Killeen tried to angle away from the onrushing form and gain the small shelter of the Flitter. A glance behind him showed that the thing was closing fast. He veered.
At each darting turn it came closer, following him with almost contemptuous ease. It loomed so near now that Killeen could see bossed metal studded with protuberances. Between riveted coppery sections was a rough, crusted stuff that seemed to flex and work with effort.
He realized abruptly that the thing was alive. Muscles rippled through it. Six sheathed legs curled beneath, ending in huge claws.
And the head—Killeen saw eyes, more than he could count, moving independently on stalks. Beside them microwave dishes rotated. It had telescoping arms socketed in shiny steel. They ended in grappling arrays of opposing pads.
The thing was at least twenty times the size of a human. A bulging throat throbbed beneath stiff-crusted graygreen skin. Its rear quarters were swollen as though thruster tubes lodged there. Yet they were also banded with alternating yellow and brown rings, like the markings of a living creature.
Killeen guessed that this was what had been near the mainmind of the station. But that one had been much smaller. This was another order of being. It united the forms of both mech and life.
This was all he could think before gaping pads clasped him in a rough but sure embrace.
The thing brought him up toward its moving eye array. It studied him for a long moment. Killeen was so rapt upon the orange ovals that only after a moment did he notice the steady tug of acceleration.
The thing was hurtling him forward. Not back to its ship, but toward the pole. It tossed him from one array of pads to another, letting him tumble for seconds in space before snagging him again.
Like a cat playing with a mouse,
his Arthur Aspect said mournfully.
“What’s…a cat?”
An ancient animal, revered for its wisdom. Grey told me of it.
Killeen’s mind whirled, empty of terror or rage.
He felt only a distant, painful remorse at all he was about to leave behind—Toby’s laughter, Shibo’s silky love, Cermo’s broad unthinking grin, the whole warm clasp of the Family he had failed, and would now die for in a meaningless sacrifice to something beyond human experience.
He tried to wrench away from the coarse black pads. They seemed to be everywhere. A brutal weight mashed him down. A long, agonizing time passed as he struggled to breathe.
He wondered abstractly how the thing would kill him. A crushing grasp, or legs pulled off, or electrocution…
In sudden rage he tried to kick against the pads. He got a knee up into them and pushed, struck sidewise with his arms—
—and was free. Impossibly, he glided away at high speed from the long, pocked form of worked steel and wrinkled brown flesh. It did not follow.
He spun to get his bearings and saw nothing but a hard glow. He was close to the hoop. No, not merely close—it surrounded him.
Killeen looked behind him. Above, the fast-shrinking alien hung at the end of a glowing tube that stretched, stretched and narrowed around him as Killeen watched.
He was speeding down the throat of the pipe made by the whirring hoop. Shimmering radiance closed in.
He righted himself and fired his jets. The alien had given him a high velocity straight down into the hoop-tube. If he could correct for it in time—
But the brilliant walls drew nearer.
He applied maximum thrust to stop himself, even though that meant his fuel would burn less efficiently. His in-suit thrusters were small, weak, intended only for maneuvers in free-fall.
He plunged straight down. The alien had so carefully applied accelerations that Killeen did not veer sidewise against the hoop walls. He was falling precisely toward the pole of New Bishop. Through the shimmering translucent walls he could see a dim outline of the planet, as ghostly as a lost dream.
His thrusters chugged, ran smoothly for a moment, then coughed and died. He fell in sudden eerie silence.
He had been simpleminded, thinking that the alien anthology of flesh and steel would kill him in some obvious way. Instead, from some great and twisted motive, it had given him this strange trajectory into the mouth of a huge engine of destruction.
At any moment, he supposed, the tube would vent more liquid metal outward. In an instant he would vanish into smoke.
Vainly he tried his sensorium. No human tracers beckoned. He grimaced, his breath coming rapidly in the sweat-fogged helmet.
The shimmering walls drew closer. He almost felt that he could touch them, but kept his arms at his sides. He fell feet first, watching a small yellow dot between his boots slowly grow. His Grey Aspect said distantly:
This is…wondrous work…such as I…never studied…comparable to the constructions…in ancient times…of mechs themselves…
His Arthur Aspect remarked:
We are inside the bore of the tube that stretches out along the polar axis. Let us hope the entire tube has been emptied by the alien mining operations. It appears we do have a quite exact trajectory. The alien sent us falling straight along New Bishop’s spin axis. We may well fall all the way through the planet.
Killeen tried to think. “How long will that take?”
Let me calculate for a moment. Yes, I retained the data on New Bishop which Shibo announced…which yields…I am performing the dynamical integral analytically…
Across Killeen’s field of view appeared:
Time to pass through to the other side of the planet is 36.42 minutes. I would advise you to start a running clock.
Killeen called up a time-beeper in his right eye, set it to zero, and watched the spool of yellow digits run. He could make no sense of them, and in his life had never needed more than a rough estimate of minutes elapsed—and then only when timing the beginning of an assault. Let the Arthur Aspect read it. Time was of no importance when the outcome was so barrenly clear.
