Labyrinth of Night (34 page)

Thinking of this, she pulled out one of the paper-wads and thrust it into her mouth, chewing it into a pulp.

Tamara completed her note and passed it back to her.
Yes I think so, but your new so who knows?
it read in her badly-spelled English.
Akers came in here ounce but I screamed loud until Swigart came to help me. Do same if he trys again.

At first Miho didn’t understand what she meant, then she hissed as she re-read the note. Charlie Akers had attempted to rape Tamara; it was a blessing that one of the other Americans was a woman. But that wasn’t the answer to the question she had intended to ask.

Picking up her own pen, she wrote beneath Tamara’s hand-script:
Sorry it happened. Thanks for advice, but not what I mean. Are we safe tomorrow? All of us?
She underlined ‘tomorrow’ to stress the point, then passed it back to Tamara.

While Isralilova read her note and formulated her reply on a fresh scrap of paper, Sasaki listened intently for the sound of the sentry in the corridor. She recalled nights like this in her teenage years, when her parents had sent her to an exclusive girls’ boarding school outside Hiroshima. Lights-out in the dorms had been at nine o’clock, and although there were prefects who had prowled the halls in search of those who dared break the rules, it had never prevented her from carrying on similar written conversations with her roommate. This was not very different from those giggly nights, but she had no warm feeling of nostalgia. Back then, the subject of late-night notes in the dark had been boys and teachers and adolescent homesickness; tonight, it was the continuance of their lives.

Tamara finished writing and stretched out her hand; Miho plucked the new note from between her fingertips and unfolded the paper beneath her penlight.
No!! L. has something planned for after V.’s trip into tunnel. Dangeros. Has to do with secrets (?) in Mod. 1—think a new CAS in there, do not know details. A. and M. in their alot. Trouble!

Sasaki gnawed at her lower lip. Tamara knew little more than what Shin-ichi had already told her, except to confirm that Paul Verduin’s sortie tomorrow morning was instrumental in L’Enfant’s plans. She had the odd suspicion that Nash might have learned something new—despite the horrendous beating he had endured this afternoon, he had been separated from her for more than twelve hours now—but there was no way she could get to Module Nine, where Tamara had treated him.

She still had the keycard-decoder, though. She had continually switched its hiding-place since Nash had been captured, but except for Marks’ discovery of the bugs in her jumpsuit, no one had yet subjected her to a full-body search—although she now suspected that Akers would love to do so.

More importantly, though, she was beginning to understand that L’Enfant’s paranoia was his main weakness. Despite his seeming omniscience, the commander had developed a blindspot toward her, apparently dismissing Miho as a simple-minded accomplice to Nash’s own schemes. Whether he had overlooked her previous role at Cydonia Base a couple of years earlier, distracted by his efforts to expose Nash, or whether he simply believed that she didn’t pose a significant threat to him, Miho didn’t know—or care—even if he’d insulted her by grossly underestimating her intelligence. L’Enfant’s arrogance and ignorance were her sole advantages at this moment, and she needed to find a way to use them.

If she could only get to Module One and use her decoder to unlock the airlock hatch…

No. She had a higher priority, although it wasn’t the one which JETRO had intended when they sent her back to Mars. She picked up her pen, hesitated, and wrote:
Most important! Destroy this at once! We leave tomorrow on the airship. B. will take you, me and others aboard after

…Again, footsteps in the corridor. Tamara immediately switched off her penlight. For an instant, Miho was tempted to ignore the risk and keep writing. Then the footsteps stopped right outside the hatch, and she quickly snapped off her own penlight and shoved it beneath her pillow.

She was barely able to wad the note into a tiny ball and shove it into her mouth before the hatch opened. Faking sleep, she squinted through her eyelids as a shaft of light came through the hatch. Her heartbeat thudded in her eardrums as a jumpsuited figure stepped through the doorway. For a terrifying moment she thought that Charlie Akers was coming for her; she pulled her knees closer to her chest, curling into a protective fetal position…

‘Pardon me, ladies,’ Megan Swigart said as she came in. ‘Mind if I join you tonight?’

Feigning drowsiness, Miho sat up in her bunk, holding the dry wad of paper in her mouth. Across from her, she could see Tamara wincing in the sudden light, holding up her hand as if she, too, had been suddenly awakened from a deep sleep.

‘Sorry to disturb you,’ Swigart said as she closed the hatch again. ‘The commander thought you might want a little company. That okay with you?’

In the renewed darkness, Miho heard the lieutenant walk through the module and settle down on one of the unmade bunks in the rear. If Swigart intended to sleep, she was going to do it fully dressed; Miho didn’t hear the distinctive sound of clothes sliding to the floor. Indeed, Swigart didn’t even take off her boots.

Miho tucked the wad of paper into her cheek with her tongue. ‘That is fine,’ she replied, pretending to be half-awake. ‘Good night.’

Swigart didn’t answer. Miho laid her head down on the pillow, masticating the note as quietly as she could. L’Enfant wasn’t taking any chances; she and Tamara were to have their own personal sentry tonight, and their single line of communication had just been severed.

Tamara was right. The situation had become extraordinarily dangerous.

I
T WAS VERY
different from operating the spider. In virtual reality, death was only an abstraction, a cessation of function by the teleoperated machine at the other end of an electromagnetic channel. This time, though, the stakes were far higher; as Paul Verduin watched the canopy hatch being lowered into place by Marks, he was uncomfortably reminded of seeing a tomb being closed—from the inside.

‘Cut it out,’ he whispered to himself. ‘You’re not going to die.’

‘Pardon me?’
Shin-ichi Kawakami’s voice came through the comlink as a thin, static-filled crackle.
‘Did you just say something?’

Verduin let out his breath. ‘Negative,’ he replied. ‘Ready for power-up.’

He reached up to the overhead console and toggled a series of recessed switches; there was a harsh whine from the rear engine compartment as the Jackalope’s turbines engaged. Multicolored lights flashed across the consoles within the tiny cockpit, and on the secondary flatscreen between his knees, the main onboard computer scrolled a long sequence of status checks. He could hear Akers climbing off the hull; he hoped that the lieutenant didn’t accidentally rip loose one of the external electrical conduits with his boot heels.

It had already been decided that he was going to ride down unpressurised; it would give an extra measure of integrity to the inner hull. Verduin switched his skinsuit’s oxygen-nitrogen hoses to the cockpit’s internal feed valves, then jacked the MRV’s comlink into his suit’s chest unit. ‘Can you hear me better?’

‘We copy.’
Kawakami’s voice was much clearer now; the static had all but vanished.
‘You’re coming through very well.’

‘Can you run through a major systems-check for us now, please, Paul?’
Tamara Isralilova’s voice was clear enough for him to hear the strain in it. Verduin found himself regretting the fact that she was his other online controller for the mission.
‘TV and main sensors first, please.’

‘All right.’ Verduin reached his left hand to the panel above the computer keyboard and stabbed a series of buttons. On the inside panel of the hatch, directly in front of him, the larger main flatscreen came to life; the image was blurred for a moment until the front-mounted TV camera autofocused, then he could clearly see Charlie Akers standing in front of the MRV; secondary images on the right side of the screen displayed his infrared ghost-image and the weakly fluctuating bar graph of his electromagnetic image. Verduin instinctively glanced through the small oval porthole on his left to make sure that Akers was standing there. ‘Do you see that?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Fine.’
Isralilova sounded more business-like now.
‘Switch around to your other cameras now, please.’

Verduin snapped the other buttons on the communications panel; the main flatscreen swiftly changed, sequentially moving around in a 360-degree arc as the smaller TV cameras arrayed on the MRV’s fuselage kicked in: starboard, the parked rover and the distant pyramids of the City; aft, the desert, with the camera filters automatically screening the glare of the morning sun; port, the vast red slope of the D & M Pyramid, with the wrench tripod poised above the pit leading down into Mama’s Back Door.

‘It all looks good,’ he said as he returned the image to the front camera. ‘I’m going to test the ECM now. Hold on.’

He moved his left hand down to the keyboard and, mouthing the digits under his breath, tapped the appropriate code numbers into the onboard computer. One special modification had been made to the MRV before it had left Japan; an electronic counter-measures system, similar to those used by military jet fighter-bombers to foil enemy radar, had been installed in the Jackalope. Since the pseudo-Cooties were, indeed, miniature robots, then it was possible that an ECM system might scramble their AI systems. The Jackalope’s ECM was designed to lock onto the electromagnetic frequencies they used and jam them, rendering the pseudo-Cooties blind and confused, or even shutting them down completely.

At least that was the general theory. If it worked, it would provide an effective shield against the aliens. There was only one drawback: it had never been tested on a pseudo-Cootie. Computer analysis said it would perform adequately—but the computers had never faced a swarm of semi-intelligent machines in an underground tunnel.

The comlink screamed with static and the main viewscreen dissolved into irregular lines until the computer dampered out the jamming signals. When the screen readjusted itself, Verduin saw Akers stagger backward slightly, apparently disoriented by what was coming through his helmet. Verduin laughed out loud; it was an unexpected pleasure to see one of L’Enfant’s men so thoroughly nonplussed. ‘Try that for size, tough guy,’ he murmured.

‘The ECM seems to work fine, Paul.’
Kawakami’s voice was harsh with static, but Paul could still detect some guarded humor in his tone. He reminded himself that L’Enfant too was probably in the monitor center; if so, he was most likely not amused.
‘Shut it down now, please.’

Verduin reluctantly switched off the ECM. On the screen, he could see Akers recovering his composure. The assault rifle he habitually wore during EVA had slipped down its strap off his shoulder; he tugged his rifle back up while silently glaring at the MRV. Paul didn’t like the expression on Akers’ face. ‘Give my apologies to the lieutenant,’ he said formally.

‘All right.’
Tamara said.
‘Try to walk now.’

This was going to be the hardest part. He had done well in practice sessions on a simulation program loaded into the base computer, but that had been like playing a sophisticated computer game. Actually piloting the Jackalope would be another matter entirely. Verduin carefully slipped his booted feet into the stirrups of the foot pedals beneath the secondary viewscreen, then reached up and activated the mobility controls. There was a slight shift as the internal gyros stabilized the Jackalope’s balance. Paul took a minute to grasp the joystick on his right and shift it around; he watched as the waldo manipulator on the MRV’s front end appeared on the bottom of the screen, gliding back and forth like a snake.

‘The waldo works well,’ he said. ‘Okay, I’m going to walk now…or try to, at least.’

He took a deep breath, then grasped the throttle bar with his left hand, shoved it forward slightly, then lifted his right foot and set it down again. The screen tilted- slightly to the right; simultaneously there was a slight jar as the massive vehicle took a step forward. Lights raced across the secondary screen, but no warning signals flashed.

Verduin let out his breath, then raised his left foot and set it down. The MRV stepped forward again, the machine trembling as the footpad found the rocky ground; the gyros kept it upright, and Verduin tried again with his right foot. The Jackalope took another big step forward; on the screen, he saw Akers cautiously backing away from the advancing machine.

‘This is great.’ Paul grinned through his anxiety. ‘I feel like Baby Godzilla.’

‘You’re doing very well,’
Kawakami said,
‘Practice for a while before we…’

There was a muffled pause, an unintelligible background conversation, then his voice returned.
‘We are advised that you should take it to the wrench for lowering. Are you confident enough to do this now?’

Verduin lost his grin. L’Enfant. He had to be in the monitor center, calling the shots. He was silent for a few moments as he considered the options. He could justifiably claim that he needed more time for practice; the Jackalope was still unwieldy, his own movements uncoordinated. He could certainly use more time in this juggernaut before he took it down into the catacombs; under normal, sane circumstances, he would have been allowed a couple of days—even another fifteen minutes—for rehearsal.

However, the present circumstances were neither normal nor sane. A dust storm was whipping out of the western plains; in another twenty-four to thirty-six hours, this area would be lashed by hurricane-force winds which could drive dust at bulletlike velocity through the MRV’s hull, shredding fine internal circuitry. Even though the machine could be covered by tarps, there was no guarantee that it would survive the onslaught.

But nature wasn’t his worst enemy. The co-pilot of the
Akron—
he had to remember that his real name wasn’t Donaldson, but Nash—had turned out to be a spy. Only yesterday L’Enfant had turned Akers and Marks loose on him, and according to Tamara they had nearly killed the man.