Labyrinth of Night (47 page)

He reached up, grasped the cable-detach bar, and yanked it down.

There was a sudden lurch as the airship freed itself from its mooring lines. Nash had already anticipated it, but Sasaki was unprepared for the abrupt motion. Caught off-balance, she was thrown across the catwalk railing; it caught her in the stomach and she nearly toppled over before Nash grabbed her by the hips and hauled her back. Through her helmet, he caught a glimpse of her blanched face.

No wonder. If she’d gone over the rail, Miho would have fallen twenty feet until she ripped through the skin of one of the internal gas cells…and then it would have been another fifty-foot drop through the cell itself until she smashed against the
Akron’s
internal skeleton, or even hurtled through the Mylar outer fuselage.

She grasped the opposite railing with both hands and placed her feet firmly on the gridded catwalk. Already they could hear the drone of the engines as they were throttled up; there was the familiar rising sensation as the
Akron
began its ascent. Miho started to place her helmet against Nash’s, but he signaled for her to reactivate her comlink, raising three fingers to indicate the third channel.

They had deliberately continued radio-silence even after they had reached the top of the secondary tunnel and climbed through the partly-disassembled roof of the great cavern. As Miho had predicted, they had emerged from the catacombs in the City Square, amidst the four major pyramids. It hadn’t been difficult to climb through, since most of the groundcover had already been removed by the pseudo-Cooties. Even then, however, they had barely been able to reach the
Akron
in time; they had been forced to hide behind a corner of the C-4 Pyramid until almost the last minute, when Swigart finally boarded the airship and enabled them to make a frantic dash for the maintenance hatch beneath the dirigible’s stern.

Sasaki hesitated, then tapped her fingers against her skinsuit’s right gauntlet.
‘Are you certain we should be doing this?’
she asked.

It was a relief to be able to hear her voice distinctly again, without the muffling effects, of helmet-to-helmet communications. ‘Positive,’ Nash said. ‘They won’t be using the comlink themselves while they’re down there, and I doubt they’ll wander up here.’

She still looked worried.
‘What about Waylon?’

‘If he’s been paying attention, he must know we’re back here. He won’t get them to make an inspection.’ Nash could only hope this assumption was true; they were running thin on luck already. ‘C’mon, we have to get to the blister. Just make sure you always keep one hand on something firm.’

She shook her head, completely grim-faced.
‘Don’t worry. One lesson was enough.’

It was dark inside the envelope, but not completely opaque; the luminescent fiberoptics that lined the central catwalks and ladders radiated an orange glow across the mammoth gas cells. Nash led her down the center of the
Akron,
retracing the path he had taken during his previous in-flight inspection of the envelope, pulling against the railings to compensate for the upward tilt of the deck. The airship shuddered as it gradually ascended to cruising altitude, its engines moaning on either side of them. It was the second time in the last hour that they had been forced to make such a steep climb; first the upper galleries of the Cootie underworld, now this. Again, Nash felt his battered stomach muscles cry in pain. He clenched his teeth and forced himself onwards.

He located the central ladder and began to make the long climb to the upper gangway, pausing now and then to look down and make certain that Sasaki wasn’t running into any more trouble. If she was having any problems, though, she didn’t show it. She carefully clung to the ladder rungs, never once looking down. She paused on the ladder, resting for a moment, and glanced up at him.

‘Much further?’
she asked, her exhaustion plain in her voice. Her breath was coming in ragged gasps; the woman had been through a lot today.

‘Not much.’ Nash was whipped as well. He waited another few seconds until they had both caught their breath, then continued to scale the ladder. ‘We’ve only got a little further to go. Then we can relax.’

They reached the upper gangway several minutes later; once they were there, Nash gave Sasaki a few minutes to get her wind again before he retraced his steps to the topside observation blister. There was room enough for both of them to squeeze inside comfortably; unfortunately, though, it wasn’t pressurized. Nash regretted that omission. The inside of his skinsuit was already beginning to smell, and he had no doubt that Miho’s suit also had the odor of stale sweat.

‘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.

N
ASH 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.’