by Allen Steele
‘How was Jamaica?’ Halprin asked once Nash had shaken his hand. ‘Better weather than up here, I might imagine.’
Nash knew that Control was fully aware that a tropical storm had lashed Kingston for the better part of the last week. ‘Warmer, at least,’ he said briefly, folding his trenchcoat over the back of a chair and rubbing a hand across his wet blond hair. ‘A bit damp, though.’
A sly smile whispered across Halprin’s face. ‘Quite,’ he replied. He briskly waved Nash to a chair on the other side of the long table and resumed his own seat. ‘This regards your next assignment, so I hope you’re well-rested from your vacation, hmm?’
Sneaky old bastard. He would also have known that Nash had spent three days bailing rainwater out of the bilge of his schooner. There was little about his field operatives that escaped the attention of Control. ‘Yes, sir,’ Nash said as he sat down and crossed his legs. ‘Very relaxing, Jamaica is at this time of year.’ He paused, and added, ‘You should try it sometime, sir. The fishing is excellent.’
‘Yes. Right.’ Halprin shuffled through the folders on his desk. The verbal fencing was over; it was time to get down to business. ‘This indirectly reflects the Cape Canaveral assignment just over two years ago. The bit of footwork you undertook for Skycorp…’
‘Photographing the F-210 Hornets?’ Nash carefully kept his voice neutral. ‘I hope our clients aren’t still upset about my giving that technician a slap.’
‘Upset’ was an understatement. Skycorp’s chief executives had been livid when they learned that Nash had knocked out a NASA pad-rat on the launch tower at Pad 2-A. Their anger was barely mitigated by the fact that the quality of intelligence they received regarding Operation Steeple Chase had been superb.
For value earned, however, there was always value received. Ever since the infamous ‘Big Ear’ debacle of 2016, when the private space corporation had been publicly embarrassed by its affiliation with a top-secret National Security Agency operation for covert domestic SIGINT espionage—and, more recently, the labor strike at Descartes Station on the Moon in 2024 and the subsequent raid by the First Space Infantry—Skycorp had been attempting to distance itself from US intelligence and the military. It was bad for business, overall, to have the company’s interests aligned too closely with the United States government. Particularly now, when the corporation was striving to forge a multinational agreement with other space companies for the construction of the first major space colony in LaGrangian orbit.
Two years ago, Skycorp had become concerned when it learned, through the usual channels of hearsay and rumor, that a covert military payload was being sent to Mars aboard the SS Shinseiki. Skycorp had considerable capital investment in Mars, much of it still speculative. The planet had become very important to the company in terms of its long-range objectives; as a fuel resource for further deep-space exploration, it was invaluable. Skycorp had wanted to know what was going up there and why; like many other private companies before them, they had secretly retained the services of Security Associates.
SA had learned much, albeit not all, of the details of Operation Steeple Chase. Nash’s mission to Cape Canaveral had been to verify the nature of the military payload which was being ferried into orbit by the Constellation. His pictures of the two aeroshells nestled within the orbiter’s cargo bay, after study by the firm’s photo analysts, had gone far to confirm everyone’s worst suspicions. Skycorp had been very pleased with the information; when the inevitable crisis had occurred, the company had been forewarned and prepared to publicly disavow any connection with Operation Steeple Chase…a useful tactic, considering that the anti-space movement had gained momentum in response to the skirmish between US and CIS forces at Cydonia. Uchu-Hiko, the company which owned the Shinseiki, had not been so fortunate; Japanese Greens had picketed their Tokyo headquarters for months, and an unexploded bomb had been found near their Australian launch facility.
Even so, Skycorp had been perturbed by the fact that Nash had been obliged to protect his identity by punching out a launch-pad technician. It had never been charged, much less proven, by NASA that someone connected to Skycorp had been responsible for the still-unsolved assault; the FBI continued to believe that it had been the radical Greens which had penetrated security at the Cape in the guise of a USAF Space Command colonel, and the small handful of people who knew otherwise weren’t about to dispel that notion. Nonetheless, it had been messy. Bad for business…even if a partial refund had been refused.
‘No, no,’ Halprin said hastily. ‘The client has come to understand that by now.’
‘The client wanted me fired, as I recall,’ Nash replied.
‘Not any longer.’ Halprin glanced up from his paperwork. ‘In fact, they specifically asked for you when they contacted us. Seems they have a lingering interest in American military activities on Mars.’
Nash clasped his hands together in his lap. ‘Another payload? Sure, I can handle that…at least, so long as I don’t have to pose as a colonel again.’
It was meant as a joke, but Control apparently didn’t grasp the humor. He leaned back in his leather-backed chair and steepled his fingers together. ‘Oh, you’ll be visiting Cape Canaveral again,’ he drawled. In this posture he reminded Nash of a British professor explaining the Battle of Trafalgar to a slow-but-promising undergraduate. ‘But you’ll be going a lot further than that, I assure you…’
He paused deliberately. ‘If you accept the assignment, of course.’
Nash didn’t like the sound of that last part. Control rarely gave a field operative the option of backing out of an assignment. His salary was equivalent to his former take-home pay as a CIA agent, but hazardous-duty commission for field assignments was three times that of even a Mossad dirty-tricks operative. This was only part of the reason why the price for a Security Associates corporate contract started at one million dollars, and that was only for cheap jobs like bodyguarding corporate CEOs. It made for a comfortable living, but he was expected to earn his paycheck. Control’s extending the privilege of backing out of an assignment—especially one for which Nash’s personal involvement had been specifically requested by a client—was not the way Security Associates normally treated their highest-paid employees.
‘I don’t understand, sir,’ he said.
Halprin did not mince words. ‘For this job, you’re expected to go to Mars yourself.’
Nash thought about it for less than a second before he pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘Excuse me, Robert,’ he said politely; it was one of the very few times he had ever used Control’s first name. ‘I think I have a boat that needs to be mended.’
He picked up his trenchcoat and started walking toward the door. Halprin let him get halfway across the office before he cleared his throat. ‘If it is of any interest to you,’ he said, ‘the name of the person you’ll be investigating is Terrance L’Enfant.’
Another brief pause. ‘Commander Terrance C. L’Enfant, United States Navy, former captain of the USS Boston.’ There was the sound of a match striking, then the sucking sound of Halprin’s pipe. ‘Someone you know, yes?’
Nash stopped just before he reached the door. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes for a moment and then, just as Control must have anticipated, he turned around and walked back to the conference room table.
‘Good.’ Control settled back in his chair and stroked the warm bowl of his pipe. ‘Now that we’ve done with the histrionics, let’s get started, shall we? Pick up your file, please, and open it to the first page…’
Cydonia Base, Mars: February 14, 1359 MCM, 2032
In the vast shadow of the D & M Pyramid, a stainless-steel sphere hung suspended beneath a tripod above a crevasse, and within the sphere was a spider. The spider had been manufactured by the St Petersburg Robotics Corporation and had cost nearly one million eurodollars. It was St Valentine’s Day, but nobody at Cydonia Base was thinking about love.
Lieutenant Charlie Akers steadied himself carefully against a
leg of the tripod and reached across the open pit to yank a powerline free from the sphere’s electrical port. He hauled the line away from the crevasse and the surrounding rubble, dropped it on the ground, gave the wrench-cable a final yank to test its slack, then turned to give a thumbs-up to one of the three TV cameras arrayed around the pit.
Inside Cydonia Base’s monitor center several miles away, Tamara Isralilova watched Akers as he stepped out of camera range. She tapped a series of commands into her console keypad. ‘Internal batteries charged and at maximum rated efficiency,’ she said, watching the graphs on her console’s flat screens. ‘Power-up sequence initiated. Drop minus twenty-five seconds and counting.’ She quickly looked over her shoulder at Paul Verduin. ‘Ready, Paul?’
Behind her in the darkened monitor center, Verduin sat tensely in his chair. Multicolored lights flashed in complex patterns on his console, but he was literally blind to them; the virtual-reality helmet which covered his head except for his nose, mouth and chin was completely opaque. ‘Ready to switch on,’ he said.
He reached out with his right hand, feeling for the master switch on the console. It was the only non-VR switch he had to use to pilot the probe, and he had carefully memorized its location at his station. But before he could find it, he felt another hand brush past him and toggle the switch. As light suddenly rushed into his dark world, he murmured, ‘Thanks, Shin-ichi.’
‘You’re welcome.’ The voice did not belong to Shin-ichi Kawakami, however. It was Terrance L’Enfant who had spoken.
Of course it would be L’Enfant, Verduin reflected; he couldn’t let anything happen without muscling in somehow. Typical pushy American, he thought, then reconsidered. No. Not so typical. Verduin might have given voice to his annoyance otherwise, but with the commander…
Yet L’Enfant was only a small irritation, at least for the moment. All at once, Verduin was one with the probe, even though it was located several miles away. He could see through a small slot in the sphere, as clearly as if it were with his own flesh-and-blood eyes, the legs of the tripod, the skinsuited technician standing nearby and, looming like the mountain before him, the broken north-eastern flank of the D & M Pyramid, towering almost a mile into the pink sky. Digital readouts at the margins of his vision showed compass coordinates, attitude, battery draw, light density and more. Unreal, and yet so real…
‘Transit capsule drop minus fifteen seconds.’ This time it was Shin-ichi Kawakami’s gentle voice which prompted him. ‘How are you doing, Paul?’
‘Telemetry is nominal.’ He gazed up at the translucent row of green lights above his forehead, focused on the second one from the left, and deliberately blinked twice; it immediately shifted to red. ‘Recorder on.’
‘Da,’ Isralilova reported, and immediately corrected herself: ‘Yes, we copy.’ English was the common tongue here, even though Verduin could have understood her if she had chosen to speak in Russian. ‘Descent sequence on full auto. Ten seconds to drop. Nine…eight…’
Verduin folded his hands in his lap and tried to make himself relax. For the next few seconds, he had nothing to do but enjoy the ride. If, of course, one could relax while falling down a shaft five hundred meters deep, even if it was only through telepresence. He took a deep breath…
‘Two…one…drop initiated.’
He almost felt the tripod release the grommets on the sphere; there was a flash of motion as the probe dropped into the crevasse, its rapid descent controlled only by the cable. Verduin instinctively shut his eyes, then forced them open. In the half-light from the top of the pit, he saw the rough rock walls blur past as he plummeted into the abyss, until sunlight faded and he was thrust into darkness.
Digital numbers flickered at the edges of his vision, so fast as to be almost meaningless. Down, down, down…
‘Four hundred meters,’ Tamara reported.
‘Basement floor, coming up,’ Verduin said. ‘Garden utensils, books, children’s toys…’
‘Cut the cute stuff,’ he heard Marks say from the other side of the module.
Anger swept aside his anxiety. ‘I would like to see you try this,’ he replied, and almost instantly regretted it. Marks was likely to rip the VR helmet off his head and do exactly that. After five months, Verduin had come to realize that arguing with L’Enfant’s bullies—escorts, if one still cared to use that term—was always a mistake. Shin-ichi was the only one who could…
‘Three hundred meters,’ Tamara said tersely. ‘Two twenty-five…two hundred…slowing rate of descent…’
The transit capsule had passed the point where the ancient meteor had collapsed part of the D & M Pyramid. Although he was still blind, the probe’s cameras shielding him within the protective shroud of the capsule, Verduin knew from sorties with earlier probes that the rock walls of the pit were smoother and less jagged at this lower depth, showing where the drilling machines had excavated the last few hundred feet to the underground tunnel which he himself had dubbed Mama’s Back Door.
‘Rate of descent slowing,’ Tamara reported. ‘One hundred meters…seventy-five…fifty…twenty-five…we’re doing fine…twenty, eighteen, fifteen…’
‘Please don’t rush on my account,’ he said half-jokingly.
‘Five meters…four…three-point-seven-five…three meters…we’re in the tunnel.’
The vertical shaft had reached its end. ‘Point-five meters to the floor,’ Tamara said. ‘Platform attitude stable.’ She paused to glance over her console, then added, ‘You’ve reached bottom.’
He slowly let but his breath as he heard her deft fingers tapping in a new series of commands. ‘Collapsing transit capsule,’ she said. ‘You’re on manual now. Good luck.’
‘Thank you,’ Verduin said. ‘AI system engage. Spider, activate lamps and switch camera to infra-red.’
All of a sudden, monochromatic light rushed back into his world as the probe’s voice-operated AI interface switched on its external infra-red lamps and slotted the appropriate filters over its fiber optic array. Verduin saw the curved sides of the capsule fall open, like an egg hatching from the inside. Before him stretched a long, horizontal tunnel, like an ancient wormhole although not burrowed by any creature which had evolved on Earth; the compass told him that it lead north-by-north-west. Straight toward the catacombs.
‘It’s dark down here,’ he said nervously.
‘We need to move quickly,’ Kawakami reminded him. ‘Any minute now they shall…’
‘Of course.’ He sucked in his breath. ‘Spider, move forward two meters and stop.’
The probe was a mechanical spider. Approximately the size of a terrier, it moved on six multi-jointed legs arranged along the sides of its low-slung body. As Verduin spoke, it clattered off the bottom of the collapsed transit capsule and onto the smooth floor of the tunnel, its way illuminated by a small, front-mounted infra-red lamp. Two long whisker-like antennae protruded from either side of the multifaceted camera array, brushing gently against the rock walls. Verduin could see, and almost feel, the slight jarring as the tiny footpads found minute cracks and faults in the tunnel floor.
‘Transit capsule being withdrawn,’ Isralilova said.
The sphere was being dragged back to the surface by the wrench-cable. Verduin was alone in Mama’s Back Door now, if only in a teleoperational sense. ‘It feels weird,’ he murmured.
Don’t worry about that now,’ Kawakami said. He paused for a second. ‘Picking up EMF trace near your touchdown point,’ he added softly.
‘What’s that mean?’ L’Enfant demanded.
His question was ignored, but Paul knew what Kawakami had meant. The probe’s sensors had already registered non-background electromagnetic activity within the tunnel—EMF which was, so far, the only reliable signature of the Cooties.
The pseudo-Cooties, rather. As always, Verduin had to remind himself that the autonomous robots that lurked beneath the Martian surface were only analogues of the real extraterrestrials. Nonetheless, any activity in this seldom-u
sed part of the uncharted catacombs between the D & M Pyramid and the Labyrinth could mean only one thing at this particular time.
They knew he was here, and they were coming for him.
That was precisely the reason why he was here.
‘Spider, walk forward,’ Verduin said. ‘Track and follow the EMF trace.’ He smiled to himself as the arachnid probe trundled forward, homing in on the electromagnetic signature of the pseudo-Cooties.
This time, the science team was ready for them. If everything went according to plan, the camouflage would work and the alien robots would mistake the spider for one of their own. If the subterfuge was successful, he could enter their ranks as a Trojan horse.
He wiped his sweaty, unseen palms on the legs of his trousers. Finally, after all the failures before this attempt, they were on the verge of exploring the catacombs beneath the City.
‘Here, kitty kitty kitty…’ he murmured.
‘Picking up stronger EMF pulses from your sensor pod,’ Kawakami said. ‘Directly ahead of you and closing…’
‘Please be careful,’ Tamara said softly.
Paul thought of Sasha Kulejan: how he had died down here only three months earlier, shortly after the tunnel had been discovered and opened. Sasha had attempted to explore Mama’s Back Door in an armored suit, thinking that he could somehow sneak up on the Cooties. His body had never been found; like Hal Moberly before him, the Cooties had inexplicably removed all traces of his armored recon suit. His final scream, as the alien robots swarmed over his armored exoskeleton, had been the last they had ever heard of him.