Part 26 (1/2)

”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 hersuit'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 naturalmeans, 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, s.p.a.ced evenly around the circ.u.mference 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sed 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 itscirc.u.mference, 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, smas.h.i.+ng 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 disa.s.semble 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-a.s.sociating. ”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 G.o.d-ants carrying their eggs to safety.”

”Jesus, yes,” Jansen said. ”And they have to carry them out to hatch on the surface because they're taking this whole d.a.m.n asteroid apart. Slicing up the front and tunneling up the rest of it so that they can chop it to bits the same way.”

Marcia felt her blood racing. ”Are either of you carrying a weapon?”

”Not really. Just an a.s.sault laser and a grenadelauncher,” Jansen said sarcastically. ”Are you out of your mind? Why the h.e.l.l would we be carrying weapons?”

”I didn't think you would be, I just hoped it.

Listen. In case you were forgetting, we have to get through that crowd down there. I don't know how good our odds are- but how much worse could they get if we grabbed one of the carrier robots and an egg on the way?”

”What? That would be suicidal!” McGillicutty sputtered. ”There are thousands of them down there! We'd never get out if we attacked them.

They'd be all over us in a flash.”

”I don't think so,” Marcia said. She knelt down, and looked over the scene more carefully. There wasn't much she could say about the Lunar Wheel to Jansen. She didn't have clearance. She chose her words cautiously. ”These things are related-somehow-to whatever is sending signals we've picked up from the Moon, and I've gotten some real data on them. The signals back and forth had more the flavor of computer programs than anything else. And not very flexible programs, at that. As if the systems could only handle certain types of situations. I don't believe these things are ready to handle the unexpected.”

”So you're hoping that we qualify as unexpected?” Jansen asked.

”I'd say that was a safe bet,” Marcia agreed. ”I'd also say it'd be a safe bet we could learn a h.e.l.luva lot about these monstrosities if we had a few samples to work with-dissect, or disa.s.semble, or whatever. We need data, and this seems worth the risk.”

”How do you know those things are even eggs?”

McGillicutty protested.

”We don't,” Marcia replied in a voice that was firm and determined. Even so, her expression, as seen through her bubble helmet, betrayed heruncertainty and fear. ”But it seems to me those things must at least be important. Whatever they are, they should be able to tell us a lot about our new friends.”

Jansen nodded. ”I agree,” she said. ”I think it's worth trying.”

McGillicutty swallowed hard. This wasn't the way he lived life. This was no laboratory where he could shut the experiment down and walk away from it.

He had always known that he wasn't very good with people. He had always believed that his intelligence would compensate for that flaw. But intellect alone was not enough to cope with this situation. These two women were willing to walk even further into danger, in pursuit of some hypothetical advantage.

The three of them had no means of escape without confronting these monstrosities directly. He didn't even dare consider staying here to make his own attempt. He did not want to be alone. Or die alone, if it came to that. ”Very well,” he whispered. His voice sounded tense, high and reedy, even to himself. ”How do you propose we do it?”

”Let's keep it simple,” Marcia said. ”This ledge we're on seems to lead clear to the end of this cavity. No one else seems to be using it, and it might keep us out of view. I say we walk down it as far as we can, then out onto the surface. We make our move out there. Those carrier robots don't look like they're made for open-field running, and maybe we can get some help from our own people. Jansen, have you got enough pictures?”

”From this angle, yes. Let's go.”

Not quite willing to believe he was going along with this, McGillicutty followed the other two as they made their awkward way along the ledge. It was hard to focus on the simple job of moving forward. There were too many strange and inexplicable things all about them. Odd machine-creatures scuttled about the chamber, rus.h.i.+ng about here and there. Weird shadows andflares of light cast themselves on the walls as the machines used their cutting torches and walked in front of them.

McGillicutty realized the stone was vibrating beneath his feet. He switched on his exterior mikes and listened to the sounds of the place.

Cluttering noises, the grinding of huge gears, the crash of falling rock and the roar of machinery all echoed in the huge chamber, weirdly faint and distant in the thin Martian air, even through the special sound boosters in his helmet. Shrieks and whispers that might have been machines and might have been some unseen and ghastly monster lurking, lying in wait for them just out of sight. He didn't know, and he didn't want to know. For the first time in his life, Hiram McGillicutty was confronted by mysteries he had not the slightest desire to solve. He was afraid, and saw the grave yawning wide before him.

The ledge ran on for most of the length of the chamber, but their luck ran out about thirty meters from the cavern entrance. A wall of shattered rock blocked the way, and they were forced to climb out into the open.

Their geology hammers were the closest any of them had to a weapon. Brandis.h.i.+ng hers didn't exactly fill Jansen with confidence, but it was all she had. The open end of the chamber was even more chaotic than the central floor. The scorpion robots were everywhere. ”Stick together, everyone,” Jansen said. ”Let's not get separated here.”

She moved forward toward the open end of the asteroid, toward the beckoning daylight beyond, trying to keep them as far as possible from the busy crews of robots. It wasn't easy. Some of the broken rocks were the size of houses, blocking the way-and the view. Jansen found herself backtracking constantly when a path proved impa.s.sable. The going was rough, with smashed piles of loose rock everywhere. They were forced to climb and clamber,slipping and sliding over the heaps of stone. At least there was nothing to block their view up. Without the inviting signpost of the clean Martian sky to guide them forward, they never could have kept their bearings. As it was, the three of them were having trouble keeping each other in view.

In fact they were having more than trouble.

McGillicutty. Jansen spun around and looked behind herself. There was MacDougal, making her way down an unsteady boulder. But she was the only one there. McGillicutty was lost to view.

”McGillicutty!” she called into her radio, hoping the signal would get bounced off the rock walls so he could hear it out of line of sight. ”Where are you?”

”Be... behind you, I think,” his voice answered, thin and weak. ”Backtrack a bit, but come slowly.

One of them is... looking at me.”