Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

She forced all that from her mind and pulled the exterior lever that swung her unjammed binoculars down into place. What had seemed glittering highlights on the surface of the creature were resolved into discrete objects—machines crawling around on its skin, working at unknowable tasks. Several seemed to have made their way down to the surface, moving off on their own, back toward the asteroid. Others seemed to be moving in and out of the creature, going in and out of holes in its upper surface.

The body of the creature constantly changed its shape, and seemed to grow the parts it needed as it required them. A boulder the size of a large house blocked its way. It extruded a limb, call it an arm or a leg, massive enough to shove the rock to one side.

And something else. Something that looked absurdly like a child’s balloon being pulled along on a string. A large spherical object, metallic blue in color, hung in the air behind the creature, held to it by a massive cable. That had to be the gravity generator.

Mercer sat there on the sands of Mars, staring at the apparition meandering over the surface. All right , she thought. A shapeless blue-gray monster the size of the largest spacecraft is ambling over the surface of Mars while a herd of attendant robots busy themselves. Now what ?

Nothing subtle about it now—light, the clear light of day, was streaming in through the hole at the end of the tunnel. The Charonian invader had smashed open a gap far larger than several barn doors when it crashed through the asteroid’s crust and out onto the planet’s surface. More than enough light came through it to illuminate Coyote Westlake’s tunnel. Marcia shut off her helmet lamp, and McGillicutty did the same. Jansen was scouting the way back up the tunnel, but Marcia had the feeling she wasn’t going to get far.

“The tunnel back is cut off,” Jansen said flatly as she came back through the airlock. “Collapsed in the second tremor. I couldn’t even open the lock door on the other side. At least the rockslide didn’t smash the transponder. We can stay in touch.”

“Great news,” McGillicutty said in a panicky voice. “The outside world can listen in while we die of suffocation.”

Marcia MacDougal looked at the chubby scientist worriedly. It was going to take all of them to get out of this— but McGillicutty didn’t seem up to be pulling his weight. “Settle down, Hiram. Take a few deep breaths. We’re not dead yet, and we do have a way out.”

Hiram swung around in his pressure suit to face her head-on. “Out? You mean down into that… that chamber !”

“Why not?” Jansen asked. “The previous occupant has vacated the premises. It seems to me we have a way forward, and none back. Unless you have an alternate suggestion?”

McGillicutty leaned back against the cramped walls of the tunnel and shook his head. “No.”

“Then I’m getting started,” Marcia said. She knelt down at the far end of the tunnel, in front of the hole at its end, pulled a rock hammer from her suit’s equipment belt and started chipping more rock away, making the opening large enough for people in pressure suits to get through. Jansen pulled out her own hammer and set to work alongside her. Either because he judged there wasn’t enough room for a third person to work, or out of sheer blue funk, McGillicutty did not choose to join them.

It didn’t much matter. It was the work of only a few minutes to make the gap big enough. Jansen, a little handier with a hammer after ten years of field geology, smoothed out the rough edges of the enlarged hole in a few practiced swings of her hammer. She stuck her head through and took a look around. “It’s empty,” she announced, “as least as far as I can tell. There’s a pretty steep grade downward, but there’s a ledge of some sort about ten meters down. I’m going to scoot down feet first, just like in the tunnel.”

She pulled her head back in, drove a rockspike into the tunnel wall, rigged a line through it, and disappeared, feet first, through the hole.

McGillicutty hesitated for a moment, obviously torn between his fears of going next and being left behind. The latter apparently worried him more, for he abruptly got up, went to the hole, and forced himself through it, moving with the air of a man who was hurrying before he could change his mind.

Marcia followed after him, wondering if she was moving fast for the same reason. She was grateful that getting down to the ledge below required all of her concentration. It would not do to think too hard about exactly what they were getting themselves into.

But then she was down on the ledge, with no distractions to keep her from seeing what surrounded her.

Even without an invader outside, even if it had been a cavern formed by some other, more natural means, the view would have been spectacular. They stood near the bottom of a huge ovoid laid on its side. The ledge was a groove sliced into the rock that seemed to run from one end of the hollow to the other. Marcia spotted other grooves, spaced evenly around the circumference of the chamber.

Except one end of the chamber wasn’t there anymore. It had been smashed away by the creature that had escaped from this place, leaving only jagged edges behind. Light, turned warm and ruddy by the pink Martian sky, flowed in through the broken end, bathing the entire space in ochers and pinks. It was, Marcia thought, as if they were standing inside a huge egg that had just been broken open.

And that wasn’t far from wrong, come to think of it. That was a major hatchling out there.

But this egg was far from empty. There were dozens, hundreds, of machines, or what seemed to be machines, moving around its interior. Fortunately, none of them seemed to take an interest in the three humans. Marcia tried to get a good look at one of them as it passed close by, but it was moving too rapidly. She was left only with the vague impression of fast moving arms and legs, and bodies that looked vaguely like scorpions. Jansen was taking careful shots of the entire chamber, zooming in for close-ups of the scurrying machines. Down at the far end, Marcia saw a series of dark holes that seemed to lead back into the unhollowed body of the asteroid. More scorpion machines were hurrying in and out of the holes. What looked like the ends of conveyor belts stuck out some of the holes, and rubbled rock was tumbling down out of them.

“Down by the open end,” Jansen said. “Look! They’re slicing it up.”

Marcia turned and looked. Teams of the robots—if they were robots—were crowded around the edge of the hollow, all the way around its circumference, some of them hanging from the walls and roof of the chamber. They were using what seemed to be fusion torches, hacking huge chunks of rock off the asteroid. Now and again, one or two would fall, smashing down onto the floor of the chamber. A many-legged variant of the scorpion machine, with what looked like parts bins on its back, would rush up to the victims—and disassemble them, using its many legs to sort the parts into the bins on its back. None of the other robots seemed to take any notice.

But then Marcia spotted something else. She saw a line of smaller robots, a different model, headless bipedal machines not more than a meter high. They were following each other in single file out from one of the holes in the rear wall of the chamber. They had two stubby arms each, with pincerlike hands, and each was carrying an identical small brown bundle through the chamber and out onto the Martian surface.

Suddenly she understood. “Ants,” she said. “Think about ants, and look at that line of robots down there. Look at all of it, and tell me what you think of.”

“Nature videos,” McGillicutty said, free-associating. “In grade school, here on Mars. I remember wondering why we were bothering to learn about weird animals on a planet fifty million kilometers away. The videos always seemed to have pictures of ants carrying—good God—ants carrying their eggs to safety.”