Johnny Winger and the Hellas Enigma, Page 3

  Before Kraft could answer, Linx cut in, livid with indignation. “Director Bosch, what you are suggesting is a slap in the face to an organization of very dedicated men and women. The world owes a hell of a lot to the Corps. BioShield wouldn’t have any teeth, if it weren’t for their ANAD operations. Who knows how many millions might have died if Serengeti Factor and Amazon Vector hadn’t been defeated. Quantum Corps was our last defense…if they hadn’t held the line….” Linx shook his head, unable to contemplate the terrible possibilities that had been avoided. “The whole world owes an enormous debt of gratitude to these brave men and women.”

  “With all due respects, sir,” Kraft added, “we know our adversary quite well. And they know us. I think the trillion note ransom is actually nothing but a smokescreen. Quantum Corps or rather, the dissolution of Quantum Corps…that’s the real demand.”

  Johnny Winger concurred. “Excuse me, General, but it seems to me that something must have changed here. Tactically, operationally, Red Hammer’s been quiet, almost non-existent, for the last twelve years. What’s happened to change the situation? That’s what we should be asking ourselves. That’s what Q2 should be looking for.”

  Bosch considered that. “Major, since you raised the question, perhaps you have some kind of answer for us.”

  Kraft cast a dubious sideways glance at Winger. It was Linx himself who had requested the Corps’ top atomgrabber be present at the briefing. That was annoying as hell. No lowly battalion commander should ever be able to upstage a ranking flag officer. But then Winger was no ordinary battalion commander, Kraft had to admit.

  “General, the best answer I can give is that Q2 should go back to basics. Look at indications. Look at their sources. Patterns. Check BioShield records. Have we seen anything indicating Red Hammer activity anywhere…something with their signature on it, like a big scope or twist shipment. A spike in illegal fabs somewhere…illegal nano erupting in odd places…anything out of the ordinary. We all know what drives Red Hammer. We know what their bread and butter is. It stands to reason that their capability to make this kind of threat and carry it out didn’t just appear overnight. There should be something Q2 can get a hold of, something that would give us an idea of what we’re up against.”

  “Agreed,” Linx decided. “Kraft, get on that. Poll your sources and run correlations. We’ve got to find out what’s changed to make Red Hammer so bold again.” He shook his head slowly, still unable to believe the communiqué. “Dr. Nakamura..?”

  The Japanese engineer floated serenely in weightlessness like a wrinkled Buddha. “Yes, General—“

  “Double-check all your security measures again. We should send a liaison to Phoenix station to get up to speed on the project and all its details. How, exactly, are you diverting this Wilks-Lucayo to Mars?”

  Nakamura launched into a detailed explanation. “Over the last two years, we’ve landed and secured to Wilks’ surface an array of some sixty-four mass-driver impulse motors. These motors are like industrial dredges with huge electromagnets attached. They chew up surface material and fling it away as reaction mass. Not a lot of thrust, mind you, but over time, it builds up. The effect of the combined array is to very gently perturb the asteroid’s course while it’s inbound from its aphelion point…its farthest point from the sun. Bit by bit, a few hundredths of a meter per second at a time…the impulse motors are altering the trajectory. The Project’s very careful about this…every eventuality has been calculated and prepared for. We want to impact Mars at a very specific place at a very specific time, to gain maximum effect. The whole point of this is to bring in a huge spike in water, carbon, hydrogen and other volatiles all at once…in effect to make a phase change in the environment of Mars. Tip the planet into a new state all at once.”

  Galen Bosch was intrigued. “I’ve read the theory behind this, Doctor. Just where are you planning to impact Wilks?”

  Nakamura fed an impact simulation to all screens. “I can answer your question best with a short video. Watch this,” he said.

  An image of Mars blossomed into view. Wilks-Lucayo soon appeared as a point of light streaking toward the southern hemisphere of the planet. In slow motion, the light grew in size until a discernible potato-shaped object was soon evident, tumbling slowly as it plowed into the upper reaches of the Martian atmosphere.

  Friction made the asteroid blaze into a fiery ball as it plummeted toward impact. In the final seconds of the video, Wilks-Lucayo hurtled deeper into the thin atmosphere surrounded by a halo of incandescent gases, streaming chunks of asteroid as it began to break up.

  At impact, a shock wave rippled outward in concentric rings while the half-mile wide body excavated a massive boiling crater and the plume of debris, ash and soot rocketed skyward, nearly reaching the edge of space itself.

  “Hellas Basin,” Nakamura announced as the video imagery froze in its final frame, the still shot of a hundred-mile high plume just visible off the limb of Mars’ southern hemisphere. “Excavated by a similar impact some two billion years ago. Four months from now, Wilks-Lucayo hits in almost the same place…and the result: Mars has a new ocean and a thicker atmosphere.”

  The comm was silent until Galen Bosch offered an opinion. “A new ocean once all the dust settles. How long will that take?”

  Nakamura was matter of fact. “We’ve estimated about a year to a year and a half…maybe sixteen Earth months…before enough dust has settled out to resume normal operations.”

  General Linx was sobered by the imagery he had just seen. “Dr. Nakamura, if Red Hammer is somehow able to divert this thing to an Earth-intercept trajectory, are we looking at a similar scenario here?”

  Nakamura’s face was impassive. “Pretty much, General. Earth’s thicker atmosphere might cause Wilks to disintegrate earlier, with more pieces falling over a wider area. That could be good or bad, depending on the mechanics of the approach.”

  “Then we can’t let that happen.” Linx rubbed his gray moustache wearily. “Kraft, I want BioShield brought into this investigation. They may have intel that’s relevant.”

  Kraft, back at Table Top, snapped his fingers, mouthing to Winger and Tallant: get Fordham down here right away.

  Major Elbert Fordham was BioShield liaison to the Table Top facility; he reported directly to Kraft.

  Winger dashed off to find the officer, who turned up at the base commissary, nursing a sandwich and coffee.

  “I’ve got my BioShield liaison on the way in now, sir,” Kraft told CINCQUANT.

  Winger came back with a slightly dazed Fordham a few minutes later.

  Linx was blunt and to the point. “Major, has BioShield detected or reported any anomalies in nanobotic activity in recent weeks?”

  Fordham took a deep breath. Winger had briefed him on what CINCQUANT wanted on the way over to Ops. The BioShield liaison pecked at a few keys on a nearby keyboard and brought up a display of the world in flat projection. Several splotches of light strobed in multiple locations.

  “These are on-going investigations, General. We’ve got spikes in nanobotic activity-- based on thermals and atomic debris clouds, they seem like assembler activity—in several locations.” Fordham highlighted two for explanation. “The main centers of detected activity are in and around Kolkata and west Bengal and a smaller locus in the suburbs of west London.”

  Linx, Kraft and the rest studied the live map of BioShield deployment. All across the globe, controlled swarms of dedicated ANADs circulated in the lower atmosphere, tuned to detect the telltale thermal bloom and atomic debris signature of unusual replication or nanobotic operation. The Containment Laws were strict; after Serengeti and Amazon, only licensed fabs or permitted nanobotic releases were allowed outside containment. Fabs had to be registered and inspected every year; the matter engines were a tightly regulated monopoly in most countries. You could get a permit for non-fab nanobot release from the local authorities but
the procedure was often cumbersome and bribery was endemic in some parts of the world.

  Fordham went on. “We think we know the source in west London. There’s a team there now, tracking down the violators. But the one in Kolkata—“ Fordham shook his head. “The signature’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Seems to be a combination of things, overlapping swarms, perhaps. Disturbances within disturbances.”

  Linx considered that. “You have an enforcement team there?”

  Fordham acknowledged. “We do, General. An E-team is on-site at this time. They’re correlating signatures with sources…so far, a lot of it is what we suspected: Kolkata’s got an epidemic of unregulated fabs going off all over the place. Somebody’s been giving them away, with no controls, no training. People are using them like cigarette lighters…fabbing anything and everything that comes to mind. Clothes, books, cars, videos and records, literally everything imaginable. The black market’s just exploded. With the local currency pretty much worthless, the fabs are all they have to trade with. I just checked the last report from the E-1…they’re covering the Howrah Bridge district and the word is the air’s thick with uncontrolled swarms of every variety…assemblers, disassemblers, you name it. Like a fog rolling down the Hooghly River, only this fog is intelligent and programmable. The team’s having a helluva time containing the swarms…we may need help.”

  Linx studied the videos Fordham had put on the net. The imagery looked like a continuous riot, with surging throngs of people caught in thick mists of assemblers, solid shapes forming out of mid-air as the fabs followed their programming. CINCQUANT just shook his head. “Like something out of the Bible…manna from heaven. They’re destroying the environment as fast as they can. Kraft, you’d better get a special team in there. We need stronger nano to contain this.”

  “Will do, General,” Kraft replied.

  Linx was bothered by something. “Major Fordham, you said the signatures BioShield was detecting were unlike anything you’ve seen. Explain.”

  Fordham knew this question would be asked. He took a deep breath. “Fabs mutate fast, General. We all know that. One month, BioShield can detect the most common signatures of assembler operation pretty well. We’ve got a catalog and we keep updating it hourly. The next month, some hacker has tinkered with the programming…added a carbene grabber here, a radical grabber there, changed bond energies on us…and the signature’s all different. We’re always behind the curve on this but we manage. But lately—within the last several weeks, BioShield has been seeing something different. I mean really different. We can see it, or rather the effects of it on the local environment but we can’t really characterize it. It’s a weird quantum effect, like a disturbance. Not really entanglement waves. We’re optimized now to scan for certain properties of quantum effects, since that’s long been a Red Hammer tactic. They’ve got quantum couplers same as we do. But this is different. There are patterns of disturbances in and around Kolkata that have to be quantum effects but we can’t find them…we see secondary effects like entanglement waves collapsing and we’ve tried triangulating and localizing but it’s just too faint and it shifts too fast.”

  Kraft was puzzled. “These disturbances…do they leave atomic effects? Molecular debris?”

  “No, they don’t, General,” Fordham went on. “That’s why we think this is a quantum effect. All quantum signals generate entanglement waves and patterns that can be detected if you have the right equipment, such as when the signals collapse at the receiver end. BioShield is seeing something like that, but it’s broader, bigger in scale. It’s more like a quantum earthquake. The disturbances are sporadic but when they happen, BioShield sees a massive entanglement wave collapse, spreading out like a tidal wave of probabilities. Like a giant fist just shook the universe. And what localization we can do points to a source in or around, or maybe below, Kolkata.”

  Kraft and Winger looked at each other. Both had a flash memory of Tectonic Strike, and the seismic disturbances caused by ANAD swarms released at fracture zones underground. Winger shuddered, recalling hours of terror, trapped miles below ground aboard the geoplane. It had taken several years to get that out of his system.

  Linx made up his mind. “Kraft, you’d better get a recon team together. Coordinate with BioShield and Major Fordham. Get to Kolkata, or wherever this disturbance is located. Something’s going on and it sounds like more than just bad fabs and loose swarms.”

  “Yes, sir,” Kraft acknowledged. “I’ll get you an op plan within the hour.” The Table Top commander motioned Winger and Fordham to get moving. As they left the briefing theater, Kraft dove into the details of what Quantum Corps would be doing.

  Outside the Ops Center, it was just dawn and the sun was poking above the tops of the Buffalo Range with orange fingers of light. Knots of people from shift change were gathering outside the commissary and the barracks areas, to catch the sight. It was one of the perks of assignment to the Western Command base.

  Winger hiked across the snowy quadrangle toward the Containment complex. Fordham could barely keep up.

  “Where are we going, Winger?”

  The atomgrabber walked briskly along the footpath, ignoring the splendor of an Idaho mountain dawn. “The General wants a recon team and an op plan in an hour. I’ve got to get my company commanders together and work up a sheet. And I’m going to need everything BioShield has on this disturbance: signatures, frequencies, characteristics, anything you got.”

  “It’s all pretty vague,” Fordham admitted. “Long-range detection can’t seem to pin the thing down…it shifts and collapses too fast.”

  “Then there’s nothing like a little side trip to check out the natives. Ever been to Kolkata?”

  Before Fordham could answer, they had made the Containment center and cycled through Security and the airlocks. Inside, Winger led them through a maze of corridors thick with piping and heavy doors, to a compartment near the center of the complex.

  Moments later, Winger and Fordham were at the battalion ready room and surrounded by troopers from 1st Nanospace Battalion.

  “Listen up,” Winger said.

  The ready room was packed with troopers sorting through and stowing their gear. Video screens wrapped around, each displaying loops of scenes from around the base, as well as training exercises, parades and combat sims. First Company commander Captain Colleen “Mighty Mite” Barnes was showing off a new arm tattoo to all who cared to see. Second Company commander Captain Nico Simonet was clicking through some company orders on his commandpad, trying to figure who was supposed to have watch duty today.

  Third Company commander hung back from the rest, hovering in the corner of the locker section. The ANAD swarm flickered and glowed like a cloud of fireflies, as it continuously held structure in something approximating a human face.

  More like a carnival mask, Johnny Winger thought as he waved his officers over to the briefing stage. It was an open question around Table Top that none of the humans had been able to figure out. Since the Corps had relented several years ago and permitted an experimental company of ANAD assemblers to organize as a standing unit within the battalion, outside of containment, the rest of the battalion had been asking: who, exactly, was in command of this sentient swarm entity?

  Winger had pondered the idea as well, even going so far as to pose the question to Doctor Irwin Frost, the Northgate University scientist who had created the original ANAD way back in the ‘60s.

  “It’s not a being in the same sense we are, Johnny,” Doc Frost had told him. “It’s a swarm. Or a colony. Or a hive, if you like. But there’s no queen bee that I can determine. The intelligence of the unit is distributed throughout all its elements. So it’s fair to say the command and the leadership is as well.”

  Which made working with 3rd Nano probably the biggest challenge Major Winger had ever faced. To make things a little easier, he had worked out an und
erstanding with ANAD. In staff meetings, briefings and the like, ANAD had agreed to detach a small portion of its swarm and form at least something vaguely resembling a human face, so the other humans would have something to relate to, someone to talk to and communicate with.

  ***There are acoustic channels, Major, that work better, even quantum channels if they have the coupler***

  “I know that, ANAD, but humans are old-fashioned. Whenever we communicate with someone, we like to be able to see who we’re talking to. Humans evolved that way.”

  ANAD had considered that for few moments. Then…

  ***ANAD has not evolved in the same way, Major Winger. Perhaps the human way is a mistake***

  That’s when Winger knew that commanding a company of ANAD assemblers would be unlike anything he had ever done before.

  “…listen up,” Winger said again. “General Kraft wants us to work out a mission plan for a little recon job. BioShield has found some disturbances they can’t locate and they need our help.”

  Mighty Mite Barnes snorted. “Where to this time, Major? Another resort like Tibet, or the bottom of the ocean?”

  “Yeah--” said 2nd Nano’s top sergeant, Kevin Childs, “—or maybe half a mile underground in a geoplane.”

  “Join the Corps, travel the world--” said Sheila Reaves.

  “—meet interesting people,” added 1st Nano’s top sergeant Marianne D’Nunzio “-and disassemble them into atom fluff.”

  “What can I say?” piped up Joe McReady, platoon leader from the 1st. “It’s not just a job…it’s a nightmare. Another boring day in paradise.”

  “Knock it off,” Winger said. “This comes from CINCQUANT himself. And for your information, the disturbance is centered in and around Kolkata and west Bengal…”

  “Ah, Kolkata—“ dreamed D’Nunzio. “—Exotic spices, unique customs…plus dysentery and malaria—“

  “And now nanobots gone haywire,” went Reaves. “What’s not to like?”

  Winger scowled at them and all the kidding died off. From behind Reaves billowed the glowing swarm of ANADs that represented a piece of 3rd Nano. A metallic voice sounded in the ready room, artificial but clear and distinct. The autonomous assemblers had formed a sound emitter from nearby molecules and pulsed out something resembling a voice.