Nanotroopers Episode 13: Small is All!

Nanotroopers

  Episode 13: Small is All!

  Copyright 2016 Philip Bosshardt

  A few words about this series….

  *** Nanotroopers is a series of 15,000- 20,000 word episodes detailing the adventures of Johnny Winger and his experiences as a nanotrooper with the United Nations Quantum Corps.

  *** Each episode will be about 40-50 pages, approximately 20,000 words in length.

  *** A new episode will be available and uploaded every 3 weeks.

  *** There will be 22 episodes. The story will be completely serialized in about 14 months.

  *** Each episode is a stand-alone story but will advance the greater theme and plot of the story arc.

  *** The main plotline: U.N. Quantum Corps must defeat the criminal cartel Red Hammer’s efforts to steal or disable their new nanorobotic ANAD systems.

  Episode #TitleApproximate Upload Date

  1‘Atomgrabbers’1-14-16

  2‘Nog School’2-8-16

  3‘Deeno and Mighty Mite’2-29-16

  4‘ANAD’3-21-16

  5‘Table Top Mountain’4-11-16

  6‘I, Lieutenant John Winger…’5-2-16

  7‘Hong Chui’5-23-16

  8‘Doc Frost’6-13-16

  9‘Demonios of Via Verde’7-5-16

  10‘The Big Bang’7-25-16

  11‘Engebbe’8-15-16

  12‘The Symbiosis Project’9-5-16

  13‘Small is All!’9-26-16

  14‘’The HNRIV Factor’10-17-16

  15‘A Black Hole’11-7-16

  16‘ANAD on Ice’11-29-16

  17‘Lions Rock’12-19-16

  18‘Geoplanes’1-9-17

  19‘Mount Kipwezi’1-30-17

  20‘Doc II’2-20-17

  21‘Paryang Monastery’3-13-17

  22‘Epilogue’4-3-17

  Chapter 1

  “Moonglow”

  Farside Observatory

  Korolev Crater, the Moon

  February 3, 2049

  0700 hours (Universal Time – U.T.)

  Nightfall at Korolev Crater came abruptly, too abruptly, thought Percy Marks. He stared out the porthole of the SpaceGuard Center and watched the shadows drop like a black curtain across the face of the crater wall. Korolev was a massive place, fully four hundred kilometers in diameter, with stairstep rim walls and a small chain of mountains inside. Like a bull’s eye on a target, the crater lay dead center in the rugged highlands of Farside, forever banished from the sight of Earth.

  Percy Marks watched the black creep down the crater walls and ooze across the crater floor like a spreading stain. Somehow, it seemed so depressing…another two weeks of night with only the stars for company. Cosmic grandeur, my ass, he muttered to himself. Give me a beach in the South Pacific and some native girls and I’ll tell you a thing or two about cosmic grandeur.

  Marks was pulling late shift today…tonight…whatever the hell it was. Tending the radars and telescopes of Farside Array, scanning sector after sector of the heavens for any little burp or fart worthy of an astronomer’s interest. The High Freq array had just gone through a major tune-up last week and it was Marks’ job to give her a complete shakedown for the next few days.

  At the moment, she was boresighted to some distant gamma-ray sources somewhere in Pegasus…where exactly he’d forgotten.

  Marks took one last look out the nearest porthole and begrudged the final wisps of daylight before Farside was fully enveloped in the nightfall. At that same moment, he heard a beeping from his console and turned his attention back to the array controls.

  What the hell…

  Percy Marks looked over his boards, controlling the positioning of the great radars out on the crater floor and the optical and radio telescopes that accompanied them. He quickly pinpointed the source of the beeping…Nodes 20 through 24…the south lateral array…seemed to be picking up some anomaly.

  He massaged the controls and tried to focus the array better, get better resolution on the target. SpaceGuard didn’t beep without reason. Then, with a startle, he realized the anomaly wasn’t coming from SpaceGuard at all.

  It was coming from Greta. The ground sensor net. It was coming from the Moon itself.

  A quick perusal made the hairs on the back of Percy Marks’ neck stand up. The system displayed a list of likely targets, based on satellite imaging and known sources. He scanned the list, mumbling the details to himself.

  “ Hmmm….latitude 9 degrees, 57 minutes, 28 seconds north. Longitude 20 degrees, 46 minutes, 8 seconds west---“ Just as he was about to consult the catalog, Greta threw up a map.

  Inside the crater Copernicus, near side. Other side of the Moon. A point source of energy had just spiked. Probably a moonquake, but Marks noted visuals from satellite imaging….a small dust cloud or something had erupted. Maybe a volcano…but surely not on this slagheap of a world.

  Marks studied the details. “This one’s a doozy--“ his fingers played over the keyboard, bringing all of Farside’s instruments to bear on the new source. The seismic spike was showing up in all bands now: P waves, elastic modulus off the scale. Whatever it was, it was shallow and continuing. Something was banging the old Moon around like a drum.

  He stared for a moment at the swelling surface cloud that had erupted on the screen in front of him. A dozen satellites were already slewing every imaginable instrument toward the phenomenon. Must be one hell of a source.

  Before he could decide what to do next, Marks was interrupted by the sound of a door opening…it was Max Lane, the shift supervisor.

  “I heard SpaceGuard got something--“ Lane was short, big moustache, squat legs of a former weightlifter, now going soft in the Moon’s sixth-g.

  Marks showed him the readings. “It wasn’t SpaceGuard, Max. It’s Greta. One bigass quake, as far as I can tell. I’ve got it designated Delta C. Epicenter a few dozen kilometers south of Copernicus center. Surface effects too…dust, landslides, I’ve already seen crater walls slumping. Big sucker, too. Blasting out P waves like there’s no tomorrow. See for yourself.”

  Lane bent to the screen. “The Chinese base again…third time this week. What’s it called?”

  “Tian Jia…Heavenly Home. Probably doesn’t feel so heavenly right about now.”

  Lane studied a seismic reading of the shock. “The old Moon’s ringing like a gong. What the hell are they doing over there? Do we have any sat imagery of the place?”

  Marks pulled up the latest. “Nothing good. The base’s sited inside Copernicus. And there’s that excavation nearby…scuttlebutt says the Chinese call the area the Tombs…lots of underground tunnels and lava tubes around there. Nobody knows what they’re digging for.”

  “Any blasting?”

  Marks shook his head. “Negative. All of these tremors are P waves, sideslip stuff. Nothing compressive, like an explosive. No, this seems to be natural, though the Chinese may be causing it somehow. What we need is for somebody to pay them a visit.”

  Lane sniffed. “They did sign the Treaty. But you know how persnickety they are about others inside their exclusion zone. We’ve flown over the site as low as satellites can go, even routed a few hoppers ‘accidentally’ nearby, but seen nothing that conflicts with the Treaty.”

  Marks watched the oscillations on the graph dampen out. “Usually, we get one of these bangs about once a week. Smacks the moon pretty good, causes landslides along the crater walls and stirs up one hell of a lot of dust. Maybe we should just fly a bot or two inside Tian Jia and do a little snooping
around ourselves. I’ll bet Statler—that guy in the shop--could cobble something together.”

  Lane chuckled. “Yeah, right, just like a spy. I think we’ll leave that to the professional snoops. Just log it and put it in the outbound feed to Gateway.”

  Marks did that and then, for good measure, dialed up the real time nearside image from Gateway, the big station at L2. He chose max resolution and let the vidchip settle in on Copernicus, studying all the lights and crawlerways and domes of the Chinese compound. As usual, much of the area was nearly obscured with dust from the tremors.

  “All those domes look like warts,” he muttered to himself. “Warts on the moon. Just what the hell are you clowns doing down there?” Percy Marks didn’t know it but the very same question was being asked at UNIFORCE Headquarters, inside the Quartier-General building in Paris, nearly four hundred thousand kilometers away from Farside.