Labyrinth of Night (12 page)

Cassidy stared back at him. ‘Come again?’

‘My fault. When I listened to the tape of Moberly’s encounter with the Room, I thought it sounded like your improvisational work. In my report to NASA, I said as much in passing. I was suggesting that we develop an artificial intelligence…maybe an AI expert system of some sort…that would copy your guitar style, something which could communicate with C4-20. After all, the Cooties themselves must have had some sort of AI running the Labyrinth, so if there was an AI which could specifically mimic your style…’ He took a deep breath. ‘But someone must have taken me literally. I didn’t think…’

He shook his head regretfully. ‘Damn, Ben, I’m sorry about this. I’ve been listening to your work for years. The last thing I wanted was to get you into this shit.’

Cassidy nodded, absently swabbing some beef in his horseradish before realizing that he wasn’t hungry in the first place. He put the paper plate on the bed. ‘S’okay. They probably would have drafted me anyway.’

‘Drafted? Jeez, you’re my age. You’re too old for the draft. What did they get you on?’

Cassidy sipped his coffee. It was wretched and he put it down on the floor. ‘Taxes and drugs,’ he replied.

‘What about ’em?’

‘I didn’t pay my taxes for a couple of years because I was strung out on drugs. They said I could go to jail or I could go to Mars. I think they came up with my name before they audited the books, but when they did, they found the leverage to get me here. At least, that’s what I figured from what Jessup told me.’

Johnson shook his head with black amusement and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. ‘Good old Dick. I should have let you rip his suit back there. Seldom has there been a more two-faced bastard to walk the earth…or Mars, for that matter.’ He picked up another slice of roast beef. ‘Guess that figures. Someone once said that the first casualty of war is the truth.’

‘Well, that’s kind of the problem with my situation, isn’t it?’ Cassidy rested his elbows on his knees and cupped his hands together. ‘I mean, it’s becoming pretty obvious that Jessup didn’t tell me everything when I still had the chance to back out. So what’s the real story here?’

‘I don’t know. What’s the question?’

‘What happened to this guy Moberly? I know he got killed in the Room, but I don’t know how or why, and that somebody else bought it in the Labyrinth. But what’s so important about exploring the place?’

‘Jessup left out a lot, didn’t he?’ Art Johnson sipped from his coffee, made a face and placed his cup on the floor. ‘Hal Moberly…Well, let me start you at the beginning…’

‘When Cydonia Base explorers opened Pyramid C-4 in early 2029, the first thing they found was a small room about the size of a large walk-in closet. The room was featureless, except for another stone door at the opposite end of the chamber. Mounted in the center of the door was a large round button.

‘The first man to enter the room was a Soviet exobiologist, Valery Bronstein. He had the right idea—push the button with his hand to open the door—but when he walked into the room, he stepped on a large round divot placed in the floor. The weight of his body pushed the divot down and, before he or anyone else could react, a one-ton stone block fell from the ceiling and crushed him to death.’

‘Oh God,’ Cassidy said.

Johnson nodded. ‘Once we hauled the block away and removed Valery’s body, someone else approached the problem by extending a rod through the doorway and pushing the door-button with it. The door opened without another block dropping, and we found a corridor leading downward. We followed it to Room C4-2, and that’s when we found the next little test.

‘Room C4-2 was larger than Room C4-1. Again, it had a door at the opposite end, but this time there was a wide slot in the middle, with a narrow bar sticking out of the left side. Above and below the slot were inscribed two horizontal wavy lines, running parallel to each other. As well, the walls of the chamber were lined with narrow, horizontal grooves. This time, the science team cautiously entered the room and studied the slot and the diagrams at length before Johnson himself performed the task that Shin-ichi Kawakami determined was the solution to the new test: he carefully moved the narrow bar along the slot from left to right, exactly following the pattern of the wavy lines.

‘I was scared to death, but the door opened,’ Johnson said. ‘Again, we found a corridor continuing downward to Room C4-3. We checked the grooves in the walls later and found spring-loaded fléchettes in them. Sharp as razors. If I had made the wrong move, they would have ripped me apart.’

‘And the next room was…?’

‘Another test.’ Johnson grinned. ‘Tic-tac-toe, if you can believe it, and another death-trap if you screwed up. This time, the whole blamed floor was rigged to collapse and drop you down a bottomless pit. And that’s the way the whole Labyrinth is designed.’

He traced a descending spiral in the air with his forefinger. ‘It goes down and down and down, room after room, and each room has its own IQ test, a degree more difficult than the last one. Mostly they involve symbology, which is the closest we’ve come to discovering any sort of written language of the Cooties, so the first trick has always been to determine what the symbols mean. By the time we reached Room C4-10 the tests began to involve mathematics, and C4-13 and C4-14 had tests relating to what we know as Newtonian physics. Sometimes it would take us weeks just to figure out what the Cooties were trying to ask, even if the solutions themselves were pretty simple. That seems to be the intent. The rooms want to find out if we can second-guess them.’

He rolled up another slice of beef and swished it around in the sauce. ‘Of course, we took precautions after I went in there. We managed to get some modified Hoplite armor shipped to us, like the ones used by UN peacekeeping troops. Strictly recon stuff…it wasn’t until later that the Russians shipped up that battle armor which Oeljanov was wearing. But it gave the first person entering a new room a certain degree of safety, and we were able to monitor what he or she was seeing and doing from the control module up here. Worked fine. We didn’t lose anyone else, until Hal Moberly entered C4-20.’

‘Okay.’ Cassidy held up a finger. ‘I know that something ripped apart his suit. You lost contact with him right before it happened, but you heard the music just before then. Is that the truth?’

Johnson nodded again. ‘Yep. Sounds as if the only thing they didn’t tell you about C4-20 is that Moberly was killed in there…and that we barely found enough of his body left to fill a bucket.’

‘His head,’ Cassidy said. ‘Part of his armor, and his head.’

Johnson grimaced as he shut his eyes. ‘The rest of him was missing, and damn if I know why.’ Then he looked up again at the musician. ‘But did they tell you that it looks like C4-20 is at the
end
of the Labyrinth?’

Surprised, Cassidy shook his head. ‘That figures,’ Johnson continued. ‘There are no other doors, but the walls look different. Metallic. Maybe there’s something behind them. If that’s the case, it would fit with Kawakami’s theory that the Cooties knew somebody from Earth was coming. They built the Face to draw our attention, and then they constructed the Labyrinth to make sure whoever explored this place was smart enough to be able to understand…’

Cassidy put up his hands. ‘Hey, slow down. Wait a minute.’ He shut his eyes briefly, trying to concentrate on an unfamiliar pattern of thought. ‘Let me get this straight. These aliens…’

‘Call them the Cooties. Everyone else does.’ Johnson peered at him quizzically. ‘I’m surprised you don’t know about this. Everyone else on Earth seems to.’

‘I’ve only recently been living on Earth again, y’know what I mean.’ Cassidy shrugged and went on before Johnson could ask what he meant by that comment. ‘These Cooties left behind a labyrinth in a dead city here on Mars…’

‘That’s right.’

‘And they built the Face to attract our attention to this place.’

Johnson nodded his head. ‘That’s correct. Go on.’

‘But they built it thousands of years before we even started dicking around with balloons, let alone rockets.’

Johnson smiled. ‘You’re on the right track.’

Cassidy sputtered, ‘Then how did they know someone was coming from Earth? And if they did know, why make it such a mystery? Why not put up…I dunno, hieroglyphics, a map, some sort of simple instructions? Why go through all this bullshit if they wanted to…?’ He suddenly ran out of steam, unable to verbalize his swarming thoughts.

‘Why go through all this if they simply wanted to establish contact?’ Johnson finished. ‘That’s the thing of it, Ben…
we don’t know!
Science is like that. You can’t just look at it once and say, “Ah-ha, there’s the answer!” Nothing’s clear-cut and obvious about this deal. There’re riddles within riddles, like an old Chinese puzzle-box or an onion, unpeeling in layers. We’ve got a city which was once occupied by an extraterrestrial race, but they leave behind nothing but a labyrinth, and at the end of it is…’

He paused and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, whatever it is that’s down there. There might be something underneath this whole city structure, something that will explain everything we don’t know about the Cooties. Like, maybe, what brought them here in the first place? Why did they build the City? What’s at the bottom of the Labyrinth that they needed to protect…?’

‘A starship?’ Cassidy asked.

Johnson shrugged again. ‘Who can tell? Both sides would love to find something like that down there. After all, we never found their vessel. It should have been left in orbit, but we don’t know how the Cooties operated. We have no idea what’s down there, but, of course, there’s so much more that we
don’t
know about the Cooties than what we
do
know. However, there’s definitely something down there they felt the need to protect with the Labyrinth.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Whatever it is, it has to be
big.’

Cassidy fell back on the bunk and let out a low whistle. ‘No wonder everyone’s so hot to lay claim to the site.’

‘Yup. International cooperation is fine and dandy when we’re just poking through some rocks, but give them even the slim chance of finding something useful like a starship…’ Johnson sighed and shook his head. ‘And once again politics screws around with science.’

‘Umm.’ Cassidy was pensive. ‘So where does that leave…?’

He was interrupted by the module hatch opening. The two men looked up to see Sasha Kulejan and Tamara Isralilova climb into the bunkhouse. They stopped when they spotted Cassidy and Johnson. Their faces were downcast.

‘Whoops,’ Johnson said. ‘Sorry, guys. We’ll get out of the way and let you two have some privacy.’ He leaned down to pick up his coffee cup, motioning to Cassidy to do the same. ‘Rules of the house,’ he murmured. ‘Whoever wants the place to themselves has priority. And you’re sitting on Sasha’s bunk.’

But Kulejan quickly shook his head. ‘No, no, no. It’s nothing like that. We were told you were in here and we came to…’

His voice trailed off. He and Isralilova looked disturbed, both angry and confused at the same time. ‘What’s going on?’ Cassidy asked.

Isralilova took a deep breath. ‘A communiqué from our country was just received at the control module,’ the young physician said, her voice shaking. ‘Orders from the President himself. The Commonwealth is formally withdrawing from this expedition. We’ve been ordered not to cooperate in any way with this mission. We are to prepare to return to Arsia Station, to await the return of the
Korolev.
’

Johnson let out his breath. ‘Great. That’s just great.’ He looked back at Cassidy. ‘I wonder if there’s any booze left at the wake. Something else just died.’

W
ASHINGTON,
June 15. Top officials of the White Administration, the Department of Defense and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration confirmed today at a surprise press conference that a rapid deployment force of the United States Marine Corps’ First Space Infantry attacked and ‘totally destroyed’ mobile military units on Mars belonging to the Commonwealth of Independent States. One Russian military advisor and one Marine Corps pilot were killed in the incident, which occurred today at 1:35 pm EST, or 6:40 pm MCM (Mars Central Meridian).

According to the announcement made at the White House, the attack was carried out by two Marine Corps pilots in Space-to-Surface ‘Hornet’ aircraft deployed from Mars orbit from the Japanese spaceship SS
Shinseiki.
The pilots both belonged to the First Space’s elite Falcon Team. The two STS fighters destroyed two Russian AT-80 ‘Bushmaster’ autotanks before a Russian Army officer piloting a space-adapted Combat Armor Suit managed to shoot down one of the STS fighters. The remaining Hornet then killed the Russian officer before successfully landing on the Martian surface.

The raid occurred in the Cydonia region in Mars’ northern hemisphere, at the site of the base camp of the international expedition which has been exploring extraterrestrial ruins recently discovered on the planet. Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Samuel O. Kasey identified the US Marine who was killed as Lt. William A. Hoffman; the surviving pilot was not identified by name. Although the name of the Russian military advisor was not disclosed, NASA officials have identified him as Major Maksim Oeljanov.

NASA spokesperson Jerome Jeffers said that no casualties or injuries were reported among civilian members of the expedition. ‘Everyone up there is completely safe now,’ Mr Jeffers said at the press conference. ‘The situation has been stabilized…It was over and done with in sixty seconds, and the Russian armor units were totally destroyed.’

White House spokesperson Mary Nile claimed that the military action, which had been covertly planned and executed, had been made in response to ‘pending Russian aggression on Mars which threatened the lives of the scientific team at Cydonia Base.’ Although she said that the United States ‘regrets’ the deaths of both Lt. Hoffman and Maj. Oeljanov, Ms. Nile claimed that the covert operation, which was code-named ‘Steeple Chase’ by the defense department, was ‘completely successful.’