Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

Sondra stared helplessly at her, then stood and stepped out into the central room of the temporary building. The medical tech, a stony-faced man whose expression seemed to be half calm and half anger, stood there waiting for her. “It can’t be done,” Sondra said. “She can’t tell us about… about whatever it is. Not without help. And we need that information now.”

The tech shook his implacable head. “She’s half in shock already,” he said. “At least I think she is. It could be she has some organic illness. I don’t know. I can’t tell. Even if it is purely mental, I’m just a tech, not a psychiatrist. I don’t have the equipment to diagnose—”

With a sudden burst of anger, Sondra half-shouted at him. “You have told me five hundred times you’re not a shrink! Fuck that!” All the terror of losing Earth, of asteroids landing on worlds, all her fear and guilt spewed out in the medic’s face. “ Fuck diagnosis! She knows something bad and won’t tell me. People are going to die if you don’t give her a goddamn shot.” Sondra nearly screamed the words.

The outburst shocked her as much as it did the tech. Was she truly that frightened, holding that much in?

Never mind, she had gotten his attention. Time to press the advantage. “That woman is diving deeper into her own navel with every second that passes. I’m no fucking doctor either—but that doesn’t sound too healthy to me. Now we’ve got three people on top of the snarging rock out there, two of whom have broken all records getting across the Inner System to get here. They have a tunnel to go down, and the more they know about what’s down it, the less chance there is of that damn rock killing them somehow. And getting killed doesn’t sound too healthy, either, does it?

“The only possible source of knowledge about that tunnel is in the next room trying to check out of reality. So are you going to give her a tranquilizing shot, or do we let my friends die before they can find out how to save this dust-blown, rat-ass crummy little planet full of arrogant sons of bitches like you?”

The tech stared at her for a long minute, then pulled out his hypo kit and walked into Coyote’s room without a word.

“There should be a portable airlock near the far end of the tunnel,” Sondra said, her heart still pounding loud.

“Not far from the other side of the lock, the tunnel breaches into a large cavity in the rock. And inside— well, that’s where she says the monster is, surrounded by all sorts of machines and robots. She goes on about an eye, but no one at this end could make much sense of it. I know it all sounds nuts, but the seismoresonators Mercer Sanchez has been using confirm there is a big hole in the rock in about the right place. So not all of it is hallucination.”

Jansen listened with the others. “This is on the level?” she demanded. “This is what’s down there?”

“That’s what Westlake says is down there. Even if it isn’t accurate, it ought to at least give you a—”

There was a sudden rumble beneath their feet that sent them all sprawling. “Jesus Christ, what the hell was that?” Jansen demanded. “Mercer, you on the feed? What do the seismos say?”

“A tremor, inside the asteroid. Big one, much larger than the hundred-twenty-eight second pulses. The epicenter’s right smack inside that damn hollow. That’s got to be the focus point of whatever is going on here. And by the way—company’s coming. The second Lander is projected to touch down about ten klicks due east of this one in about fifteen minutes. Latitude zero degrees, just like this one. They like being on the equator.”

“Right now we’ve got other problems,” Marcia said. “We’re not going to know a damn thing more until we go down that tunnel and see what there is to see.”

“But the tremor!” McGillicutty protested. “If there’s another of those while we’re down there—”

“Then we’ll be glad we’re wearing armored suits,” Jansen said grimly. “MacDougal’s right. There’s nothing up here to find. Let’s go. Mercer, we’ll be spooling a fiber cable behind us, back to a radio transponder here on the surface. We should be able to stay in touch.”

“You do that, Jan,” Mercer’s voice whispered in the earphones. “You do that.”

Jansen walked over the crumpled surface of the asteroid, up to the entrance pit of the tunnel. She set down the transponder, unspooled a cable from it, and hooked her comm unit up to the cable. With practiced skill, she drove a spike into the rock next to the tunnel, and clipped a climbing spooler to it. Clipping the other end of the spooler to her belt, she turned and faced the pit. Determined not to hesitate, she hopped down into the pit and immediately started down the steep tunnel itself. Marcia followed behind her, with McGillicutty a distant third.

They learned two things first off: one, that the way was very steep, and two, that Coyote Westlake was a good tunnel borer. The tunnel was cut straight and true, smooth walled and perfect. But the going was not easy. The tunnel had been cut for use in zero gee, and the asteroid’s landing had placed the tunnel at an awkward angle. Jansen soon found the best way to move was a bit silly looking—sitting on her rear, scooting forward and downward, peering forward into the darkness by the light of her headlamp. Behind her, Sondra and McGillicutty followed in the same posture. Jansen was glad of the undignified descent—in an odd way, it served to take all their minds off the dangers, real and imagined, that awaited below.

After about five minutes’ awkward travel, they arrived at Coyote’s inflatable airlock, still securely in place, though a certain amount of tunnel debris had slid downward and piled up against the inner door.

Jansen drove another rockspike into the tunnel wall and clipped the end of her climbing rope to it. You couldn’t feed a rope through an airlock. Nor a fiber cable. She unplugged the cable from her suit’s comm set and into another transponder. The plastic lock ought to be transparent to radio. With any luck, Mercer would be able to hear them. Jansen shoveled most of the fallen debris out of the way, matched pressure with the first chamber of the lock, and swung the door open.

The lock was only large enough to cycle one person at a time. Jansen, Marcia and then McGillicutty moved through it, into a small chamber filled with a filmy green gas. At the far end of the chamber, the smooth tunnel stopped abruptly, stuttering out into a rough rock wall. A miner’s zero-gee jackhammer lay abandoned, half-covered by rock chips.

And at the exact center of the end wall, there was a hole large enough to stick a pressure-suited helmet through.

“Everyone, cut your helmet lamps for a minute,” Marcia said. The lights died, and Marcia looked toward the jagged edges of the hole.

There was a faint green luminescence coming from it. Marcia switched on her suit’s external mikes and listened.

There was sound from the hole as well. A faint scrabbling that might be metal legs scurrying over stone—and a wet, tearing sound that might be the sound of flesh being torn from a body.

Marcia was moving forward to take a look through that hole at what lay beyond when the second tremor hit and the pressure dropped.

Now was the time. The Worldeater was satisfied with the results of its systems checks. Its energy reserves were satisfactory, its biological components were in good health, and its mechanical portions were in excellent repair. The follow-on Worldeaters were homing in on its signals.

It was time to move out of the chamber it had slept in for so long and begin its proper work. It moved its main body forward across the chamber, toward the thinnest section of the chamber’s wall. Even there, the rock between chamber and the asteroid’s outer surface was many meters thick.