Hunted Earth - The Ring Of Charon Part 28

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. Wasone 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."

"d.a.m.n 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 lastfog-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 embarra.s.sment.

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 d.a.m.n 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 kilometers 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 greatthings, 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 a.s.sistants at times, capable of great things but utterly lacking inflexibility. In what was nearly a flash of humor, the Caller realized 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 susbst.i.tuted for a pain response, warningLarry 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 mikes 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 h.e.l.l 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."

"Why?"

"To make sure we're the only ones on it. We don't know what's down here, remember?"

"Oh yeah, I remember. That little detail I definitely remember."

Larry didn't reply to that. "Fifty meters," his voice said. "Forty. Thirty. Slowing again. Twenty.

Ten. Slowing again. Three. One meter off the ground, full stop. Everybody out."

Lucian got up from his crash couch, moving carefully. He looked over the edge of the cage.

"That's more than one meter," he objected. "More like two."

The TO. turned and looked at Lucian. "So jump,"Larry's voice said. "Would you rather they guessed wrong the other way and came to a stop two meters under the surface?"

Lucian grunted, shuffled carefully to the edge of the platform, and jumped down. Under the Moon's leisurely gravity, there shouldn't have been much of an impact when he landed, but still it knocked the wind out of him for a second, and he lost his balance. He held his arms out to break his fall, and ended up with his face a hands-breadth from the ground. "I've just made my first discovery about the surface down here," he announced. "It's very dark in color. And it's crunchy."

The T.O. lowered a pack full of gear to the ground on a rope and jumped down itself, even more clumsily than Lucian, landing on its hands and knees. "I don't have the best fine-tactile sensations through this thing," it said. "What do you mean, crunchy?"

Lucian stood up. "I mean crunchy. Like walking through leaves when the park is in autumn mode.

The whole surface is sort of a dark rust color, all dried and shriveled up in discrete layers. Step on it and you crunch through all the upper layers to whatever is underneath."

"It looks like dead snakeskin, somehow. And there's junk everywhere," Larry's voice said, speaking more for the recorders on the surface than for Lucian's benefit. "Broken things, or dead, or something. Bits and pieces I can't quite identify.

Some the rust color of the surface, some bits that look more metallic."

The T.O. stood up and looked around. "So far it looks quiet enough."

? ? ?The Caller felt the mildest twinge of oddity. For a long moment it did not understand. It felt something, two somethings, moving about in its skin-but these were not units under its control. It should have also felt, seen, tasted whatever the remote units felt and did. But there was nothing.

In times past, the Caller would have immediately blocked the unexplained data out, refused to accept it as factual. But the Caller was growing, changing. The awakening of its own remote units from their long slumbers, the bustle of maintenance servants providing it with outside input, the sensations arriving from the other planets had all required it to see more, to remember once again how to learn. These new things required investigation.

No sophisticated remote units were in the area, just a few small parts-scavengers working through the detritus of the Caller's own dead outer skin for usable parts and materials. They would be of no help at all in this situation.

Two larger laborers were not far away. It would send them to get a look. And to defend the Caller, if it came to that.

For the Universe was a hostile place.

Lucian stood up, framed by the lights on the elevator cage, and tried to see out past his own looming shadow. Suddenly the light shifted and his shadow fell away as the elevator cage rose again.

The light from the cage, which had been extremely oblique, now was coming straight down on them.

Wide-angle lamps on the cage illuminated the sides of the chamber.The two of them were standing in a huge tunnel.

It suddenly struck Lucian that this was the Wheel's tunnel. He could set off down that tunnel, straight ahead, and walk clear around the Moon, from North Pole to South and back. Weirder still, he was standing on the Wheel, standing on a world-girdling thing far below the Lunar surface.

"Company, Lucian," Larry's voice announced in quiet tones.

Lucian's stomach froze and he turned around slowly to look the way the T.O. was pointing.

Something about the size of a large rabbit was bustling through the debris on the surface. It was gleaming silver in color, and moved on lots of small, stubby legs. Lucian could see that some of the broken junk on the surface matched the shape of this thing. Parts that could be its carapace, parts that could fit inside it.

The bustling little thing continued to examine each broken bit it found with a pair of long, graceful tentacles. It picked bits and pieces off some of the objects it found, and dropped them into a slot on its back. Lucian could not tell if the slot was a mouth or a storage bin. "Is that alive or is it a machine?" he asked, not really expecting an answer.

The teleoperator with Larry's voice turned to him, raised its mechanical arms, touched one of them to its chest, and asked, "Which am I?"

"Get serious," Lucian asked. There was something about Larry's tone of voice that unnerved him.

"I am serious. Think about it."

Lucian considered the question. "Both, I guess.

You're a living thing that's controlling a machine."

"Exactly. And that's what these are. Except the data from Mars sounded like it was machines controlling the living things sometimes. Maybe they don't make the distinction between life andmachine that we make."

That was an unsettling thought. Lucian was about to reply when he spotted another of the shuffling creatures coming through the debris. The two things sensed each other and moved together.

Their tentacles touched, and then each started reaching into the slot on the back of the other, removing small objects and transferring them to its own carry-slot. The tentacles flitted over the two bodies faster than the eye could see, doing things Lucian could not quite follow. But when the two creatures moved away, one seemed to have traded a pair of its legs for the other's left tentacle. "Jesus,"

Lucian said. "Modular animals? Mix and match parts? Come on, let's get busy with the gee-wave sensors before something that wants to trade parts with us comes along."

The T.O. picked up the equipment bag and hooked it onto the front of its body. It rummaged through the bag until it found the gravity-wave sensor, the same device Larry had used to find the Rabbit Hole in the first place. Now it was adjusted to point them toward areas where the induction tap could find a strong enough signal to work on. "My G.o.d," Larry's voice said. "We could just dump the taps on the surface, Lucian. The gee-wave fields are strong as h.e.l.l."

"Can we do that?" Lucian asked. "Wouldn't those little digger things mess them up?"

"We could probably get away with it. They're pretty well sealed and armored. And the tapping team just told me they're already getting signals from the things. Still, we really ought to-"