The Ring of Charon the-1

by Roger MacBride Allen

  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 her
e 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.