Johnny Winger and the Europa Quandary

by Philip Bosshardt

  Chapter 19

  (Seven months later….)

  Aboard UNISPACE Transit Ship UNS-227 Johannes Kepler

  Three Days from Jupiter Orbit Insertion

  October 21, 2121 (Earth U.T.)

  The voyage out from Gateway Station had taken two hundred and forty five days, but Captain Yamato insisted on calling the trip a ‘real speed run.’ Frontier Corps captains had a different idea about time and space, Johnny Winger decided. He entered the viewing cupola, after stepping aside to let one of the crewmen exit, and strapped himself in for a good long look, at something he had seen years before…and hoped never to see again.

  Jupiter.

  It was a salmon-hued world, mottled and banded with oranges, reds, browns and ambers, a cauldron of clouds, storms and majestic seething turbulence. Alternating strips of light and dark wrapped the planet in a calico shroud and several small red spots boiled away in the north tropical zone, companions to the Great Red Spot in the south, a centuries-old hurricane churning since the time of Cromwell and King Charles.

  For several days, Kepler coursed through the Jovian skies in a steeply inclined orbit, skirting the shoals and reefs of her radiation belts, until at last they found the first of several holes in the sheath of charged particles. Captain Yamato passed the word to all hands that the ship was about to begin a series of maneuvers which would end up bringing them into orbit around Europa. Kepler dropped to a lower orbit through the first of these holes, like navigating a minefield in a wartime harbor.

  After a few days had passed, the ship settled into orbit half a million kilometers above the cloud tops. By now, the planet filled nearly a third of the sky and hundreds of frothing spicules and cells of gas swept by beneath them. The speed of its rotation flattened Jupiter at the poles and widened it to a bulge at the equator. Ferocious winds resulted and they smeared the columns of gas into all sorts of grotesque and beautiful shapes. Several of the crew came by the crew’s mess, watching the scenery below for hours at a time. Evan Metcalf found himself transfixed by the ever-shifting palette of colors and shapes. He could well imagine the planet’s visible face as a giant’s palette, where Nature worked as the artist to create an ever-changing panorama of colors, forms and brush strokes.

  In time, Kepler made her way into orbit about Europa. Johnny Winger himself joined some of the crew in the mess compartment, as the cracked billiard-ball of a world turned slowly below them.

  “Gives me the creeps,” Metcalf said. He shuddered involuntarily and sucked at his drink.

  “Yeah,” said another crewman, Shirley Suttles, from Power and Propulsion. “Looks like a fuzzy beach ball,” she decided. “With hair—“

  Yamato pronounced himself satisfied with the view. “Yeah, a beach ball with enough radiation to fry your pretty little brain in about two seconds.”

  “You’re assuming I have a brain…I checked mine at the recruiting station when I signed up.”

  Yamato trained Kepler’s scopes on a darkening along one of the linea. “See that dark spot down there…could be the Keeper. If you look up at the limb and the horizon, you can see crap geysering off into space.”

  Winger agreed. “The damn thing has come to the surface. It’s just boiling away in that ice ravine near the Equator.” He checked the map. “Rhadamanthys Linea, it’s called. That’s where we have to go.”

  Yamato didn’t like the looks of the place. “Swell. I’ll call an all-hands meeting in the crew’s mess, get all the assignments sorted out.”

  Yamato waved everyone quiet. “Settle down, boys and girls. By now, you’ve figured out this won’t be your average camping trip. The assignments are posted on the crewnet. Starnes, Kwan and Singh, you’re on this one. General Winger, myself and Colonel Metcalf will round out the crew. Commander Smithers here—“Yamato indicated the angel executive officer hovering in a far corner of the canteen “—will be in charge.”

  Starnes was from Comms and Signals. “Captain, looks like a lot of ice down there. Should I bring my skates?”

  That drew several chuckles. Yamato wasn’t one of them. “Just your brain will do, Starnes.”

  “Yeah,” someone called from the back, “what’s left of it.”

  “Europa’s no theme park ride,” Yamato went on. “Lots of things could go wrong down there. We’ve got several missions. First, we recon. That dark cloud down there is called the Keeper. General Winger—“

  Winger went over what he knew from his first trip. “It’s like nothing you’ve ever encountered before. Physically, it’s a swarm…nanoscale robotic elements, we believe. Each individual element is millions of times more capable than our latest bots. Together, organized into a swarm, the Keeper has capabilities you wouldn’t dream of in your worst nightmare.”

  Lucy Kwan, from Maintenance, was one of the away team members. “I read the reports, General. The Keeper can affect time and space, displace things forward and backward in time, move objects from one location to another in an instant.”

  Winger nodded. “That’s what happened to us on the Jovian Hammer mission. It’s like a funhouse hall of mirrors. One moment, I’d be approaching the swarm. Then, the next moment, I’d be kilometers away in a different time. Not only that, but like any quantum system, when you engage the Keeper or any part of it, you may or may not be engaging something real.”

  “So how did you defeat it?”

  Winger looked Kwan squarely in the face. “We didn’t. We had orders to leave Europa and return to Earth. We never developed any tactics that could counter the Keeper. This time, we have to finish the job. The Keeper is some kind of portal to the Old Ones. UNIFORCE thinks it’s a combination beacon and command center, maybe even a forward element for the Old Ones, preparing the battlefield. We’ve got to put it out of commission.”

  “Which leads me to our mission,” Yamato added. “As I said, the first part is recon. We get down there and scope out the terrain, see what this Keeper is doing and capable of doing. The second part of our mission is neutralization…degrade and, if possible, destroy. We’re carrying upgraded MOBnet systems, disentanglers, plus the usual armory of HERF and magpulse weapons. My orders are specific: do whatever it takes to knock the Keeper offline. Questions?”

  There were some grumbles and glances around the mess compartment, but no questions.

  “Very well then. Away team will assemble at the forward dock in half an hour, with all gear. I want to go over descent procedures and recon assignments after we land.”

  With that, Yamato dismissed the crew. The captain drew Winger aside, finding a small niche behind the bar, still draped in fake palm fronds and Fiji Island Lagoon decorations.

  “Give it to me straight, General,” Yamato asked. “Is this doable? I know what our orders say. I want your opinion. Can we beat this Keeper?”

  Winger shrugged. “In past engagements, we’ve barely been able to hold our own. It’s like boxing a balloon. You probe here, it expands over there. You attack there, it knocks you somewhere else. The biggest problem we faced on Jovian Hammer is not knowing if we we’re attacking something real, or just entangled copies of something real…things that could go poof in an eye blink. The Keeper is the perfect enemy…everywhere and nowhere at the same time. I just hope all this gear we brought, plus some new tactics, will work this time.”

  “That makes two of us,” Yamato decided.

  They headed up to the forward dock.

  Tycho disengaged from Kepler with a slight rattle and backed off a few kilometers, before beginning her descent. Yamato did the descent burns and before long, the icy crags and valleys of Europa came rushing up at them, a little too fast, thought Winger, though Yamato was an experienced lander pilot.

  They crossed kilometer after kilometer of rugged, tortured icescapes. On Europa, there was only ice…to the naked eye. Ice cliffs and ice valleys. Ice ravines and ice canyons. Ice bergs, buttes, badlands. Ice continents. r />
  “Geysers ahead,” Yamato reported. Tycho was cruising laterally over the surface, skimming along at an altitude of several kilometers. Through the forward portholes, the geysers Yamato had spotted were plainly visible. “That’s our target.” He consulted his nav display and pitched the lander backward, slowing their progress. “Now we hunt for a landing spot….”

  Yamato found a small patch of mostly level ice between two ravines and set Tycho down with a bouncing, rattling shudder.

  From the aft cabin, Walt Starnes turned to Lucy Kwan with a smirk. “That’s one small step… and you know the rest.”

  Kwan paid no attention. She peered out a side porthole. Ice mountains and cliffs as far as she could see. The swollen salmon-hued belly of Jupiter, half in shadow, filled the sky. Callisto and Io looked like pearls on a string, wrapped around the calico disk of the huge planet. “Just another beautiful day in the Corps, I suppose.”

  The third crewmen, berthed with Kwan and Starnes in the aft compartment, was Mohan “Mo” Singh. Singh was Engineering aboard K-Dog. He was also the driver for Felix, their ground vehicle.

  Singh swallowed audibly at the scene outside his porthole. “Jeez, there’s enough radiation out there to make bacon out of all of us. At least, I don’t weight as much.” They all knew Europa sported less than fifteen percent Earth surface normal.

  “Yeah,” said Kwan, as she started unhooking her harnesses. “Now you can eat even more of those robo-steaks from the crews mess.”

  Up front, Yamato secured the lander and activated the sling that would put Felix, their rover, on the surface.

  “Looks like Felix’ll be getting quite a workout,” Evan Metcalf observed. “Pretty rough going out there.”

  “Felix can handle anything,” Yamato told them. “Come on. Let’s get going. Mo Singh is driving today. I want him to make the final decision on whether Felix stays on the ground or flies.”

  “We had a ship called Trident on the Jovian Hammer mission,” Winger remembered. “It could traverse on the ground too but mainly it was designed to bore through the ice and operate as a submarine in the ocean. Felix is optimized for surface traverse.”

  It was true. Singh had already christened the vehicle a ‘eurocat’, for Europa Caterpillar. It could trundle up and over all kinds of ice cliffs and valleys like a giant caterpillar, on triple tread tracks. But Felix also had rocket motors and could make short suborbital hops across difficult terrain in Europa’s light gravity. Yamato and Winger both figured that was a capability that might well come in handy.

  The six of them were inside Felix and underway in less than two hours. Singh had taken a look at the terrain surrounding them and decided on ground traverse. “I think Felix can handle those hills in this gravity. From the maps, looks like there are some valleys, or linea or whatever they’re called, we can also use.”

  “Maybe,” Winger observed. “I remember those little canyons. Just filled with ice blocks and craters and other fun stuff. Just don’t go in there expecting a nice freeway.”

  Singh played with Felix’ controls, actuating the treads and revving its motors like a hot rod on a drag strip. “Felix can handle it. Let’s unsling this jalopy and get motoring.”

  So they set off.

  Singh unshackled the treads and secured the lift thrusters completely. Within moments, the eurocat was a giant cylindrical tractor, waddling and rocking from side to side, trundling across the icescape like a drunken pig.

  “Let’s check out the view, Captain,” Metcalf said.

  Through the starboard porthole, the view of Euphemus Linea was fantastic…a jumbled pile of every conceivable shape, cubes and pyramids and smashed polygons piled on top of each other like some giant child had dropped a big ice tray. Dead ahead of Felix, the canyon floor was a maze of ice blocks and boulders, while towering ice cliffs loomed overhead on either side, several thousand meters over them.

  Winger eyed the cliffs warily. “I’m hoping we don’t run into any landslides…or maybe I should say ice slides. That’s probably what’s littering this canyon floor.”

  Singh steered them carefully between boulders, as the ship pitched and heaved over the rough frozen ground. “You could be right…maybe navigating this canyon isn’t such a hot idea after all. We could lift our way over those canyon walls and see if the going is any better up top.”

  Yamato had a bad feeling. “Your call, Mo. Just keep to this heading. That geyser in the distance should be the Keeper.”

  Singh brought them to a stop and engaged the liftjets. As if grabbed by a giant’s hand, Felix hurtled into the air and drifted forward over the jagged tops of the canyon walls.

  Now they had a perfect view of their target. Yamato put a scope on the geyser, still many kilometers distant.

  “Looks like a fog bank to me. General, how close do you want to get?”

  “Not that close. Keep a couple of klicks away…there could easily be straggler bots outside the visible structure. I’d also get your botshields up right now.”

  “Good idea.” Yamato pressed a few buttons on a side console. Though not visible from inside, the eurocat was soon enveloped in a faint shimmering veil, a barrier of nanobots that should protect them from isolated bots spalling off the Keeper. “I’ll get the HERF guns primed too.”

  After some careful maneuvering and circling, Singh found a relatively uncluttered patch of ice between several hills, only a few dozen meters from a steep ice-choked ravine. He set Felix down gently on its skids and held his breath, as the cat shifted and settled for a moment. “I think we’re stable, Captain…for the moment.”

  Yamato turned to Winger and Metcalf. “Okay, gentlemen…it’s your show now. We’re three kilometers from the outer bands of that geyser.”

  Winger eyed the geyser and the tawny-brown swirl of the swarm with growing dread. “I’d say we head out on foot now. Bring the packbots. And get your botshields up right now. It won’t be much protection if the Keeper blows up. But every little bit helps.”

  So the detail set out, six hypersuited crewmembers and two pack bots, trudging up and down the icescape, leaping small ravines where they could in the light gravity, boosting over deeper chasms where they had to.

  From their distance of several kilometers, the Keeper was a spray of geysers shooting off into space, towering over them in sparkling rainbows like a magnificent fountain. Framing the swollen belly of Jupiter, Winger could almost admire the majesty of the picture…the black of space, the salmon hues of Jupiter and the iridescent streams of the geysers spraying the sky like artist’s fingers. Almost. He knew perfectly well that embedded in all that ice and water were uncountable gazillions of bots and those bots were even now making their way earthward.

  MARTOP. Or whatever Farside was calling the anomaly now. The Keeper was spalling off pieces of itself, replicating like nanobotic swarms did and Earth had been suffering from the infestation for months.

  Winger wondered if this was Phase One of something greater.

  Just seeing the Keeper swarm in its full scope and power brought chills to the back of his neck. Over the four decades of his active-duty career with Quantum Corps, he had encountered scores of adversary swarms, but none like this. The Keeper was a thing alive, malevolent, vindictive, just plain nasty. And unpredictable to boot. As they slipped and skidded and stomped their way closer, he wanted very much to be anywhere but here.

  Yet somehow, he had always known it would come to this. Johnny Winger wasn’t much of a believer in fate. You make your choices and you live with them. Yet ten years ago, when Jurgen Kraft had ended the Jovian Hammer mission and ordered Archimedes to come home, he had known, in ways he couldn’t really describe, that he would meet this malignant force once more, somewhere, sometime.

  Now was the time.

  The geysers grew larger and Winger studied the structure as they came closer. “This is as close as we should get,” he announced. They
stopped on a low rise, overlooking a rumpled plain of ice blocks, jumbled and smashed over eons of icequakes and meteor bombardment.

  Yamato stood next to Winger, in awe of the vast streams shooting off into space. “If I didn’t know what we’re looking at, I’d say it was a magnificent sight. Like a living sculpture…ropes of water and ice writhing…it almost seems alive.”

  Metcalf shook just his head, fingered the HERF carbine slung from his hypersuit web belt. “It is. I could pump a few rounds of rf into that beast with a clear conscience.”

  “You’d just wind up making it mad,” Winger said. “We have to be smart about this. Get the disentanglers out. Captain—“ he looked over the terrain, considering defilade positions, fields of fire, prominent ground structures. “…I’d like to split us up, into three groups. One group goes right, across that gully to that little cluster of hillocks over there.” He pointed to a distant position, maybe a thousand meters away. “One group stays here. The third group I’d put on the edge of that ravine off to the left, right on the edge.”

  Yamato wasn’t about to question General John Winger, but he wanted some kind of explanation, just for comfort. “Tactics, General?”

  “Call it a hunch. We’ve got three disentanglers. If we space them apart, we may be able to bollix up the quantum shifts the Keeper likes to make. At least long enough to give us a sporting chance of dropping this MOBnet over the bastard.”

  Metcalf looked at the swollen jets of ice spewing up from the boiling caldron that now covered several kilometers of a deep trench ahead of them. “I don’t know about these MOBnets, General. Seems like trying to corral a herd a bees to me. Some are bound to get out. And probably replicate like mad. Maybe we ought to HERF the bejeezus out of the thing first. Slam it upside the head and stun it, before we try anything else.”

  Winger tried to explain his tactical thinking. “In general, that’s what I want to do, Colonel. The disentanglers may or not may not work, but even if they don’t, they’re a useful distraction. While the Keeper’s dealing with the disentanglers, that’s when we blast the sumbitch with HERF and mag pulses. With any luck, we can force the thing to react and even contract a little, and that’s when I send the MOBnet flying. We got these newfangled net launchers…we may as well use them.”

  Yamato took a deep breath, kicking at some ice clods with the toe of his boot, watching them cascade downslope in the low gravity. “Now I know why I joined Frontier Corps, General. Nice boring cycler chip duty, that’s what I signed up for. How do you want to do this?”

  “I’ll stay on this main axis. Give me one of your people, Captain. Lieutenant Starnes can stay with me. You take Kwan and go right to those hillocks. Metcalf, take Singh and go left to that ravine. Grab a disentangler and get it primed. When you’re in position, let me know. I want to coordinate the assault as closely as we can. No telling how the Keeper’ll react when we sting him with this.”

  The detail split up as Winger had requested. One packbot went with Yamato. The other went with Metcalf. Winger and Starnes unpacked their own disentangler and got the unit up humming and blinking green in a few minutes.

  “All copacetic, General,” Starnes announced. He fiddled with a small panel of controls that popped out of the side. “We got juice, we got a good bead on the centroid of that monster. Circuits are active. Buffers, focusers, state emitters…everything looks green.”

  “Very well, Starnes. Keep your shirt on and keep that thing boresighted right into the belly of the Keeper. I’m going to the other side of this gully….see if I can get a feel for what’s along the perimeter of the swarm…there may be stragglers we’ll have to account for. Cover me.”

  “Will do, sir.” Starnes hoisted his own HERF carbine and rested the barrel on the shoulder of the packbot. “Watch your footing, sir. That ice looks like she’ll slide pretty easily.”

  Winger loped down the foreslope of the gully like a drunken kangaroo, taking ten-meter leaps in the low gravity. He grunted hitting bottom but stayed upright with help from his suit servos.

  The quake, when it came, surprised everybody. There was a shudder, then the ground seem to liquefy, sliding sideways in waves. Winger’s suit tried to compensate but he tumbled backwards and landed hard in a hollow of flying ice chips and shards. Even as he fell, he could see sheets of ice sloughing off the edges of the gully, an avalanche in slow motion.

  If I don’t boost out of here, I’ll be buried alive.

  That’s when the lights went out completely and Winger found himself hurtling down some kind of curving corridor at breakneck speed. He was tumbling end for end, getting dizzier by the second until the corridor came to an abrupt end and he found himself hitting some kind of solid ground with the rump of his suit, a hard landing right on his bottom. The suit servos whined and squealed down and the corridor collapsed in a spray of light, crushing him into unconsciousness.

  His last thought before the night came was this: that was no icequake. The Keeper had burped and belched, kicking him somewhere else in time and space. A displacement transient, the techs like to call it.

  But where? And when?

  The first sensation he had was the smell, an antiseptic smell. Winger opened his eyes to slits, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

  Then it came to him. It was the hospital. The hospital in Denver. The hospital where his Dad had died.

  Johnny Winger arrived at the hospital shortly after sunset. The Critical Care Unit was on the fifth floor, north wing. The waiting area was half full, with small knots of people engaged in whispered conversation, two children joysticking remote action bots along the wall, and a wraparound active display showing live scenes from Vail and Aspen and Steamboat Springs. The admin nurse showed Winger down a hall to the Active Care Unit. Through the bioshield, a sort of containment zone inside of which active nanodevices were at work, Johnny came up to the bed where Jamison Winger lay enveloped in thick ganglia of wires and hoses.

  A faint coruscating blue glow surrounded the bed, the inner containment field pulsating with active nano to protect the patient from further infection.

  A swarthy Egyptian doctor, Sethi Hassan, attended a small display, with imaging views that looked familiar to Winger. Two nurses also attended.

  Dr. Hassan sensed the presence of someone new, but did not at first look away from the screen. His right hand manipulated a tiny trackball and the view on the screen changed with each manipulation.

  “Lieutenant Johnny Winger,” the nanotrooper announced himself. “This is my father—“

  Dr. Hassan stole a quick peak at Winger’s black and gold Quantum Corps uniform. “I imagine you’ve seen this kind of gear before, Lieutenant.”

  Winger bent over the bed, pressing lightly against the field. A keening buzz changed pitch and invisible forces pressed back against his fingers, forcing his hand away. Standard mobility barrier, he told himself, almost without thinking.

  “How is he, Doc?”

  Hassan sighed, flexed his fingers around the trackball and did some more manipulations, delicately driving the medbots under his command.

  “Stable…for the moment. Two hours ago, we perfused his brain with a small formation of neurocytes…you’re no doubt familiar with the technique?”

  Winger nodded. “Quite familiar. Is it Serengeti?”

  Hassan took a moment to tap out a few commands on a nearby keyboard. Probably changing config, Winger noted from behind his back.

  “Seems to be. Whatever it is, his brain’s infested with active nanodevices, viral programming from the looks of it. These neurocytes are hunting now. I detached a small element just an hour ago, got them into position to block a serotonin avalanche that was firing off inside his limbic system…nasty buggers, they were. We got the convulsions mostly stopped…although there’s been some leakage into the hippocampal regions.”

  Winger studied his father’s face.
His eyes were screwed shut, tension lines all converging along his forehead. He was clearly still in pain. His lips trembled and a rhythmic twitch made his fingers and feet move in fits of shaking.

  Dad…Dad, I’m so sorry. This shouldn’t be happening to you…to anyone. You don’t deserve this—

  “You’ll have to engage them close up, Doc. I’ve battled them myself. These neurocytes…what’s the core version?”

  Hassan shrugged. “Our unit grew them from a config we got from Northgate University, about six months ago. Mainly they’re antivirals…you know: Alzheimer’s, meningitis, that sort of thing. Fellow from Northgate came by a few weeks ago, when we started to get a lot of cases like this. He tweaked the program.” Hassan seemed at a loss. “All I can do so far is keep them from spreading. The ‘cytes can find them, and I engage when they do. But…well, you know how HNRIV is, how S Factor is.”

  Winger wanted so badly to touch his father’s face. The shield wouldn’t let him. It was the only thing keeping the enemy mechs contained.

  “My guess is the neurocytes don’t have the programming to deal with Serengeti. You don’t have bond disrupters, enzymatic knives…that sort of thing.”

  “I don’t have military nano here at all, Lieutenant. I’m trying to save lives.”

  “That’s what it takes to deal with Serengeti, Doc. You’ve got to be nimble and ruthless. You’ve to be able to close on them quick and sling atoms like a banshee. And it doesn’t hurt to be kind of sneaky too. Serengeti’s program seems able to counter pretty much any kind of normal assault you’d make. It seems to know what to expect from garden-variety bots.”

  “So how do you fight it?”

  “You do the unexpected.”

  Jamison Winger stirred slightly. His eyes fluttered half open. They focused on Johnny’s face for a moment, then recognition sank in. His trembling hand lifted, bumped against the inner barrier and quickly dropped, as the shield bots buzzed back.

  “Dad…Dad, can you see me? Can you hear me?”

  Jamison Winger smiled weakly. “Is that you….Johnny—“

  “Dad—“ Winger bent as close as he dared to the barrier. He could feel the sting of the mechs tickling his chin. “Dad—I—how do you feel now?”

  Mr. Winger summoned his strength and replied. “Like I’ve just been to about a hundred New Year’s Eve parties—“

  “Dad…it’s S Factor…they’re inside you…inside your head.”

  “I know—I hear ‘em. There’s a lot of horns going off all the time. And my arms—“

  “—you’ve got neurocytes inside you, too. Dr. Hassan’s driving. He’s hunting down the mechs, rooting them out.”

  “—making a hell of a racket doing it…if you ask me—“

  “Dad…you’ve got to hang in there—remember when you got the patch…remember what the doctors told you?”

  Mr. Winger started to convulse—his arms and hands went rigid, then spasmed fluttering off into the air, brushing against the barrier. The mechs buzzed back. Beside the bed, Hassan busied himself driving the herd of neurocytes onward, tracking down the errant discharges. Seconds later, as he swarmed the ‘cytes into a herd of Serengeti mechs, the spasm gradually died off. Mr. Winger’s arms dropped, his fists unclenched. The doctor looked up; his eyes saying that was too close.

  “The patch…that was different…just chemicals—“

  “I know…but you had to go through hell while they went to work. Remember what Doc Givens told you? ‘Imagine climbing a mountain…that’s how the dopamine sponge works. It’s easy at first, then the hill’s steeper and you think you’ll never make it, you think you’re going to slip back, maybe even fall off. Then, all of a sudden, if you can just hold on, you’re there. You’re at the top. And that’s when the view is so great. You’ve finally made it. You just have to have faith, faith that there is a top up there somewhere…”

  “You always had…a better memory…than me, son.”

  Johnny gritted his teeth. If only I had ANAD here…I could smash those bastards for good…yank the lot of ‘em out of Dad and give him his mind back. He knew what his father was feeling, what it was like to have a billion needles jabbing into the back of your head, what it was like to have a puppet’s arms and legs, jerking out of control so hard you were lucky you didn’t break a bone.

  The truth was he’d done a hell of a lot of growing up, after his mom had died. That had been 2047, just a few days after he’d graduated from Pueblo Netschool, two days after his Worldnet wizard Katie Gomez had awarded him a citation for excellent work. Mr. and Mrs. Winger had been so proud of their son. Then Ellen Winger had driven to Colorado Springs, just visiting friends, bragging about her boy. On the drive back late at night, her car had been sideswiped by a truck and she’d lost control. The police had estimated the ravine was about seven hundred feet deep…there hadn’t been much left of the car when it stopped rolling.

  Those four years from ’47 to ’51, had been hell for Johnny, for the whole family. Mr. Winger had been devastated by the loss; in some ways, you never got over something like that…you just wore the pain like an old shirt, eventually, even deriving a bit of comfort from the hurt, like a scab that wouldn’t go away. Each of them—Mr. Winger, Johnny, his brother Bradley, his sister Joanna, dealt with grief in their own way.

  For Mr. Winger, that meant long hours alone in his barn, behind the house. He’d always been a tinkerer, and the barn had long been his lab and shop. Now, without his wife, he just tinkered with a ferocity they’d never seen before, seldom coming out except for dinners and essential matters. Jamison Winger had made a lifetime of working on inventions and gizmos and gadgets that never had any future and he did so with a single-minded determination now that was at times a little scary.

  For most of that four-year period, at least until Jamison Winger had gotten the patch treatment for depression, Johnny and Brad and Joanna had pretty much run the ranch business. Johnny had put off any further thoughts of more school and settled in with grim determination to learn the business of ranching through and through.

  The most difficult time of all came in midsummer of ’50, when drought and low beef prices caused the Winger kids to have to sell off more than half of the North Bar Pass Ranch to a resort developer. The developer then proceeded to put in place a faux ‘dude’ ranch-Wild West showplace called Highhorn, catering to rich city people. Johnny had hated himself for agreeing to that decision ever since. Just seeing the stylized Highhorn signs and billboards and all the para-sailors wafting overhead on mountain thermals near the ranch perimeter made him sick.

  It wasn’t too long after Jamison Winger had gotten the patch treatment that Johnny had seen on Worldnet some stories about a new organization called United Special Operations Force. They were offering scholarships, for a six-year hitch.

  “Dad—“ he called through the flickering bioshield. “I’ve got to go on another mission…we’re fighting Serengeti, same as you are. I wish I could stay—we’ve got equipment that would help…but—“

  Jamison Winger smiled up gamely at his son. “A lot of people…a lot…are depending on you, son.”

  “You depend on me, too, sir.”

  Mr. Winger nodded. “I always have…since your mother died. Come closer—did I ever tell you—“

  Johnny bent down as close as the shield bots would let him.

  “—tell you…” he stopped, shuddered for a moment, then squeezed his lips into a tight line and fought back against the wave of pain—“did I ever…tell you I know…what you did…what you did with old Bailey--?”

  Bailey? He hadn’t thought of the old flyer for several years. Bailey had been his favorite pet, a constant companion out on the ranch, helping him herd the cattle to and from their grazing fields.

  “Dad…where is old Bailey…what’s he doing?”

  Mr. Winger shook his head, or was it a shudder
? It was hard to tell. “Bailey’s crapped out…just sitting in the corner of the barn. Needs a new motor…fan drive gave out, son. When I opened…him up, I saw what you’d done—the new sensors and stuff…really souped him up, you did—“

  Johnny reddened. Bailey the flyer bot—he’d always called him Bailey the Flying Dude—had been one of his most loyal companions as a child. Unknown to his parents, Johnny had often opened up his second-floor window at home and by remote-control, teleoperated Bailey right into his bedroom. The flyer had spent many a night in that room, either hovering gently in the corner, its red eye winking on and off, or sitting on the luggage trunk at the end of his bed, whirring softly in sleep mode.

  Johnny had always liked to tinker, especially with Bailey. There was one trait he’d definitely gotten from his Dad. He’d thought for years his father had never known. While he was growing up at the ranch, Johnny had spent countless hours modifying Bailey’s processor, giving him greater memory, teaching the bot to respond only to his voice, adding sensors, and souping up the propulsor motors. Bailey was at the same time Johnny’s hot rod and pet. He’d always loved the bot like the little brother he never had.

  “—I loved old Bailey, Dad…we were close, like brothers.”

  “I know…” Something pained Jamison Winger. His lips twitched, words ready to spill out, but held back somehow. Another spasm? He looked over at Dr. Hassan. “—I know, son. Come…” his hands beckoned Johnny closer. But the bioshield buzzed, keeping them apart. “—I wasn’t very good, son…I’m sorry…I wasn’t a very good father—“

  “What are you saying? You taught me a lot…you were—“

  “—always in the shop…always in the barn, wasn’t I?” His father tried to force a brave smile, but gave up. “Kind of like Bailey…I just… sort of crapped out. Gave up the ghost.”

  “Don’t say that, Dad—“ he looked at Hassan again. Was it the ‘cytes? Was it Serengeti, squeezing some circuit, making him say things? Maybe the patch was wearing off. “Don’t be silly…you taught me how to work on things. That’s how I got Bailey all fancied up. He could fly circles around any other bot out there.”

  Mr. Winger closed his eyes, sighed, his forehead wrinkles finally relaxing. “I love you, son. I’m…very proud…very proud of you.”

  Dr. Hassan had been driving a flock of neurocytes through Jamison Winger’s limbic system the whole time. He didn’t like what he was seeing.

  “I’m sorry…I think it’s best if you leave now, Lieutenant. I’m going to have to replicate more, expand my zone of operation a bit. The infestation’s spreading—see for yourself. I’m afraid the buggers are into the limbic striatum…volition and intentionality circuits. He may not—“ Hassan stopped, waggled his hand, not quite willing to go on.

  Johnny Winger swallowed hard, watched his father lying inside the bubble, seemingly at peace. But a war was raging inside his skull and the outcome was in doubt. Winger wiped away a tear. Instinctively, he touched the shield, until the bots pressed back. He knew he couldn’t touch his father. That made it worse.

  “I’ve got to go, Dad. Got a mission. Fight ‘em…fight the buggers hard. I’ll be fighting ‘em too. At least, we can be together that way.” He turned to leave. “I want to be kept up to date on his progress, Doc—“

  Hassan gave him the net address. “I’ll post anything new. Any changes, I promise you’ll know.”

  That was good enough. Johnny Winger took a last, tearful look at Jamison Winger. His arms were shriveled like old tree branches. Every few seconds, as the S Factor bots steadily took over, he shuddered and a low moan escaped his lips.

  Johnny Winger couldn’t watch any longer. He screwed his eyes tightly shut to choke off more tears and left the room.

  One way or another, I’ll lick this bastard menace, if it’s the last thing I do.

  Johnny Winger shook his head. This can’t be right. I’m back in the hospital…it’s September 2062. It’s happening all over again.

  Winger had lived with it for decades. Always, he had wanted to do the medbot insert himself. Get in there and fight Serengeti himself. The doctors had advised against it. Could kill the patient… critical functions could be affected…tissue might be damaged….

  Winger was fully aware that none of this was real. Some of the details were wrong…how his Mom had died…the accident reports from the freeway…the ravine, the position of the car, the autopsy results.

  Something had changed the memory. This was a sim, that’s what it had to be. Somehow the Keeper had thrown him back into his own past, or concocted a reasonable facsimile from his own memory, but there were subtle alterations. Maybe some kind of glutamate tracing was going on, affecting his recall, generating memories of things that had never happened.

  Or maybe his memory was just faulty. Yet when he touched his Dad, when the med barrier was dropped and he could feel the flushed hot skin of his forehead, the pulsing of his neck veins, he felt real. What was this? A dream? A sim? A different reality, a different time and space, a universe sliced in a different direction?

  Winger tried to ignore his own feelings and put some analysis to the situation. I can reason my way out of this, he told himself.

  Rational analysis said there were two decisions to be made here. What to do about his Dad? And how to get the hell out of this nightmare and back to his Europa Forge teammates?

  Maybe they’re related. Maybe making one decision forces the other.

  Eventually, it came to him that the only way he could move forward or backward in this sim (for that was how he had come to think of it) was to confront the decision he had never made in the past, to do the medbot insert, battle Serengeti inside his Dad and try to save him. He’d tried to drown the guilt over that for decades, guilt over the fact that he didn’t or couldn’t try the insert and he’d carried it with him, deeply buried to be sure, for nearby sixty years.

  Johnny Winger told himself: the Keeper wants me to engage Serengeti. Okay, pal, I’ll play your little game.

  He wasn’t sure he understood what was going on but it seemed like the Keeper was somehow sensitive to emotional conflicts inside him. It had the ability to sniff out these burned-in memories and draw them out—maybe some kind of memory tracing, like glutamate sniffing—like a giant therapist. Now, confronted with the one of his most painful memories, Johnny Winger decided he had to resolve it, here and now, even if it was only a sim.

  He snapped at Dr. Hassan. “Drop the barrier.”

  Dr. Hassan spluttered in confusion. “Lieutenant Winger, I don’t think—“

  “Drop the barrier. I’m doing an insert here.”

  “But you’re not—“

  Winger yanked the doctor by the arm and forcibly seated him at the control console. “Run the panel. Do what I say.” To the attending nurses, Winger said, “And get him prepped for an insert. I’m going inside.”

  "Okay, Lieutenant," the lead nurse, whose nameplate read Nalinka, patted down the incision she had just made in the side of Jamison Winger’s skull. "Subject's prepped and ready."

  Reluctantly, Hassan handed Winger the injector tube, attached by hose to the containment chamber. "Steady even suction, Doctor. ANAD ready to fly?"

  Hassan studied his board and came back, "Ready in all respects, Lieutenant. But you’re making a big mistake. Your father can’t take—“

  "Vascular grid?"

  "Tracking now. You’ll be able to follow the master just fine. You can replicate once you're through the blood-brain barrier."

  Winger concentrated on his own instruments. Focus. Focus. “I think I know how this works, Doctor.”

  "Watch for capillary flow," said Nalinka. "When his capillaries narrow, your speed will increase. And viscosity will stay up."

  "Like slogging through molasses. ANAD's inerted and stable…ready for insertion."

  The insertion went smoothly enou
gh. A slug of plasma forced the replicant master into Jamison Winger’s capillary network at high pressure. Johnny Winger got an acoustic pulse seconds later and selected Fly-by-Stick to navigate the system. A few minutes' run on its propulsors brought the Autonomous Nanoscale Assembler/Disassembler to a dense fibrous mat of capillary tissues. The image soon appeared on Winger's IC panel.

  "Ready for transit," Hassan told him. "Cytometric probing now. You can force these cell membranes open any time."

  Winger used ANAD's acoustic coupler to sound the tissue dam ahead, probing for weak spots. "There, right to starboard of those reticular lumps…that's a lipid duct, I'd bet a hundred bucks. I’ll try there."

  He steered ANAD into the vascular cleft of the membrane. He twisted his right hand controller, pulsing a carbene grabber to twist the cleft molecules just so, then released the membrane lipids and slingshot himself forward. Seconds later, ANAD was floating in a plasma bath, dark, viny shapes barely visible off in the distance. The plasma was a heavy viscous fluid. Winger tweaked up the propulsor to a higher power setting and took a navigation hack off the vascular grid.

  "Ventral tegmentum, Doctor. Just past the mesoencephalic nucleus. Looks like we're in."

  Winger navigated ANAD through the interstices of his father’s brain for the better part of an hour. He had programmed the assembler to send an alarm when it encountered any kind of unnatural activity…especially assembler maneuvering or replication. If there were any remnants of Serengeti left in his brain, Johnny Winger wanted to be ready.

  Hassan was practically holding his breath, watching the acoustic pulses come back. “Lieutenant, your father’s not strong enough for this. Using an insert at this point is a really bad—“

  “I’ll take responsibility for what happens,” Winger told him. “Besides, you’re not real anyway. I’m just doing what I should have done sixty years ago.”

  "Hopefully, the last treatment with Serengeti finished them off," Hassan muttered to himself.

  At 1824 hours, ANAD sent back an alarm.

  The imager screen was at first murky, crowded with the spikes and cubes of dissolved molecules. Lumpy, multi-lobed sodium molecules darted across their view like shadowy ping-pong balls. Winger studied readouts from ANAD's sounder…something was there, hidden in the data traces on the scope. He fiddled with the gain on the imager, tweaking it, subtracting foreground clutter.

  Something approximately sixty nanometers in one dimension, narrow with a globe structure at one end…and scores of probes, effectors, cilia, whatever. Incredible mobility…triple propulsors beat an idling rhythm as ANAD closed in….

  “Doc, I think we found what we’re looking for.”