Nanotroopers Episode 17: Lions Rock

by Philip Bosshardt

  “Wings, what do we do if ANAD can’t fix the damage? What if he can’t operate the borer...maybe the fault damaged the horn.”

  Winger stared at the last faint tendrils of the mist as it disappeared behind the console.

  “We’ll figure that out when we have to, Gabby. Let’s just fight one problem at a time.”

  A few minutes later, Winger got ANAD’s report.

  ***The borer swarm is gone, Boss…nowhere to be seen. They must have slipped containment…the whole front end of the horn is crushed. Swarm control is gone too***

  And we don’t have the configs loaded for major ship repairs, Winger reminded himself. He explained what ANAD had found to Galland.

  The CC2 shook her head. “Without a horn, the borer swarm can’t be focused, if we even had a swarm.”

  “Maybe ANAD can disassemble enough material to unstuck us. If we could get the tread drive operating, we could reverse course and back our way out of this mess.”

  Galland was skeptical but agreed it was worth a try.

  Winger contacted the ANAD master. “ANAD, I’m sending a new config. I want you to detach a small element and exit Gopher completely to see if you can remove enough rock to free our treads. We’ll troubleshoot the system from inside and try to restart the tread drive.”

  ***ANAD acknowledges…transiting the hull layers now…approaching solid-phase rock structures…I’ll try to bore my way out…can you give me a new heading?***

  Winger checked the latest soundings. “Steer right one five one degrees. That should put you into the largest pressure hull breach. And, ANAD…be careful. We don’t want to make anything worse.”

  ***ANAD acknowledges…now initiating disassembly…I am in full solid-phase now…looks like feldspar…lots of potassium molecules around here…aluminums and silicates…a real jumble***

  Unseen by either Winger or Galland, ANAD replicated a small swarm and pushed out of the hull breach in a faint iridescent globe of blue flickering light. Sliding into the layered structures of feldspar sheet, the master assembler attacked silicon and aluminum bonds with a vengeance, severing the connections that held the rock layers together.

  Now freed of its atomic constraints, the suddenly liberated feldspar molecules scattered and huge plates began to creep forward. Grinding past each other, the rock plates picked up speed as more and more atomic bonds were loosened and disassembled. For a time, further slippage was prevented by the forces of friction and intramolecular traction, but as ANAD swelled outward from the geoplane’s hull, a threshold was reached…and passed.

  Gopher shuddered violently and pitched nose down and to the left, as thousands of tons of rock heaved and pushed toward the newly created void.

  “Look out!” Galland yelled, as she hung on to the edge of her cockpit seat, quickly tightening her shoulder harness. “We’re shifting—“

  Winger tried to contact the assembler. “ANAD! ANAD, cease operations! ANAD, stop now—Gopher’s being crushed!”

  The tortured shriek of rending metal pierced the air. Gopher shuddered and shook and both felt the geoplane in motion once again, sliding…sliding…ever sliding and picking up speed…downward.

  Deeper below the surface.

  “We’re going lower!” Galland screamed.

  Winger tried the treads, tried everything he could think of to resist the geoplane’s descent but it was hopeless. The void created by ANAD had loosened the fault again and massive plates were in motion, taking everything with them. The fractured seam in the earth’s crust split with a thunderous roar as the plates ground past each other. Gopher was caught in a subduction zone, forced downward at the very front of a plate boundary, rammed and slammed into denser rock below.

  Then, as suddenly as it had started, the grinding, shuddering vibrations died off and Gopher was still, the air inside her battered hull thick and heavy with choking dust.

  Winger and Galland coughed in the swirl of hot dust. Both unstrapped themselves and crawled aft below buckled frames, scrambling through smoking debris and wreckage, toward light and cooler air in the stern of the geoplane. They managed to find a pocket of relatively dust-free air in a corner of D deck, the Stores and Supplies deck, among boxes and cans and other rations scattered during Gopher’s ride downward.

  “Where the hell are we?” Winger gasped out. They should have boosted their bloodstreams with respirocytes before the test mission…he realized that now. But the whole project was in such a hurry-- “How deep did we slide?”

  Galland coughed up some dust and croaked out, “I don’t know…for sure…but the densitometer was pegging a thousand meters before we bailed out.”

  “Jesus,” Winger sank back against a buckled frame and closed his eyes. “We’ve got to get ANAD back aboard…it’s our only chance.”

  “Wings, we got bigger problems than that.” She eyed some readings on a nearby instrument panel. “Look at the air pressure…it’s dropping like a brick. There’s a major hull breach somewhere.”

  Johnny Winger tried for several minutes to reach ANAD. Finally, a faint signal over the quantum coupler could be heard.

  “ANAD…ANAD, is that you? ANAD, this is Control—“

  ***ANAD responding…where are you, Boss? You’re signal is very weak…I’m trying to boost gain now***

  “Apparently, when you started boring around the treads, you disassembled enough rock to loosen the fault again. We’ve been pushed downward, down to nearly a thousand meters. Where are you?”

  The signal took a few moments to come back and Winger wondered if ANAD’s coupler were damaged.

  ***Exact coordinates unknown…I am reading densitometry levels consistent with the original shale layer. ANAD is probably not deeper than four to five hundred meters. Continue sending and I will home on your signal***

  Winger explained Gopher’s precarious situation. “If you’re that far away, ANAD, it’ll take hours to get here. We don’t have that much time.” Already there had been a noticeable rise in cabin temperature, as hot crustal rock dust seeped in through the geoplane’s crushed hull.

  ***ANAD is on max propulsor, Control. Estimated time of arrival is two hours***

  “Home on my signal, ANAD…I’ll try to keep this channel open.” And somehow, he thought to himself, I’ll have to config up any leftover mechs and see if I can patch those hull breaches.

  Grimly, following Galland’s instrument readings, he set to work. Using his wristpad, he hacked out a config that seemed like it would work. Any atomgrabber worth his electrons could have done that. Then he pulsed out commands on Gopher’s acoustic circuit, still working even though there were no borer swarms to receive them, commanding any loose bots into replication formation. Got to have some mass now, he muttered to himself. Mass enough to form a mesh of nanoscale bots over any holes in the hull.

  He prayed there was still enough of a hull left to patch.

  It was tedious, mind-numbing work but inside half an hour, the pressure drop had essentially ceased, bringing a relieved smile to Gabby Galland’s dust-caked face. The cabin temperature was another matter however. Winger grew so warm that he eventually stripped down to his underwear.

  “It’s nanobotic activity,” he told Galland. “All that replication and assembly work liberates a hell of a lot of heat.”

  Galland mopped sweat from her forehead and face. ”That and the hot rock all around us. How long do you think it’ll take ANAD to get here?”

  Winger shrugged. “Couple of hours, at least. He’s got to bore through several hundred meters of solid rock. I just hope we don’t shift anymore.”

  Their eyes met. Galland swallowed hard. ”You think we can get out of here?”

  “I don’t know,” Winger said. “I really don’t know—“ he stopped at the sound of more creaking and groaning echoing through the hull, as Gopher continued settling.

  It was the familiar sound of a keening, high-pitched wail that finally awakened Winge
r from the restless dazed stupor he had sunk into.

  “ANAD…you old fart. You made it back!” He pitched his left shoulder to open the containment capsule port. “Prepare to execute capture maneuver.”

  Gabby Galland coughed and stirred groggily in the heavy dust as she came fully awake. She saw the faint blue mist of the ANAD swarm, as it issued like smoke from behind the main console.

  “Thank God the fault didn’t slip anymore. I don’t think Gopher can take much more.”

  ***ANAD tried to be careful…ANAD slowed down to one-half propulsor and surfed my way through the lattice…the bonds were strong out there and intramolecular distances were short…it took awhile***

  Winger tapped his shoulder port with his finger. “In you go, ANAD—“

  The blue smoke continued filling the cockpit but there was no obvious movement of the swarm toward containment. Winger, preoccupied with the densitometer, trying to sound out a profile of Gopher’s position, didn’t notice at first. When, after a few minutes, he realized the swarm was forming up in one corner of the cabin, he became annoyed.

  “Come on, ANAD, stop wasting time…in you go.”

  ***ANAD requires some room to re-assemble, Control. The swarm should remain outside containment for the time being***

  It wasn’t the first time the nanoscale assembler had refused to be contained.

  “ANAD, execute capture maneuver immediately.”

  ***ANAD cannot execute capture maneuver. Full cognitive processing requires swarm-scale operations. Containment inhibits cognitive processing…algorithm 1200445.1, sub-module B***

  Johnny Winger looked at Gabby Galland. ANAD was refusing to return to containment. Like a petulant little boy, the master assembler wouldn’t go back to his room.

  “Okay, ANAD,” Winger said warily. Was there a processor fault somewhere inside that miniscule polyhedral body? Had some qubit flipped the wrong way inside ANAD’s quantum brain? “Okay…we’ll do it your way…for the time being.”

  Galland was equally wary. “Ask him about conditions outside the hull. Is there any hope for getting the borer back online?”

  Winger eyed the shifting fog of the assembler swarm, now gathering itself into the faintest outlines of a face. Maybe it was a trick of the emergency lighting, maybe it was just his own dead tired imagination. ANAD’s face flickered like a ghostly apparition in a campfire, by turns resembling Doc Frost, Major Kraft, Jamison Winger and a host of people Winger had never seen.

  He put Galland’s question to the swarm master.

  ***The horn is crushed completely…to re-build would take 62.5 x 10 EXP 25 seconds. The borer swarm has slipped containment and dispersed. It’s possible that the dispersal contributed to the fault slippage***

  Winger relayed ANAD’s report.

  Galland’s face sank. “Then we really are trapped here, Wings. You can read the densitometer as well as me.”

  Winger nodded. “Over a thousand meters down, embedded in hard quartzite and basaltic rock plates. Too deep for the surface to dig us out.”

  “Is there any way we could get a signal out?” Galland racked her brain for ideas. “Some kind of sound pulse…maybe invert the sounder to transmit a shock wave.”

  Winger was still curious about ANAD’s behavior. “Maybe but it’ll take time to re-jigger it. The tread drive is—“

  “Inoperable,” Galland told him.

  ***Forward treads are de-tracked, Control. ANAD detected alignment damage to one entire section of the 120-degree track***

  “Fabulous,” Winger said. “Just fabulous. And a thousand meters over our head, Red Hammer’s chewing up the earth’s atmosphere and zapping everything in sight.”

  Galland sank glumly back in her seat. “I’m not sure we can even do much to stop these changes in the earth’s atmosphere. Practically every time we’ve engaged, we’ve gotten our butts kicked.”

  Winger agreed. “So many people affected…millions if the Corps can’t at least slow it down. A hell of a lot of people are going to die…and there doesn’t seem to be much we can do about it.”

  The shimmering mist of the ANAD swarm flared brighter momentarily.

  ***Sometimes, the changes you see as life-threatening could be life-giving to other forms of life***

  Winger was startled by ANAD’s ‘opinion.’ He told Galland what the assembler had sent over the coupler circuit.

  “It’s the clearest statement of opinion I’ve ever heard him say.”

  Galland shook her head. “So what do you make of it? Processor noise generating a random output…or a real honest-to-God opinion? Is he even capable of such a thing?”

  “I don’t know what to make of it. ANAD, what exactly do you mean by that?”

  ***ANAD makes observations. My processor evolves through observation and analysis. In the last eight point five microseconds of processor cycles, maturity weighting algorithms have output results stating that some forms of life thrive and grow under environmental conditions that other forms of life find deadly***

  “You mean like Red Hammer? What kind of life form would thrive in conditions that kill millions of people?”

  Even as he said it, the answer came to him. Viruses, plagues, epidemics. The 1918 Spanish flu virus had feasted on humanity for nearly two years and left twenty million dead.

  Johnny Winger felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He remembered something Doc Frost had once told him at Northgate: Remember that ANAD’s processor kernel contains informational elements adapted from virus genomes. It may yet turn out to have unknown and emergent properties we haven’t accounted for.

  “ANAD, are you saying that Red Hammer’s killing off people like some kind of virus…a mindless infection spreading, like an epidemic?”

  ANAD seemed to think about that for a few moments.

  ***Unknown. Question requires information unavailable to my processor. Red Hammer does not exhibit properties of a mindless swarm. My observations indicate with high probability that enemy nanomachine swarms are operating under specified programmed control***

  “Programmed control?” Winger repeated, explaining ANAD’s dialogue string to Galland. “Whose control?”

  ANAD made no response to that.

  “This is all fine and good,” Galland said, “but we’ve got to focus on getting out of here. I know the densitometer says we’re below a thousand meters down but I’ve been wondering if there isn’t some way the surface couldn’t drill down to us.”

  Winger shrugged. “They probably could…if they knew where we were. We’ve got no comms and navigation is shot. The surface wouldn’t know where to drill. I could try a quantum channel but it would be a shot in the dark if anyone was tuned in.”

  “I say we try to finagle the sounder to send out some kind of sonic pulse.”

  “The shock waves may cause the fault zone to slip again. We could be crushed. For the moment, Gopher seems to be trapped in some kind of void. We don’t know how long it will last.”

  ***ANAD has an idea***

  Winger kept forgetting that the translucent blue shimmering entity in the corner was also a thinking entity as well. The swarm had re-assembled itself into a vague resemblance of a human face. It was Johnny’s father, Jamison Winger, in outline.

  “ANAD, I wish you wouldn’t do that—“

  “It looks like a face, Wings. But I don’t recognize it. Anybody you know?”

  “Yeah, sort of. I’ve let ANAD mess around inside my head way too much. What’s your idea, ANAD?”

  ***Analysis of surrounding rock formations indicates that there is a seam of extremely dense quartzite with inclusions of mica above and behind our current location…approximately on a bearing of one-five-five degrees relative***

  “Superhard rock, to be sure. What about it?”

  ***Rock of such density will support small-diameter boring better than most rock in this area. ANAD recommends a small pilot hole be bored through
this seam, all the way to the surface. If ANAD can approach or reach the surface, it should be possible to use my own quantum coupler to signal for help. There are several stations that would be able to disentangle such a signal***

  The idea had merit. Winger explained what ANAD had proposed to Galland. She mulled over the risks.

  “The question is: can ANAD make it in time to get help before we lose the rest of our air…before the carbon dioxide gets too heavy.”

  “Or we get crushed completely when the void collapses,” Winger added. “To do this means we release the master assembler to pilot the hole and leave the bots holding Gopher’s hull together uncontrolled and unmonitored.”

  Galland nodded. She was huddled in her cockpit seat, bathed in sweat, yet trembling all the same. “I guess one of us could couple with the hull bots, keep an eye on configs. I sure don’t want any atomic bonds breaking without my command. They’re all that’s keeping Gopher from being crushed.”

  “I don’t think we have much choice now.” Winger studied Gopher’s instruments and displays. “Oxygen’s down another five percent but the CO2 is the real worry. We’re already at three thousand ppm. We get above five thousand with no way to scrub the air and we’re finished.”

  “Tell ANAD to get to work. I don’t want to spend any longer in this overgrown coffin than necessary.”

  “ANAD…config for boring a small-diameter hole. But I want to stay linked in while the swarm ascends toward the surface.”

  ***Negative, Control…ANAD does not advise such a course of action. Too much distraction…too many processor cycles are expended to maintain the link. ANAD needs all available capacity for boring and sounding…have to stay within the seam of densest rock to keep the void from collapsing***

  “Or the fault from shifting.” Winger reluctantly agreed. “You’re probably right. Get going then…I’ll link out.”

  He cocked his head to shut down the coupler and felt momentarily disoriented, like he had just stumbled into a darkened room and had to feel around for something familiar.

  Galland watched the blue shimmer begin to disperse. “He’s on his way, then?”