Johnny Winger and the Europa Quandary

by Philip Bosshardt

  ***Ribosomal Systems…20%***

  “Jeez, Smithers’ is dying—“ Simonets could hardly believe his own eyes. “Captain--?”

  Amirante was already on comms to Frankie. “Gurstens…Pham…Smithers is in a world of hurt…I’ll give you a vector. Steer that way and try to grab him…what’s left of him.”

  Pham’s voice crackled over the comm. “Aye, sir…we see the point of engagement…it’s about half a kilometer from here. I don’t want to bring Frankie up too close. We’ll have to do this by hand—“

  Amirante knew what that meant. “Copy that. Be careful out there.”

  Gurstens and Pham would drive Frankie as close to MARTOP as they dared. Then they would don suits and take a walk.

  For the next few minutes, Amirante hardly breathed.

  It was always going to be a ticklish operation. Nina Pham drove Frankie closer and closer to the MARTOP swarm, probing, sniffing, trying not to get too close to the bots, while hunting for any kind of signal, any kind of signature, from the Smithers bot master. She knew every bot had a unique fingerprint, a special array of electromagnetic, acoustic, and atomic characteristics that distinguished them.

  The trick would be for Gurstens to go EVA and grab the failing bot without also grabbing a fistful of MARTOP.

  “Got it,” she muttered into her lip mic. “It’s Smithers…everything matches up. You ready in there?”

  Gurstens had already zipped up his hypersuit and squeezed into the airlock. “Ready as I’ll ever be.” He thumbed control studs of the side of the containment capsule, checking action. Lights cycled on and off, red, yellow and green.

  “I make the target at thirty meters off Frankie’s port side bow…I’ll give you a vector as soon as you’re out.”

  Gurstens exited the ship and oriented himself toward the faint flicker of the MARTOP swarm. A dim snaking line of light flashed on and off, like Christmas lights draped around shrubbery, as MARTOP drifted Earthward, slamming what few atoms it could find to maintain structure. Pham dared not bring Frankie any closer; every swarm sought feedstock to grab atoms and keep itself going. Swarms were like flies…always seeking something sweet to grab onto and grow on.

  Pham ported the vector right to Gurstens’s hypersuit and he soon felt his jets pulsing, driving him toward the target. He couldn’t see anything; it was coal black in space, with only the distant Sun for company. That and the lights of the swarm. He took a deep breath, swallowed hard and forced himself to relax.

  He felt like a circus entertainer sticking his head in a lion’s mouth.

  “Less than ten meters,” he muttered. “I’m going manual.” He stopped the approach and studied the scene for a moment. Trillions of bots were slamming atoms and the edge of the swarm resembled a distant thunderstorm, backlit by lightning. “I’ve got him in my crosshairs, Nina. Closing slowly…capsule coming open.” He thumbed the control studs. Slung in a web belt on his suit, the containment vessel came alive, ticking over, readying itself to receive its tiny guest. Whatever was left of Winston Smithers would need a few weeks of TLC to survive and be regenerated. But that was a problem for Gateway engineers. First, he had to grab Smithers and skedaddle before MARTOP took a liking to all his atoms and made dinner out of him.

  Centimeter by centimeter, Gurstens closed on the target, centering the signature return on his sighting scope. It was like to trying to grab a piece of candy out of a whirling fan blade.

  “Got it! I got him, Nina!”

  Gurstens had extracted the capsule and turned himself to make a glancing sweep along the visible, detectable edge of MARTOP. For a brief second, there was a stuttering vibration along his hypersuited arm—that was MARTOP trying to get a bite—then the capsule lit up green…it had sucked in the remains of the Winston Smithers bot master and shut itself tight. Lights cycled green and red. Gurstens’s head-up display told the story: TARGET ACQUIRED. CONTAINMENT SECURED.

  Smithers was home. If you could call a glorified coffee can with a quantum processor brain home.

  “On my way back…no signatures on me that I can detect. Sweep me good when I’m in range, Nina.”

  “Don’t worry about that. I’ll lick you up one side and down the other like a dog, to make sure you’re not bringing anything aboard my ship.”

  Gurstens checked out clean. He made his way back to the shuttle and squeezed inside, palming the Re-Press button after he had dogged the hatch. A few minutes later, he stepped out of the airlock, handed the containment capsule to Pham and laboriously extracted himself from the hypersuit.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here and go home.”

  Twenty minutes later, Frankie had nosed into her docking station alongside the Francis Bacon and disgorged her passengers.

  Amirante was down on C deck outside the airlock. He took the capsule from Gurstens and turned it over end for end, squinting at its tiny display, recording vitals from what was left of Winston Smithers inside. “Hell of a way to come home,” he said. “We’ll have to run diagnostics pretty soon, let Gateway know what happened.”

  Nina Pham was trying to straighten out her kinky black hair, after hours in a hypersuit, kneading the braids with long, practiced fingers. “Will he make it, Captain? Can Smithers be regenerated?”

  Amirante shrugged. “If there’s enough of the processor left. That’s up to the engineers.”

  Gurstens handed the Captain another capsule. “That’s our samples, Captain. MARTOP, up close and personal. Handle with care.”

  Amirante just shook his head. “If I had my way, I’d toss the damn thing overboard and be done with it. But the Corps wanted samples. So I’ll give them samples. We nearly got our butts chewed off getting them.”

  For the next few hours, Bacon co-orbited with the MARTOP formation as it drifted steadily Earthward. Fortunately, MARTOP made no further moves toward the ship. The swarm seemed content to plow through space, munching on stray atoms like a contented cow, as it dropped down the Sun’s gravity well, heading…so the astros at Farside said...for a likely intercept with Earth in less than two months.

  Amirante knew he had a crippled ship. Francis Bacon had suffered multiple hull breaches when MARTOP came after them, a full-bore decompression casualty and she had lost two crewmembers: Systems Techs Klieg and Disrud. The crew was mustered for a farewell service and the deceased techs were given a memorial sendoff and their bodies discharged to space in pressurized coffin pods, complete with beacons and running lights.

  “On eternal patrol,” Amirante pronounced, then dismissed the crew from the service, held on C deck.

  Now, there was the matter of getting Bacon turned around and maneuvered onto course for return to Gateway Station, with her precious swarm samples. UNISPACE had sent orders for UNS-225 to depart from her normal cycler run and come home.

  Amirante climbed the gangway to A deck, where Simonets and ISAAC were monitoring the burn as they departed the vicinity of MARTOP.

  About damn time, he thought. I believe we’re due a little extra liberty for making this little side trip. Whether the brass hats at UNISPACE saw it that way would be another matter.

  Gateway Station

  Earth-Moon L2 Point

  Two Weeks Later….

  General Ravi Ramachandran had been CINCSPACE for all of two years now and in that time, he had never particularly liked rocketing off into space like some heroic astronaut from olden days. Oh, sure, shuttles were smooth and their crew well practiced in making the half-day hop up to Gateway Station; you couldn’t ask for a better ride. Hell, the Paris Metro that he used to take to the Quartier General was a bone-rattling teeth-clencher compared to the shuttle trips. It was just something about zooming off into the heavens at twenty-five times the speed of sound, zipping into and out of zero-g, accelerating, decelerating, all the bangs and pops and annoying booms and barrel rolls…his stomach had long since given up trying to deal with that and it was only the yellow pill
s, lots of yellow pills and some strategically placed biobots in his inner ear that allowed him to keep breakfast down at all.

  Still, this trip was surely necessary, he told himself. CINCSPACE wanted to see for himself the exact nature of the thing that had nearly cost him a cycler ship and her crew out beyond Mars orbit.

  “Doesn’t look like much,” he had said to the lab techs in the containment chamber on Gateway’s B Module. “Propulsors, effectors, could be a garden-variety ANAD bot from anywhere.”

  The lab tech had a nameplate. It read Munoz. “True enough, General, but it’s what you don’t see that makes this bugger so special.”

  “Explain.”

  “Well, sir, it’s the whole architecture that’s so interesting. We’ve run analyses up one side and down the other on this mother and every analytic we do comes up the same…these are Keeper bots, sure as I sitting here staring at a flux imager. Everything we’ve measured points that way: from the compound tetrahedral casing to the grabbers and disrupters, from the flagellar thrusters to the power cells, from picowatt propulsors to the actuator mast…it is an ANAD clone, to be sure, but more importantly, it’s a damn close match to what we have in archives. It’s like someone took our Keeper files from the Jovian Hammer mission and banged out an exact copy.”

  “That’s what worries me the most.” The voice was familiar but as CINCSPACE turned around, there was no body attached to the voice. “Maybe somebody did.”

  It was Johnny Winger, with CINCQUANT in the person of General Jake Argo, vidconned in from Table Top Mountain, on the surface.

  Ramachandran was momentarily startled but he was glad Winger was there, if only virtually. “You’ve looked at this thing, General?”

  “Like the back of my hand,” Winger said. He and Argo seemed to be in an office setting, probably CINCQUANT’s office suite at Table Top. “If these are Keeper bots, that’s officially bad news.” He recounted a little of what had happened in the Jovian Hammer mission, years before.

  “There are some people who think the Keeper’s a portal to the Old Ones, maybe an archive of their knowledge, even a gateway to the ‘mother swarm.’ I don’t know about that. But what I do know is this: the Keeper is a swarm, a big one, comprised of bots of unbelievable speed, flexibility and intelligence. It’s like a giant quantum coupler. And because it’s a swarm, it can disperse and re-assemble just about anywhere. On Jovian Hammer, we encountered it below the surface of the ocean. Now—“ Winger shrugged, “who knows? Maybe it’s on the Europan surface. Maybe somewhere else.”

  CINCSPACE introduced Winger to Major Evan Metcalf, from UNIFORCE Special Investigation Branch, who had come to Gateway to see the MARTOP sample for himself. Metcalf had never met Winger before but the legendary atomgrabber’s exploits were well known around UNIFORCE.

  “General,” Metcalf asked, “I’ve heard about this Keeper…it had some kind of displacement ability, didn’t it?”

  “It did. Because the Keeper is a nanobotic swarm, the damn thing can make its individual bots multiply instantaneously, through some kind of entangler system. Multiple copies of swarms and bots representing different probability states. That’s what the eggheads call it. I don’t pretend to understand it, but it was a bad-ass system to encounter. All these copies and copies of copies aren’t real, not in a touchable sense. They just appear real. Multiple probabilities…gives you a real headache. When you engage them, they all collapse into one real swarm. This spawning or shadowing process made a shambles of our tactics. We were constantly engaging targets that weren’t real. You could never know what was real until you engaged. And if you engaged the wrong thing—“ Winger just shook his head. “It didn’t help that sometimes you engaged and the Keeper just displaced you to another time and space, just like that.”

  Metcalf watched the MARTOP sample, wriggling in the imager view under containment, beating to some unknown inner rhythm. “And now we may have elements of this same Keeper in near-Earth space.”

  CINCSPACE had a bad feeling about this. “There’s only one conclusion we can make, gentlemen: what Europa-Eye saw as ice geysers on Europa wasn’t ice at all. It was the Keeper, all or part of it, now up on the surface. And somehow, if General Winger is right, it must be dividing, replicating, maybe spalling off elements of its basic assembler swarm and sending them our way.”

  “My question is why?” Metcalf asked. “What triggered this? If these bots have been coming our way for a few months, that might explain all these meteor showers we’ve been having. The damn things are falling to Earth. No telling how long this has been going on.”

  Winger pointed out that Config Zero had once been in contact with the Keeper. “But we severed that link ten years ago when we quarantined Config Zero on Kipwezia. It’s been more or less contained ever since. Major, I’m supposed to be retired now. I’m not in the loop anymore. Anything from Q2 on that?”

  Metcalf shook his head. “Nada. UNIFORCE hasn’t detected any quantum signals at all coming to or from Config Zero. The disentanglers seem to be still working. Unless the Bugs have figured something out we don’t know of. What the hell has stirred the Keeper into activity again after all these years?”

  The thought was there for all to say, but nobody wanted to say it. Finally, Winger spoke up. “Delta P…the 51 Pegasi anomaly. Or Devils’ Eye, out beyond Pluto. Maybe they’re even the same thing.”

  CINCSPACE was skeptical. “That theory has been floating around for years. You’re talking Old Ones again, General. You’re saying the Old Ones have somehow commanded the Keeper to make all these moves.”

  “I’m saying it’s a theory. And it fits a lot of facts, Ravi. We can’t just discount the Old Ones as some kind of mass hallucination, like a lot of people do.”

  “Some people like me,” CINCSPACE countered. “If you’re theory’s correct, General, and all these bots are falling out of the sky like meteors, what effect are they having? Wouldn’t you expect quantum nanoscale bots with the smarts of the Keeper to have some impact here on Earth?”

  Before Winger could answer that, Metcalf cut in. “Sir, all we have to do is watch the news lately. What’s on the vids? Increased meteor showers. Problems and glitches inside WorldNet and Solnet. The UN frees Symborg after years of containment. Angels are spreading everywhere. Assimilationists are sprouting like mushrooms after a rain. Huge spikes in angelizing. These things can’t all be unrelated coincidences.”

  Nobody had an answer for Metcalf. Ramachandran turned to regard the MARTOP sample again. It was a tiny thing, no more than fifty billionths of a meter in any one direction. Yet it had incredible capability, incredible intelligence. One technician had termed it almost god-like, with the computational resources of a world packed into something the size of a virus. A god virus, able to replicate with blazing speed, into a near infinite array of configurations, able to entangle matter and manipulate time and space, appearing in multiple places at the same time.

  Left unsaid was the uneasy conclusion that no one who gazed on the MARTOP sample wanted to voice: that maybe the Old Ones were very real. Maybe they were looking at one right now.