Johnny Winger and the Hellas Enigma, Page 2

The master bot sloughed off all replicants and in a few minutes, had made its way back to containment and entered the tiny capsule in Dao’s left shoulder. He winced at the stinging burn of the maneuver, then felt the capsule port snap shut beneath his pressure suit.

  The angels had returned to heaven.

  Dao now set to work powering up the marscat, bringing her four electric motors on-line. Settling himself into the commander’s seat, he backed the cat down the slope of the mesa and turned around to a more northerly heading.

  Now it was time to contact the Keeper. Time to locate the sphere.

  Dao drove the marscat to the predicted coordinates, at the base of a small mound two miles from the mesa. He steered the cat through slippery sand dunes across a boulder-strewn plain, crunching and bouncing over heavy rubble pans, probably outflow from whatever primordial rivers had once gushed through the area. Arriving at the spot indicated by the nav screen, he found the mound a dust-covered rock fall abutting a canyon wall at the foot of the mesa, several hundred feet below and a mile to the north of their original position.

  Upon reaching the mound, Dao parked the cat and began suiting up.

  Dao shook his head several times just so, probing for the quantum link. He got snatches of something at first, then shuddered as the full force of the Keeper signal came flooding in.

  As always, for the first few moments, you were dizzy and disoriented, like you had spent the entire day riding the Dragon’s Tail roller coaster at Macau…that kind of dizziness.

  Then came the imagery…it never made any sense…or more likely, according to Souvranamh, your brain couldn’t make sense of the flood of entanglement waves that washed through the coupler. By turns, he felt like he had fallen into the ocean and storm waves were battering him from all directions.

  That subsided, to be replaced by a strong, fetid smell, a swamp smell of decay and rot. Mist and fog cleared and he was floating chest deep in a steaming swamp. Something screeched overhead and wings fluttered.

  Then the imagery dissolved once again, to be replaced by an open plain, like Sinkiang steppe land, only the plain was covered with undulating plants. The plants were not plants at all, he soon realized. The ground writhed with life, swarms upon swarms of bots seething and swelling and contracting, pulsing and throbbing to some unseen rhythm. The imagery jerked and shifted and this time, the horizon was curved and he was in space orbiting a planet. A planet of bots, teeming with nanoscale life.

  The planet of the Old Ones.

  Dao shook himself free from the maelstrom of the planet-swarm and checked the coordinates of the Keeper once more.

  A few seconds later, the nav screen beeped at him and he parked the cat for good. He was there. The Keeper signal was just ahead.

  Dao unstowed the cat’s twin manipulator arms and selected excavator grips from a rack on the side of the vehicle. Gingerly, he lowered the manipulators to the rusty, rubbly ground and began clearing, scraping and then digging.

  The sun was low now, a wan orange smear in the dust of the dig. Night came fast on Mars. Dao knew he would have to hurry if he wanted to make contact while there was still light left.

  And he didn’t know how much of an emergency message the Russian had managed to get off. That was a worry, but he put it out of mind. Still, he knew rescue teams could show up at any moment…he figured they were an hour’s lifter flight from Hellas Station at most.

  A few minutes’ excavation produced nothing definite so Dao commanded the arms to change angle and dig more deeply.

  Just as the sun started to pass behind a rock overhang, casting the dig site into shadow, the arms struck something hard. Dao emergency stopped the device.

  He left the cat in full pressure suit and clambered and skidded his way down the loose red dirt slope of the dig until his boots struck the same hard surface. Switching on his helmet lamps, Dao saw what he had found.

  It was a smooth, translucent pearl and white dome, a curved top to a much larger, almost egg-shaped structure. Dao smiled. He had done it!

  The sphere they had been seeking for nearly twelve years now lay right at his feet.

  It was Souvranamh, or maybe it was Kulagin, the Russian, who had given them the best description of the original sphere:

  “It’s like Pushkin Square Station in Moscow…you go inside and suddenly, a new world, a lot of new worlds open up. You can go anywhere, at any time. Everywhere is within reach. Just find the right platform and climb aboard. It’s a gateway to everywhere…”

  In truth it was a portal…to the Old Ones, whoever and whatever they were.

  Dao figured he knew how to get inside, if this sphere worked like the one Quantum Corps had destroyed at Paryang. He set to work.

  From memory, he placed both hands on the exposed translucent surface of the sphere. It felt faintly warm to the touch. Then he shook his head, to link in with the quantum coupler.

  After the usual buzz of disorientation, he found himself in a small dimly lit room, devoid of furnishings. Each wall had two doors, eight doors in all. Dao knew he had to somehow determine which door to open. Opening the right door would unlock the sphere. Opening the wrong door would lead to places best left undisturbed.

  The Paryang monastery sphere had used a riddle based on the Eight-Fold Path. Dao ticked off the parts in his mind: right view, right intention, right mindfulness and effort…it was an anagram, he recalled…a mathematical scrambling of the elements—

  …and then it came. An image of geometric forms—icosahedrons, polygons, trapezoids—all compressed into a tunnel, a long curving corridor and he found himself hurtling at breakneck speed down this corridor, until—

  With a hard bump, his whole body jarred from the impact and when he opened his eyes, caught his breath and came to his senses, he was in.

  Inside the sphere.

  How long he had been inside the portal, Dao couldn’t say. He shook himself fully awake and found he had fallen sprawling right on top of the sphere’s surface. It was dark inside the dig pit, save for a faint glow from the sphere itself, a dim almost imperceptible radiance that reflected off suspended dust.

  Dao collected himself and climbed out. The sun had just set below the scalloped hump of Hellas’ horizon. Fortunately, the marscat’s interior and running lights were on. Dao scrambled for footing and made his way over to the vehicle, climbing inside and hurriedly cycling the airlock.

  He went forward to the command deck and sat in Fedorov’s chair. Already he was working on what he would tell the rescue party. Whatever the story, it would have to be plausible and consistent.

  Dao checked his watch. It was already night outside…1735 hours local time. The Chinese meteorologist selected the same radio frequency Fedorov had been broadcasting on. The signal would go planet-wide, bounced off relay sats in orbit to every camp and settlement on Mars.

  “Any station, any station…this is Marscat M-22 declaring a level one emergency. We have casualties here. Any station, any station…Marscat transmitting in the clear from—“ he rattled off the latitude and longitude from the nav screen “—declaring a level one emergency. Mayday, mayday—“

  He didn’t have long to wait. Even as he was rummaging through the rations locker in the galley aft, the radio crackled to life.

  “…M-22…this is Lifter Rescue out of Hellas Station. We are inbound, closing on your position…descending through ten thousand…M-22, turn on your approach beacon immediately…we’ll maneuver and land as close as we can—“

  Dao located the powerful lights and switched on. Outside, the rock fall and canyon walls were bathed in a yellow glow. From ten thousand feet up, Marscat M-22 would flare like a supernova in the black of a Martian night.

  Dao settled back to munch on some crackers. He knew the next few hours would be grueling and nerve-wracking. But at least he had one satisfaction.

  The link with the Keeper of the Sphere was now open again.

  Unit
ed Nations Quantum Corps Briefing

  UNQC Western Command Base

  Table Top Mountain, Idaho, USA

  September 1, 2080

  General Jurgen Kraft walked quickly across the grassy quadrangle toward the Ops building with a sour set to his face. Must be something in the way the planets are aligned, he muttered to himself. Table Top was especially scenic at the beginning of fall, with a light dusting of snow on the northern slopes of Buffalo Ridge, while patches of aspen and birch lent autumnal colors to the valley below the hill.

  Kraft was carrying a communiqué that UNIFORCE had just received overnight at its Paris headquarters. It was a message from Red Hammer, the east Asian cartel that Quantum Corps had been battling for nearly twenty years now. The message was an ultimatum.

  I thought we’d buried the scumbags once and for all, Kraft thought. The Corps hadn’t heard anything from Red Hammer in several years. All their normal hangouts had been quiet. Twelve years before, the cartel’s main base of operations in the Himalayas had been destroyed in an assault by Johnny Winger and 1st Nano. Red Hammer had been scattered to the winds and very little had been heard or seen of them since.

  Now, this-- Kraft clutched the disk in his coat pocket. The wind had picked up across the top of the mountain. Off to his left, a hyperjet roared off down Runway 32 Left, accelerating through bright blue skies for some distant land. It burned in the sky like a meteor in reverse and was gone in seconds, heading for a space-skimming ride to somewhere.

  Kraft was now commanding officer of Quantum Corps’ Western Command, which meant he ran Table Top Mountain. Just after midnight, the duty officer from Ops had awakened him in quarters with flash traffic from UNIFORCE. General Wolfus Linx, Kraft’s immediate boss and CINCQUANT, had ordered him to set up a briefing at 0800 hours local, with vidlinks to Paris and several other places.

  “It’s from Red Hammer,” Linx had told him. “An ultimatum…we’ve got to act fast. Get your best people on it and patch me in when you’re set. UNSAC himself may attend too.”

  That got Kraft out of his bunk in a hurry. UNSAC was the Security Affairs Commissioner himself, one Jiang Hao Bei. If UNSAC was involved, Kraft knew whatever had happened was serious enough to affect the whole world.

  Had Red Hammer somehow finally reconstituted? Had Quantum Corps intel missed something?

  Kraft made the Ops building and headed for the briefing theater. Halfway there, he ran into Major Johnny Winger.

  “What is it, General?” Winger asked. He fell in alongside Kraft as they took the lift down into the bowels of the mountain, to the secure command post five levels below.

  “I got word we have a Code One in the making…”

  Kraft nodded tersely. “UNSAC asked for a briefing. It’s Red Hammer. Some kind of message or ultimatum came into Paris overnight and UNIFORCE is in an uproar.”

  The briefing theater was a semi-circular facility surrounded by screens and desks. SOFIE ran all the visuals and links; the AI had recently been upgraded to receive inputs directly from ANAD swarms. There was a direct patch to BioShield so the Corps could monitor the status of the protective swarms that patrolled the planet and enforced the nanobotic edicts…a direct outgrowth of Serengeti Factor and Amazon Vector outbreaks years before.

  Kraft came in and the non-duty personnel came to attention.

  “As you were…status of briefing setup?” Kraft took his position in the “bird’s nest” one level above the monitoring stations.

  The duty officer in charge reported: “All parties are on line now, sir. Your station is ready to go.”

  Kraft acknowledged the faces vidlinked in…from Paris, from Phoenix station in high earth orbit, and elsewhere at Table Top. In addition to those present at the Ops center, General Linx’s hard Teutonic face scowled back at Kraft from one screen. To his right, Galen Bosch, assistant Director-General at UNIFORCE-Paris was blowing his nose on another screen. A third screen displayed an elderly but clear-eyed Japanese national, floating serenely in weightlessness amid spartan, vaguely Shinto surroundings. Kaoru Nakamura was the Earth-bound chief of the Green Mars Initiative. At the moment, Nakamura was scholar-in-residence at Lagrange Televersity, at Phoenix Station.

  Kraft sat down and shuffled through some notes.

  “Is it Red Hammer, Kraft?” Linx asked. “That’s all I need to know.”

  Kraft swallowed hard. Linx was a gruff, impatient four-star heading up Quantum Corps interests at UNIFORCE’s Paris headquarters. HQ was a real playpen for politicians, a hotbed of intrigue and Kraft figured being gruff and crusty was a career Corpsman’s best defense in a place like that. At least he keeps the pols off our backs, Kraft reasoned.

  “We believe it is, sir. Overnight, at 2250 hours your time, UNIFORCE received a rather unusual communication at Paris. The message came in via ground courier, delivered directly at HQ. Intel’s looking at the thing now but the gist of the message is this: Red Hammer seems to be alive and well. Q2’s trying to authenticate the message right now.”

  Linx snorted. “I knew it! The bastards are like a disease…stamp them out in one place and they grow like a fungus somewhere else. I knew Paryang wouldn’t be the end of them.”

  Nakamura’s voice echoed in from a quarter million miles away. “Just how did the message arrive? Who received it?”

  “I can answer that.” Galen Bosch’s image was pale and terse. The A-DG had been up all night, mostly in meetings. “The communication was addressed to the Director-General personally. It’s basically an ultimatum from this Red Hammer group.”

  Johnny Winger had heard some of the scuttlebutt floating around Table Top. “What kind of ultimatum?”

  Kraft scanned several reports. “Q2’s still trying to validate the message but here are the basic details: somehow, some way, the cartel is threatening to divert a long-period asteroid now heading for Mars, to support the Green Mars Initiative. They’re threatening to divert this asteroid from Mars to Earth…impact in less than three months. Is such a thing even possible?”

  Linx’s face hardened. “Nakamura…you should know something about all this. Is there such an asteroid…can they do this?”

  The distance to Phoenix station, orbiting Earth at the L2 Lagrange point created a momentary delay. Nakamura was glad of that; he needed time to compose an answer.

  “It’s called Wilks-Lucayo, General. A C1-class carbonaceous chondritic body we located out beyond Mars…about a half mile in diameter. The project got approval last year. The diversion just started last month. We’ve got propulsion units all over its surface, nudging the asteroid onto a Mars-intercept trajectory.”

  Galen Bosch was grim. “Have you still got control of the thing? Could this Red Hammer cartel seize control of the propulsion units?”

  “Unlikely,” Nakamura replied. The engineer busied himself checking other screens around his workstation. “Current status on Wilks: on course for Mars intercept on January 11, 2081, our time. That’s about four and a half months from now. Control just executed a trajectory correction burn two days ago…they’re reporting no anomalies at this time. I have the data here—“

  “So what the hell’s all this about, Kraft?” Linx growled. The veins on CINCQUANT’s forehead stood out like miniature canyons whenever the O-10 was mad. “Some kind of hoax?”

  Kraft could feel the sweat trickling down the back of his neck. “Unknown, sir. The ultimatum indicates that Red Hammer has the capability to divert this object. They don’t explain how. And they list some conditions, if we want to prevent Wilks from being diverted.”

  “What kind of conditions?”

  Kraft perused his copy of the communiqué. “Basically, this is a ransom note, General. As I read it, Red Hammer is demanding two things: a payoff of 1 trillion UNotes and one other matter—“ Kraft paled as he looked up, seeing CINCQUANT’s expectant face.

  “And what’s that?”

  “That Quantum Corps
itself cease operations. Be closed down by UNIFORCE.”

  “What!” Linx was incredulous. “Absurd…even the thought of it is absurd. The Corps is absolutely vital to UNIFORCE…isn’t that so, Herr Bosch?”

  The A-DG’s hesitation was only momentary, almost imperceptible. But it was there. “Of course, General. Such a demand is quite impossible. Naturally, this communication must be brought to UNSAC’s attention right away. There will undoubtedly be a meeting of the UNIFORCE Council, just to discuss these demands and how we should respond. I assume there’s a deadline, General Kraft?”

  “They’ve given us one month to comply. There are also some details on how the ransom is to be paid off…currencies, assets, drop-off points, that sort of thing.”

  Bosch was thoughtful, stroking a trim black beard. “Why, exactly, was Quantum Corps brought in on this investigation in the first place, outside of the demands themselves? Wouldn’t this have been better handled by UNISPACE? Why does Red Hammer even mention Quantum Corps in their demands?”

  “I can answer that,” Kraft responded. “Red Hammer and Quantum Corps are old enemies. It was Major Winger here who led the assault known as Tectonic Strike, back in ’68, to put their main base of operations out of commission.”

  “This was the facility in Tibet that the Chinese made such a commotion over--?”

  “Yes, sir. Paryang was the name. Red Hammer had centralized operations there. During the Amazon Vector crisis, most of their swarm control was located there. When Tectonic Strike busted Paryang, the Amazon swarms became less coordinated, less effective. BioShield, with our help, was able to defeat the swarms and restore the Earth’s atmosphere to normal. We also smashed their link to this alleged race of aliens…the Old Ones, they were called.”

  Bosch nodded. “Yes, yes…I recall studying the tactical reports and the after-action write-ups in school. Quite an operation that was. Bear with me, gentlemen…I’m just trying to understand what’s going on here. You really believe that this message—these demands—are all about Red Hammer getting revenge on Quantum Corps?” Bosch looked almost comically skeptical. His black eyebrows lifted in mock surprise. “Forgive me, General, but isn’t your analysis a bit far-fetched?”