“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.