Chapter 3 - The Labyrinth of Night

Author’s Note - A thought experiment: Try, right now, this very second, to picture an alien landscape, without comparing to or modifying an existing nonalien one.

What did you come up with? Anything?

It’s a difficult assignment, like “describe a color no one has ever seen.” You just fundamentally will end up resorting to comparisons to other more familiar items. This is the challenge I faced in attempting to describe the Martian landscape. Mars is, after all, an alien world. Yet, if you look at pictures sent back from our various robots on the Martian surface, all you can think of is “Hey, this looks like Arizona.”

If you’re an aspiring author, one who has a story set on Mars, you’re kind of stuck in this bind, of just describing Earth, then at the end, changing all of the “earth” placenames to Martian placenames. This does not do the Martian landscapes justice. And, more fundamentally, it fails to actually describe Mars. You’re always stuck in this place of describing your significant other via comparisons to your ex.

Noctis Labyrinthus is a real network of canyons on Mars. Technically, they’re grabens, but that’s an important bit of geology semantics that matters little to our story. It’s a real labyrinth. It’s right there in the name. Labyrinths, mazes, are interesting story elements, in that they can serve as fairly on-the-nose metaphors for being disoriented, adrift…lost. They’re also unnatural and spooky - there’s the notion that one might venture into the maze and never again find your way out. The maze may come to metaphorical life and consume you, if you’re unwary.

Mazes, from a certain perspective, are alien to us. They are self referential. The maze can only be compared to itself, to the concept of “mazes”.

So, the Labyrinth of the Night is a kind of metaphor nesting doll. A metaphor for alienness and one for disorientation, all anxiously bundled together.

Nestor runs into Noctis seeking refuge by becoming lost. He hopes that no one would ever find him there. He is wrong, of course, because beasts inhabit this maze, and they wish him harm with weapons that he finds indecipherable for reasons he does not fully grasp. How alien it must all feel to him. If we could only feel what he’s feeling, we might begin to understand how a true alien landscape might feel. A Martian one, perhaps.

Darkness came on quickly inside the sunken maze, and Nestor Creede was lost. Throughout his trip amongst the outlying canyons of the Labyrinth, he’d doubled back and taken smaller offshoots, trying desperately to make it difficult to track him here. It seemed to have worked, for he’d seen no other living soul. He knew he needed to stay close to the canyon walls, where the shadows would obscure the bulk of the truck, where an onlooker would need just the right angle to see him, but doing this seemed to interfere with his GPS, and the computer placed him in a canyon that looked nothing like the one before him. Matters were made worse when the floor of the canyon ahead became completely encompassed in late-day shadows, obscuring any detail that might help him narrow down his position. He didn’t want to turn on the headlights, for he was sure they would give him away in this wild and empty place. He eventually reckoned that there was nothing for it, and he needed to stop for the night and pick it back up in the morning.

Beyond trying to outrun whoever might still be in pursuit of him, Nestor had also been attempting to work his way to the south, under the assumption that perhaps he could use the Labyrinth to circle around Pavonis and approach from a safer direction. What he’d really have liked to do was go back to Poynting and kill Vincent, balance the scales of justice, pain for pain and horror for horror. But Nestor had no plan for that, and beyond not having any idea how he might go about such a thing, he found himself overwhelmingly nauseated at the mental images of the action itself, for it was too real, too close, and too horrifying.

He parked the truck in a shallow depression that cut back into the western canyon wall. The depression extended up and back about three hundred meters, with a large overhanging section along one side, which looked ripe for collapse, but not likely on this night. He looked around in the dark and decided that the truck was only visible from one angle and getting to such an angle would require driving up into this dead-end, which he hoped no one in search of him would attempt. The GPS lost signal here, but he could keep the map up, and he scrolled idly through it, trying to locate some route to get him out of here. Some route to safety. He was pondering what safety might be left for him in all this world when he fell asleep.

*****

Nestor dreamt that night of things he’d never seen, things which preceded his place in this world or the place of any human or trace of humanity. He dreamt of Olympus brooding in his prison by the sea and he dreamt of that great volcano glowering over all the space between them and he dreamt Olympus saw him and wished him ill.

In his dream Olympus formed thunderheads that towered over that great mountain’s head and sent those squalls east towards Nestor where he slept. The storms hit the Tharsis mountains and there they let loose their great gouts of water, which ran in flooding rivulets down the bulge and carved an impassible warren of omni-directional ravines there. The flood found its way to the Valley, which it filled all the way to the rim and scoured it and drained out into vast oceans to the east.

The flood of waters caught Nester, and they washed him into the tangle of grabens. He found a large rock there and held onto it while the rains fell and the water gushed all about him. All night he clung to that rock, battered fiercely by the flood. In the morning, the rains had ceased, for Olympus believed that no small creature could have survived such an onslaught. Nestor lowered from the rock and realized he was quite lost, for he could see no surface features inside those empty canyons, and could locate no way out. In his dream, he wandered long through the maze and he retraced his steps again and again and he found many dead ends along the way. He attempted to climb the walls, only to find they were too loose to support his weight and would crumble beneath him dangerously before he could make much height at all. After many days lost in the warrens, Nestor gave up and sat down upon a small bluff and pled with Mars to tell him what he had done to deserve such a fate as this, for he had only ever tried to help his kin.

In his dream, Mars heard Nestor’s plea, and he knew she felt great sympathy for him. He dreamt Mars went to Jupiter and asked if he would help Nestor find his way, and since Mars was Jupiter’s most treasured child, the great planet agreed.

Jupiter changed his orbit around the sun and chose a new one in which he could hang above the horizon on the route that Nestor should follow through the maze, and in his dream Nestor could see Jupiter’s brilliant light over the horizon at night and he followed it and it became brighter as he walked and then the light spoke to him and he awoke.

*****

He woke to a light shining in his face. He squinted and held up a hand to the hot white orb floating off his right shoulder, instinctively pulling back. There was something sticking out from the top of the orb, something that was round and black. A gun barrel. Someone was pointing a gun with a light on it at him. The light spoke, with a voice full of gravel, “He’s alive. Wakey wakey, sleepy head.”

He tried to scrabble back away, but hit the side of the truck cab, the driver’s seat-arm digging into his back as he leaned.

“Ah ah ah. There’s no getting away. Now come on. You need to put on your suit. We going outside.”

The light backed into the space in front of the passenger seat, lowering as its owner squeezed himself sideways in. Nestor paused for a moment, trying to understand what was happening.

“UP, NOW,” the light yelled, clearly not feeling much patience with his charge.

“Okay, okay,” Nestor almost instinctively put his hands up and came around the driver’s seat and walked to the back of the truck. He took only a couple steps before he felt the barrel of the gun pressed between his shoulder blades. He stooped into the cargo area to see two other men crouching on either side, both armed and wearing strange envirosuits that were form-fitting, pack-less, and designed for cramped areas. He grabbed his own suit and sat down to pull on the legs. The man with the light was pointing it at his chest now, and he could just make out a scruffy helmetless face peering at him from behind the light.

“Where you takin’ me?” he tried, hoping that asking questions wouldn’t get him shot.

“You’ll see. You ain’t stayin’ here, that’s for sure.”

“Are you the law?”

The man chuckled and shook his head. Nestor could see the others smiling as well. It was obvious, looking at any of them, that they couldn’t be further from any sort of law. They were ragged, bearded, and scarred, with scuffed suits and scoped, short-barreled guns that had folding stocks and long magazines, guns that looked like something a soldier might have carried in some long-ago conflict and then thrown away for trash upon its resolution.

“What do you think? You think the law comes out into the Labyrinth?”

Nestor looked around, “So what are you all then?”

“Us? We’re not anybody, kid. Did someone tell you to stop puttin’ that suit on? Come on, already. I’m already tired of waitin’ on you.”

Nestor pulled on the torso portion of his suit and pressed the seals into the waist, “How did you get in the airlock? It was locked up.”

The man sighed with much melodrama and then squinted at Nestor sarcastically, “Any one of us can crack a lock like that in less than thirty seconds. These range trucks are all the same, anyway; most the time the locks use the same maintenance override.”

Nestor dropped the helmet over his head and snapped it into place. The backpack kicked on and he could feel the suit filling with air and pressure. The man sat his gun to the side, put on his own helmet, then picked up the gun again and squeezed past Nestor to depressurize the cargo area. Then the man opened the door and dropped down to disappear from sight.

One man who’d been crouching off to the side stood up and gestured with his gun for Nestor to get out of the truck as well. Nestor climbed down the short ladder, dropping lightly to the ground below, and found the first man already standing there, his rifle at the ready. It was still very dark. Deimos hung directly overhead, and Nestor reckoned it the middle of the night.

The men’s truck was infested with spotlights facing every conceivable direction and all of them lit, a garish star that cast long bent shadows all about the little cove. Nestor could make out little else of that vehicle. It appeared much the same as the other truck he’d run into at the entrance of the Labyrinth, but he could not be sure.

As the other men dropped from the truck, they detached and moved off a few meters to join four others who were setting up a massive survival tent. Nestor had heard of tents like this all his life, but had never seen one. Tents rarely fared well in the Martian wind, were difficult to keep warm in the Martian night, and were worse to use than virtually any other option. Good only for emergencies, where no other option was available. But in this canyon there was no wind, and it seemed a fair bit warmer than usual. Here it seemed like a tent might work. This tent was an incredible one indeed, for it looked to be five meters per side and tall enough to stand up in, with an included fabric airlock and atmospheric generator, double-walled for insulation, with a large spindly structure of lightweight poles to keep it rigid.

The man with the lighted rifle noticed him staring at the tent and said over his coms, “Don’t even bother lookin’ at that tent, boy. You ain’t stayin’ in no tent. You stayin’ in there.”

He gestured toward a stubby box at the back of the modified range truck. It looked barely big enough to hold one person. As he pushed Nestor inside, he came back over the coms one final time, “Don’t take off yer helmet, understand? This box don’t have no air, no heat, and no pressure. I find it helps to keep folks nice and calm, knowin’ that if they tear a hole in their suit tryin’ to escape, they’ll be dead before anyone even thinks to check on ‘em.”

Nestor wasn’t sure, but he thought he could see a smile on the man’s face as he closed the door.

*****

Nestor jolted awake at the sound of someone fooling with the lock on the door. The fumbling went on for long seconds and then the entire box shook when the door was finally jerked open. Outside he could see it was just after first light, and the sky was gunmetal gray above the far rim of the canyon. In this faint light, he could barely make out the face of the man who’d opened the door, recognizing him as one of the men from his range truck. He looked different, more disheveled, his eyes glassy and red, and Nestor knew this look well, for his father had looked just like this for the last few years. The man fumbled with his coms button and finally found it and slurred at Nestor, “C’mon, git outta the box…Cricheck wans to see you.”

Nestor stood up and banged the top of his helmet against the roof of the box. He recoiled and stooped down and carefully disembarked. The man was no longer carrying a gun and was swaying slightly. Nestor considered for a moment that it would be quite easy to ram the man off his feet and make a run for it. The man frowned back at Nestor and seemed to read his mind and then shoved him hard, forcing Nestor to take a couple of steps back to catch himself.

“Go on, git movin’. The tent.”

He grabbed Nestor by the left shoulder with enough force that the boy could feel the man’s fingers digging through both the suit and the layer of air underneath. Nestor complied and walked the short distance over to the tent. He arrived at the flimsy tent airlock, its outer flap pinned up, and looked back at the man behind him.

“What’re you waitin’ on?” the man said, giving him a push forward, “Go on, git in there. Why are you so fuckin’ slow about everthing?”

Nestor bent under the flap and the man followed, turning around to seal them inside.

“Turn on the air generator there by yer foot,” the man said, gesturing to the small silver box. Nestor reached down and flipped the little toggle switch on top of the box and it roared to life. The man didn’t wait for the box to finish fulfilling its singular purpose and reached past Nestor to undo the inner flap while the airlock was still filling with breathable atmosphere. Nestor took this as his sign to continue moving and stooped through into the inner sanctum of the tent, taking off his helmet and hanging it by a strap from his belt as he entered.

As his helmet came off, the overwhelming reek of piss and sweat and liquor assaulted Nestor. There were three men sitting in their beaten-up envirosuits with helmets off at a folding table in the center of the tent. No one had bothered to set up any other sort of furniture whatsoever, and the other men of the party had sprawled passed out on the fabric floor itself. Bottles of liquor were scattered everywhere, with some propped half full inside helmets, and other emptier bottles strewn about the floor haphazardly. The men’s guns had been similarly tossed around the tent and seemed to have been dropped wherever each man had lost interest in carrying his.

The man who’d woken Nestor up in his range truck, who Nestor guessed must be the aforementioned Cricheck, was sitting at the table and gestured for Nestor to come sit in the one open seat in front of him. Nestor complied, avoiding the detritus on the floor as he walked over to sit in the flimsy folding chair. The man who’d escorted him to the tent went to a corner and dropped heavily down and laid his head back against the thin fabric wall and closed his eyes. Of the three men sitting at the table, only Cricheck was sitting fully upright. The man to Nestor’s left was sprawled on the table, his face in a puddle of drool, and the man to his right had slumped back in his seat, his chin to his chest. Cricheck looked as drunk as his friends, but there was a quality to him sitting there that conveyed a sense of coiled tension. He leaned forward to rest his elbows on the table and face in hands as Nestor took his seat.

“How you enjoyin’ yer accommodations, boy? Are they to yer likin’?” he slurred, grinning contemptuously at his prisoner.

Nestor shrugged, the bulk of his suit mostly eating the movement, “They fine, I guess.”

Crichek’s grin faded, “They’s about as good as you gonna get, here on out.”

Nestor stared at him and wondered where this was going.

Crichek leaned back in his seat and put his hands behind his head and then squinted at Nestor in half-lidded drunkenness, “Who are you, kid?”

“I ain’t no one. Name’s Nestor.”

“I know yer name, Nestor. What I don’t know is why anyone would want to pay a bounty on you. From what I can tell jes sittin’ here, yer nothin’ but a starvin’ dust farmer’s kid.”

Nestor shook his head and shrugged again.

“Dunno, huh? I don’t believe that fer a second. This bounty on you from the mob over in Poynting is a fortune. Enough that ever man in this tent right now won’t need to work for some time, once we turn you over. If they don’t drink it all away, that is.”

Crichek winked conspiratorially at Nestor and grinned in that weird contemptuous way again. Nestor noticed that the eyelid for the eye that hadn’t winked seemed to not fully open, and was permanently stuck at half-mast, which made Crichek appear to be unimpressed no matter what the rest of his expression conveyed.

“Seriously, mister. I ain’t no one, and I don’t think I’m the person you lookin’ for. Ain’t no bounties on me.”

“Bounty said a kid in a beat-up ol’ range truck out in the Labyrinth, who answers to Nestor. How many of them you think there are, kid?”

Nestor shrugged again and looked down and to the side. He tried his best to hide that he noticed one of the men’s guns laying at most an arm’s length away from his foot.

Crichek persisted, “Yer him. I don’t much appreciate bein’ lied to, normally, but this time I’ll let it slide. Know why?”

Nestor shook his head and looked back up at Crichek again. Crichek met his eyes and beamed.

“Well, see, here’s the thing. We found you after dark, and I hate drivin’ in this place in the dark. So’s we set up camp here till mornin’, and I turned on the law enforcement band on my radio over there to keep me company, because it’s always a good idea to know what the law is up to. And what do I hear on their band? Why, I hear that they’re lookin’ for some kid in a farm truck who’s tied up somehow with the mob in Poynting.”

He stopped to look at Nestor meaningfully. Nestor simply looked back at him and tried to keep his expression mild. This was apparently not what Crichek wanted, as he shook his head and stopped grinning.

“I’m an honest man, believe it or not. Like fer everone to know where they stand. Always been that way. I’d like you to understand that, too. I think you are that kid who the law’s lookin’ for, and I know yer the one who the mob is lookin’ for. And I been thinkin’, sittin’ here and drinkin’, waitin’ on the law to get back to me with what they’ll pay fer you if I take you that way instead of t’other. And what I’m thinkin’ is this–why in the world would anyone care about you this much? You don’t look like nothin’ to me. Some gutter trash. No offense, I was gutter trash, too, of a time. But if you are that, then the only thing you’d have, that anyone’d want, would be if there was somethin’ you know that’s a secret.”

He paused again for a long time, so long that Nestor began to wonder if he’d somehow passed out with his eyes open. Finally, he pierced the silence again, his voice a low growl.

“Well? What do you know that’s so interestin’? Did you stumble on some mob dealins or somethin’?”

“I don’t know nothin’, mister. I don’t know why anyone would be after me.” Nestor looked him fiercely in the eye.

Crichek shook his head, slowly and methodically. “Nuh-uh, that ain’t goin’ to work. I’m no fool, and I know a lie when I hear one.”

“Seriously mister. I don’t know nothin’.”

Crichek ceased leaning back and pivoted his body forward in a weird, stiff motion that ended with him on his feet and looming over the shaky table, holding the edges with his hands. His voice was still a growl, but now it was very low, almost a whisper.

“You got yerself a choice now, boy. You can lie to me again and I’ll kill you right here. It won’t be nothin’ to me. Hell, Vincent might even pay me better to deliver you dead. You can bet that’s what he intends for you anyhow. Or you can tell me the truth, and maybe if what you know is worth somethin’ to me, you don’t have to go either direction, to the mob or to the law.”

“Yer sayin’ if I tell you what I know, you’ll jes let me go?”

Crichek smiled a glaring smile, one that seemed to only involve his mouth, “Of course. You tell me what you know, and I’ll set you free. You can go live in the dust till yer heart’s content.”

Nestor considered this for a moment, “I know where the mob stores their…their stuff.”

Crichek let go of the table and looked at Nestor skeptically and began to pace slowly back and forth. He produced a large folding knife from a pocket on his suit and he began absently tapping his bottom lip with the point of it as he paced.

“That so? And where is this? What kind of ‘stuff’?”

“Smuggled food. The fancy stuff. On my family’s claim. In our huts. I know which specific ones they usin’ right now. If you let me go, I’ll write down the locations for you.”

Crichek paused and stared absently at Nestor for a moment. Then some small manner of his face changed slightly, almost as if it had grown darker where he stood. He nearly sprung to Nestor’s side, and he leaned over and whispered in Nestor’s ear, “No need to write ‘em down. You can jes tell me now. I have a real good memory.”

Nestor tried looking at the man off his shoulder and had to crane his neck in a strange uncomfortable way to see him. “I…I think I need some sort of proof you’ll let me go once I tell you.”

Suddenly the knife was at his cheek and Crichek was slowly drawing the point down along the flesh, not pressing hard enough to cut, but enough to leave a sensate trail behind as he drew it along, “Tell me now and if I believe you I promise I won’t slit yer throat right here.”

Nestor froze, his mind flooding with the crystal-clear image of his father’s cheek laid open. Jaw working grotesquely in full view. His throat bubbling out a curtain of blood. A wave of dizziness and nausea bubbled up from Nestor’s belly and he worked his throat to fight the sickness, struggling against the spasms in his abdomen, but his horror overcame his panic and he jerked forward and retched. Crichek stepped back away from him and from his prospective vomitus and stumbled drunkenly over an upside-down helmet behind his heel and pratfell hard, letting go of the knife as he fell.

Nestor stayed doubled over his knees and tried to suppress any further sickness, spitting several times to clear the taste of bile from his mouth. He opened his eyes, looking directly at the gun. Crichek was laughing for reasons beyond comprehension from his place upon the floor off on the other side of him, and Nestor realized this was his chance and in a single unified movement reached out and grabbed the gun and spun himself about and stood, his chair tumbling backward as he rose. He pointed the gun at Crichek, who was himself fumbling about in search of the dropped knife, which had bounced across the floor to come to rest by the tent wall. Nestor could see in his periphery where the knife lay, but his eyes did not shift from Crichek.

Crichek looked up at Nestor with a strange sort of arrogance and brought his legs under himself and leant towards Nestor, looking for all his efforts like he was about to pounce, “You still ain’t gettin’ it, is you boy? That gun in yer hands ain’t gonna make the least bit of difference. You cain’t get away, not even if you run. I’ll find you wherever you go, and if you kill me, one who’s worse’n me will find you instead. Maybe even one of these boys here.”

Nestor shouldered the gun and pointed it at Crichek and pulled the trigger to earn his freedom. The trigger didn’t fully depress, and the gun sat mute and motionless in his hands.

Crichek glared his contemptuous half-lidded grin at Nestor, “’Course, you need to know how to use the gun if yer gonna try to kill me with it.”

He pivoted himself forward, rising first to his knees and then to his feet, moving methodically, his eyes never once leaving Nestor and the gun. Nestor stared back down the sights of the weapon at his captor and felt blindly with his index finger all around the trigger, trying to find the safety and failing.

Crichek had begun circling the table with that same slow, methodical movement, every step purposeful. Nestor backed away and circled the opposite direction, trying to keep the table between them. The tent was deathly silent, the snores of the other men suddenly gone, though none in Nestor’s view had yet moved. Nestor wondered if any were truly still asleep and decided not to chance it and backed further from the table. He noticed movement on his periphery to the right. He flicked his eyes that way to see the man who’d come to get him from his box earlier moving laterally towards Nestor in a kind of protracted pincher movement with Crichek.

Nestor still could not find the gun’s safety and was unavoidably aware of how little room he had to maneuver within this cramped reeking tent and yet how far away was the entrance. He brought his other hand back down the barrel towards him and searched blindly with it, desperate to feel any button that might make this hunk of useless steel in his hands into a weapon. Right above the gun’s long curved magazine he felt a tab and tried pressing it. It didn’t move. The man to his side was very close, nearly close enough to reach out and grab him, and he ran his finger back and forth over the button, trying to work out what it was supposed to do, and found a lateral groove behind it. He tried sliding the button back, and it moved with just a slight bit of tension and then with a click the magazine dropped from the gun.

Nestor barely had time to process what had just happened when the man to his side leapt forward and grabbed the barrel of the gun and jerked it hard down and away from Nestor. Nestor might have otherwise fought him for the weapon, but it was at this point that Crichek charged him. Nestor leapt away instead, letting go the gun and falling and landing hard on his shoulder by the tent wall. Crichek was standing right where Nestor had just been and spun about and pounced and landed on top of the boy. Nestor rolled and spilled Crichek loose, and then on his side kneed his attacker hard in the gut, knocking the wind out of the bigger man. His eyes flicked around the tent and he noticed the other men coming to their feet now, turning to face him, and the man with the gun stooping to pick up the magazine and slide it effortlessly back into place.

Nestor rolled again and then scrabbled on his back towards the far wall. He looked all around, searching for another gun. Crichek was drunkenly righting himself and looked to be preparing for another pounce, and the man with the gun had swung it to point at Nestor. Nestor looked up at the tent wall above him, then to his side, once again seeing the knife, now sitting by his left hand. He grabbed it and held it pointed at the men approaching him and they smiled at his futile gesture. He looked back up at the tent wall and swung his arm up in a broad arc and felt the knife bite into the double-walled plastic and felt it slip through and felt it tear as he dragged it down to him.

The men froze as the meager air inside the tent gusted out, the fabric flapping with the wind escaping from all about them. Nestor took advantage of their surprise and flipped his helmet up to snap it on and then dove through the hole as if being birthed to a new frigid, dusty life of freedom on the other side. The men had fallen to fighting each other over whatever helmet they could find and had temporarily forgotten their quarry and the flapping of the fabric was already subsiding as the last air inside the tent seeped away.

He scrambled to his feet and ran for his range truck, covering the distance easily, and hauled himself up the ladder, not bothering with the airlock at all. As he sat in the driver’s seat, he looked back through the open truck to see one man climbing through the hole in the tent wall, already helmeted and armed. He turned on the truck and bounced up out of the landslide and then down the draw and he heard bullets thunk as they burrowed uselessly into the lead radiation-protecting plating on the side of the truck as he fled.

He kept the truck going as fast as he dared over the loose gravel of the canyon floor, taking every turn he came across, keeping his lights off in the deep dawn shadows. He drove this way for a long time, monitoring the faulty GPS, trying in vain to mentally draw a course through the warren of canyons around him, the wide rift valleys, the deep draws that dead ended suddenly. He kept the rear view camera up on his console, in constant dread of some sign of the bounty hunters in pursuit. Nothing appeared.

He spent the next several hours carefully picking his way through the network of canyons, lost in the task of thoroughly evading an enemy that he’d not actually seen in pursuit of him. He’d have gone on this way forever if his suit battery’s warning hadn’t suddenly gone off, incessantly beeping in alarm that his battery was nearly exhausted.

Nestor didn’t bother finding a spot to hide; he simply brought the truck to a stop and parked it. He sat for a while and listened to his suit beeping and watched the rearview camera. Occasionally he peered behind himself, out through the distant open airlock doors, checking to confirm that there was not some dread pirate lurking back there. Still nothing came. No matter how hard he tried, he could not shake the feeling that he was still being hunted and was still at a loss because of some unforeseen advantage of his pursuer.

Eventually he convinced himself to break away from the camera and got up and stooped back to the rear of the truck. He grabbed a replacement battery and walked to the open airlock and looked out at the canyon behind him. He popped out the discharged battery, the suit suddenly falling silent, and the air in his helmet almost immediately tasting stale. He popped the new battery in, and his suit whirred back to life, everything back to normal. His eyes wandered out of the open door, along the canyon walls behind him, and he marveled at how they waved and wandered and how truly incomprehensible this place was.

He’d grown up hearing stories about travelers who booked dubious passage through the Labyrinth, only to disappear, never to be seen again. He absently wondered, if the Labyrinth was so hard to navigate, so dangerous to try to callously cross, then what made the bounty hunters so special? What did they know Nestor couldn’t? There had to be some other advantage they had.

He wondered if it was possible to track his GPS. It had to connect with a satellite to work, and so that satellite surely knew where he was. If the bounty hunters could access those satellites, then they’d know where he was, too. He stared at the canyons behind the truck for a long time mulling this over, trying to decide what to do. Finally, his mind made up that he was being tracked by the GPS, he decided it must come out.

He stooped forward to the cab and reached up to undo the access panel on the ceiling. He unscrewed the module’s mounting screws, unplugged two wires, and stood there, holding it. He looked at the console screen, which now read NO SERVICE. He looked down at the module, not sure what to do with it. If he kept it, he’d want to use it, and he was sure that it would immediately give away his position the moment he plugged it back in. No, he had to get rid of it.

Nestor carried the module to the back of the truck and threw it hard at the far canyon wall. The module landed well short and bounced to a stop in the dust. He closed the door and repressurized the truck and took off his helmet as he sat in the driver’s seat again, and then he stared at NO SERVICE on the console screen. He sat there for a few moments and tried to convince himself to go back out and get the module, for it was such a foolish idea to leave it behind. He had no plan, no idea how to get out of this place, no ability to keep himself safe. It was suicide to drive away from here, and a pointless one at that, for he was not certain the bounty hunters could even track his GPS. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath and reached out to turn off the screen. He reopened his eyes with them pointed outside and they traced a crack up the canyon wall, following it all the way to the top, hoping that some other notion might come to him while he tarried here. He looked down at the rearview camera. Still nothing arrived. He looked ahead again, pressed the accelerator, and bounced away.

*****

Hours of directionless driving passed before he came upon a vaguely star-shaped valley. The western pair of the valley’s arms dwindled back into steep canyons anew, leading away in their respective directions. The northeast arm of the valley had collapsed in a titanic landslide dating back across the eons and still ongoing, with kilometer-long-mounds of dust slowly sliding down the grade, pushed by the wind howling in from the surface. To the southeast was a wide terraced rift valley, the terraces of stone dispassionately pulled out stepwise from the slope in variegated ways by some primordial giant. Perhaps by Olympus himself. Nestor decided to go this way, preferring the apparent rock of that surface to any of the other options.

The terraced ridge he chose extended perhaps thirty kilometers along the rift valley and travel was much slower going than he’d hoped. The rock of the terrace was crumbling and brittle and the big tires of the range truck scrambled for purchase within it for the weight of the truck caused the rock to pulverize to thick mire. After hours of carefully picking his way along, he reached an end of the terrace on a promontory that looked out over the broad, broken valley below. Bluffs jutted up everywhere and tiny ravines and trap canyons wound all around, a minor chaos of geology spread before him like an imaginative child’s sandbox. He paused and looked around the prominence, following its edge to the far wall, up and into a plethora of shallow surface canyons that spread like crows’ feet about Mars’s great squinting eyes, marking her death mask with pain and gaiety and wisdom, all long past but not yet forgotten by the landscapes in which those feelings had been marked. He looked down the slope into the valley, mining his experience on the slopes of Ascraeus to evaluate the grade. He thought he saw a way down, for to the left there was a long steep slope, the result of some past erosion of that wall, fanning all along and down the foreland’s face.

He crabbed down this landslide, outright sliding down some portions. It was a three-kilometer descent, taking at least an hour to fully complete. In truth, he’d stopped tracking time long before he got to the bottom. Finding a better surface on the valley floor, he roared away from the landslide and followed the first drainage he came across. Steep bluffs with pebbled gravel surfaces quickly surrounded him. He evaluated them each on merit and decided each time he did not wish to attempt the climb. The drainage he was in wound serpentine and directionless about the landscape, never quite finding its way anywhere, and after hours more of travel he realized he had circumnavigated the rift valley entirely and had returned to the foot of the initial promontory, which now jutted out thousands of meters above him. At the top of that overlook sat Crichek’s truck, its windows shining brightly in the sunlight. He wondered for a moment if they saw him down here, and as he pondered this, the truck above him began to move. Probing for a way down.

Nestor stared at the cliff and then looked all around him futilely and wished for some better alternative. He focused upon his tracks descending to the side and watched them wind away into the loop he’d just made, and he sat back in his seat and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands to keep himself from weeping in frustration. He sat a long time just staring at the face of the cliff, not knowing what to do, waiting to see the bounty hunters bouncing down to come and capture him, wishing he had someone here who could tell him what step to take next, what path to follow that would not lead to ruin.

On some heedless impulse, he turned the big truck around and drove out across the middle of the valley floor, scanning the country to his south and east for some exit. He saw nothing there but bluffs and ravines, and he found a bluff that looked suitable on the eastern edge of the valley and headed up. The truck bogged down in the deep loose gravel, spinning rocks out behind, each centimeter of progress hampered by constant backslides. He beat the wheel in aggravation and he cursed the scree and dust and he continued on nonetheless for this was no place to flag and no place to stop. It was late afternoon before he emerged at the rounded top of the bluff and paused and looked out behind him to see the glint of his pursuers upon the valley floor. He immediately began descending the opposite side, sliding on the loose surface into a twin of the valley he’d just exited, this new rift valley also running north-south. He came across a granite intrusion that wound bizarrely about the slope on his way down and followed that, practically luxuriating in the hard, smooth surface.

This river of granite eventually wound to the southeast across the valley until it ran beneath the eastern wall. Nestor’s intention was to travel east, but he could find no way past the thousand-meter-tall walls blocking that direction. He followed the wall down the valley as it broadened and deepened until he found a sharp ravine with a steep incline heading up to the surface to the east and he begrudgingly climbed up this slope, for lack of a better alternative. The truck and Nestor’s stomach both groaned at the angle of his climb and through the front windows Nestor could see only sky and he persisted until he crested the top of the incline just as night was falling. Below him the shadows stretched through the maze of deep canyons that seemed to run beyond infinity into the gloom. He knew out there prowled men in pursuit of him, and he despaired for he could no longer see where they may be. He watched the gathering dark below him and hoped that the bounty hunters would turn on their plethora of lights so he could locate them, but no lights came on and nevertheless he stared until he fell into a restless sleep.

The next morning he descended into that geomorphological madness and immediately lost all sense of direction and fell to picking routes at random upon gut feelings that were as much starved indigestion as they were inspiration. Bitter with his situation and exhausted, he came across a climb back to the surface and took it, hoping for a better chance at reckoning his location up above. He crested to see the bounty hunters upon the surface at a distance of several kilometers. Between them were many canyons and he could see no route his pursuers could take to get to him, but he saw them see him and turn and begin searching to find just such a path.

He drove aimlessly and panicked, and found those lands broken and impossible to follow in any one direction. Regretting his decision to ascend, he began looking for a way back down, but could find nothing, and near dark on this day he decided to attempt to switch back crudely down the vertiginous slope into the canyon directly to his north. He made it safely down the slope shortly after dark and stopped his truck at the feet of that wall and collapsed in exhaustion. Off his bow he could see Jupiter hanging over the horizon, and remembering his dream, decided to travel that way when he awoke the next morning.

He would spend much of that next day holding this course through canyon after canyon, trying to find a new route east and constantly thwarted. By luck alone he came upon a canyon that widened into a valley, the walls fading to the horizon, the center seeming to gather sand until it coalesced into a miniature dune sea. He saw no hint of his pursuers on this day, but exposed as he was, he felt sure they would find him at any moment and so he drove out recklessly to skirt that sea of sand, and he stayed at this task for the remainder of that day and much of the following morning.

Around noon of the subsequent day, he came upon towers of rock jutting from the valley floor, a lost city of geologic ancients whose skyscrapers of weathered stone were hidden deep in this maze, far from any living man’s prying eyes. The dune sea washed upon the feet of the monoliths and spread further and deepened and filled the entire valley to the very limit of vision. No valley walls were visible in any direction and the air here was thicker and held a pink-green light not familiar to Nestor, and as he paused at the final terminus of rock jutting into that ocean of sand, he watched the sky all about him change from pink to black when the stars made their sparkling arrival and the sun fell to its rest behind him.

*****

The next morning, Nestor started across the dune sea. Going was rough in the sand, for the range truck’s exceptional mass sunk deeply in, bogging him down. He tried to climb exactly one dune in the truck, making it less than a third of the way up its hundred-meter-tall face before giving up and allowing the truck to slide limply back down. He couldn’t go over the dunes, but he found it easy to follow the minor valleys between the dune crests, and so he stuck to these low areas as they shifted and blew in the unabating Martian wind.

It took him most of the morning to cross the sea this way, trying to avoid the biggest dunes, which seemed to concentrate to the south of the great valley. He traveled robbed of direction or purpose by this place inimical to landmarks, and as time wore on his only goal became to escape the dunes. It was in this state that, around mid-morning, he came upon the north wall of the valley, and he exalted as the dune sea fell away behind him. But as he approached the wall, he saw he couldn’t continue on this way, for in his path lay a canyon-within-the-canyon running to the east. He chose instead to reverse and take the gentle slope to the south, winding back down to trace the edge of the sea.

He emerged into the broader Mariner Valley in mid-afternoon, and carefully hugged the north wall of the canyon to keep away from the dunes that spilled down the center, and drove in a torrent of grit that perpetually poured down the wall above him. He spent that night in a sort of cove carved in towering walls that seemed to define the very edge of existence, and as the sun set and temperatures cooled, clouds formed to wreath their middle heights in a kind of transient white canopy.

The next day, Nestor started to come across the aboveground settlements. They were centuries old and decrepit from the scouring they’d received from the wind and sand. The first one he came upon looked like it had been violently disassembled, and pieces of metal and plastic were scattered for kilometers around the apparent center of the town, with no standing structures to speak of. All that remained of that place was a grid of rapidly disintegrating roads and the skeletal remains of buildings. This town had a road that departed to the east, and he followed that line of slumping concrete until it disappeared into the dunes. He circumvented the blockading dunes and drove on, coming across settlements every so often as he drove, each and every one of them a little cluster of dead dreams blown apart and away by the wind.

In one abandoned burgh of spindles and spikes he came across a field of meter-high rounded stone platters jutting up from the ground covering the small hills in every direction. He had seen no hint of the bounty hunters in days, and feeling secure here, he stopped the truck and walked among the stones for some time, hoping to come across some explanation of what he was seeing. The stones themselves offered few answers as the sand had worn most smooth and the few that were not told tales in alphabets he’d not seen before and could make no sense of whatsoever.

In his walkabout through this strange place, he came to a hillside eroded by the wind and collapsed in a minor landslide and the resulting flow peppered throughout by the strange stones and two-meter-long boxes. He crab-walked through the friable incline to a box and he found it to be made of some thin material that had cracked and splintered, and peering inside he saw the mummified body of a small child, still clutching some toy or trinket in its withered hands. He could not help but see his brother Eric in that box instead and decided he wished to see nothing further and mounted back up into the truck and drove on.

Of living people he saw none. He refused to stop at any further settlements, for he no longer wished to know what tales they still told. Near sundown, his path took him up a steep slope along the northern wall, lifting him thousands of meters above the valley floor, yet still thousands more from the surface. He looked down at the country below him and could see spread throughout that place hundreds of little clusters of eroded human refuse, each one a settlement, each one abandoned to the wind and the dust. The metal and glass that hadn’t fully oxidized yet sparkled like forgotten jewels all throughout, as if a handful of the gems of humanity had been nonchalantly tossed into the chasm, and where they’d fallen, they’d stayed to erode away.

The storm hit midway through the following day. He was nearing the end of this branch of the chasm and towering above him was a headland defining the edge of a massive ridge that ran down the middle of the valley proper. In front of him stood a new and vast dune sea. He’d been sticking to the wall of this valley, and as that wall vanished at the headland, he could see only dunes. He knew by now that he must be in the Mariner Valley, but said valley was thousands of kilometers long, and he had no way of knowing which of those multitudes he occupied. Out in the distance, on the ocean of sand before him, a wall of dust towered, seeming to extend up to space itself.

It was a tremendous haboob, the opaque front billowing with red and orange dust, the entire enormous mass racing across the sand sea unimpeded. Purple and white lightning arced before it as the storm reached out to touch with stellar plasma those things it found most detestable. Nestor tried to hide the truck between rises, but the storm poured over him unabated, obscuring everything. He drove for a short while in the blind searching for better protection, while the dust scoured every surface and somehow found its way into the truck to filter lightly down around him. The wind howled in anger at his audacity and shoved the truck around with fury. He ultimately gave up and stopped the truck where it stood and peered out at the riot of grit swirling around him as it formed ephemeral shapes that flared and morphed and faded. In them he saw his father and he saw Victor and he saw Crichek and he saw his mother and she looked sad, and he wished momentarily to go out and comfort her. He decided this was a trick of the eye or perhaps a trick of the storm itself to tempt the lost traveler to abandon his ship and walk away, sacrificing himself to a mirage that might shift into something wholly more horrifying once the traveler was sufficiently away from safety. As the truck rocked, and the visions through the windows continued unabated, he found himself lulled into a sleep that he hadn’t experienced in years. He closed his eyes, and he dreamt of the shapes outside coalescing from dust into dirt and then from dirt into flesh. Fully formed into his forlorn friends and foes and family, the shapes gathered around to gaze upon him serenely while he slumbered.