VEL…
He didn’t read the rest, for he suddenly heard a high thin whistle, which sounded absurdly like the sound-effect one hears in a cartoon when a bomb is being dropped out of the sky. Verduin looked again across the plain at the distant mounds of the habitat. Oeljanov—no one else would be wearing that combat armor suit, so it had to be Oeljanov—and the two autotanks were still between him and safety inside the modules. But maybe, if he took advantage of the one-third gravity and discarded his ankle-weights which allowed him to walk normally on the surface, he could still…
Don’t even think about it, he told himself. You have several million tons of stone block between you and whatever is coming down from the sky. If you stay here, you have a chance, but caught out in the open…
Verduin grimaced and crouched lower behind the corner of the pyramid. He remembered stories his grandfather, who had been a child during World War II, had told him about cowering in his mother’s flat in Arnhem when the Nazi Panzer divisions were laying siege to the Allied Forces of the ill-fated Operation Market Garden. His grandfather had been among the few Dutch residents who had escaped harm when Arnhem was eventually leveled during the combat. To the young Paul Verduin, who was then devouring all the science books he could lay his hands upon, the Siege of Arnhem sounded as remote as the Fall of Ancient Rome to the Visigoths.
He had listened to the old man’s oft-repeated stories with little more than casual interest, being polite while he leafed through another astronomy text, but now he had a sense of what his grandfather had felt. A mechanized, faceless terror was descending upon him, and the only options he had were to run or hide…never to fight back.
The whistling grew louder. From his all-too-close vantage point, he could see the Russian autotanks tilting back on their legs as their ugly black machine guns simultaneously telescoped upward.
‘Damn you,’ he whispered in Dutch. ‘Get off this planet…’
Then, all at once, the fury of war was upon him.
The Unit One autotank opened fire first, followed milliseconds later by a continuous burst from Unit Two, the one closer to him. A dim staccato pappa-pappa-pappa-pappa was carried through the thin atmosphere as fire seemed to erupt from their machine guns, spent shell casings ejecting from the sides of the robots and falling, bouncing, to the desert floor. Verduin instinctively held his hands up to the sides of his helmet as he watched Oeljanov take one step forward, his own gun blazing away at something still unseen in the sky beyond the peak of the pyramid…
‘Get off my goddamn planet!’ Verduin shouted.
Something exploded between Unit One and Unit Two, sending up a shower of dust and pummeling Oeljanov to his knees. A fraction of a second later, Verduin caught the briefest glimpse of something streaking into Unit Two…
Then the Bushmaster went off like a bomb, its fuel tank detonating as an orange-red fireball, twisted metal debris spewing outward. Amid the muffled roar, Verduin saw something spiraling straight toward him; he threw himself flat on the ground, covering his head with his arms, and a moment later felt something heavy smash into the ground only a few feet away.
Verduin glanced between his elbows and saw the head of the C-4 scanner, its camera lenses pointed straight at him. A couple more feet of random velocity and it would have crushed him.
He barely had time to take this in before there was another explosion, this time from above. Paul craned his neck back as far as his helmet would permit and saw a small, stub-winged spacecraft racing across the sky, only a couple of hundred meters above the ground, its shadow passing over the ruined hulk of the autotank. Black smoke was billowing from beneath its wings; the craft canted sideways, out of control in a long downward arc, and disappeared from sight past the huge peak of the C-l Pyramid…
More gunfire. Unable to help himself, Verduin rolled sideways to stare in horrified fascination as another missile lanced Unit One. The autotank’s upper turret exploded and the mobile lower fuselage seemed to reluctantly collapse upon itself like the beheaded body of an animal. Maksim Oeljanov, making an ungainly struggle to his feet in his CAS, was raising his right-hand gun to take aim when a wide, dark shadow fell across him…
Bullets pocked the armor like hard rain. Oxygen-nitrogen spewed outward from the CAS like fine mist—pink-tinted white mist—as the Russian officer toppled backwards, letting loose a final bit of obstinate gunfire as he sprawled into the rocky soil. His body was lost in a dusty cloud as, a moment later, the second spacecraft whipped overhead, streaking against the setting sun into the dark sky.
The Greeks named this world after a God of War…
Paul Verduin watched it soar upward as he waited for the next missile, the next fusillade of 30mm shells. Yet there was peace now. The western wind slowly carried the mixed haze of red dust and black smoke away from the battlefield, and the fuel of the destroyed autotanks made a brief and futile attempt to burn in the sparse atmosphere. There was an unintelligible chatter of voices—unnoticed until now, but everpresent nonetheless—in his headset.
So what else should you expect…?
Verduin lay prone on the ground, feeling his body shake within the tight confines of his skinsuit. There was a stinging, acid sensation between his thighs where he had involuntarily pissed himself beyond the capacity of the suit’s urine-collection cup. He hardly cared. He watched the little spacecraft as it banked sharply to the right, turning around and coming back toward the base. In one part of his mind he knew that it was coming in for landing…but he instinctively waited for its pilot to train the cannon on him, where he lay helpless on the ground, and open fire again.
But he knew that wouldn’t happen. No. It wouldn’t.
It wouldn’t…
‘Get off my planet,’ he whispered again.
Excerpt from ‘Mars’, The Solar System, Volume 4), Time-Life Books, New York (2034)
The second expedition to the City found as many new mysteries as it did new discoveries.
The extraterrestrial explorers who had visited Mars in the distant past apparently never left the planet. Indeed, the red planet had become their final resting place. The giant D & M Pyramid was found to be an immense tomb, its interior catacombed with niche-like compartments containing their desiccated remains. Although only one intact exoskeleton of a Cootie—as the alien race was dubbed by the initial explorers—was ever found, this single specimen, along with fragments of others, was enough to provide Cydonia Base exobiologist Shin-ichi Kawakami and the science team with a near-complete picture of the physiology of the insectile aliens (see fig. 3-8).
Why did the Cooties settle on Mars instead of Earth? And why did the aliens never leave Mars, but commit themselves to mass—and perhaps living—entombment within the D & M Pyramid? While there are several theories, the leading one was first propounded by Richard Hoagland, in the 1980s before the existence of the Face and the City was verified, and later tentatively supported by Kawakami.
According to the Hoagland theory, the aliens had been colonists brought to our solar system b
y a sublight-speed starship from their homeworld, located in an as-yet undetermined part of the galaxy. The starship had followed a course tracked by an earlier advance probe to Earth, but after a voyage which must have lasted for hundreds, or even thousands, of years, the colonists found Earth to be critically different from what had been anticipated.
Hoagland speculated that Earth’s gravity might have been too high to support such a colony, a factor which an advance probe might have overlooked in its assay of Earth as a colonizable world. From his examination of the Cooties’ remains, Kawakami has stated that the aliens’ fragile physiology may not have been strong enough to support their life-functions for very long in Earth’s higher gravity, lending some credence to Hoagland’s theory.
Other exobiologists have since questioned these conjectures—the possibility of microbiological predators has been raised, for instance, along with the obvious mystery of why such an advanced interstellar probe failed to report gravitational conditions—but the Hoagland-Kawakami theory stands as the leading explanation.
Even then, a major question persisted: why did the Cooties leave their home system? An exploratory spirit? A need to colonize other planets because of conditions in their home system? No one knew for certain.
Nonetheless, under such conditions, the Cooties might have reached the decision to settle on Mars instead of Earth. Their starship might have been on a one-way trip, with return to the home system impossible for reasons of fuel and resources; with the remaining planets even more inhospitable. Mars was the best and only hope for the colony’s survival.
For whatever reason, the Martian colony did not survive. The planet’s climate could not support the Cooties for long. Although a starship has never been found, circumstantial evidence suggests that it was dismantled and that the Cooties did not leave our Solar System again.
Within the City Square, Pyramids C-l, C-2 and C-3 were found to be the vacant remains of the colony, with vast chambers and small rooms apparently once devoted to sustaining—for a brief time—the lives of the Cooties. Yet surprisingly few relics were found in the pyramids, nor were there any signs of the aliens’ culture: no hieroglyphs, no examples of a written language, and most importantly, nothing which indicated from whence the Cooties had come. Indeed, it seemed as if the Cooties had deliberately removed and hidden their artifacts before they entombed themselves inside the D & M Pyramid.