Labyrinth of Night (48 page)

‘Then our lives are still in jeopardy,’
she insisted.

He shrugged his shoulders, feeling his skin chafe inside his skinsuit. Nash would have given anything to get out of it; he had been dressed for EVA for almost a full day now. It was probably because of this that he still felt fatigued. ‘Maybe, maybe not. If we stay up here until we’ve landed, then there’s not much opportunity for him to do anything to harm us. Even in the hangar, there will be too many witnesses around for him to attempt to knock us off.’

‘But if he gets us alone inside the base, he could…’

‘Look, Miho, there’s all sorts of variables in this thing.’ Nash felt himself becoming irate. He took a deep breath, forcing himself to calm down. No point in snapping at Sasaki because she was worried about Boggs. ‘All we can do is play it by ear and…’

‘Play it by ear?’
she repeated, sounding a little confused
. ‘I don’t know what you’re…
’

He grinned and sat down again on the deck. ‘Play it by ear. Make it up as we go along. Improvise.’

‘Oh. Right.’
Miho turned around and slumped down next to him.
‘Shin-ichi would know what you…’

Her voice trailed off as her eyes closed in grief. She bent forward and hugged her knees between her arms, suddenly remembering the grotesque death of her mentor. Nash heard her sobbing over the comlink; he reached out and took her gloved hands between his, but said nothing. She needed a good cry; it was long overdue.

After a short while, she gave his hands a brief squeeze, then rested her back against the curved wall.
‘August
…’ she began, then hesitated.
‘What do you intend to do about L’Enfant?’

Nash didn’t say anything. He gazed up at the pale-pink sky passing overhead. He had Control’s permission to act with extreme prejudice. L’Enfant had violated the seventh protocol; the proof was there, not only in the lives which had been wasted and the destruction which had been wrought, but also on the microfilm which was sealed in his camera.

Not that Nash needed anyone’s permission to kill his former captain.

‘I’ll deal with Terry,’ he murmured. ‘You don’t have to worry about that.’

He felt his eyes beginning to close again. God, was he tired. Every muscle in his body seemed to ache; he still felt the bruises he had received from his beating. Nash lay his helmeted head back against the side of the cupola and stretched his legs out as far as he could. Sasaki didn’t continue the discussion, for which he was grateful. They still had a long journey ahead of them; if he could doze through the next eight or nine hours…

Just before he fell asleep again, though, his half-shut eyes fell across his boots and his lower left leg, and he noticed something curious. The last time he had consciously looked at his legs, the soles of his boots and the left calf of the skinsuit overgarment had been stained crimson. That was down in the Cootie underworld, when he had slipped in a puddle near one of the nanite-vats; he had been lightly splashed with some of the liquid from the pits, but he had been in too much of a hurry to escape the catacombs to even mention it to Miho.

Like the rest of his skinsuit, his boots and calf were filthy with dust…but now there was no sign of the stains. They had completely vanished, as if they had never been there in the first place.

An indistinct thought tickled his mind.
So…

He shook his head. So what? It had been a long hike to retrace their steps through the catacombs, followed by a steep climb through the secondary tunnel to the surface. After that, he and Sasaki had been forced to jog through the wide City Square in order to make the covert rendezvous with the
Akron.
The stuff must have rubbed off during all that; the Martian dust was abrasive enough to scour anything clean…

So it was nothing important.

He couldn’t think anymore. Nash let his eyes close.

He was awakened by the
Akron
lurching violently to one side as if it had been kicked by a massive foot; before he could even open his eyes, he was slammed against Sasaki as both of them were pitched against the side of the cupola.

Miho’s left shoulder was wrenched backward by the impact; as she screamed in agony, the airship lurched again, this time downward. Nash had barely an instant to throw his arms and legs out and pin Sasaki beneath him to keep her from being hurled against the dome. Her face was twisted in pain, but she held onto him as the
Akron
abruptly bucked sideways again.

‘The dust storm…!’
she shouted.

Nash heard a loud ripping sound below them, as if something deep within the airship’s hull was fighting to get loose. However, the airship seemed to steady itself; Boggs was apparently still in control of the rudder and was fighting to stabilize the massive craft. Grasping the inside ledge of the dome with his fingers, Nash hauled himself to his knees and stared out of the blister.

The sunlight was much dimmer than when he had gone to sleep; it was late afternoon now, and he realized that he had been asleep much longer than he had intended. Yet the evening sky was completely clear, unmarred by the sirocco of red sand he had expected to see. He looked to the west, toward the setting sun, and was astonished to see a great cone towering above the western horizon: Pavonis Mons, one of the three shield volcanoes of the Tharsis region.

Another sudden jolt, less violent than the first three, passed through the fuselage of the
Akron.
It almost knocked him off his knees, but Nash held tight to the edge of the dome.
‘What’s going on?’
Sasaki demanded, her voice high-pitched with fear.
‘Isn’t it the dust storm?’

‘No,’ he said, trying to remain calm in spite of his own confusion. ‘I don’t know what it is.’ The deck was tilting forward now, but Nash hung on and forced himself the rest of the way to his feet.

In the farthest distance beyond Pavonis Mons, he could see the great bulge of Olympus Mons. He glanced toward the tapering bow of the airship and saw, many miles away and yet rapidly approaching, the chaotic canyons of the Noctis Labyrinthis. They were less than a hundred miles from Arsia Station, yet he could also see that the
Akron
had lost altitude; the airship was no more than six hundred feet above the ground.

Miho shouted something else but he ignored her. Nash swung his gaze toward the stern and felt his heart freeze. The fuselage was still largely intact, but it had lost much of its rigidity; there were great dimples in its aft sides, as if massive hands had squeezed its flanks, and the long spoiler-like elevator was partially collapsed on its support pylons. One glance at the main elevator, and Nash knew that the
Akron
had lost much of its control. And even though there were no apparent rents along its silvery skin, he had little doubt that the airship was slowly leaking hydrogen from somewhere along its hull.

They were almost home…but for whatever reason, the big ship was floundering and in serious trouble. Minute by inexorable minute, the
Akron
was going down.

‘Get the hatch open!’ he shouted. ‘We gotta get below!’ When he looked around, he saw that Miho had already undogged the hatch cover and was halfway down the ladder. She had switched on her helmet lamp; its beam danced back and forth as she hurried down the rungs.

Yet another tremor swept through the ship; he fell to his knees and braced himself against the lip of the hatch. He waited until he caught a glimpse of Sasaki stepping off the ladder, then he gripped the hatch tightly and swung himself headfirst through the opening, making a clumsy half-gainer to the gangway below. It was a risky move, but he didn’t want to linger in the observation blister for a second longer.

His boots hit the gridded gangway deck at the same moment as there was another hard lurch; off balance, Nash began to topple forward, but Miho grabbed him from behind and hauled him back. They fell together onto the gangway, tangled in each other’s arms and legs.

‘What’s happening?’
she yelled, almost on the verge of panic.
‘Are we crashing? Why are we…?’

She suddenly stopped screaming; instead, Nash heard a startled gasp over the comlink. His eyes darted in her direction; she looked unharmed, but the stark bright oval of her lamp had caught something: the side of one of the slender frame-rings which ran laterally through the skeleton of the airship. Disentangling himself from her, Nash fumbled with his wrist controls until his own helmet lamp flashed on; he swung his shoulders until the beam landed on the same ring…

‘Oh my God,’ he whispered.

The surface of the ring was bleeding.

Red liquid streaks were oozing down its curved grey sides, as if the metal itself had developed ulcerous stigma. No, not oozing…
crawling,
as a solid mass of near-microscopic lice ran up and down the polycarbon girder. Feeding upon it…

‘The nanites,’
Miho said.
‘They’re aboard the ship.’
She swung her face toward Nash.
‘When you slipped in that puddle in the cavern…’

‘I know,’ he murmured. ‘Some of that stuff got on my suit. I thought it rubbed off me, but I…’

‘Never mind that now.’
She was already clambering to her feet, grabbing the gangway railing for support. Another shudder ran through the fuselage, but they were prepared for it now.
‘They’ve probably replicated billions of times by now, making endless copies of one another. If they’re following their original purpose…
’

‘You don’t have to spell it out.’ There was a sickening drop in his stomach as the full magnitude of the situation came home to him. The micro-Cooties—if they could be so-called—had hitched a ride on his skinsuit; they couldn’t consume his suit’s outergarment, but once they had been carried into the
Akron,
they had found a rich source of basic materials to disassemble for their own innate purposes. It didn’t matter to them if the Cootie starship had already been completed and launched; their programming was simple: tear it apart and rebuild it.

‘If the
Akron
returns to Arsia Station,’
Sasaki continued,
‘they’ll be beyond our control. We’ll never be able to contain them.’
Her voice was beginning to rise.
‘They could even contaminate the
Sagan
and be transported back to Earth aboard the
Lowell,
where they could…
’

‘No. You don’t have to worry about it going that far.’ Nash hauled himself to his feet and stumbled toward the ladder leading down to the central gangway. ‘Believe me, the
Akron’s
never going to make it back to base. They’ll…’

The airship quivered like a wet dog shaking off water. He grabbed a rail for support and felt it give a little; he looked down and saw that it had bent inward slightly, as if it was made of half-hardened putty. The palm of his glove was covered with redness. He lifted it for Sasaki to see.

‘They’re destroying the ship from the inside out!’ he yelled. ‘If we don’t get out of here, they’re going to take us with her! Now
c’mon…
!’

The climb down the ladder was frightening; individual rungs had turned soft and threatened to collapse, plunging them into the dark chasm beneath their feet. The airship occasionally gave another violent surge which almost loosened their tenuous grip on the ladder. But it didn’t take long to get to the bottom; they were too scared to take their time making a careful descent.

Once Miho had reached the central gangway and was out of the way, Nash took a deep breath and jumped the rest of the distance. He landed on all fours, his breath huffing out of him. He picked himself up off the deck and looked around. In the translucent half-light cast by the fiber-optic safety lines, he could see the airship’s skeleton collapsing inward, its support rings and trusswork melting as if made of wax. All around them, the giant gas cells were sagging like old pillows as hydrogen leaked through their dissolving skins. Nanite liquid dripped all around them, as if the
Akron
were a hemorrhaging leviathan. He could hear a vast groaning, grinding sound throughout the massive envelope; every few seconds there was a distant crash as a support gave way and another piece of the internal frame toppled downward.

The
Akron
was dying. It was a big ship; although infected with billions of micro-Cooties, its destruction was taking some time to complete. But it was dying nonetheless.

Sasaki was hugging the gangway rail, staring speechlessly at the chaos erupting around her. Nash turned toward her, pointing at the bow of the ship. ‘Get to the cargo bay!’ he shouted. She looked toward him. ‘If we can blow the hatch and drop the cables, maybe we can…!’

‘Look out!’
she screamed.

He instinctively ducked and whipped around, expecting a girder to come crashing down upon him. Instead, a human form lunged out of the semi-darkness behind him, arms outstretched to shove him over the railing…

His reflexes took over. Nash grabbed his assailant by the forearms as he simultaneously kicked his right foot into the figure’s midriff; at the same time, he allowed himself to fall backward, still grasping the other person’s arms. His backpack slammed into his spine and he almost lost his breath, but he managed to hurl the other person up over himself.

The judo throw took Megan Swigart completely by surprise. In the half-instant before Nash released his grip, he caught a glimpse of her shocked face through her helmet. Then she was over the railing, her arms and legs flailing helplessly as she was pitched off the catwalk.

If she screamed, he couldn’t hear her; she was on a different comlink channel. Yet, as he glanced down from the catwalk, he saw her helmet faceplate shatter as it slammed directly into a crossbeam twenty feet below; there was a brief spout of instantly-frosted air amid the shattered glass, then Swigart’s body fell into the impenetrable darkness of the lower hull.

A second later there was another slight jar through the fuselage; without looking, Nash knew that her body had just punched through the outer skin of the
Akron.
The airship might be falling, but it was still a long way down…