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, Lucia
n. 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 tim
e 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.
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