We still need samples, Jansen told herself, and a better chance wasn’t likely to come their way. Jansen looked down and realized that her rock hammer was still in her hand. She lifted it up, gave it a practice swing.
“Yeah, they killed him,” she said. “Let’s go pay them back.”
She staggered forward, brandishing the hammer, straight for the closest carrier drone, forcing herself not to think more than a split second ahead. Part of her knew she was running on hysteria, on adrenaline, on anger and fear, but that part also knew that what she was doing needed to be done. One step forward, another, another. And she was on top of the clumsy little robot carrying its vile burden. She spotted a sensory cluster similar to what she had seen on the scorpion that had killed McGillicutty.
She lifted her hammer and smashed it in.
The little machine dropped its burden, tottered forward a step or two, and collapsed in the sand, its two legs still working feebly. Its fellows ignored it and merely sidestepped the obstruction in their path. Jansen knelt down, wrapped her arms around the machine, and lifted it. It was surprisingly light. Behind her, Marcia knelt and picked up the thing they were calling an egg, cradling it in her arms like a baby. She caught Jansen’s eye, and the two women stared at each other for a long moment. Too much had happened.
They turned without speaking, and moved as quickly as they could toward the distant human camp.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Rabbit Hole
“Let me try once more to convince you. It’s a rock,” Mercer Sanchez said unhappily. “Hiram McGillicutty died and you risked your life stealing a rock, and we’ve wasted a day and a half confirming that fact.”
Jansen Alter frowned and stared at the egg-shaped thing sitting in the middle of the left-hand operating table. They were in the same field hospital that was treating Coyote Westlake. There hadn’t been any casualties to speak of, so most of the hospital had been pressed into service as a field lab. “Are you sure?” Jansen asked. It sure as hell looked like a rock, sitting inert in the middle of the table. It was a very plain brown ovoid, about the length of Jansen’s forearm from end to end, and maybe half that in width.
Mercer shook her head in frustration. “I’m a geologist, for God’s sake, and so are you. Of course I’m sure it’s a rock. We’ve x-rayed it, done sample assays, examined it under an electron microscope, drilled holes in it. It’s a perfectly normal sample of undifferentiated asteroidal rock, a lump of high-grade organic material, salted with nonorganic material. If I were a rock miner, I’d love to find a vein of this stuff to sell to Ceres. High-grade, water-bearing ore. But there’s no internal structure at all.”
“I don’t get it,” Jansen said. “The carrier bugs were treating these things like they were the crown jewels.”
“Maybe the bugs like rocks,” Mercer said. “Maybe they’re planning on building a decorative stone wall.”
The doors swung open and Coyote Westlake came in, dressed in pajamas and a loose-fitting robe. She looked wan and pale, but tremendously better than she had the day before.
“What are you doing out of bed?” Jansen asked. “You should still be resting.”
“I won’t argue with that,” Coyote said in a voice that was trying to be calmer than it was. “But they’re using the other beds in my room as an overflow dorm for some of the night-shift workers. One of them snores. Woke me up, drove me clear out of the room and I’m wandering the halls.” She nodded toward the egg-rock. “Any progress?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Jansen said, looking at Coyote carefully. She was obviously still stressed out, on edge. Someone who needed to be handled with care. “We’re just giving up. Mercer has established that our precious egg is a rock. A plain old boring lump of rock. Anything else going on?”
Coyote shook her head. “They finally got that robotics expert Smithers in from Port Viking, and they’re in the other operating room, dissecting the carrier-bug robot.”
“Dissecting it?” Jansen asked. “Don’t you disassemble a robot?”
“Not this one,” Coyote said. “Sondra told me it seemed to have a lot of organic components as well.”
Coyote shuffled forward a little further into the room. “Any news from the outside world?” she asked.
“Plenty,” Jansen said. “We’re up to ten landing zones now, and we’re probably going to have more soon. So far, all of them precisely on the equator. Between five and forty Lander asteroids at each site. And the Landers in Zones Three and Four have formed up into pyramids, just like ours.”
Jansen saw Coyote’s face change color at the news. Well, if anyone was going to have a visceral reaction to news of the Charonians, it ought to be Coyote.
Along with everyone else, Jansen had followed the action at Landing Zone One closely and been utterly baffled by it. It seemed that all the other zones were following the same pattern, albeit a step or two behind.
One thing they had learned: the Lander creatures were highly variable as to color, size, and shape, and the companion machines and creatures that rode with them were likewise quite different from Lander to Lander. The first Lander was attended almost solely by robots, and the fourth almost entirely by what appeared smaller versions of itself.
As far as anyone could tell, all of the variant forms of creatures and devices were functionally identical to their counterparts aboard the other asteroids. The differences seemed to be of style and emphasis, rather than substance.
Each grounded asteroid contained one of the huge Lander creatures. In every landing zone, the Landers acted the same way. Each Lander would break out of its asteroid. All the Landers in the group would proceed to a central point. Each would tow a large, floating, spherical object along behind itself. The consensus was that the floating spheres were gravity generators. While the Landers were meeting up, the auxiliary creatures and machines would continue disassembling the carrier asteroids.
Next, the Landers would join together, not just touching but merging, flowing into each other, melding their bodies into one larger amalgam creature. Four or ten or forty of the huge things would form up into a fat, four-sided pyramidal shape, all their gravity generators suspended directly over the apex of the pyramid like so many children’s balloons.
Jansen turned and looked out the one small window in the operating room. That was the stage the Zone One Landers had passed early this morning. There, right outside the window, three kilometers away, she could see the next and weirdest stage of all in progress. All the auxiliary creatures and robots from all the Landers were at work constructing a large structure around and atop the amalgam-creature pyramid, attaching the structure directly to the merged bodies of the Lander creatures.
None of the other zones were as far along as Zone One. No one knew what would happen when the companions were finished with their work. All the amalgam-creature structures were immense, the smallest surpassing the size of the largest Egyptian pyramid.
Coyote came up behind her and looked out the window.
“Look at those sons of bitches out there,” she said. “What the hell are they building?”
“God knows,” Jansen said. But it wasn’t such a good idea to get Coyote thinking about the massive creature she had shared an asteroid with. Jansen changed the subject. “Are they getting any clues taking the carrier-bug robot apart?”