Labyrinth of Night Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF ALLEN STEELE

  * * *

  “An author with the potential to revitalize the Heinlein tradition.” —Booklist

  “The best hard SF writer to come along in the last decade.” —John Varley, author of Slow Apocalypse

  “One of the hottest new writers of hard SF on the scene today.” —Asimov’s Science Fiction

  “No question, Steele can tell a story.” —OtherRealms

  Orbital Decay

  Winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel

  “Stunning.” —Chicago Sun-Times

  “[Steele is] the master of science-fiction intrigue.” —The Washington Post

  “Brings the thrill back to realistic space exploration. It reads like a mainstream novel written in 2016 A.D.” —The New York Review of Science Fiction

  “A damned good book; lightning on the high frontier. I got a sense throughout that this was how it would really be.” —Jack McDevitt, author of Cauldron

  “An ambitious science fiction thriller . . . skillfully plotted and written with gusto.” —Publishers Weekly

  “A splendidly executed novel of working-class stiffs in space.” —Locus

  “Reads like golden-age Heinlein.” —Gregory Benford, author of Beyond Infinity

  “Readers won’t be disappointed. This is the kind of hard, gritty SF they haven’t been getting enough of.” —Rave Reviews

  The Tranquillity Alternative

  “A high-tech thriller set against the backdrop of an alternative space program. Allen Steele has created a novel that is at once action-packed, poignant, and thought provoking. His best novel to date.” —Kevin J. Anderson, bestselling author of the Jedi Academy Trilogy

  “Science fiction with its rivets showing as only Steele can deliver it. This one is another winner.” —Jack McDevitt, author of The Engines of God

  “With The Tranquility Alternative, Allen Steele warns us of the bitter harvest reaped by intolerance, and of the losses incurred by us all when the humanity of colleagues and friends is willfully ignored.” —Nicola Griffith, author of Ammonite

  Labyrinth of Night

  “Unanswered questions, high-tech, hard-science SF adventure, and action—how can you fail to enjoy this one?” —Analog Science Fiction and Fact

  The Jericho Iteration

  “Allen Steele is the best hard SF writer to come along in the last decade. In The Jericho Iteration he comes down to a near-future Earth and proves he can handle a darker, scarier setting as well as his delightful planetary adventures. I couldn’t put it down.” —John Varley, author of Slow Apocalypse

  Rude Astronauts

  “A portrait of a writer who lives and breathes the dreams of science fiction.” —Analog Science Fiction and Fact

  Labyrinth of Night

  Allen Steele

  This one’s for Frank Jacobs…

  Who wouldn’t take no for an answer

  Contents

  Introduction

  Prologue

  Part One: Red Planet Blues

  1. The Shinseiki

  2. Ultimatum

  3. Steeple Chase

  4. 60 Seconds Over Cydonia

  5. The First Casualty

  6. Music for Aliens

  7. Beyond the Labyrinth

  Interlude

  Part Two: Journey to Cydonia

  8. The Percival Lowell

  9. Final Briefing

  10. The Mars Hotel

  11. The Flight of the Akron

  12. The Takada Maru Incident

  13. L’Enfant

  14. Xenophobe

  15. Blown

  Part Three: In a Handful of Dust

  16. The Seventh Protocol

  17. Breakout

  18. Mama’s Back Door

  19. The Running of the Minotaurs

  20. Boot Hill

  21. Kentucky Derby

  22. Underworld

  23. Pikadan

  24. Contamination

  25. The Labyrinth of Night

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Introduction

  BEFORE WE GO ANY FURTHER, let me make one thing clear, so there won’t be any misunderstandings:

  There is no Face on Mars.

  And there are no pyramids, either.

  As stated in the opening acknowledgments, Labyrinth of Night is a work of science fiction … and in this instance, the word fiction needs to be emphasized. When I published the novel in 1992, I was already skeptical—more than skeptical; disbelieving, really—that there were any extraterrestrial artifacts on Mars. Since then, NASA has sent nearly a half-dozen probes to the Red Planet, and high-resolution photos taken from orbit have settled the issue. What was spotted in the Cydonia region by the Viking 1 Orbiter in 1976 was a collection of natural landforms which, due to the angle of sunlight falling on them and the fuzziness of the images themselves, vaguely appeared as if they might be artificial in origin. Yet they weren’t. They were nothing more than hills the Martian winds had eroded into shapes which—if you looked at them in just a certain way—resembled familiar objects: a giant face and a nearby collection of pyramids.

  So why did I decide to treat them as if they were things left behind by an alien race? There lies the story …

  In late 1986, I was getting close to finishing my first science fiction novel, Orbital Decay. I was still working as a newspaper reporter at the time, but Ace Books had already expressed interest in publishing this work in progress. My job had become frustrating, and I was seriously considering, if the book sold, turning in my resignation and taking a stab at writing SF full time. But if I did so, that meant I’d need to be ready to follow Orbital Decay with another novel.

  But what would I write about? Orbital Decay had absorbed my SF-writing attention for the previous three years. I had no other ideas, except that I wanted to continue writing about space exploration. Mars seemed like the natural next step. There hadn’t been very many stories about the place lately—during the 1980s, Mars had fallen out of vogue as a setting for SF novels—but I didn’t want to simply do another first-mission story; there had been too many of those already. I needed to find a new angle.

  Then the November 1986 issue of Analog came out, and that month’s nonfiction article was a piece by science writer Richard C. Hoagland concerning a strange astronomical anomaly. Titled “The Curious Case of the Humanoid Face … on Mars,” it told how, several years earlier while examining old Viking orbital images, NASA researchers had stumbled upon an object that somewhat resembled a human face, and how the author himself had located nearby objects that somewhat resembled pyramids. It was Hoagland’s assertion that these things might be artificial, indicating that Mars might have once been inhabited.

  Whereupon I leapt to my feet, shrieked, “Oh, my God! There’s aliens on Mars!” and then dashed to my typewriter, where I … . . .

  No. That’s not what happened.

  Hoagland’s article was intriguing, but I couldn’t have been more skeptical about his conclusions. I was an investigative reporter who’d also been trained as a science journalist; Hoagland’s hypothesis was based almost entirely on a handful of blurry ten-year-old photos, and that left too many unanswered questions for my liking.

  As science, I couldn’t take it seriously. But as science fiction … well, there might be something there.

  All serious SF is based on one simple question: “What if …” followed by the speculative query of your choice. As long as the story is based on science or technology that is in the realm of possibility, it’s fair game. However improbable the underlying premise may be, it can be the basis for a story if it hasn’t yet been proven to be impossible. So while the
Face and the so-called pyramids might have been unlikely, until there was evidence against their existence, I could use Hoagland’s hypothesis as the springboard for a novel.

  I finished Orbital Decay, sold it to Ace, quit my job, and—after a mild detour to do things like get married, establish a part-time career as a freelance journalist, and move to a log cabin in New Hampshire—I went to work on what then had the generic title The Book of Mars. But I’d barely written the first forty pages when I hit a block. Although I had a fairly good idea of what I wanted to do—an adventure story revolving around the discovery of alien relics in the Cydonia region—the whole thing just sputtered out on me.

  I fought with it for a while, but finally gave up. This book just wasn’t ready to be written yet, if ever. So I threw the incomplete manuscript and my notes into a desk drawer and turned my attention elsewhere. By then, I’d begun selling short stories to Asimov’s Science Fiction, and its editor, Gardner Dozois, wanted more from me. It occurred to me that I had enough material to turn an aborted novel into a pretty snazzy novella, so I did major surgery on the fragment, provided the story with an ending, and sent it to Gardner under the title Turn to Stone. Gardner liked the story, but since he planned to use it in an issue for which he’d already scheduled a novella by Lucius Shepherd called The Father of Stones, we needed to come up with a different title. A skull-busting session on the phone and a long walk in the woods with my dog yielded a new name: Red Planet Blues (which was inspired by a chapter title in Carl Sagan’s Cosmos—“Blues for a Red Planet”).

  Red Planet Blues appeared in the September 1989 issue of Asimov’s. It was my first published novella, and since it appeared shortly before Orbital Decay came out, it helped cement my status as a promising new writer. By then, I’d signed a two-book deal with Ace, so I went to work on my second SF novel, Clarke County, Space, and followed it with Lunar Descent, all three of which comprised a thematic trilogy set within what I’d eventually call the Near-Space series.

  Yet Red Planet Blues felt like unfinished business. I wanted to know what happened next … and now I had a much better idea of where the story should go after the events of the original novella. So a few months after I turned in Lunar Descent, I went to work on what is now called Labyrinth of Night, rewriting Red Planet Blues slightly so that it was now Part One, and also fitting the novel into the Near-Space chronology.

  Things had changed a bit, though, between when I’d first written Red Planet Blues and when I set out to expand it into a novel. For starters, the Soviet Union had fallen, leaving me in the same predicament as countless other novelists who’d been deprived of a convenient superpower Bad Guy. And worse, the Face on Mars had gone from the inside pages of Analog to the front page of the Weekly World News. It was harder than ever for me to take the Face seriously now that it was sharing space in the public consciousness with Bat Boy and the giant alligators of New York’s sewers. So I had to work around that, and my solution was to reinvent Russia as a political and economic rival to the United States—I wasn’t too far off, as things turned out—while surrounding the Face with so much scientific and technological verisimilitude that the Cydonia artifacts would seem a little more plausible.

  Labyrinth of Night came out in the same year that three other Mars novels were published: Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, Mars by Ben Bova, and Beachhead by Jack Williamson. I called it the Great Martian Land Rush, and it was only beginning; other SF writers soon followed us with their own Mars novels (and they’re still coming; my friend Robert J. Sawyer recently published a book called Red Planet Blues, and yes, I gave him permission to reuse my novella’s title). Red Mars overshadowed everyone else’s books and rightfully so, but Labyrinth of Night held its own. It received great reviews and remained in print for quite a while, with British, German, and Italian editions published not long after.

  Yet Labyrinth of Night has always been a source of mild discomfort for me. I’m not embarrassed by this novel. In fact, I’m still quite proud of it. But because of its unlikely—and now proven-to-be-impossible—premise, I chose to ignore the Cydonia artifacts in subsequent Near-Space stories set on Mars; they were never mentioned again, as if they (surprise!) never existed. And over the years, I’ve received queries from readers, both by mail and in person, asking me about the secret information they imagine I must have learned that supports the notion that there’s an extraterrestrial city on Mars and that the American government has sought to hide its existence from the public.

  I’ve told them the very same thing I told you in the opening paragraphs of this introduction. Labyrinth of Night is a novel, not an exposé. It is meant as entertainment, and I hope that it succeeds in being just that. Please don’t expect it to be anything else.

  Allen Steele

  Whately, Massachusetts

  May 2013

  Prologue

  ‘NO ONE WOULD have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water…Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes and surely drew their plans against us…’

  The War of the Worlds (1897)

  H. G. Wells

  Cydonia Base, Mars: July 6, 0945 MCM (Mars Central Meridian), 2029

  HAL MOBERLY GINGERLY STEPPED on a round stone divot in front of a red door deep beneath the Martian surface, closed his eyes and waited to die. Instead, the door slid grindingly aside, towed along coasters by pulleys at least as old as recorded history. Hearing the door move, the NASA geologist opened his eyes and took a deep breath. Through the now-open door, beyond the oval of light cast by his armor’s lamp, lay the darkness of Room C4-20.

  ‘Thank God,’ he murmured. ‘I’m still here.’

  Shin-ichi Kawakami watched from Cydonia Base’s monitor center, located outside the City on the rock-strewn, wind-stripped red plain. Around him, other members of the team were hunched over their stations, concentrating on their instruments. ‘We copy that, Hal,’ the Japanese exobiologist replied. ‘Stay in the doorway for a few moments and let the pod sweep the room.’

  Next to Kawakami, Paul Verduin watched as the radar in Moberly’s suit sensor pod—a sausage-shaped package mounted on the armor’s right shoulder—mapped the interior of Room C4-20. The radar’s feedback was input directly into Verduin’s computer, which in turn assembled a three-dimensional image of C4-20 on his screen. The new room was 40 feet long, 21 feet wide and 8 feet high. There were apparently no furnishings in this chamber, but the Dutch astronomer noticed that the computer had painted the room’s walls as being irregular, rippled and unsmooth.

  From her station behind them, Tamara Isralilova held vigil on the armor’s internal monitors. Moberly’s Hoplite II armor was less like a garment than it was a vehicle. A spinoff from the military armor used by American and Russian heavy infantry units, the Hoplite suit weighed a half-ton and resembled an egg which had sprouted semirobotic arms and legs. Within its cocoonlike interior, Moberly’s body was covered with biosensors.

  ‘Respiration, EKG, blood pressure, brain alpha patterns all rising,’ the Russian doctor reported. ‘He’s extremely nervous, Dr. Kawakami.’

  ‘Don’t inject him with anything, Tamara,’ Kawakami replied. ‘I would rather have him nervous than somnambulant at this juncture.’ He glanced over Verduin’s shoulder. ‘What’s in there, Paul?’

  Verduin shook his head. ‘It resembles a normal chamber, except that the walls seem irregular. Lumpy. And look at this.’ He pointed to the spectrographic readout. ‘Metal, not stone. Light aluminum-steel alloy of some variety. We have not seen anything like this yet.’

  ‘Don’t k
eep me in suspense, guys.’ Moberley’s voice came through their headsets. ‘Are there any booby-traps here?’

  Kawakami and Verduin traded glances. An unnecessary question. Each chamber of the underground labyrinth had been booby-trapped, and already one person had been killed. Moberly was really asking if there was anything which would annihilate him the moment he entered the new chamber. Verduin shrugged, then shook his head. ‘Go ahead, Hal,’ Kawakami said. ‘Take two steps into the room and stop. Also increase your white-light intensity a little bit so we can get a good picture.’

  As Moberly stepped through the door into Room C4-20, the TV image transmitted from his armor’s chest-mounted camera brightened. Kawakami and Verduin watched the monitor screen between their stations. The walls, toned like burnished copper, were intricately patterned, interlaced with whorls and swirls as if cut by a jigsaw. Very strange. Other chambers in the Labyrinth contained wall designs, but none as complex or extensive as these. The camera swiveled to the far wall and stopped. ‘Hey!’ Moberly yelled. ‘Do you see that?’

  ‘Yes, we see it,’ Verduin replied excitedly. Isralilova turned to look at the monitor. After staring at the screen for a moment, she cast a rare smile at Kawakami.

  What they saw of significance in the last wall of the new chamber was nothing at all. There was no door in the far wall.

  ‘That’s it,’ Kawakami whispered. ‘The end.’

  Then Verduin glanced down at his console and stopped grinning. Cupping his left hand over his headset mike, he pointed at his screen. Kawakami looked and felt his elation vanish.

  ‘Electromagnetic surge,’ Verduin whispered. A computer-generated red line in a window on his screen had suddenly spiked in its center. Before Kawakami could ask, Verduin answered his next question by pointing at a more regular blue line underneath the red spike. ‘That is his suit voltage. The red line indicates an exterior source. The surge happened the moment he stepped in the room. I cannot isolate the source, but it is definitely from inside C4-20.’