Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

Once inside the rock, the heat and dust were a bit more tolerable. Even so, no one but a miner would have been able to endure it. The roar of the fusion jet was conducted through the borer’s handles to her suit. She was engulfed in a deafening roar, and the supposedly shielded glare from the fusion jet frequently flickered a tongue of flame out. Her helmet lamp and the occasional dazzling flare from the borer were the only light. The darkness seemed to close in all around her, like a live thing hovering just over the shadows on her shoulder.

But she was moving. With the inertial tracker clamped to the top of the borer, she could watch her progress inward toward her goal, moving at a snail’s pace over the tiny display. It took her two long weary days to cut her way close to her target. Then she started using the thumper, a combination noisemaker and listener that showed hollows in the rock. She got a positive result on her second try. The thumper’s echolocator showed a large area of very low density only a meter ahead.

Not wishing to bathe the hollow’s interior with a fusion flame, Coyote retreated back up her tunnel with the borer, glad to be done with it.

She came back down the tunnel with a zero-gee jack-hammer. It was a far slower and less powerful tool than the borer, but it wouldn’t vaporize her prize either. Coyote was not interested in taking chances; she did not know what, if any, atmosphere was behind that last meter of rock. Time for the bubblelock.

The lock was a simple gadget, an inflatable double-walled cylinder made of tough plastic, with three hatches in it. It was meant to form an airtight seal in a tunnel, and thus allow a miner to shed her suit and work in atmosphere. It would serve for current purposes. Coyote dragged it into the tunnel, and pumped up the airspace between the inner and outer cylinders. The plastic formed itself against the tunnel walls. Coyote climbed through all the hatches and inflated both chambers behind her. That ought to hold air pressure—if there was any pressure to hold.

She set to work with the jackhammer, carefully bracing its legs against the tunnel walls, rigging the protective skirting, and setting the hammer blade to work. The trouble with a zero-gee jack was that you needed the skirting between you and the workface to keep the rock chips from slicing your suit open. The snappier models had armored video cameras under the skirting, but Coyote ran a low-budget operation. She had to work by feel, pausing frequently to dig the broken rock out.

When the jackhammer nearly skipped out of her hands, she knew she was through. A jet of green, smoky air shot past her, filling the tunnel back up to the airlock.

There was gas pressure in that cavity, all right. She shut the hammer down and forced herself to move slowly as she pulled it out of the way and cleared out the last of the rubble. Her helmet lamp revealed a small hole, the size of her fist, punched in the rear wall of the tunnel. Pressure had equalized now. Not a whisper of air moved past her. Though she had doubts that these gases were air in any human sense. The light of her helmet lamp shone through them with an off-putting smoky greenish pallor.

Her mind tingling with fear and excitement, her body limp with exhaustion, Coyote cleared the last of the rock chips out of the way and set to work enlarging the hole with a heavy-duty cutting laser. In a few minutes she had widened it enough to poke her helmet through.

She screwed up her courage and stuck her head into the hole.

But for the light from her lamp, the huge hollow space was utterly dark. At a guess, the hollow was forty meters across and eighty from end to end, a football-shaped void carved from the living rock. Coyote’s drillhole had breached the cavern wall about midway down the long axis, perhaps a bit toward the aft end. At first Coyote thought the hollow was truly empty, but then her eyes caught a flicker of movement through the hazy greenish gas. A huge something sat, somehow looking slumped over, at the aft or bottom end of the cavern.

Something that moved.

Eyes are merely lenses and light receptors: in a very real sense, seeing actually takes place in the brain, where images are processed and analyzed. But the human brain cannot easily see what it does not understand. It tries to force the unfamiliar into previously recorded patterns, or to compare it to objects that are in some way similar. Once in some manner understood, the new thing can be catalogued in memory alongside the old and familiar.

These techniques are successful well over ninety-nine percent of the time, but they fail utterly when the brain is confronted with something that does not fit into any previous category, and does not even resemble anything in a previous category.

Coyote saw fluid movement, huge size, dark color, the gleam of a shiny-wet surface—and thought she saw a whale. For a half moment of time, she wrestled with the impossible question of how a blue whale could have come to be here, and even, absurdly, worked up a moment of righteous indignation that someone would have so cruelly treated a member of a protected species.

But then her helmet lamp caught the glittering metallic cable sprouting from the brow of the dimly seen thing. She followed the cable upward toward the forward end of the hollow, and saw it join with a massive spherical object that hung there, supported by heavy braces that bound it to the surrounding rock on all sides. That heavily braced sphere had to be the source of the gravity drive. But it was hooked up to the whale thing. Why would a massive cable be implanted in a living creature? Or was it alive? Was it controlling the gravity drive?

She swung her light around again and wondered that she had even thought of it as a whale. At second glance, and with the idea of machinery instead of life in mind, she saw the smooth lines of a sleek machine. More cables terminated at it, coiling here and there to other devices around the cavern. And there, sprouting from the skin of the thing, was a manipulator arm, obviously mechanical. That was the movement she had seen. She adjusted the helmet lamp to give a wider-angle beam and now saw a perfect forest of manipulator arms, busy about unknowable tasks, all of them sprouting from the featureless, shapeless blue-gray surface of the huge object that lay huddled at the base of the cavern. Strange gadgets littered its surface, dropped there by the arms. The surface itself seemed to move and quiver a bit, as if other devices beneath its surface were in action. But there was nothing there but machines, all machines. Nothing here was alive. Of that much she was certain.

Until one of the manipulator arms extruded a cutting blade, bent over the surface of the massive body it sprang from, and sliced the skin open. Crimson blood splattered for a second and then was gone. Gleaming, pink underflesh peeled away under the knife, and a flaccid tentacle with a bulbous end to it floated up out of the gore. Before the tentacle was wholly unfurled, two new arms were at work, somehow sealing up the wound the first arm had made.

Coyote watched in stunned horror as the tentacle swung toward her. But she did not scream, or run, or panic, until the skin of the bulbous tip peeled back to reveal a huge, staring eye, hovering in the darkness, regarding her with obvious curiosity.

Larry looked out of the lander’s viewport at the cold lands of the Moon’s North Pole. Damn it, he hadn’t come billions of kilometers just to find himself on another ice world.

Tortured sheets of frozen water cowered at the Moon’s poles, hiding from the blinding power of the Sun. On a map, the ice fields are minute, covering a mere dot of the surface, easily missed from orbit. But right at the North Pole, it seemed to Larry as if the ice covered everything. The craters, the hillocks and the boulders were all covered in the midnight-black gleam of glare ice as seen by starlight. Here the Sun, hidden by high crater walls and mountains, never shone.