“Damn, and we had to miss it. Go get ‘em, Merce. We’re gonna hunker down here before anything can happen.”
“Jansen, I—”
“For God’s sake, Merce, you can’t do anything for us, and that thing is what we’re all here to see! Get moving. Jansen out.”
Mercer stayed frozen for another split second, and then started a dogtrot toward the open end of the asteroid, determined to see all she could.
It wasn’t easy to get there. The tremors had kicked up a tremendous amount of dust, and the dawn winds were remarkably fierce, kicking up a blinding fog of dust. All around her, men and women were racing in all directions, some on foot, some in crawlers or other machines. Everyone seemed to have a different purpose: some running away from the chaos in panic, some hurrying toward it to get a better look, others rushing to care for some vital piece of machinery. Mercer plugged along, ignoring it all, moving nearly blind by dead reckoning.
The wind cleared the dust away at last, and Mercer found herself in the clear, having run beyond the asteroid’s end, putting her right alongside—
Something.
Huge, blue-gray, shapeless—yes. But no eyes on stalks swooping out to get a look at her. Maybe that much of Westlake’s report was hallucinatory. If so, Mercer wasn’t going to complain. It seemed to move by extruding the forward portion of its body ahead and then oozing the rest of itself forward.
It was impossible to pick out any further details. Its surface—hull? skin? whatever—seemed to glitter in the early morning sun. Was it alive, or a machine?
Mercer tried to pull her helmet binoculars into place. But the bloody swing-down mechanism had jammed again. The balky mechanism always picked the wrong time to screw up. Mercer knew the suit, knew she had only to bleed pressure, open the visor and free the swing-down arm from inside the helmet. She could get the suit back up to pressure in seconds, once it was sealed up again. She checked the outside temp and swore. Marginally marginal. In point of fact, ten degrees below normal safety margins.
But Mercer needed to see. She lifted her left arm and opened the panel on the tiny environmental control panel there. She hit the pumpback control, and her backpack made a gurgling noise as it started sucking air out of the suit, down to Mars normal. Her eyes began to sting, and her sinuses started throbbing the moment the pumpback started. Mercer knew from experience she could handle the low pressure long enough to fix the binocs, but she wasn’t going to enjoy it. She swung her helmet open just as an eddy of the greenish fog slipped out of the asteroid and was blown toward her.
She almost dropped from the stench.
Even in that low pressure, that cold air, even holding her breath, the stink was overpowering. Eyes watering, she shoved a gauntleted hand into her helmet and jiggled the clumsy mechanism. The binocs fell into place, and she slammed the visor shut. She undid the safety from the air purge button and shoved it in, air waste be damned. With a violent howl, her backpack airpumps roared back to life as the spill valves opened. The purge cycle ran long enough to dump all the existing air out of her suit, and then the spill valves shut, leaving Mercer gasping for breath, her eyes popping and sinuses thundering as the suit regained pressure. She slumped back, allowed herself to fall backwards into the sands of Mars. She landed half sitting up, staring up at the clean pink sky. A crash change in pressure was always nasty, but it beat having to breathe that… that corruption.
Never had she smelled anything that had even come close. It was the stench of rotting meat, festering corpses, rotting vegetables, gangrenous wounds, contaminated compost, soiled diapers, unwashed bodies and rotting eggs.
It was that stench of death that convinced Mercer Sanchez the invader was alive. No machine, not even the most obscenely polluting refinery of the twentieth century, could ever have produced such a ghastly reeking odor.
Alive. Alive and somehow entombed in that asteroid for how long? Centuries? Millennia? Millions of years? No matter how slowed the metabolic processes were, some respiration, digestion—and excretion—had to go on. It could have been lying in a pseudo-dead state for longer than the average lifespan of an Earth species.
And she was watching the creature emerging from its tomb-womb. In a real sense, then, this was a birth. Mercer smiled briefly, thinly, to herself. In a way, she had just gotten a whiff of a million-year-old diaper.
She forced all that from her mind and pulled the exterior lever that swung her unjammed binoculars down into place. What had seemed glittering highlights on the surface of the creature were resolved into discrete objects—machines crawling around on its skin, working at unknowable tasks. Several seemed to have made their way down to the surface, moving off on their own, back toward the asteroid. Others seemed to be moving in and out of the creature, going in and out of holes in its upper surface.
The body of the creature constantly changed its shape, and seemed to grow the parts it needed as it required them. A boulder the size of a large house blocked its way. It extruded a limb, call it an arm or a leg, massive enough to shove the rock to one side.
And something else. Something that looked absurdly like a child’s balloon being pulled along on a string. A large spherical object, metallic blue in color, hung in the air behind the creature, held to it by a massive cable. That had to be the gravity generator.
Mercer sat there on the sands of Mars, staring at the apparition meandering over the surface. All right, she thought. A shapeless blue-gray monster the size of the largest spacecraft is ambling over the surface of Mars while a herd of attendant robots busy themselves. Now what?
Nothing subtle about it now—light, the clear light of day, was streaming in through the hole at the end of the tunnel. The Charonian invader had smashed open a gap far larger than several barn doors when it crashed through the asteroid’s crust and out onto the planet’s surface. More than enough light came through it to illuminate Coyote Westlake’s tunnel. Marcia shut off her helmet lamp, and McGillicutty did the same. Jansen was scouting the way back up the tunnel, but Marcia had the feeling she wasn’t going to get far.
“The tunnel back is cut off,” Jansen said flatly as she came back through the airlock. “Collapsed in the second tremor. I couldn’t even open the lock door on the other side. At least the rockslide didn’t smash the transponder. We can stay in touch.”
“Great news,” McGillicutty said in a panicky voice. “The outside world can listen in while we die of suffocation.”
Marcia MacDougal looked at the chubby scientist worriedly. It was going to take all of them to get out of this— but McGillicutty didn’t seem up to be pulling his weight. “Settle down, Hiram. Take a few deep breaths. We’re not dead yet, and we do have a way out.”
Hiram swung around in his pressure suit to face her head-on. “Out? You mean down into that… that chamber!”
“Why not?” Jansen asked. “The previous occupant has vacated the premises. It seems to me we have a way forward, and none back. Unless you have an alternate suggestion?”
McGillicutty leaned back against the cramped walls of the tunnel and shook his head. “No.”
“Then I’m getting started,” Marcia said. She knelt down at the far end of the tunnel, in front of the hole at its end, pulled a rock hammer from her suit’s equipment belt and started chipping more rock away, making the opening large enough for people in pressure suits to get through. Jansen pulled out her own hammer and set to work alongside her. Either because he judged there wasn’t enough room for a third person to work, or out of sheer blue funk, McGillicutty did not choose to join them.