Labyrinth of Night (11 page)

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.

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 by 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.

Meanwhile, there was the mystery of the Face itself. The mile-long mesa near the City had clearly been carved to resemble a human visage. From the anthropomorphic evidence, it appeared that the Cooties had knowledge of the human race’s existence on Earth; why else would there be a human face on a planet where
homo sapiens
had never evolved? Extensive natural erosion to the structures—including a large chasm in the wall of the D & M Pyramid caused by an ancient meteor impact—demonstrated that the Face and the City were thousands of years old, created long before the human race had achieved the ability to travel to other planets. If the aliens had believed that the inhabitants of the third planet would one day venture to Mars, why did they feel it was so necessary to draw the attention of human explorers, considering that humans would arrive long after the demise of the doomed colony?

The answers to these enigmas lay within Pyramid C-4—the last to be opened by the international team of explorers, the first to take lives…

N
IGHT HAD FALLEN
by the time the
Burroughs
returned to the base. The crew had set up portable floodlights around the perimeter of the habitat, but it was still dark enough that the airship’s touchdown, guided by the flashlights of two expedition members on the ground, was rough. Most of the floods were centered around the wreckage of the two Bushmasters. Oeljanov’s corpse, still inside the bullet-pocked remains of his combat armor, was sprawled near the habitat where he had fallen during his final stand. Overhearing the conversation through the comlink, the surviving Hornet had alighted near the
Shinseiki’s
lander, but the other Hornet had plowed into the desert several miles away. Miho Sasaki and Spike D’Agostino had taken a tractor out to the crash site to retrieve the remains of Goober Hoffman.

Ben Cassidy found Dick Jessup near Oeljanov, watching as someone used a portable laser to slice through the CAS’s ceramic shell to remove the major’s body. The musician ignored the silent, almost respectful circle of people surrounding Oeljanov. He grabbed Jessup’s left shoulder. ‘Jessup, I want some words with you,’ he demanded.

‘Not now,’
the NASA administrator said softly. He didn’t look up from Oeljanov’s body.

‘Why didn’t you tell me about Moberly? Or about the first guy who went in there, the one who was killed as soon as he entered the Labyrinth?’

‘This is not the time,’
Jessup insisted.

‘You son of a bitch, when
was
the time?’ Cassidy’s voice rose belligerently. The people standing around looked away from Oeljanov toward them. ‘Before you drafted me for this goddamn mission? Or maybe you were afraid that I wouldn’t go along with this if I knew that the last person who went into Room C4-20 was ripped apart like a roast chicken?
Christ, all you found was his head…!’

Jessup, saying nothing, pulled his arm out of Cassidy’s grasp and started to walk away. Cassidy grabbed his arm again and hauled him back as he balled his right hand into a tight fist. For a moment, he was able to relish a look of fear through the frost-rimmed faceplate of Jessup’s helmet.

Arthur Johnson, who had been standing nearby, jumped forward and pried Cassidy’s fingers off Jessup’s suit.
‘Cut it out!’
he shouted.
‘If you even crack his helmet, he’ll die before we can get him into an airlock!’

He hauled Cassidy away from Jessup, who had turned around to silently gaze at the two of them. ‘That’s no worse than what he had planned for me!’ Cassidy yelled. ‘What were you planning to do? Throw me in there and see if the room would kill me just like it did with Moberly?’

Johnson, still restraining Cassidy, looked at Jessup.
‘You didn’t tell him about Hal?’
he asked. Jessup said nothing; he only stared at Cassidy. Johnson shook his head within his helmet.
‘Is there anything
else
you’ve been keeping from us, Dick?’

‘Great. That’s just fabulous.’
Waylon Boggs, who had just joined the circle after checking over the
Burroughs,
walked up behind Jessup.
‘The way this mission is going so far, we’ll have more bodies to bury around here than the Cooties left in the pyramids.’

‘Leave it to NASA,’
Johnson murmured.
‘Good old Never A Straight Answer…’

‘NASA, like hell.’
Paul Verduin, standing on the other side of the circle, shuffled his feet in the dirt.
‘Any time the American military gets involved, it’s never a straight answer.’

‘Okay! All right!’
Jessup lost his cool; he stepped forward into the ring of accusation which seemed to surround him.
‘You want to know why you weren’t told about Moberly, Ben? You got it right the first time—you wouldn’t have come if I had told you. Art, you want to know why you weren’t informed in advance about Steeple Chase? Because the secret would have leaked to Oeljanov and he would have taken hostages, and maybe more people would have died…’

‘I have a hard time believing that,’
Verduin said.
‘Maksim was many things, but I don’t think he would have taken us hostage. If he wanted to do so, why didn’t he begin the moment your gunships entered the atmosphere? He had the time. I was watching when…’

‘You want to call me a liar,’
Jessup snapped,
‘go right ahead, but maybe you’re all still alive because some secrets were kept.’

No one said anything for a minute; the comlink was silent except for the faint hiss of static. In the glare of the floodlight, the exhaust of their life-support systems rose like smoke from small, smoldering fires. Cassidy was reminded of all the backstage fights he had been part of, back in the days when he still had a band: the times when he was too fucked up on drugs to go out and play, when Jaime and Amad and the session men would haul him away from the mike and into the wings, demanding to know whether he had broken his vow to stay straight for this one gig. And always, he would lie. No, I haven’t touched the shit. I’m just having a bad night, that’s all. I swear, there’s nothing wrong with me. Just one too many beers…

‘Truth sucks, doesn’t it?’ he asked aloud.

Jessup’s eyes darted toward him. His gaze was murderous, but he said nothing.

‘I’ll ask you again, this time politely,’
Johnson said at last.
‘Is there anything else you’re keeping secret from us?’

‘No,’
Jessup said laconically.
‘Nothing.’

‘All right then,’
Johnson said. He let go of Cassidy and motioned towards the habitat.
‘Ben, if you’ll come with me, we’ll get you a cup of coffee and a bite to eat in the wardroom. Then we’ll give you the whole story about the Labyrinth and what happened to Hal Moberly.’
He hesitated.
‘Of course, after you know everything, you may not want to go in there.’

‘Yeah, maybe I won’t,’ Cassidy said. ‘But do I have a choice?’

Within his helmet, Johnson shook his head.
‘Probably not, I’m afraid.’

Module Four of the Cydonia Base habitat was a wardroom which served jointly as the galley, dining area, conference room and recreation area. By the time Cassidy and Johnson got there, though, it had been taken over by Boggs, Katsuhiko Shimoda, Spike D’Agostino and several other crew members. D’Agostino had just returned to the base with the remains of Goober Hoffman; he was in the mood for a wake and Boggs was only too willing to oblige. Shimoda had contributed a flask of saké and Boggs had dug a bottle of whisky out of his locker, and they were proceeding to indulge in a melancholy bender. Neither Johnson nor Cassidy cared to join in. Johnson found some rehydrated roast beef and horseradish in the refrigerator, poured a couple of mugs of black coffee, and the two men retreated to Johnson’s digs in the Module Six bunkhouse, deserted now that everyone else was getting twisted in the wardroom.

‘It’s been a wonderful day.’ Johnson settled down on his bunk and dabbed a slice of beef into the brown puddle on his plate. ‘First I get relieved of command, then I get to see two men killed.’ He shoved the roast beef in his mouth and chewed on it as he gazed at Cassidy, who was sitting on the bunk across from him. ‘What I’m ashamed to admit,’ he continued once he had swallowed, ‘is that I’m the guy who got you into this fix.’