He couldn’t find her. “Melina!” he cried, alarmed.
“Over here,” she replied.
His head whipped around. There she was in the passenger seat, slamming the door. She hadn’t waited for his call.
Quaid gunned the motor. The mole leaped forward, suddenly become a monster. Soldiers and miners scattered.
Cohaagen stood before the floor-to-ceiling window in his office and stared moodily out at the domes. The horizon was pink, signalling the approach of dawn. Alarms wailed in the background, muffled but insistent.
Richter fidgeted on the other side of the room. What more proof did Cohaagen need? Surely it was clear by now that there was only one way to deal with the traitor that Hauser had become. “Well, sir?” he said finally.
Cohaagen remained in silent thought a moment longer. Hauser was a top agent. There would be hell to pay before he could be gotten under control again. Friendship went only so far. The man had outlived his welcome. Without turning around, he answered flatly: “Kill him.”
“It’s about fucking time,” Richter muttered, turning on his heel and dashing from the room.
If he had thought Cohaagen couldn’t hear him, he was wrong. Cohaagen stiffened at the words. If it hadn’t been for Richter’s messing in, the Quaid programming might have gone smoothly. Certainly, the man would not have developed such a strong attachment to his temporary identity. A man could get to believe in himself if he had to fight for his life. After this ugly job was done, Richter himself would be expendable. It was about fucking time, indeed.
Cohaagen’s pent-up anger at the man exploded. He glared at the fish swimming harmlessly in the bowl on his desk, and swept it to the floor, where it smashed to bits. The fish floundered desperately, unable to breathe. Cohaagen smiled.
But there were more important things to do. Cohaagen had suspected that Hauser knew more about the alien artifact that he had let on. Now he was sure of it. He could afford to wait no longer.
He picked up a phone. “Get the demolitions team,” he said. Then he stared intensely into space. He didn’t like doing this, destroying Hauser and the alien artifact. Both could have been far more useful to him, in other circumstances. But security came first. He had built a kind of empire here, and he couldn’t afford to let either friendship or greed threaten it.
CHAPTER 25
Reactor
“Do you know the way to the Pyramid from here?” Quaid asked as the mole charged along.
“Yes,” she said, looking. She pointed. “Turn right, there.”
He swung right, into a wide tunnel, and careened down it at top speed, almost trampling miners who ran for their lives.
“Watch out!” she cried. She didn’t want to hurt the common folk, only Cohaagen’s minions.
“We have to get there first,” he explained tersely. “He’s going to destroy the reactor.”
She was mortified. “No . . .”
“If Mars has air, Cohaagen’s finished.” But that was the least of it!
Quaid swerved to avoid a fallen miner. He zoomed on down the tunnel, seeing the way now clear.
“If Mars has air,” she said, realizing, “we’ll be free.”
“We’ll be free,” he echoed. “But there’s more. The No’ui—”
“What?”
“I never had time to tell you—and it wasn’t safe anyway, as long as Cohaagen could interrogate you,” he said. “I—that is, Hauser—did more down in that alien pit than just desert you. He—”
“Desert me?” she asked, frowning.
“Hauser was a spy. I remember now. He was only playing you along. He faked the fall so he could get ‘captured’ by Cohaagen or seemingly killed. His mission for Cohaagen was through, because you were too smart for him. But that wasn’t the only reason.”
“I understand. You don’t have to explain.”
“Yes, I do! You don’t understand. Hauser was Cohaagen’s man. He was an emotionless machine, ready to use anyone in order to carry out Cohaagen’s orders. And then you came into his life. You showed him what it meant to believe in something, what it meant to be good. He grew to admire and respect you and then . . .
“His feelings for you were so alien that he didn’t know what they were. He suppressed them, he fought to control them, and it wasn’t until he found himself in the Pyramid Mine that he realized he couldn’t betray you because . . . he loved you. So he wandered around down there, really trying to do the mission you had sent him on. And he found the aliens.”
Her face turned to him, amazed. “He—?”
“They had left a—a message. That the artifact was built by the No’ui, an intelligent galactic antlike species, for us, when we came of age. To make air for Mars, and to share technology, so that we could become a species like them, a galactic trader, spreading civilization.”
“Missionaries!” she breathed.
“Right. And Hauser—well, he was impressed. The No’ui trusted him to do the right thing, to tell his species what the artifact was for and how to use it. Because if we use it well, we’ll be traders, but if we use it the wrong way, or try to destroy it—”
“There’s a self-destruct mechanism!” she exclaimed, catching on.
“Right. The thing is primed like a bomb. Do the right thing and it’s okay, great for man in fact, and it will usher in a new age for us, greater than any we have known in the past. But do the wrong thing, and it blows. That hydrazoic acid—there must be hundreds of thousands of tons of the stuff, down below the glacier. Maybe that’s what does it.”
“I can imagine!” she said. “If that’s released, it could wipe out the whole human colony here!”
“Yes. No’ui don’t pussyfoot around. I saw one of their hatchlings. Just out of the egg, and he had to answer questions I couldn’t answer, and show he was one of them, or they would have killed him on the spot. We either use it right or we lose it; we don’t dare use it wrong. So if Cohaagen tries to destroy it, it won’t be just the atmosphere we lose, it’ll be all our lives.”
She was awed. “And that converted Hauser?”
“That finished the job you started,” Quaid agreed. “He couldn’t stand to see you tortured, which he knew Cohaagen would do next, to make you tell where Kuato was. But he also knew he couldn’t let Cohaagen know the full nature of the artifact. Cohaagen must already have figured it would make air, so he tried to hide it away so it wouldn’t ruin his monopoly. But if he had learned how much more it meant, that he could learn the alien technology and magnify his power a thousandfold, he’d—”
“He’d take over Earth too,” she said. “He’d pretend to be a good guy, using the reactor to make air and seeking to learn more about it, but once he had the information, he wouldn’t need his air monopoly. He’d be able to take over everything.”
“Exactly. Hauser—I’m not making any apologies for him, he was an asshole, but you—you were a good influence on him, and the No’ui—it was really a kind of mind implant, and it converted him, and he wanted to do what was right. But Cohaagen routinely mind-checked his agents to make sure no spies had infiltrated, and he would’ve learned about the No’ui. So Hauser—”
“Volunteered for a new mission,” she concluded.
“Right. That saved you, and the artifact. But now—”
“I’m right with you,” she said. “Do what you have to do, Doug. We have to get there and activate that thing before he destroys it.”
“And then we have to see that he’s dead,” he said. “So he can’t pretend he started it, and that he’s a hero who should remain in charge. That man could talk the warts off a mutant toad! We may die doing it, but—”
“Kuato and the Resistance Fighters have given their lives,” she said quietly. “I can do no less.” Then she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.
“Does this thing have a radio?” he asked. “Better check on the pursuit.”
Immediately she turned on the radio. It was a standard unit, able to receive commercial bands as w
ell as private transmissions. She sampled stations. “They must be maintaining radio silence,” she said. “So others won’t catch on to what’s going on.”
“Then they can’t coordinate to cut us off,” he said with satisfaction. “It’s a straight horse race.”
She stopped at a news station. “. . . results of the special election will be announced as they occur,” the announcer said. “Meanwhile on the science front: astronomers report another ‘inexplicable nova’ discovered. That makes seven so far. According to scientists, these novas shouldn’t be happening, because they aren’t the right type of stars. They—”
Something connected in Quaid’s mind. “Oh, my God!” he breathed.
Melina looked at him again. “Something wrong?”
“That news item—those novas—I just realized—” He choked off, not wanting to believe it.
“What’s the matter, Doug?” she asked, alarmed.
“Those novas—they’re artificial,” he said. “That’s why they don’t seem to make sense. They’re seeded, same way as the No’ui seed species.”
“I suppose, if the aliens are as powerful as you say,” she said doubtfully. “But I can’t believe that—”
“Believe it!” he said. “You haven’t seen the sheer scale of that reactor! If they can build something like that, and use alien science to make air in a way we couldn’t, they can seed a star to go nova?”
“Well, maybe so, if you say so. But what has that to do with this?”
“I told you, they don’t pussyfoot! It’s all or nothing with them. No second chance.”
“Yes, but—”
“The destruct symbol,” he said, feeling the horror rise as he spoke. “It was a nova.”
Melina shrugged. “Why not? We put a skull and crossbones to indicate poison. We don’t mean it literally. It’s figurative.”
“They don’t know figurative. They’re a literal species, maybe because of the way they come genetically preprogrammed, like ants. To them, something either is or it isn’t, or it is ignored. It can’t be partway, unless it’s something under construction. So when they use a nova symbol—”
Now the horror came to her face too. “You mean—?”
“I mean that when they say nova, they mean nova! If we abuse the reactor—”
“Our sun will go nova,” she said.
“It must be keyed in. The moment the reactor starts to go wrong, it sends the destruct signal to the sun. The sun flares up and takes everything out, maybe through the orbit of Jupiter. Just a little flare, on the galactic scale, but our species will be gone. Just as those other species went, thousands of years ago when they didn’t pass the test, and now we’re seeing their novas. There are three requirements, one being that we achieve limited space travel on our own, another that we are able to recognize the nature of the artifact, and the third is undefined—but now we know that it means to do it right, or else.”
“No second chance,” she agreed, staring straight ahead.
“We’re shooting for all the marbles!” His face felt frozen. He remembered the dream he had had, of mankind ending. No dream, but an alien warning!
“All the marbles,” she echoed hollowly. “God, Doug—”
“Yeah.” He arrowed on down the passage, feeling numb.
The mole passed an intersecting tunnel. A second mole pulled out of the tunnel and took off in pursuit.
Melina looked back. “That’s Benny!” she exclaimed. “Watch out—he knows how to drive!”
Indeed he did. The moles were supposed to be uniform in speed, but the one behind was gaining. Its drill started spinning.
“Look out!” Melina cried.
But there wasn’t much Quaid could do. He watched in the rearview as Benny’s mole caught up and bored into the back of his own mole. The giant screw was made to handle rock; how would it react to metal?
There was a horrendous screech of metal chewing metal. Shrapnel flew through the cabin. The whole vehicle vibrated violently.
Ask a silly question! Quaid had already been traveling at top velocity, but somehow he managed to coax more from the engine and pull ahead. It was no good; Benny caught up and drilled again.
The spinning drill bit appeared in the cabin, chewing hungrily. They leaned forward to avoid it, but had too little room. The sound was deafening. The thing could grind them into sausage!
Then it stopped, inches from their backs. Melina stared at it. “I guess that’s its limit,” she said. “It’s meant for rock, and rock will crack open and fragment away. It’s stuck in the metal.”
“Stuck, eh?” Quaid smiled grimly. “Then maybe we have him by the balls.”
“Balls?” she inquired, glancing sidelong at him.
“Whatever. Let’s see how this pecker likes our action.”
Quaid swerved left, then right, making his mole rock back and forth in the passage. Benny’s mole, held captive by its proboscis, was whipped into the stone walls. He hastily braked and disengaged from Quaid’s mole. It wasn’t enough; he ended up with two wheels propped against a wall.
“I’ll keep that ploy in mind if I ever don’t like your action,” Melina murmured.
Quaid kept a straight face. Behind, he saw Benny’s mole maneuvering clumsily, its gears grinding. Then it flopped back on the level and resumed its forward motion.
They entered a dark chamber. Quaid turned his headlight to the side and saw that there was room here to make a loop. He shut off the light and began to turn in darkness.
“What are you doing?” Melina asked, alarmed.
“Maybe I can get him in the ass this time,” Quaid said. “See how he likes his own medicine.”
He completed most of his loop and slowed, lights out. He saw Benny’s headlights, then the nose of the mole, coming slowly in. The lights cast about, scanning the chamber.
Quaid gunned his engine and turned on his lights. They illuminated the side of Benny’s mole, glaringly bright.
With his drill extended straight forward, churning ferociously, Quaid headed directly for Benny’s cabin. “Screw you,” he said succinctly.
He saw Benny’s eyes and mouth open wide, in the glare of the lights, as the man saw the drill coming straight at him. He tried to gun his own mole out of the way, but was too late. Quaid’s mole bored through the cabin, having no trouble at all with glass and plastic, and chewed it up as if it were being fed into a giant food processor. Benny was shredded into chopped meat, in a manner literal enough for even the No’ui.
Benny’s mole had been near the far cavern wall. Quaid’s mole couldn’t stop; it drilled right on into the wall. Sand and gravel poured in through holes. The whole machine rattled.
There was nothing to do but keep going. The stone wall started to crumble. Quaid ground forward, hoping he wouldn’t get stuck. But he was in luck; the other side of the wall was hollow space.
“Doug!” Melina screamed, staring ahead.
Now he realized that the luck he was in was bad. There was nothing ahead. They were drilling into the abyss of the alien reactor!
He slammed on the brakes. The mole tilted through the aperture, starting its fall. But the torn rear of the mole lodged against the top of the tunnel, making it pause a moment.
“Jump!” Quaid shouted, tearing away his seat belt.
The two of them barely had time to jump out of the doors and grab onto scaffolding before the huge machine dislodged itself and fell into the depths.
But why weren’t they suffocating? The abyss of his dream-memory had been a near-vacuum; they had used space suits to enter it. How could he forget the frustration of trying to kiss Melina through the helmet! But there was air here; this was pressurized.
Then he remembered a bit more of his Hauser knowledge: the main part of the reactor was pressurized, because Cohaagen had been trying to find out more about it. Cohaagen had been cautious, which was just as well: if he had done anything ignorant to it, the nova would have been set off. The pressurization hadn’t affected it; th
e reactor was constructed to handle atmospheric pressure, because it was part of the process that made the atmosphere. Hauser and Melina had entered the unpressurized, unexplored section that Cohaagen thought didn’t matter—and had discovered that it mattered very much. It wasn’t just one unit, it was an interlocking complex of units, with the nuclear reactor just the tip of the iceberg in an almost literal manner.
They hung from the scaffolding on opposite sides of the hole, then got their footing and scanned the vast reaches of the abyss.
“You’re right,” Melina whispered, awed. “I never saw this. It’s ten times as big as I ever imagined, and—”
“And a hundred times as complex,” he said, awed himself, though he had explored much of it in his prior visit and in his buried memory of that visit, and had experienced the No’ui explanation of it. “This is our future—man’s future—if we can get it started before Cohaagen destroys it.”
They continued gazing at it. An enormous metal truss stretched from the wall into space, reminiscent of the ancient Eiffel Tower laid on its side. Four such arches supported an immense round platform in the middle of the abyss.
The platform was a metal pegboard which braced a bundle of huge columns running through pegholes. The columns reached from the top of the abyss down toward its bottom, lost in darkness. Other arches and platforms braced the columns at various other levels, above and below.
Quaid climbed down and dropped onto the truss. “Come on,” he called to Melina, gesturing.
She climbed down next to him and contemplated the long treacherous bridge they had to cross, which stretched into inky darkness. This might have endured for millennia, but it seemed insecure now.
Suddenly a frightening crash thundered through the abyss, making them both jump.
“The mole,” Quaid said, catching on. It had reached the bottom. It had seemed like several minutes since they escaped it, but it had probably been several seconds; the splendor of the reactor had made their perception of time distort. He thought.
“They’ll be here soon,” Melina reminded him. “You have to do it first.”