Nanotroopers Episode 14: The HNRV Factor

by Philip Bosshardt

  ***ANAD has received all signals…maneuvering to pre-set coordinates…now on half propulsors…effector set full extension…heading zero five five on grid…estimating contact in eight minutes...ANAD is ready to dig, Base***

  The swarm was invisible to the naked eye during transit and Winger resisted the impulse to link in and watch what happened at nanoscale. Greg Nygren and the UNISPACE geos had provided detailed data on Hicks’ composition before Galileo had departed Phobos Station. ANAD would see pyroxene and plagioclase lattice structures at the asteroid, a lot of them. Row after row of octahedral molecule clusters thick with carbon and nitrogen bonds would be all that ANAD saw. Digging and disassembly ops would consist of breaking these bonds with his bond disrupters and chewing through the rows, ad infinitum.

  “I’m launched,” Reaves announced. Her hypersuited figure waved at Winger and Detrick from the opposite bank of the Fissure. “ANAD is away, all mean and in the green.”

  “Same here,” Spivey added. “ETA is now under six minutes.”

  The first visual proof of ANAD ops came when a faint blue white light began emanating from the shadows inside Odin’s Fissure. The ball of light looked like a miniature supernova in slow motion, expanding rapidly as the ANAD swarms merged and bond breaking accelerated. Soon, much of the deep shadow had been dispelled by the swelling light ball.

  “A new sunrise, right on schedule,” Reaves said. She was documenting the effect with a handheld camera for UNISPACE records.

  “Check swarm orientation,” Winger ordered. “Make sure ANAD is setting up properly and the cut vector’s on course. I don’t want ANAD veering off toward those impulse arrays. The geos say we follow this vector for a day, then in twenty hours, we change heading toward the Saddle. That aligns us with a suspected crustal seam inside the asteroid.”

  “Looks good for the moment, Skipper,” Detrick said. “Swarm properties within parameters. Centroid of disassembly is off by less than five nanometers.”

  Winger finally began to relax a little. “Okay, ANAD, it’s all yours. Chomp away.” He peered through the sun glare some five hundred meters away, at the Asgard dig site in the distance. “Charlie Team, how about it? I see some ANAD light over there. Give me a status report.”

  Al Glance’s voice came back.

  “We’re underway now, sir. Jeez, this chasm is one deep hole. It looks like it’s cut halfway through the whole asteroid. “

  “It just about is,” Winger reminded him. “Any problems with your ANAD launch?”

  “None at all. We launched and vectored the swarm to the correct coordinates, sent the rep command and made sure it’s pointed in the right direction. Right now, Lucy’s scanning the whole dig site, to make sure ANAD’s on the proper heading. So far, all copacetic.”

  Winger acknowledged. “Good. Bravo Team, status report. I can’t see you from here.”

  Vic Klimuk’s voice erupted in his earpiece. “Man, this is one wild place, Major. ANAD launched in good order and he’s digging away right below me. Working no issues or constraints at this time. Skipper, have you noticed what happens when you pick up a rock and drop it?”

  Winger decided to try it himself. He selected a fist-sized rock at his feet. Experimentally, he dropped it from a point level with his shoulders. The rock didn’t fall straight vertically to the ground. It drifted down slowly in Hicks’ microgravity, at a pronounced angle from vertical, falling toward the Saddle.

  “That’s wicked,” Winger agreed. “The asteroid’s center of mass is over by the Chasm, in the Saddle area. The rock falls toward that, not straight down.”

  “Exactly, Skipper. Gravity’s a whole new ball game on this rock pile.”

  Winger knew Bravo Team had a thankless task. The geos had decided that the anti-sunward pole of Hicks-Newman needed to be whittled down to make impulse diversion feasible this deep in the Sun’s gravity well. Bravo had no crustal faults or seams to work with, only an endless rubble and boulder field peppered with depressions and craters. Their job was simply to shape this end of the asteroid into something that could be more easily diverted when the other teams had succeeded in splitting Hicks into three separate pieces.

  Winger was about to check Alpha Team’s dig progress when a barely throttled cry came over the crewnet.

  It was Lucy’s voice.

  “Watch out! ANAD went too far…it’s caving in--!”

  Even from a distance of nearly two kilometers, Winger could make out the faint glow of ANAD operation at Charlie Team’s dig site. The asteroid’s horizon was actually too near to see the site directly, but the pronounced kink in the terrain at the Saddle put the Chasm of Asgard in Winger’s field of view anyway.

  What he saw made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

  The faint blue white glow of ANAD was dimmed by a swelling cloud of dust, electrostatically charged into a series of rainbows, billowing up from inside the Chasm. The great valley in the Saddle of Hicks-Newman was collapsing.

  Winger leaped into motion and left Alpha Team, kangaroo-hopping as fast as he could across the rubble fields toward the Chasm. “Spivey, you’re with me. The rest of you stay put and keep an eye on ANAD here—“

  “What’s happened?”

  Al Glance’s voice came back strained and hoarse, as if he were lifting a great weight.

  “Lucy—the side walls are giving way…get out of there now! Chris…Taj…try to snag his arm or leg—“

  Winger and Spivey covered the two-kilometer distance in under ten minutes, leaping high in twenty-meter arcs to cover the ground. When they arrived, the dig site was in complete chaos.

  The Chasm of Asgard boiled in dust and rubble as the canyon’s side walls collapsed in slow motion, shrugging off curtains of rock in great sheets. Microgravity added a surreal underwater quality to the scene.

  Inside the dig pit, the glow of ANAD ops had died off; the swarm had become lost in the cascade of falling rock. Even without ANAD, the momentum of the collapse was accelerating as the walls sloughed off seam after seam of unstable material.

  And caught squarely in the middle of the avalanche was the bobbing white helmet of Lucy Hiroshi, now nearly enveloped in debris as she lit off her suit boost, trying to propel herself out of the Chasm before it caved in on her completely.

  A steady shower of rubble, rock and dust fell into the chasm for twenty minutes.

  “Lucy! Lucy…can you hear me?” Al Glance leaned out over the edge as far as he could, searching for light, movement, anything to indicate the trooper had survived the collapse. “I’m not seeing anything. Lucy…do you copy? Lucy Hiroshi, comm check on channel one?”

  Dust billowed thick and blinding around the upper edges of the huge canyon, forming staticky clumps as electrostatic discharges went off throughout the cloud.

  The corrupted ANAD in Lucy’s embed, taken right from the Lieutenant’s master, had done its job.

  “Anybody getting a beacon signal?” Glance asked.

  “Nothing, Sarge.” Taj Singh checked all bands. Every hypersuit was equipped with an emergency locator. “Not a thing…maybe her transmitter’s damaged—“

  “I hope the suit’s not breached,” said Chris Calderon.

  Johnny Winger could see the situation was bad, and getting worse. Even though the asteroid had a minute level of gravity, the rocks loosened in the avalanche still had their own inertia, enough to cause serious injury in a bad fall. “Get back from the edge,” Winger reminded everybody. “I don’t want to lose anybody else. Everybody stay back until this thing stabilizes.”

  Long tense minutes followed as the slow motion collapse finally subsided. When he was reasonably sure the worst was over, Winger had an idea.

  “Get your ANADs recalled and reconfigured…all of you. We’re going to use swarms to tunnel down into that debris and find Lucy.”

  Taj Singh had some misgivings. “Is that safe, Skipper? ANAD may trigger another slide. May
be we should wait a little longer.”

  Taj was right of course, but time was critical. “If we wait any longer, Lucy has no chance. Get your ANADs reconfigged and launched now.”

  For the next few minutes, the edge of the chasm was thick with dust and nanobotic swarms. Every master assembler was re-built for optimum tunneling efficiency…strengthening its bond breakers to rip apart solid lattice structures of pyroxene, feldspar and methane ice.

  Spivey was done first. “Launching ANAD,” he announced. A diffuse blue white globe of light descended into the smoking canyon, heading for the top of the pile of talus and rock fall thirty meters below them.

  The others sortied their ANADs in quick succession: Calderon, Singh and Glance all contributed to the sparkling fog that soon filled much of the chasm walls.

  Johnny Winger checked config status on his own ANAD one last time. He didn’t notice a small warning flag that had popped up, signaling a problem.

  “It’s up to you, ANAD. Get down there and clear us a path to Lucy. Her life depends on it.”