They slid behind the shack relative to the Banshee; as its glowing habitats vanished behind the horizon of the shack, their pilot said, "Fire," and the rail-shaped cart they hung onto pulled away from the interceptor. Michael had little sense of movement unless he turned to watch the interceptor depart.
Harp, their squad leader, pointed back along the surface of the shack. "I can see Captain Cassels's group. They're headed for the Banshee."
The cart drifted to a stop a meter from the shack. Michael switched off the infrared view and turned on his helmet light. The ferrofluid was a dull black, and until he reached to touch it, he wasn't sure he was seeing it. The surface indented slightly under his touch, but he couldn't penetrate it with his glove.
"No surprise we can't get through here," said Harp. "They'd want to control the placement of doors. Where's that photomosaic, Professor?"
Michael waited while they located an airlock. He was scared, in a completely different way than he was used to. This alien artifact was potentially more dangerous than any he and Herat had investigated— but the chief danger here was Man, not the alien.
Still, he told himself, this is what I've been waiting for. Ever since Kimpurusha, he had been wandering, waiting to come full circle. Now, finally, he had his chance to strike at the conquerors of his home. This time he would get it right.
Harp drew them over the curve of the shack to where one of the Lasa's distinctive airlocks sat nested in the spiky black skin of the shack. The soldier unclipped a hunt bot from his belt and pushed it through the resilient liquid. Michael tried to open an inscape window to it by habit; of course that didn't work in this military situation. He brought up his HUD and peered at the tiny image it projected ahead of him.
The inside of the shack was mostly one open space, lit by red laser light. For a moment Michael thought he was looking at some kind of computer-generated cartoon, however, because the interior of the place was overlaid with layers of ghostly image. Three dimensional ghosts shimmered as the hunt bot moved from its position by the airlock. It was as if some ectoplasm had been shaped into the cylinders and planes of giant machines, all faint and trembling. Through these vast ghosts moved tiny objects similar to the hunt bot.
"No hostiles visible," said the soldier who was piloting the bot. "Shall we go through, sir?"
"Standard penetration maneuver," said Harp. Two of the soldiers flipped through the lock, then Harp and the last soldier. Without comment, Herat followed. Michael grabbed the autotroph's canister and was the last through.
Now he saw with his own eyes what the bot had reported. He could see all the way across to the other side of the shack, but hazily, as though a giant hologram were projected inside the shack. The hologram of a colossal, intricate machine…
As he watched, one of those little Lasa bots swept by, not four meters away. As it passed, the contours of a half-visible girder swayed, and seemed to gain solidity.
"What…?" He appealed to Herat. The professor chuckled in delight.
"You've never seen the inside of a three-d printer before, have you, Bequith? I believe we're looking at a new cycler, or part of one. It isn't being built, so much as condensed atom by atom. The bots used a combination of magnets, laser holography and vapor deposition to create the entire thing as a single object. Incredible."
He couldn't tear his eyes away from the sight. Over the weeks or months, the elemental material harvested from the Twins would be breathed into this space and manipulated by subtle forces to come to rest here, there; to join with neighbors to become solid, or form the boundary of such a solid. The whole cycler was a single thing, so much more tightly integrated than humanity's modular machinery that its structure rivaled the organic.
Or exceeded it…
"There's air," said a soldier. "Not great, though, and low-pressure. A mix of helium, hydrogen, and oxygen."
"Keep helmets on," said Harp. "Which way, Professor?"
"Um?" Herat too had been staring. "Ah. To our left, I believe. I think there's another chamber there." Where he pointed, blackness shimmered beyond the phantom machinery. Another wall of ferromagnetic liquid? They drifted in that direction, hunt bots roving ahead.
"I still don't understand what they're building here," Herat muttered. Michael didn't take the verbal bait; he was too busy trying to keep his flight straight while hauling along the autotroph canister.
"I mean, the tethers around Osiris and Apophis won't produce enough power to launch a cycler," the professor went on. "So then, what is this?" He gestured at the slowly coalescing machinery in the center of the shack.
"A colony," somebody else said. Michael was startled at the thought— but maybe it was true.
"They might have spent most of their energy to launch the Envy, and then this is being provided as a home for whomever the Envy manages to find on its ring," Michael suggested.
"Halt," said Harp. They were approaching the wall that separated this half of the shack from the rest. Michael could see circular airlocks at regular intervals around the wall. The rest was ribbed and spiked ferrofluid, all conforming to the invisible shapes of the magnetic fields that held it in place.
He knew there were no living beings here, unless the other half of this structure held habitats. If it did, this would be the only settled spot in the Twins' system, which made no sense.
The hunt bots reported no human presence here, not even that of other bots. Crisler's people must have decided to leave this gestation chamber to do its work without interference. That was a lucky break.
They sailed up to one of the airlocks, and Harp repeated the procedure of sending a bot through it first. Michael was nervous— expecting at any moment that some trap of Crisler's would be sprung on them. Nothing happened, and the bot proceeded to beam back pictures of the new space.
The second half of the shack was a single large space, like the first. But while the first contained only the ghostly shadows of machines materializing, here the objects were fully made. The entire space was crammed with a giant, bulbous, and somehow insectile thing. It was vaguely egg-shaped, Michael thought, with circular holes in the end closest to the bot. Those could be weapons… or engines.
The entire white skin of the thing was covered in intricate, multicolored lines of text— but not, Michael realized with a shock, the spiky red writing of the Lasa.
"That's Chicxulub," said Herat. Michael could hear disbelief in the older man's voice, an echo to what Michael himself felt.
"It is a cycler," Michael said doubtfully.
"It can't be," insisted Herat. "Look at it, it must be incredibly massive— built with all kinds of unnecessary metal plating and girders…"
"It's a drop ship!" exclaimed Harp. "Like our interceptors."
"No… Too delicate for that. And way too big. I have no idea what it is," Herat concluded. Normally mysteries excited him, but he seemed more uneasy than pleased at this particular one. "But if not Lasa…"
Michael laboriously turned the autotroph canister until the little window pointed toward the cycler-or-whatever. "Translate that," he instructed the autotroph being.
The bulk of the giant machine obscured whatever else might be in the chamber. Harp took them through the airlock cautiously, but so far there was no sign of hostiles. But as the hunt bots shot away to explore, Michael spotted something far down along the curve of the ship. "White light," he said to Harp, pointing. "There."