Ganymede Monster
A monster guards the Io surface — radio-eating, magnetically sure-footed, and cunning enough to hurl its own bomb — but Bobbie's fire finally kills one for good.
Story so far
Outside the Io lab, one of the protomolecule soldiers proves every fear about it. It kills Bobbie Draper's radio simply by nearing it (radar/RF-absorbing), moves low and stealthy against the sulfurous ground, and when it charges runs at impossible speed, sticking to Io's surface as if mag-booted despite the low gravity, its childlike blue eyes blazing and long hands grasping. It's fast straight-on but poor at cornering, and — crucially — Holden's incendiary rounds work: the self-oxidizing flame burns wounds that don't seal like water.
Cornered and hurt, it shows new cunning: rather than simply self-destructing, it tears off its own bomb-laden abdomen and throws it, downing Bobbie. Then it hesitates to kill her, instead probing her sealed armor with a finger and a goo-spewing tube, seemingly trying to infect rather than destroy — a soldier reverting toward the invasive protomolecule imperative. Bobbie ends it point-blank, emptying two thousand incendiary rounds into its head.
One of the doomsday weapons, at last, definitively dead.
Appearance
A near-human anthracite-black construct with childlike blue-glowing eyes and long improbable hands, chitinous skin with things moving beneath; burnt and half-severed, sprouting a goo-dribbling probe-tube from its midsection.
Role
The protomolecule soldier guarding the Io surface, killed by Bobbie's incendiary fire after nearly infecting her.
Relationships
Sources — 9 recorded facts, by chapter
- An unkillable, blue-eyed chitinous horror that slaughters a Marine platoon on Ganymede's surface unprotected by any suit.
- A surviving protomolecule hybrid — the lab's escaped 'third player' — that bent into the Roci's hull with bare hands and rides aboard, alive.
- The protomolecule stowaway wakes and fights back — shrugging off shotgun and rocket fire, pinning Holden, and clinging on despite being blasted apart.
- The stowaway is revealed as a radiation-hunting weapon — it claws for the reactor, chases radioisotope bait off the ship, and leaves a bomb behind.
- Analysis of the stowaway reveals the protomolecule constructs are unstable hybrids that slip their programming — the incendiary charge a fail-safe it chose to eject.
- The protomolecule soldiers are revealed as a networked, self-reverting weapon — sharing information through Venus and doomed to break their programming.
- Loosed at last: over two hundred protomolecule soldiers launch from Io as a first strike on Mars — radar-dark, twenty-g, and able to hole a warship into a plague.
- Aboard the King the protomolecule reveals its Eros lessons learned: not soldiers but a horde of 'new, improved' vomit zombies — blue-eyed, intelligent, swarming.
- A monster guards the Io surface — radio-eating, magnetically sure-footed, and cunning enough to hurl its own bomb — but Bobbie's fire finally kills one for good.