Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

But that was no barrier at all to a being like the World-eater. Feeling its still-awakening power, reveling in it, it heaved itself at the yielding stone.

The second Lander was setting down a few kilometers away, but Mercer paid it no mind. Let the other chase teams, the skim jets and dragonflies amuse themselves by going after it.

The first Lander, this Lander, was the key. Of that she had no doubt. She stood on the desert floor a bare quarter kilometer away and stared at it as it towered over her, blotting out the sky, gleaming in the first light of the new-rising Sun.

Jansen was in this one, her voice brought to Mercer’s ear by a tenuous link of radio waves and cables and radio-repeating transponders.

Suddenly, the ground bucked and swayed, knocking her off her feet. A massive cloud of debris shook itself off the Lander, and a huge wave of shattered stone slumped down from one end of the asteroid. A jet of greenish smoke spewed out from the Lander’s interior.

The asteroid shuddered again. More stone slumped over, revealing a hollow space inside. And something was moving in there.

Suddenly, Mercer knew what her subconscious had been trying to recall. She knew what this nightmare reminded her of.

The War of the Worlds . The goddamn War of the Worlds . The ancient stories, always immensely popular on Mars, because loving them annoyed arrogant ground-hogs, if for no other reason. The H. G. Wells book, the Orson Welles audio play and the George Pal two-dee movie—all quaint, old-fashioned, creaky and much-loved parts of Martian popular heritage.

The old images swept over her. The mysterious invaders landing in their cylinders—just outside London, in Graver’s Mill, New Jersey, in rural California—lurking, ominous shapes that finally opened, unleashing the Martian invaders inside upon an unsuspecting Earth.

A third tremor hit as the thing inside slammed aside the last of the rock wall that blocked its way. It seemed to hesitate for a moment before moving out from its stone cocoon.

Mercer got cautiously to her feet and watched as the first of the invaders emerged.

At first she could see nothing but a vague blue-gray shape. She could not tell if there were one or many things moving forth, could not tell whether she was watching machines or life.

Jansen . Was she okay? “Jansen, you three still there?” she asked, speaking into her helmet mike.

The signal was scratchy, and the voice was faint, distorted, but at least it was there. Mercer breathed a sigh of relief even before she heard the words. “We’re— kay.—utty got rattled aro— p —ood, but he’s in one —iece. What —hell was —at?”

“You’re cutting in and out, Janse. Bet you snapped your antenna. It looks like whatever is inside there just decided to come on out.”

“—and by.” Suddenly the carrier wave cleared and Jansen came back on, her signal far stronger. “Okay, patching through MacDougal’s radio. The tremor rattled us pretty good, and there was a hell of a pressure drop at the same time. Something is busting out of here?”

“Affirmative. It’s got to be a hundred meters long at least, whatever it is.”

“Damn, and we had to miss it. Go get ‘em, Merce. We’re gonna hunker down here before anything can happen.”

“Jansen, I—”

“For God’s sake, Merce, you can’t do anything for us, and that thing is what we’re all here to see! Get moving. Jansen out.”

Mercer stayed frozen for another split second, and then started a dogtrot toward the open end of the asteroid, determined to see all she could.

It wasn’t easy to get there. The tremors had kicked up a tremendous amount of dust, and the dawn winds were remarkably fierce, kicking up a blinding fog of dust. All around her, men and women were racing in all directions, some on foot, some in crawlers or other machines. Everyone seemed to have a different purpose: some running away from the chaos in panic, some hurrying toward it to get a better look, others rushing to care for some vital piece of machinery. Mercer plugged along, ignoring it all, moving nearly blind by dead reckoning.

The wind cleared the dust away at last, and Mercer found herself in the clear, having run beyond the asteroid’s end, putting her right alongside—

Something.

Huge, blue-gray, shapeless—yes. But no eyes on stalks swooping out to get a look at her. Maybe that much of Westlake’s report was hallucinatory. If so, Mercer wasn’t going to complain. It seemed to move by extruding the forward portion of its body ahead and then oozing the rest of itself forward.

It was impossible to pick out any further details. Its surface—hull? skin? whatever—seemed to glitter in the early morning sun. Was it alive, or a machine?

Mercer tried to pull her helmet binoculars into place. But the bloody swing-down mechanism had jammed again. The balky mechanism always picked the wrong time to screw up. Mercer knew the suit, knew she had only to bleed pressure, open the visor and free the swing-down arm from inside the helmet. She could get the suit back up to pressure in seconds, once it was sealed up again. She checked the outside temp and swore. Marginally marginal. In point of fact, ten degrees below normal safety margins.

But Mercer needed to see . She lifted her left arm and opened the panel on the tiny environmental control panel there. She hit the pumpback control, and her backpack made a gurgling noise as it started sucking air out of the suit, down to Mars normal. Her eyes began to sting, and her sinuses started throbbing the moment the pumpback started. Mercer knew from experience she could handle the low pressure long enough to fix the binocs, but she wasn’t going to enjoy it. She swung her helmet open just as an eddy of the greenish fog slipped out of the asteroid and was blown toward her.

She almost dropped from the stench.

Even in that low pressure, that cold air, even holding her breath, the stink was overpowering. Eyes watering, she shoved a gauntleted hand into her helmet and jiggled the clumsy mechanism. The binocs fell into place, and she slammed the visor shut. She undid the safety from the air purge button and shoved it in, air waste be damned. With a violent howl, her backpack airpumps roared back to life as the spill valves opened. The purge cycle ran long enough to dump all the existing air out of her suit, and then the spill valves shut, leaving Mercer gasping for breath, her eyes popping and sinuses thundering as the suit regained pressure. She slumped back, allowed herself to fall backwards into the sands of Mars. She landed half sitting up, staring up at the clean pink sky. A crash change in pressure was always nasty, but it beat having to breathe that… that corruption .

Never had she smelled anything that had even come close. It was the stench of rotting meat, festering corpses, rotting vegetables, gangrenous wounds, contaminated compost, soiled diapers, unwashed bodies and rotting eggs.

It was that stench of death that convinced Mercer Sanchez the invader was alive. No machine, not even the most obscenely polluting refinery of the twentieth century, could ever have produced such a ghastly reeking odor.

Alive . Alive and somehow entombed in that asteroid for how long? Centuries? Millennia? Millions of years? No matter how slowed the metabolic processes were, some respiration, digestion—and excretion—had to go on. It could have been lying in a pseudo-dead state for longer than the average lifespan of an Earth species.

And she was watching the creature emerging from its tomb-womb. In a real sense, then, this was a birth. Mercer smiled briefly, thinly, to herself. In a way, she had just gotten a whiff of a million-year-old diaper.