Time stopped for a long moment. “They know we’re here,” Larry said at last. There could be no doubt of that. There was something watchful, aggressive, in their posture.
And then they moved. Faster than Larry could make the T.O. react, they were on top of Lucian. One of them reached out with those cruel claws and grabbed for his armored suit, lifting him high off the ground.
For a terrible moment, Larry could see into Lucian’s helmet, see the shock on his face, his stunned horror. Lucian reached out an arm to him, seemed about to cry out—
But then the robot spun about, and vanished down the tunnel shaft with him.
He was gone.
“Lucian!” Larry screamed, and the T.O. set off after him, dropping the forgotten induction taps. But the other roller robot grabbed for the teleoperator. Larry, staring through the eyes of the T.O.‘s remote cameras, dodged the first grab and kicked out hard at the manipulator arm. The arm swung back, rebounded against the robot’s body—and then plunged deep into the T.O.’s carapace, seeking not to grasp, but to tear, to rip.
Larry screamed as the control rig shot pain-reflex shocks through his body. The electric charge was not enough to hurt, but Larry was not just in his own body anymore. He was in the T.O., and his chest had just been ripped open. The pain was real, in the place where all pain was real, in the mind, in the soul. He imagined his heart sagging out of his chest wall, shattered ribs hanging at obscene angles. His left leg buckled as a control circuit shorted. He swung out with his right arm, desperately trying to defend himself—but that razor-sharp claw sliced his arm off at the elbow.
Larry screamed again at the pain shock as his arm spun away. Real and imagined, seen through the soul and the TV cameras, he saw his arm shorting and sparking, spewing imaginary bright red blood from hydraulic lines. He saw hallucinated, bleeding flesh visible under the shattered metallic skin. And then another cruel slash, and Larry screamed in a voice that choked off as his head was hacked away from the teleoperator’s body. The T.O.‘s vision switched automatically to the chest cameras. Dead eyes that still could see watched in mindless terror as the T.O.’s head smashed to the littered, filthy ground and the little scavengers began to pick over the teleoperator’s corpse.
They pulled Larry, screaming, from the control rig and put him under with the heaviest anesthetic they could find. While he slept, the technicians discovered that the induction taps, abandoned on the ground, were working, pulling in massive amounts of data. The analysts understood none of it at first, but they rushed to beam it all toward the Saint Anthony, and to Earth.
Time passed, and the rover-laborer brought its prize inside the Caller, to a place where it might be examined more thoroughly. Even in the first moments of study, the Caller was startled, indeed astounded by what its rovers had found. This airless satellite was not a world where organic life should have been found. It was baffled by the crude artificial carapace that this creature lived in. Clearly, the carapace could not keep the creature alive for very long at all.
But the Caller could not invest time or energy in examining its find. Not until it had pulled this chaotic star system into some sort of order.
Still, the Caller’s kind were adept at analyzing new life-forms and then preserving them. They needed such skills, for in each biological component of the Charonian life cycles were bits and pieces from a hundred genetic heritages.
This new creature might well provide more such useful data. The Caller put a small subset of its consciousness to work on the problem of placing this animal in suspended animation until such time as it could deal with the problem. A day, a year, a generation or a millennium from now, it could return to this puzzle at its leisure.
Marcia MacDougal tossed the datacube to the floor of her room and stared through the window at the Martian night. A debacle. An absolute, bloody debacle. Lucian Dreyfuss dead—or maybe worse, if her private fears were true. No one had seen him die—and she had just gotten through dissecting one of the Charonians. What might they do to Lucian?
And Larry Chao, heavily sedated, had been packed aboard the Nenya for transport back to Pluto, trucked off like a sack of potatoes. There was not time to wait for his recovery on the Moon. He would have to pull himself together on the flight home.
A bloody disaster, completely needless. The induction taps were functioning perfectly just lying on the floor of the shaft, beaming their signals straight up, in ideal line-of-sight conditions. They could have simply dropped the probes down the shaft and accomplished every bit as much.
But there was something worthwhile that could be gleaned from the disaster. Her intuition told her that. Somewhere in the transcripts, in the videotapes, the data-tap recordings, there was an answer, an answer worth all the struggle and fear and confusion.
That answer might not be enough by itself. But with the data pouring out of the induction taps, with the clues they were gathering here on Mars, maybe it would be the last, key piece in the puzzle.
And she had to find it.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Naked Purple Contact
The engines lit. No test firing this time, but in earnest. At long last the Terra Nova was going places.
The massive ship shuddered, lurched forward, and blasted her way free. Forward, up, and out. The Terra Nova, too long a prisoner of Earth orbit, broke her shackles and reached for open space.
Dianne Steiger—Captain Dianne Steiger, she reminded herself—gloried in the massive, crushing acceleration. They were doing four gees already, and the Terra Nova could keep that up for hours. There was power here, incredible power just waiting to be translated into distance and speed.
Not that much of it was to be put to use just yet, of course. The Terra Nova’s engines needed a high-power throat clearing, but once that was complete, the flight plan called for a throttle-down to one-gee boost. Already Dianne could feel the acceleration easing off.
No one had established a system of nomenclature yet for the Multisystem. How should so many new worlds be named? They needed a system of names that would prevent confusion.
The navigators simply referred to the nearby planet as Target One and left it at that. The trip to Target One would have barely warmed up a normal interplanetary ship’s engines, never mind those of a starship. For a ship meant to cross trillions of kilometers, this little journey of a few million kilometers was nothing. They would be there in two days. Even that fast a trajectory would require only a half hour of one-gee thrust. Less with the initial four-gee boost factored in.
Pinned to her crash couch on the bridge, Dianne loved every moment of the rocket burn. All was going well.
She felt justified in having ordered the rush launch of the ship. Getting away was the main thing. No matter if some of the crew and their gear had been piled on at the last moment. They were moving, before the weirdnesses of the enemy could stop them. On their way, before some utterly human bureaucratic snarl could be invented to delay them.
Already, there had been mutterings that sending an exploration ship might provoke the builders of the Multisystem. Dianne didn’t want to give that argument time to gain strength. Better to chance a shipboard glitch and launch now.