Labyrinth of Night (20 page)

Nash typed in his code-number; as an afterthought, he then pulled out a pair of lightweight headphones and jacked them into the computer. He switched the playback mode to Vox so that the message would be verbally communicated through the speech synthesiser. He had a few other things in the attaché case to check out, and having the E-mail read to him would save a few minutes.

The company’s logo appeared on the screen, accompanied by a sterile androgynous voice:
‘Good day, Mr Donaldson. The following message was transmitted to you at 1500 Greenwich Mean Time, August 1, 2032. An extra-high baud-per-second ratio was used during transmission to prevent its being read. It is preprogrammed to play only once, then erase itself from this diskette. You are further instructed to destroy this diskette after use. When you are ready to receive, please touch any key…
’

Further proof that the message had not been tapped. He should have known that SA would take such precautions. Nash randomly tapped the letter J on the keyboard; there was a brief pause, then the voice continued.
‘Thank you. Your message will now commence…
’

Again, another pause, although the screen remained static. The same AI voice continued, but the delivery, the choice of words, was unmistakably that of Robert Halprin; all that was lacking was his Oxford accent.
‘Good afternoon, Mr Donaldson. This is a final briefing before commencement of your present assignment and an update of the current operating environment. You will be receiving this message shortly after you are revived aboard the USS
Percival Lowell
en route to Mars. Since extended biostasis has been known to trigger spontaneous lapses in long-term memory, this briefing will commence with a review of your assignment
…’

Leave it to Control to cover all the bases, even when it was redundant. Nash smiled to himself as he reached into the case; his hand found a small, bubble-celled plastic packet, which he pulled out and unzipped as he listened.

A digitalized photo of an unsmiling man—mid-fifties, craggy face, narrowed sharp eyes, thinning blond hair—appeared on the screen. Nothing about him showed any trace of warmth or humor. Nash felt something tighten in his chest as he studied the familiar face.

‘This man is Commander Terrance L’Enfant,’
Control’s AI doppelganger unnecessarily explained.
‘He is currently the American co-supervisor of the international scientific research base at Cydonia…
‘

Almost involuntarily, Nash touched the
Pause
key on the computer. Gazing at L’Enfant’s face, he rested his arms on his knees, remembering a night long ago when he watched his former captain snuff out the lives of almost fifty men and women…

In 2019, Nash had been enlisted in the US Navy, serving as a seaman aboard the USS
Boston.
The
Boston
was a Seawolf-class attack submarine, assigned to duty in the South Pacific; at the age of twenty-five, Nash was around for the short-lived India-Japan Crisis…and for the
Takada Maru
incident.

When the government of Japan announced its intention of importing as much as one hundred and fifty tons of plutonium, extracted from spent uranium fuel rods from Eastern European nuclear power plants, to power its own domestic nukes, the United States, Great Britain and Germany had led a protest in the United Nations against the proposal. The plan called for the plutonium to be transported by rail from Eastern Europe and the CIS to the Indian port city of Madras, where it would be loaded aboard Japanese commercial freighters and sailed along principal shipping routes in the Indian and Pacific Oceans to the Japanese port city of Osaka.

Japan was in desperate need of plutonium for its nukes; the country was still heavily dependent on civilian nuclear energy, but it had lost its principal suppliers of uranium and plutonium, the United States, Australia and South Africa, due to the Green Revolution. The CIS, along with Hungary and Czechoslovakia, had no such environmentalist scruples, however; they had already sold the reprocessed plutonium from their own dormant nuclear plants to India, with the Indian government anticipating a tidy profit from the subsequent resale to Japan. Although both Japan and India unofficially conceded that there was an inherent ecological danger in shipping so much plutonium across the high seas—not to mention the threat of Third World terrorist groups either hijacking a train as it made its way across the Middle East or pirating a freighter in the Indian Ocean—neither country was willing to abandon their agreement in the face of political fire. Too much money was at stake for India, and Japan’s government was under public pressure to relieve the periodic blackouts in its major cities.

When both Japan and India refused to cede to binding United Nations resolutions against the shipments, push finally came to shove. Under the accords of the UN Environmental Protection Treaty, the General Assembly voted in favor of naval blockades of both India and Japan. The USS
Boston
was assigned to the blockade of Osaka; its primary mission was to stop any Japanese freighters bound for the Japanese seaport, search their holds, and place under arrest the crews of any ships found to be carrying plutonium.

Within a few days of the blockade’s commencement, India caved in. Japan remained firm, however, calling the UN resolutions illegal under international maritime law. Meanwhile, an untold number of Japanese freighters were at sea between India and Japan. No one knew for certain which of them carried plutonium or not. India’s pre-existing government was toppled by civil insurrection as a result of the crisis; its new Green parliament was in complete disarray, and Japan refused to provide any information which would interfere with the arrival of the plutonium it had already bought and shipped out of Madras. For the first time since the end of World War II, it was Japan versus the rest of the global community.

Then, on the night of May 29, 2019, the USS
Boston
located a Japanese freighter, the
Takada Maru,
in the Philippine Sea, apparently bound for Osaka. In command of the
Boston
was captain Terrance L’Enfant; among the members of the boarding party was Seaman August Nash…

But that was over thirteen years ago, and he couldn’t afford to think about it now. A job had to be done; he could wrestle again with ghosts at a more opportune time.

Nash restarted the message by tapping the
Pause
key again; the screen unfroze and the narrative continued. As he listened, he unsealed the packet containing a small collection of electret bugs, each with its own microtransmitter and attachable to almost any surface by suction pads, along with the tiny Sony microrecorder to be used with the bugs. Everything was neat and concealable; he could hide the whole apparatus in his underwear if necessary.

‘Following the cessation of hostilities between the US and the CIS in 2030,’
the voice said,
‘American and Russian military forces were withdrawn from the Cydonia region. As an indirect result of World Court arbitration which found that the CIS had been the principal aggressors, and in accordance with the UN Security Council Resolution which ended the conflict, the United States was allowed to place unarmed military observers at Cydonia Base as a token peacekeeping force to prevent further shipments of Russian munitions to the base. Although this was not in keeping with the initial demands made by the science team at Cydonia Base, they reluctantly agreed to the stipulation.’

A small padded box held a Seiko wristwatch; concealed in its LCD face was the tiny aperture of an auto-focus lens. When pressed twice in rapid succession, the microfilm camera inside the chronometer would take a flashless picture. The film micro-disc was good for seven exposures; Nash regretfully unstrapped his own Rolex Oyster and slid the Seiko onto his left wrist, making sure that the chronometer was facing out.

‘Because he was perceived to be a military officer capable of making independent decisions, and also because of opinions he had expressed during a speech at the Annapolis naval academy regarding the alien relics at Cydonia, Terrance L’Enfant was selected by the Pentagon for the assignment. Shortly after L’Enfant’s appointment, the American co-supervisor of Cydonia Base, Dr. Arthur Johnson, resigned in protest. Several other members of the Cydonia expedition followed him off the base, reducing the science team to four persons, with no American members among them. Nonetheless, the Security Council ruling remained in effect. L’Enfant’s status was subsequently upgraded and he became the new American co-supervisor, with the reluctant compliance of the European and Japanese members of the Cydonia science team. The CIS issued a formal protest, but allowed two of its scientists to remain at Cydonia…
’

The image on the screen split four ways to include the faces of three other persons next to L’Enfant’s mugshot. One was a thick-bearded black man, subscripted
A. Marks
by the computer. The second was a wiry, prematurely-balding younger man, labeled
C. Akers.
The third was a young woman with crew-cut brown hair:
M. Swigart.
Altogether, Nash surmised, they looked as if they had been recruited from Camp LeJeune: tough guys.

‘L’Enfant has been accompanied to the base by three military officers who have been officially designated as observers: Staff Sergeant Alphonse Marks, Lieutenant Charles Akers, and Lieutenant Megan Swigart. Marks is a former US Marine Corps combat instructor, Akers was trained as a Navy SEAL, and Swigart was a former Navy A-36 fighter pilot. Although all are Annapolis graduates and have some degree of college-level education in the sciences, none are scientific specialists, nor are any of them members of the Marine Corps’ First Space Infantry. Their prior relation to L’Enfant is unknown, although he specifically requested them for this assignment…
’

The screen changed again, this time to present a three-dimensional topographic layout of the City at Cydonia, including the Face and the nearby D & M Pyramid, and the smaller man-made habitat modules of Cydonia Base. The gridded map slowly rotated as the narrative continued.

‘Despite the successful penetration in 2030 of the labyrinth beneath the C-4 Pyramid, during the past two years the international science team has failed to establish further contact with the robotic aliens—nicknamed the pseudo-Cooties—who have tunneled beneath the alien city. The only progress made in this time was the discovery of a tunnel that leads directly from the D & M Pyramid to an unexplored area beneath the central cluster of pyramids near Cydonia Base.’

The tunnel was outlined in red light on the screen.
‘However, when a Russian scientist was sent into the new tunnel earlier this year, all contact with him was lost. The scientist, Sasha Kulejan, was also the Russian co-supervisor of the expedition. He is missing and presumed dead, and has not been replaced by the Russian space agency Glavkosmos due to continued political protest by Minsk against the UN Resolutions…
’

Nash nodded his head; he was already aware of that situation. Although the Russians were still interested in the Cydonia Expedition, mainly because of possible technological benefits that might be derived from any new discoveries, they had erred greatly by sending military forces to Mars to back up their claims. In the end, it had been a desperate act which had backfired against the CIS. When world opinion had backlashed against the Commonwealth in the aftermath of the raid, the Russian public had voted the Nasanov government out of office and the CIS had been forced further into retreat, leaving behind only a couple of key persons at Cydonia. Now, with Kulejan’s death, only one of the Russian scientists remained at Cydonia Base, a final token-member of the CIS’s delegation to the expedition.

‘Efforts to send teleoperated probes into the tunnel have also failed,’
the voice continued,
‘destroyed upon contact with pseudo-Cootie drones which attack any intruders to the underground network. This is one of the central enigmas of the alien city, since the Face at Cydonia was obviously constructed to lure humankind into a first-contact situation, just as the labyrinth beneath C-4 was
a
pparently intended as a test of our intelligence and ingenuity. Why the aliens are now deterring further attempts at communication, although the Face itself initially appeared to have been an invitation to
homo sapiens,
is now a mystery to the science team…
’

A digitalized, slightly out-of-focus snapshot of a man in a skinsuit appeared on the screen; he was half-turned toward the camera, apparently unaware that he was being photographed. In the background could be seen the giant, angular shape of one of the Martian pyramids, but what was more intriguing was the fact that the man in the skinsuit was apparently cradling an assault rifle. Looking closer, Nash recognized the weapon as a 5.56 mm Steyr AUG, a gun favored by several US law enforcement agencies.

‘This photo was in a film disk which was recently smuggled out of Cydonia Base,’
the voice continued.
‘It was covertly taken by an airship pilot, Katsuhiko Shimoda, who was later killed in a flight accident near the Tharsis region. The man in the picture has been tentatively identified as Staff Sergeant Marks. He is armed with an assault weapon, a violation of the United Nations agreement since it expressly prohibited the US observers at Cydonia Base from being armed. During the last twelve months, reports to Earth from Cydonia Base have become more sporadic and less informative, sometimes containing little more than routine statistics of consumables used by the base personnel and request forms for resupply. Direct contacts with Arsia Station, the principal Mars base, have similarly diminished to monthly supply visits by the airship
Akron.
It is currently believed that Commander L’Enfant and his aides have seized paramilitary control of Cydonia Base and are prohibiting candid communication from members of the science team under threat of force. If this is so, the reasons are unknown…
’

The screen split again. On the right was a diagram of an elongated, awkward-looking spacecraft which Nash recognized as an unmanned American interplanetary freighter, the type used to ferry supplies to Mars between cycleship excursions. On the left was an animated diagram of a Hohlmann trajectory between Earth and Mars.
‘Since you departed Earth orbit aboard the
Lowell,
there has been an unforeseen occurrence. The automated deep-space freighter
Bradbury
has been sent to Mars on an eight-month flight-path which will beat the
Lowell
to Mars rendezvous by little more than one week. We know only that a cargo pod, which was launched to orbit by a US military shuttle launched from Vandenberg and loaded onto the
Bradbury
just prior to its departure from LEO, has been parachuted to Cydonia Base. The contents of the cargo pod are unknown. However, given the source of the cargo, we can only assume that the payload is military in nature…
’