Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

Jansen started to move forward, but MacDougal held her back. “This is the first time that one of these— things —has even noticed a human being. We don’t know how it will react—but if we get closer, we might make it feel threatened. Stay back. Don’t confuse the issue. McGillicutty—are you okay?”

They could see his face, albeit dimly, through his helmet, could see his jaw work, the fear sweat popping out on his round face. For a long moment he had trouble forming words. “ Sc-sc-scared ,” he said at last. And that was the last of McGillicutty. One of the two jaw-clamp arms moved forward and neatly snipped his head off, helmet and all. His corpse stood there for a moment, and then tottered forward, his blood’s crimson splashing over the killer robot.

Jansen screamed, and Marcia grabbed her, pulled her back down the rock slab, away. Jansen resisted at first, insisting for a split second on looking, seeing the horror. But then no more. She turned and scrambled away, with no further thought than out, escape, far away . She hurried forward, unthinking, toward the cavern entrance. She barreled into a line of the carrier robots, knocking two of them over, and neither knew nor cared. Terror, anger, horror coursed through her. There. There was the very lip of the cavern. There. She rushed forward, dimly aware that Marcia was behind her, calling to her, trying to calm her. But she ignored the voice in her headphones as she ignored everything but the last heap of rubble to get over. She scrabbled up the last bulwark in the jungle of stone, and found herself teetering on the brink of a straight fall. Without a moment’s hesitation she heaved herself out , down onto the clean sands of Mars.

Whump . She landed on her stomach with a stunning jolt that served to clear her head for a moment. She looked up to see Marcia a good ten meters up, on the lip of the cavern, setting herself for a more cautious leap down.

Even in Mars’s fairly gentle gravity, it was a long fall, and Marcia landed badly, sprawling out on her back for a moment before she got to her feet.

“Jesus. Sweet Jesus God in Heaven,” Marcia said, and the words were a prayer. “He’s dead in there. Dead.”

Jansen got to her feet and looked around, the chittering whispers of panic still flitting about her mind. “We’re not safe,” she announced. The wide plain was literally crawling with the enemy. The scorpions, the carriers, other types were moving about. In the middle distance, a blue-gray something the size of a mountain was undulating across the surface. Further away, much too far away, off to one side, were pressure tents, half-tracks, people . There. That was the way to go.

“He’s dead,” Marcia repeated again. “That thing killed him.”

Jansen turned and looked back the way they had come. The massive bulk of the ruined asteroid towered over them. A line of those damned carrier drones was carefully picking its way down the loose scree about thirty meters away, then moving off across the sands in the wake of the monstrous creature that ruled this nightmare realm. They seemed to have a bit of trouble moving over the powdery, rock-strewn sands. Now and again one would flounder a bit. She looked around for one of the scorpion models. They, too, seemed to be slowed more than a little by the sands.

We still need samples , Jansen told herself, and a better chance wasn’t likely to come their way. Jansen looked down and realized that her rock hammer was still in her hand. She lifted it up, gave it a practice swing.

“Yeah, they killed him,” she said. “Let’s go pay them back.”

She staggered forward, brandishing the hammer, straight for the closest carrier drone, forcing herself not to think more than a split second ahead. Part of her knew she was running on hysteria, on adrenaline, on anger and fear, but that part also knew that what she was doing needed to be done. One step forward, another, another. And she was on top of the clumsy little robot carrying its vile burden. She spotted a sensory cluster similar to what she had seen on the scorpion that had killed McGillicutty.

She lifted her hammer and smashed it in.

The little machine dropped its burden, tottered forward a step or two, and collapsed in the sand, its two legs still working feebly. Its fellows ignored it and merely sidestepped the obstruction in their path. Jansen knelt down, wrapped her arms around the machine, and lifted it. It was surprisingly light. Behind her, Marcia knelt and picked up the thing they were calling an egg, cradling it in her arms like a baby. She caught Jansen’s eye, and the two women stared at each other for a long moment. Too much had happened.

They turned without speaking, and moved as quickly as they could toward the distant human camp.

“Let me try once more to convince you. It’s a rock,” Mercer Sanchez said unhappily. “Hiram McGillicutty died and you risked your life stealing a rock, and we’ve wasted a day and a half confirming that fact.”

Jansen Alter frowned and stared at the egg-shaped thing sitting in the middle of the left-hand operating table. They were in the same field hospital that was treating Coyote Westlake. There hadn’t been any casualties to speak of, so most of the hospital had been pressed into service as a field lab. “Are you sure?” Jansen asked. It sure as hell looked like a rock, sitting inert in the middle of the table. It was a very plain brown ovoid, about the length of Jansen’s forearm from end to end, and maybe half that in width.

Mercer shook her head in frustration. “I’m a geologist, for God’s sake, and so are you. Of course I’m sure it’s a rock. We’ve x-rayed it, done sample assays, examined it under an electron microscope, drilled holes in it. It’s a perfectly normal sample of undifferentiated asteroidal rock, a lump of high-grade organic material, salted with nonorganic material. If I were a rock miner, I’d love to find a vein of this stuff to sell to Ceres. High-grade, water-bearing ore. But there’s no internal structure at all.”

“I don’t get it,” Jansen said. “The carrier bugs were treating these things like they were the crown jewels.”

“Maybe the bugs like rocks,” Mercer said. “Maybe they’re planning on building a decorative stone wall.”

The doors swung open and Coyote Westlake came in, dressed in pajamas and a loose-fitting robe. She looked wan and pale, but tremendously better than she had the day before.

“What are you doing out of bed?” Jansen asked. “You should still be resting.”

“I won’t argue with that,” Coyote said in a voice that was trying to be calmer than it was. “But they’re using the other beds in my room as an overflow dorm for some of the night-shift workers. One of them snores. Woke me up, drove me clear out of the room and I’m wandering the halls.” She nodded toward the egg-rock. “Any progress?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Jansen said, looking at Coyote carefully. She was obviously still stressed out, on edge. Someone who needed to be handled with care. “We’re just giving up. Mercer has established that our precious egg is a rock. A plain old boring lump of rock. Anything else going on?”

Coyote shook her head. “They finally got that robotics expert Smithers in from Port Viking, and they’re in the other operating room, dissecting the carrier-bug robot.”

“ Dissecting it?” Jansen asked. “Don’t you disassemble a robot?”

“Not this one,” Coyote said. “Sondra told me it seemed to have a lot of organic components as well.”

Coyote shuffled forward a little further into the room. “Any news from the outside world?” she asked.