Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

There was a flash of light. A strobe light? An idea came to her. Sondra worked the controls and zoomed the view in closer.

Lettering. It was lettering, a serial number of some sort, on the side of the cylinder. And the strobe lit again. A standard tracking beacon bolted to a hab shed.

“That’s our stuff, McGillicutty,” Sondra said, delighted at the chance to give him a good swift kick in the ego. “A miner’s habitat shed, real old model, at least twenty years out of date. That’s its ID number. Captain Mtombe, can you give us anything based on that number, or is that going to be an Autocrat’s secret too?”

“Stand by just a second. I need to stabilize our course here.” Mtombe took up stationkeeping alongside the asteroid, a half kilometer off. As soon as the computers were happy with the course, he ordered the comm system to link through to Mars for the most recent version of the Belt Community’s claims list. “That’s a current number,” he reported. “Matches asteroid AC125DN1RA45, claimed and being worked by one Coyote Westlake, solo miner. Full specs on equipment and claims coming through.”

“Wait a second,” Sondra said. “A current number? That thing is still being worked? This Coyote person, he’s supposed to be there now ?”

“She. It’s a woman, but yes.”

“Dammit, why hasn’t she radioed in, sent a Mayday in all this time?”

“With what?” Marcia asked. “I don’t see any high-gain antennas down there. Look at her equipment manifest. Her only long-range radio was aboard her ship, the Vegas Girl— and I don’t think the ship came along for the ride this time. Any sign of the Vegas Girl’s beacon, Captain Mtombe?”

“No, we would have picked that up hours ago. But Westlake should be reachable on her short-range radio. If she is still alive.”

“But should we try and radio her?” McGillicutty asked. “Suppose she is part of the conspiracy? Suppose that she is actively controlling that asteroid?”

“And the other thirty thousand that are bearing down on our worlds?” Sondra said snappishly. “That would be one hell of a remote-control problem for a woman without a long-range radio. We’ve known right along that some of the asteroids that moved were being mined by live crews. It’s just sheer chance that we happen to be trailing one of them.”

Mtombe looked up from his controls. “Should I make the call?”

Sondra glanced at McGillicutty, and then nodded. Mtombe sent a series of hailing signals.

He got no reply. “No signs of life at all,” Mtombe said. No signal lights, no activity.

Sondra watched the autohailer repeat the call over and over again. Probably the hab shed had started popping rivets as soon as it was accelerated. Instant pressure loss.

Sondra imagined a vacuum-shriveled corpse huddled inside the shed and shivered. “There’s proof for you, Dr. McGillicutty. How can she be controlling the asteroid when she’s dead?”

The eye. The big eye. The really big eye. Coyote West-lake sat at the bottom of her tank, wrapped up in a fetal crouch, rocking slowly back and forth. The playback on her helmet camera had proved it wasn’t a hallucination. She couldn’t bear to view it again, but it proved she wasn’t completely mad.

Which was not much of a comfort at the moment. Crazy she would prefer right now, rather than accept that there was a tentacle-eyed monster the size of a blue whale sharing this asteroid with her.

And all it truly proved was that she hadn’t been insane then. In the days that had passed since, Coyote had been able to feel reality sliding away from her, slipping through her fingers even as she tried to cling harder to it.

Would the monster come after her? Could it extrude some dreadful pseudopod of itself down the tunnel she had drilled, track her back to her habitat shelter?

The radio call bleeped again, but Coyote merely huddled into a tighter ball. No. That was a trap. She dared not show herself, or that Thing would come for her. There was nothing more for her to do but curl up and die. And she had already done the first part.

Destiny was drawing near for the Worldeater. The target world commanded by the Caller was close now, very close. The minor mysteries that had baffled it since awakening were now no longer even remotely important. The tiny, errant being or machine that had bored its way into its travel cyst and then run away; the small, odd asteroid that was following it.

None of that mattered. The time had come.

Slowly, carefully, it guided the monstrous shell of the asteroid down toward the waiting world below. But the Worldeater knew full well that the massive bulk of the asteroid was in large part an illusory protection. Asteroids were fragile things, accreted in the dark and the cold, unused to major strains. Even the mild gravity acceleration that had brought the Worldeater here had caused measurable stresses on the asteroid’s structural integrity.

It would have to move most slowly, most carefully.

Jansen Alter watched the dust-pink skies and waited. Twilight was coming, and the western sky was turning ruddy, darker. She shivered slightly, more in anticipation of the cold than from any actual discomfort. But she was glad of her heavy-duty pressure suit just the same. Even on the Martian equator, getting caught outside at night in a standard suit was no fun. The Martian tropics got just a tad cool at night. But she loved the chance to see the Martian night as it was, far away from the cities, uncloaked from the dome glare of Port Viking—that was in large part why she was still doing field geology.

Her partner, Mercer Chavez, crawled out of the pressure igloo’s low airlock and stood beside her. “This is turning into something besides a straight geology run,” Mercer said mischievously, her low voice trying to hide its excitement. “I just thought we were going to come out here and bang on rocks.”

“Oh, there’ll be some rocks banging together all right,” Jansen replied. “We’ll see it. If we live.”

Mercer shifted nervously, as if she were trying to see behind herself. She was in her early forties, still youthful and vigorous, but with the first shadows of middle age reminding her of her own mortality. Her dark brown skin was becoming more lined, her jet black hair betraying a few streaks of gray. “Is there any point in trying to get out of here?” she asked.

“None,” Jansen said, her voice crisp and cool. She was fifteen years younger, tall, willowy, blond, pale— with an edge of fierceness that unnerved most people. “All we know for sure is that we happen to be near one of the possible impact points. The asteroid is still maneuvering. It could end up here, or a hundred klicks away, or on the other side of the world, for all I know. I’ve got my helmet radio tuned to the watch frequency-nothing but chatter. No hard data at all.”

“If we run away from here, we stand just as good a chance of running right to where it’s coming in,” Mercer said. “Well, it’ll be exciting to be part of history. If we live to see the history.”

“Mercer, take a clue,” Jansen said. “There are thirty thousand of these damn things bearing down on the planets. The novelty of having one land on you is going to wear off pretty fast. Right now every human being is wondering if she or he is going to live through this—”

“Look!”

Jansen’s eye followed Mercer’s eager hand as it pointed toward the eastern sky. A tiny white dot gleamed in the fading daylight. “That’s just Phobos,” she protested.

“Phobos set half an hour ago and Deimos won’t rise for an hour,” Mercer replied. “That’s the asteroid.”