“Try a better question. Like why? These things are the size of mountains. They can land on a planet and just take over. But they disguise themselves as rocks and hide, maybe for millions of years at a time. So what are they hiding from? What’s dangerous enough to scare them?”
That drew Lucian up short, and the suit technician too.
“Jesus,” Lucian said. “I hadn’t thought of it that way. But why? Why land asteroids and build pyramids on Mars?”
“And Venus and Mercury and the big moons of the outer planets as well,” Larry said. “Word from all over: radar scans of Venus, Sunside flyovers of Mercury, and eyewitness accounts from Ganymede and Titan. These things are going up everywhere.”
“Why? And who? Who is doing this? Are the Lander creatures the ones running the show, or is it the Wheel— or something else?”
“Answer those questions, and you’ll be earning the really big money,” Larry said, a forced and frightened smile on his face. The tension between the two of them was eased, at least for the moment.
“Any update from the drilling crew?” Lucian asked.
“Got a call just before you came in. Confirmation just a minute or two ago: we’ve drilled down into a hollow cavity. They dropped a camera on a cable—and found the top of a hollow shaft fifty meters across, six hundred meters under the surface. Now they’re using a heavyweight Gopher shaft borer to widen the drillhole. Crew boss said it’s strictly routine tunnel-cutting procedure.”
Lucian nodded woodenly. “Except that the next step is to hang me on a cable and lower me down a hole forty kilometres deep,” he said.
Larry shivered at that thought as the suit tech made the last hookups to the armoured suit. But what else could they do? Fly a spaceship down?
There had even been some serious thought about doing just that, and a small rocket-powered lander had been flown to the pole just in case—but the dangers were simply too great. Lowering Lucian on a cable seemed risky, but flying a lander inside an enclosed and pressurised area seemed insanely dangerous, all but suicidal.
But suppose the cable broke? What if one of those scorpion robots was down there, and decided to snip it in two?
Given time, Larry had no doubt they could have come up with a better way to do it. But there was no time. Those damn pyramids were going up on every world except the Moon. Humanity needed to know what they were for.
And they had a deadline. The Saint Anthony, travelling inert, on a leisurely course that was supposed to keep the Charonians from noticing it, would be at Earthpoint in another day. There was no way to stop, or even delay, the probe. Nor was there a desire to do so. Delay might mean detection. But once the Saint Anthony went through the Earthpoint wormhole, the game might well be up.
The Charonian leaders—whoever and whatever they were—would very likely prevent any further contact. Earth would need every scrap of data it could get, every scrap the investigators in the Solar System could relay to the Saint Anthony before the probe went through the hole in search of Earth.
And it was a pretty good bet that what answers there were waited at the bottom of the Rabbit Hole. Down the hole. Larry shivered at the very thought.
Larry blinked suddenly, and came back to himself. “There’s one other thing that comes out of the news from Mars. Now we know how to listen in to their gravity-wave transmissions. The machine shop is rigging up induction taps for us to carry down. They should be able to pick any signals the Wheel sends, convert them to radio signals, and relay them up the Rabbit Hole to the surface. Trouble is, for the induction taps to work, they have to be physically attached to whatever they are tapping.”
Lucian looked grimly at Larry. “And I’m the guy who has to put them there. Great.”
◊ ◊ ◊
The elevator cage was an open box-girder frame about three meters on a side, the whole affair welded together on the spot and then wrestled through a cargo lock into the pressure dome. Lucian, encased in his armoured suit, stood on the far side of the shaft opening and looked at the cage a bit uncertainly. It sat on the ground, right at the edge of the pit.
The transparent pressure dome held the greenish gas in, making the dome interior just hazy enough to dim the outlines of the cold grey landscape outside, causing the Moon’s surface to look sickly and sad. The Gopher borer sat hunched down on the surface outside the dome, and the dozers were still clearing the huge masses of pulverised rock the Gopher had heaved back toward the surface.
Lucian stepped into the cage, sat in his crash couch, and turned his head to regard his companion for this little jaunt. It sat there, motionless, on a packing case full of radio relay gear. A humanoid teleoperator. And an ugly one, too: all angles and cameras, wires and servos, more closely resembling a human skeleton than a human. Its dark metal frame was gaunt and wiry, and the object above its shoulders could be called a head only because of its position.
Two primary television camera lenses were more or less where the eyes should go, and two strangely sculpted mikes where the ears should go. But half a dozen other auxiliary camera lenses, and boom and distance mikes, augmented its operator’s senses. For the moment, it was on standby, and Lucian was grateful for that. It gave him some feeling of privacy.
He did not like being stuck with a teleoperator. Most people would have called the thing a robot and been done with it—it certainly looked like a humanoid robot—but then most people weren’t going deep into the Moon with it. Lucian needed to keep the difference in mind. A true robot does its own seeing and doing, its own thinking, right on the spot. Unfortunately no robot was quickwitted enough, or smart enough, to be trusted in a situation like this.
Lucian felt a wave of anger pass over him. Larry was going to stay up here, topside and safe, enjoying the vicarious thrills of virtual reality while Lucian went below for real. But that was unfair. Larry had wanted to go, but Daltry had prevented him when Lucian himself kicked up a fuss. Perhaps it was Larry Chao who had brought this disaster down on all their heads with his damn-fool experiments, but Lucian was honest enough with himself not to label Larry a coward.
The teleoperator was there to make things easier on Lucian. All communications between Lucian and the people topside would go through Larry and the T.O., so that Lucian would have to deal with only one voice. The T.O. would have all its cameras going, recording everything, so that Lucian would have no need to take pictures.
But most importantly, Larry was in that teleoperator control rig to watch Lucian’s back.
The winch operator powered up his gear, drew in the slack and then lifted the cage clear of the ground. It swayed back and forth for a moment before the momentum dampers cut in, and then the winch operator swung the cage into place over the top of the shaft.
Lucian looked up. The cage hung from four slender cables, each capable of holding the entire weight of the cage, set in a sophisticated rig that would automatically shift the load if a cable snapped, adjusting the lines to keep the cage level at all times. The winch operator would hang momentum dampers on the cable set every five hundred meters, in the hopes that they would prevent the whole rig from swinging like a pendulum. Considering the short time they had had to put it together, it was a pretty impressive job.
Lucian waved to the operator and to the small crowd of anonymous suited figures that stood there in the transparent dome. Strange to wave good-bye, not knowing which figure was which person. Was one of them Larry? Or was he already strapped into the T.O. controller? Why, Lucian wondered, did he care about that now of all times? The winch started to run. The cage began its descent into the darkness, the cold ground swallowing it up. Lucian switched on the cage’s running lights as the surface was lost to sight.
Lucian was keyed up. He wanted to be up and doing things, but the engineers had warned him to keep movement to a minimum on the elevator. The less random motion there was, the less chance of some movement catching just the right harmonic and setting the whole works swinging wildly back and forth. Knowing that didn�
��t make sitting still in the crash couch any easier on his nerves.
The first three hundred meters or so held no surprises. The shaft exactly resembled the perfectly standard vertical shaft that Conners cut into the Moon by the thousand. The first part of the shaft was almost comforting, a taste of the familiar through the pallid green air.
But the familiar was not going to last long. Lucian leaned over the edge of his crash couch and looked down. He saw a dark hole at the bottom of the human-cut shaft, too far and too deep for the elevator cage lights to illuminate. There. That was the transition into the unknown.
There was sudden movement at his side—fluid, glittering highlights in motion. Lucian nearly jumped out of his crash couch in fright.
“Oh, sorry,” Larry’s voice said in his helmet phones. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I just switched this thing on.”
“Damn it, don’t—” Lucian fought down another wave of irrational anger. “Jesus. Yeah. Right. You just startled me. How’s that thing feel?”
“Not too bad. I’ve used them before on Pluto. Actually, this rig is a lot easier. No speed-of-light delay.”
Larry’s voice seemed strangely disembodied to Lucian, perhaps because the T.O. had no mouthlike part he could pretend the voice was coming from. He was getting the voice, relayed from Larry on the surface, through a direct radio link from the T.O., over a standard suit comm unit. He was used to suit radios, and talking to disembodied voices belonging to people he had never seen. But this. He was talking to a machine with Larry Chao’s soul, an alien being with Larry’s mind. He shivered and forced the thoughts from his mind.
The T.O. leaned over the edge of the cage and peered downward. “Coming up on the bottom of our drill hole,” the T.O. announced.
“Right,” Lucian said weakly.
The cage lowered away, down into the depths. The hole at the bottom of the human-bored shaft grew larger as they sank toward it. Wisps of the greenish gas eddied up out of the hole, licking at the bottom of the shaft. They seemed to be moving faster as they dropped. Lucian knew that that had to be an illusion, caused by their moving closer to the hole. The descent meter showed a steady drop speed. But he was not comforted. He looked up, at the darkness that closed over them as the elevator’s lights petered out, fading into a greenish glow.
He looked down again, just in time to see them drop through the hole.
And into infinite, green-fogged darkness. The sickly air was not merely green tinged, but a thick, dead green that cut visibility down to less than ten meters. Even Larry’s T.O., close enough that Lucian could reach out and touch it, faded out a trifle.
The walls of this monstrous shaft could not be seen at all. The goggle-eyed head of the T.O. swung back and forth as Larry took the view in, the T.O.‘s aux cameras panning in all directions. Neither Larry nor Lucian could think of anything to say.
Lucian looked upward and caught a last fog-shrouded glimpse of the shaft ceiling. “Larry! Did your cams pick up the ceiling? Virgin rock, never been worked.”
“Yeah,” the T.O. answered. “The mining engineers topside are all swearing the surface had never been cut or disturbed. Maybe they were right. It would explain why we haven’t found excavated rock on the surface.”
“If the Charonians didn’t dig the hole from the surface, then how did the Wheel get down there?” Lucian asked. “And why did they just dig it nearly all the way? And where did the dug-out rock go?”
The T.O. shrugged in an eerie imitation of Larry’s mannerisms. “Maybe it bored down there as a much smaller creature, from some other point on the surface, and then ate out the rock as raw material. Maybe the Wheel dug up into this shaft to collect construction material. It could have compressed the surplus rock to make up the walls of the shaft and strengthen them. Or maybe there’s a very small tame black hole shielded down there, with the missing rock compressed down into it.
“As to why it dug the shaft nearly all the way, I do have one other idea. Maybe it’s going to break out of the Moon’s interior one day, the way those Lander creatures came out of the asteroids, and it needs an escape hatch. Who knows?”
Lucian felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. Larry Chao was not exactly a source of comforting ideas.
The two of them rode in silence for a long time, the time blurring away as they dropped past the featureless walls. Lucian thought of the original Rabbit Hole, and how long Alice had fallen down it. Long enough to get bored with the fall, and start asking herself nonsense questions. “Do bats eat cats?” he muttered to himself.
The T.O. turned and looked at him. “Did you say something?” it asked.
“No, nothing,” he answered in pointless embarrassment.
They rode again in silence for a short time. “That’s strange,” Larry’s voice said. “The temperature should be rising steadily as we go deeper in toward the planetary core. But it’s holding steady, maybe dropping.”
“Maybe this damn Wheel thing is absorbing some of the core’s heat as an energy source,” Lucian said. “Not enough to detect from the surface, but enough to draw down the temperatures in the shaft. Maybe that’s what the shaft is for, to draw heat down toward the Wheel.”
“That’s possible.” The teleoperator looked around for a moment. “I think the fog is lifting. I’m starting to see the shaft walls. Hold on a second, let me send a ranging pulse toward the bottom.” There was a moment’s pause. “We’re getting there,” Larry’s voice announced. “Just two kilometres over the bottom now,” he said. “Hang on, Lucian, the winch controller’s going to start slowing us down.” Lucian felt a surge of pressure as the cage slowed its descent. For a sickening second, the cage began to sway back and forth, and Lucian imagined the elevator cage working up a pendulum motion, swinging slowly, relentlessly, back and forth until it smashed into the shaft wall. But then the momentum dampers caught the swing and damped it out. Lucian breathed a sigh of relief. At least they wouldn’t get killed that way. Though there were no doubt plenty of other possibilities waiting for them at the bottom.
◊ ◊ ◊
The Caller was but dimly aware of the intruders entering its domain. It was involved in great things, in nothing less than commanding the conquest of the Solar System. The tiny disturbances at the northern portal were unimportant. Its maintenance systems could handle any difficulty. It chose to concentrate its attentions on its work, on the task of coordinating the Worldeaters. They were frustrating assistants at times, capable of great things but utterly lacking inflexibility. In what was nearly a flash of humour, the Caller realised that the Sphere must see its Callers in much the same light. The Caller was developing its capacity for contemplation, for self-awareness and self-understanding. It would have need of those abilities in the next stage of its development. A stage that would find both the Caller and the Solar System vastly transformed.
◊ ◊ ◊
The sweat ran down Larry’s brow. Even just sitting still in this thing was a strain. No matter what he might say to keep Lucian settled down, wearing a teleoperator control rig was tough work. Larry was so thoroughly enveloped in the control rig’s exoskeleton that the comm techs at the other end of the room could barely see him.
The control rig hung in midair, so that the feet would be unconstrained by the floor. He could run, jump, kick, wave his arms, do anything he wanted, and the control rig would stay right where it was, merely waving its limbs about. The teleoperator down below actually moved.
Pressure sensors inside the legs, the arms, the body of the teleoperator itself transmitted their sensations back to servos inside the control rig, providing appropriate physical sensations based on what the T.O. was doing. The mildest of electric shocks susbstituted for a pain response, warning Larry if what he was doing threatened to damage the T.O.
Larry’s head was hidden inside an enormous helmet. Inside it, two video screens displayed the view out of the T.O.‘s cameras. Larry’s earphones merged the faint noises transmitted to the T.O.’s external mike
s with the voices on the comm channel.
Wires and gears, levers and sensors: that was what the control rig looked like from the outside.
From in it, things were different. Larry was not in the comm center. He was riding down that huge pit in an open elevator cage, alongside Lucian, the darkness a shroud just outside the feeble lights, the fetid air whistling past his ears. He was there, all his physical sensations keyed to the place he wasn’t.
But he knew that all he felt was unreal. This darkness, this wind, did not surround him. This frightened man in a pressure suit, whom he could reach out and touch, was not there. It was like the strange self-awareness he sometimes felt in a nightmare, knowing the dream was not real, but still experiencing it, accepting the world’s unreality even as he struggled against the demons.
But that sort of detachment had no place in a tele-operator rig. He had to believe, wholeheartedly, that he was down in that shaft. For it was real, it was life and death. He looked at Lucian, sitting there next to him in his crash couch, the fear plain in his eyes. Getting this right was life and death: Lucian’s. And maybe all of humanity’s.
Somehow, that thought made it all seem a great deal less like a dream—but more like a nightmare.
◊ ◊ ◊
Lucian’s hands clenched the arms of his crash couch. “Five hundred meters,” Larry’s voice called out calmly. “Four hundred. Slowing a bit more. Hang on, Lucian— the winch operator wants to come to a complete halt early, just to make sure we’re stable before we land. Three hundred meters.”
The cage slowed further, and Lucian felt the weight bear down on him. What the hell was down there waiting for them? All they knew, all they really knew, was that it produced a band of gravity energy that girdled the Moon.
“Full stop,” Larry’s voice announced. “Ranging pulse shows us a shade over one hundred eighty meters up. Everything’s stable. Negligible pendular motion and rebound, all the cables holding up. It looks good. Down we go.”
The cage started downward again, more slowly. They could see the shaft walls clearly now, could see that they were inside a gleaming, jet black cylinder a hundred meters across. “Lucian, as soon as we’re down, I’ll grab all the gear, you get out as fast as you can,” Larry’s voice said. “They’re going to pull the cage back up to the hundred-meter mark and leave it there until we’re ready to go back up.”
Hunted Earth Omnibus Page 32
