Hunted Earth - The Ring Of Charon Part 27

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 disa.s.sembling 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 pa.s.sed early this morning. There, right outside the window, three kilometers away, she could see the next andweirdest 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 surpa.s.sing the size of the largest Egyptian pyramid.

Coyote came up behind her and looked out the window.

"Look at those sons of b.i.t.c.hes out there," she said. "What the h.e.l.l are they building?"

"G.o.d knows," Jansen said. But it wasn't such a good idea to get Coyote thinking about the ma.s.sive 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 suba.s.semblies 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 pa.s.s 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 suba.s.sembly 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 G.o.d," she said at last. "What is-"

"It's no rock, that's for d.a.m.n sure." Coyote hissed. She reaimed the laser, right between the thing's eyes, and pressed the power b.u.t.ton. 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 steppedover 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, but 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. "G.o.d 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 h.e.l.l is it?"

"Most likely biological waste products."

"From the Wheel! You mean to say we're walking around in gaseous Wheel s.h.i.t?"

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."

Larry watched as Lucian struggled into his armored pressure suit. "You clear on this alternate-form gravity-wave stuff?" he asked. "It could make the difference between-"

Lucian nodded testily. "Yeah, yeah," he said. "I know what difference it could make." He turned and glared at the suit technician. "And you, take it easy with that clamp," he snapped. "You're supposed to hook up the suit, not amputate my arm."

Larry checked his watch. He would have to leavesoon if he was going to have time to get into the T.O. rig. "Look, there's one other thing you need to be clear on. The rock monster sprouted eyes, a mouth, and legs in a matter of minutes. It had a circulatory system and a nervous system, and what resembled electronic power and logic circuits where its brain should have been. Obviously, the ability to generate all that was in the rock all the time.

They're calling it an existing implicate order, whatever the h.e.l.l that means. The point is, the rock monster was hidden away in the rock all along. The signal from Mars says that before it woke up, the rock monster was indistinguishable from asteroidal rock. This Dr. Mercer Chavez thinks that some of the asteroids we've mined for organic material were in fact Lander creatures in an inert, encysted phase.

And don't ask how you can get such camouflage at the molecular level. No one knows."

Lucian frowned. "In other words, anything that looks like a rock down there could suddenly come to life and bite me in the a.s.s," he said. "How could that be?"

"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 t.i.tan. These things are going up everywhere."

"Why? And who? Who is doing this? Are theLander 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 kilometers deep," he said.

Larry shivered at that thought as the suit tech made the last hookups to the armored suit. But what else could they do? Fly a s.p.a.ceship 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 pressurized 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 d.a.m.n 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,traveling 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 sc.r.a.p of data it could get, every sc.r.a.p 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 armored 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 gray 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 ma.s.ses of pulverized 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 pa.s.s 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 d.a.m.n-fool experiments, but Lucian was honest enough with himself not to label Larry a coward.