Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

“My God, you’re right,” Jansen said. “And it’s getting bigger.” She pulled the lever that swung her helmet binoculars into place. The image of the asteroid leapt toward her, the gleaming dot transformed into a massive rock hanging in the sky. “Good God, what the hell is holding it up?”

“You’re not the first one to ask that question,” Mercer replied in grim amusement. “What are they saying on the watcher band?” She switched the channel in on her comm set.

“— firm that the intruder has entered the outer atmosphere.”

“Now he tells us,” Mercer muttered.

“Shhh, I want to hear this,” Jansen snapped.

“ Now projecting impact or landing at or near zero degrees latitude, one hundred forty-five degrees longitude-”

“Right on top of us!” Mercer said. She felt a sudden urge to run, to get the hell out of there—and then just as suddenly she was determined to stay right where she was. She wanted to see this.

A skim jet screamed lazily over the horizon from the west, boosting up into the sky. Mercer watched it for a moment, a tiny thing sharing the sky with a monstrosity. Then she went back to the binoculars and stared at the impossible sight of a mountain hanging in the sky.

Down, down. The ground was approaching. Soon it would touch the ground, burst the bonds of the imprisoning asteroid, and begin its work.

It was the first to this world. It would be the beacon to urge the others on, bringing them to this spot as well.

But haste was to be avoided. Reentry at anything approaching conventional speeds could easily shatter the asteroid. With precise and powerful gravity control, there was no need to risk such velocities. Slowly, cautiously, it drifted down from space. The slightest of tremors shook the Worldeater as the high-altitude winds caught at the asteroid .

Sounds whistled past the hab shed.

Past it? Outside it?

Coyote came to herself a bit more.

The wind was howling outside . The wind . Coyote Westlake clung, wild-eyed, to a pair of handholds as the habitat shed bucked and twisted in the wind and the shifting gravity fields. At her best guess, she was now under a full third to one-half gee, with surges of more than twice that. The unaccustomed weight left her leaden with exhaustion.

But how the hell was there wind outside? Her sole external camera wasn’t working anymore. Probably it wasn’t there anymore. The hab shelter’s only portholes were in the midsection, and she had no desire to climb up the side of the shed in this gravity.

Mars. They had to be at Mars. Somehow, impossibly, her hab shelter hadn’t melted off during the reentry. Her skyrock was heading for a touchdown.

Perhaps even one gentle enough for her to survive.

A new thought, one she had dared not entertain before now, came to Coyote.

Maybe she was going to live through this.

Maybe. It was going to be a hell of a long shot. But damn it, she was a Vegas Girl herself, born and/or bred in the land of the long shot.

Time to do what she could to improve her odds. Moving as carefully as possible, she climbed toward the suit rack. God only knew how, in these conditions, but she would have to get her pressure suit on if she hoped for a stroll around Mars.

Mercer stomped down on the accelerator. The crawler spun out on its left tread and veered around to chase the asteroid once again. A whole fleet of skim jets was wheeling through the sky by now, one of the bolder ones actually approaching the monster for close flyarounds. No one knew what to make of the hab shelter bolted to the side of the damn thing.

Now they no longer needed binoculars to see the asteroid. The thing was huge, hanging close, blotting out half the sky, standing on end, a huge gray-and-black mass of solid rock framed boldly against the darkening pink Martian twilight. It just hung there, sliding slowly downward. Now and then a massive fragment of rock would break loose and fall to the ground, leaving a cloud of asteroid dust hanging in the sky, raising a cloud of Martian dust at impact.

Now Mercer felt no fear, only a lust for the chase. She was determined to see as much of this as possible, to get close enough to actually witness—and record—the touchdown and whatever happened next. She glanced over at Jansen. The young woman was handling the camera skillfully, holding it steady against the violent jouncing of the crawler as it bounded over the rock-strewn plain.

Now they had to look up to see the asteroid. It was close enough that it seemed to be directly over them. Suddenly it stopped its gradual descent and hung, motionless, in midair for a moment. Then the nose began to pitch down toward the west, catching the light of the fast-fading Sun. Slowly, ponderously, the huge mass swung around in the sky, blocking out the sunlight. A flurry of boulder-sized chunks of debris was shaken loose and fell to the ground. One of them smashed into the ground a scant hundred meters ahead of the crawler, and Mercer abruptly decided they were close enough. She braked to a violent stop and stood up in the cab of the open vehicle.

The floating asteroid passed in front of the setting Sun, eclipsing all light. The massive body blocked out the entire western sky, a huge, rough-edged oblong of stone so close it seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon.

At last it began to settle in toward the ground, moving slowly, slowly down. It moved in a graceful, near-perfect silence, flawed only by moaning and whistling of the wind that caught at it, played with it, before running on. Dust devils began to spurt up below it as jets of wind were forced downward into the ground.

Then, the silence was broken as the asteroid touched down with a booming, endless roar, a roar Jansen could feel rattling her body as it vibrated the crawler they sat in.

The noise went on and on, as if it had been pent up for too long and now sought to make up for lost time. The asteroid rolled a bit as it settled on the Martian soil. Massive fragments of it snapped off under the stress of supporting the asteroid’s weight. More and more rubble slumped over as the collapse continued, kicking up dust all around the behemoth, shrouding it in a ruddy cloud until the wind whipped the haze away again. Smaller landslides continued for a time, but the asteroid’s basic structure held. Hazed in dust, backlit by the setting Sun, it sat there, already part of the landscape.

Mercer stared at the scene in wide-eyed fascination. An asteroid had just landed a bare kilometer from where she stood. Jansen grabbed her arm and pointed. “Up there!” Jansen cried. “There’s that miner’s hab shed.” Mercer spotted the tiny white dot on the gray-and-brown mountain. For a fleeting moment, Mercer thought back to her children’s storybooks and envisioned the scene as an albino mouse perched on an elephant’s back. But no, even that scale was wrong. A mouse was far larger in relation to an elephant.

“Do you see it?” Jansen asked. “There’s something moving up there.”

“Rockslide,” Mercer said, in a voice that sounded unconvincing even to herself. She snapped her binoculars back into place and looked again. “Oh, my God,” she said. “I don’t believe it. The miner’s alive.”

A tiny, stick-figure human was boosting itself out of the hab shed, climbing free from the hatch, escaping the unlikely prison that had held it.

Coyote clung hard to the rocks, holding fiercely to each knob and crevice. She stared out against the massive shadows cast by the behemoth she had ridden, out over the lonely ocher sands of Mars. Behind her, the Sun was setting, drenching the cold land ever deeper into life-red blood. She sat down gingerly on the asteroid and looked out over the broad, clear, understandable landscape below.