The Labyrinth of Night
Sneak Preview for The Sons of Ares
Chapter 25
Ice fog was eerie, and it rose every morning over the Labyrinth of Night, draping a ghostly vaporous veil over the tortured landscape, as if it was shielding the ground from the coming sunlight to ward it off. The Labyrinth was a menacing place, an evil place, the land broken, shattered, forsaken. Its narrow valleys and canyons conspired to make a confounding maze and lead a man in circles. Mordor was a happy playground of Orcs by comparison.
In this place, the shadow of night still clung to the stony flanks of the canyon walls by day. Here the shadows reigned, and light seemed to shun them, retreating as their reach and power grew near sunset. Then the darkness of another terrible night settled over the labyrinth, and the nightmares emerged to walk the narrow, sandy valleys with death on their minds.
Troyak didn’t like it here. The chaos of the previous mission was striking, taunting the imagination to conjure up a force that could have broken that land to that extent; daring you to conceive a power that could have wreaked such havoc. Yet here, there was a lurking, sinister feeling, that seemed to creep into the bones when darkness came. This land was not broken by the Kroth. No, it took its current shape as a result of some unknown cataclysm on Mars that twisted and wrenched its crust to make this baffling maze of canyons and mesas. Now the ages lay heavily upon the Labyrinth and the violence that created it had subsided to a sinister feeling, like a quiet death, even though this land seemed as broken and fractured like the shattered mesas east of the Great Valley.
Here was a slice of Martian hell, not hot and fiery, but dismally cold and lifeless. It was a place where Vampires might linger around every stony corner, though he knew there were no Vampires. The things here were far worse, and blood sucking Vampires would have fled at the sight of them—the Ice Men, the Skeletals, the Kroth.
A peculiar odor lingered here; a death smell; a gathering of rot and ruin, dusted over by the red loam of Mars, and lashed daily by the incessant wind. The smell hung over the truncated hills and flat-topped mesas, and it ripened on the valley floors. It even found its way inside the EVA suits of Troyak and his Marines. Only the wind could bring relief, but with it came other fears.
Here the wind at night was a howl of anguish; a song of lament; a cold coursing lash that strove to chill a man’s soul as much as his body. Here, hope died, dreams died, sanity retreated in terror, and only nightmares remained. It was as forsaken as any place Troyak had ever seen, and he had been all over the Earth. Only the Chaos regions east of the valley could rival this kind of stolid desolation, and yet in spite of that, he could see a wild beauty in this landscape, and of course, Troyak kept no tryst with fear.
The Labyrinth was cold, its canyon rim scored by the wind averaged -175 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. The rocks on the canyon floor would often be warmer. They were only -100 Degrees Fahrenheit below zero. Temperatures like this made this place far colder than Antarctica, and it was no wonder that if any water was to be found there, it would be as frost and solid ice.
Troyak wasn’t that eager to return to the cave where they found that vacant hidden city. But as always, when duty called, he saluted and stood first to answer. Fedorov seemed so excited to see the city, but he did not know what else they might find there. He had been studying some articles on the discovery of a fifth big volcano, a long-lost brother to the other four on the Tharsis rise.
It was first called “Noctis Mons” like the other shield volcanoes, but it was a fractured and badly eroded landscape, which is why it was not seen as a volcano for over 50 years. The four great volcanoes in the Tharsis region had been easily seen from space, but not this one. It looked like a series of canyons and valleys, blending well with the Labyrinth of Night, which was on its western edge. Yet there it was, as wide in diameter as Arisa Mons. It was well east of Arisa, in the eastern section of Noctis Labyrinthus, and it was not even discovered until March 2024. Scientists looking for subterranean glacial ice were studying images of the region when they suddenly realized, from a number of clues, that they were looking at the center of an ancient volcano that had been hidden right beneath the noses of Geologists since the exploration of Mars first began with the Soviet Mars-3 Lander in 1971.
They found its summit and caldera between the large Oudemans Crater and Dalu Cavus where Fedorov had planned to investigate the City of Night. Its highest elevation measured at 9022 meters or 29,000 feet atop the arcing canyon ridge above its caldera. The deep reaches of Valles Marineris touched the eastern edge of the volcano, and Noctus Labyrinthus then began just beyond its western edge. That made it all of 280 miles wide, stealing all that terrain from the Labyrinth where it had been masquerading as part of that maze for eons until it was finally unmasked in 2024.
Beneath the volcano and along its edges there was evidence of glacial ice underground, and learning this, Fedorov also assumed that a network of lava tubes might reach down and through the ground there, which could make it a perfect haunt for the Kroth. That was why he first sent Troyak to scout the region. Perhaps it was no mystery that the hollow mesa near Dalu Cavus existed, and that the ancient Martians had built a small city there. The hidden city was just 114 kilometers from the western edge of Noctis Mons. Yet the possibility was high here for the presence of the Kroth. Troyak didn’t think Fedorov truly appreciated the danger.
The Captain had seen the Kroth once—the very first Ice Man they found in Antarctica on Earth. Another had peered through the port hole of Theseus on the moon at Luna Alpha One. Yet there was always a wall between the Captain and the thing peering in at him. Like the Bahadur that had glared at him through the Shuttle window on their first visit here. Most often, that wall was a band of intrepid warriors called the Black Death.
Troyak was their leader, and that made him Death in Chief when it came to any combat scenario. He had faced and fought the Kroth hand to hand, even their deadly best, the dread Bahadur, a word that meant ‘Undefeated’ in their Alien language, or so Fedorov told him. The Major’s many kills in close combat made a mockery of that title.
Kandemir Troyak had been a Master Sergeant of Marines for as long as he could remember, until a promotion first to Lieutenant and then to Major had lifted him out of the non-comm soup. Yet the men still thought of him as “Sarge,” and it pleased him that they still called him that. In truth, he never wanted to be an officer of any rank, but he accepted the titles, the bars and stars, the extra responsibilities that saw him often commanding a full regiment, as in the battle of Coprates that now had his name all over its history.
That had been a difficult mission, a series of caves and chambers and tunnels in the side of the steep valley wall. There they had fought, and killed, well over a hundred of the Kroth, and they were all Eight Footers. But here, in the Labyrinth of Night, things felt so much worse than that fight. Here it felt as though they were fighting evil itself, a force that would never show itself to you by day but would always come for you by night. That’s what shadows and nightmares do, don’t they, he thought. They wait for night.
Was he ever really afraid? Troyak shook his head. He and his men had faced damn near everything the Earth could throw at them, from the Raptors to Tyrannosaurus Rex. Mars could do no worse. With the long cold steel of his military knife in his right hand, and a Magnum Pistol in his left hand, Troyak wasn’t afraid of anything. And though this place conspired to make a man feel lost, Troyak knew that he was never alone on a mission like this. His men were all there with him, Zykov with his Simonov, Big shouldered Igor Blok, Sergeant Chazov, to name but a few. They were not a collection of daring men, no, on a mission like this they were one deadly thing against anything else that would dare to challenge them. They were the Russian Black Death.
* * *
They were in the Labyrinth at the Dalu Cavus site on the following day. Troyak took down one of the four shuttles, a second landing beside it on the top of the mesa where they had found the hidden entrance. Two other shuttles circled, and above them, a flight of three fighters was on call.
Before he committed the full platoon, Troyak wanted to take in a single squad from his shuttle, but he asked Fedorov to wait in the shuttle until he ascertained the situation underground. They found the hatch easily again and opened it, with Troyak still not understanding why such entries were not latched or locked. As before, he was the first man down, and this time they had a rope ladder attached to make it easier to climb back out. The tube down was about nine feet, and it was four feet wide.
Troyak made a guarded descent, disappearing through the side passage below. Why would there be no guards here, he thought? Why no sensors or alarms to signal an unauthorized breach of security? Were the Kroth unmindful of threats to a base like this, or simply unconcerned. By now, with four noisome shuttles out there and fighters overhead, they would know that Earthforce was here in some strength. He would have thought they would stand to arms if they were here, but the corridor ahead was dark and silent as before. He tossed in a light tube, switched to night vision, but saw nothing. It would extend about twenty yards, then open to a wider chasm where the ground angled gently downward along an interior slope.
Seeing nothing, he backed into the entrance tube again and waved at his Marines to follow him. One by one, they descended, Zykov, Blok, Chazov in the first team, the next fire team following with four more Marines. They moved quietly, careful that their RPGs would not bang on the metal side of the tube as they climbed down, and they were quick. Team three of the twelve-man squad was at the shuttle with Fedorov, and now they heard an order from Troyak on their helmet speakers to bring him forward and down through the entrance. Troyak was waiting in the passage when they got down there. Shuttle-2, with another 12-man squad was on the mesa top to guard the two birds and stand as a quick ready reserve if there was fighting.
When Fedorov reached the downward slope, his eyes widened when he saw the rooftops, smooth stone domes, and sculpted arches of the city below. He could hardly believe it. A Martian city! It could be nothing else. Surely the Kroth had not labored to build this place. They were only inhabiting it as a hornet’s nest. He couldn’t wait to get down there, but Troyak told him he wanted to use the three nano-drones to sweep the area before they went any further.
So Fedorov sat patiently on the dark sandy slope while the Marines deployed the drones and they went off, whisper quiet, with the barest buzz of their rotors. Zykov was controlling one and he sat next to Fedorov so the Captain could see his pad screen. With it, he could control the movement and elevation of the drone, and view anything it was seeing. For Fedorov it was like a trailer for a movie he had been longing to see. He was amazed at how preserved these buildings were, and here they sat, silent beneath this mesa in the Labyrinth of Night for 100 million years.
After the terrible destruction they had seen in the Chaos, and his discovery of a teardrop there in Timbuktu, he was surprised and grateful that the Kroth had not destroyed this place as well. Yet Troyak said the city was empty as he found it before. The drones had detected no Kroth on its shadowed streets, though they had not searched inside every building there. In spite of that, Troyak felt it safe enough to go down the slope and enter the city on the long central avenue lined by rows of standing columns. On each one Fedorov noted a letter character was carved at eye level. He did not yet know enough of the Martian script to understand them, and Apollo was not in orbit now, so he could not contact Nikolin and get information from the Quantum Computer that had been translating the language. But he did have some of what it had translated on his cell phone, with an application that could search and return any translation that matched. He decided not to bother with it now and just collect as much data as possible.
He wanted to turn right onto the very first street. Troyak stayed with him, sending Blok and Chazov ahead on point. As always, Zykov lingered near Troyak with his Simonov AT Rifle at the ready, a five round clip loaded. Aside from a Magnum pistol at very close range, the Simonov was the one hand carried weapon that could penetrate the blue body shielding of the Kroth. Zykov had used it like a sniper rifle, blowing off a good number of Krothi heads thus far.
“You say you found ice here?” said Fedorov.
“Yes sir, back at the base of the slope. There could be more beneath the city, but we’d have to break through the stone pavement to get at it.”
“No need. I don’t know about you, Major, but I have a feeling the Kroth are still here somewhere. Can you feel it?”
“I do sir, and the men do as well. I can tell by the way they move. Yet the drones found no sign of them. I have three men on the slope still operating them. They’ve given me the all clear on these first five streets.
There were stone buildings to either side of the street, and the masonry was precise, with stones fitted together on fine sharp lines. In spite of the thousands of centuries that had passed since this city was built, the engineered stone remained smooth, in perfect alignment and largely unblemished. Fedorov saw one wall with an elaborately carved frieze in relief, and rows of characters along the bottom. He photographed it all, and looking at the images presented he thought it was a telling of the departure of Talas, a prominent Martian King as he assumed. He remembered the translation the computer had given him, “…Brave Talas bids us farewell, as he rises to greet the Old Ones and rejoin Kronos the Fair, and great Atlas, in Elysium. Ebrel has vowed to follow him. But Angatyr and Drakos remain among us, deep in the Labyrinth, and will not give up the fight…”
Entering this building the story continued to show the fate of Angatyr, or so Fedorov surmised. This relief was new and had not been seen by the drones, so he photographed it, and then entered a small alcove There he could not believe what he found. There was another carved frieze, and his eye fell on a figure that wore a helmet and enclosing garment that looked much like a man in an EVA suit! He was surrounded by Martian soldiers holding up a thicket of spears. It was an extraordinary find, and he quickly photographed it.
That was not all. Sitting on a high shelf within a small niche was a book! It was bound in something that looked like leather, though the front cover bore a slash mark from some sharp object. He wondered if he dared to touch it. Might it disintegrate before his eyes? What could its interior hold? Was it written on some kind of paper? Surely there could be no pressed leather parchment here. If so, that would be long gone, he thought, and what would it have been made from? Slowly, and with some sense of reverence, he reached up and opened the front cover. He wondered if it might relate something of the fate of those who built this small city sanctuary—the Sons of Ares. That name appeared in every frieze on the walls.
The interior was not paper, or parchment, but something of sterner stuff that felt like plastic lamination. It protected the page within, and this accounted for this book surviving the eons it had sat in this alcove untouched, unless the slash mark had been made by the Kroth. He saw the cover was metallic beneath a softer outer membrane that was eroding and disintegrating away. But the metal was untarnished.
“Oh, good Lord,” he said aloud. Should I take it with me? Or leave it where it sits, and just photograph the pages. It was rather thick, and the object was utterly priceless as he saw it. It would be the key to his final decoding of the Martian Language, perhaps recounting a history of what was happening on Mars at the time of the Kroth invasion. He had been teaching himself Martian words and phrases, and this book would advance that immeasurably. He simply had to have it.
He photographed it in situ, just as he first saw it with the cover closed. He estimated there might be 200 or more pages, a lot to try and photograph, though he took a photo of the first three pages. Then he slowly closed the book, taking a breath and closing his eyes as he whispered thanks to any Gods that led him to this amazing find. He could not wait to get back to Apollo with the book and study it in depth with the aid of the computer. But those Gods had other plans for him, and that was going to be a long wait.