by Allen Steele
He forced the notion from his mind. Do the dirty work first, Verduin told himself. There will be plenty of time later to write your acceptance speech.
The Jackalope arrived at the bend. Grasping the joystick in his right hand, he vectored it to the left, gradually shifting the yaw of the footpads to make the turn. The searchlights flowed across the rock, turning with the MRV as they reached into the abyss. Closer, closer…
Then the searchlight beams landed on a huge dark form in the tunnel.
For a moment, Verduin irrationally thought that the tunnel had caved in; the shape filled the passageway, blocking it completely as a near-solid mass.
Then it surged forward, and in the brief instant in which he realized that the shape was humanoid, an almost absurdly long arm lashed upward. He caught a glimpse of an enormous four-fingered claw.
He shouted in fear as he grabbed for the waldo joystick, but he barely managed to raise the manipulator before the claw slammed into the canopy of the Jackalope, ripping through the fuselage as if it were paper…
One instant, they saw Verduin on the TV monitor, frantically grabbing for support inside the Jackalope’s cockpit as an immense claw—vaguely glimpsed for a half-second on another screen as belonging to some dark and amorphous form—gouged through the canopy of the MRV. They heard a scream…
Then, in the next instant, the screens flickered and went blank.
‘Paul, come in!’ Kawakami shouted, hunching forward in his chair to stare at the dead TV screens. ‘Do you copy? Paul, do you hear me? Paul!’
In the adjacent seat, Isralilova’s hands flew across her console as she sought to establish contact with the MRV. ‘Complete loss of telemetry!’ she snapped, her face ashen as she ran across all the possible frequencies. ‘Comlink severed at the source! Zero modulation, no source-EM! I’m not receiving a carrier signal!’
Kawakami spun around to face L’Enfant. ‘Have Akers wrench him out of there now! There may still be a chance for him!’
For a moment, it seemed as if L’Enfant might refuse. Then he tapped the lobe of his headset. ‘King to king’s knight,’ he said with almost absurd calm. ‘We’ve encountered hostile activity in Mama’s Back Door. Pull him out of there, Charlie, right now.’
He listened for a moment, then nodded and looked back at Kawakami. ‘The Lieutenant has re-engaged the wrench. He reports getting some tug on the cable, so your boy is probably still attached to the other end.’ He looked away from the Japanese exobiologist and added. ‘I can’t guarantee what condition he’ll be in, however.’
Kawakami’s hands clenched into trembling fists. ‘I told you not to let him go through with this,’ he hissed, barely able to suppress his rage. ‘The danger was only too apparent, but instead you…’
‘Shin-ichi!’ Tamara suddenly shouted. ‘Look there!’
Kawakami’s eyes darted back to her. The Russian scientist was pointing at a computer flatscreen above her console; a red line had spiked upwards sharply, tracing a rising curve on the screen. A telltale electromagnetic signature, indicative of pseudo-Cootie activity.
He stared at the screen. ‘I thought you said we had a complete loss of telemetry,’ he murmured.
Tamara looked back at him. ‘That’s not from the MRV,’ she said softly. ‘That’s from the sensor pod in C4-20…in the City!’
Kawakami’s mouth dropped open. It had been almost countless months since any alien activity had been registered in the Labyrinth. But there could be no mistake. It was a pseudo-Cootie trace—an incredibly strong one, more intense than any they had seen before.
‘Something’s coming out of the Labyrinth,’ Tamara said, ‘and it is very large.’
One by one, a series of six digits appeared on the LCD of the small black case in Sasaki’s hand. As the last number appeared, she hastily tapped the sequence into the keycard decoder’s numeric pad. There was a soft buzz and a metallic clunk as tumblers within the hatch slid back; Miho slipped the decoder’s plastic tongue out of the keycard slot, folded it back into the unit, and tucked it in her breast pocket.
‘Okay, we’re in,’ she whispered.
Nash took a final glance over his shoulder before he gripped the lockwheel and turned it counter-clockwise, tugging the hatch open. Recessed ceiling lights automatically flickered on as they hurried into the airlock chamber. He glanced up at the indicator panel and saw that Module One was unpressurised. ‘Suit up,’ he said as he laid the assault rifle on the floor and shut the hatch behind them. ‘Make it quick. We can’t count on our luck holding out much longer.’
Miho was already pulling open skinsuit lockers. ‘What next?’ she asked as she unzipped her jumpsuit and let it drop to the floor around her ankles. ‘Take over the command module?’
Nash discarded his own jumpsuit; he heard her gasp as his bruises were revealed, but paid no attention. ‘Truthfully? We can’t go back in there. That’s for certain.’
She stopped and stared at him. ‘But Paul…’
‘I’m sorry, Miho, but Paul’s on his own.’ He cocked his head toward the closed hatch. ‘Even if we got control of the command module and fucked up things from that end, we’d be trapped in there. Not only that, but L’Enfant can take the others hostage. It’s a no-win situation either way. And I don’t think Terry’s going to be too happy about us punching around one of his people.’ Nash shook his head. ‘It all leads back to the same thing. We inevitably surrender, L’Enfant is still in charge, and the next time we see this airlock, it’s without the benefit of this.’ He held up the rubbery mass of a skinsuit. ‘You understand?’
Sasaki hesitated, then reluctantly nodded. ‘All right. Then what are we going to…?’
‘I’ll let you know as soon as I come up with something.’ He began to shimmy into the skinsuit. ‘Now hustle. We don’t got all day.’
In fact, he did have a vague plan. If they could make their way unobserved to the Akron and climb aboard without anyone spotting them, he could lead Sasaki into the airship’s envelope and up to the unused observation blister in the upper fuselage. He doubted that L’Enfant or his troops were aware of its existence—at least, he hoped that was the case—so it was feasible that they could hide up there until Boggs lifted-off again.
It was chancey, but the only possible alternative would be to steal a rover and attempt to take it all the way back to Arsia Station. However, that meant driving the vehicle over four thousand miles through a Martian dust storm, without maps or even water. He had no illusions about their chances for survival under those conditions…
That, he considered as he sealed the front of his skinsuit and reached for the helmet, or try to directly take on L’Enfant and his men in a firefight. Nash glanced at the Steyr on the airlock floor. Sure, he was armed now—but he was also outgunned four-to-one, and in unfamiliar territory besides. This was L’Enfant’s home turf; he and his team had been here for many months now, while Nash himself had only once walked through part of the area. Injured, running for his life in strange surroundings, trying to protect an unarmed non-com…
No, he thought. We’ll make for the Akron…and if that fails, we’ll have to take our chances with a rover.
Just before Nash tucked his right arm into the suit’s sleeve, he glimpsed the Seiko on his left wrist. As an afterthought he unbuckled it, held it in his left hand until he had pulled on the skinsuit, then cinched it around the outer right sleeve of the suit’s overgarment. He might still need to take some pictures, although he was beginning to wonder if the film would ever make its way back to Washington.
Sasaki opened a service panel and disabled the airlock’s electromagnetic scrubber—exit-decontamination would only waste precious time now—then started the decompression cycle as soon as they had sealed their skinsuits and switched to internal pressure. As the airlock voided its atmosphere, Nash picked up the rifle. The Steyr was fully loaded with thirty 5.56mm safety rounds. Under the circumstances, he could have wished for the rocket-propelled gyrojet bullets normally used by
First Space Special-ops Infantry, but he recalled L’Enfant telling him how safety shells were used by his men inside the base. All right; so long as he didn’t have to open fire on anyone in the first place, it hardly mattered. All he wanted to do was get him and Miho out of there in one piece…
And what about L’Enfant? Didn’t he have a score to settle with him?
No. His score with L’Enfant could wait until later. Screw the assignment. Right now, basic survival was his only consideration.
A green light flashed above the hatch, signaling that decompression was complete. Deliberately staying off the comlink—the frequencies could be scanned and eavesdropped—he raised a gloved forefinger to his faceplate, signaling Sasaki to remain silent. She nodded her head, then he undogged the exit hatch and kicked it open, raising the gun in case someone was waiting for them on the other side of the airlock.
Module One was vacant; no one had come in through the garage doors to surprise them. He carefully looked both ways, sweeping the unpressurised compartment with the barrel of the gun, before leading Sasaki into the module. A rover was parked in front of the open double-doors, but that wasn’t what immediately caught his eye.
Propped against the far right wall was a CAS. However, the aircraft-grey exoskeleton was of an entirely different design from either the Hoplite-style combat armor commonly used by the US or the Russians; this suit had triple-paned tinted windows in the front and sides, allowing the wearer to see directly out of the suit without having to use either VR systems or a periscope. It was also heavier than a Hoplite; the rear section bulged outward in a way which seemed more than necessary to house the usual internal fuel cells and open-loop life-support systems. Nash also noticed that the suit’s left arm contained a built-in machine gun.
It was a radically different design from previous combat armor. Except for the gun, it looked as if it had been custom-built, intended more for reconnaissance than for combat. But why the difference?
Remembering his spy-watch, Nash raised his right arm to his chest, pointed the face toward the CAS, and clumsily pressed a forefinger against the tiny shutter-button, snapping a picture for posterity. His curiosity aroused, he then started forward to give it a more detailed inspection, but Sasaki suddenly grabbed his free arm. He looked back at her and saw that she was pointing to a workbench on the left side of the garage.
Abandoning the CAS for the moment, Nash stepped past Sasaki and walked around the parked rover toward the bench. A couple of small, foam-padded aluminum equipment cases lay open beneath the bench. It appeared as if unassembled parts of something had been packed inside the cases; the padding was cut to precise measurements. He guessed that they had been in the cargo pod which had been parachuted from orbit just previous to their arrival at Cydonia Base.
The object on the bench itself was both indistinct and yet annoyingly familiar; a long, slender metal tube, painted neutral grey, approximately the length and diameter of a baseball bat, but with a large hand-grip on its midsection. At one end of the tube was a large, irregularly-shaped sphere, about the size of a basketball. The sphere was sealed, but he noticed an open service panel on the tube just in front of the handle; the panel exposed a miniature bay, enclosing a recessed keypad and an LCD. The whole assembly was clamped into a cradle on the bench; the number of tools spread around the object showed that it was still being worked upon.
Nash walked closer, then stopped. Printed on the sphere was an all-too-familiar red hexagon: the international symbol for hazardous radiation.
Seeing that, everything suddenly meshed together. Nash realized exactly what he was looking upon. He numbly raised the Seiko and snapped another picture.
‘Goddamn,’ he breathed. ‘They’ve got a nuke.’
The wrench was dragging something up from the pit; whatever it was, it was threatening to rip the machine apart.
Even through the sparse atmosphere, Charlie Akers could hear the high, coarse whine of the wrench motor as it struggled to raise the MRV from the pit. He kept the operating lever in reverse, gritting his teeth as he mashed it down with both hands. The spool turned slowly as the cable was reeled in, a few precious meters at a time. His back turned to the pit itself, Akers kept his eyes fixed on the cable, alert for signs of fray and praying that it didn’t snap; if it did, it could possibly whiplash and hit him, perhaps fracturing his helmet. That would be a stupid finale to a promising military career.
The fate of Paul Verduin was the least of his concerns. Akers had overheard the exchange from the distant monitor center through the comlink, and he had already surmised that the Dutch astrophysicist was toast. But the commander had ordered the MRV retrieved, and since it was undeniably still attached to the umbilical cable—whatever was left of it, that is—Akers had no choice but to reel it home.
Fine, he thought as he fought to keep the lever pinned down. Bring the sucker back up. Then we’ll go ahead with Kentucky Derby and get rid of the little shits once and for all. Like, y’know, the only good Cootie is a dead Cootie…
The spool started to turn faster now; the wrench’s whining took on a slightly higher pitch. It looked as if he was reaching to the end of the line. As the last few yards of cable appeared, Akers noticed that it looked shredded and torn, almost as if something had been chewing on it.
‘Jesus H. Christ,’ he whispered under his breath. ‘What happened down there?’
He barely had time to reflect upon this disconcerting observation, though, before the cable halted. Okay, it was up. Akers yanked the wrench back into neutral, banged the lock-lever into place, then turned toward the pit. Right, time for the messy part of this…
He stopped dead, staring at the abomination which hung beneath the tripod.
He recognized the battered upper fuselage of the MRV only because of the little cartoon jackalope painted on the side; everything else, from the legs on down, was completely ripped away. There was no sign of the man who had been in the cockpit except for a wide streak of blood beneath one of the shattered canopy portholes, but hanging beneath the fuselage was…
‘Oh my God,’ Akers muttered.
The huge shape—reddish-black, human-like yet seemingly mechanical—let go of the wreckage and, with terrifying agility, threw itself forward. It landed, hunched forward, on the edge of the crevasse, its dagger-shaped claws sinking into the rocky red soil for anchorage. For a second it looked as if it might lose its balance and fall backward into the pit.
Then its splayed feet found purchase on the ground and it hauled itself away from the shaft. The giant stood erect on its massive, double-jointed legs; as its monstrous claws tore out of the ground and its long, almost simian arms stretched upward, a cyclopian red eye beneath the cowl of its neckless head swung toward Akers…
And locked on.
It was nine feet tall, and it looked like a demon straight from hell.
For the single instant that the creature stopped, Akers managed to shake off his paralysis. As he dove for the Steyr he’d left propped against a boulder, he yelled into his headset; ‘King’s knight to king! Mayday, Mayday! Bogey at the D & M…!’
With horrifying swiftness, the monster lurched toward him, its arms extended.
‘I’m under attack…!’ Akers howled as he grabbed the assault rifle. He crouched and brought the Steyr into an awkward firing position. ‘Jesus, get somebody down here, it’s…!’
Then it was on top of him. Screaming with incoherent fear, Akers managed to squeeze off a few futile rounds before the behemoth, with one swift and violent swipe of a claw, decapitated him.
19. The Running of the Minotaurs
‘WHEN I GET MY hands on that son of a bitch, I’m going to rip out his…’
‘Knock it off.’ Marks glanced up at the indicator above the airlock hatch. He had to depressurize Module One before they could go in there; otherwise, he wouldn’t be able to climb into the CAS, since it was not designed to be used with a skinsuit. ‘You’ll get your chance, okay? Just ease off and do your…’<
br />
‘Ease off, my ass.’ Swigart was struggling into her skinsuit; once Marks was in the armor, she would have to depressurize the garage again. It was a time-consuming procedure—they were both in a rush, her anger was making her clumsy, and Marks had to watch her carefully to make sure she didn’t miss any steps in the suitup procedure. ‘And if I see that slant-eyed cunt, I’m going to…’
‘I said, knock it off!’ Marks grabbed her arms and threw her against the bulkhead wall. For a moment it looked as if Swigart was going to flail at him; her gloved hands were balled into fists at her sides and her teeth were clenched in naked rage. ‘Get it straight!’ he shouted in her face. ‘I’m gonna need you out there, and I’m gonna need you chilly! You copy that?’
‘They beat me up!’ she yelled back at him; her voice was almost a childish wail. The bruise on her jaw was livid. ‘They punched my clock and tied me up in a goddamn closet!’
‘Then we’ll punch them back!’ Marks kept her arms pinioned against the wall. ‘After we get rid of the bugs! I promise you, we’ll do it…but we gotta take care of business first! You got me?’
An annunciator buzzed and the green light above the hatch flashed on, indicating that the garage module had been depressurized. Marks barely glanced at the indicator. At least Boggs had done his job; he had cycled through the auxiliary airlock and had re-secured the outer doors so that Module One could be used by Marks for CAS suitup. He was out on the surface now, waiting to help Swigart get the Hornet airborne.
‘We don’t got time for this shit, Megan,’ Marks said, more calmly now. ‘Something out there scragged Charlie and now it’s coming our way. We’re next for lunch unless we wax ’em first. So TCOB, okay?’
Swigart took a deep breath and let it out; she seemed to relax a little. ‘Okay, okay. TCOB.’ She pushed Marks’ hands off her, then zipped up the overgarment and pulled a helmet out of a storage bin. ‘But when this is over, they’re history, man,’ she added as she pulled the helmet over her head and latched down the neck-ring.