***ANAD…was there a slight hesitation, maybe the slightest stumble?—ANAD is one entity among many…the swarm must survive and grow…the swarm must prevail***
The capture coordinates came up and Winger enabled the port.
Wham! Suction pulled the embed with its trapped master assembler into his shoulder capsule. The port snapped shut and Winger quickly massaged the sting out of his shoulder.
“ANAD, maybe you’re not the same bot we left Mars with…maybe that quantum wave pulse damaged something. Maybe it’s something else…I’m taking you back to see Doc Frost…get you fixed up like new. First Nano needs a good swarm to complete our mission.”
With the capture completed and ANAD tucked away, Johnny Winger was ready to boost back to the ship.
“Al, let’s get the hell out of here.”
“With pleasure,” Glance agreed.
The two of them lit off their suit boost and lifted away from the surface of Hicks-Newman. The trip up to Galileo took about twenty minutes.
As they ascended, Winger surveyed the crumpled terrain of the asteroid, now dwindling below his boots. What effect had the Detachment had on the asteroid? Would ANAD’s boring be enough to break up the asteroid in time?
The Chasm of Asgard lay between his feet, framed by the rocket plumes of his suit boost. The great fissure was deeper and blacker than ever. Their own geo analysis had indicated ANAD had bored nearly two thirds of the way through Hicks at the Chasm…there wasn’t much now holding the rubble pile together.
“A few good shots from Galileo’s coilguns ought to do the trick.” Al Glance’s voice crackled over his helmet speaker. He had been having the same thoughts.
“I just hope we’ve done enough.”
Both of them could see the mottled brown and green outlines of Africa and the deep blue of the Indian Ocean basin on Earth, less than four days away now and filling their sky rapidly.
“Yeah, it’s not like there’s much room to maneuver. Those impulse arrays look mighty small down there.”
“Let’s get back to the ship and start blasting. The sooner we break up this rock pile, the sooner UNISPACE can shove the pieces out of the way.”
Glance’s hypersuited figure drifted closer to his as they arrowed their way together toward Galileo. “Lieutenant, what are you going to do with ANAD? You know we can’t trust him anymore.”
“I don’t know, exactly—“ and that was the truth. “I want to bring what I captured back to Table Top—if there still is a Table Top—and have Doc Frost check him out. That quantum wave really scrambled his processor.”
Ten minutes after the two of them had floated into Galileo’s service deck airlock and cycled through into the ready room, Johnny Winger found out that Doc Frost had been killed at Table Top, in the first few minutes of a Big Bang.
It was Mendez who described what had happened, while Winger climbed out of his hypersuit in the ready room.
“That’s all we know,” Mendez was saying, helping Glance stow his gear on a nearby rack. “The Big Bang started in the Containment building at Table Top, from what I heard. Dr. Irwin Frost and several others were inside at the time. They couldn’t get out in time.”
Winger was stunned. Doc Frost…gone? It couldn’t be….He had a brief flashback to his own father. Jamison Winger had succumbed to Serengeti infection months ago. He could recall every moment of that day, as if it were just last week. Doc Frost…Jamison Winger…it was somehow all mixed up in his mind.
“I’ve got to call Table Top—“ He hurried out of the ready room and made his way forward to the comm shack. He dialed up Table Top, Major Kraft, hoping to catch the battalion commander, get a better explanation.
Maybe it was all a mistake. Confusion and chaos had no doubt swept Table Top in the first moments of the Big Bang. It was easy to mistakenly identify victims, especially in a nanobotic attack. Features were disassembled into atom fluff, obscured. Ident chips were lost or malfunctioned. That had to be it. It was an easy mistake to make.
The signal lag was only a few seconds now. Hicks-Newman was bearing down on Earth, closing the last few tens of millions of kilometers with increasing speed.
Kraft’s harried face came up on the vid. Behind him, figures scurried and dashed about, moving things, shouting, gesturing. It was chaos.
“Johnny…I’m glad you called—“ Kraft turned to give someone off-screen some instructions, then scribbled something on a tablet. He handed the tablet off to a staff aide. “As you can see, we’re evacuating the mountain. Orders from General Linx. We’re being re-located to an underground facility in Switzerland, near Basel, I think—“
“Major—“ Winger felt a catch in his throat. “I was calling about Doc Frost.”
Kraft’s face visibly tightened. He shook his head, continued stuffing papers and items into a small satchel. “There was nothing we could do, Johnny. Believe me, we tried. By the time Security got to Containment, it was too late. They had to get help from 2nd Nano to fight their way in.”
Winger felt like he weighed a million tons. His heart sank. “We—“ but he stopped, re-shuffled his thoughts. “We’ve boosted off the asteroid, Major. I managed to gum up the Bang here and stop ANAD from doing any more damage. But we can’t use ANAD anymore, something’s affected his processor, I don’t know what…and our embeds won’t work very well with borer configs…they don’t have the processor smarts. We’re going to have to finish the mission with Galileo’s coilguns.”
Kraft understood. “UNIFORCE has been talking with UNISPACE the last few days—Nakamura, I think. As long as you can split up Hicks the way they described, Nakamura says the impulse motors should be able to divert what’s left away from Earth. But I don’t have to tell you—it’s chaos here. Everywhere…cities are in an uproar all over the world…people fleeing…riots…mass waves heading to the ports, to the mountains, the coasts, anywhere. It’s like just going somewhere—doing something—will somehow save them.” Kraft’s eyes were tired, weak and watery. Winger thought the Table Top battalion commander looked a hundred years old. He needed nanoderm bad.
“Has UNISPACE made any analysis on possible impact sites?”
Kraft nodded. “According to General Linx, some scenarios have been generated. But nobody’s saying anything publicly. It’s all pretty closely held…’we don’t want to start a panic’…is the explanation I’ve heard. I’ve got news for you: the panic has already started. Official silence is only making it worse.”
Winger swallowed hard. “Then it’s pretty clear what we have to do here.” He blinked back a few tears, gathered himself. “It’s just that doing it without Doc Frost—“
“I know, Johnny. All of us feel the same way. Frost was the creator. Nobody knew more about ANAD. There’s a big void now, and it won’t be filled for a long time, if ever. It’s like A Black Hole, in fact.”
Winger sensed a presence nearby. It was Kamler, the ship’s pilot. He had drifted down to the comm shack from the command deck.
“Lieutenant, Mendez would like to get everything stowed and squared away. He wants to start maneuvering in one hour.”
Winger acknowledged. “Tell Mendez the Detachment will be buttoned up in half an hour. You’re warming up the coilguns?”
“As we speak,” Kamler said. “We need to back Galileo off about two kilometers before we start blasting. Surface effects…we could be hit by stuff flying off Hicks if we stay any closer. As it is, we only have proximity maneuvering. We have no way to run and hide if things go south.”
Winger knew he might never see Major Jurgen Kraft again.
“Major, we’ve got to get buttoned up here. Galileo’s prepared to cut her anchor lines and back off. We should be ready to start shooting in one hour.”
“Good luck,” Kraft said. “And once you’ve got that asteroid broken up, get the hell out of there. I know that ship has lifeboats.”
“Barely enough
to accommodate the Detachment, sir. It’ll be a tight squeeze.”
“Just get your ass back to Earth, Lieutenant. I don’t want to lose my best atomgrabber.”
“Acknowledged…Winger out.” He turned to face Kamler. “Stu, let’s go kill us an asteroid.”
Kamler was grim as they scrambled forward to the command deck. “With pleasure, Lieutenant.”
Winger got on the crewnet. “Detachment, this is the Lieutenant…listen up—“ throughout the ship, in every compartment, nanotroopers were de-suiting, stowing gear, jamming equipment into lockers, securing loose items, cussing and swearing and making obscene gestures at the battered, pock-marked surface half a kilometer below them.
“—get everything squared away by 1730 hours…you’ve got half an hour. Strap in and hold on. Galileo’s going to cut anchor lines and back off two klicks on proximity thrusters. Then we’re going to blast this sumbitch to kingdom come.”
Shouts and hoots and more swearing erupted in every compartment.
“Kick asteroid ass!” yelled Turbo Fatah.
Mighty Mite Barnes pumped her fists in the air. “Yeah…let’s make cereal outta this berg—scorch the place!”
In the last row of jump seats on the Hab deck, Taj Singh quietly closed his eyes and tried to center his thoughts. He prayed silently to his honorable ancestors. Please to let me not screw up…make many pieces of the hateful Hicks-Newman…
Winger heard some of the jeers over the crewnet. He finished cinching up his own shoulder and lap harness, giving them one last tug.
“Detachment prepped and ready, Lieutenant. You may commence operations.”
Mendez and Kamler were at the command station up front. Through the portholes, they had a panoramic view of 23998 Hicks-Newman, now rolling over like a sick potato on a spit, rolling into deep shadow as it rotated and gyrated and nutated toward Earth.
“Give me a five-second count on my mark, Stu,” Mendez commanded. “Arm anchor line pyros—“
“Pyros armed,” Kamler came back.
“Mark—“ he twisted a handcontroller. “I’m thrusting up and away—“
“Five…four…three…two…”
“Full slack on the cables—“
“…one…punch it, Pete!”
Mendez stabbed a button on a side panel. A staccato clanging sounded through the hull of the command deck, as one by one, the five anchor lines were explosively severed. They watched as the five spider webs pulled sharply down and away, whipped through space by the asteroid’s nine-hour rotation. At the same moment, Galileo’s jets puffed briefly and the huge shish-kebab of a ship drifted outward, fast enough to avoid being snagged by the anchor lines.
“Lines away and clear, Skipper,” said Kamler. Both men breathed a long-held breath. It had been a ticklish operation, fraught with possible catastrophe.
“We’re backing on proximity thrust…two point five meters per second…nulling all rates—“
The entire maneuver took about an hour. The ship pulled out to a distance of nearly two kilometers and hovered in the asteroid’s weak gravity field as Hicks continued her slow rotation below them.
“Coilgun status, Stu,” Mendez inquired.
Kamler checked the board. “All four tubes ready in all respects, Lieutenant. We have a full magazine…sixty four shots in all. All coils are charged. First rounds loaded.”
Mendez turned back to Winger, who was strapped into a jump seat behind the main control deck. Al Glance was there too, looking pale and ashen. “I’ve got the cannon boresighted on Bravo site, Lieutenant. Would either of you care to make a final check of my alignment?”
“With pleasure,” Winger said. He slid up to the targeting scope and peered in. The crosshairs were centered on the lower end of Odin’s Fissure. In the scope, the fissure was a deeply shadowed, sinuous crack in Hicks’ surface, spilling out of rugged upcountry near Loki crater, then trending down-sun across a rubbly plain, centered like a dagger between two parallel ridges.
If all went well, if ANAD’s boring had gone deep enough, if the geos’ analysis of Hicks’ composition were right… if…if…if….Winger realized he had stopped breathing. He forced himself to relax.
This had to work.
“I believe you are centered and targeted properly, Lieutenant. The rounds have to hit the fissure pretty much dead on.”
“I’ve still got your grid to guide me in,” Mendez told him. “I can adjust the trajectory of the rounds in flight if I want to, although the traverse will take less than a second. I’m trying to fly right down the throat of that fissure. Lieutenant, I’m planning to do this in stages. I’m salvoing three rounds at first—that’s twelve shots—at Bravo site, then we’ll check and see what damage we’ve done. If there’s no detectable breach at the fissure, I’m salvoing three more rounds…that’s a total of twenty four ferro-mag projectiles. I’ll keep hammering at Bravo until we can detect some kind of measurable separation along that fissure. I’ve got sixty four rounds in all, so I have to save some for the other sites. But I don’t want Hicks flying apart in some uncontrolled fashion. Galileo has extremely limited maneuverability. We do this right and, assuming your ANAD’s done his job, we can sever one whole end of Hicks clean off from the main body.”
“Lieutenant, ANAD did his job, you can count on that.” Winger said it with more conviction than he really felt. He ignored a sideways glance from Al Glance. “You may commence firing when ready.”
Mendez turned back to his control station and flexed his fingers like a concert pianist one last time. He did a quick recon of the board. Everything was clean and green.
“Stu, fire the first round. All tubes.”
Galileo had four coilgun tubes in a pod mounted to the top of her command deck. From head-on, the weapons pod made the ship’s command sphere look like a rooster’s mane. The pod was sighted in on Odin’s Fissure and the Bravo dig site.
“Fire in the hole!” Kamler announced.
A sharp rippling crack sounded through the hull as all four tubes discharged at once. At the same instant, a brief light flash lit up the cockpit.
Four ferro-magnetic explosive projectiles slashed away from Galileo and a split second later, slammed into the fissure head on, having traversed the intervening two kilometers at forty-four thousand kilometers an hour.
A white flash erupted from the surface of 23998 Hicks-Newman, followed over the next few moments by a billowing plume of rubble, rock and ejecta, mushrooming in slow motion out into the vacuum.
Winger silently prayed that ANAD had bored deep enough to expose bedrock to Galileo’s guns. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Taj Singh in the back of the cabin, nodding faintly in the direction of Al Glance, trying to get Winger’s attention. It was clear that Taj had something he wanted to say.
Winger shook his head. “Later, Taj…not now….”
This stunt has to work, he told himself, over and over again. We won’t get a second chance. This has to work….
TO BE CONTINUED…
About the Author
Philip Bosshardt is a native of Atlanta, Georgia. He works for a large company that makes products everyone uses…just check out the drinks aisle at your grocery store. He’s been happily married for 25 years. He’s also a Georgia Tech graduate in Industrial Engineering. He loves water sports in any form and swims 3-4 miles a week in anything resembling water. He and his wife have no children. They do, however, have one terribly spoiled Keeshond dog named Kelsey.
To get a peek at Philip Bosshardt’s upcoming work, recent reviews, excerpts and general updates on the writing life, visit his blog The Word Shed at: https://thewdshed.blogspot.com.
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Nanotroopers Episode 14: The HNRV Factor Page 26
