Labyrinth of Night (2 page)

Yet
Labyrinth of Night
has always been a source of mild discomfort for me. I’m not embarrassed by this novel. In fact, I’m still quite proud of it. But because of its unlikely—and now proven-to-be-impossible—premise, I chose to ignore the Cydonia artifacts in subsequent Near-Space stories set on Mars; they were never mentioned again, as if they (surprise!) never existed. And over the years, I’ve received queries from readers, both by mail and in person, asking me about the secret information they imagine I must have learned that supports the notion that there’s an extraterrestrial city on Mars and that the American government has sought to hide its existence from the public.

I’ve told them the very same thing I told you in the opening paragraphs of this introduction.
Labyrinth of Night
is a novel, not an exposé. It is meant as entertainment, and I hope that it succeeds in being just that. Please don’t expect it to be anything else.

Allen Steele

Whately, Massachusetts

May 2013

‘N
O ONE WOULD
have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water…Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes and surely drew their plans against us…’

The War of the Worlds (1897)

H. G. Wells

H
AL MOBERLY GINGERLY STEPPED
on a round stone divot in front of a red door deep beneath the Martian surface, closed his eyes and waited to die. Instead, the door slid grindingly aside, towed along coasters by pulleys at least as old as recorded history. Hearing the door move, the NASA geologist opened his eyes and took a deep breath. Through the now-open door, beyond the oval of light cast by his armor’s lamp, lay the darkness of Room C4-20.

‘Thank God,’ he murmured. ‘I’m still here.’

Shin-ichi Kawakami watched from Cydonia Base’s monitor center, located outside the City on the rock-strewn, wind-stripped red plain. Around him, other members of the team were hunched over their stations, concentrating on their instruments. ‘We copy that, Hal,’ the Japanese exobiologist replied. ‘Stay in the doorway for a few moments and let the pod sweep the room.’

Next to Kawakami, Paul Verduin watched as the radar in Moberly’s suit sensor pod—a sausage-shaped package mounted on the armor’s right shoulder—mapped the interior of Room C4-20. The radar’s feedback was input directly into Verduin’s computer, which in turn assembled a three-dimensional image of C4-20 on his screen. The new room was 40 feet long, 21 feet wide and 8 feet high. There were apparently no furnishings in this chamber, but the Dutch astronomer noticed that the computer had painted the room’s walls as being irregular, rippled and unsmooth.

From her station behind them, Tamara Isralilova held vigil on the armor’s internal monitors. Moberly’s Hoplite II armor was less like a garment than it was a vehicle. A spinoff from the military armor used by American and Russian heavy infantry units, the Hoplite suit weighed a half-ton and resembled an egg which had sprouted semirobotic arms and legs. Within its cocoonlike interior, Moberly’s body was covered with biosensors.

‘Respiration, EKG, blood pressure, brain alpha patterns all rising,’ the Russian doctor reported. ‘He’s extremely nervous, Dr. Kawakami.’

‘Don’t inject him with anything, Tamara,’ Kawakami replied. ‘I would rather have him nervous than somnambulant at this juncture.’ He glanced over Verduin’s shoulder. ‘What’s in there, Paul?’

Verduin shook his head. ‘It resembles a normal chamber, except that the walls seem irregular. Lumpy. And look at this.’ He pointed to the spectrographic readout. ‘Metal, not stone. Light aluminum-steel alloy of some variety. We have not seen anything like this yet.’

‘Don’t keep me in suspense, guys.’
Moberley’s voice came through their headsets.
‘Are there any booby-traps here?’

Kawakami and Verduin traded glances. An unnecessary question. Each chamber of the underground labyrinth had been booby-trapped, and already one person had been killed. Moberly was really asking if there was anything which would annihilate him the moment he entered the new chamber. Verduin shrugged, then shook his head. ‘Go ahead, Hal,’ Kawakami said. ‘Take two steps into the room and stop. Also increase your white-light intensity a little bit so we can get a good picture.’

As Moberly stepped through the door into Room C4-20, the TV image transmitted from his armor’s chest-mounted camera brightened. Kawakami and Verduin watched the monitor screen between their stations. The walls, toned like burnished copper, were intricately patterned, interlaced with whorls and swirls as if cut by a jigsaw. Very strange. Other chambers in the Labyrinth contained wall designs, but none as complex or extensive as these. The camera swiveled to the far wall and stopped.
‘Hey!’
Moberly yelled.
‘Do you see that?’

‘Yes, we see it,’ Verduin replied excitedly. Isralilova turned to look at the monitor. After staring at the screen for a moment, she cast a rare smile at Kawakami.

What they saw of significance in the last wall of the new chamber was nothing at all. There was no door in the far wall.

‘That’s it,’ Kawakami whispered. ‘The end.’

Then Verduin glanced down at his console and stopped grinning. Cupping his left hand over his headset mike, he pointed at his screen. Kawakami looked and felt his elation vanish.

‘Electromagnetic surge,’ Verduin whispered. A computer-generated red line in a window on his screen had suddenly spiked in its center. Before Kawakami could ask, Verduin answered his next question by pointing at a more regular blue line underneath the red spike. ‘That is his suit voltage. The red line indicates an exterior source. The surge happened the moment he stepped in the room. I cannot isolate the source, but it is definitely from inside C4-20.’

They heard a familiar grinding sound in their headphones, picked up by the armor’s exterior mike. Everyone looked up.
‘The door’s closing,’
Moberly said.
‘There it goes.’
The TV image on the monitor screen shifted sharply as Moberly turned around, now showing the door to the corridor quickly shutting itself. Moberly lurched forward a step, but the door was sealed before he could reach it.

Everyone in the module took a deep breath. Although it had been anticipated that the new room would reseal itself once Moberly was inside, there was still a palpable sense of foreboding. Hal was obviously keeping his own fear under tight rein—the professional cool of a scientist-explorer, typical of a man who had hung a framed picture of Sir Richard Burton above his bunk—but the people at the other end of his comlink were at the edge of their nerves.

They remembered what had happened to Valery Bronstein…and they were all too aware of the solitary grave that lay on the small hill behind the base.

Still, Kawakami thought, it’s not going to do Hal any good if we begin to panic. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘It knows he’s in there.’ His fingers found the keypad in his lap and punched in two digits. Arthur Johnson and Miho Sasaki, the American and Japanese co-leaders of the expedition, were on standby in the corridor outside C4-20. ‘Team Lima-Two, do you copy?’

‘We’re here, Shin-ichi.’
Arthur Johnson’s voice was stressed.
‘The door just shut. What’s going on in there?’

Kawakami was about to answer when another sound overrode the comlink: not static, not the usual crackle of electromagnetic interference from the Pyramid. Something formed and rhythmic, as natural and yet unexpected as a coyote howl in the midnight desert. ‘Listen,’ Isralilova said. ‘Do you hear that!’

‘Shh!’ Kawakami hissed. Music. Formless and random, even grating, but undeniably it was music, lifting from the alien caverns like the sullen riffs of a subway jazz player, as if an
avant-garde
musician were lurking somewhere inside the chamber. Weird, yet somehow appropriate…and nonetheless threatening.

‘Are you getting this?’
Hal Moberly quietly asked.

Kawakami glanced at the CD-ROM deck above his console. ‘We’re recording it, yes, Hal,’ he replied. ‘Stand by. Wait for our next signal.’

The team’s senior scientist had no doubt what the sounds signified. In some way, this was the Labyrinth’s final test. Yet this was something entirely new. Before now, everything beneath Pyramid C-4 had related to equations and common sense. How can anyone ask a piece of music, alien or otherwise, to explain itself as an obvious statement?

Kawakami looked at Verduin. The other scientist met his gaze, glanced back at his console, then silently shook his head. Instinctively, they both knew the hard truth, although neither of them had the courage to openly speak it.

Hal Moberly was not going to emerge from C4-20 alive. And there wasn’t a damned thing they could do about it…

The Blackhawk was an older helicopter, on the verge of retirement but still in use by the government for low-profile odd jobs. Its military markings had been removed, so it was appropriate for flying Dick Jessup from central Massachusetts to Waterville Valley. When Jessup had asked why he simply could not drive to the concert site, the copter pilot had grinned. ‘I don’t think you want to do that, sir,’ Lieutenant Orr had replied.

Now, after a one-hour jaunt from Worcester Municipal Airport to the resort town, Jessup could see why. Traffic was backed up for miles on the highways leading into Waterville Valley, tucked in the foothills of the White Mountains. An estimated crowd of seventy thousand music-lovers surrounded the huge outdoor stage of the New England Bluegrass and Jazz Festival. Orr circled the vast sprawl of people, tents and cars before setting the Blackhawk down on a packed-earth landing pad inside the fenced backstage area. A couple of roadies dashed out to meet Jessup as he climbed out, then backed off, confused that the helicopter’s lone passenger was not a performer. One of them made a call on his wristphone and a few minutes later the stage manager stalked over, convinced that Jessup was a high-rolling gatecrasher. It took a few minutes for Jessup to settle the dispute; it was not until the stage manager made a phone call to the promoter and verified that Jessup was there as an invited guest that he calmed down. Jessup was relieved; he did not want to produce his government ID, which would have ended the dispute more quickly but would also have raised some uncomfortable questions.

On the other hand, the stage manager seemed irritated that he couldn’t have Jessup arrested by the security guards. ‘Just get that bird of yours out of here,’ he snapped, pointing at the Blackhawk. ‘We’ve still got people flying into this place.’

‘Okay,’ Jessup replied. ‘Can you tell me where Ben Cassidy is?’

‘He’s onstage. You can talk to him when his set is over. Now get your chopper out of here.’

Jessup waved to Orr and gave him the thumbs-up, and the pilot pointed at his watch and lifted two fingers. Two hours. That was sufficient time. Jessup nodded, and the Blackhawk lifted back up into the clear August sky. Jessup turned back to the stage manager, but he was already walking off to harangue someone else. Jessup wondered if he ever listened to the concerts he ramrodded, or if he was merely in this business because it gave him an excuse to be a jerk.

Jessup found his way to the stage and walked up the stairs to a small area between a stack of equipment boxes and a table covered with folded rally towels and bottles of mineral water. Roadies and various hangers-on moved back and forth around him; he felt out of place, wearing his beige business suit and tie, among the jeans and T-shirts which were the uniform for this Labor Day weekend gathering. Too much like a government official on official government business. People shied away from him as if he were an IRS agent there to audit the gate receipts. Jessup was sure that, if he were to identify himself as a NASA administrator, it would not make any difference. Not with anti-space sentiments growing as they were now…

He turned his attention to the lone figure on the stage, a burly man sitting on a wooden stool with his back turned to Jessup. Ben Cassidy was performing solo, as usual, with no backup band. He was a middle-aged man—balding, beard turning white, the creased and heavy-browed face of a longshoreman turned itinerant musician—plainly dressed in baggy dungarees with shirt sleeves rolled up above his elbows, hunched over the keys and digital fretboard of a Yamaha electronic guitar.

It seemed impossible to Jessup that one person could entertain the vast ocean of faces that lapped at the shoreline of the stage, that his music would be drowned in the tide of humanity. Yet, as Cassidy played, Jessup found himself empathetically melding with the current: the crowd, the mid-afternoon heat, and above all else the music which flowed from Cassidy’s guitar. He was coming out of a blues number—Jessup, who had briefly been a blues fan in his college days, vaguely recognized it as Muddy Waters’
My Dog Can’t Bark, My Cat Can’t Scratch—
and was gliding into free-form improvisation.

As Jessup listened, be became increasingly fascinated. At first it seemed as if Cassidy was simply dog-paddling, thrashing without direction on the same couple of chords. Then he added a keyboard solo to the bass refrain and began holding a dialogue between the two sets of chords, shifting back and forth like an actor singlehandedly conducting a conversation between two characters. When it seemed impossible that Cassidy could carry this on much longer, the musician added a third refrain, a lilting lead guitar riff which joined into the mesh of notes. The crowd near the stage, mesmerized by this performance, shouted and applauded their approval but Cassidy, huddled over his instrument, face almost pressed against it, did not look up, nor even seem to notice that he had an audience.