at.”
Marvin slithered near and joined us. “It’s biotic in nature,” he said.
We all looked at him, except for Kwon, who was getting ready to slide down the next cliff of mud on his butt again. He looked back in my direction. “Best to keep moving, Colonel,” he said.
“Hold on a second,” I said, raising my hand. “I’m getting a feeling here, and I don’t like it. Marvin, what kind of bullshit have you gotten us into?”
“Your reference is unclear. This is not fecal matter, but a slurry of silicon, carbon and water, mixed with a variety of other elements. The biotic content is less than one percent.”
One percent biotic? That sounded high to me, but I shook my head and approached him. When dealing with Marvin, it was important not to get distracted by random statements, interesting though they might be. He had half a dozen cameras on me, a sure sign I was worrying him.
“Let’s get back to the part about that cloud. You say it is biotic in nature, and the last time I talked to you, I found you slurping up slime in some mud hole at the LZ. What do you know about what we are facing here?”
“There are few certainties. I have suspicions, which I’m trying to verify. In time, I will make a full report.”
“In time, we’ll all be dead-even you, Marvin. Talk to me now, before this team goes another step deeper into this hellhole. You tell me what you are holding back. What is it you don’t want us to know?”
Marvin had a camera on everyone in the team now. The rain still drizzled over our suits. His electric eyes focused and zoomed independently. I knew he was taking a reading of our collective mood. Apparently, he didn’t like what he saw, because he swung most of his cameras back to me and finally answered.
“The cloud ahead is biotic in nature. It is a life form, I believe. A mass made of many small parts. In a way, it is similar to a nanite formation.”
My helmet swiveled back toward the shifting darkness. It looked like thick smoke, but I supposed it could be more of a giant, gaseous jellyfish. “You’re telling me that thing is alive? It’s huge. Is it solid, liquid or gas?”
“None of those. It is more like a living plasma, or a living gel. Part gaseous, part liquid. Very little of it could be called a solid.”
Sloan lifted a gauntlet and pointed at the robot. “I have it!” he said. “It’s a mass of those microbes, the ones we found back on the Macro cruiser. Is that it, Marvin?”
“Good question,” I said, giving Sloan a nod.
“No,” Marvin said.
We all looked at him, but he didn’t volunteer anything more.
“Well?” I demanded. “Then what is it? If you want to press ahead with this mission, you’d better keep talking.”
“It’s a single organism, not a mass made up of a trillion individual cells.”
I grunted unhappily. Far from being like robots in old movies, Marvin was a tight-lipped miser with information, rather than a mechanical blabbermouth. “Okay, what the heck is it doing squatting at the bottom of this hole?”
“It is imprisoned here.”
I nodded. “Fine. Is there a Macro dome down there with it? Or was all that talk of a production facility in this location a trick to get us to come here?”
Marvin hesitated. “I don’t know.”
Half the men in the squad groaned aloud. Marvin swung his cameras from face to face.
“All right,” I said. “I apologize, everyone. Marvin, you are fired. When I get you off this world, I’m putting you into a hold on the Centaur stations where you can’t do any more harm.”
I pulled out my com-link and activated it.
Marvin slithered closer and a cluster of his cameras studied me. “What are you doing, Colonel Riggs?”
“What does it look like? I’m calling Fleet.”
“But we were to maintain long-range radio silence.”
“Not anymore. We are pulling out. I’m calling for our extraction from this garden spot you lured us into. Unless you give me a good reason to do otherwise, right now.”
“The Macro factory is probably down there. I calculate a sixty-two percent probability.”
“Sixty-two percent?” I asked. “That sucks, Marvin. That’s almost a coin-toss.”
“It’s closer to two out of three.”
I shook my head. “No, there is no ‘probability’. The factory is either down there, or it isn’t. What is the basis for your argument? Why do you think it’s here and not at the bottom of some sea?”
“The mineral exhaust and regional harvesting machine activity levels are far higher than normal in this region.”
“That’s it?”
“Also, the prisoner would most likely be in close proximity to one of the Macro Superiors.”
“What prisoner, and what do mean by Macro Superior?”
“Super-brains, I believe you called them. AI intellects.”
“Right. No wonder you wanted to come here. Is it mating season?”
“I don’t understand your statements, Colonel Riggs. They seem to be non-sequiturs.”
“Never mind,” I said. “You think there is a massive alien prisoner, a Macro factory and a Macro Superior all down at the bottom of this hole? When did you first suspect this?”
“As soon as I examined satellite imagery of the location.”
I sighed. This was often how it went with Marvin. He was deceptive and manipulative, but when you finally forced answers out of him, he gave them all at once. Somehow, that made it harder to be angry with him. His full confessions seemed to absolve him of his sins.
“All right. Where does this giant gelatinous being come from?”
“It is a one of the race-members of the species you most commonly refer to as ‘the Blues’.”
If I had possessed ten cameras of my own, I would have put them all on Marvin. Every trooper around us stared in shock. They all knew about the Blues, the theoretical race of beings we’d yet to find. They were the ones who’d let the Nanos and the Macros loose on the rest of us poor, unsuspecting biotic slobs.
“But that cloud isn’t blue,” Kwon complained. “It’s black.”
I walked to the edge of the second cliff and stared down at the shifting, translucent mass. It had to be huge-a mile across at least. Could such a thing be alive, even intelligent? I thought about what kind of life form might be able to survive on a gas giant world. I supposed it could be something like this-a massive volume of aerogel. It wouldn’t have enough mass to be crushed by the overwhelming gravity of the world. In a way, I supposed the Blues had to be something of very low density, or very high density. Our kind could not take the brutal G-forces.
“What are we going to do, Colonel?” Kwon asked.
I sighed and directed my laser projector toward the mass. “We are going down, First Sergeant. We are going to find out exactly what is at the bottom of this very odd hole.”
— 15
When we slid down the fourth cliff of the massive pit, we ran into trouble. I supposed it was bound to happen eventually. All the military Macros nearby were focused on my diversionary destroyers, but there were workers and the like that kept plodding along, performing their mundane duties. It was one of these machines that discovered us.
A heavy earth-mover came along the road at a surprisingly fast clip. It was on its way down from the top, spiraling to the bottom along the endless roadway. It ran on treads, and was made in sections like a caterpillar of burnished metal. The machine made such a racket that we could hardly hear ourselves screaming inside our own helmets.
“Move out!” I shouted, making the hand signal to advance. I was pointing in the general direction of the next cliff-edge-I swear I was. But Kwon didn’t take it that way.
