Permanence

The inside of the shack was mostly one open space, lit by red laser light. For a moment Michael thought he was looking at some kind of computer-generated cartoon, however, because the interior of the place was overlaid with layers of ghostly image. Three dimensional ghosts shimmered as the hunt bot moved from its position by the airlock. It was as if some ectoplasm had been shaped into the cylinders and planes of giant machines, all faint and trembling. Through these vast ghosts moved tiny objects similar to the hunt bot.

"No hostiles visible," said the soldier who was piloting the bot. "Shall we go through, sir?"

"Standard penetration maneuver," said Harp. Two of the soldiers flipped through the lock, then Harp and the last soldier. Without comment, Herat followed. Michael grabbed the autotroph's canister and was the last through.

Now he saw with his own eyes what the bot had reported. He could see all the way across to the other side of the shack, but hazily, as though a giant hologram were projected inside the shack. The hologram of a colossal, intricate machine…

As he watched, one of those little Lasa bots swept by, not four meters away. As it passed, the contours of a half-visible girder swayed, and seemed to gain solidity.

"What…?" He appealed to Herat. The professor chuckled in delight.

"You've never seen the inside of a three-d printer before, have you, Bequith? I believe we're looking at a new cycler, or part of one. It isn't being built, so much as condensed atom by atom. The bots used a combination of magnets, laser holography and vapor deposition to create the entire thing as a single object. Incredible."

He couldn't tear his eyes away from the sight. Over the weeks or months, the elemental material harvested from the Twins would be breathed into this space and manipulated by subtle forces to come to rest here, there; to join with neighbors to become solid, or form the boundary of such a solid. The whole cycler was a single thing, so much more tightly integrated than humanity's modular machinery that its structure rivaled the organic.

Or exceeded it…

"There's air," said a soldier. "Not great, though, and low-pressure. A mix of helium, hydrogen, and oxygen."

"Keep helmets on," said Harp. "Which way, Professor?"

"Um?" Herat too had been staring. "Ah. To our left, I believe. I think there's another chamber there." Where he pointed, blackness shimmered beyond the phantom machinery. Another wall of ferromagnetic liquid? They drifted in that direction, hunt bots roving ahead.

"I still don't understand what they're building here," Herat muttered. Michael didn't take the verbal bait; he was too busy trying to keep his flight straight while hauling along the autotroph canister.

"I mean, the tethers around Osiris and Apophis won't produce enough power to launch a cycler," the professor went on. "So then, what is this?" He gestured at the slowly coalescing machinery in the center of the shack.

"A colony," somebody else said. Michael was startled at the thought— but maybe it was true.

"They might have spent most of their energy to launch the Envy, and then this is being provided as a home for whomever the Envy manages to find on its ring," Michael suggested.

"Halt," said Harp. They were approaching the wall that separated this half of the shack from the rest. Michael could see circular airlocks at regular intervals around the wall. The rest was ribbed and spiked ferrofluid, all conforming to the invisible shapes of the magnetic fields that held it in place.

He knew there were no living beings here, unless the other half of this structure held habitats. If it did, this would be the only settled spot in the Twins' system, which made no sense.

The hunt bots reported no human presence here, not even that of other bots. Crisler's people must have decided to leave this gestation chamber to do its work without interference. That was a lucky break.

They sailed up to one of the airlocks, and Harp repeated the procedure of sending a bot through it first. Michael was nervous— expecting at any moment that some trap of Crisler's would be sprung on them. Nothing happened, and the bot proceeded to beam back pictures of the new space.

The second half of the shack was a single large space, like the first. But while the first contained only the ghostly shadows of machines materializing, here the objects were fully made. The entire space was crammed with a giant, bulbous, and somehow insectile thing. It was vaguely egg-shaped, Michael thought, with circular holes in the end closest to the bot. Those could be weapons… or engines.

The entire white skin of the thing was covered in intricate, multicolored lines of text— but not, Michael realized with a shock, the spiky red writing of the Lasa.

"That's Chicxulub," said Herat. Michael could hear disbelief in the older man's voice, an echo to what Michael himself felt.

"It is a cycler," Michael said doubtfully.

"It can't be," insisted Herat. "Look at it, it must be incredibly massive— built with all kinds of u

"It's a drop ship!" exclaimed Harp. "Like our interceptors."

"No… Too delicate for that. And way too big. I have no idea what it is," Herat concluded. Normally mysteries excited him, but he seemed more uneasy than pleased at this particular one. "But if not Lasa…"

Michael laboriously turned the autotroph canister until the little window pointed toward the cycler-or-whatever. "Translate that," he instructed the autotroph being.

The bulk of the giant machine obscured whatever else might be in the chamber. Harp took them through the airlock cautiously, but so far there was no sign of hostiles. But as the hunt bots shot away to explore, Michael spotted something far down along the curve of the ship. "White light," he said to Harp, pointing. "There."

Harp deployed countermeasures, and they began crawling slowly along the inside wall of the chamber, flat invisibility shields held overhead. Gradually, the source of the white illumination revealed itself.

Here was Crisler's base of operations. Two small balloon-habitats had been inflated inside the shack, one against its outside wall, and one half-encircling the nose of the giant machine— which Michael stubbornly decided must be a cycler, regardless of what Herat said. The habitats were a patchwork of white, made of the same stuff as the Banshee's habs. In several places each was transparent; Michael recognized the material the soldiers used for temporary bubble airlocks.

The habitat attached to the shack wall was small, probably subdivided into no more than two rooms. The one encircling the cycler's nose was much larger; it looked like it held as much volume as two floors of the Banshee's habs.

"Guards visible," said one of the hunt bots. "Cameras on habs."

"Seen." Harp gestured to two of his men. "Auto-aim on the bot's signal. Get ready to take out those cameras."

"Whatever you do, don't hit the artifact," said Herat.

Michael had to laugh. "Have you deciphered the writing yet?" he asked the autotroph.

"That which I have seen," it said. "There is much that is not visible from this point. I must be allowed to circle the vessel—"

"Not now—" Michael forgot whatever else he'd been about to say. He was looking in the direction of the habs, and had noticed a change in the white glow coming through the plastic.

"Sir," he said, "parts of the hab are pulsing. Pulsing red."

Harp cursed. "It's an alert! They've seen us. No more time for subtlety, boys. Fire."

"Wait!" shouted the professor. "Maybe it's not us they spotted, but Rue's party."

At that moment they lost the feed from the lead hunt bot. Michael looked around his shield, to behold a very strange sight. Where a moment ago the air within the cavernous space of the shack had been empty, now a long line of tiny glowing beads lay strung between the balloon-hab on the shack's wall, and the mangled smoking wreck of the bot a hundred meters closer. In the second or so Michael stared, he saw some of the little beads vanish, while others seemed to split in two, or begin to drift.