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.”