Labyrinth of Night (44 page)

Easy, man…easy…easy…

Now they were all over him. Six? Ten? A dozen? Nash had no idea. He could feel them scurrying up his chest, like miniature rock-climbers making an assault on a cliff-face. Their combined weight threatened to drag him to the floor; he locked his knees and hips and forced himself to remain rigid. Pretend you’re a statue, he told himself. He tried to bring forth the immense bronze sculpture of Abraham Lincoln, forever seated within the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, and instead his mind flashed to Control, sitting in the third-floor boardroom of SA’s headquarters, sucking on his filthy stinking briar pipe.

Keep control, he thought crazily, almost on the edge of hysteria. Just keep…

Caught in the amber glow of his heads-up display, a shadowed alien countenance rose in front of his helmet: a pseudo-Cootie, staring straight in through his faceplate.

Nash held his breath, not daring to even move his eyes. No more than a few inches separated him from the pseudo-Cootie. He wanted to blink, so badly that the corners of his eyes itched, but he struggled against the impulse. Eerily, he could see his own face reflected in the multifaceted eyes of the little robot, miniaturized and multiplied as tiny mirror-images. Its antennae flicked back and forth, lightly brushing against those of the other pseudo-Cooties crawling around it on his shoulders. Nash was acutely aware of its sharp, mantis-like forelegs digging into the nylon fabric of the overgarment on either side of his helmet.

He waited for the pseudo-Cootie to move onward, perhaps to climb to the top of his helmet. Maybe it would plant a little flag up there, open a tiny bottle of champagne, take some pictures for the folks back home.

But it didn’t move.

He couldn’t breathe. His lungs needed to exhale. He couldn’t breathe. His lungs were aching. If he didn’t breathe…

The hell with it.

‘Boo,’ he whispered, and cautiously sucked in a breath of air.

The mechanical insect jerked backward slightly, as if startled, but continued to cling to his chest, peering into his helmet like a climber who has found a snake lurking within a cave. All at once, the other pseudo-Cooties went motionless. Nash was all too aware that their pincers could rip through his skinsuit within seconds.

On the other hand, the heads-up display told him that the oxygen reserve was almost exhausted. Asphyxiation or having his skinsuit shredded; either way, it added up to the same thing. He was about to die.

Might as well get this over with…

‘What are you waiting for?’ he murmured under his breath, addressing himself as much as the pseudo-Cootie. ‘If you’re going to do it, get it over with.’

The pseudo-Cootie remained still, yet its antennae lashed back and forth madly, rubbing against those of the others around him. Nash remembered what Kawakami had told him about the possibility of a collective intelligence—a hive-mind—existing amongst these creatures. Maybe these were the equivalent of soldier-ants, searching their environment for enemies or food. He hoped that he was neither…

Then, abruptly, the pseudo-Cootie vanished from his faceplate, and at the same moment he again felt the crawling sensation around his body…but this time, it was heading downward, as if in full retreat.

As swiftly as they had come, the creatures were abandoning him.

He remained stock-still until he felt the last of the pseudo-Cooties leave him; then, very cautiously, he moved his fear-stiffened left hand to the chest unit, groped for the proper buttons, and reactivated his life-support system. There was a rush of cool air through his helmet, clammy against the perspiration on his skin; he hadn’t realized that he had been sweating. He sucked greedily at the air, taking it in as deep draughts, wondering if Sasaki felt the same…

‘Miho,’ he rasped. Did she also…?

Helmet lamplight lanced out from a spot next to him, dazzling him with its unanticipated brightness. He squinted against the glare and almost switched on the comlink before a hand laid itself over his wrist unit. As he blinked and covered his faceplate with his glove, he felt a human form against him and a now-familiar shape thump against his helmet.

‘It’s me!’ he heard her yell through the inductive connection. ‘We made it! Go ahead and turn on your light!’

There was no telling how many pseudo-Cooties had been in C4-20, but the chamber was now completely vacant. One thing was immediately apparent, however.

The nuke was missing.

Sasaki pointed toward the dismantled wall. ‘They must have taken it that way,’ she said, stating the obvious. She glanced at the still-closed door leading into the Labyrinth. ‘Unless we want to stay here…’

‘We’re going to have to follow them,’ Nash finished. Although they had reactivated their skinsuits’ life-support systems, they cautiously remained off the comlink. The helmet-touch system was cumbersome, but in the stillness of the chamber they could hear each other plainly. ‘I don’t get it. Did they crawl all over you too?’

Sasaki nodded her head; he felt her shudder at the recollection. ‘Then why didn’t they kill us?’ he asked. ‘I had one of them looking straight through my helmet, and it couldn’t have mistaken me for anything but a human.’

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘We weren’t wearing combat armor.’

Of course…Nash closed his eyes. ‘Miho,’ he said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t speak in riddles whenever I ask you a question.
Why
didn’t they kill us because we weren’t wearing armor?’

‘The only people who have survived encounters with them in this room were Ben Cassidy and Arthur Johnson,’ she replied. ‘They both came down here in skinsuits. Everyone else who came in here was wearing armor…and didn’t Shin-ichi observe that the minotaurs vaguely resembled CASs?’

‘So you thought that they might home in on combat armor?’

‘Yes. Something like that.’ She looked straight at him, smiling slightly. ‘I had a hunch that might be the situation. That’s why I had you turn off everything and stand still. They must perceive combat armor…in fact, anything mechanical and emitting electromagnetic frequencies, like the probes or the Jackalope…as a threat, and immediately act to neutralize it. Probably another one of their tropisms.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Nash was still regaining his breath. It sounded like a plausible explanation. ‘When did you arrive at this conclusion?’

Her face became solemn. ‘About ten minutes ago,’ she said almost inaudibly.

Nash slowly exhaled as he sagged against the wall behind him. ‘Better late than never,’ he muttered. He wasn’t about to split hairs with her. He looked dubiously at the gap in the wall. ‘The point is, if we go in there, will they attack us?’

Sasaki hesitated. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said uncertainly. ‘They could have killed us a few minutes ago and they didn’t. Maybe without the armor we’re not interesting…or perhaps there’s nothing they can salvage from our suits.’

‘That sounds too much like guessing.’

‘It is,’ she admitted. ‘Either way, we don’t have a choice. If we can find our way to Mama’s Back Door, we could get to the D & M Pyramid. There’s bound to be a way up to the surface from there.’

Nash glanced at the digital chronometer on his helmet’s heads-up display; he was surprised to see that only ten minutes had elapsed since L’Enfant and Swigart had forced them into the chamber. ‘We’ve only got two hours until the
Akron
takes off. If we’re going to make it out of here before the bomb detonates, we’re going to have to hurry.’ He looked back at her. ‘You ready?’

Sasaki slowly nodded her head; despite her outward composure, it was apparent that she was shaken by her near-death experience. Nash gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘let’s go.’

He stepped back, breaking contact with her helmet, but Sasaki continued to clasp his hand. Nash smiled and nodded, then led her across the empty chamber to the broken wall.

Beyond lay darkness, the beginning of the catacombs. Hand in hand, they stepped gingerly across the border into the undisturbed domain of the Cooties.

B
EYOND ROOM
C4-20, the tunnel became both wider and higher than the one in the Labyrinth. Instead of narrow corridors of smooth rock, it resembled the passageway of an underground river, with smooth, sloping walls of eroded stone leading further into the depths of the catacombs. Nash was struck by its similarity to cave-systems on Earth; he wondered if the Cooties had indeed built the City on top of an ancient underground waterway, one which had once fed water into the shallow sea where the Acidalia Planitia now lay.

Yet that wasn’t what immediately attracted his attention. On either side of the tunnel rested large, almost shapeless metallic hulks, some the size of trucks although they could hardly be mistaken for vehicles. Discarded machinery of some sort, yet they all looked oddly stripped-down, as if they were great engine-blocks which had been cannibalized for functional parts. Nash approached one of the hulks and carefully wiped away a patina of red dust from a flat surface; caught beneath the ray of his helmet lamp was a series of tiny holes and grooves, resembling attachment-points for something which had long since been removed.

‘What do you think these…?’ he started to ask before he remembered that he wasn’t sharing a comlink with Sasaki. He turned around and saw her kneeling on the tunnel floor, apparently studying something. As he walked closer, she stood up and clamped her helmet against his.

‘Tracks,’ she said, pointing down at the floor. The red dust was sifted and dragged, showing where hundreds of tiny legs had recently moved through the tunnel. They led straight ahead, past the reach of her light into the darkness.

‘They went thattaway,’ he drawled. She looked at him strangely, and he grinned back at her. ‘Let’s head ’em off at the pass, pilgrim.’

‘Ah, yes.’ Miho smiled tightly. ‘John Wayne. The old American cowboy star. Maksim Oeljanov was a big fan of his movies.’ Her face went serious again. ‘Never mind that now. We need to catch up with them.’

Sasaki broke contact and began walking down the tunnel, carefully keeping the oval spot of her lamp centered on the tracks. She displayed no curiosity about the alien artifacts around her, and Nash couldn’t blame her. She was onto much bigger game now; why waste time in what amounted to an auto graveyard when there was the potential of discovering the source of these relics?

In any case, he had no choice but to follow her. Nash fell into step beside her, making certain that he didn’t lose sight of the tracks himself. Despite the fact that they were running against the clock, he found his own curiosity aroused by what little he had seen thus far. They were the first human beings to have ventured so far into the Cooties’ lair. Not only that, but following the trail of the pseudo-Cooties was their best bet of finding a way out of the catacombs.

The tunnel was sloping gradually downward; as they walked, he was increasingly aware that it was taking them further away from the surface. After several hundred yards, they came to a junction where another, seemingly smaller tunnel to their right converged with the first one. More tracks led from that junction. Miho stopped, consulted the compass on her wrist and matched it against the larger line of tracks; she decided to stick with the main tunnel since it led directly south-east, where the D & M Pyramid lay. After another hundred feet, they came upon a second convergence where another branch intersected the tunnel. Again, after studying the tracks and her compass, Miho decided to remain on the present course.

‘I think those are secondary tunnels,’ she said. ‘They may once have been tributaries in a subsurface river system that the Cooties…’

‘I figured as much,’ Nash interrupted, and she gave him a sharp look. ‘I’m not totally stupid, Miho. I just want to make sure that we don’t get lost in this maze. We don’t have time to backtrack if we do.’

She shook her head. ‘I understand…but those seem to be secondary arteries, and even if they might lead to one of the other pyramids, there’s a chance they could branch into even smaller veins before we reach an opening.’ She pointed toward the larger set of tracks leading into the main tunnel. ‘There has been much recent motion this way. They probably carried the nuke in this direction, and corresponds with the seismic activity we’ve already detected. It is our best hope.’

Nash checked the REM counter on his heads-up display. No clues there; it showed only the nominal background radiation typical of any place on Mars. It figured; the Kentucky Derby nuke was well-shielded, so there was no telltale gamma trace of its passage through the catacombs.

‘If you think you’re right,’ he said.

Sasaki said nothing. She stepped away from him, pointed straight ahead, and continued the long march. They were in completely unknown territory, unmapped by humankind. Nash could only hope that she remembered this, and prayed that they didn’t get confused. He glanced up at the rock ceiling above them and felt a brief chill; he didn’t want to be beneath all that mass when the nuke detonated. They had to find their way out of the catacombs, or remain sealed in here forever…

Buried alive, beneath a city of the dead.

The convergences became more frequent as the main tunnel grew more serpentine, winding downward into the rocky mantle. Each time they came to a junction, Sasaki had to stop and check the compass. After the fourth intersection, however, the width of each tunnel and the tracks in the dusty floor began to look almost identical, until it was impossible to differentiate between the main artery and its tributaries except for the south-eastern compass reading. The disassembled machinery was left behind by the time they passed the fourth convergence; the tunnels were now vacant of anything except the furrowed places where extraterrestrial footprints now lay. A claustrophobe would have been shrieking in terror.

As they rounded a bend and came upon the seventh junction, they saw something completely unexpected. The new tributary converged from above, and from it flowed a steady stream of pseudo-Cooties. Two streams, rather: one coming down from the new tunnel, heading for the main artery, and the other marching in the opposite direction, into the tributary