‘I HOPE YOU’RE not some scientist who wants to grab some rock samples ’cause I’m not putting ’em on board and we’re getting the hell out of here now!’
W. J. Boggs, six feet of bowlegged Tennessee flyboy, did not wait for an answer as he lurched through the gondola’s airlock hatch and flopped into the pilot’s seat on the left side of the flight compartment. The co-pilot of the USS Edgar Rice Burroughs, Katsuhiko Shimoda, reached above Ben Cassidy—who was scrunched on the floor behind the seats—and flipped a switch to automatically seal the hatch while Boggs stabbed the radio button with his gauntleted thumb.
‘Cydonia Command, this is the Burroughs, requesting permission for emergency takeoff,’ he snapped. He did not wait for a reply. ‘Who gives a shit, anyway?’ he muttered. ‘We’re in a hurry here. Katsu, is that hatch secured?’
‘Roger that, W. J.’ Shimoda calmly flipped toggles on his flight station’s consoles. ‘Cabin pressurization cycle initiated. MPU’s at a hundred percent, check. Elevators, check. Envelope integrity is copacetic…’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Screw the checklist, let’s just get out of here.’
‘Burroughs, this is Cydonia Command. You are cleared for emergency takeoff.’
‘We copy, Command,’ Boggs replied. He glanced over his shoulder at Cassidy. ‘Hang on there, pal, this is going to be rough. Okay, Katsu, ropes off!’
Shimoda flipped two toggles which severed the airship’s tethers. The 120-foot airship bobbed in the stiff breeze which had kicked up as the sun began to set on the western horizon. On either side of the gondola, red dust was blown up from the ground by the idling VTOL turbofans; through the crimson haze the skinsuited ground crew were running from beneath the long, ovoid shadow of the blimp.
‘Elevators trimmed for vertical ascent!’ Boggs called out. ‘Port and starboard fans gimbaled to ninety and up to full throttle! Hang on, here we go!’
Boggs jammed the two engine throttles forward with his right hand and the Burroughs pitched back on its stern as it bolted skyward, its 800-horsepower turbofans howling as they clawed for loft in the tenuous Martian atmosphere. A ballpoint pen which had been left loose on the dashboard skittered down the surface and plummeted to the floor to continue its noisy descent to the rear of the cabin.
‘Oh, hell,’ Boggs murmured. ‘I was afraid of this.’ The pilot eyed his altimeter suspiciously, then glanced back again at Cassidy. ‘Can you fly?’ he asked.
‘What?’ Cassidy asked weakly. It seemed as if the airship was standing on its tail. He had already been sick once today; it wasn’t fair to make him go through this kind of ordeal again, less than an hour after reaching firm ground. He managed to look up from the few inches of deck between his knees. ‘This thing?’
‘No. I mean, if we have to throw you out the hatch, can you flap your arms and make it to the ground on your own? We’re overloaded and this ship isn’t made to take three people.’
‘Uhh…’
‘Damn.’ Boggs turned back to his controls. ‘Katsu, we’ve got a passenger here dumb enough to think he can flap his arms and fly. Hey, keep an eye on the radar, willya?’
Shimoda looked back at Cassidy. ‘Don’t worry about him. He’s always cranky when he has to rush somewhere.’ He checked his gauges. ‘Cabin pressurization normal. We can remove our helmets.’
He unsnapped the collar of his skinsuit and removed his helmet, then reached over to take off Boggs’ helmet since the pilot had his hands occupied with the airship’s yoke. Cassidy fumbled with his own helmet, finally getting the thing to detach from his skinsuit; Shimoda helpfully reached back to push the switch on Cassidy’s chest unit which turned off the internal air supply. The Japanese co-pilot placed a headset over his own ears, then pulled a spare out of a locker to toss to the musician. Boggs managed, with one hand steadying the yoke against the buffeting of the wind, to yank a George Dickel baseball cap out from under his seat and pull it over his head, securing a headset over it. The foam-padded headsets barely muffled the engine roar, but the mikes made it a little easier for them to hear each other.
‘I’m sorry we had to leave your parcel behind,’ Shimoda apologized. ‘Our cargo capacity is limited, as W. J. explained, and we’re forcing matters by putting you aboard. What was it, anyway?’
‘My guitar.’
‘A guitar?’ Boggs yelled again. ‘Are you that musician we’re supposed to be sent?’
‘Yeah, that’s me. I’m the musician. That’s my guitar you left at the base. What are you in such a hurry for?’
Boggs peered at him closely, squinting the sunburn-wrinkled corners of his eyes. ‘You were just up there. You tell me. All I know is, I just got high-priority orders to get us the fuck outta here mucho pronto. Something’s about to happen back there and I was told not to have my vessel at risk.’ He returned his attention to the controls. ‘If there’s anything you need to tell us, son,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘now’s the time, ’cause I’m righteously p.o.’d…and I ain’t half-kidding about those flying lessons.’
‘Well, ah…’ Cassidy remembered Jessup’s warning to him, back on the Shinseiki, to keep his mouth shut. Screw it. Something nasty was about to come down, and he was only slightly more informed than these two characters. ‘There’s some Marines up there on the Shinseiki,’ he said, and both men darted glances toward him. ‘Space Infantry,’ he added. ‘They’re planning something called Steeple Chase, but I don’t know what…’
‘Do they have landers?’ Boggs snapped. ‘STS craft?’
‘What’s an STS craft?’ Cassidy shrugged, feeling stupid; he was quickly getting used to the emotion. ‘I mean, if you know what’s going on here…’
‘Oh, I know. I know, all right.’ Boggs stared at Shimoda; the co-pilot nodded his head gravely. ‘Gotta be STS fighters. I’ll be a sheep-dipped son of a…’ He suddenly grinned at Shimoda, who merely smiled back and shook his head, then he glanced over his shoulder again at Cassidy. ‘So you’re the guitar player. That’s funny.’
‘It’s better than getting another boring scientist,’ Shimoda remarked.
‘Keep your eyes peeled on the radar, pal. Angels one-two and leveling off, course thirty-two north by four-zero-four east.’ Boggs pushed the yoke out of his lap and the airship’s nose eased back to a more horizontal position. Cassidy decided it was safe to look up again; he raised his eyes and gazed out the port window.
A thousand feet below him was the rocky, wind-scored terrain of the Martian low plains. The blimp’s tiny shadow passed over an endless red desert, falling into valleys and ancient crumbling riverbeds, passing over small hills and the eroded escarpment of an old impact crater. It was the first time he had gotten a chance to look at Mars; he hadn’t seen the landscape during the lander’s descent, and he had been bustled aboard the Burroughs before he had more than a few fleeting seconds to accustom himself to the one-third normal gravity, let alone the red-tinted landscape.
So this was Mars. It looked like…no, not like hell. He had been in hell, and it looked nothing like this. Like limbo, maybe. Purgatory. Kansas on a really bad day. The way your head feels after a hard summer night in a seamy bar in downtown Memphis when the crowd has been apathetic and the summer heat has sucked the cold out of your next beer before the barmaid manages to bring it to the stage, but you put down ten bottles anyway while you dumbfuck your way through Willie Dixon’s greatest hits. Just like that: desolation of the mind and soul. Mars was a planet suffering from God’s own hangover…
‘Okay, we’re outta the shit and we’ve got some safe distance,’ Boggs said. ‘How’s the envelope, Katsu?’ Shimoda silently cocked a thumb upward. ‘Fine. Fifteen miles downrange should be enough room. Let’s heave-to here and watch the show. Anything on the scope yet?’
‘Negative,’ Shimoda said, eyeing the radar screen.
‘That’s negatory, dammit! We speak English on this ship!’ He feigned a swat at the top of Shimoda’s crew-cut head, which the co-pilot easily ducked. ‘One would think you were still hauling kangaroo meat up from Australia on Shin-Nippon, the way you talk.’
‘Beef,’ Shimoda corrected. ‘I was hauling beef, not…ah! Radar contact. Two objects entering the atmosphere at fifty thousand feet at Mach Two, forty-two degrees north by thirty- five degrees west…faint third and fourth objects dropping away from them just now, off the scope.’
‘That’s the aeroshells breaking loose,’ Boggs said. ‘Five bucks says they’ve developed STS fighters since we’ve been gone.’ He glanced back at Cassidy again. ‘You were up there. Ain’t that right?’
‘I dunno.’ Cassidy was still transfixed by the scene outside the gondola windows. ‘Where’s the Face?’
‘Left it way back there. Shoulda been looking. What was aboard the Shinseiki?’
‘There were a couple of Marines aboard when…’
‘A couple? Only two?’
‘Three. I meant three.’ Cassidy thought about it a moment. ‘Three from the First Space, but they didn’t let me in on anything, so I don’t know what…’
‘Hell, no, but I do!’ Boggs cackled and slapped his right palm against the yoke. ‘See, Katsu? Told you so.’ He looked back at Cassidy. ‘Musician, huh? No kidding. I’m named after a musician myself. Waylon Jennings. From Nashville, Tennessee. My hometown.’
‘I think that’s wonderful.’ Cassidy burped and felt a little bit better for it. His guts were no longer in knots; there was nothing left in them to vomit anyway. ‘Now will somebody give me a straight answer and tell me what’s going on?’
Boggs laughed. ‘What’s happening is that Major Oeljanov and his robots are about to get smeared by the United States-fuck almighty-Marines Corps, and if you watch out this window you can see the whole show.’ He motioned to the triple-paned window next to Shimoda’s seat. ‘They’ve been asking for it and now…’
‘Two o’clock high,’ Shimoda said, pointing out his window. ‘Two vapor trails.’
‘There we go.’ Boggs leaned over to stare across Shimoda’s shoulders. Two thin white streaks were lancing across the dark purple stratosphere. ‘So,’ he added absently, ‘you’re the guy who’s going down into the Labyrinth?’
‘Yeah.’ Cassidy clumsily tried to rise and balance himself on his knees, fighting the constant motion of the deck. ‘I guess I’m the person.’
‘Lucky you. I hope you make out better than the last guy who was down there.’
Cassidy forgot about the vapor trails for a moment. He looked sideways at Boggs. ‘The last guy? What about him?’
‘They brought him out of there in a bag…what little they could find of him, that is.’ Boggs stopped and looked back at Cassidy. ‘You mean to say that nobody told you what happened to Hal?’
‘Aeroshell jettison on my mark,’ Spike D’Agostino said into the darkness as he curled his gloved hand around a lever next to his left thigh. ‘Three…two…one…’
He yanked the lever upward. There was a sudden lurch, a loud bang, and the aeroshell which had enclosed D’Agostino’s tiny spacecraft broke apart like a clamshell. Harsh red-pink light exploded through the canopy of his cockpit, causing him to blink furiously despite the helmet monocle that was fitted over his right eye. ‘Woooo-wee!’ Hoffman’s voice shouted through his headset. ‘This baby bucks like a Texas bronc!’
D’Agostino ignored him. The F-210 Hornet was plummeting toward the ground some fifty thousand feet below; if he didn’t do anything in the next five seconds, atmospheric drag on the craft’s stub wings would put him into an irreversible flat spin. Grabbing the yoke between his legs with his right hand, he reached up with his left hand to the engine control panel above his head and ignited the engines. The LED lamps on the engine status panel switched to green; D’Agostino shoved forward the throttle and gently pulled back on the yoke.
The five Pratt & Whitney oxygen/carbon monoxide engines, mounted below and behind the Hornet’s sleek fuselage, roared to life, catching the STS fighter from its deadly freefall and clutching it in the sky. The fuselage shook as the digital airspeed indicator rolled back to Mach One and the black-white ball of the artificial horizon steadied on the Y-axis. Spike breathed a short sigh of relief. He wasn’t going to be splattered all over Mars after all.
‘Falcon One to Falcon Two,’ he said. ‘How’ya doing there with that horse of yours?’
‘Copacetic, Falcon One. All stations green and we’re flying. Was it good for you too?’
‘Just lovely, Falcon Two.’ The eight-ball was rising a little too far into the white; now that its airspeed had been cut, the Hornet was beginning to ascend rather than descend. D’Agostino gently pushed the forward yoke; the port and starboard engines gimbaled back to supply aft thrust, punching the STS fighter forward.
He glanced to his left. Several hundred yards away at nine o’clock, the other Hornet was slicing through the thin atmosphere, leaving a white vapor trail behind it. Falcon Two looked all right; he knew that Hoffman was in turn giving Falcon One a quick visual inspection. D’Agostino had to hold tight to the yoke to counter the violent twists and lurches of the Martian stratosphere, but otherwise it was much the same as he had experienced in the simulators. All that was missing was a flight instructor chewing his ass off about slow reaction time…
Fuck it. This was the real-deal now. ‘Okay,’ D’Agostino said. ‘Lock in weapons systems.’
‘Roger that, Falcon One. Lock and load.’
D’Agostino flipped more switches with his left hand. The dashboard fire control panel lit up, showing him in green letters that the two air-to-ground smart missiles below each wing and the 30mm cannon mounted beneath the cockpit were armed and ready. The ECM panel showed that radar and infra-red jamming were in operation; radar was tracking no incoming bogies, so the RWR screen was blank. A tiny crosshairs had appeared in his helmet’s right-eye monocle; he tracked his eyes left and right, and the crosshairs followed the sweep of his vision. The heads-up display within his helmet visor copied the info shown on the dashboard multifunction display.
‘Falcon Two, we’re A-OK and on the beam,’ he said.
‘Roger that, Falcon One. I take it back. She’s a sweet lil’ pony, fresh out of the manger…’
‘We copy.’ Foal or wild mustang, this was a nice little ship he was piloting, and D’Agostino was all too willing to kick mongo ass with it. He grinned and pushed the yoke forward. Falcon One pitched its blunt nose forward and the red horizon rose through the canopy windows. ‘Okay, let it roll.’
‘You got it, Falcon One. Let’s go hunt some bear…’
Arthur Johnson found Richard Jessup in the command module; he didn’t look away from the bank of TV monitors he had been closely watching when the astrophysicist pushed the hatch open. Johnson was about to say something—exactly what, he didn’t know, except that he was still pissed off and only too willing to let Jessup know it—until he reached Jessup’s side and saw what was on the screens.
Two of the screens showed scenes from cameras mounted outside the habitat. On each, a Bushmaster was quickly striding across the rocky terrain between the habitat and the City; in the background of each screen one or the other of the autotanks could be seen. They seemed to be taking up positions alongside each other.
The third screen displayed a ceiling view of the interior of Module One, the vehicle garage and airlock. Its double-doors were shut; centered in the screen was Maksim Oeljanov, The CIS Army major was encased in a Russian CAS; the carapace lid of the armor was open and they could see his head protruding through the suit’s thick inner lining. Oeljanov was wearing a white cotton Snoopy helmet. As they watched, his lips moved silently.
‘Look at that,’ Jessup said quietly, for the first time acknowledging Johnson’s entrance. He pointed at the other two screens. The upper turrets of the two Bushmasters rotated forty-five degrees, their guns both pointing east and tilting upwards towards the sky.
‘Bastard.’ Jessup’s voice was an awed near-whisper. ‘He’s figured it out and got the Bushies slaved to voice-only command. I tried to squirrel into their AI system interface, but they locked me out.’ He shook his head. ‘Maybe the Hornets can ECM the signals, but I doubt it because…’
Johnson didn’t wait to hear the rest. He yanked his beltphone from his hip, switched to Channel One, the common band for base operations, and raised the phone to his face. ‘Major Oeljanov, this is Dr. Johnson,’ he said. ‘Do you hear me? Over.’
Oeljanov’s head cocked upwards, apparently responding to Johnson’s voice. Jessup turned and made an effort to take the phone away from Johnson, but the scientist stepped back, pushing Jessup out of the way. ‘Maksim, this is stupid,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what Jessup was planning, but if you go ahead with what you’re doing, you’ll be endangering the whole project. Just…’
‘Art, don’t try to…’
‘Shaddup, Dick,’ he said. ‘Look, Maksim…get out of that thing and come back in here and we can talk it over. Okay? We don’t have to go through with this nonsense.’
Oeljanov clumsily turned around in the heavy armor and peered straight up at the camera lens. A sardonic smile appeared on his face before the lid of the CAS slowly dropped on its pneumatic hinge. Then Oeljanov raised his right arm—the one which ended in the ugly, stubby maw of a laser-sighted machine gun—toward the camera. There was a microsecond-brief flash from the barrel of the gun; the screen fuzzed out and went blank. A second later the computer replaced the TV image with a line of type: CAMERA 1.01 INOPERATIVE / 1838:32:45/6-18-30 / TOTAL FAILURE
‘I don’t believe it,’ Johnson murmured. ‘He shot out the…’ At that instant there was a sharp bang! from somewhere nearby; alarms began to go off within the habitat. Johnson whirled around and checked the flatscreen readout on the environmental control station: DECOMPRESSION MODULE 1 / AIRLOCK INOPERATIVE / INNER HATCHES SEALED / INTERNAL PRESSURE STABLE MODULES 2-9 / 1838:33:01/6-18-30
‘Goddamn!’ he shouted. ‘Blowout in Module One! He blew a hole right though the skin!’
‘Will that keep him from opening the garage door?’
‘No. He can still get out by using the manual override…’
‘Damn.’ Jessup remained calm. ‘And now the TV camera’s gone. If you hadn’t done that, we might have been able to watch what he was doing.’
‘Hell with that!’ Johnson snapped. ‘Now no one can cycle through the main airlock! I’ve got people trapped out there…!’
‘Calm down. If they want to get in, they can still use the auxiliary airlock in Module Ten.’ Jessup reached past Johnson to switch off the decompression alarms, then turned back to the two screens which were still operational. ‘I’m in charge now, Art. Don’t do anything like that again or we’re going to have problems.’
‘Problems?’ Johnson let the beltphone dangle from his hand; a profound sense of unreality was settling upon him. ‘You call this a problem? What the hell are you…?’
Unable to articulate his rage and confusion, he floundered wordlessly. Jessup’s eyes didn’t waver from the screens. ‘If you still want to help,’ he said, ‘you can tell everyone to take cover where they can. There’s going to be a space-to-surface airstrike on the base within the next five minutes. Think you can do that?’
Arthur Johnson stared at the back of Jessup’s head. There was a fire extinguisher bracketed to the wall behind them; maybe, with one good stroke, he could use it to bash in the brains of his old frat brother…
But instead, he lifted the beltphone again and pecked out the digits for Channel One with a numbed forefinger.