Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

“Plenty,” Jansen said. “We’re up to ten landing zones now, and we’re probably going to have more soon. So far, all of them precisely on the equator. Between five and forty Lander asteroids at each site. And the Landers in Zones Three and Four have formed up into pyramids, just like ours.”

Jansen saw Coyote’s face change color at the news. Well, if anyone was going to have a visceral reaction to news of the Charonians, it ought to be Coyote.

Along with everyone else, Jansen had followed the action at Landing Zone One closely and been utterly baffled by it. It seemed that all the other zones were following the same pattern, albeit a step or two behind.

One thing they had learned: the Lander creatures were highly variable as to color, size, and shape, and the companion machines and creatures that rode with them were likewise quite different from Lander to Lander. The first Lander was attended almost solely by robots, and the fourth almost entirely by what appeared smaller versions of itself.

As far as anyone could tell, all of the variant forms of creatures and devices were functionally identical to their counterparts aboard the other asteroids. The differences seemed to be of style and emphasis, rather than substance.

Each grounded asteroid contained one of the huge Lander creatures. In every landing zone, the Landers acted the same way. Each Lander would break out of its asteroid. All the Landers in the group would proceed to a central point. Each would tow a large, floating, spherical object along behind itself. The consensus was that the floating spheres were gravity generators. While the Landers were meeting up, the auxiliary creatures and machines would continue disassembling the carrier asteroids.

Next, the Landers would join together, not just touching but merging, flowing into each other, melding their bodies into one larger amalgam creature. Four or ten or forty of the huge things would form up into a fat, four-sided pyramidal shape, all their gravity generators suspended directly over the apex of the pyramid like so many children’s balloons.

Jansen turned and looked out the one small window in the operating room. That was the stage the Zone One Landers had passed early this morning. There, right outside the window, three kilometers away, she could see the next and weirdest stage of all in progress. All the auxiliary creatures and robots from all the Landers were at work constructing a large structure around and atop the amalgam-creature pyramid, attaching the structure directly to the merged bodies of the Lander creatures.

None of the other zones were as far along as Zone One. No one knew what would happen when the companions were finished with their work. All the amalgam-creature structures were immense, the smallest surpassing the size of the largest Egyptian pyramid.

Coyote came up behind her and looked out the window.

“Look at those sons of bitches out there,” she said. “What the hell are they building?”

“God knows,” Jansen said. But it wasn’t such a good idea to get Coyote thinking about the massive creature she had shared an asteroid with. Jansen changed the subject. “Are they getting any clues taking the carrier-bug robot apart?”

“Who knows?” Coyote asked, her voice tired and distracted. She had too many mysteries to deal with already. “Marcia and Sondra seem to be having a field day trying to figure out what made it go.”

Jansen looked at Mercer. “Want to go take a look?”

“Why not?” Mercer said. “Nothing happening here. Where do we store our rock? Or should we just dump it?”

Coyote turned from the window, a bit abruptly, and looked at them. “Leave it here and pretend you’re still studying it,” she said. “As long as that rock’s in here, you two have this room, and no one else can barge in to use it for some other experiment. This whole camp is crawling with people trying to find places to be busy. I could do with a nap in a room where no one’s snoring.”

Jansen grinned and nodded. Coyote Westlake was a pretty good conniver. “You’ve got a twisted mentality, Coyote. You’d make a good Martian. Come on, Merce, let’s go watch MacDougal and Berghoff dissect an alien.”

The two geologists left the room, and Coyote lay down on the empty operating table, with her back to the other operating table where the egg-shaped rock sat, a meter away. She was even more tired than she thought. She was asleep in half a minute.

Otherwise she would have noticed the slight quiver of movement on the other table.

The second operating room was crowded full to bursting with techs and observers and scientists trying to get a look at the carrier bug’s innards. Jansen had to stand on her tiptoes by the door to see. Marcia MacDougal, being a qualified exobiologist, was doing the actual carving, with Sondra right alongside her, eagerly picking over the pieces. Both of them were wearing surgical gloves and masks. In fact, everyone in the room had a mask on. That startled Jansen. Maybe it had crossed her mind that a person might be able to catch something from the living aliens—but from their robots? She noticed a mask dispenser by the door. She took one for herself and handed one to Mercer.

Sondra and Marcia had removed most of the carrier bug’s outer skin, revealing gears and linkages—and what looked disturbingly like lungs and a circulatory system. There was a small collection of subassemblies removed from the bug sitting on a side table, and a man who had to be Smithers, the Port Viking robot expert, was examining one of them through a jeweler’s loupe.

Marcia was speaking into a throat mike as she worked, in the manner of a pathologist doing an autopsy. “As should not be surprising, very little of the hardware on board the robot is immediately understandable, or even recognizable,” she said. “But we’ll get there. The data extracted from the Lunar transmissions should provide valuable insights into the design approaches that went into this robot. Though ‘design’ may be a misnomer. There is some evidence, in the form of what seem to be superseded and needlessly redundant subsystems that remain in place inside the robot, that the design of this machine might well have in part ‘evolved’ rather than having come to pass by deliberate effort.”

Sondra Berghoff was leaning over the carrier bug, poking it with a probe. “Bingo,” she said triumphantly. “ This one I recognize.” She took up a cutting tool and snipped a subassembly away. She carefully lifted her prize from the bug’s torso and held it in her hands for all to see.

Smithers left the side table and came over to take a look. “What is it?” he asked.

“And how can you tell what it is?” Jansen wanted to know. It looked like all the other hunks of electronics that had already been yanked from the bug.

“It’s a gravity-wave receiver,” Sondra said. “A very small one, and a very strange one.” She pointed a gloved finger at a gleaming pair of cone shapes joined at their points, with a wire frame overlying both cones. “But some components, like antennas, have to be certain shapes and made certain ways if they’re going to work. And that gizmo there is a miniaturized gravity-receiver antenna. But it’s not like any gee-wave receiver I’ve ever seen. Almost like it’s designed to pick up a different form of gee waves we haven’t even detected. Like the difference between AM and FM radio. A receiver built for AM won’t even be able to detect an FM signal.”

Sondra turned the thing over and looked at it again. “If they’re building things to receive signals, they must be sending those signals. If we figure out how this thing works,” she said, “we can build some of our own and tune in on a whole new set of Charonian transmissions we didn’t even know existed.”