Chapter 2
“The Shaman and the Sonic Lens”
Banks Island
Northwest Territory, Canada
September 1, 2049
1750 hour (U.T.)
Johnny Winger examined the strange dish-shaped port on geoplane Otter’s forward hull and looked over at Drew Wilkins. Wilkins grinned and patted Otter like a big pet.
“You don’t miss much, do you, Lieutenant.” Wilkins was a project engineer at Table Top, heading up the geoplane section of the Lab. “It’s called a sonic lens. With this baby, we can shatter any swarm of bots you care to release. Test Sequence O-1 will prove that.”
Wilkins was a lean dark-skinned man of medium build, with a thin moustache and a goatee. He wore sealskin mukluks, a fur-lined parka and heavy gloves, and from a distance, he could have passed for local Inuit. He was the Test Director for the whole effort.
Two geoplanes had been lifted north from Table Top, all the way to a remote, bitterly cold, windswept realm of ice called Banks Island, in Canada’s Northwest Territory. A base camp for the test group had been set up near the tiny Inuit village of Inuvik. The camp was situated on a low hill overlooking the Inuit village. Smoke from fires streamed skyward in the fading twilight, twisted into braids by winds coming off the sea, itself only a few hundred meters to the south.
Winger studied the strange port on the side of Otter. “So how does this gizmo work?”
Wilkins started to explain, then stopped when a raucous flock of snow geese careened by overhead, streaking for their feeding grounds out to sea. “The sonic lens generates megawatts of sound energy…acoustic pulses. It shapes and focuses these pulses. Because it’s sound, it travels well, at high speed, through rock and underground formations. With the sonic lens, our theory is you can shatter any formation of bots you encounter. You can even damage geoplanes.”
“So what’s the difference between the sonic lens and my HERF guns?”
Wilkins smiled like a proud dad. “HERF is High-Energy Radio Frequency. RF pulses are higher frequency than sonic pulses. Rock doesn’t transmit them nearly as well. With the sonic lens, we’ve got a device that generate, shape, focus and transmit a large energy pulse in the most effective way for the medium you’re operating in…namely below ground.”
“Wouldn’t this set off a lot of tremors? Doesn’t it shatter rock as well as swarms?”
Wilkins shook his head. “You’d think so, but in practice, at least in the lab, it hasn’t. That’s what we’re up here to test.”
Winger saw the second geoplane sitting on its carrier a few meters away. He read the name stenciled on her borer. Ferret. “Why two ships?”
Wilkins pulled out a small palmpad and brought up the details of Test O-1. He squirted the protocol to Winger’s wristpad. “Otter and Ferret will both submerge, full Boundary Patrol crew with test engineers and techs on both ships. You’re assigned to Ferret. Otter carries a standard ANAD swarm. Once at test depth, and everything looks good, Otter launches her swarm. She backs off to observe and take measurements—we want full analytics on the test. Ferret fires her sonic lens. If the weapon works as designed, the swarm will be destroyed by sequential acoustic pulses. We want to take careful measurements of what happens. The test ANAD swarm is configured to resemble a Red Hammer formation as closely as possible…we may need your help on that, Lieutenant.”
“You’ve got it.” The two men left the geoplane staging area, scanned out through security and headed for the temporary barracks that Boundary Patrol had built just outside the village.
They slowed as they approached the small village. Inuvik was a scruffy gathering of tents and careened qajaks, with cooking fires spotted through the settlement. Bloated carcasses of walrus and seal were lined up between two larger tents.
Winger saw a man shuffling through the snow as he approached. He was short, dark-skinned, enveloped in a heavy qaspeq parka and hood, with bone necklaces rattling around his neck as he approached. A village elder, perhaps? It was hard to tell.
The man spoke something, though neither Winger nor Wilkins couldn’t hear over the whine of the wind. Winger soon realized the man was Inuvik’s angakkuq, the shaman. He was gesturing at something in the sky.
Winger looked back over his shoulder. It was late afternoon, with the sun low, but already he could make out the shimmering veil of the aurora borealis hovering over the distant mountains.
The angakkuq approached both men and stopped, placing a hand on Winger’s shoulder.
“The peril of our existence lies in this fact: we eat souls. Everything we eat has a soul. All things have souls. If we hunt and fail to show respect for the souls of our prey, the spirits will avenge themselves. See in the sky…the Old Woman of the Sea is already disturbed. In the days to come, we must be careful.”
With that, the shaman ambled off toward a nearby hill.
Wilkins shrugged. “Local witch doctor. I don’t put much stock in them, myself. They’ve been pretty agitated since Boundary Patrol arrived.”
Winger looked at all the new installations. “I don’t doubt it. Look what you’ve brought: strange looking ships, buildings, lots of armed people. Quite a change for these people.”
“Yeah,” said Wilkins, as they reached the barracks and cycled inside, away from the wind and sleet. “The local witch doctors—they’re called angakkuq—have been ranting for days about disturbing spirits, putting hexes on us, angering the gods, that sort of thing. Superstitious mumbo-jumbo, if you ask me. Me, I’m just trying to do some engineering and get a successful operational test done.”
Wilkins maneuvered through narrow corridors and small rooms thick with the smell of steam heat to the mess hall. There he introduced Winger to the geoplane crews.
Ferret was captained by Lieutenant David Gerhart, late of Armadillo and the recent patrol mission below New York City.
Gerhart was a blond rockhead with a quick smile. “Long time no see, Winger. Should be a little easier up here than what we had underneath New York.”
They shook hands. Winger knew Gerhart slept and ate Boundary Patrol and looked on Quantum Corps as a bunch of geek scouts with atoms for brains. Still, he respected the BP officer’s command skills and operational judgment. That had been proven a few weeks before, chasing Red Hammer contacts below the Big Apple.
Ferret’s crew was all BP: Walz was the DSO. Thielen was the BOP. Geotech Mwale and Sensors and Surveillance Tech Bandarsaran rounded out the rockheads. Only Sheila Reaves, the ship’s DPS and Winger, as test chief, hailed from Quantum Corps.
There was some good-natured ribbing and kidding while Winger met the crews of both ships. Otter, the ship that would carry the test ANAD swarm, was commanded by a Lieutenant Lashyro. Winger shook hands with the BP officer, sizing up the kid, and figured he was a good enough skipper for this kind of mission.
Dinner that night was simple, little more than Q-rations heated up, leavened with a little caribou steak and plenty of alcohol, some of it a gift from the elders of Inuvik. Reaves took a swig off one bottle and nearly threw up. Her eyes watered and she fanned her face like it was on fire.
“Jeez, stick that stuff in the geoplane engine…we’ll be burrowing like a crazed rat all the way to Tokyo!”
Someone belched out, “Subterraneous defensores!” It meant ‘subterranean defenders’ and was a kind of rally cry for the rockheads. Winger toasted the whole table.
“To a good test tomorrow!”
That night, every crewman slept as if dead.
The sun was a pale dab of butter rolling around on the horizon when the test crews boarded their geoplanes the next morning. Winds whipped across the shoreline and sleet flecked the crews as they arrived at their mounts. On board Ferret, Winger found a spot had been rigged up next to Sheila Reaves in the aft end of the command deck, B deck. The cramped station housed comm gear and config status displays, so he could keep a steady eye on what was
happening to the test ANAD swarm. The sonic lens controls were also located at Winger’s station. The previous night, Wilkins had briefed him on the test protocol and procedures, including how to power-up, test and operate the sonic lens. When H-hour came, it would be Winger who pressed the button.
“Always give me the creeps,” Reaves muttered to Winger as they strapped themselves in. “Burrowing underground…it just ain’t natural, Lieutenant. I don’t know what these rockheads have for brains but it isn’t normal stuff.
“Subterranean defenders strike hard,” someone yelled out. Ferret’s treads started up with a screeching clank and a blue-white glow soon enveloped the nose of the ship as the borer lens came fully online. The cylindrical geoplane huffed and shuddered as she motored forward on her treads, clambering over nearby rubble piles and across a snow bank. Moments later, Ferret started her descent, angling nose-first toward the ground.
Inside the command deck, Gerhart gave directions to Corporal Walz, the DSO. Pressing a few buttons, Walz manipulated the borer that formed a huge dish-shaped nose on the geoplane’s bow. Inside the borer, actuators fired to release the ANAD swarm contained there. In seconds, the outer surface of the dish was thick with nanoscale disassemblers, forming a shimmering half-globe around Ferret’s nose. Like a single huge blue-white headlamp, the dish and its halo of mechs formed the geoplane’s working surface for subterranean operations.
“Let’s go digging,” Gerhart said. “Head for that shallow ravine and contact Test Ops… tell ‘em we’re going under.”
Walz complied. “Turning left, heading now… one three five degrees. Depth is forty five meters, five degrees down angle.”
“Borer coming on line,” Corporal Mike Thielen reported. Thielen was the Borer Operator, BOP1 for the Detachment. He scanned his instrument panel, reading swarm density, alignment and other parameters. “Bots are ready to bite—“
“Otter reports ready to burrow,” came back Winger, reading the signal from the other geoplane on his display.
“Very well,” said Gerhart. “Take us down to five hundred meters. Make turns for two kilometers an hour. Let’s get to the test site.”
The DSO, Corporal Walz, programmed a new heading into the tread control system and steered them southeast on a heading of one two five degrees, roughly paralleling the Beaufort Sea shoreline of Banks Island. Acoustic sounding soon showed the geoplane was entering harder, denser rock layers.
“Shales,” Sergeant Honore M’wale muttered. M’wale was GET1 for the Test Detachment, the Geo Engineering Technician. From earlier briefings with Boundary Patrol geologists, she knew the layer was sheeted with hard slate and mica, compacted over millions of years by glaciers and the overriding Brooks mountain range. “Nothing to worry about…just sit back and enjoy the view.”
Gerhart snorted. The only view they had was of the inner pressure hull of the geoplane. Even as he watched, he imagined that he could see the compression of Ferret’s interior frame under the millions of tons pressing down on them.
“Sounding ahead…” Sergeant Bandarsaran reported. “Your depth is now four eight eight meters. Signal distortion coming back…it’s probably the shale zone.”
Walz shoved the control stick forward. “I’m going a little deeper…see if we can plow through some of that quartzite.”
Ferret maneuvered for the next few minutes, until M’wale announced they were at depth. “Approaching firing zone, Skipper,” she reported.
“Now passing five hundred meters…zero point less than fifty meters ahead this bearing.”
Gerhart studied the stratigraphic charts. The protocol for Test O-1 called for Ferret to assume a firing position some ten kilometers off the western shore of Banks Island, at a depth of five hundred meters. Otter, for her part, would lay off Ferret’s starboard bow some one thousand meters, and release her ANAD swarm there. Once the other geoplane backed off, Ferret would then begin a series of test shots with the sonic lens. Both geoplanes would circle the fracture zone and take measurements.
That was the plan.
“Message from Otter,” Winger reported. “She reports in position for release.”
Gerhart went around the command deck, getting a go/no-go from each station.
“DSO?”
“Go.”
“BOP?”
“Go.”
“DPS?”
“Ready, sir.”
“Lieutenant Winger, status of sonic lens—“
Winger checked his board. “Weapon is primed, fully charged and trained on coordinates. Ready to fire, Lieutenant.”
“Inform Otter she can launch ANAD when ready.”
A thousand meters away, geoplane Otter was also ready. Her CQE, one Sergeant Sheila Reaves, took one last look at the config she had dialed in. ANAD reported back ready in all respects. Reaves spoke to herself silently: effectors armed, grabbers armed, propulsors at initial state, disrupters enabled. She sent the command.
Outside Otter’s hull, a small capture port opened and ANAD exited the ship, fully configged for solid-phase transit. Though it wasn’t visible to anyone, the rockface glowed blue-white as trillions of bots chewed their way into the hard shale just beyond the hull.
Otter shuddered and groaned as rock shifted outside. They felt the ship sliding forward, then to the left again, but the motion stopped almost as soon as it started.
“Okay--“ the DSO pulled her own hands away from the controls. “No more tread…I’ll wait till ANAD’s in position. Let’s not make things worse. DPS, where’s that swarm?”
“Best estimate is two hundred meters on course for the fracture zone. He can’t move any faster through this rock than we can.”
Nanotroopers Episode 18: Geoplanes Page 13
