Labyrinth of Night (3 page)

Jessup, listening and watching, suddenly realized why he had been sent to recruit Cassidy. He had heard the tapes of Hal Moberly’s encounter with Room C4-20. Jessup had wondered if Arthur Johnson was losing his mind when he suggested Cassidy’s name; it seemed improbable that the scientist would want anyone for Cydonia Base other than another scientist. Now, hearing Cassidy’s guitar, Jessup understood. His improvisational style was disturbingly similar to the music of Room C4-20.

Jessup’s right hand moved involuntarily toward the inside pocket of his suitcoat before he stopped himself. The folded message inside would wait until he met Cassidy backstage after his gig. Abruptly, Jessup hated himself. He had studied Cassidy’s record, knew that the musician had been a draftee during Gulf War II. No one should be conscripted twice.

No choice, though. The final puzzle of the Labyrinth had to be solved, at any or all costs.

Cassidy ended his instrumental piece and, as the crowd went wild, he stood up for a moment to take a quick, solemn bow and reflexively scoot his stool back a couple of inches. As he did so, he glanced behind him and saw Jessup standing in the wings. Their eyes met and locked for an instant. Jessup caught the cool, appraising glare, the downturned mouth within the beard. Then Cassidy turned his attention back to his guitar and his audience.

He pensively warmed up with a couple of notes, then edged into his next number. Jessup recognized the song immediately as
Uncle Sam Blues.

The unmanned cargo shuttle
Constellation
was an old bird, the last of her breed. Built in the early 2000s to ferry the final components of the first-generation Freedom Station into orbit, she was the last of the Rockwell ‘Delta Clippers’ to be rolled out to the launch pad. Her sister vessels were now on display in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, the KSC visitors’ center on the other side of the Cape, and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.

The
Constellation
was still flying, though, partly because no one at the Cape had the heart to put the last of the Delta Clippers out to pasture. The second-generation McDonnell-Douglas ‘Big Dummies’ were more efficient workhorses, but they were mostly owned and operated by Skycorp and other space companies. Although NASA flew third-generation SSTO spaceplanes for most orbital missions, there was still a need for the
Constellation’s
more capacious cargo hold. But everyone at the Cape knew that the
Constellation
was near the end of her days; at twenty-nine, she was a grand old dame who was tired of hauling freight. In another year or so she would be taken off the flight-line, her innards cannibalized for any re-usable parts and her empty hull shellacked and mounted on a concrete parapet at another NASA facility, posing for tourist snapshots and collecting bird droppings on her fuselage. Nobody lives forever.

Tomorrow morning, though, she would be flying again. Ten days earlier, the
Constellation
had been rolled out to Pad 2-A near the northern end of the Cape for the loading of her cargo and the pre-launch checkout. Her cargo was not explicitly listed in any of the manifests, nor was its orbital destination being disclosed. Flight 29A-NM was a classified military mission for the United States Navy, so even its exact launch-time was traditionally kept secret from the public under longstanding Department of Defense guidelines. Security was tight at Pad 2-A for this launch.

An elevator glided up the core of the Rotating Service Structure and stopped at the fourth level; the hard-hatted pad technician in the cage with August Nash pulled back the metal-grate door and stood aside.

‘Right through there, Colonel Meredith,’ he said deferentially. ‘Do you want me to wait until you’re through with your inspection?’

‘No,’ Nash said. ‘Thank you again, ah…’ he pushed back his horn-rimmed glasses and allowed his gaze to drop to the ID badge pinned to the pad-rat’s white jumpsuit:
Robillard, J. E.
‘…John,’ he finished. ‘I’ll take the stairs down when I’m finished here. Just leave a jeep behind for me, if you would.’

‘Very good, sir,’ Robillard said. Nash nodded and was about to step out when the technician stopped him. ‘Sorry, sir. Your hood…?’

Right. The white nylon hood that hung from the back of Nash’s head-to-toe whiteroom jumpsuit. Nash silently cursed himself; a small mistake like this could blow his cover. The jumpsuit was to keep dust from contaminating the pristine environment of the RSS whiteroom. A real Air Force colonel would know better than to enter this area without drawing the hood over his head.

‘Of course,’ he murmured. ‘Sorry.’ He pulled the hood over the Air Force cap that covered his grey-dyed hair. His fake eyeglasses, with their utterly useless lenses, slipped down the bridge of his nose and almost fell off; he caught them with the gloved tip of his forefinger and pushed them back, then closed his neck flap along its Velcro seal. Stepping off the elevator, he turned and waved to J. E. Robillard. ‘Be seeing you.’

‘Sure thing, Colonel.’ The pad-rat waved back agreeably as he pulled the grate shut with his left hand. As the elevator began to drone back down through the swing-away service tower, Nash turned and gently pushed through the translucent flap of the heavy plastic membrane which isolated the whiteroom.

Cold air, pumped outward to maintain positive-pressure on this side of the membrane, brushed against his face. After the high-eighties scorch of the launch pad outside the RSS, it was a welcome chill. Just ahead was an open, mansized steel hatch:
Side 4 Door,
read the sign on the door.
No Smoking.
As if anyone in their right mind would dare strike a match this close to over one million pounds of liquid oxygen and hydrogen contained in the shuttle booster. Nash stepped through the hatch, and in front of him lay the objective of his assignment.

The long, vertical maw of the
Constellation’s
cargo bay loomed before him, nestled up to the airtight confines of the RSS white-room. The Level 4 access platform had been extended from the tower until it stopped just inside the open bay doors; here, all was white and reflective silver, dust-free and so immaculately clean that a germ would die of starvation. And there, securely fastened to a pallet within the cargo bay, were two large pill-shaped objects, each wrapped in gold Mylar film.

A cargo technician, similarly robed in a white jumpsuit, knelt at the edge of the service platform, studying a datapad in his hands. He looked over his shoulder at Nash as he came through the hatch; the obvious question was unspoken, but plain on his face. ‘Colonel Joel Meredith,’ Nash said briskly. ‘USAF Space Command.’ As if he had every right to be here…which, in the sense of the lie, he did. He nodded toward the twin gold saucers. ‘How’re you doing today?’

‘Fine, sir,’ An uncertain pause. ‘Just fine.’

‘Those are the birds?’

The cargo tech, a middle-aged black man with a trim beard, didn’t take his eyes from Nash’s face. ‘Uh-huh,’ he said noncommittally. He gently folded the datapad. ‘They’re the ones.’

The cargo tech seemed to be paying a little too much attention to his guest. Nash ignored him, although he felt the man’s eyes running across his face, looking closely at his ID badge. Nash took a couple of steps closer, looking up and down at the payload compartment.

Despite the bulk of the insulation, he could tell that the two objects nestled within the
Constellation’s
cargo bay were aeroshells. Yet they weren’t the same size aeroshell normally used by OTVs which aerobraked in Earth’s atmosphere before rendezvousing with Freedom Station or one of the other low-orbit space stations; these were smaller, very similar to the fuselages of Martian landers. And while there were a score of off-white stencils on the Mylar wrap, locating fuel and electrical ports, there was nothing which explicitly identified them as military spacecraft. But if his Intelligence briefing had been correct…

‘When did you shave off the mustache, Colonel?’ the technician asked.

‘Hmmm?’ Nash glanced at the other man’s ID badge—
Humes, T. S.—
and immediately returned his attention to the
Constellation
as if to ignore the tech’s question. Yet the nervous twinge he’d felt from the moment he had first seen the technician was still there.

‘When I last saw you, you had a mustache,’ Humes persisted. He hesitated, and added, ‘Four months ago.’

‘Oh, that was a while ago,’ Nash drawled. ‘Got tired of the soup-strainer, that’s all.’

The company’s file photo of Air Force Colonel Joel K. Meredith had shown him to be clean-shaven, otherwise Nash would have cultivated a mustache to match, since he had been given the assignment to penetrate Pad 2-A three weeks ago. But Meredith’s photo was a relatively old one, taken at least six months earlier. Although Meredith seldom visited the Cape, his last pre-launch inspection had been exactly four months ago. It was possible that Humes remembered him because of a mustache he might have grown since the file photo had been taken.

Sure, people can grow and shave mustaches in a period of four months. Even without one, though, Nash looked enough like Meredith to pass inspection; temporary exodermic alterations by the mug-doctors at Security Associates had matched his face to that of the Colonel’s. The real Colonel Joel K. Meredith was conveniently taking a vacation in the Smoky Mountains with his family; surveillance reports had placed him only yesterday at his summer home just outside Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Although Nash’s phony face and bogus credentials had been sufficient to get him into KSC and out to Pad 2-A for a last-minute inspection, he was aware that it would take only a few well-placed phone calls to completely blow his disguise.

So far, nothing had occurred to raise anyone’s doubts. But if someone became suspicious, even for a second…

‘Uh-huh.’ Humes stood up and, in an all-too-casual manner, ran his gloved hands down his thighs to straighten out the wrinkles in his jumpsuit. ‘Well, if you’ll excuse me a minute, Colonel…’

‘Coffee break?’ Nash asked. Humes quickly nodded, his sudden grin obviously faked. ‘Sure. Go right ahead.’

Nash continued to peer closely at the aeroshells, allowing Humes to ease past him. There was a phone on the wall behind them; Nash let the technician get halfway to it before he whirled and, curling in his knuckles, slammed the heel of his right hand into Humes’ neck just below his left ear.

Humes toppled to the platform, knocked cold by the karate chop. Nash knelt over him, tested his pulse to make certain that he was still among the living, then grabbed his shoulders and hauled him away from the edge of the platform, just in case Humes awoke in a daze and wandered in the wrong direction.

Nash hated to have had to punch out the pad-rat’s lights; at least half a dozen somnambulant KSC security guards had waved Nash through the checkpoints solely on the basis of his phony ID before this one lowly pad-rat had tumbled to the ruse, acting on nothing more than the fact that a person he had last seen several months earlier was then wearing a mustache. ‘Someone should give you a raise,’ he whispered as he dropped Humes next to the fire extinguisher.

Now the clock was ticking. Unless he cared to kill Humes—which was the last thing Nash had in mind—it was only a matter of time before the technician regained consciousness and blew the whistle. Nash had to be through the checkpoint at KSC’s west gate before then. But Robillard had left a vehicle for him just outside the pad’s perimeter fence, and Nash was wearing his street clothes beneath the jumpsuit. In fifteen minutes, with luck, he could be out of the space center and on the highway to Titusville, where the Security Associates’ private jet was waiting for him at the municipal airport. He would be cutting it close, but…

Never mind that now. The assignment came first. His fake eyeglasses held a tiny nanocamera in their frame, capable of storing three images in microchip memory. Since he was now alone on the inspection platform, though, Nash could afford to use the miniature 35mm camera he had hidden in his inside jacket pocket; its resolution was much sharper than the blurred images produced by the nanocamera. Unzipping the jumpsuit, he pulled out the hand calculator which disguised the camera and spent the next fifteen seconds hastily photographing images of the twin aeroshells in the
Constellation’s
cargo bay. With the last available frame, he snapped a quick picture of Humes—for his own amusement, as well as the remote possibility that Control might want proof that he had not thrown the poor man to his death from the service tower—then he tucked the camera back in his jacket and zipped up the jumpsuit.

Nash took a last glimpse over his shoulder at the
Constellation
as he stepped over the technician’s legs. It wasn’t part of his job to be second-guessing either his employer’s wishes or the client’s reasons for wanting information. Nash was the leg-man, pure and simple. Get inside, obtain the info desired, and get out again without being caught. That’s all there was to it.

And yet, and still…

The part of Nash’s mind that used to work for the CIA wanted to know what was so important about another payload which, if his briefing had been correct, was ultimately destined for Mars. Sure, the mysterious objects were destined for Freedom Station, for final attachment to the next outward-bound cycleship which docked at the US space station. But why did they have their own aeroshells? What was the secret cargo that the Air Force was sending to Mars?

He hurried through the hatch and plastic membrane and began jogging down the adjacent stairs to the bottom of the launch tower. You’ll never know, Nash told himself, and it’s none of your business anyway…

For the second time during this job, he was wrong. His involvement was only just beginning.

C
YDONIA BASE, MARS: JUNE
15–16, 2030

‘The Cydonia region is also of great interest because of some unusual surface features, areas where great blocks of rocks stand out starkly from the surrounding plains. One of these blocks bears an uncanny resemblance to a simian face. This has been explained as a fortuitous chance of lighting. However, there have also been suggestions based on another image at a slightly different angle that the shape is quite real and is related in several ways to nearby features on a geometrical basis. There have been suggestions that the “face” on Mars is evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence at some earlier epoch laying down a purposeful pattern on the planet’s surface. Whether or not this shape is fortuitous or designed or is another example of anthropomorphic Mars remains to be seen when the area is again surveyed, and in more detail, by one of the upcoming missions to Mars…’