The Ring of Charon

CHAPTER SIXTEEN Names of the Saints

“I am expendable. He is not. The first journey down there is too dangerous to risk more than one person. I should go. He shouldn’t.” Lucian Dreyfuss resisted the impulse to reach across Chancellor Daltry’s desk and shake some sense into the man. “How much simpler could it be?”

“He’s making me seem essential when I’m not,” Larry said, trying to keep his voice steady. “The Nenya’s repairs have been delayed, so I can’t leave for another seven days anyway. I’ve told the science teams here as much as I know, and they’re making progress on their own. And if I do know so much about gravity generators, doesn’t it make sense to send me down to get a look at this one?”

Chancellor Daltry said nothing, and looked at each of the young men in turn. The silence stretched for a long moment. “Do you each want to go around the circle one last time, or shall I speak now?” Neither Lucian nor Larry seemed ready to take the bait, and Daltry went on. “This is not about logic, or sensible reasons. This is ego, and anger, and guilt. And quite frankly, if I did not view you both as essential to our light against this enemy, I would not waste my time on your trivial bickering.

“There are, after all, one or two other claims on my time. It was a bit of miracle that the Martians agreed to sit at the same conference table with you. They were willing to talk with me only because I was not part of the government and thus not associated with this imaginary attack. They wanted you clapped in irons, Mr. Chao, and tried for crimes against humanity. It took a great deal of work to convince them otherwise.”

“Maybe they were right the first time,” Lucian muttered, half under his breath.

Daltry snapped his head around and glared at Lucian with a gimlet eye. “Were they indeed? For what it is worth, Mr. Dreyfuss, I thought so too, at first. I share all your anger and fear. But I have studied the matter, and concluded that Mr. Chao merely stumbled into a trip wire set long before humanity was born. It was chance, nothing more, that made him the one to do what he did. I choose to direct my anger and fear toward whoever set that trip wire, and the hideous trap it set off.”

“You live in Central City,” Lucian said. “Do you know how many dead there were in the quake? How many buildings were destroyed?”

“I do. And I mourn. But Mr. Chao is not guilty of their deaths. If he is, then so are all the people connected with the design and construction of the Ring of Charon, and its researches over the past fifteen years. His amplification technique would have been impossible without their work.”

Daltry turned his attention back to Larry. “And you, Mr. Chao. I know something of you. As I have said, I have examined all the data concerning you. Including your psychiatric profile. Having read that, and having met you, I believe I know what might be motivating you to volunteer for this duty. A sense of guilt. A need for atonement. And a desperate need to prove to persons such as Lucian Dreyfuss that you are not a monster. You seek to prove your innocence, your decent intentions, with a display of valor.”

Larry reddened, lifted his hand in protest. “Of course I feel guilty. Of course I want to help. What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. That is precisely the trouble. I am faced by two admirable young men, far more like each other than they realize, each courageous, each willing to offer up his life in the cause, each armed with logical reasons for following his desired course of action.

“You are right, Mr. Dreyfuss. Although we need your skills, they are more easily replaced than Mr. Chao’s intuitive understanding of gravities. You are more expendable. Nor should we risk more than one person on this job.

“And you are right, Mr. Chao. It may well be wise to get a gravities man down there.” Daltry looked down at his notepack again. “I notice one other thing in your file. You are experienced with teleoperators?”

Larry hesitated a moment. “Well, yes. I am. We use them at the Gravities Station for doing maintenance on the Ring.”

“Wait a second,” Lucian said. “A teleoperator. A remote-control robot? Those things don’t give you the dexterity or the reflexes you need for this kind of job.”

“I agree,” Daltry said. “We can’t send a T.O. down by itself. But they do have advantages. They can do heavy lifting. They can carry telemetry. And they are expendable. Of course, we haven’t found the entrance to this so-called Rabbit Hole yet. Maybe we won’t find it in time for Mr. Chao to run the T.O. from the surface. Maybe we’ll never find it. But if we do, it seems to me, Mr. Dreyfuss, that we could send a T.O. down with you.”

Lucian glared at the chancellor. Trust a guy like Daltry to make sure no one got what he wanted.

How did it go? Coyote Westlake tried to remember the lessons from her old pilot’s physics course text on the differences between rockets and gravity.

No matter where in the system you measure, a rocket-propelled system shows acceleration in the same direction and at the same strength. Not so with gravity. Gravity pulls in from all directions, radially, toward a central point. The further you get from the source, the weaker it gets. So measurements at different points inside a gravity field should reveal different values for both direction and strength of acceleration.

That clear in her mind, Coyote set to work experimenting. She dropped weights from the ceiling and timed the fall to measure rate of acceleration. She hung other weights on lines to measure direction. Crude stuff, but the answers they gave were damn confusing. Things dropped from the side of the cylinder furthest from the asteroid fell at virtually the same speed as things dropped from closer in, but nothing dropped in a straight line. Everything curved in toward the asteroid as it fell, and curved more sharply when dropped on the rockward side of the shed. Weighted cords did not hang straight up and down the way plumb lines were meant to. Instead, they curved throughout their lengths in strange, disturbing patterns, as if they were drawing the gee-field lines of force in midair. It was as if she were in a cross-breed field, somewhere between linear acceleration and a gravity field.

Directionalized gravity. Suppose someone, somehow, had put a gravity source—a powerful one—just in front of the asteroid, and then set the gee source moving, accelerating? And suppose that someone focused the gee source’s gravity field, somehow, so its entire force was directed through the body of the asteroid, and with just a little of it slopping over to pass through her hab shelter, for example. Think of it as a tractor beam, she told herself. The asteroid would be set to falling, pulled toward the moving gee source, and her hab shelter, outside the path of the beam but physically attached to the asteroid, would experience forward linear acceleration as it was dragged along, with the result that things inside the shed would fall backwards. Plus a little leakage from the tractor beam, pulling in toward the rock. It fits the facts of her situation. Maybe it was even true. That ancient and mythical patron of engineers, Saint Ruben of Goldberg, would have loved it.

The whole theory depended, however, on there being something to provide a gravity field just ahead of the asteroid. And her exterior camera revealed that there was nothing there.

Okay then. Run through the facts. There was no rocket pushing the asteroid from behind. And nothing visible to produce the tractor beam that seemed to be pulling it from in front. What did that leave?

How about something inside the rock, some projector or gadget that produced and accelerated the focused gravity field that seemed to be pulling the asteroid along? A gizmo that in effect pulled the asteroid along by its own bootstraps.

Just as she came up with that idea, the seismo alarm bleeped again. Not as if she needed the alert. She could feel the whole asteroid shuddering. At first she had thought—or at least had hoped—that the microquakes were just the asteroid reaching a new equilibrium, a normal reaction to a most abnormal source of acceleration.

If that were the case, the quakes should have faded away after a while. She checked the seismometer. This quake was precisely as powerful as the first one had been—and the quakes were coming at regular intervals, too. She had timed it: one rumble every 128 seconds. Something about the microquakes reminded her of the street rumbling as a subway train passed beneath her feet.

So maybe there was something moving around inside the asteroid. Coyote found herself with a sudden need to know where it was, exactly. She realized that she wanted a peek at this gizmo. Maybe she had a bad case of cabin fever, but she had the sudden urge to get out, to drill her way in through the rock and give the whatever-it-was a look-see. But first she needed to know where it was.

The seismometer. She could get readings from it from different points in the hab shed and triangulate back to locate the epicenter inside the rock. She set to work.

She spent the next several hours methodically getting as many readings as possible on the epicenter of the quake. It felt good to have something to do.

She didn’t really start getting scared until she had a good solid position. Until she had the chance to face this thing, whatever it was. Forcing herself not to think about what she was doing, she loaded the gee source’s position into her inertial tracker’s memory and got ready to go look at the thing in the rock. She climbed into her pressure suit and cycled through the airlock to the surface of the asteroid.

Outside, that five-percent acceleration was a positive menace. Make one wrong move, fall off the asteroid, and there would be no way back. No big deal as long as you’re careful, Coyote told herself, and tried to believe it. Back when this was just another rock to mine, Coyote had bolted any number of handholds to the rock. Now she kept herself clipped to a safety line at all times, and she made sure the line was always looped through at least two handholds. At least the borer was where she had left it last, carefully secured to its storage stand.

But the tunnel borer wasn’t meant to be horsed around by just one person under these conditions. It was tough going to fuel it up while keeping the fat exhaust tube from getting completely out of control.

Once she had the borer fueled and primed, she drilled into the rock more or less at random, just to get inside the asteroid and put some rock under her feet. It was hot work. The borer, really just a pocket fusion torch, worked by vaporizing and ionizing a small percentage of the rock. That broke the chemical bonds that held the rock together, making it collapse into powder. The borer’s exhaust system used an electric charge to pull the rock dust out of the tunnel, taking the heat along with it, but nonetheless the heat and dust were everywhere. Coyote’s suit could not dump the heat fast enough and she was bathed in sweat. Her faceplate was instantly coated with dust, and Coyote whispered a prayer of thanks to Saint Ruben and whoever it was who had thought of putting wipers on the outside of suit helmets.

Once inside the rock, the heat and dust were a bit more tolerable. Even so, no one but a miner would have been able to endure it. The roar of the fusion jet was conducted through the borer’s handles to her suit. She was engulfed in a deafening roar, and the supposedly shielded glare from the fusion jet frequently flickered a tongue of flame out. Her helmet lamp and the occasional dazzling flare from the borer were the only light. The darkness seemed to close in all around her, like a live thing hovering just over the shadows on her shoulder.

But she was moving. With the inertial tracker clamped to the top of the borer, she could watch her progress inward toward her goal, moving at a snail’s pace over the tiny display. It took her two long weary days to cut her way close to her target. Then she started using the thumper, a combination noisemaker and listener that showed hollows in the rock. She got a positive result on her second try. The thumper’s echolocator showed a large area of very low density only a meter ahead.

Not wishing to bathe the hollow’s interior with a fusion flame, Coyote retreated back up her tunnel with the borer, glad to be done with it.

She came back down the tunnel with a zero-gee jack-hammer. It was a far slower and less powerful tool than the borer, but it wouldn’t vaporize her prize either. Coyote was not interested in taking chances; she did not know what, if any, atmosphere was behind that last meter of rock. Time for the bubblelock.

The lock was a simple gadget, an inflatable double-walled cylinder made of tough plastic, with three hatches in it. It was meant to form an airtight seal in a tunnel, and thus allow a miner to shed her suit and work in atmosphere. It would serve for current purposes. Coyote dragged it into the tunnel, and pumped up the airspace between the inner and outer cylinders. The plastic formed itself against the tunnel walls. Coyote climbed through all the hatches and inflated both chambers behind her. That ought to hold air pressure—if there was any pressure to hold.

She set to work with the jackhammer, carefully bracing its legs against the tunnel walls, rigging the protective skirting, and setting the hammer blade to work. The trouble with a zero-gee jack was that you needed the skirting between you and the workface to keep the rock chips from slicing your suit open. The snappier models had armored video cameras under the skirting, but Coyote ran a low-budget operation. She had to work by feel, pausing frequently to dig the broken rock out.

When the jackhammer nearly skipped out of her hands, she knew she was through. A jet of green, smoky air shot past her, filling the tunnel back up to the airlock.

There was gas pressure in that cavity, all right. She shut the hammer down and forced herself to move slowly as she pulled it out of the way and cleared out the last of the rubble. Her helmet lamp revealed a small hole, the size of her fist, punched in the rear wall of the tunnel. Pressure had equalized now. Not a whisper of air moved past her. Though she had doubts that these gases were air in any human sense. The light of her helmet lamp shone through them with an off-putting smoky greenish pallor.

Her mind tingling with fear and excitement, her body limp with exhaustion, Coyote cleared the last of the rock chips out of the way and set to work enlarging the hole with a heavy-duty cutting laser. In a few minutes she had widened it enough to poke her helmet through.

She screwed up her courage and stuck her head into the hole.

But for the light from her lamp, the huge hollow space was utterly dark. At a guess, the hollow was forty meters across and eighty from end to end, a football-shaped void carved from the living rock. Coyote’s drillhole had breached the cavern wall about midway down the long axis, perhaps a bit toward the aft end. At first Coyote thought the hollow was truly empty, but then her eyes caught a flicker of movement through the hazy greenish gas. A huge something sat, somehow looking slumped over, at the aft or bottom end of the cavern.

Something that moved.

Eyes are merely lenses and light receptors: in a very real sense, seeing actually takes place in the brain, where images are processed and analyzed. But the human brain cannot easily see what it does not understand. It tries to force the unfamiliar into previously recorded patterns, or to compare it to objects that are in some way similar. Once in some manner understood, the new thing can be catalogued in memory alongside the old and familiar.

These techniques are successful well over ninety-nine percent of the time, but they fail utterly when the brain is confronted with something that does not fit into any previous category, and does not even resemble anything in a previous category.

Coyote saw fluid movement, huge size, dark color, the gleam of a shiny-wet surface—and thought she saw a whale. For a half moment of time, she wrestled with the impossible question of how a blue whale could have come to be here, and even, absurdly, worked up a moment of righteous indignation that someone would have so cruelly treated a member of a protected species.

But then her helmet lamp caught the glittering metallic cable sprouting from the brow of the dimly seen thing. She followed the cable upward toward the forward end of the hollow, and saw it join with a massive spherical object that hung there, supported by heavy braces that bound it to the surrounding rock on all sides. That heavily braced sphere had to be the source of the gravity drive. But it was hooked up to the whale thing. Why would a massive cable be implanted in a living creature? Or was it alive? Was it controlling the gravity drive?

She swung her light around again and wondered that she had even thought of it as a whale. At second glance, and with the idea of machinery instead of life in mind, she saw the smooth lines of a sleek machine. More cables terminated at it, coiling here and there to other devices around the cavern. And there, sprouting from the skin of the thing, was a manipulator arm, obviously mechanical. That was the movement she had seen. She adjusted the helmet lamp to give a wider-angle beam and now saw a perfect forest of manipulator arms, busy about unknowable tasks, all of them sprouting from the featureless, shapeless blue-gray surface of the huge object that lay huddled at the base of the cavern. Strange gadgets littered its surface, dropped there by the arms. The surface itself seemed to move and quiver a bit, as if other devices beneath its surface were in action. But there was nothing there but machines, all machines. Nothing here was alive. Of that much she was certain.

Until one of the manipulator arms extruded a cutting blade, bent over the surface of the massive body it sprang from, and sliced the skin open. Crimson blood splattered for a second and then was gone. Gleaming, pink underflesh peeled away under the knife, and a flaccid tentacle with a bulbous end to it floated up out of the gore. Before the tentacle was wholly unfurled, two new arms were at work, somehow sealing up the wound the first arm had made.

Coyote watched in stunned horror as the tentacle swung toward her. But she did not scream, or run, or panic, until the skin of the bulbous tip peeled back to reveal a huge, staring eye, hovering in the darkness, regarding her with obvious curiosity.

Larry looked out of the lander’s viewport at the cold lands of the Moon’s North Pole. Damn it, he hadn’t come billions of kilometers just to find himself on another ice world.

Tortured sheets of frozen water cowered at the Moon’s poles, hiding from the blinding power of the Sun. On a map, the ice fields are minute, covering a mere dot of the surface, easily missed from orbit. But right at the North Pole, it seemed to Larry as if the ice covered everything. The craters, the hillocks and the boulders were all covered in the midnight-black gleam of glare ice as seen by starlight. Here the Sun, hidden by high crater walls and mountains, never shone.

The first signs of polar ice had not been noticed until human settlement on the Moon was well advanced. Some thought it was all there as a result of human activity, water vapor leaking out of life-support systems on the Moon and the nearby habitats. The theory rather vaguely suggested the water was transported to the Lunar poles and deposited there. Other theories held that the ice was natural and cyclic, appearing and vanishing in a very long-term pattern that had nothing to do with humans.

No one quite knew who had started calling the still-hypothetical entrance to the Lunar Wheel the Rabbit Hole, but the name fit. The data from the gravity-telescope images wasn’t good enough to give a precise location, or show just how deeply buried the top of the hole was. It might not even be a hole. Larry himself had dreamed up at least four possible purposes for the spikes growing out of the pole points of the buried Lunar Wheel. That didn’t matter. Getting at anything related to the Wheel would tell them volumes about the Charonians.

Larry sighed. The time pressure had eased, at least a bit: the engineers refurbing the Nenya had discovered a dangerous flaw in the main fuel-pump assembly. It would take them three more days to get her repaired. On the bright side, they had installed external fuel tanks, eliminating the need to use the ship’s interior space for tankage. There would be a lot more room on the ride back to Pluto.

The silence that hung over the Moon’s North Pole reminded him of Pluto’s emptiness. He wished desperately for more faces, more people. Even the few days he had spent in the hustle and bustle of the Moon’s cities had been enough to remind him of how much he missed human beings.

Of course, there was at least one person he would not miss. Larry was devoutly grateful that Lucian Dreyfuss had made the run south to Central City for more equipment.

One of the small robot rollers crawled over the horizon as he watched. Crammed full of every kind of sensor, the roborollers could spot virtually any kind of subsurface anomaly. Magnetic and gravitic properties, thermal energy, dielectric constant, seismic, color. Anything the searchers could think of to use. Surely the buried top of the Rabbit Hole would reveal itself to one of them. He looked over at the search chart that showed how much of the area had been surveyed. Slowly the shaded area was growing.

But it would help if they knew what they were looking for.

The signal-probe design had barely firmed up in the computer when Tyrone Vespasian christened the craft.

Lucian Dreyfuss, however, was not up on his saints. He, Vespasian, and Raphael stood by the viewport, watching the rollout. “I don’t get it,” Lucian said as the probe was rolled out. “The Saint Anthony? Shouldn’t that be the Saint Jude? Wasn’t she the patron saint of losing things?”

Simon Raphael watched through the viewport as the massive cylinder was towed from the thermal lock and into position on the linear accelerator’s launch cradle. “If I recall my hagiography,” he said, “Jude was a man, not a woman, and he was the patron saint of lost causes. But one prays to Saint Anthony if one loses an object. Which would you rather call Earth? A lost cause, or simply lost, misplaced?”

Lucian didn’t have an answer for that. Or if he did, he kept it to himself.

Raphael went on. “By naming the probe after Anthony, Mr. Vespasian obviously meant to remind us of Jude—and to remind us that Jude is not appropriate here, that there is hope. I’d call Saint Anthony a subtle and apt name for our little emissary.”

It pleased Tyrone to be so honored by such a scholar as Dr. Raphael. He nudged the younger man and chuckled. “Fallen away, Lucian?” he asked.

“Never was a Catholic to start with,” Lucian said with a slight edge of irritation. “But I’ll be taking a leap of faith soon enough, Tyrone. Maybe Saint Jude can go with me, so long as he’s not going to be busy.”

The two older men shifted uncomfortably. Lucian had been showing more than a few rough edges as the search for the Rabbit Hole progressed.

Descending forty-odd kilometers below the surface to confront the thing that waited down there. Tyrone Vespasian shuddered. Even for a Conner used to living underground, that idea induced claustrophobia. No wonder Lucian was nervous, Tyrone thought. Going down into the pit of Hell.

If Vespasian was reading his old friend right, Lucian was treating Daltry’s ruling as a draw in the odd rivalry between Larry and Lucian. No one pretended to understand that silent battle completely—not even, Vespasian guessed, Lucian or Larry. But such things were not enough to explain Lucian’s odd behavior. There was, in Vespasian’s eyes, something else in Lucian’s character that explained it.

Everyone knew that someone or something had stolen the Earth. All of them were afraid, and a few even had the nerve to step forward and fight against the unseen enemy, willing to pit a tiny human’s strength against such mighty powers. Lucian was of that number—but with him it was different.

With him, it was personal. With sudden inspiration, Vespasian understood Lucian’s anger toward Larry. He blamed Larry, directly, personally, for what had happened. Larry had pushed the button. Because that button was pushed, Lucian’s city was half-wrecked. Lucian’s father had all but single-handedly saved that city, years before. In the Dreyfuss family, you inherited responsibilities. Lucian felt himself responsible for Central City’s safety.

Which was, of course, absurd. And completely understandable. Damn it. Vespasian shrugged. Or maybe he had gotten it all completely wrong. Wouldn’t be the first time.

“Tell me again why we can’t just put a radio transmitter up alongside the wormhole and broadcast through it,” Lucian said. “I thought that was the original idea.”

“It was, and we put some embroidery on it,” Vespasian said, glad for the change of subject. “Mostly the problem was that the wormhole only opens once every hundred twenty-eight seconds, and remains open only three seconds. Not much transmission time. Also, we don’t know where in the sky Earth will be on the other side. No way to aim an antenna. And suppose the Charonians just close the hole to silence us? If the Saint Anthony can get through, it should be able to lock in on Earth and then broadcast and receive constantly. It’s got a massive datapack aboard, with everything we know about the Charonians on this end. With luck, it ought to be able to broadcast the whole dataset before it gets silenced. It can run some, if they attack it, maybe long enough to transmit the data Earth needs.

“And it will know where the wormhole is, with us on the other side, through its own inertial tracking system. It should be able to send lasergram messages back to us every hundred twenty-eight seconds.”

Vespasian glanced at his watch. “Launch in five minutes. And then two days until the Saint Anthony is in position.”

“Two days and a hundred twenty-eight seconds until we know for sure if Earth is still there,” Raphael said.

“Of course, there’ll be a fair amount of excitement before then,” Vespasian said.

Lucian looked over at the older man. “What do you mean?”

“Hell, you boys at the North Pole really are out of it,” Vespasian said. “Tomorrow, the first of the gee-point asteroids from the Belt drops onto Mars. McGillicutty, MacDougal and Berghoff should be on station already, waiting for it.”

Lucian grinned eagerly. “So things are finally starting to happen.”

Vespasian cocked an eyebrow skyward. It seemed to him that quite a bit had been happening up to now. Choosing not to reply, he turned toward the viewport and switched on the monitor screens that surrounded it. The Saint Anthony carried its own on-board cameras, and they ought to provide a hell of a view during the boost phase.

The massive, heavily armored probe was in place on the launch cradle now, in the hands of the automatic launching system. For reasons that he would have found hard to explain, Vespasian decided not to watch the countdown clock on this one. Instead he stared fixedly at the probe itself. So much was riding on this—more than any of them were willing to admit. Larry Chao’s work seemed to prove that Earth had been moved, not destroyed. But Vespasian was not quite ready to believe that.

Yes, he wanted to believe Earth had survived. Maybe the Saint Anthony would give him the proof he needed.

Unless the probe was destroyed in the wormhole, or arrived on the other side to find no sign of Earth, or somehow failed to send back any data. None of those outcomes would settle the point. Even if the probe functioned perfectly but did not locate Earth, that would mean nothing. They were merely assuming that this worm-hole—if wormhole it was—was linked to a piece of space near Earth on the opposite end. Anthony might well arrive light-years away from Earth.

Unless it found a rubble cloud identifiable as Earth’s remains, it could not demonstrate irrefutably that Earth was dead. They might send probes out forever and never confirm that. Space was vast.

And the Anthony was probably their one shot. Surely whoever controlled the wormhole would spot the probe coming through and attempt to destroy it. Surely they would find ways to prevent any other probes from making the trip.

Suddenly the probe seemed to quiver on the launch cradle as the linear accelerator was brought up to power. The launch computer activated the system, and the Saint Anthony vanished in a flash of speed.

Vespasian shifted his gaze to the monitor displaying the on-board camera view. The body of the Anthony was visible at the bottom of the screen. On either side, the Lunar landscape was whipping past at incredible speed, a sharp-edged blur of grays and whites. Vespasian barely had time to spot the end of the launching rail on the horizon before the probe reached rail’s end and leapt from the launch cradle, arcing gracefully up into space.

“On the wings of Saint Anthony ride all our prayers,” Vespasian whispered.

If either of the other two men heard, they did not respond. Each was alone with his own thoughts.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN The Eye in the Stone

They had come a hell of a long way just to look at a rock, Sondra thought. Out the forward viewport, Mars hung aloof and enormous, a battle-scarred globe of orange, red and brown. Spectacular though the view of Mars was, none of the passengers had eyes for anything but the asteroid that was rapidly approaching.

As if to emphasize that thought, Hiram McGillicutty quite abruptly shoved his way in front of both the women, so as to get a better view of the rock for himself. “Surely we should be able to see some detail by now,” he objected.

“Not just yet, Doctor. After all, it’s not very big,” Sondra said, speaking politely and resisting the temptation to swat this little man out of her way. Sondra glanced over at Marcia, who seemed to be working hard to suppress a smile. Sondra had learned a few things on the sprint flight from the Moon to Mars. First, that Marcia MacDougal was capable of putting up with a lot. Second, that McGillicutty was a lot to put up with. And third, that she had had enough of rush spaceflights. Even without McGillicutty’s abrasive personality aboard, the endless vibration of the engines and the cramped quarters did not make for a pleasant trip.

Well, at least this flight was near its end. “Any idea which asteroid this is yet?” Sondra asked.

“No, and there won’t be, either,” Captain Mtombe said in an irritated voice. Clearly he was getting damn tired of the question. “It could be any of hundreds that moved out all at once. Tracking was not very accurate. We can pick up an Autocrat’s Beacon signal from it—but the beacon is encrypted, and the Autocrat has refused to provide us with the encryption key. We know the rock was registered at one point, but nothing else. Besides, what difference could it make? A rock is a rock.”

Captain Mtombe, a rather dour and poker-faced dark-complexioned man with a slight West African accent, checked his displays. He seemed to be making a point of ignoring the image of the asteroid and concentrating on his instruments. “We should have a velocity match with the asteroid in twenty minutes. The asteroid is behind us and moving at speed, coming up on us, but decelerating. I’ve set our course so that it will match our present velocity as it comes alongside.

“Once the rock is alongside, I will be firing our engines to match its deceleration. We should be able to stay alongside it for several hours at least.”

“How long precisely will we have to observe, if we stay alongside as long as possible?” McGillicutty asked.

Mtombe shrugged. “You tell me. If this damn rock does what the objects targeted for Venus and Mercury did, it’s going to soft-land on Mars. Somehow. No one’s seen how they do that yet. Magic, I guess. My ship isn’t rated for magical landings, just orbit-to-orbit constant-boost flight. You want to follow this rock all the way into atmosphere, then blip out at the last minute, boost to orbit? It might work. Unless maybe we crash a little bit, and get dead. Or else maybe we slide into orbit and keep alive after the flyby. Then we stay alive here, get a look at asteroid number two coming in eight hours behind, and the next coming four hours behind that, and the whole fleet coming down our throats next day. And we don’t even get killed, not one little bit. Which do you want?”

For once, McGillicutty knew when he was being needled and shut up.

“Too bad we can’t blow the damn things out of the sky,” Mtombe muttered. “I know we don’t have enough nuclear weapons, and that we don’t want to risk their revenge. I’ve heard you people talking. But wiping out invading aliens—what better use for nuclear weapons?”

Sondra shook her head. “It’s a tempting thought. But we might end up with nothing more than a bunch of very angry radioactive Charonians. Besides, there aren’t any nukes available. Not on Mars, anyway. I’m sure the Martians could build some out of reconfigured fusion engines, if nothing else. But we have to come up with a better tactic than blasting these things—and to get that we need more data.”

Sondra started working with the image-enhancement routines, peering into a smaller monitor. “Dammit, we’re practically down to a resolution of centimeters here,” she said. “If there was anything to see, we’d have seen it by now. There’s nothing to be seen, that’s all. That’s a rock, plain and simple. Nothing there.”

“Unless whatever it is we’re looking for is on the other side…” Marcia suggested.

Mtombe took the hint. “Hang on to something, then,” he said. He skewed the ship over to do a flyaround, moving in a slow, careful arc, staying at a respectful distance from the asteroid.

“There!” McGillicutty called out, and leaned forward, eager for his first glimpse at utterly alien technology.

A tiny, white, lozenge-shaped form hove into view over the rock’s short horizon. Sondra worked the enhancer and the image leapt upward in scale until the white shape filled the screen. McGillicutty giggled with nervous excitement, and immediately went to work, trying to identify what he saw. “That is obviously a fuel tank of some sort,” he said. “I would suggest that it contains at least some fraction of the propellant used to accelerate the asteroid. Note the smaller structures clustered around the tank. Perhaps those are associated with guidance of the asteroid. I note some sort of patterns on the tank. Could you perhaps boost the contrast a bit so we could get a look at that.”

There was a flash of light. A strobe light? An idea came to her. Sondra worked the controls and zoomed the view in closer.

Lettering. It was lettering, a serial number of some sort, on the side of the cylinder. And the strobe lit again. A standard tracking beacon bolted to a hab shed.

“That’s our stuff, McGillicutty,” Sondra said, delighted at the chance to give him a good swift kick in the ego. “A miner’s habitat shed, real old model, at least twenty years out of date. That’s its ID number. Captain Mtombe, can you give us anything based on that number, or is that going to be an Autocrat’s secret too?”

“Stand by just a second. I need to stabilize our course here.” Mtombe took up stationkeeping alongside the asteroid, a half kilometer off. As soon as the computers were happy with the course, he ordered the comm system to link through to Mars for the most recent version of the Belt Community’s claims list. “That’s a current number,” he reported. “Matches asteroid AC125DN1RA45, claimed and being worked by one Coyote Westlake, solo miner. Full specs on equipment and claims coming through.”

“Wait a second,” Sondra said. “A current number? That thing is still being worked? This Coyote person, he’s supposed to be there now?”

“She. It’s a woman, but yes.”

“Dammit, why hasn’t she radioed in, sent a Mayday in all this time?”

“With what?” Marcia asked. “I don’t see any high-gain antennas down there. Look at her equipment manifest. Her only long-range radio was aboard her ship, the Vegas Girl—and I don’t think the ship came along for the ride this time. Any sign of the Vegas Girl’s beacon, Captain Mtombe?”

“No, we would have picked that up hours ago. But Westlake should be reachable on her short-range radio. If she is still alive.”

“But should we try and radio her?” McGillicutty asked. “Suppose she is part of the conspiracy? Suppose that she is actively controlling that asteroid?”

“And the other thirty thousand that are bearing down on our worlds?” Sondra said snappishly. “That would be one hell of a remote-control problem for a woman without a long-range radio. We’ve known right along that some of the asteroids that moved were being mined by live crews. It’s just sheer chance that we happen to be trailing one of them.”

Mtombe looked up from his controls. “Should I make the call?”

Sondra glanced at McGillicutty, and then nodded. Mtombe sent a series of hailing signals.

He got no reply. “No signs of life at all,” Mtombe said. No signal lights, no activity.

Sondra watched the autohailer repeat the call over and over again. Probably the hab shed had started popping rivets as soon as it was accelerated. Instant pressure loss.

Sondra imagined a vacuum-shriveled corpse huddled inside the shed and shivered. “There’s proof for you, Dr. McGillicutty. How can she be controlling the asteroid when she’s dead?”

The eye. The big eye. The really big eye. Coyote West-lake sat at the bottom of her tank, wrapped up in a fetal crouch, rocking slowly back and forth. The playback on her helmet camera had proved it wasn’t a hallucination. She couldn’t bear to view it again, but it proved she wasn’t completely mad.

Which was not much of a comfort at the moment. Crazy she would prefer right now, rather than accept that there was a tentacle-eyed monster the size of a blue whale sharing this asteroid with her.

And all it truly proved was that she hadn’t been insane then. In the days that had passed since, Coyote had been able to feel reality sliding away from her, slipping through her fingers even as she tried to cling harder to it.

Would the monster come after her? Could it extrude some dreadful pseudopod of itself down the tunnel she had drilled, track her back to her habitat shelter?

The radio call bleeped again, but Coyote merely huddled into a tighter ball. No. That was a trap. She dared not show herself, or that Thing would come for her. There was nothing more for her to do but curl up and die. And she had already done the first part.

Destiny was drawing near for the Worldeater. The target world commanded by the Caller was close now, very close. The minor mysteries that had baffled it since awakening were now no longer even remotely important. The tiny, errant being or machine that had bored its way into its travel cyst and then run away; the small, odd asteroid that was following it.

None of that mattered. The time had come.

Slowly, carefully, it guided the monstrous shell of the asteroid down toward the waiting world below. But the Worldeater knew full well that the massive bulk of the asteroid was in large part an illusory protection. Asteroids were fragile things, accreted in the dark and the cold, unused to major strains. Even the mild gravity acceleration that had brought the Worldeater here had caused measurable stresses on the asteroid’s structural integrity.

It would have to move most slowly, most carefully.

Jansen Alter watched the dust-pink skies and waited. Twilight was coming, and the western sky was turning ruddy, darker. She shivered slightly, more in anticipation of the cold than from any actual discomfort. But she was glad of her heavy-duty pressure suit just the same. Even on the Martian equator, getting caught outside at night in a standard suit was no fun. The Martian tropics got just a tad cool at night. But she loved the chance to see the Martian night as it was, far away from the cities, uncloaked from the dome glare of Port Viking—that was in large part why she was still doing field geology.

Her partner, Mercer Chavez, crawled out of the pressure igloo’s low airlock and stood beside her. “This is turning into something besides a straight geology run,” Mercer said mischievously, her low voice trying to hide its excitement. “I just thought we were going to come out here and bang on rocks.”

“Oh, there’ll be some rocks banging together all right,” Jansen replied. “We’ll see it. If we live.”

Mercer shifted nervously, as if she were trying to see behind herself. She was in her early forties, still youthful and vigorous, but with the first shadows of middle age reminding her of her own mortality. Her dark brown skin was becoming more lined, her jet black hair betraying a few streaks of gray. “Is there any point in trying to get out of here?” she asked.

“None,” Jansen said, her voice crisp and cool. She was fifteen years younger, tall, willowy, blond, pale— with an edge of fierceness that unnerved most people. “All we know for sure is that we happen to be near one of the possible impact points. The asteroid is still maneuvering. It could end up here, or a hundred klicks away, or on the other side of the world, for all I know. I’ve got my helmet radio tuned to the watch frequency-nothing but chatter. No hard data at all.”

“If we run away from here, we stand just as good a chance of running right to where it’s coming in,” Mercer said. “Well, it’ll be exciting to be part of history. If we live to see the history.”

“Mercer, take a clue,” Jansen said. “There are thirty thousand of these damn things bearing down on the planets. The novelty of having one land on you is going to wear off pretty fast. Right now every human being is wondering if she or he is going to live through this—”

“Look!”

Jansen’s eye followed Mercer’s eager hand as it pointed toward the eastern sky. A tiny white dot gleamed in the fading daylight. “That’s just Phobos,” she protested.

“Phobos set half an hour ago and Deimos won’t rise for an hour,” Mercer replied. “That’s the asteroid.”

“My God, you’re right,” Jansen said. “And it’s getting bigger.” She pulled the lever that swung her helmet binoculars into place. The image of the asteroid leapt toward her, the gleaming dot transformed into a massive rock hanging in the sky. “Good God, what the hell is holding it up?”

“You’re not the first one to ask that question,” Mercer replied in grim amusement. “What are they saying on the watcher band?” She switched the channel in on her comm set.

“—firm that the intruder has entered the outer atmosphere.”

“Now he tells us,” Mercer muttered.

“Shhh, I want to hear this,” Jansen snapped.

“Now projecting impact or landing at or near zero degrees latitude, one hundred forty-five degrees longitude-”

“Right on top of us!” Mercer said. She felt a sudden urge to run, to get the hell out of there—and then just as suddenly she was determined to stay right where she was. She wanted to see this.

A skim jet screamed lazily over the horizon from the west, boosting up into the sky. Mercer watched it for a moment, a tiny thing sharing the sky with a monstrosity. Then she went back to the binoculars and stared at the impossible sight of a mountain hanging in the sky.

Down, down. The ground was approaching. Soon it would touch the ground, burst the bonds of the imprisoning asteroid, and begin its work.

It was the first to this world. It would be the beacon to urge the others on, bringing them to this spot as well.

But haste was to be avoided. Reentry at anything approaching conventional speeds could easily shatter the asteroid. With precise and powerful gravity control, there was no need to risk such velocities. Slowly, cautiously, it drifted down from space. The slightest of tremors shook the Worldeater as the high-altitude winds caught at the asteroid.

Sounds whistled past the hab shed.

Past it? Outside it?

Coyote came to herself a bit more.

The wind was howling outside. The wind. Coyote Westlake clung, wild-eyed, to a pair of handholds as the habitat shed bucked and twisted in the wind and the shifting gravity fields. At her best guess, she was now under a full third to one-half gee, with surges of more than twice that. The unaccustomed weight left her leaden with exhaustion.

But how the hell was there wind outside? Her sole external camera wasn’t working anymore. Probably it wasn’t there anymore. The hab shelter’s only portholes were in the midsection, and she had no desire to climb up the side of the shed in this gravity.

Mars. They had to be at Mars. Somehow, impossibly, her hab shelter hadn’t melted off during the reentry. Her skyrock was heading for a touchdown.

Perhaps even one gentle enough for her to survive.

A new thought, one she had dared not entertain before now, came to Coyote.

Maybe she was going to live through this.

Maybe. It was going to be a hell of a long shot. But damn it, she was a Vegas Girl herself, born and/or bred in the land of the long shot.

Time to do what she could to improve her odds. Moving as carefully as possible, she climbed toward the suit rack. God only knew how, in these conditions, but she would have to get her pressure suit on if she hoped for a stroll around Mars.

Mercer stomped down on the accelerator. The crawler spun out on its left tread and veered around to chase the asteroid once again. A whole fleet of skim jets was wheeling through the sky by now, one of the bolder ones actually approaching the monster for close flyarounds. No one knew what to make of the hab shelter bolted to the side of the damn thing.

Now they no longer needed binoculars to see the asteroid. The thing was huge, hanging close, blotting out half the sky, standing on end, a huge gray-and-black mass of solid rock framed boldly against the darkening pink Martian twilight. It just hung there, sliding slowly downward. Now and then a massive fragment of rock would break loose and fall to the ground, leaving a cloud of asteroid dust hanging in the sky, raising a cloud of Martian dust at impact.

Now Mercer felt no fear, only a lust for the chase. She was determined to see as much of this as possible, to get close enough to actually witness—and record—the touchdown and whatever happened next. She glanced over at Jansen. The young woman was handling the camera skillfully, holding it steady against the violent jouncing of the crawler as it bounded over the rock-strewn plain.

Now they had to look up to see the asteroid. It was close enough that it seemed to be directly over them. Suddenly it stopped its gradual descent and hung, motionless, in midair for a moment. Then the nose began to pitch down toward the west, catching the light of the fast-fading Sun. Slowly, ponderously, the huge mass swung around in the sky, blocking out the sunlight. A flurry of boulder-sized chunks of debris was shaken loose and fell to the ground. One of them smashed into the ground a scant hundred meters ahead of the crawler, and Mercer abruptly decided they were close enough. She braked to a violent stop and stood up in the cab of the open vehicle.

The floating asteroid passed in front of the setting Sun, eclipsing all light. The massive body blocked out the entire western sky, a huge, rough-edged oblong of stone so close it seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon.

At last it began to settle in toward the ground, moving slowly, slowly down. It moved in a graceful, near-perfect silence, flawed only by moaning and whistling of the wind that caught at it, played with it, before running on. Dust devils began to spurt up below it as jets of wind were forced downward into the ground.

Then, the silence was broken as the asteroid touched down with a booming, endless roar, a roar Jansen could feel rattling her body as it vibrated the crawler they sat in.

The noise went on and on, as if it had been pent up for too long and now sought to make up for lost time. The asteroid rolled a bit as it settled on the Martian soil. Massive fragments of it snapped off under the stress of supporting the asteroid’s weight. More and more rubble slumped over as the collapse continued, kicking up dust all around the behemoth, shrouding it in a ruddy cloud until the wind whipped the haze away again. Smaller landslides continued for a time, but the asteroid’s basic structure held. Hazed in dust, backlit by the setting Sun, it sat there, already part of the landscape.

Mercer stared at the scene in wide-eyed fascination. An asteroid had just landed a bare kilometer from where she stood. Jansen grabbed her arm and pointed. “Up there!” Jansen cried. “There’s that miner’s hab shed.” Mercer spotted the tiny white dot on the gray-and-brown mountain. For a fleeting moment, Mercer thought back to her children’s storybooks and envisioned the scene as an albino mouse perched on an elephant’s back. But no, even that scale was wrong. A mouse was far larger in relation to an elephant.

“Do you see it?” Jansen asked. “There’s something moving up there.”

“Rockslide,” Mercer said, in a voice that sounded unconvincing even to herself. She snapped her binoculars back into place and looked again. “Oh, my God,” she said. “I don’t believe it. The miner’s alive.”

A tiny, stick-figure human was boosting itself out of the hab shed, climbing free from the hatch, escaping the unlikely prison that had held it.

Coyote clung hard to the rocks, holding fiercely to each knob and crevice. She stared out against the massive shadows cast by the behemoth she had ridden, out over the lonely ocher sands of Mars. Behind her, the Sun was setting, drenching the cold land ever deeper into life-red blood. She sat down gingerly on the asteroid and looked out over the broad, clear, understandable landscape below.

But none of it was real. She felt a rumble in the stone beneath her feet. A further settling of the stone—or the beast within the stone, struggling to be free? The monster, and its eye sliced from its own belly by its own hand. The eye in the stone.

That was real. Nothing else could be.

The shakes began again. She knelt down and grabbed at an outcropping of rock, held on to it with all her might, as if clinging to it would keep the last of sanity from slipping away.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Grover’s Mill, New Jersey

McGillicutty did not trust dragonflies. The Martian-style helicopters seemed too fragile, too delicate to entrust his life to. He clung to the handhold and swallowed hard, wishing mightily that he could be magically transported back to Port Viking, that he could peel off his pressure suit and forget this entire nightmare.

He looked out the open side-hatch, down onto the sprawling desert plains below. There was a new feature in the once wide-open spaces, and the dragonfly was coming up on it fast.

The ‘fly pilot swooped in low, down onto the craggy and unstable rocks atop the summit of the asteroid. The landing skids touched down, bounced once, and the ’fly was resting lightly on the rock. Time to go. McGillicutty found himself hesitating.

The geologist, Jansen Alter, urged him on with an un-subtle toe in his rear, and McGillicutty stepped out onto the ugly surface. Alter and Marcia MacDougal followed.

But the ‘fly didn’t leave immediately. The members of the stretcher party climbed aboard, bearing their ungainly load as well as they could. A near-catatonic woman in a miner’s armored pressure suit had to be hell to carry, especially under these conditions.

Its return passengers in place, the dragonfly leapt away.

McGillicutty, Jansen, and MacDougal watched it go, before turning toward the little habitat shelter, toward whatever had driven Coyote Westlake mad.

McGillicutty shivered a bit as he made his way over the craggy surface. It would not do to think of their destination in those terms, though he was hard-pressed to think of an alternative.

Already, some people had trouble referring to it as an asteroid. After all, there it was, a huge part of the landscape, so big that it was hard to imagine that it hadn’t always been there. Now they were calling it the Lander. Images of the huge asteroid slumped over on the Martian landscape were glowing down from video screens the length and breadth of the Solar System. Nothing like it had ever been seen.

But the second Lander was already coming, and the third was not far behind. Mercer stood, transfixed, watching the predawn sky as another of the massive things glided down to a magical, impossible landing. What were these incredible things? What did they intend?

Mercer was frightened, badly frightened by the invaders, and yet there was something far beyond fear in her heart. These were miracles she was seeing. Dangerous and threatening as they might be, the Landers were also wondrous. They were far beyond any imaginable human technology, as far beyond present human ability as flight would have been to King Tut. A strange and fitting comparison, Mercer told herself, for mountains of hewn stone symbolized the ancient Egyptian civilization—and here was a new monument of stone, a flying monument to rival any power of Tut’s engineers.

And, like Tut’s tomb, this Lander held mysteries inside. What or who was inside that made these mountains fly?

Her reverie was broken as another pressure-suited figure shoved past her, carrying some unknown piece of equipment toward the security perimeter around the first Lander. She and Jansen had lost their exclusive dominion over the landing site in the first minutes after the touchdown, but still she felt an irrational resentment against all these strangers barging in on “their” discovery.

Before the night was far advanced, the first Lander was surrounded—at a respectful distance—with a ring of powerful floodlights. Cameras, sniffers, sensors of every kind were pointed at the new mountain. Now and again a worker or a machine would scuttle in front of the lights, throwing huge and fearsome shadows. The skim jets were gone now, but a half-dozen dragonflies had taken their place. The ‘flies moved overhead on their oversize rotors and blades, shifting position with the abrupt grace of their namesakes, framed in the glare of the lights from below.

Spotlights from the spindly dragonflies stabbed down onto the upper slopes of the Lander, striving to find something, anything, that might reveal a clue. One of the dragonflies was casting its beam on the abandoned hab shelter. Casting its beam where Jansen was.

Damn it, yes, obviously someone had to go aboard and check the place out, and yes, a geologist should have been part of the team—but why Jansen? Mercer stood, staring at the grounded asteroid, at the tiny white dot perched atop it. She was afraid for her friend.

Let it ride, she told herself. Jansen’s there because she volunteered. She forced the worry from her mind. For there was something about this scene. Something so familiar, something so basic she could not see it. Never mind. It would come to her, sooner or later. Sunrise was on the way.

Coyote Westlake knew herself to be in a dream, for none of this made sense. She lay in a warm bed in an improvised field hospital where she was the only patient.

She was in an inflatable, general-purpose emergency-response building. A four-bed, two-room “hospital” was set up in one wing of the standard-issue cruciform building. Someone had left the door open, and Coyote could see the occasional busy-looking person bustling across the central room, back and forth to whatever took up the other wings of the little building.

The wall behind her back throbbed and hummed as the compressor chugged along, keeping the building pumped up. Maybe this wasn’t a dream. Maybe she had made it, maybe the copter had truly plucked her from the flank of the asteroid. Maybe she had seen that impossible eye swooping up to stare at her.

She felt herself shivering with reaction, and realized she was curled up in a ball again, eyes shut, blocking out the world. She forced herself to uncurl her body, lie flat on her back and stare at the bland beige plastic of the ceiling. Someone was speaking.

“Ms. Westlake?” the kindly voice repeated. “Ms. Westlake, if we could continue?”

Coyote turned her gaze downward from the ceiling and saw a heavyset, slightly doughy-skinned woman smiling at her. “I know this must be hard on you, but any bit of information might be vital.”

“Who… who are you?” Coyote asked, her voice sounding raspy and weak even to herself.

The woman frowned in obvious concern. “I’m Sondra Berghoff, one of the people investigating this landing. We’ve been talking now for a half hour, you and I. Don’t you remember?”

Coyote blinked and tried to hold her thoughts together. Which were the dreams, which were real? How long had she sat inside that hab tank, how long had she gone without sleep, without food and drink, too paralyzed by fear to move at all? Well, perhaps there was something wrong with her. “Yes,” she lied, hoping the memories would return soon. Wait a second. Sondra. Sondra Berghoff and a friendly smile, a hand that held her own, offering comfort. Yes, that was real, was a true memory. Her mind had been struggling to deny reality for so long, it was no longer capable of accepting anything as true.

“My colleagues have found a tunnel near your hab shed,” Sondra said. “They need to know where it leads, whether it is safe to go down it.”

The tunnel. What was down it? Was it safe? Safety? No! Danger! An eye and a creature that must have been old before humanity crept down from the trees, a monster whose million-year sleep was now ended, and she had been there when it first opened its eye. Coyote froze again, fell back into whatever lost place in her mind she had just returned from.

Sondra stared helplessly at her, then stood and stepped out into the central room of the temporary building. The medical tech, a stony-faced man whose expression seemed to be half calm and half anger, stood there waiting for her. “It can’t be done,” Sondra said. “She can’t tell us about… about whatever it is. Not without help. And we need that information now.”

The tech shook his implacable head. “She’s half in shock already,” he said. “At least I think she is. It could be she has some organic illness. I don’t know. I can’t tell. Even if it is purely mental, I’m just a tech, not a psychiatrist. I don’t have the equipment to diagnose—”

With a sudden burst of anger, Sondra half-shouted at him. “You have told me five hundred times you’re not a shrink! Fuck that!” All the terror of losing Earth, of asteroids landing on worlds, all her fear and guilt spewed out in the medic’s face. “Fuck diagnosis! She knows something bad and won’t tell me. People are going to die if you don’t give her a goddamn shot.” Sondra nearly screamed the words.

The outburst shocked her as much as it did the tech. Was she truly that frightened, holding that much in?

Never mind, she had gotten his attention. Time to press the advantage. “That woman is diving deeper into her own navel with every second that passes. I’m no fucking doctor either—but that doesn’t sound too healthy to me. Now we’ve got three people on top of the snarging rock out there, two of whom have broken all records getting across the Inner System to get here. They have a tunnel to go down, and the more they know about what’s down it, the less chance there is of that damn rock killing them somehow. And getting killed doesn’t sound too healthy, either, does it?

“The only possible source of knowledge about that tunnel is in the next room trying to check out of reality. So are you going to give her a tranquilizing shot, or do we let my friends die before they can find out how to save this dust-blown, rat-ass crummy little planet full of arrogant sons of bitches like you?”

The tech stared at her for a long minute, then pulled out his hypo kit and walked into Coyote’s room without a word.

“There should be a portable airlock near the far end of the tunnel,” Sondra said, her heart still pounding loud.

“Not far from the other side of the lock, the tunnel breaches into a large cavity in the rock. And inside— well, that’s where she says the monster is, surrounded by all sorts of machines and robots. She goes on about an eye, but no one at this end could make much sense of it. I know it all sounds nuts, but the seismoresonators Mercer Sanchez has been using confirm there is a big hole in the rock in about the right place. So not all of it is hallucination.”

Jansen listened with the others. “This is on the level?” she demanded. “This is what’s down there?”

“That’s what Westlake says is down there. Even if it isn’t accurate, it ought to at least give you a—”

There was a sudden rumble beneath their feet that sent them all sprawling. “Jesus Christ, what the hell was that?” Jansen demanded. “Mercer, you on the feed? What do the seismos say?”

“A tremor, inside the asteroid. Big one, much larger than the hundred-twenty-eight second pulses. The epicenter’s right smack inside that damn hollow. That’s got to be the focus point of whatever is going on here. And by the way—company’s coming. The second Lander is projected to touch down about ten klicks due east of this one in about fifteen minutes. Latitude zero degrees, just like this one. They like being on the equator.”

“Right now we’ve got other problems,” Marcia said. “We’re not going to know a damn thing more until we go down that tunnel and see what there is to see.”

“But the tremor!” McGillicutty protested. “If there’s another of those while we’re down there—”

“Then we’ll be glad we’re wearing armored suits,” Jansen said grimly. “MacDougal’s right. There’s nothing up here to find. Let’s go. Mercer, we’ll be spooling a fiber cable behind us, back to a radio transponder here on the surface. We should be able to stay in touch.”

“You do that, Jan,” Mercer’s voice whispered in the earphones. “You do that.”

Jansen walked over the crumpled surface of the asteroid, up to the entrance pit of the tunnel. She set down the transponder, unspooled a cable from it, and hooked her comm unit up to the cable. With practiced skill, she drove a spike into the rock next to the tunnel, and clipped a climbing spooler to it. Clipping the other end of the spooler to her belt, she turned and faced the pit. Determined not to hesitate, she hopped down into the pit and immediately started down the steep tunnel itself. Marcia followed behind her, with McGillicutty a distant third.

They learned two things first off: one, that the way was very steep, and two, that Coyote Westlake was a good tunnel borer. The tunnel was cut straight and true, smooth walled and perfect. But the going was not easy. The tunnel had been cut for use in zero gee, and the asteroid’s landing had placed the tunnel at an awkward angle. Jansen soon found the best way to move was a bit silly looking—sitting on her rear, scooting forward and downward, peering forward into the darkness by the light of her headlamp. Behind her, Sondra and McGillicutty followed in the same posture. Jansen was glad of the undignified descent—in an odd way, it served to take all their minds off the dangers, real and imagined, that awaited below.

After about five minutes’ awkward travel, they arrived at Coyote’s inflatable airlock, still securely in place, though a certain amount of tunnel debris had slid downward and piled up against the inner door.

Jansen drove another rockspike into the tunnel wall and clipped the end of her climbing rope to it. You couldn’t feed a rope through an airlock. Nor a fiber cable. She unplugged the cable from her suit’s comm set and into another transponder. The plastic lock ought to be transparent to radio. With any luck, Mercer would be able to hear them. Jansen shoveled most of the fallen debris out of the way, matched pressure with the first chamber of the lock, and swung the door open.

The lock was only large enough to cycle one person at a time. Jansen, Marcia and then McGillicutty moved through it, into a small chamber filled with a filmy green gas. At the far end of the chamber, the smooth tunnel stopped abruptly, stuttering out into a rough rock wall. A miner’s zero-gee jackhammer lay abandoned, half-covered by rock chips.

And at the exact center of the end wall, there was a hole large enough to stick a pressure-suited helmet through.

“Everyone, cut your helmet lamps for a minute,” Marcia said. The lights died, and Marcia looked toward the jagged edges of the hole.

There was a faint green luminescence coming from it. Marcia switched on her suit’s external mikes and listened.

There was sound from the hole as well. A faint scrabbling that might be metal legs scurrying over stone—and a wet, tearing sound that might be the sound of flesh being torn from a body.

Marcia was moving forward to take a look through that hole at what lay beyond when the second tremor hit and the pressure dropped.

Now was the time. The Worldeater was satisfied with the results of its systems checks. Its energy reserves were satisfactory, its biological components were in good health, and its mechanical portions were in excellent repair. The follow-on Worldeaters were homing in on its signals.

It was time to move out of the chamber it had slept in for so long and begin its proper work. It moved its main body forward across the chamber, toward the thinnest section of the chamber’s wall. Even there, the rock between chamber and the asteroid’s outer surface was many meters thick.

But that was no barrier at all to a being like the World-eater. Feeling its still-awakening power, reveling in it, it heaved itself at the yielding stone.

The second Lander was setting down a few kilometers away, but Mercer paid it no mind. Let the other chase teams, the skim jets and dragonflies amuse themselves by going after it.

The first Lander, this Lander, was the key. Of that she had no doubt. She stood on the desert floor a bare quarter kilometer away and stared at it as it towered over her, blotting out the sky, gleaming in the first light of the new-rising Sun.

Jansen was in this one, her voice brought to Mercer’s ear by a tenuous link of radio waves and cables and radio-repeating transponders.

Suddenly, the ground bucked and swayed, knocking her off her feet. A massive cloud of debris shook itself off the Lander, and a huge wave of shattered stone slumped down from one end of the asteroid. A jet of greenish smoke spewed out from the Lander’s interior.

The asteroid shuddered again. More stone slumped over, revealing a hollow space inside. And something was moving in there.

Suddenly, Mercer knew what her subconscious had been trying to recall. She knew what this nightmare reminded her of.

The War of the Worlds. The goddamn War of the Worlds. The ancient stories, always immensely popular on Mars, because loving them annoyed arrogant ground-hogs, if for no other reason. The H. G. Wells book, the Orson Welles audio play and the George Pal two-dee movie—all quaint, old-fashioned, creaky and much-loved parts of Martian popular heritage.

The old images swept over her. The mysterious invaders landing in their cylinders—just outside London, in Graver’s Mill, New Jersey, in rural California—lurking, ominous shapes that finally opened, unleashing the Martian invaders inside upon an unsuspecting Earth.

A third tremor hit as the thing inside slammed aside the last of the rock wall that blocked its way. It seemed to hesitate for a moment before moving out from its stone cocoon.

Mercer got cautiously to her feet and watched as the first of the invaders emerged.

At first she could see nothing but a vague blue-gray shape. She could not tell if there were one or many things moving forth, could not tell whether she was watching machines or life.

Jansen. Was she okay? “Jansen, you three still there?” she asked, speaking into her helmet mike.

The signal was scratchy, and the voice was faint, distorted, but at least it was there. Mercer breathed a sigh of relief even before she heard the words. “We’re— kay.—utty got rattled aro— p —ood, but he’s in one —iece. What —hell was —at?”

“You’re cutting in and out, Janse. Bet you snapped your antenna. It looks like whatever is inside there just decided to come on out.”

“—and by.” Suddenly the carrier wave cleared and Jansen came back on, her signal far stronger. “Okay, patching through MacDougal’s radio. The tremor rattled us pretty good, and there was a hell of a pressure drop at the same time. Something is busting out of here?”

“Affirmative. It’s got to be a hundred meters long at least, whatever it is.”

“Damn, and we had to miss it. Go get ‘em, Merce. We’re gonna hunker down here before anything can happen.”

“Jansen, I—”

“For God’s sake, Merce, you can’t do anything for us, and that thing is what we’re all here to see! Get moving. Jansen out.”

Mercer stayed frozen for another split second, and then started a dogtrot toward the open end of the asteroid, determined to see all she could.

It wasn’t easy to get there. The tremors had kicked up a tremendous amount of dust, and the dawn winds were remarkably fierce, kicking up a blinding fog of dust. All around her, men and women were racing in all directions, some on foot, some in crawlers or other machines. Everyone seemed to have a different purpose: some running away from the chaos in panic, some hurrying toward it to get a better look, others rushing to care for some vital piece of machinery. Mercer plugged along, ignoring it all, moving nearly blind by dead reckoning.

The wind cleared the dust away at last, and Mercer found herself in the clear, having run beyond the asteroid’s end, putting her right alongside—

Something.

Huge, blue-gray, shapeless—yes. But no eyes on stalks swooping out to get a look at her. Maybe that much of Westlake’s report was hallucinatory. If so, Mercer wasn’t going to complain. It seemed to move by extruding the forward portion of its body ahead and then oozing the rest of itself forward.

It was impossible to pick out any further details. Its surface—hull? skin? whatever—seemed to glitter in the early morning sun. Was it alive, or a machine?

Mercer tried to pull her helmet binoculars into place. But the bloody swing-down mechanism had jammed again. The balky mechanism always picked the wrong time to screw up. Mercer knew the suit, knew she had only to bleed pressure, open the visor and free the swing-down arm from inside the helmet. She could get the suit back up to pressure in seconds, once it was sealed up again. She checked the outside temp and swore. Marginally marginal. In point of fact, ten degrees below normal safety margins.

But Mercer needed to see. She lifted her left arm and opened the panel on the tiny environmental control panel there. She hit the pumpback control, and her backpack made a gurgling noise as it started sucking air out of the suit, down to Mars normal. Her eyes began to sting, and her sinuses started throbbing the moment the pumpback started. Mercer knew from experience she could handle the low pressure long enough to fix the binocs, but she wasn’t going to enjoy it. She swung her helmet open just as an eddy of the greenish fog slipped out of the asteroid and was blown toward her.

She almost dropped from the stench.

Even in that low pressure, that cold air, even holding her breath, the stink was overpowering. Eyes watering, she shoved a gauntleted hand into her helmet and jiggled the clumsy mechanism. The binocs fell into place, and she slammed the visor shut. She undid the safety from the air purge button and shoved it in, air waste be damned. With a violent howl, her backpack airpumps roared back to life as the spill valves opened. The purge cycle ran long enough to dump all the existing air out of her suit, and then the spill valves shut, leaving Mercer gasping for breath, her eyes popping and sinuses thundering as the suit regained pressure. She slumped back, allowed herself to fall backwards into the sands of Mars. She landed half sitting up, staring up at the clean pink sky. A crash change in pressure was always nasty, but it beat having to breathe that… that corruption.

Never had she smelled anything that had even come close. It was the stench of rotting meat, festering corpses, rotting vegetables, gangrenous wounds, contaminated compost, soiled diapers, unwashed bodies and rotting eggs.

It was that stench of death that convinced Mercer Sanchez the invader was alive. No machine, not even the most obscenely polluting refinery of the twentieth century, could ever have produced such a ghastly reeking odor.

Alive. Alive and somehow entombed in that asteroid for how long? Centuries? Millennia? Millions of years? No matter how slowed the metabolic processes were, some respiration, digestion—and excretion—had to go on. It could have been lying in a pseudo-dead state for longer than the average lifespan of an Earth species.

And she was watching the creature emerging from its tomb-womb. In a real sense, then, this was a birth. Mercer smiled briefly, thinly, to herself. In a way, she had just gotten a whiff of a million-year-old diaper.

She forced all that from her mind and pulled the exterior lever that swung her unjammed binoculars down into place. What had seemed glittering highlights on the surface of the creature were resolved into discrete objects—machines crawling around on its skin, working at unknowable tasks. Several seemed to have made their way down to the surface, moving off on their own, back toward the asteroid. Others seemed to be moving in and out of the creature, going in and out of holes in its upper surface.

The body of the creature constantly changed its shape, and seemed to grow the parts it needed as it required them. A boulder the size of a large house blocked its way. It extruded a limb, call it an arm or a leg, massive enough to shove the rock to one side.

And something else. Something that looked absurdly like a child’s balloon being pulled along on a string. A large spherical object, metallic blue in color, hung in the air behind the creature, held to it by a massive cable. That had to be the gravity generator.

Mercer sat there on the sands of Mars, staring at the apparition meandering over the surface. All right, she thought. A shapeless blue-gray monster the size of the largest spacecraft is ambling over the surface of Mars while a herd of attendant robots busy themselves. Now what?

Nothing subtle about it now—light, the clear light of day, was streaming in through the hole at the end of the tunnel. The Charonian invader had smashed open a gap far larger than several barn doors when it crashed through the asteroid’s crust and out onto the planet’s surface. More than enough light came through it to illuminate Coyote Westlake’s tunnel. Marcia shut off her helmet lamp, and McGillicutty did the same. Jansen was scouting the way back up the tunnel, but Marcia had the feeling she wasn’t going to get far.

“The tunnel back is cut off,” Jansen said flatly as she came back through the airlock. “Collapsed in the second tremor. I couldn’t even open the lock door on the other side. At least the rockslide didn’t smash the transponder. We can stay in touch.”

“Great news,” McGillicutty said in a panicky voice. “The outside world can listen in while we die of suffocation.”

Marcia MacDougal looked at the chubby scientist worriedly. It was going to take all of them to get out of this— but McGillicutty didn’t seem up to be pulling his weight. “Settle down, Hiram. Take a few deep breaths. We’re not dead yet, and we do have a way out.”

Hiram swung around in his pressure suit to face her head-on. “Out? You mean down into that… that chamber!”

“Why not?” Jansen asked. “The previous occupant has vacated the premises. It seems to me we have a way forward, and none back. Unless you have an alternate suggestion?”

McGillicutty leaned back against the cramped walls of the tunnel and shook his head. “No.”

“Then I’m getting started,” Marcia said. She knelt down at the far end of the tunnel, in front of the hole at its end, pulled a rock hammer from her suit’s equipment belt and started chipping more rock away, making the opening large enough for people in pressure suits to get through. Jansen pulled out her own hammer and set to work alongside her. Either because he judged there wasn’t enough room for a third person to work, or out of sheer blue funk, McGillicutty did not choose to join them.

It didn’t much matter. It was the work of only a few minutes to make the gap big enough. Jansen, a little handier with a hammer after ten years of field geology, smoothed out the rough edges of the enlarged hole in a few practiced swings of her hammer. She stuck her head through and took a look around. “It’s empty,” she announced, “as least as far as I can tell. There’s a pretty steep grade downward, but there’s a ledge of some sort about ten meters down. I’m going to scoot down feet first, just like in the tunnel.”

She pulled her head back in, drove a rockspike into the tunnel wall, rigged a line through it, and disappeared, feet first, through the hole.

McGillicutty hesitated for a moment, obviously torn between his fears of going next and being left behind. The latter apparently worried him more, for he abruptly got up, went to the hole, and forced himself through it, moving with the air of a man who was hurrying before he could change his mind.

Marcia followed after him, wondering if she was moving fast for the same reason. She was grateful that getting down to the ledge below required all of her concentration. It would not do to think too hard about exactly what they were getting themselves into.

But then she was down on the ledge, with no distractions to keep her from seeing what surrounded her.

Even without an invader outside, even if it had been a cavern formed by some other, more natural means, the view would have been spectacular. They stood near the bottom of a huge ovoid laid on its side. The ledge was a groove sliced into the rock that seemed to run from one end of the hollow to the other. Marcia spotted other grooves, spaced evenly around the circumference of the chamber.

Except one end of the chamber wasn’t there anymore. It had been smashed away by the creature that had escaped from this place, leaving only jagged edges behind. Light, turned warm and ruddy by the pink Martian sky, flowed in through the broken end, bathing the entire space in ochers and pinks. It was, Marcia thought, as if they were standing inside a huge egg that had just been broken open.

And that wasn’t far from wrong, come to think of it. That was a major hatchling out there.

But this egg was far from empty. There were dozens, hundreds, of machines, or what seemed to be machines, moving around its interior. Fortunately, none of them seemed to take an interest in the three humans. Marcia tried to get a good look at one of them as it passed close by, but it was moving too rapidly. She was left only with the vague impression of fast moving arms and legs, and bodies that looked vaguely like scorpions. Jansen was taking careful shots of the entire chamber, zooming in for close-ups of the scurrying machines. Down at the far end, Marcia saw a series of dark holes that seemed to lead back into the unhollowed body of the asteroid. More scorpion machines were hurrying in and out of the holes. What looked like the ends of conveyor belts stuck out some of the holes, and rubbled rock was tumbling down out of them.

“Down by the open end,” Jansen said. “Look! They’re slicing it up.”

Marcia turned and looked. Teams of the robots—if they were robots—were crowded around the edge of the hollow, all the way around its circumference, some of them hanging from the walls and roof of the chamber. They were using what seemed to be fusion torches, hacking huge chunks of rock off the asteroid. Now and again, one or two would fall, smashing down onto the floor of the chamber. A many-legged variant of the scorpion machine, with what looked like parts bins on its back, would rush up to the victims—and disassemble them, using its many legs to sort the parts into the bins on its back. None of the other robots seemed to take any notice.

But then Marcia spotted something else. She saw a line of smaller robots, a different model, headless bipedal machines not more than a meter high. They were following each other in single file out from one of the holes in the rear wall of the chamber. They had two stubby arms each, with pincerlike hands, and each was carrying an identical small brown bundle through the chamber and out onto the Martian surface.

Suddenly she understood. “Ants,” she said. “Think about ants, and look at that line of robots down there. Look at all of it, and tell me what you think of.”

“Nature videos,” McGillicutty said, free-associating. “In grade school, here on Mars. I remember wondering why we were bothering to learn about weird animals on a planet fifty million kilometers away. The videos always seemed to have pictures of ants carrying—good God—ants carrying their eggs to safety.”

“Jesus, yes,” Jansen said. “And they have to carry them out to hatch on the surface because they’re taking this whole damn asteroid apart. Slicing up the front and tunneling up the rest of it so that they can chop it to bits the same way.”

Marcia felt her blood racing. “Are either of you carrying a weapon?”

“Not really. Just an assault laser and a grenade launcher,” Jansen said sarcastically. “Are you out of your mind? Why the hell would we be carrying weapons?”

“I didn’t think you would be, I just hoped it. Listen. In case you were forgetting, we have to get through that crowd down there. I don’t know how good our odds are— but how much worse could they get if we grabbed one of the carrier robots and an egg on the way?”

“What? That would be suicidal!” McGillicutty sputtered. “There are thousands of them down there! We’d never get out if we attacked them. They’d be all over us in a flash.”

“I don’t think so,” Marcia said. She knelt down, and looked over the scene more carefully. There wasn’t much she could say about the Lunar Wheel to Jansen. She didn’t have clearance. She chose her words cautiously. “These things are related—somehow—to whatever is sending signals we’ve picked up from the Moon, and I’ve gotten some real data on them. The signals back and forth had more the flavor of computer programs than anything else. And not very flexible programs, at that. As if the systems could only handle certain types of situations. I don’t believe these things are ready to handle the unexpected.”

“So you’re hoping that we qualify as unexpected?” Jansen asked.

“I’d say that was a safe bet,” Marcia agreed. “I’d also say it’d be a safe bet we could learn a helluva lot about these monstrosities if we had a few samples to work with—dissect, or disassemble, or whatever. We need data, and this seems worth the risk.”

“How do you know those things are even eggs?” McGillicutty protested.

“We don’t,” Marcia replied in a voice that was firm and determined. Even so, her expression, as seen through her bubble helmet, betrayed her uncertainty and fear. “But it seems to me those things must at least be important. Whatever they are, they should be able to tell us a lot about our new friends.”

Jansen nodded. “I agree,” she said. “I think it’s worth trying.”

McGillicutty swallowed hard. This wasn’t the way he lived life. This was no laboratory where he could shut the experiment down and walk away from it. He had always known that he wasn’t very good with people. He had always believed that his intelligence would compensate for that flaw. But intellect alone was not enough to cope with this situation. These two women were willing to walk even further into danger, in pursuit of some hypothetical advantage. The three of them had no means of escape without confronting these monstrosities directly. He didn’t even dare consider staying here to make his own attempt. He did not want to be alone. Or die alone, if it came to that. “Very well,” he whispered. His voice sounded tense, high and reedy, even to himself. “How do you propose we do it?”

“Let’s keep it simple,” Marcia said. “This ledge we’re on seems to lead clear to the end of this cavity. No one else seems to be using it, and it might keep us out of view. I say we walk down it as far as we can, then out onto the surface. We make our move out there. Those carrier robots don’t look like they’re made for open-field running, and maybe we can get some help from our own people. Jansen, have you got enough pictures?”

“From this angle, yes. Let’s go.”

Not quite willing to believe he was going along with this, McGillicutty followed the other two as they made their awkward way along the ledge. It was hard to focus on the simple job of moving forward. There were too many strange and inexplicable things all about them. Odd machine-creatures scuttled about the chamber, rushing about here and there. Weird shadows and flares of light cast themselves on the walls as the machines used their cutting torches and walked in front of them.

McGillicutty realized the stone was vibrating beneath his feet. He switched on his exterior mikes and listened to the sounds of the place.

Cluttering noises, the grinding of huge gears, the crash of falling rock and the roar of machinery all echoed in the huge chamber, weirdly faint and distant in the thin Martian air, even through the special sound boosters in his helmet. Shrieks and whispers that might have been machines and might have been some unseen and ghastly monster lurking, lying in wait for them just out of sight. He didn’t know, and he didn’t want to know. For the first time in his life, Hiram McGillicutty was confronted by mysteries he had not the slightest desire to solve. He was afraid, and saw the grave yawning wide before him.

The ledge ran on for most of the length of the chamber, but their luck ran out about thirty meters from the cavern entrance. A wall of shattered rock blocked the way, and they were forced to climb out into the open.

Their geology hammers were the closest any of them had to a weapon. Brandishing hers didn’t exactly fill Jansen with confidence, but it was all she had. The open end of the chamber was even more chaotic than the central floor. The scorpion robots were everywhere. “Stick together, everyone,” Jansen said. “Let’s not get separated here.”

She moved forward toward the open end of the asteroid, toward the beckoning daylight beyond, trying to keep them as far as possible from the busy crews of robots. It wasn’t easy. Some of the broken rocks were the size of houses, blocking the way—and the view. Jansen found herself backtracking constantly when a path proved impassable. The going was rough, with smashed piles of loose rock everywhere. They were forced to climb and clamber, slipping and sliding over the heaps of stone. At least there was nothing to block their view up. Without the inviting signpost of the clean Martian sky to guide them forward, they never could have kept their bearings. As it was, the three of them were having trouble keeping each other in view.

In fact they were having more than trouble. McGillicutty. Jansen spun around and looked behind herself. There was MacDougal, making her way down an unsteady boulder. But she was the only one there. McGillicutty was lost to view.

“McGillicutty!” she called into her radio, hoping the signal would get bounced off the rock walls so he could hear it out of line of sight. “Where are you?”

“Be… behind you, I think,” his voice answered, thin and weak. “Backtrack a bit, but come slowly. One of them is… looking at me.”

“Sweet Jesus in heaven. Hang on.” Jansen headed back the way they had come, up and over the rock MacDougal had just come down. MacDougal reversed course and followed her up.

The two women reached the top of the boulder at about the same moment, looked down—and froze.

McGillicutty was standing there, facing them, holding himself perfectly still. A scorpion was standing straight in front of him, towering over him. For a brief moment, Jansen was impressed that McGillicutty had the courage to stand his ground that way—until she realized that the little man was simply too terrified to move.

The scorpion moved a step closer to McGillicutty and Jansen drew in her breath. The thing was larger than she had thought. It stood on five pairs of segmented, claw-footed legs, holding its flat body a good two meters off the ground. At its forward end was a complex set of what Jansen assumed to be sensors, but nothing that she could recognize as a camera lens or an eye. It was at least three meters long, a gleaming dull silver in color, all hard corners and mechanical brawn. Up close, it didn’t resemble a scorpion—or any living thing—at all. It was cold, alien. Its two massive arms reached toward McGillicutty. Jaw clamps at the ends of the arms opened, moved carefully forward, and the robot prodded the strange object it had found.

Jansen started to move forward, but MacDougal held her back. “This is the first time that one of these— things—has even noticed a human being. We don’t know how it will react—but if we get closer, we might make it feel threatened. Stay back. Don’t confuse the issue. McGillicutty—are you okay?”

They could see his face, albeit dimly, through his helmet, could see his jaw work, the fear sweat popping out on his round face. For a long moment he had trouble forming words. “Sc-sc-scared,” he said at last. And that was the last of McGillicutty. One of the two jaw-clamp arms moved forward and neatly snipped his head off, helmet and all. His corpse stood there for a moment, and then tottered forward, his blood’s crimson splashing over the killer robot.

Jansen screamed, and Marcia grabbed her, pulled her back down the rock slab, away. Jansen resisted at first, insisting for a split second on looking, seeing the horror. But then no more. She turned and scrambled away, with no further thought than out, escape, far away. She hurried forward, unthinking, toward the cavern entrance. She barreled into a line of the carrier robots, knocking two of them over, and neither knew nor cared. Terror, anger, horror coursed through her. There. There was the very lip of the cavern. There. She rushed forward, dimly aware that Marcia was behind her, calling to her, trying to calm her. But she ignored the voice in her headphones as she ignored everything but the last heap of rubble to get over. She scrabbled up the last bulwark in the jungle of stone, and found herself teetering on the brink of a straight fall. Without a moment’s hesitation she heaved herself out, down onto the clean sands of Mars.

Whump. She landed on her stomach with a stunning jolt that served to clear her head for a moment. She looked up to see Marcia a good ten meters up, on the lip of the cavern, setting herself for a more cautious leap down.

Even in Mars’s fairly gentle gravity, it was a long fall, and Marcia landed badly, sprawling out on her back for a moment before she got to her feet.

“Jesus. Sweet Jesus God in Heaven,” Marcia said, and the words were a prayer. “He’s dead in there. Dead.”

Jansen got to her feet and looked around, the chittering whispers of panic still flitting about her mind. “We’re not safe,” she announced. The wide plain was literally crawling with the enemy. The scorpions, the carriers, other types were moving about. In the middle distance, a blue-gray something the size of a mountain was undulating across the surface. Further away, much too far away, off to one side, were pressure tents, half-tracks, people. There. That was the way to go.

“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, 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. “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.”

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 leave soon 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 hell 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 ass,” 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 masses 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.”

“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 and machine 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 God,” Larry’s voice said. “We could just dump the taps on the surface, Lucian. The gee-wave fields are strong as hell.”

“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—”

“Behind you!” Lucian said.

The T.O. whirled about to see.

“Oh my God,” Lucian said. There were two of them, and for once they looked indisputably like robots. Animals did not have wheels. Each of the things had a low cylindrical body held horizontal to the ground by two pairs of wheels. Each had four manipulator arms; long, hard-looking, fierce-gleaming metal, the end clamps cruel and sharp. The two of them paused for a moment about fifty meters from Larry and Lucian.

Time stopped for a long moment. “They know we’re here,” Larry said at last. There could be no doubt of that. There was something watchful, aggressive, in their posture.

And then they moved. Faster than Larry could make the T.O. react, they were on top of Lucian. One of them reached out with those cruel claws and grabbed for his armored suit, lifting him high off the ground.

For a terrible moment, Larry could see into Lucian’s helmet, see the shock on his face, his stunned horror. Lucian reached out an arm to him, seemed about to cry out—

But then the robot spun about, and vanished down the tunnel shaft with him.

He was gone.

“Lucian!” Larry screamed, and the T.O. set off after him, dropping the forgotten induction taps. But the other roller robot grabbed for the teleoperator. Larry, staring through the eyes of the T.O.‘s remote cameras, dodged the first grab and kicked out hard at the manipulator arm. The arm swung back, rebounded against the robot’s body—and then plunged deep into the T.O.’s carapace, seeking not to grasp, but to tear, to rip.

Larry screamed as the control rig shot pain-reflex shocks through his body. The electric charge was not enough to hurt, but Larry was not just in his own body anymore. He was in the T.O., and his chest had just been ripped open. The pain was real, in the place where all pain was real, in the mind, in the soul. He imagined his heart sagging out of his chest wall, shattered ribs hanging at obscene angles. His left leg buckled as a control circuit shorted. He swung out with his right arm, desperately trying to defend himself—but that razor-sharp claw sliced his arm off at the elbow.

Larry screamed again at the pain shock as his arm spun away. Real and imagined, seen through the soul and the TV cameras, he saw his arm shorting and sparking, spewing imaginary bright red blood from hydraulic lines. He saw hallucinated, bleeding flesh visible under the shattered metallic skin. And then another cruel slash, and Larry screamed in a voice that choked off as his head was hacked away from the teleoperator’s body. The T.O.‘s vision switched automatically to the chest cameras. Dead eyes that still could see watched in mindless terror as the T.O.’s head smashed to the littered, filthy ground and the little scavengers began to pick over the teleoperator’s corpse.

They pulled Larry, screaming, from the control rig and put him under with the heaviest anesthetic they could find. While he slept, the technicians discovered that the induction taps, abandoned on the ground, were working, pulling in massive amounts of data. The analysts understood none of it at first, but they rushed to beam it all toward the Saint Anthony, and to Earth.

Time passed, and the rover-laborer brought its prize inside the Caller, to a place where it might be examined more thoroughly. Even in the first moments of study, the Caller was startled, indeed astounded by what its rovers had found. This airless satellite was not a world where organic life should have been found. It was baffled by the crude artificial carapace that this creature lived in. Clearly, the carapace could not keep the creature alive for very long at all.

But the Caller could not invest time or energy in examining its find. Not until it had pulled this chaotic star system into some sort of order.

Still, the Caller’s kind were adept at analyzing new life-forms and then preserving them. They needed such skills, for in each biological component of the Charonian life cycles were bits and pieces from a hundred genetic heritages.

This new creature might well provide more such useful data. The Caller put a small subset of its consciousness to work on the problem of placing this animal in suspended animation until such time as it could deal with the problem. A day, a year, a generation or a millennium from now, it could return to this puzzle at its leisure.

Marcia MacDougal tossed the datacube to the floor of her room and stared through the window at the Martian night. A debacle. An absolute, bloody debacle. Lucian Dreyfuss dead—or maybe worse, if her private fears were true. No one had seen him die—and she had just gotten through dissecting one of the Charonians. What might they do to Lucian?

And Larry Chao, heavily sedated, had been packed aboard the Nenya for transport back to Pluto, trucked off like a sack of potatoes. There was not time to wait for his recovery on the Moon. He would have to pull himself together on the flight home.

A bloody disaster, completely needless. The induction taps were functioning perfectly just lying on the floor of the shaft, beaming their signals straight up, in ideal line-of-sight conditions. They could have simply dropped the probes down the shaft and accomplished every bit as much.

But there was something worthwhile that could be gleaned from the disaster. Her intuition told her that. Somewhere in the transcripts, in the videotapes, the data-tap recordings, there was an answer, an answer worth all the struggle and fear and confusion.

That answer might not be enough by itself. But with the data pouring out of the induction taps, with the clues they were gathering here on Mars, maybe it would be the last, key piece in the puzzle.

And she had to find it.

CHAPTER TWENTY Naked Purple Contact

The engines lit. No test firing this time, but in earnest. At long last the Terra Nova was going places.

The massive ship shuddered, lurched forward, and blasted her way free. Forward, up, and out. The Terra Nova, too long a prisoner of Earth orbit, broke her shackles and reached for open space.

Dianne Steiger—Captain Dianne Steiger, she reminded herself—gloried in the massive, crushing acceleration. They were doing four gees already, and the Terra Nova could keep that up for hours. There was power here, incredible power just waiting to be translated into distance and speed.

Not that much of it was to be put to use just yet, of course. The Terra Nova’s engines needed a high-power throat clearing, but once that was complete, the flight plan called for a throttle-down to one-gee boost. Already Dianne could feel the acceleration easing off.

No one had established a system of nomenclature yet for the Multisystem. How should so many new worlds be named? They needed a system of names that would prevent confusion.

The navigators simply referred to the nearby planet as Target One and left it at that. The trip to Target One would have barely warmed up a normal interplanetary ship’s engines, never mind those of a starship. For a ship meant to cross trillions of kilometers, this little journey of a few million kilometers was nothing. They would be there in two days. Even that fast a trajectory would require only a half hour of one-gee thrust. Less with the initial four-gee boost factored in.

Pinned to her crash couch on the bridge, Dianne loved every moment of the rocket burn. All was going well.

She felt justified in having ordered the rush launch of the ship. Getting away was the main thing. No matter if some of the crew and their gear had been piled on at the last moment. They were moving, before the weirdnesses of the enemy could stop them. On their way, before some utterly human bureaucratic snarl could be invented to delay them.

Already, there had been mutterings that sending an exploration ship might provoke the builders of the Multisystem. Dianne didn’t want to give that argument time to gain strength. Better to chance a shipboard glitch and launch now.

She was playing a risky game—but to her, the Terra Nova was a known factor. She knew how far she could push the big ship, what it could take, and what it couldn’t. The unknown risks were the aliens and humans who might stand in the way. Better to get a jump on all of them, at a trivial risk to the ship, rather than giving them all time to stop the flight.

Officially they were boosting for the Sphere, but everyone knew perfectly well that was hogwash. They were going no further than the next planet inward. Dianne was prepared to press on from there if all was going well-but not in the direction of the Sphere. Not for a long time. She smiled with pleasure and watched her status boards, all of them glowing green.

On the next couch over, her second-in-command was not enjoying the ride nearly so much.

Gerald MacDougal, exobiologist, crossing space to a world presumably brimming with unknown life, wondered exactly why he had wanted so much to take this trip. At this precise moment, he could think of nothing but the groaning metal around him. He knew the ship could take this thrust, and ten times as much; knew that it was normal for load-bearing members to make a little noise now and then; but his fertile imagination could not be bothered with mere facts. In his mind’s eye, he could see collapsing bulkheads.

He felt a touch of claustrophobia. Monitors and view-screens and graphic flight-path displays were all very well, but there weren’t any real windows on the bridge. He felt himself to be in a cramped metal cave, a coffin in space, hurtling toward a needless doom. His thoughts turned to Marcia. He did not want to die, now or anytime, without seeing her first.

But even as that melodramatic idea flashed across his mind, another part of his mind knew that all was well, that the ship was performing as expected. And yet a third part of his mind was praying to God as hard as it ever had.

No sense in taking chances, he told himself.

The Terra Nova shut down her engines, and coursed through open space, toward a new world without a name.

The Nenya rushed away from the Moon, out away from the Sun, boosting toward the cold and dark of Pluto, toward the Ring of Charon, Tyrone Vespasian at the controls.

Dr. Simon Raphael sat in Larry Chao’s cabin, watching the Moon grow smaller in the monitor and wondering what it was like to live through decapitation.

Dr. Raphael had never worn a teleoperator control rig himself, but the experts said that the better the rig, the more realism it provided—and the more traumatic the psychic effects of an accident to the teleoperator.

The rig Larry had been wearing was one of the best.

The boy shifted in his sedated sleep, moaned, and rolled over. His left hand flopped out of the bed and Raphael took it, held it. Somewhere in the midst of all Larry’s terrors there might be some part of him that could sense a touch, and know it to be friendly, comforting.

Raphael looked over to the video monitor. He used the bedside control to cut away from the view of the Moon to a dynamic orbital schematic, an abstract collection of numbers and color graphics. But to Simon Raphael, there could be nothing more meaningful in the Universe. It was the Saint Anthony’s flight path, tracking its progress from the Moon to the Earthpoint black hole.

And Earthpoint was getting close.

The probe fell relentlessly, down toward the nightmare point where Earth had vanished, toward the strange throbbing blue flashes of light. Toward the place where huge and mysterious vehicles were materializing still, rushing out toward the surviving planets. Down toward the black hole, the wormhole that marked the spot where Earth had been.

All the latest data from Mars, from the Lunar Wheel induction taps, from all sources, had been radioed aboard the little armored craft. Whatever information the Solar System had gathered concerning its invaders would be aboard, ready for transmission to Earth.

If Earth was still there.

But the Saint Anthony was incapable of worrying about that. All it knew was that it needed to arrive in precisely the right spot, a point mere meters across, at a moment timed with utterly compulsive precision. Miss the point, fail to move through in the nanosecond between a pseudo-asteroid arriving and the wormhole slamming shut again, and the Saint Anthony would be just another submicro-scopic, infinitesimal part of the Earthpoint black hole.

The moment was coming closer. The Saint Anthony checked its alignment one last time.

The wormhole opened, precisely on time. The probe’s cameras saw the event from close range, broadcast it back to the Moon, taped it for a hoped-for transmission to Earth.

A gee-point craft burst out of nowhere, leapt through the hole at terrifying speed, missing an impact with the Saint Anthony by a scant few hundred meters before flying off into the darkness beyond.

The hole was open.

The probe fell in.

Vortices of space, time, light, gravity, twisted and swirled around each other in ways that should not have been possible, knotting themselves about each other. The wormhole went through the probe, instead of the other way around. Time stopped, space stopped, and then each turned into the other and ran backwards. Gravity became negative, and the black glow from outside the wormhole was the stars absorbing photons, using them to fission helium into hydrogen. Time fell in knotted loops around the craft, chasing itself backwards, forwards, sideways—

And then it was over, and the Saint Anthony was through.

Chelated Noisemaker Extreme/Frank Barlow was responsible for keeping the Naked Purple Habitat in contact with the outside Universe. But now, Earth was the only comm target, and it was dead easy to track from here. But on the other hand, without its comsat network, Earth’s own communications were sorely degraded.

Chelated’s boss, Overshoe Maximum Noisemaker, was much troubled by the situation. After all, the Noise-makers were charged with keeping comm from getting too good or too bad. And therein lay the problem. Did the ease with which they could signal Earth mean comm was good and needed screwing up? Or did the damage to the space communications net represent bad comm that needed tender loving care? And how many pinheads can dance on an angel? Chelated/Frank asked himself sarcastically. He was tired of all the almost theological worrying over minor points.

He was tired of it all. Tired of his Purple name, tired of thinking in circles, tired of not being allowed to do his job properly. It was his name that was bugging him most of all. Noisemaker just meant communications worker. Extreme was a bit less neutral, a derisive comment on how seriously he took his job. But Chelated. He had known that in Purpspeak it meant overdetermined and overeager. But it was not until last night that he found out the hard way from a cruelly informative young woman that it had a sneering sexual connotation. And they had been calling him that for months!

The hell with it. The hell with all the rules. While the powers-that-be dithered, Frank felt himself free to do his job properly, free to use his gear to observe the strange things NaPurHab now shared a universe with. He spent much of his time with all sensors locked on the wormhole, watching the massive vehicles drop into it, bound for who knew where. Frank was fascinated by it. He sat, for hours at a time, transfixed, staring at the hole in space.

So he sat when the Saint Anthony came through from the other side.

Frank Barlow/Chelated Noisemaker Extreme stared in astonishment as powerful video and radio signals lit up comm screens that had been dark for weeks. It took a long moment to understand what he was seeing. And then his fingers were flying over the control panels, setting up to record everything.

The news from home poured in, and Frank watched in awe. He looked down and realized that his hand was on the intercom phone. His first and understandable reflex was to call his supervisor, Overshoe Maximum Noisemaker.

But what the hell would Overshoe do? Sit there and contemplate the proper response under the Naked Purple philosophy? Calculate how this development could best be turned to the benefit of the Pointless Cause? Hold a meeting of all the brothersandsisters?

No, he told himself. Frank felt a higher duty than to Overshoe. And besides, this was a message for Earth, not for the Purples.

He powered up his best antenna and focused it on Earth, tuned it to the main comm signal for JPL. The folks at JPL were the ones who should take this call.

The Saint Anthony was a robust piece of hardware. The trip through the hole had been rough—it probably would have killed a human being—and it did scramble a few systems. But the probe’s builders had expected such problems, and built the Anthony to be able to bounce back.

The Anthony took a few seconds to sort itself out and restart its major systems. And then its video sensors began searching for the one sight that could answer the most questions.

It found what it was looking for, and recorded as many images as it could before the first signal-back period. It gathered the data it had collected and fired it all off down the hole on the tightest beam it could manage.

Larry opened his eyes, and found himself safe in bed, feeling far too heavy. “What’s… what’s going on?” he asked.

“You’re on board the Nenya,” a gentle voice told him. “We’re flying you home to Pluto.”

He looked to his side. Dr. Raphael was sitting next to him. Larry blinked once, twice, and looked around. He noticed a video screen in the corner of the room. It was showing a status display of some kind.

Raphael noticed what he was looking at. “It’s the Saint Anthony,” he said. “The probe just dropped through the hole a few seconds ago.”

Larry sat up a bit more and looked again at the screen. All the display values were at zero. The largest frame on the screen was supposed to show the video from the probe—but it too was black. A knot formed in his stomach. The probe had already met whatever fate was reserved for it.

Another clock display showed the time since entering the black hole. Larry leaned forward, watching it, scarcely daring to breathe. One hundred twenty-eight seconds passed.

“Any second now,” Raphael said.

And the screen scrambled and cleared.

To show a fuzzy, low-quality, long-range video frame.

Of Earth. Unmistakably of Earth. The planet lived.

Tears sprang into Larry’s eyes. Raphael turned to him, and the two men flung their arms about each other.

Earth. Earth was still there, surviving in a strange and frightful Universe. The homeworld lived, surrounded by peril.

But then, that had always been true.

Earth’s radio astronomers should have been happy people: Earth’s new sky was full of very bright radio sources.

The trouble was, none of the radio sources meant anything. As far as anyone could tell, every one of the worlds in the Multisystem was ringed by a set of close-orbiting radio emitters, immediately and confusingly tagged as “COREs.” The COREs seemed to serve no other purpose than to jam any investigations of other radio sources in the system.

They had another problem—there weren’t that many dishes left to work with, or radio astronomers left to work on them. As with most of astronomy, research in the radio frequencies had long ago moved off Earth.

A few ground-based dishes were still in operation on Earth, and there were a few ground-based scientists to work them. Those dishes were in use every moment, struggling to understand this brave and fearful new world of which Earth was suddenly a part. Most of them were targeted on the Dyson Sphere—and none on the Moon-point black hole.

They all missed the Saint Anthony’s signals, until NaPurHab clued them in.

When Chelated/Frank’s call came in, Wolf Bernhardt was, for what seemed the first time in weeks, sound asleep. His assistant ignored strict orders not to wake him for any reason, and yanked him from his cot the moment the first message came in. By the time Wolf arrived at JPL’s main control room and sat down in front of his console, JPL’s comm dishes had locked in on the Saint Anthony and queried it directly. The computers were pulling down the main body of data—everything the Solar System had learned about its invaders. Starting with the name, strange and cold. The Charonians. Wolf spoke the word to himself, as if it were a mantra against further danger. As if giving the enemy a name explained them, made them understandable and controllable.

The video monitors and text screens were scrolling off the most incredible data—asteroids attacking planets, a black hole taking Earth’s place. Fantastic knowledge.

But Wolf Bernhardt—tired, disheveled, still not quite awake, was in no mood for wonderment. He focused on the question of answering back, and fast, before those coldly named Charonians could interfere. One data channel gave the instructions for responding—among other things, the data capacity and format for the laser transponder that would attempt a relay to the Solar System. Screens full of information came in. The Solar System was giving Earth all it knew—Earth had to return the compliment. But would they have the chance? The Saint Anthony could broadcast to Earth constantly on all sorts of frequencies—but could only send back toward the Solar System on one laser beam through the wormhole, for three seconds every 128 seconds.

The probe was sure to have a limited lifespan. Earth would have to get its highest priority information beamed back to the probe and fast.

He stared unseeingly at the display screens and slumped back in his chair. Think. Clear your mind and concentrate. A mug of coffee appeared unbidden at his elbow, and he muttered a distracted “thank you” to the unseen person who delivered it. He took a first thoughtful sip of the coffee, still not even really aware that it had been given to him.

All right, then. Assume the enemy was going to destroy the probe in the next five minutes, so that he would have only one chance to report on Earth’s situation. What did the Solar System need to know first? Hell, that was obvious.

The Sphere. The Sphere was literally and figuratively at the center of all this. But explaining the situation would take time—and that would delay the first message. Second things first then. Just dump everything that they had, in whatever order they could, while drafting a proper message.

He pressed a key on his comm panel. “Todd, locate all the science summaries since the Big Jump and start transmitting them at the coordinates and frequencies listed on status page four. Send it priority two. I’ll be sending a priority one in a few minutes.”

He pulled a keyboard out and started to write. What was the first thing to say? “Earth,” he began, “has survived. We have been captured and placed in a huge artificial multistar system dominated by a Dyson Sphere. Many deaths and injuries were caused by loss of space infrastructure and orbital destabilizations. Night sky from this location reveals few stars outside Multisystem, apparently due to shell of obscuring dust. Efforts to locate the Sun in the sky therefore not yet successful, Earth’s location relative to Solar System unknown. Distance from Earth unknown, but, as observations from the Solar System never located this remarkable star system, we can base a distance estimate on how far away one would have to be not to detect the Multisystem. On that basis, range estimated to be at a minimum of several hundred light-years, with no Upper limit. Perpetrators of Earth-theft unknown. Purpose of Earth-theft unknown…”

Arrangements were not yet complete. The Sphere had not done all that needed doing to see after its new charge. The captured world was still exposed to some slight dangers, some unlikely hazards.

One of those dangers seemed to have been realized. An object, of fair size, had appeared through the wormhole link to the planet’s old system. It was not unheard of for debris to fall through a wormhole, but this was an unusually large fragment, and falling straight toward the newly acquired world at some speed. Though there was no real danger, the Sphere never took unneeded chances.

Another world was near enough to divert one of its Shepherds to meet the danger. The Sphere contacted the nearby world’s Keeper Ring and ordered the diversion. Almost immediately, a Shepherd swung out of its orbit and toward the intruder.

The Sphere noted another, larger object departing the vicinity of the new world, indeed headed for a close pass of the nearby planet that was providing the Shepherd.

But the large debris fragment was not on a collision course. If, somehow, the situation changed, then the planet’s Shepherds could handle the problem. The Sphere directed its attention elsewhere, checking again on the far-off danger that threatened the Sphere.

Far off, yes. But slowly getting closer. Disaster was yet decades off. But every moment of that time would be needed in order to avert disaster.

Every moment. The Sphere sent yet another message-image to the new system’s Caller, urging it on to greater speed.

The Anthony’s arrival was reported to the Terra Nova just as Dianne Steiger headed to her cabin for the evening. There was little the Nova could actually do, other than download the probe’s data and distribute it to the science staff.

Captains were supposed to delegate authority. Dianne decided to let her subordinates handle that job for her.

Dianne Steiger slept best in zero gee, and now was a time when she needed that sleep. It had been a busy time, getting the Nova launched, and she was exhausted. She was asleep the moment she slid between the sheets.

Five seconds or five hours after she lay down, a buzzer sounded by her bedside and she snapped to sudden wakefulness. She fumbled for the unfamiliar controls, got the lights on, and found the intercom switch. “Steiger here.”

“Ma’am, LeClerc here.” A tiny viewscreen popped on, and showed LeClerc’s earnest young face. “Sorry to disturb you, but this seemed important. We’ve got something on the radar plot board. One of the COREs just boosted for Earth.”

Dianne blinked and sat bold upright. “Say again. Our fusion core did what!”

“Sorry ma’am. I meant one of the radio sources orbiting the Target One planet. One of the COREs. One just broke orbit and started heading toward Earth. Boosted at an incredible rate, thirty gees at least, and then shut down. Ah, stand by, computer’s giving me a refined trajectory. Make that headed close to Earth. I read it now as intercepting that probe, the Saint Anthony. Here’s the plot.” LeClerc’s face vanished, to be replaced by an orbital schematic.

Dianne peered at it and swore. “Oh, hell. The party’s over. How long until intercept?”

“Forty-eight hours, four minutes. Though we still need to refine that a bit.”

“How close a pass will we get with the CORE?”

“Won’t come within ten thousand kilometers of us, according to the current track.”

A stray thought popped into Dianne’s head. “Wait a second. I ordered passive-only detection. How are you tracking the CORE at this range?”

“Hard not to track it, ma’am. These damn CORE things absolutely glow in radio frequencies. Bright enough that they seem to jam out all the natural radio sources.”

“Very well. Make sure Earth knows what’s happening, so they can use those forty-eight hours. Any theories on why the things didn’t come after us?”

“No, ma’am. Unless maybe they’re just waiting until we get closer.”

“‘That’s not very comforting. Thank you, LeClerc. You did right to wake me. Stay on top of it.”

As if any human being could stay on top of what was going on in a place like the Multisystem.