“He’s dead,” Marcia repeated again. “That thing killed him.”
Jansen turned and looked back the way they had come. The massive bulk of the ruined asteroid towered over them. A line of those damned carrier drones was carefully picking its way down the loose scree about thirty meters away, then moving off across the sands in the wake of the monstrous creature that ruled this nightmare realm. They seemed to have a bit of trouble moving over the powdery, rock-strewn sands. Now and again one would flounder a bit. She looked around for one of the scorpion models. They, too, seemed to be slowed more than a little by the sands.
We still need samples, Jansen told herself, and a better chance wasn’t likely to come their way. Jansen looked down and realized that her rock hammer was still in her hand. She lifted it up, gave it a practice swing.
“Yeah, they killed him,” she said. “Let’s go pay them back.”
She staggered forward, brandishing the hammer, straight for the closest carrier drone, forcing herself not to think more than a split second ahead. Part of her knew she was running on hysteria, on adrenaline, on anger and fear, but that part also knew that what she was doing needed to be done. One step forward, another, another. And she was on top of the clumsy little robot carrying its vile burden. She spotted a sensory cluster similar to what she had seen on the scorpion that had killed McGillicutty.
She lifted her hammer and smashed it in.
The little machine dropped its burden, tottered forward a step or two, and collapsed in the sand, its two legs still working feebly. Its fellows ignored it and merely sidestepped the obstruction in their path. Jansen knelt down, wrapped her arms around the machine, and lifted it. It was surprisingly light. Behind her, Marcia knelt and picked up the thing they were calling an egg, cradling it in her arms like a baby. She caught Jansen’s eye, and the two women stared at each other for a long moment. Too much had happened.
They turned without speaking, and moved as quickly as they could toward the distant human camp.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Rabbit Hole
“Let me try once more to convince you. It’s a rock,” Mercer Sanchez said unhappily. “Hiram McGillicutty died and you risked your life stealing a rock, and we’ve wasted a day and a half confirming that fact.”
Jansen Alter frowned and stared at the egg-shaped thing sitting in the middle of the left-hand operating table. They were in the same field hospital that was treating Coyote Westlake. There hadn’t been any casualties to speak of, so most of the hospital had been pressed into service as a field lab. “Are you sure?” Jansen asked. It sure as hell looked like a rock, sitting inert in the middle of the table. It was a very plain brown ovoid, about the length of Jansen’s forearm from end to end, and maybe half that in width.
Mercer shook her head in frustration. “I’m a geologist, for God’s sake, and so are you. Of course I’m sure it’s a rock. We’ve x-rayed it, done sample assays, examined it under an electron microscope, drilled holes in it. It’s a perfectly normal sample of undifferentiated asteroidal rock, a lump of high-grade organic material, salted with nonorganic material. If I were a rock miner, I’d love to find a vein of this stuff to sell to Ceres. High-grade, water-bearing ore. But there’s no internal structure at all.”
“I don’t get it,” Jansen said. “The carrier bugs were treating these things like they were the crown jewels.”
“Maybe the bugs like rocks,” Mercer said. “Maybe they’re planning on building a decorative stone wall.”
The doors swung open and Coyote Westlake came in, dressed in pajamas and a loose-fitting robe. She looked wan and pale, but tremendously better than she had the day before.
“What are you doing out of bed?” Jansen asked. “You should still be resting.”
“I won’t argue with that,” Coyote said in a voice that was trying to be calmer than it was. “But they’re using the other beds in my room as an overflow dorm for some of the night-shift workers. One of them snores. Woke me up, drove me clear out of the room and I’m wandering the halls.” She nodded toward the egg-rock. “Any progress?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Jansen said, looking at Coyote carefully. She was obviously still stressed out, on edge. Someone who needed to be handled with care. “We’re just giving up. Mercer has established that our precious egg is a rock. A plain old boring lump of rock. Anything else going on?”
Coyote shook her head. “They finally got that robotics expert Smithers in from Port Viking, and they’re in the other operating room, dissecting the carrier-bug robot.”
“Dissecting it?” Jansen asked. “Don’t you disassemble a robot?”
“Not this one,” Coyote said. “Sondra told me it seemed to have a lot of organic components as well.”
Coyote shuffled forward a little further into the room. “Any news from the outside world?” she asked.
“Plenty,” Jansen said. “We’re up to ten landing zones now, and we’re probably going to have more soon. So far, all of them precisely on the equator. Between five and forty Lander asteroids at each site. And the Landers in Zones Three and Four have formed up into pyramids, just like ours.”
Jansen saw Coyote’s face change color at the news. Well, if anyone was going to have a visceral reaction to news of the Charonians, it ought to be Coyote.
Along with everyone else, Jansen had followed the action at Landing Zone One closely and been utterly baffled by it. It seemed that all the other zones were following the same pattern, albeit a step or two behind.
One thing they had learned: the Lander creatures were highly variable as to color, size, and shape, and the companion machines and creatures that rode with them were likewise quite different from Lander to Lander. The first Lander was attended almost solely by robots, and the fourth almost entirely by what appeared smaller versions of itself.
As far as anyone could tell, all of the variant forms of creatures and devices were functionally identical to their counterparts aboard the other asteroids. The differences seemed to be of style and emphasis, rather than substance.
Each grounded asteroid contained one of the huge Lander creatures. In every landing zone, the Landers acted the same way. Each Lander would break out of its asteroid. All the Landers in the group would proceed to a central point. Each would tow a large, floating, spherical object along behind itself. The consensus was that the floating spheres were gravity generators. While the Landers were meeting up, the auxiliary creatures and machines would continue disassembling the carrier asteroids.
Next, the Landers would join together, not just touching but merging, flowing into each other, melding their bodies into one larger amalgam creature. Four or ten or forty of the huge things would form up into a fat, four-sided pyramidal shape, all their gravity generators suspended directly over the apex of the pyramid like so many children’s balloons.
Jansen turned and looked out the one small window in the operating room. That was the stage the Zone One Landers had passed early this morning. There, right outside the window, three kilometers away, she could see the next and weirdest stage of all in progress. All the auxiliary creatures and robots from all the Landers were at work constructing a large structure around and atop the amalgam-creature pyramid, attaching the structure directly to the merged bodies of the Lander creatures.
None of the other zones were as far along as Zone One. No one knew what would happen when the companions were finished with their work. All the amalgam-creature structures were immense, the smallest surpassing the size of the largest Egyptian pyramid.
Coyote came up behind her and looked out the window.
“Look at those sons of bitches out there,” she said. “What the hell are they building?”
“God knows,” Jansen said. But it wasn’t such a good idea to get Coyote thinking about the massive creature she had shared an asteroid with. Jansen changed the subject. “Are they getting any clues taking the carrier-bug robot apart?”
“Who knows?” Coyote asked, her voice tired
and distracted. She had too many mysteries to deal with already. “Marcia and Sondra seem to be having a field day trying to figure out what made it go.”
Jansen looked at Mercer. “Want to go take a look?”
“Why not?” Mercer said. “Nothing happening here. Where do we store our rock? Or should we just dump it?”
Coyote turned from the window, a bit abruptly, and looked at them. “Leave it here and pretend you’re still studying it,” she said. “As long as that rock’s in here, you two have this room, and no one else can barge in to use it for some other experiment. This whole camp is crawling with people trying to find places to be busy. I could do with a nap in a room where no one’s snoring.”
Jansen grinned and nodded. Coyote Westlake was a pretty good conniver. “You’ve got a twisted mentality, Coyote. You’d make a good Martian. Come on, Merce, let’s go watch MacDougal and Berghoff dissect an alien.”
The two geologists left the room, and Coyote lay down on the empty operating table, with her back to the other operating table where the egg-shaped rock sat, a meter away. She was even more tired than she thought. She was asleep in half a minute.
Otherwise she would have noticed the slight quiver of movement on the other table.
* * *
The second operating room was crowded full to bursting with techs and observers and scientists trying to get a look at the carrier bug’s innards. Jansen had to stand on her tiptoes by the door to see. Marcia MacDougal, being a qualified exobiologist, was doing the actual carving, with Sondra right alongside her, eagerly picking over the pieces. Both of them were wearing surgical gloves and masks. In fact, everyone in the room had a mask on. That startled Jansen. Maybe it had crossed her mind that a person might be able to catch something from the living aliens—but from their robots? She noticed a mask dispenser by the door. She took one for herself and handed one to Mercer.
Sondra and Marcia had removed most of the carrier bug’s outer skin, revealing gears and linkages—and what looked disturbingly like lungs and a circulatory system. There was a small collection of subassemblies removed from the bug sitting on a side table, and a man who had to be Smithers, the Port Viking robot expert, was examining one of them through a jeweler’s loupe.
Marcia was speaking into a throat mike as she worked, in the manner of a pathologist doing an autopsy. “As should not be surprising, very little of the hardware on board the robot is immediately understandable, or even recognizable,” she said. “But we’ll get there. The data extracted from the Lunar transmissions should provide valuable insights into the design approaches that went into this robot. Though ‘design’ may be a misnomer. There is some evidence, in the form of what seem to be superseded and needlessly redundant subsystems that remain in place inside the robot, that the design of this machine might well have in part ‘evolved’ rather than having come to pass by deliberate effort.”
Sondra Berghoff was leaning over the carrier bug, poking it with a probe. “Bingo,” she said triumphantly. “This one I recognize.” She took up a cutting tool and snipped a subassembly away. She carefully lifted her prize from the bug’s torso and held it in her hands for all to see.
Smithers left the side table and came over to take a look. “What is it?” he asked.
“And how can you tell what it is?” Jansen wanted to know. It looked like all the other hunks of electronics that had already been yanked from the bug.
“It’s a gravity-wave receiver,” Sondra said. “A very small one, and a very strange one.” She pointed a gloved finger at a gleaming pair of cone shapes joined at their points, with a wire frame overlying both cones. “But some components, like antennas, have to be certain shapes and made certain ways if they’re going to work. And that gizmo there is a miniaturized gravity-receiver antenna. But it’s not like any gee-wave receiver I’ve ever seen. Almost like it’s designed to pick up a different form of gee waves we haven’t even detected. Like the difference between AM and FM radio. A receiver built for AM won’t even be able to detect an FM signal.”
Sondra turned the thing over and looked at it again. “If they’re building things to receive signals, they must be sending those signals. If we figure out how this thing works,” she said, “we can build some of our own and tune in on a whole new set of Charonian transmissions we didn’t even know existed.”
Mercer leaned in toward Jansen. “Janse, we need to get some pictures of that thing. I’ve got a buddy at Port Viking U. who’d love to see them.”
“Hold on a second. I left my camera in the other operating room.” Jansen said. She ducked out of the room and headed down the hall.
* * *
Coyote Westlake awoke with a start. There had been a noise at her back. For a half moment she wondered where she was. This didn’t look like her hab shed. Then it all came back to her. She was in the field hospital, napping on the operating table. But what was that noise at her back? She rolled over to look.
And froze.
That rock wasn’t a rock anymore. It was alive.
It had extruded two stalked eyes, a mouth, and a pair of crawling limbs. Its surface still looked like plain old rock, but even as she watched, bits of it started to peel and fall off, revealing gleaming skin.
And it was looking at her through eyes that took her clear back to her worst nightmare. The eye in the stone.
Her heart pounding, Coyote sat up on the table and carefully stepped off it backwards, keeping the operating table between herself and the rock monster.
She had to kill this thing. It moved forward, toward her, making a strange snuffling noise. It encountered the edge of the table, and its stalked eyes looked downward to investigate the situation.
Coyote used that moment to back away further, toward the wall. She looked around the room frantically searching for a weapon. Mercer’s geology kit. Her cutting laser. She could see it sticking out of the bag.
Keeping her back to the wall, Coyote shuffled around the room toward the laser. The rock monster had backed away from the table’s edge and was watching her again. Three more steps. Two. One. Coyote grabbed for the laser, and the sudden move startled the rock monster. It let out an aggressive-sounding growl and seemed to raise itself off the table a bit.
Coyote glanced down at the laser and fumbled with the control settings. Tight beam, maximum power. She looked back up and saw the thing open its mouth, revealing razor-sharp blade teeth.
There was a movement at the door. Acting on reflex, Coyote looked toward it and aimed the laser.
Jansen Alter came into the room and froze. The rock monster swiveled its eyes toward her. “Oh my God,” she said at last. “What is—”
“It’s no rock, that’s for damn sure.” Coyote hissed. She reaimed the laser, right between the thing’s eyes, and pressed the power button. A ruby beam sliced into the thing’s head, and it let out a death scream. Its skin bubbled and burst, it fell from the table, and dark brown slime splattered on the floor as it hit.
Coyote Westlake felt a rush of exultation. She had killed it. She had won, this time. But the shakes started coming back. It would take more than killing a rock monster for her to come all the way back.
But there was a gleam in her eye as she stepped over the slime and handed Jansen the laser. “Make sure it stays dead this time,” she said.
* * *
The cold stars of the Moon’s north polar sky glared down on the busy team below. A tense group of engineers stood inside the transparent pressure dome, watching the strain gauges on the flare drill. Larry, still holding the gee-wave detector that had led them to the spot, stood back a bit from the others, wishing they could all get out of their pressure suits. But there was no pressure in the dome yet, and if there was some later, it wouldn’t be anything you’d want to breathe. Everyone at the Pole had been briefed about the Wheel—but it would take something like a jet of gas from the Moon to convince most of them. The majority of the techs were skeptical, to put it mildly.
Larry was tired, bu
t that was understandable. They had roused him in the middle of the night, as soon as the news from Mars had come in. At least Lucian was being allowed to sleep. Lucian, exhausted by his rush trip to Central City and back, was going to need his rest.
Larry looked around at all the activity inside the dome. Four hours ago, this had been a barren piece of undistinguished Lunar landscape. But then the message from Mars came down, describing the alternate-form gravity-wave detector and how to build it. It hadn’t taken long to confirm that it received a form of gravity-wave signal beam.
The alternate-form detector was a device easy to build and easy to use—and it led them right to this spot the moment they switched it on.
“Strain drop to zero!” the flare controller called. “We’re breaking through—”
A cheer went up, but was drowned out almost immediately by a plume of dust and vile greenish gas jetting up from the drillhole. But the Martians had warned of that too, prompting the placement of the dome.
“Pressure in there for sure,” the drill-gang boss said, walking over to Larry. “God only knows what this muck is,” he said, fanning a hand through the fog. “Looks like the same stuff they had on Mars. You know what the hell is it?”
“Most likely biological waste products.”
“From the Wheel! You mean to say we’re walking around in gaseous Wheel shit?”
Larry turned his palms upward, the pressure-suit version of a shrug. “Could be. Probably. Your guess is as good as mine. But we’re through? Broken through into the top of the Rabbit Hole?”
“Still spooling up the drill head. Then we drop a camera and see what we’ve got. But yeah, we’re through. You guys get to find out what it is we’ve broken into. If I were you, I’d go wake up your pal and start getting into the teleoperator rig.”
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