Echoes of Earth by Sean Williams, Shane Dix

she was really there with him. Whether that was to discourage him from banishing her or to preserve his mental stability, he wasn’t sure.
    “Biotech,” asked Sivio from orbit, “or nanotech swarm?”
    “What’s the difference?”
    “Well, we would use swarms to build something like this, since we tend not to think of biology as a suitable tool for mega-engineering. But I think we should be careful not to impose our preconceptions on the Spinners. Biotech could theoretically build something like this—”
    “Yeah,” put in Samson, “if your version of biology involved diamond strand fibers and buckyball cells.”
    “There’s no reason why it shouldn’t.”
    “If they’ve evolved to eat this stuff, I don’t want to get any closer to their teeth.”
    “ You don’t have to,” said Alander. “Where do I go now, Jayme? Has that thing moved?”
    “It’s on the far side,” Sivio explained. “The shuttle scanned it before landing, and it does indeed look like some sort of climbing device, although it hasn’t moved an inch. Check it out when you’re ready.”
    Alander turned to his left and began walking around the trunk of the orbital tower. The base was easily thirty meters across, allowing for stray roots and the structure’s odd asymmetry. He kept looking upward to see the tower itself, but it was still too dark to see very far. It was hard to imagine that he was standing next to something that stretched all the way up to geostationary orbit, over twelve thousand kilometers up. The two orbital towers humanity had built on Earth to facilitate UNESSPRO stretched twice as high but had taken years to build. The thought that this tower had descended from the sky literally overnight made his skin crawl.
    This feeling was only enhanced as the “climbing device” came into view in stages. The first was a high, rounded hump not dissimilar to a snail’s shell, but ribbed, black, and peaked along its extensive axis. This split down its flanks, like a hand did into fingers, to leave wide strips of plating around a number of openings, from which issued a multitude of close-packed, insectile legs. The more Alander looked at it, the more it resembled a wingless fly, albeit one thousands of times larger and strangely squashed, as though its backside had been moved toward its nose and its upper carapace had cracked and risen to accommodate the change.
    At the front, instead of a head, was an opening wide enough for a person to step into. Alander couldn’t see what lay inside and was in no great hurry to find out.
    “You realize you’re going to have to get in that thing, don’t you?” said Hatzis from orbit.
    Attempting humor to cover his fear and uncertainty, he said: “I was expecting something more sophisticated. This is just a big bug.”
    “Are you still okay with this, Peter?”
    “Yeah, I’m okay,” he said. “It just looks as if it’s going to eat me, that’s all.”
    He resigned himself to the inevitable and moved closer.
    Samson followed as he stooped slightly to enter the bug. The inside was made of a similar dark material to the outside, but there were no controls or windows of any kind to be seen. It was cramped, too, but not as close as the shuttle’s cargo hold had been.
    He sat down in one of the two crudely fashioned seats to the rear of the cabin; Samson settled next to him with a quizzical look.
    “It’s almost as if they knew there would be two of us,” she said.
    Alander nodded, even though there weren’t two of them at all. The notion had already occurred to him, and he wondered just how far the Spinners were prepared to go to reassure him.
    “What happens n—uh!” The ground suddenly moved out from underneath them as the bug’s legs stirred into life. The “mouth” closed in front of them, and Alander fell heavily back into his seat as its orientation suddenly changed.
    “What’s going on?” he asked.
    Sivio answered, “You’re climbing up the base and onto the tower