“Who knows?” Coyote asked, her voice tired and distracted. She had too many mysteries to deal with already. “Marcia and Sondra seem to be having a field day trying to figure out what made it go.”
Jansen looked at Mercer. “Want to go take a look?”
“Why not?” Mercer said. “Nothing happening here. Where do we store our rock? Or should we just dump it?”
Coyote turned from the window, a bit abruptly, and looked at them. “Leave it here and pretend you’re still studying it,” she said. “As long as that rock’s in here, you two have this room, and no one else can barge in to use it for some other experiment. This whole camp is crawling with people trying to find places to be busy. I could do with a nap in a room where no one’s snoring.”
Jansen grinned and nodded. Coyote Westlake was a pretty good conniver. “You’ve got a twisted mentality, Coyote. You’d make a good Martian. Come on, Merce, let’s go watch MacDougal and Berghoff dissect an alien.”
The two geologists left the room, and Coyote lay down on the empty operating table, with her back to the other operating table where the egg-shaped rock sat, a meter away. She was even more tired than she thought. She was asleep in half a minute.
Otherwise she would have noticed the slight quiver of movement on the other table.
The second operating room was crowded full to bursting with techs and observers and scientists trying to get a look at the carrier bug’s innards. Jansen had to stand on her tiptoes by the door to see. Marcia MacDougal, being a qualified exobiologist, was doing the actual carving, with Sondra right alongside her, eagerly picking over the pieces. Both of them were wearing surgical gloves and masks. In fact, everyone in the room had a mask on. That startled Jansen. Maybe it had crossed her mind that a person might be able to catch something from the living aliens—but from their robots? She noticed a mask dispenser by the door. She took one for herself and handed one to Mercer.
Sondra and Marcia had removed most of the carrier bug’s outer skin, revealing gears and linkages—and what looked disturbingly like lungs and a circulatory system. There was a small collection of subassemblies removed from the bug sitting on a side table, and a man who had to be Smithers, the Port Viking robot expert, was examining one of them through a jeweler’s loupe.
Marcia was speaking into a throat mike as she worked, in the manner of a pathologist doing an autopsy. “As should not be surprising, very little of the hardware on board the robot is immediately understandable, or even recognizable,” she said. “But we’ll get there. The data extracted from the Lunar transmissions should provide valuable insights into the design approaches that went into this robot. Though ‘design’ may be a misnomer. There is some evidence, in the form of what seem to be superseded and needlessly redundant subsystems that remain in place inside the robot, that the design of this machine might well have in part ‘evolved’ rather than having come to pass by deliberate effort.”
Sondra Berghoff was leaning over the carrier bug, poking it with a probe. “Bingo,” she said triumphantly. “This one I recognize.” She took up a cutting tool and snipped a subassembly away. She carefully lifted her prize from the bug’s torso and held it in her hands for all to see.
Smithers left the side table and came over to take a look. “What is it?” he asked.
“And how can you tell what it is?” Jansen wanted to know. It looked like all the other hunks of electronics that had already been yanked from the bug.
“It’s a gravity-wave receiver,” Sondra said. “A very small one, and a very strange one.” She pointed a gloved finger at a gleaming pair of cone shapes joined at their points, with a wire frame overlying both cones. “But some components, like antennas, have to be certain shapes and made certain ways if they’re going to work. And that gizmo there is a miniaturized gravity-receiver antenna. But it’s not like any gee-wave receiver I’ve ever seen. Almost like it’s designed to pick up a different form of gee waves we haven’t even detected. Like the difference between AM and FM radio. A receiver built for AM won’t even be able to detect an FM signal.”
Sondra turned the thing over and looked at it again. “If they’re building things to receive signals, they must be sending those signals. If we figure out how this thing works,” she said, “we can build some of our own and tune in on a whole new set of Charonian transmissions we didn’t even know existed.”
Mercer leaned in toward Jansen. “Janse, we need to get some pictures of that thing. I’ve got a buddy at Port Viking U. who’d love to see them.”
“Hold on a second. I left my camera in the other operating room.” Jansen said. She ducked out of the room and headed down the hall.
Coyote Westlake awoke with a start. There had been a noise at her back. For a half moment she wondered where she was. This didn’t look like her hab shed. Then it all came back to her. She was in the field hospital, napping on the operating table. But what was that noise at her back? She rolled over to look.
And froze.
That rock wasn’t a rock anymore. It was alive.
It had extruded two stalked eyes, a mouth, and a pair of crawling limbs. Its surface still looked like plain old rock, but even as she watched, bits of it started to peel and fall off, revealing gleaming skin.
And it was looking at her through eyes that took her clear back to her worst nightmare. The eye in the stone.
Her heart pounding, Coyote sat up on the table and carefully stepped off it backwards, keeping the operating table between herself and the rock monster.
She had to kill this thing. It moved forward, toward her, making a strange snuffling noise. It encountered the edge of the table, and its stalked eyes looked downward to investigate the situation.
Coyote used that moment to back away further, toward the wall. She looked around the room frantically searching for a weapon. Mercer’s geology kit. Her cutting laser. She could see it sticking out of the bag.
Keeping her back to the wall, Coyote shuffled around the room toward the laser. The rock monster had backed away from the table’s edge and was watching her again. Three more steps. Two. One. Coyote grabbed for the laser, and the sudden move startled the rock monster. It let out an aggressive-sounding growl and seemed to raise itself off the table a bit.
Coyote glanced down at the laser and fumbled with the control settings. Tight beam, maximum power. She looked back up and saw the thing open its mouth, revealing razor-sharp blade teeth.
There was a movement at the door. Acting on reflex, Coyote looked toward it and aimed the laser.
Jansen Alter came into the room and froze. The rock monster swiveled its eyes toward her. “Oh my God,” she said at last. “What is—”
“It’s no rock, that’s for damn sure.” Coyote hissed. She reaimed the laser, right between the thing’s eyes, and pressed the power button. A ruby beam sliced into the thing’s head, and it let out a death scream. Its skin bubbled and burst, it fell from the table, and dark brown slime splattered on the floor as it hit.
Coyote Westlake felt a rush of exultation. She had killed it. She had won, this time. But the shakes started coming back. It would take more than killing a rock monster for her to come all the way back.
But there was a gleam in her eye as she stepped over the slime and handed Jansen the laser. “Make sure it stays dead this time,” she said.