Nanotroopers Episode 15: A Black Hole

Nanotroopers

  Episode 15: A Black Hole

  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

  “Hailstorm”

  Aboard UNS Galileo

  May 21, 2049

  Four Days to Earth Impact

  “Measuring separation…I am seeing a little,” Al Glance announced. He had a scope on the target zone. “Maybe a few meters…more at the lower end of the Fissure.”

  “Okay, let’s do another round,” Mendez announced. The coilgun was recycled, coils re-charged, new shots loaded.

  “Fire it!”

  The flash-snap! crackled through the hull again and another mushroom two kilometers below them announced the impact.

  “What’s she look like now?” Kamler asked.

  Johnny Winger put the targeting scope on the impact site. Most of the ground was obscured by dust and rubble, thick and slow-moving like a ground fog in the asteroid’s minute gravity field. “Hard to tell…give me a radar pulse.”

  Mendez stabbed a button and electromagnetic fingers reached out across the void to kiss the surface. “Possible change in aspect ratio…there must be something in motion down there.”

  “Yeah, lots of rock from the looks of it. Sorry, Lieutenant, but I think we’re going to need another round.”

  “Let’s make it a half round this time,” he decided. “We need to conserve shots for the other sites. Stu, re-cycle the gun but load two shots this time.”

  Kamler did as Mendez ordered. “Guns ready, Lieutenant.”

  “Fire.”

  A sizzling flash-snap! sounded through the hull once more.

  Winger watched as the white flash and the plume erupted off the surface, geysering in slow motion upward and outward into space.

  It was Glance who saw the first signs of the breach. “Something’s going on…right near Loki crater—look! See that rubble cloud spalling off? It’s breaking up—“

  Mendez studied the radar return. “Measurable breach this time. I’m getting a possible aspect change.”

  “Look at that debris!” said Kamler. “Beautiful…just beautiful!”

  Hicks-Newman was still turning slowly, like a roasting potato on a spit. But now, one entire end of the asteroid was separating in slow motion from the main body. All along the cleft of Odin’s Fissure, the asteroid was calving off a part of itself. Immutable forces of rotation were finishing the job first started by ANAD and helped by Galileo’s coilguns. Hicks was shedding an entire up-sun third of its body. The severed end hung together by seams of rock for a few minutes, enveloped in a swelling cloud of rubble. But the centrifugal force of the asteroid’s rotation, combined with extra gyrations from its nutating wobble, corkscrewed the severed end away and it finally separated.

  “We did it!” exulted Glance. He pumped a fist in the air. “We chopped the bugger right off—“

  “Al—wait a minute…look…“

  “I don’t believe it…of all the—“

  Even as the partitioned end of Hicks spun lazily away in an expanding fog of rubble and rock, a new fissure quickly opened up. Opposite what had been Odin’s Fissure on the other side of Loki crater, a new seam had suddenly developed, a new crack.

  “The mantle must have been weak there,” Winger theorized. “She couldn’t hold together when the breach came.”

  “Yeah, angular momentum made sure of that,” Kamler added. “Her rotation increased and that must have stressed a pre-existing fissure.”

  The newly created body, spinning and wobbling away from what was left of Hicks-Newman, now calved off another section. The oblong chunk ran for hundreds of meters along a stress line that curved around the lower ridges of Loki crater. The small berg looked like a skullcap with fingers of rock sticking out into space.

  “This isn’t good news, folks,” Kamler announced. “There’s no impulse motor on that piece. It’s just a loose rockberg spinning around in space.”

  Mendez was already on the comm. “I’d better advise Gateway…UNIFORCE too. Without impulse arrays on that piece, there’s no way to divert it from impact. Maybe killsats can zap it but it’s going to be close.”

  “Let’s hope it’ll spin away from Earth…maybe just skim off the upper atmosphere.”

  Left unsaid was a tactic that had come to Winger’s mind, a last ditch desperation maneuver he hoped no one else would think of, if it was even possible. Galileo might have just enough maneuvering propellant to bump the extra piece and nudge it away from Earth. But that would require somebody to stay on board and run the ship.

  It was a silly idea anyway.

  They watched the two severed pieces for a few moments. Both had picked up unusual torques in the breaching process and so spun, wobbled, and tumbled with crazy gyrations as they slowly separated from the main body of Hicks.

  The asteroid itself, now shorn of roughly a third of its mass, had increased its own rotation rate as well.

  “Hicks looks like a drunken dancer now…that end wobble has picked up,” Glance noted. “She’s really nutating…can you sight in on Asgard?”

  Mendez watched the rump asteroid gyrating like a spinning child’s top for a few moments. The yawning fracture that was the Chasm of Asgard turned below them like a black seam stitched across the jagged up-sun end of the asteroid.

  “I don’t know…with that kind of rate, we’ll have to pick our moment. Plus there’s an extra wobble now. That’ll make targeting a bitch…but we have to try. Let me study one full rotation, see if I can pick my spot.”

  Kamler interrupted. “I’ve got Nakamura on the vid, Lieutenant. Gateway Ops wants all the data they can get on the smaller body.”

  Mendez saw the pale face of Kaoru Nakamura on the vid…floating in micro-g aboard the station. Gateway had been established in a halo orbit about the Ear
th-Moon L3 point several years before…the better to keep a close eye on Chinese activities at their Tian Jia base at Copernicus crater.

  “We’ve gotten radar off the smaller body—we’re calling it Hicks-D—from Aristarchus Array just a few minutes ago,” Nakamura was saying. “Geos say it’s pretty light in mass, maybe just a loose rubble cloud. There’s a chance it may break up if it hits Earth’s atmosphere.”

  “We could try a few more coilgun bursts after our next breaching shot,” Mendez offered. “Maybe that would help Hicks-D break up faster.”

  Nakamura advised caution. “Let the geos run with the data for a few hours…it’s close enough to do spectrum analysis on…we can get a better handle on its composition then. We saw the vids of the first breach…good work, Galileo. Good shooting. And thanks to Quantum Corps too; I’m sure the ANAD digs helped that process. You’re targeting Asgard now?”

  “As we speak, Gateway,” Mendez said. “But the first breach imparted quite a dramatic wobble to Hicks. It’s tumbling around like my son’s football passes now. I’m not sure I can get an accurate shot at Asgard…and we don’t have that much left in our magazine.”

  “Currently, we make you at about twenty seven two thousand kilometers from Earth. Aristarchus is giving us velocity and position updates every half hour. You’re approaching the planet at just under 21,000 kilometers per hour. That puts impact in a few minutes less than forty-six hours…just under two days. By the way, if you can, translate Galileo more toward the down-sun end of the asteroid. We’re going to be operating the impulse motors on the piece that has them…the one with the polar arrays. I don’t want the ship to be in the line of fire of the pellet stream.”

  “Roger that,” Mendez said. “We’ll move down-sun. But I can’t go too far off axis from Asgard…I’ve got to take the best shot I can when I have it.”

  “Agreed. Just be advised we’ll be operating the impulse motors within the hour. UNIFORCE wants to divert that piece as soon as we can.”

  “Understood…Galileo out.” Mendez punched in the new position to the ship’s maneuvering computer. “This should put us about halfway between the Chasm of Asgard and Freya crater.”

  “Fabulous country,” said Mighty Mite Barnes. “I’d like to build a vacation home there.”

  “Stu, what’s our magazine like?”

  “Twenty four rounds,” Kamler told him. “Plus four loaded. That’s it.”

  Mendez studied the terrain below as the ship’s computers translated Galileo to its new firing position. “Your opinion, Lieutenant. Best targets inside that Chasm--?”

  Winger discussed the targeting with Al Glance. “You were the site commander, Al. You had the grid. Where do we shoot?”

  Glance didn’t hesitate. He pointed out an area a few hundred meters away from Thor crater. “See where the Chasm widens out…you can still see some of our garbage scattered around the dig site. ANAD boring was deepest there. Shoot there.”

  Mendez swung his targeting scope around to zero in on the location. He pressed a few buttons to slave the coilgun array to those coordinates.

  “Coilguns enabled?”

  “Armed and ready, Lieutenant.”

  “Do it, Stu. Now.”

  Kamler pressed the firing button. The staccato bang of guns discharging rippled through the command deck hull. Almost at the same instant, a bright white plume of rubble and dust erupted from the dim recesses of Asgard Chasm, geysering out into space like a slow-motion plant blooming.

  Winger operated the radar to measure lateral separation across the Chasm at the impact site. “Minimal change…I think we just vaporized a canyon wall…landslide going on now. Can you tweak your aim a little bit uphill, into those shadows at the ‘Y’?”

  “I’ll try,” Mendez muttered. “But remember the asteroid’s rotating. I’m trying to hit a moving target here…and there’s still debris from the first shots fogging up the ground view. It’ll take a few minutes for that stuff to fall out.”

  He made the adjustments and fired another salvo of four rounds. This time, the plume erupted into a massive boiling cloud of rubble, several times wider than the first.

  “You hit something…a gas pocket, maybe,” Tallant watched. “It’s venting like the dickens.”

  “I see some separation now,” Winger said. “She’s beginning to breach…several meters per second—“

  “Look…another seam,” Kamler pointed out. “See to the left, back toward Heldof crater?”

  “Crap…of all the rotten—“ Winger said. “I don’t believe it. This rock pile’s nothing but loose rubble. It may tear itself into a dozen pieces.”

  They continued watching for a few moments, as the asteroid rotated below them, now enveloped in a debris field that sparkled and shone in the sunshine. The dig site at Asgard continued to widen, as centrifugal forces tore at Hicks’ innards, flinging off boulders and smaller chunks. Soon, that end of the asteroid hung only by a few loose seams of rock, wobbling like a broken child’s top.

  “Designating main body as Hicks-A,” Reaves said. “Largest bodies are now Hicks-A, B, C and D.”

  “Al, there aren’t enough letters in the alphabet to name all those pieces. I just hope most of that junk burns up in the Earth’s atmosphere.”

  Mendez was grim. “We’d better let Gateway know what’s happened.”

  Aboard Gateway Station, the Ops center was in an uproar. Kaoru Nakamura oversaw a small platoon of technicians scrambling to power up impulse motors on the surface of Hicks-Newman…or what was left of it.

  Nakamura shook his head at the radar plots. Aristarchus and SpaceGuard were now tracking no less than twenty chunks of Hicks leftovers.

  “What the hell are they doing up there?” he wondered out loud. “Every sim we did had the burg splitting cleanly along—“

  “—excuse me, sir,” interrupted Jonas, a nearby tech working the maneuvering console. “Polar arrays on Hicks-C are powered up. Loader bank and grid charged. The bots are giving us a good stream of material.”

  Nakamura knew they couldn’t afford to wait. “Advise Galileo once more. Tell them to stand off several kilometers, at least. We’re firing in less than five minutes…start the count.”

  “Yes, sir.” Jonas pecked out a few commands and set up the maneuver. “Estimating twenty-two point one meters per second, total delta-vee over a nominal one-hour burn, sir.”

  “Very well…we’ll fire for an hour and re-plot. What about the other pieces?”

  Jonas checked the board. “We have plots on Hicks A, B, C and D, from Aristarchus and SpaceGuard. There are impulse motors on A, B and C. D’s a lost cause…it’s going to hit in less than twenty-six hours. And Plot’s giving us returns on a lot of other pieces up there…twenty in all.”

  Nakamura had queried his computer to display the original composition of Hicks, as determined by the first scoutships. “Must have more seams of volatiles than we allowed for. That could explain the explosive breaching Galileo’s reporting.”

  “Yes, sir…she looks heavy on volatiles.”

  Nakamura was in a quandary about what to do next. “Get UNIFORCE on the line. I need to let them now there will definitely be impactors.”

  “One minute to firing, sir.”

  Polamalu was the comm tech, a Samoan kid who had grown up in Singapore, joined Quantum Corps as a recruit and washed out of nog school. He’d signed on for a stint at Gateway L3 to get his space legs, with an eye toward UNISPACE and maybe even Frontier Corps as a career.

  ‘Pollie’ worked his board, ported the vid to Nakamura’s station one level up. “It’s UNIFORCE, sir. General Linx’s office on screen one.”

  The Corps commander’s face looked like an old hide leathery and beaten with worry. “Gateway, what’s going on? I’m getting SpaceGuard reports we still have impactors undiverted.”

  “That’s correct, General. We’re getting ready to divert one piece now. B
ut Hicks seems to have shattered as it breached under Galileo’s coilgun fire. Carbonaceous bodies are like that…really just loose rubble piles, dirty snow cones.”

  Linx winced like he’d been shot. “Give me the details. “What’s going to hit?”

  Nakamura went down the list. “Biggest worry is a piece we’re calling Hicks-D. We have no divert capability for it. It broke off away from any of our impulse motors. This one came from the up-sun end, breached off and spun away from the Odin’s Fissure site. I’ve just talked with our geos…they’re saying the whole asteroid’s probably riven with seams of volatiles, just waiting to be exposed to the Sun. Hicks-D is about seventy meters in longest dimension…I’m getting projections from Plot coming in right now…looks like entry velocity will be about 26,400 kilometers per hour. Estimated impact point is in North Africa, in the Sahara desert near the Algeria-Tunisia border. “

  Linx winced at the thought. “I’ll let UNSAC know. The Secretary-General will have to issue a broad-area alert. We still have two days…mass evacuations will help but we don’t have a lot of time. What about the other pieces?”

  “—thirty seconds to firing, sir—“ It was Polamalu.

  “We’re preparing now to operate impulse motors on Hicks-C. Aristarchus should be able to give us a new plot after an hour’s firing. Hicks-B breached intact and we have motors sited there. But Hicks-A shattered when Galileo fired…Plot is following some twenty pieces out of that. Our impulse array is on one of them but the others—“

  Linx was realistic about what was coming. “A primary object that big will create one hell of an impact. Shock waves, heat, probably a tsunami in the Med…I’m authorizing Quantum Corps to develop and execute ANAD operations around the Mediterranean basin…erecting a tsunami barrier might just cut down on the death and devastation. It’ll have to be done at Big Bang scale to work…but that can’t be helped. We don’t have a lot of time.”

  “Gateway is estimating a Level 9 impact on the Torino scale, sir.” Nakamura watched the final seconds tick off to impulse motor firing at Hicks-C. “General, excuse me, I’ve got to monitor the burn.”

  “Very well, Gateway…keep me advised. Linx, out.” The vid blanked out to a stylized UNIFORCE logo…the sunburst and spear logo. Nakamura briefly imagined that’s what Hicks-D would look like at the moment of impact.

  “Five seconds, sir…four…three…two…one…executing now—“

  All of the impulse arrays had vid systems embedded in their controller mounts. The screens shook slightly from vibration and much of the view was obscured by rubble and dust clouds stirred up from breaching a few hours before.

  Nakamura, Jonas and Polamalu watched as the launcher rail belched a stream of pellets, first one, then another, then another in a thickening stream which soon blurred into a continuous flow of shaped rounds, all expelled at twenty thousand kilometers an hour by the electromagnetic cannon.

  “Stream coming up nicely…rate is nominal, mass nominal…looks like a good start, sir.”

  “Pan around, Pollie. I want to see the rest of the array, especially the feeder.”

  “Panning now, sir.” Polamalu operated the vid cameras with a small joystick. Hicks was now close enough to Earth to enable real-time control of the burn.

  From a distance, each impulse motor array resembled a giant T embedded in the rocky surface of the asteroid. At both ends of the top of the “T” were open pits excavated by robotic borers, feeding surface rock into crusher/processor stations. The crushers prepared raw surface stock for transfer along conveyor lines to the T’s intersection with its leg. There, under the watchful eyes of its controller station, the shaped pellets were transferred through a charging grid into a loader bank. Now fully magnetized, the pellets, each roughly the shape of a small ball, were fed into the launcher chamber and accumulated into a shot. When the controller signaled firing, the magnetized shot was expelled by sequentially collapsing magnetic fields, slinging small masses away from the asteroid at up to twenty-thousand kilometers per hour. Total delta-vee was small with each shot…at best, a few tenths of meter per second but the impulse motor could operate for long periods, days at a time, slinging shots of rock off the asteroid, and so build up large delta-vees over time.

  The trouble was they no longer had a lot of time. And Hicks-C was deep in the Earth’s gravity well, accelerating every second.

  Nakamura studied the imagery from Pollie’s pan. “Borers, crushers, loaders, it all looks good. Magnetrons?”

  Jonas checked readouts from the controller. “Charging to seventy-thousand gauss, right on the money.”

  “First results from Plot coming in, sir,” said Polamalu. “Aristarchus is showing measurable delta-vee…just a fraction of a meter per second, but detectable. Rough projection: Hicks-C will skim the upper atmosphere, possibly bounce off.”

  “Okay,” said Nakamura,” we’re not done yet. Start setup on Hicks-B, Pollie. Get the arrays warmed up. We’re not home free.”

  General Wolfus Linx stared out his seventh floor window for a few minutes, taking in the timeless Parisian cityscape spread out below. He wondered how much of it would survive the coming impact.

  The Eiffel Tower dominated the northwest view, now covered with fixbots as it was nearing completion of the structural upgrade ordered by the Secretary-General a few months before. There was the Place Vendome and the low hill of Montmartre, thick with pedestrians and aircabs. UNIFORCE had been built twenty years before on the Rue des Jardins, at a busy intersection off the Luxembourg Gardens, deep in the heart of the 5th Arrondisement. The mansard roofline of the Palais du Luxembourg filled his northeast windows.

  No time to erect a nanobotic barrier now, he thought. All resources will have to be devoted to screening off the Med, blocking the shock wave and the wall of water that would surely erupt from the impact of a seventy-meter object at twenty thousand kilometers an hour.

  Whether such a hastily erected barrier along the periphery of the impact zone would be enough to contain the fury of the impact was not something Wolfus Linx cared to dwell on. Better to die in action, he reminded himself, than suffer life in doubt.

  Linx dialed up Quantum Corps at its temporary site in Scharnhorst, Switzerland on the vid.

  Major Kraft, now re-located from Table Top Mountain, came on the line. The major’s harried face spoke volumes.

  “Kraft, I’ve got a job for you. UNIFORCE just got early projections on what’s left of Hicks-Newman after Galileo finished her off.”

  “Nothing but rubble, I hope, General.”

  Linx filled him in on Nakamura’s report. Kraft’s face fell.

  “That’s bad, General. Will UNIFORCE be using the killsats?”

  “We’re throwing everything we have at the impactors, Kraft. I want Quantum Corps to develop a config and launch an ANAD operation to surround the projected impact zone with a barrier, to try to contain the worst of the shock wave, heat effects and water surge. You’ve got about a day and a half, by the way.”

  Kraft wasn’t particularly surprised. “We’ve already got something cooking, General. We actually simmed this scenario a few years before, not in any detail, but we have the configs to start with already in Containment. I’ll assign a Detachment right away. We should be able to lift to the site in about four to six hours…we’ll need everything flyable Balzano has.” Balzano, Italy was the site of Quantum Corps’ Central Command base.

  “I’ll see you get it, Kraft. Coordinate with Nakamura at Gateway station on the details and the timing. I don’t have to tell you UNSAC and the SG are under a hell of a lot of pressure now, to do something, to do anything. Get that barrier up now, Major. It may save a few hundred million lives.”

  Kraft acknowledged and Linx cut the link. The Major sank back in his seat, surveying all the boxes and containers that packbots were still wheeling around the underground base in the Konigsruhe Mountains just outside of Basel.

&
nbsp; Surround the projected impact zone with a nanobotic barrier to contain the shock waves—

  Just saying the words in his mind made Kraft’s head swim. There were about a million things to be done and less than two days to do them: pull together some kind of Detachment; check with Containment and Engineering on concocting a config to slap up a barrier at double time, Big Bang speed; coordinate with Balzano on getting the lifters they would need.

  It was bad enough they’d had to move temporarily out of the Table Top base. CINCQUANT himself had ordered that, since Quantum Corps had been in Red Hammer’s crosshairs since the beginning of the crisis. Now the whole planet was in the crosshairs of the remnants of this blasted asteroid.

  It made Kraft nostalgic for the days of Serengeti Factor, when Quantum Corps only had to face threats on one planet.

  He dialed up Gabrielle Galland, nominally the battalion c/o for 2nd Nano. Galland had been TDY’ed to UNIFORCE Paris for a staff assignment. Her blond buzzcut came up on Kraft’s wrist vid as he hurried down to Containment.

  “Major—“ Galland was saying, “I’ve just been summoned to a briefing…CINCQUANT’s going over all the details about the asteroid fragment…scuttlebutt says we’ve got a few impactors coming our way.”

  Kraft rode the tube down to Scharnhorst’s 05 Level and cycled through the locks to reach the Containment chamber. “Galland, I want you to honcho a special op.” He filled her in on Linx’s orders. The Lieutenant’s dark eyebrows lifted like question marks.

  “Sir, I’ve got several troopers in mind already…Lucy Liu, Chekwarthy, Kincade, probably Mwale too. He’s dynamite on the latest configs. Speaking of configs—“

  Kraft was one step ahead. “Already there, Lieutenant. I’m heading to the Tank right now. I know Wiggins and Klepnick have a few tricks up their sleeves. For starters, I’m thinking we adapt that config we simmed last summer in the counter-hurricane scenario.”

  “CC1101…I remember it, sir. I’ll get the book on it and brush up on my way down. I can catch the maglev and be inside the Mountain in two hours.”

  “Do it,” Kraft ordered. “I’ve got Balzano getting me some transport. Three lifters and one hyperjet will be at Basel airport by 1130 hours this morning. I want to depart for Algiers not later than noon, with everything.”

  “Understood, sir. Galland…out.” Her face winked off his wristvid and Kraft passed through the last set of locks.

  He found Containment in an uproar.

  Sergeant Wiggins, lead containment tech, was bent over a quantum imager screen, manipulating something inside Tank 1. The containment vessel was surrounded by other techs, excitedly talking and gesturing among themselves.

  “Sergeant, what the hell’s going on here?”

  All hands immediately snapped to attention. Kraft waved them to ease.

  Wiggins had an explanation. “Sir, these are the remains of the techs who got Big Banged at Table Top last week. Dr. Renfroe here—“ he indicated a balding bear of a man next to the imager—“is from Med. He wanted to run some pathology on the remains, so we put them under the scope. That’s when we found this—“ Wiggins pointed to the screen.

  Kraft took a look. “All I see are some loose atoms…a few tetrahedrals and polygons, some carbons and oxygens. Plus that little cylinder thing off to the side. What’s that?”

  “That’s the question, sir. We’re not sure. It looks like a containment capsule. Look closer: see the port on the side? And the control studs on the bottom? Unless I’m missing a few brain cells, that’s a Mark III Containment Capsule. Just like the troopers have embedded.”

  Kraft grudgingly conceded the point. “So it’s a containment capsule…so what?”

  “Well, sir, this capsule was not disassembled by the ANAD swarm during the Big Bang. It survived somehow and from all appearances, it was itself embedded in one of the techs who died. Or possibly Doc Frost…sir.”

  “Anything inside?”

  “Don’t know for sure, sir. We were just going to open it.”

  Kraft rubbed a two-day old stubble on his chin thoughtfully. “It survived the Big Bang? How’d it do that?”

  “Unknown, Colonel,” said Klepnick, the other tech. Klepnick was an eager young stud right out of nog school. Containment Ops had been his first assignment. “Major, there’s evidence of some kind of internal shielding. Plus some kind of barrier that can be activated and deactivated.”

  “Maybe it fought off ANAD during the Bang,” someone said.

  Kraft scowled. This was a waste of time. They had to cobble together a config for a shock wave and tsunami barrier.

  “Open it,” Kraft ordered.

  Wiggins cycled the port, using the quantum imager’s effectors.

  At first, nothing seemed to happen. The capsule port opened.

  “Detecting a few atoms,” Klepnick said. He tweaked a few knobs, increased resolution. “Looks like a small swarm coming out.”

  “Probing now…” said Wiggins. “Some carbons and sugars, a smattering of phosphates, lots of hydrogens and oxygens…don’t see any structure yet.”

  “I do,” said Dr. Renfroe. “Watch—“

  The capsule continued discharging a small swarm into the chamber. As the swarm issued out of the port, the first traces of structure began to appear. Molecules stuck together. Bonds were made, lattices formed. Loose atoms were gathered together and hung like pots on a shelf. Slowly, but with gathering speed, the swarm built structure and formed recognizable clusters of molecules, then bigger clusters, then continents of clusters that began to take on the appearance of tissue mats.

  “It’s a face—“ Klepnick breathed.

  Moment by moment, even as they watched in stunned disbelief, the swarm operating under an unknown config, built more and more structure. Kraft was certain that Klepnick had jumped to a ridiculous conclusion.

  Five minutes later, he had to admit the young tech was right.

  “What the—?”

  “Can you tell what config it’s running?” Kraft asked. The swarm had begun to assume the basic proportions of a human head, not completely filled out yet, but the dimensions seemed right. There were openings for what the mind could imagine as eyes. A long fissure that might become a nose. A horizontal slash that was even now, filling in with more structure…a mouth. Could those appendages be ears?

  Were they imagining shapes and forms? Had all the stress the last few days, the Big Bang, the imminent impact of rocks from space, the hurried re-location to Scharnhorst…had all the stress made them loony? Seeing things that weren’t there?

  Kraft spoke in a low voice. “I’m not seeing this. It’s a trick. Wiggins, check the imager. Check the Tank…what the hell’s in that medium?”

  But it was no trick.

  Relentlessly, unmistakably, the swarm was forming a tissue-like structure that could only be seen as a likeness, a damn good likeness, Kraft had to admit later, of Dr. Irwin Frost.

  Renfroe said what no one else dared say. “That’s Frost, isn’t it? What kind of config is this?”

  “What the hell--?”

  They watched in stunned amazement as the swarm continued adding structure, so that after five minutes, the likeness with Doc Frost was at first glance startlingly realistic. The basic facial proportions were there, the features were there…only a slight blurring at the fringes betrayed the nanobotic origins of the likeness.

  Renfroe took out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead. “I guess Irwin made a few advances we didn’t know about.”

  “The only way this makes sense,” said Kraft, “is that Frost concocted a configuration to make a swarm rendering of himself—“

  “And had it embedded inside his body,” added Wiggins. He tweaked a few dials on the quantum imager, zoomed in to higher resolution.

  “A strange kind of immortality,” said Renfroe. “I’m not sure this has ever been done before.”

  “Open up an acoustic c
hannel,” Kraft suggested. “Let’s see if it has a processor worth a flip.”

  Wiggins pecked out commands on a nearby keyboard. “Something’s coming in…let me tune it better—“ He fiddled with some dials. “Something around seventy, maybe eighty cycles—I’ll put it on speaker—“