by Allen Steele
‘No food, but I guess that can’t be helped.’ He bent down and pulled the hatch shut behind them. ‘You’ll have to ration your water intake, too.’ He grunted as he dogged the hatch shut. Now that it was closed, the rumble of the engines was effectively muffled. ‘It’s going to be a long ride home, that’s for sure.’
She didn’t answer. When he looked up, he saw that she was standing beneath the Plexiglas bubble, silently gazing toward the rear of the airship. He stood up and huddled against her to look out of the dome.
Darkness had fallen over the Martian landscape. During their long climb, the Akron had reached cruising altitude and had leveled out. The ground below them was completely invisible; the airship’s navigational beacons flashed blue and red on either side of the delta-shaped fuselage, reflecting dully off the solar cells. Above them, the stars were beginning to appear in the night sky, cold and untwinkling in the black depths of space.
‘When it comes,’ she said, ‘shut your eyes and turn away. Don’t look at the flash, whatever you do.’
For a moment, he didn’t know what she was talking about. Then the chill realization hit him and he glanced at his heads-up display. The chronometer read 1829:45:38…fifteen seconds and counting.
Had it taken that long to make it up here? Worse yet, he had almost completely forgotten about what they had left behind.
‘God…’ he murmured.
‘God has nothing to do with it,’ she said, her voice low and tense. ‘Get ready.’
Nash instinctively fastened his arm around her shoulders; after a moment, he felt her arm slide around his waist, yet he felt no comfort in her embrace. Had Boggs been able to gain sufficient distance in time? It was impossible to tell. He fastened his gaze on the changing digits of the chronometer.
‘Five…four…three…’ Sasaki repeated the countdown as a steel-voiced monotone. ‘Two…one…don’t look! Get down!’
He caught the briefest glimpse of a silent white-hot flash in the far distance, illuminating the line of the western horizon, before Sasaki savagely yanked him beneath the lip of the dome. Nash hugged her against him as they crouched within the dome, squinting against the sudden glare that surged through the blister.
Even though his eyes were tightly shut, for an instant it seemed as if he could see through his eyelids: a silent blast of nuclear light, bright as a supernova.
The glare intensified, then seemed to recede. He started to stand up, but Miho held him tight against her. ‘No!’ she shouted. ‘Wait for the noise! Wait for the…!’
An immense sledgehammer of sound, impossibly loud and dense, swung solidly against the airship. He felt the Akron careen forward as the Shockwave slammed into its broad stern, its nose tilting toward the ground.
Still clinging to each other, he and Sasaki were hurled against the far end of the blister. He barely heard Miho scream through the comlink as the impact knocked the air from his lungs; there was a sharp, ragged pain in his ribs as his skinsuit backpack drove itself against his bruised rib cage. He gasped, fighting for breath, feeling his bladder involuntarily void itself…
They were going down. The blast had nailed them. The Akron was going down…
Then the violence and the roar faded away, and as it did, he felt the airship slowly begin to rise again. The floor of the observation blister gradually became horizontal once more.
Nash hesitantly opened his eyes. There was a suffused reddish-white light coming through the blister, spreading outward from the direction of the detonation. Sasaki disentangled herself from his arms; he let her go and struggled to his feet, staring out of the bubble at the unearthly light.
The false dawn of the nuclear explosion was already diminishing, but that wasn’t what attracted his attention. Against the black sky, a new star was quickly rising into the heavens: a small, indistinct orb, strangely flattened at the bottom, was climbing into space atop a streak of fire. Hurtling towards an escape velocity it had awaited since the dawn of human civilization.
‘Pikadan,’ Miho said softly.
He looked at her, but said nothing. ‘They called it the pikadan,’ she said in response to his unasked question. ‘The survivors of the Hiroshima bombing gave it a name…the “flash-sound” of the bomb going off.’
Her eyes remained fastened upon the ascending alien vessel. ‘My grandfather used to tell me about it when I was a child. He was blinded by the explosion, but he could still remember the last thing he saw before he…’
She stopped talking as her legs suddenly buckled beneath her. Nash grabbed her in his arms as she collapsed; he carefully lowered her to the deck and laid her on her back, then checked her oxygen feed and examined her face through the light of his helmet lamp. For a minute, he was frightened that her life-support system had somehow failed. He checked the digital readings on her chest unit and let out his breath. No, that wasn’t the problem. She had simply fainted.
‘It’s okay,’ he muttered. ‘Sleep now…you deserve it.’
Nash stretched her legs out and folded her hands together over her stomach, then squatted next to her within the blister. The glare of the explosion had disappeared; looking up through the bubble, he could see the shooting-star ascending into the galactic heavens.
‘You’re going home,’ he whispered, watching the new star. His eyes felt heavy-lidded. ‘I hope it was worth it.’
He let his eyes close and his head fall backwards as a warm, comforting darkness reached in to take him for its own.
24. Contamination
NASH AND SASAKI slept through most of the night, curled up against each other on the floor of the observation blister, as the Akron raced south-west out of Cydonia and into the Acidalia Planitia. From time to time, Nash was stirred by an abrupt motion of the airship; he would awaken to take a drink of water, move himself around a little, look up at the bright starlight through the transparent dome…then he would allow himself to slide back into sleep once again. He was more exhausted than he had ever been; crammed in as they were, he slept soundly.
Bright sunlight was shining through the blister when he next awakened. Miho was still asleep; sometime in the night she had managed to embrace him, although less as a lover than as someone who was trying to make herself comfortable in a cramped situation. Nash smiled as he carefully unwrapped her arms from around him and stood up, stretching as much as he could in the little cupola.
It was already late morning. Judging from the appearance of the cratered terrain that stretched out below the Akron, he was surprised that they were already above the Chryse Planitia, just north-east of the Lunae Planitia. That would mean that they were more than halfway home; he noticed the speed at which the airship’s triangular shadow was rushing over the ground and guessed that the Akron was moving at more than eighty nautical miles per hour.
Boggs was keeping the engines throttled up. Nash got a bearing from his suit compass, then looked toward the north-west. At the farthest edge of the horizon, he spotted a dark reddish-brown haze, as if a ghost-like mountain range had been dropped from the sky and was gradually moving across the plains. The leading edge of the dust storm; from the looks of it, the storm had already entered the Acidalia Planitia, and was probably already in Cydonia. Boggs was undoubtedly taking the Akron below the storm belt in an attempt to outrun the hurricane-force winds which could slash apart his ship.
‘Good morning,’ he heard Miho say. Nash looked around and saw that she was awake and beginning to stand up. ‘What are you looking at?’
‘Dust storm. Over there.’ Nash pointed at the faraway haze. ‘Looks like your boyfriend is doing his best to get us out from under it. They’ll probably have to completely overhaul the engines, the way he’s cooking them, but at least we’ll make it out of here in one piece.’ He checked his chronometer and made a rough computation in his head. ‘In fact, at the rate he’s cruising, we may even reach Arsia Station shortly after nightfall. We’ve probably picked up a good tailwind. That’ll help.’
She nodded her
head, but said nothing. Her face was solemn as she stared at the distant storm, her mind apparently elsewhere. ‘I can’t promise you breakfast,’ he added, attempting to force some levity from their situation, ‘but we might be able to catch last call at the Mars Hotel.’
‘Yes.’ Her voice sounded distracted as she gazed out of the dome. ‘But when we land, there’s still L’Enfant and Swigart to contend with.’ She looked at him. ‘They’ll kill us, you know. All three of us. We’re the only witnesses.’
Nash let out his breath and shook his head…‘No, they won’t…not now, at least. If they knew we were up here, they would have come for us already. The fact that we’re standing here means that L’Enfant is sure that we’re dead. W. J.’s living on borrowed time, but L’Enfant has to keep him alive until they reach Arsia. He’s the only one who can bring the Akron home.’
‘Lieutenant Swigart’s a pilot…’
‘Not the same kind of pilot. It’s one thing to be able to fly a one-seater Hornet, quite another to handle a five-hundred-foot dirigible.’ Nash shook his head again. ‘Boggs is safe for the time being, or at least until we reach the ground. Maybe even after that. Who knows? L’Enfant’s crazy, but he’s not completely ruthless. He’s the type of person who respects talent. He might not kill W. J. just because he managed to get him out alive.’
‘Then our lives are still in jeopardy,’ she insisted.
He shrugged his shoulders, feeling his skin chafe inside his skinsuit. Nash would have given anything to get out of it; he had been dressed for EVA for almost a full day now. It was probably because of this that he still felt fatigued. ‘Maybe, maybe not. If we stay up here until we’ve landed, then there’s not much opportunity for him to do anything to harm us. Even in the hangar, there will be too many witnesses around for him to attempt to knock us off.’
‘But if he gets us alone inside the base, he could…’
‘Look, Miho, there’s all sorts of variables in this thing.’ Nash felt himself becoming irate. He took a deep breath, forcing himself to calm down. No point in snapping at Sasaki because she was worried about Boggs. ‘All we can do is play it by ear and…’
‘Play it by ear?’ she repeated, sounding a little confused. ‘I don’t know what you’re…’
He grinned and sat down again on the deck. ‘Play it by ear. Make it up as we go along. Improvise.’
‘Oh. Right.’ Miho turned around and slumped down next to him. ‘Shin-ichi would know what you…’
Her voice trailed off as her eyes closed in grief. She bent forward and hugged her knees between her arms, suddenly remembering the grotesque death of her mentor. Nash heard her sobbing over the comlink; he reached out and took her gloved hands between his, but said nothing. She needed a good cry; it was long overdue.
After a short while, she gave his hands a brief squeeze, then rested her back against the curved wall. ‘August…’ she began, then hesitated. ‘What do you intend to do about L’Enfant?’
Nash didn’t say anything. He gazed up at the pale-pink sky passing overhead. He had Control’s permission to act with extreme prejudice. L’Enfant had violated the seventh protocol; the proof was there, not only in the lives which had been wasted and the destruction which had been wrought, but also on the microfilm which was sealed in his camera.
Not that Nash needed anyone’s permission to kill his former captain.
‘I’ll deal with Terry,’ he murmured. ‘You don’t have to worry about that.’
He felt his eyes beginning to close again. God, was he tired. Every muscle in his body seemed to ache; he still felt the bruises he had received from his beating. Nash lay his helmeted head back against the side of the cupola and stretched his legs out as far as he could. Sasaki didn’t continue the discussion, for which he was grateful. They still had a long journey ahead of them; if he could doze through the next eight or nine hours…
Just before he fell asleep again, though, his half-shut eyes fell across his boots and his lower left leg, and he noticed something curious. The last time he had consciously looked at his legs, the soles of his boots and the left calf of the skinsuit overgarment had been stained crimson. That was down in the Cootie underworld, when he had slipped in a puddle near one of the nanite-vats; he had been lightly splashed with some of the liquid from the pits, but he had been in too much of a hurry to escape the catacombs to even mention it to Miho.
Like the rest of his skinsuit, his boots and calf were filthy with dust…but now there was no sign of the stains. They had completely vanished, as if they had never been there in the first place.
An indistinct thought tickled his mind. So…
He shook his head. So what? It had been a long hike to retrace their steps through the catacombs, followed by a steep climb through the secondary tunnel to the surface. After that, he and Sasaki had been forced to jog through the wide City Square in order to make the covert rendezvous with the Akron. The stuff must have rubbed off during all that; the Martian dust was abrasive enough to scour anything clean…
So it was nothing important.
He couldn’t think anymore. Nash let his eyes close.
He was awakened by the Akron lurching violently to one side as if it had been kicked by a massive foot; before he could even open his eyes, he was slammed against Sasaki as both of them were pitched against the side of the cupola.
Miho’s left shoulder was wrenched backward by the impact; as she screamed in agony, the airship lurched again, this time downward. Nash had barely an instant to throw his arms and legs out and pin Sasaki beneath him to keep her from being hurled against the dome. Her face was twisted in pain, but she held onto him as the Akron abruptly bucked sideways again.
‘The dust storm…!’ she shouted.
Nash heard a loud ripping sound below them, as if something deep within the airship’s hull was fighting to get loose. However, the airship seemed to steady itself; Boggs was apparently still in control of the rudder and was fighting to stabilize the massive craft. Grasping the inside ledge of the dome with his fingers, Nash hauled himself to his knees and stared out of the blister.
The sunlight was much dimmer than when he had gone to sleep; it was late afternoon now, and he realized that he had been asleep much longer than he had intended. Yet the evening sky was completely clear, unmarred by the sirocco of red sand he had expected to see. He looked to the west, toward the setting sun, and was astonished to see a great cone towering above the western horizon: Pavonis Mons, one of the three shield volcanoes of the Tharsis region.
Another sudden jolt, less violent than the first three, passed through the fuselage of the Akron. It almost knocked him off his knees, but Nash held tight to the edge of the dome. ‘What’s going on?’ Sasaki demanded, her voice high-pitched with fear. ‘Isn’t it the dust storm?’
‘No,’ he said, trying to remain calm in spite of his own confusion. ‘I don’t know what it is.’ The deck was tilting forward now, but Nash hung on and forced himself the rest of the way to his feet.
In the farthest distance beyond Pavonis Mons, he could see the great bulge of Olympus Mons. He glanced toward the tapering bow of the airship and saw, many miles away and yet rapidly approaching, the chaotic canyons of the Noctis Labyrinthis. They were less than a hundred miles from Arsia Station, yet he could also see that the Akron had lost altitude; the airship was no more than six hundred feet above the ground.
Miho shouted something else but he ignored her. Nash swung his gaze toward the stern and felt his heart freeze. The fuselage was still largely intact, but it had lost much of its rigidity; there were great dimples in its aft sides, as if massive hands had squeezed its flanks, and the long spoiler-like elevator was partially collapsed on its support pylons. One glance at the main elevator, and Nash knew that the Akron had lost much of its control. And even though there were no apparent rents along its silvery skin, he had little doubt that the airship was slowly leaking hydrogen from somewhere along its hull.
They were almost home…but for
whatever reason, the big ship was floundering and in serious trouble. Minute by inexorable minute, the Akron was going down.
‘Get the hatch open!’ he shouted. ‘We gotta get below!’ When he looked around, he saw that Miho had already undogged the hatch cover and was halfway down the ladder. She had switched on her helmet lamp; its beam danced back and forth as she hurried down the rungs.
Yet another tremor swept through the ship; he fell to his knees and braced himself against the lip of the hatch. He waited until he caught a glimpse of Sasaki stepping off the ladder, then he gripped the hatch tightly and swung himself headfirst through the opening, making a clumsy half-gainer to the gangway below. It was a risky move, but he didn’t want to linger in the observation blister for a second longer.
His boots hit the gridded gangway deck at the same moment as there was another hard lurch; off balance, Nash began to topple forward, but Miho grabbed him from behind and hauled him back. They fell together onto the gangway, tangled in each other’s arms and legs.
‘What’s happening?’ she yelled, almost on the verge of panic. ‘Are we crashing? Why are we…?’
She suddenly stopped screaming; instead, Nash heard a startled gasp over the comlink. His eyes darted in her direction; she looked unharmed, but the stark bright oval of her lamp had caught something: the side of one of the slender frame-rings which ran laterally through the skeleton of the airship. Disentangling himself from her, Nash fumbled with his wrist controls until his own helmet lamp flashed on; he swung his shoulders until the beam landed on the same ring…
‘Oh my God,’ he whispered.
The surface of the ring was bleeding.
Red liquid streaks were oozing down its curved grey sides, as if the metal itself had developed ulcerous stigma. No, not oozing…crawling, as a solid mass of near-microscopic lice ran up and down the polycarbon girder. Feeding upon it…