Labyrinth of Night (28 page)

There was a six-wheeled, wire mesh-tired rover parked nearby. Apparently L’Enfant expected to drive it back to the base himself, leaving Akers to hitch a ride aboard the airship. ‘Yes sir, Commander.’ Nash found himself gritting his teeth as he replied. ‘We’ll…’

‘Excuse me, Commander.’
Unexpectedly, it was Shin-ichi Kawakami who spoke up; Nash realized that he and the other two scientists had been silent throughout the entire exchange. The elderly exobiologist walked closer to the two men.
‘Paul and I will need some time to check out the MRV before we head back, if that’s all right with you. We can ride back to the base in the airship, if necessary. Perhaps if Mr Akers could escort you back to the base…?’

L’Enfant gazed silently at Kawakami for a few moments; it was as if an unspoken yet nonetheless lucid exchange were occurring between the two men. Between them, Akers looked uncertainly from one man to the other. L’Enfant finally raised his hands a little, as if in a small token compromise.
‘All right then, Dr. Kawakami. You and Paul can ride back to the base with these guys. Charlie will go with me in the rover. I’ll expect you back there by twelve-hundred hours. Understood?’

‘Quite clearly, Commander.’
Kawakami gave a slight, submissive bow.
‘By noon at latest.’

The self-appointed commander of Cydonia Base nodded dismissively, as if excusing an underling, then began to stride back to the rover. Akers fell in behind him, exposing the assault rifle on his back; they marched past Sasaki and Verduin without seeming to notice them.

Nash watched them go. ‘I don’t know if I…’ he began to say.

Kawakami swatted his wrist with his hand.
‘Having trouble with the ladder, I understand?’
he asked.

Nash looked at him and Kawakami quickly raised a forefinger to his helmet, pursing his lips behind the faceplate. The meaning of his gesture was unmistakable: be quiet until they leave.
‘It cannot be all that difficult,’
he said conversationally.
‘Here, let me help you.’

They walked to the
Akron’s
airlock hatch, but before Nash could reach up to push back the tiger-striped lid over the manual disengagement lever, the gangway began to unfold by itself. As it descended to the ground, the hatch opened and Boggs cautiously peered out. He raised three fingers; Nash and Kawakami obligingly switched their comlinks to Channel Three.
‘Is it safe to come out yet, or is Mack the Knife still in the vicinity?’

Nash looked around. The rover was trundling away from the landing site, raising a small cloud of red dust behind it as it dodged the larger rocks and boulders. He waited until it had passed out of sight beyond the edge of the D & M Pyramid. At that point, he guessed, L’Enfant and Akers were out of unobstructed range of their radios, making it safe for him to answer. ‘Nice dodge, W. J., but I’d love to know why.’

‘No reason other than the fact that I saw him sharking for you before you did.’
The pilot was already climbing down the ladder.
‘I told you the crazy fucker scares the shit out of me. If there was going to be a showdown between you two, I didn’t want to get in the middle of it.’

‘Glad to know I can count on you in a jam,’ Nash said sourly. But Boggs’ description had been right on target: L’Enfant had indeed come on like a shark, and Nash felt as if he had just been circled by a Great White.

Another way in which L’Enfant had changed. The captain had run a tight boat when he had been in command of the
Boston,
but he had never been as imperious. The old captain L’Enfant would never have confronted a visitor to his ship, demanding that he be formally addressed by his proper rank. Nor would he have consciously insulted somebody for little or no reason. In fact, he had been known for his informal manner, even requesting that senior officers call each other—and himself—by their first names. L’Enfant had been a ramrod, it was true, but never a martinet; he was the type whose orders were couched as requests, not demands.

At least, he was before the
Takada Maru
incident…

Nash looked back at Kawakami. ‘Something you said back there…that stuff about the rover. I don’t get it.’

‘If there’s anyone to congratulate for making a good dodge, it’s Shin-ichi.’
Paul Verduin trudged closer to them. Miho walked beside him.
‘He used L’Enfant’s own edict against himself, and got rid of both him and his bodyguard.’

‘I still don’t understand,’ Nash said.

‘
No. Of course you don’t,’
Verduin halted and absently peered up at the long fuselage of the airship.
‘Our noble commander
h
as made a hard and fast rule that no one may go out unaccompanied on the surface, especially when he or she is not in the immediate periphery of the base. For our own safety, he says, although it’s more for keeping us under supervision. He couldn’t very well disobey his own orders, could he?’
He gave a short, bitter laugh as he glanced down at his dirt-caked boots.
‘I’d feel safer alone in the Labyrinth than with him at my side in the wardroom.’

Kawakami smiled and reached out to give Verduin a genial pat on the arm.
‘You may receive your chance to do just that soon enough, Paul. Be patient.’

Verduin smiled back with wan courage. Kawakami turned again to Boggs and Nash, letting out his breath as a long, audible sigh. Even in his skinsuit, he looked worn-out and tired, despite the fact that it was still early morning.
‘Gentlemen, this may be our only chance to speak freely while you’re here, and Terrible Terry has not given us much time for even this. We will talk further while we unload Paul’s new toy.’
He extended a hand toward the open cargo bay.
‘Shall we…?’

‘N
OW THAT,’ BOGGS SAID,
‘has got to be the ugliest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen.’ He thought about it for a second, then added. ‘Next to the Jefferson Street whore who got my cherry, I mean. Now she was…’

‘Waylon…’
Miho began.

‘Okay, okay, I’m sorry.’
Boggs walked around behind the MRV, studying the machine from its spade-shaped footpads to its high-gain antennae, and shook his head.
‘But if the bugs don’t drop dead the moment they see this fucked-up thing, they might roll over and laugh themselves sick.’

No one disagreed with the pilot’s assessment of the manned reconnaissance vehicle. It had been wrenched down from the
Akron’s,
cargo bay, and as Paul Verduin removed the last of its shrouding, everyone got their first good look at the ‘fucked-up thing.’ Its aluminum/polycarbon fuselage was painted dark tan, but on the forward canopy hatch was stenciled a goofy-looking jackalope, cross-eyed and grinning stupidly as if it had just won a footrace with a bandersnatch. It was weird to see a mythical American animal pictured on a Japanese-manufactured machine, but the nickname was fitting: the Mitsubishi MRV-2 did vaguely resemble an unlikely crossbreed between a jackrabbit and an antelope.

And it
was
ugly. The semi-robotic machine stood ten feet high and moved on two backward-jointed waldo legs; to that extent, it looked somewhat like one of the Russian AT-80 autotanks which had been previously deployed at Cydonia Base. But the Jackalope’s similarity to the Bushmaster was only superficial; instead of a revolving, cannon-mounted upper turret, the MRV’s fuselage consisted of an elongated, ovoid-shaped one-person cab, with small portholes on either side of the enclosed canopy and various TV cameras and sensors arrayed along its fuselage. At the frontmost part of the cab, below the forward hatch and next to the swivel-mounted IR scanner, was a multijointed claw-fingered manipulator.

The Jackalope had a strange history, atypical of even the longstanding Japanese fascination with robotics. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries had designed the first prototype, the MRV-1, as a military reconnaissance vehicle, but it had not been purchased by any of the Western armies for which it had been intended; the machine was deemed to be too slow and vulnerable for use in real-life combat situations. Mitsubishi had not given up on the idea, though; the second-generation version was redesigned and adapted for non-combat use on the Moon. Uchu-Hiko has utilised a couple of the newer MRV-2s for exploration sorties nearby Alphonsus Crater, where the company eventually established its first lunar mining colony, but with only limited success; the Jackalopes couldn’t do anything that a couple of hardsuited prospectors in a long-range rover couldn’t also accomplish with less expense and trouble. In either case, the MRV-2 was a classic example of the Rube Goldberg school of engineering: an overly high-tech solution to a simple problem.

The Jackalope which had been brought to Mars was the last one purchased by Uchu-Hiko; it had been mothballed in the company’s warehouse near the Kagoshima Space Center, the ail-but forgotten relic of an enthusiastic but unwise contract. It might have remained there had not Paul Verduin remembered its existence.

‘And you’re taking this hunka-junka down into the Labyrinth?’
Boggs asked.

‘Tomorrow morning,’
Verduin said, as distractedly as if he had been asked on an Amsterdam street about a bus schedule. He tugged experimentally at a power cable leading into the left leg’s main servomotor.
‘Yes, quite so.’

Boggs whistled and shook his head.
‘You’re crazier than you look, Paul.’

‘I never claimed to be sane, my friend.’

As the Dutch astrophysicist began crawling around and underneath the contraption, Nash went to help Kawakami in folding up the discarded shrouds. ‘You were telling me about L’Enfant…his actions after he got here.’

For a moment it seemed as if the senior scientist had not heard him. His shoulders sagging within his skinsuit, he doggedly continued to gather the reams of Mylar until he finally glanced up at Nash.
‘Oh…yes, yes. I’m sorry, I was, wasn’t I? I…
’

Miho Sasaki bounded over to him, hop-skipping in the lesser gravity. She laid a hand on his shoulder and gently spoke to him in Japanese; he seemed to hesitate, then nodded his head.
‘Miho believes that I may be over-exerting myself.’
he said to Nash
. ‘I apologies, Mr Donaldson, but I tend to agree.’

‘You don’t have to apologies.’ They had been working hard for the last hour, bringing the Jackalope down from the cargo bay; hard enough, in fact, that they had not fully discussed the present situation at the base. Nash took a sip of water from the tube in his helmet. ‘Why don’t you sit down over there for awhile and we can…?’

Sasaki laid a protective arm around Kawakami’s shoulders.
‘We should take this into the
Akron,’ she said.
‘Dr. Kawakami shouldn’t have been out on EVA for this long. Perhaps without his suit and with a cup of tea…?’

‘So long as it’s fresh,’
Kawakami said. He glared at her militantly.
‘You
have
brought fresh tea, have you not?’

‘Yes, Shin-ichi-san.’
Miho laughed sweetly.
‘I didn’t forget. It’s all in my duffel bag.’
She steered the frail exobiologist toward the
Akron’s
airlock hatch. Nash glanced over his shoulder, and Boggs silently gave him the thumbs-up; he would handle everything out here, including the job of lashing a protective tarp over the Jackalope.

Nash nodded, then checked the chronometer on his helmet’s heads-up display; they still had more than an hour remaining until L’Enfant’s deadline for return to the base. He turned and followed Kawakami and Sasaki to the airlock.

Once they had taken turns cycling through the airlock, Nash stayed in his skinsuit, only removing his helmet and gloves; he realized that he would have to go EVA again before liftoff. The two scientists, however, gratefully stripped off their suits. They did so together in the airlock, without a trace of embarrassment; as Nash had already observed, the relationship between Kawakami and Sasaki was akin to that between a father and his daughter, however surrogate those roles might be. They could not be easily discomfited by each other’s disrobing.

Without the padding of his skinsuit, though, it was clear that Shin-ichi Kawakami’s physical condition had deteriorated since the time the last available photos of him had been taken. His prolonged stay in the lesser gravity of Mars, coupled with his lack of exercise, had shriveled his body to the point of emaciation. As he picked up his tea mug, his gaunt hands shook slightly as he carefully nestled it within his palms.

Sitting across from him in the airship’s wardroom, Nash wondered if Kawakami was exhibiting the first symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease. He said nothing, though, as he reached into his skinsuit pocket and covertly switched on the tiny Sony recorder. Within the airship, at least, it would be able to tape the conversation.

Kawakami noticed Nash’s attention to his hands. ‘Acute muscular atrophy,’ he said with blunt detachment, as if explaining a curious side-effect of an experiment to a grad student. ‘The principal reason why I cannot return to Earth now, even if I so desired.’ He smiled a little and took a sip from his mug, holding it with both hands. ‘Whether I like it or not, I have become the first Martian…if you don’t count our friends from Achird Cassiopeia, of course.’

Miho stopped halfway through pouring Nash’s mug; the thin brown Ceylon tea spilled onto the wardroom table, but the astrophysicist appeared not to notice. ‘Achird Cassiopeia? You’ve located the Cooties’ home world?’

Kawakami put down his mug and spread his hands in an expansive shrug. ‘Only a supposition, perhaps in error. Achird Cassiopeia is at least the working-model for what I believe was the Cooties’ home system. It’s a G-zero class star, whose mass and radius is only slightly less than that of our own sun and which has equal luminosity. The Van Allen space telescope recently detected a small planetary system around it, and if the rest of my conjecture is correct, then its distance of nineteen-point-two light years is on target.’

Nash shook his head. ‘I don’t follow you. Why would…?’ He struggled to pronounce the name of the star and gave up. ‘Why would this star be the aliens’ home system? Because of its similarity?’