Labyrinth of Night

By Allen Steele

On Mars, a research team encounters an ancient puzzle that only a guitarist can solve
In 2029, an American research team ventures to Mars to investigate an astounding find: a labyrinth older than humanity itself, whose maze of rooms conceals the deepest secrets of the red planet. In the final chamber, strange music plays, as chilling as it is beautiful. It will be the last thing the scientist who discovers it ever hears. As the music rises to a climax, the chamber door closes, leaving him to die in the pitch dark.
Where one explorer has failed, Ben Cassidy must not. An internationally famous guitarist, his music is the closest thing on Earth to Mars’s deadly hymn. The government sends him into space to solve a planetary mystery, but what Cassidy encounters is a team of researchers whose jealous competition is every bit as dangerous as the secrets of Mars.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Sep 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781480439948

Allen Steele

Before becoming a science fiction writer, Allen Steele was a journalist for newspapers and magazines in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Missouri, and his home state of Tennessee. But science fiction was his first love, so he eventually ditched journalism and began producing that which had made him decide to become a writer in the first place. Since then, Steele has published eighteen novels and nearly one hundred short stories. His work has received numerous accolades, including three Hugo Awards, and has been translated worldwide, mainly into languages he can’t read. He serves on the board of advisors for the Space Frontier Foundation and is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He also belongs to Sigma, a group of science fiction writers who frequently serve as unpaid consultants on matters regarding technology and security. Allen Steele is a lifelong space buff, and this interest has not only influenced his writing, it has taken him to some interesting places. He has witnessed numerous space shuttle launches from Kennedy Space Center and has flown NASA’s shuttle cockpit simulator at the Johnson Space Center. In 2001, he testified before the US House of Representatives in hearings regarding the future of space exploration. He would like very much to go into orbit, and hopes that one day he’ll be able to afford to do so. Steele lives in western Massachusetts with his wife, Linda, and a continual procession of adopted dogs. He collects vintage science fiction books and magazines, spacecraft model kits, and dreams. 

Book preview

PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF ALLEN STEELE

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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

The master of science-fiction intrigue. —The Washington Post

Allen Steele is among the best —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Steele writes with a spirit of exuberant, even exalted, optimism about our future in space. … Intelligent, literate, and ingenious. —Booklist

[Steele’s writing is] highly recommended. —Library Journal

A leading young writer of hard science fiction. —Science Fiction Weekly

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

Clarke County, Space

Lively … engaging. —Locus

A really gripping tale … This stuff is what I love the most about science fiction! —The Texas SF Inquirer

Lunar Descent

A well-balanced blend of hard science, adventure, and thoughtful extrapolation. —Science Fiction Chronicle

A triumph of the individual human spirit … excellent. —Starlog

Time Loves a Hero

"Not only a story about time traveling and multiple worlds, but also a look at how science fiction inspired scientific endeavors … [Time Loves a Hero] demonstrates Steele’s growth as a writer." —Steven Silver’s Reviews

Oceanspace

Steele’s descriptions of the ocean depths and the unknown possibilities down there are first rate. —The Denver Post

Steele’s account of the undersea research facility that is the real star of this book is so thorough you’d think he had visited the place. The plot is complex and the characters real. There aren’t many people writing fiction grounded in realistic scientific explanation. Allen Steele is among the best. —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"The closest thing in years to [Arthur C.] Clarke’s The Deep Range. Steele has done his technical homework thoroughly and he writes with an eye to pacing and dry wit. Hard SF adventure doesn’t get a whole lot better than this." —Booklist

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 keep 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.’

They heard a familiar grinding sound in their headphones, picked up by the armor’s exterior mike. Everyone looked up. ‘The door’s closing,’ Moberly said. ‘There it goes.’ The TV image on the monitor screen shifted sharply as Moberly turned around, now showing the door to the corridor quickly shutting itself. Moberly lurched forward a step, but the door was sealed before he could reach it.

Everyone in the module took a deep breath. Although it had been anticipated that the new room would reseal itself once Moberly was inside, there was still a palpable sense of foreboding. Hal was obviously keeping his own fear under tight rein—the professional cool of a scientist-explorer, typical of a man who had hung a framed picture of Sir Richard Burton above his bunk—but the people at the other end of his comlink were at the edge of their nerves.

They remembered what had happened to Valery Bronstein…and they were all too aware of the solitary grave that lay on the small hill behind the base.

Still, Kawakami thought, it’s not going to do Hal any good if we begin to panic. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘It knows he’s in there.’ His fingers found the keypad in his lap and punched in two digits. Arthur Johnson and Miho Sasaki, the American and Japanese co-leaders of the expedition, were on standby in the corridor outside C4-20. ‘Team Lima-Two, do you copy?’

‘We’re here, Shin-ichi.’ Arthur Johnson’s voice was stressed. ‘The door just shut. What’s going on in there?’

Kawakami was about to answer when another sound overrode the comlink: not static, not the usual crackle of electromagnetic interference from the Pyramid. Something formed and rhythmic, as natural and yet unexpected as a coyote howl in the midnight desert. ‘Listen,’ Isralilova said. ‘Do you hear that!’

‘Shh!’ Kawakami hissed. Music. Formless and random, even grating, but undeniably it was music, lifting from the alien caverns like the sullen riffs of a subway jazz player, as if an avant-garde musician were lurking somewhere inside the chamber. Weird, yet somehow appropriate…and nonetheless threatening.

‘Are you getting this?’ Hal Moberly quietly asked.

Kawakami glanced at the CD-ROM deck above his console. ‘We’re recording it, yes, Hal,’ he replied. ‘Stand by. Wait for our next signal.’

The team’s senior scientist had no doubt what the sounds signified. In some way, this was the Labyrinth’s final test. Yet this was something entirely new. Before now, everything beneath Pyramid C-4 had related to equations and common sense. How can anyone ask a piece of music, alien or otherwise, to explain itself as an obvious statement?

Kawakami looked at Verduin. The other scientist met his gaze, glanced back at his console, then silently shook his head. Instinctively, they both knew the hard truth, although neither of them had the courage to openly speak it.

Hal Moberly was not going to emerge from C4-20 alive. And there wasn’t a damned thing they could do about it…

Waterville, New Hampshire: August 31, 1730 EST, 2029

The Blackhawk was an older helicopter, on the verge of retirement but still in use by the government for low-profile odd jobs. Its military markings had been removed, so it was appropriate for flying Dick Jessup from central Massachusetts to Waterville Valley. When Jessup had asked why he simply could not drive to the concert site, the copter pilot had grinned. ‘I don’t think you want to do that, sir,’ Lieutenant Orr had replied.

Now, after a one-hour jaunt from Worcester Municipal Airport to the resort town, Jessup could see why. Traffic was backed up for miles on the highways leading into Waterville Valley, tucked in the foothills of the White Mountains. An estimated crowd of seventy thousand music-lovers surrounded the huge outdoor stage of the New England Bluegrass and Jazz Festival. Orr circled the vast sprawl of people, tents and cars before setting the Blackhawk down on a packed-earth landing pad inside the fenced backstage area. A couple of roadies dashed out to meet Jessup as he climbed out, then backed off, confused that the helicopter’s lone passenger was not a performer. One of them made a call on his wristphone and a few minutes later the stage manager stalked over, convinced that Jessup was a high-rolling gatecrasher. It took a few minutes for Jessup to settle the dispute; it was not until the stage manager made a phone call to the promoter and verified that Jessup was there as an invited guest that he calmed down. Jessup was relieved; he did not want to produce his government ID, which would have ended the dispute more quickly but would also have raised some uncomfortable questions.

On the other hand, the stage manager seemed irritated that he couldn’t have Jessup arrested by the security guards. ‘Just get that bird of yours out of here,’ he snapped, pointing at the Blackhawk. ‘We’ve still got people flying into this place.’

‘Okay,’ Jessup replied. ‘Can you tell me where Ben Cassidy is?’

‘He’s onstage. You can talk to him when his set is over. Now get your chopper out of here.’

Jessup waved to Orr and gave him the thumbs-up, and the pilot pointed at his watch and lifted two fingers. Two hours. That was sufficient time. Jessup nodded, and the Blackhawk lifted back up into the clear August sky. Jessup turned back to the stage manager, but he was already walking off to harangue someone else. Jessup wondered if he ever listened to the concerts he ramrodded, or if he was merely in this business because it gave him an excuse to be a jerk.

Jessup found his way to the stage and walked up the stairs to a small area between a stack of equipment boxes and a table covered with folded rally towels and bottles of mineral water. Roadies and various hangers-on moved back and forth around him; he felt out of place, wearing his beige business suit and tie, among the jeans and T-shirts which were the uniform for this Labor Day weekend gathering. Too much like a government official on official government business. People shied away from him as if he were an IRS agent there to audit the gate receipts. Jessup was sure that, if he were to identify himself as a NASA administrator, it would not make any difference. Not with anti-space sentiments growing as they were now…

He turned his attention to the lone figure on the stage, a burly man sitting on a wooden stool with his back turned to Jessup. Ben Cassidy was performing solo, as usual, with no backup band. He was a middle-aged man—balding, beard turning white, the creased and heavy-browed face of a longshoreman turned itinerant musician—plainly dressed in baggy dungarees with shirt sleeves rolled up above his elbows, hunched over the keys and digital fretboard of a Yamaha electronic guitar.

It seemed impossible to Jessup that one person could entertain the vast ocean of faces that lapped at the shoreline of the stage, that his music would be drowned in the tide of humanity. Yet, as Cassidy played, Jessup found himself empathetically melding with the current: the crowd, the mid-afternoon heat, and above all else the music which flowed from Cassidy’s guitar. He was coming out of a blues number—Jessup, who had briefly been a blues fan in his college days, vaguely recognized it as Muddy Waters’ My Dog Can’t Bark, My Cat Can’t Scratch—and was gliding into free-form improvisation.

As Jessup listened, be became increasingly fascinated. At first it seemed as if Cassidy was simply dog-paddling, thrashing without direction on the same couple of chords. Then he added a keyboard solo to the bass refrain and began holding a dialogue between the two sets of chords, shifting back and forth like an actor singlehandedly conducting a conversation between two characters. When it seemed impossible that Cassidy could carry this on much longer, the musician added a third refrain, a lilting lead guitar riff which joined into the mesh of notes. The crowd near the stage, mesmerized by this performance, shouted and applauded their approval but Cassidy, huddled over his instrument, face almost pressed against it, did not look up, nor even seem to notice that he had an audience.

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.

Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, Florida: October 4, 0800 EST, 2029

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

Reviews for Labyrinth of Night

[randystafford · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

My reactions to reading this book in 1993. Some spoilers follow.There are a lot of annoying things wrong with this novel. Steele’s characterization is minor at best and consists of assigning tag traits to his characters. Thus, Shin-ichi Kawakami’s makes a hobby of American slang. Waylon Jennings Boggs won’t stop spouting his rustic, Southern homilies or dirty jokes. Miho Sasaki goes around acting embarassed around men, a chip on her shoulder about rumors she’s slept around to get her job. And every single military character is thoroughly brutal, repulsive, disgusting, and unsympathetic. Steele seems to be a resolutely, judging from this book’s political attitudes, populist liberal. All government and military characters are portrayed unflatteringly. The President seems to be a saber rattling warmongerer just 'cause he’s a Republican.) Commander Terrance L’Enfant is the most trite cliché: an insane military leader, although, to Steele’s credit, it is shown that most of his actions (apart from his outbursts and final descent into madness) can be justified as a response to a possible alien threat. (Indeed, you could argue that the Cooties may have delibratley provoked such an action to get their claws on the nuke. As with most novels involving alien artifacts, you can postulate a variety of explanations for what is, after all, alien behavior.). There are also several lapses in plot logic. Why do W.J. Boggs and August Nash let L’Enfant and Swiggart boss them around under gunpoint after they come in possession of the other Marines’ weapons and are unobserved for a while? Why do the aliens, sophisticated enough to develop nanotechnology and nuclear explosive driven starships, not have a science of planetology good enough to tell them that Mars’ water and atmosphere will bleed away or that the gravity may be too much for them? And how are they going to get anywhere with one nuclear bomb (a tactical nuke at that)? Despite all that, I liked a lot about this novel. The Face on Mars, its reality, is a great jumping off point for a novel. Mars' alien and natural grandeur were well conveyed. I liked the hardware, particularly the Mars dirigibles and combat armor suits. I liked the references to Percival Lowell and H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds. And, of course, I’m always a sucker for the Dos Passos technique of document insertion. Here (aided by Steele’s stint as a journalist) we have lots of newspaper articles, book excerpts, and transcriptions of Senate hearings. Steele skillfully throws in quotes from things in the future of the story’s timeline. Some people in reviews complained of musician Ben Cassidy and the first part of the book with him (particularly that it was popular music that was used and not classical) convincing the aliens that humanity is creative. Why they need this convincing if they just want a nuke? Why not just send a pseudo-Cootie out to see if we have one?Despite a lot of problems, this book kept me interested, and I’m not sorry I read it.