Labyrinth of Night by Allen Steele Read Free Book Online Page A

raised a forefinger before Cassidy could speak. ‘I can’t tell you what it is right now. Just do as I say and you won’t get hurt. Okay?’
    Cassidy stared at Jessup for a moment, then unzipped the seal on the bundle and looked inside at his Yamaha guitar. ‘What do I do after that?’
    ‘Do your job, that’s all,’ Jessup replied with a shrug. ‘It’s what we brought you here for. But till then, just go where we tell you to go. Understand?’
    ‘Uh-huh.’ Cassidy deflected his nervousness by running his fingers over the neck of his instrument. He didn’t want to admit it, but the craving was back. Just like it always had been, those times when he was unsure of himself, of his talent. ‘So, to paraphrase the immortal Frank Zappa, I just shut up and play my guitar.’
    ‘That’s not a bad idea,’ Jessup said.

Excerpt from Manifest Destiny and Mars: A History by David L. Zurkin, Duggan & Sons, Boston (2034)
    Even as the news media were spreading photos of the City and the Face across every screen and page, at Arsia Station preparations were already underway for an extended expedition to the alien necropolis. The Edgar Rice Burroughs expedition of 2028 had made little more than a flyover and a brief touchdown at the Face, and although the airship was the fastest means of long-range transportation available on Mars—unlike ground vehicles, it didn’t have to contend with the planet’s rugged terrain—it did not have the cargo capacity or crew complement necessary for long-term exploration of the site. Meanwhile, scientists on Earth (along with the general public) were clamoring for more information about the City. It was because of the haste in which the expedition was mounted that a dispute arose: who had the primary right to explore the ruins?
    Although the prior establishment of Arsia Station was an international effort, different nations had contributed the components of the settlement and had aided in the discovery of the site. The Burroughs was registered to the United States, but her two-man crew, W. J. Boggs and Katsuhiko Shimoda, were respectively American and Japanese. Was the United States the prime discoverer of the Face, since Boggs had been flying the airship, or was Japan, since Shimoda had been the first one to spot the pyramids? The Mars tractors which brought the second expedition to Cydonia were Russian-made, but the leaders of the Arsia Station science team, Shin-ichi Kawakami and Paul Verduin, were Japanese and Dutch, while the co-supervisors of the newly-established Cydonia Base—Arthur Johnson, Sasha Kulejan and Miho Sasaki—were American, Russian and Japanese. Although the scientific equipment which was cannibalized from Arsia Station’s labs and transported to Cydonia Base was largely American-made, the habitat modules had been built by the European Space Agency while the ingenious portable waste-recycling plant was a product of the CIS, and so on.
    In ideal circumstances, this would have been a testament to international space cooperation. Indeed, the members of the Mars settlement had long since learned to disregard the matter of who contributed what. Boggs and Shimoda, in fact, refused to take official credit for ‘their’ discovery, pointing out that it was the Viking Imaging Team which had first located the Face in 1976 (a self-effacing statement which would later have dire repercussions). But on Earth, the sponsoring governments did not view matters in the same light. When Mars had been a way-station for further planetary exploration and its resources were considered nearly limitless, the US and the CIS, Japan and the Europeans were completely willing to share the wealth. But the City, the unexplored culture and technological artifacts of the aliens (nicknamed the ‘Cooties’ by Boggs, an appellation which was made to stick by the news media) was not seen to be part of the bargain.
    Unfortunately, international space law had yet to evolve to cover exploration or salvage