The Swarm

by Orson Scott Card

  He found Dr. Benyawe in the common area, where about twenty more engineers were scattered around the room, parked on sofas and loveseats, hard at work. Benyawe saw him, gave one last bit of advice to the engineer she was speaking to, and came over.

  “You look nice,” she said, gesturing to the formal suit Lem was wearing. “What was it? The ballet? Political fund-raiser? Midnight’s a little late for that, isn’t it?”

  Lem was still looking around, taking it all in. “I feel like a parent who just found his teenaged son throwing a house party.”

  “We’re a little short on space,” said Benyawe. “I put a request in to one of your assistants for more square footage. This company has to have some empty offices we could use. I have people sitting on crates.”

  “You have people sleeping on the floor,” Lem said. “How many people did you hire?”

  “Close to three hundred. Most of them are on a contract basis, but a few of the really good ones are permanent.”

  “Three hundred?” Lem said.

  Benyawe nodded. “It’s a surprisingly mixed group. Our HR department has worked wonders. Your departing senior executives freed up a lot of cash.”

  “Cash I was supposed to use to lure and hire new senior executives,” Lem said. He ran a hand through his hair to calm himself. “Where did these people come from, dare I ask? You couldn’t have possibly found them all on Luna.”

  “Before you go nova,” Benyawe said, “I’ll remind you I’m doing what you requested. The only engineers on this rock already work for this company. My only option was to go planetside.”

  “Flying three hundred people up from Earth? Please tell me you crammed them all in a single rocket.”

  “It took several flights,” said Benyawe. “You won’t like the fuel expense. It’s several times what we’re paying these people. But if you want fast, miraculous results, you need new blood.”

  “New blood is fine. Bleeding the company dry is not.”

  “You’re being melodramatic,” Benyawe said, “and a bit obnoxious. This company employs over half a million people. Do I need to show you how much profit this department secures above the others? We’re one of the smallest in terms of staff and one of the largest in terms of revenue generation. I think you can cut us a little slack.”

  Lem sighed. “Is this why you called me in? To show me your new recruits?”

  Benyawe started walking, and Lem had to hustle to keep up. “We’ve actually been working on this for a while now,” Benyawe said, “but it’s never been developed enough to show you. I had my doubts about it as well. But we made some recent strides, so I wanted to bring you in. I thought you would’ve waited until morning, though. You never answered my question, by the way.”

  “What question?” Lem was practically speed walking to keep up with her.

  “The suit. What was the event?”

  “They were naming a new wing in the hospital after me,” Lem said.

  She looked at him. “You’re kidding.”

  “No.”

  “That’s a little cliché, isn’t it?”

  Lem frowned. “I objected to the whole thing, but the PR people insisted. Our health division donated several nanosurgical devices, and the company coughed up a lot of money for construction. Apparently if you pay for it, they name it after you.”

  “Ah,” said Benyawe. “Tax write-offs disguised as philanthropy. It makes me feel all warm and snuggly inside.”

  “You know, for someone who’s quick to defend herself with claims of revenue generation, you sure have a poor grasp of how free markets work.”

  “I only use economics when it helps my argument. Otherwise I loathe it. I’m a scientist, remember?”

  “Can you tell me why I’m here at midnight please?”

  “We’re calling it the NanoCloud,” said Benyawe.

  They were leaving the main hall and heading toward the workshop.

  “NanoCloud?” Lem asked. “What is that exactly? Swarm tech?”

  “Basically.”

  “To do what?”

  “To breach hulmat on a Formic warship and get marines inside, of course. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? A solution that beats out Gungsu’s faulty gravity disruptor?”

  “Nothing would make me happier than to cripple Gungsu,” Lem said. “But let’s remember that we have no idea how to penetrate the Formic hull material. If your NanoCloud is nothing more than nanobots programmed to eat through hulmat, it’s not going to work.”

  “The Cloud doesn’t eat through anything,” Benyawe said. “It’s designed to open the ship from the inside out.”

  She led him into the workshop. Crews of engineers were busy at various workstations, building or tweaking or repairing small experimental spacecraft or pieces of larger ones. Tools and worker bots and metalworking machines were everywhere, and yet everything seemed clean and well organized.

  “Does everyone always stay this late?” Lem asked.

  “You said to put a full-court press on this,” said Benyawe. “That’s what we’re doing.”

  They weaved their way through the workstations until they reached a small observational room with a glass wall overlooking an enormous vacuum chamber. A metal structure about the size of a city bus stood in the center of the chamber, and it took Lem a moment to realize what he was looking at.

  Benyawe and her team had recreated a piece of the Formic scout ship. It was as if they had used a laser to cut out a cross section of the hull about ten meters square—like cutting out a piece from the center of a cake. Every part of it looked identical to the real thing. There was the red glossy hull, with its apertures, large and small. There were the layers of pipes and shield plates beneath the hull. And there under it all, directly below the largest closed aperture, folded in on itself, was a replica of one of the Formic cannons. The cannon was unpainted, crudely sculpted, and nowhere near complete.

  “We’re not yet finished with the model obviously,” said Benyawe, “but you can see that we built everything to scale. This is exactly as it is on the real ship. The only exception is the material used. Dublin and his team have not yet identified what the hulmat is composed of, so we built ours with steel. The metal doesn’t matter for our purposes though.”

  She closed the door to the observation room and killed the lights. Lem stepped to the glass to get a better look. Benyawe pulled up her sleeve and tapped at her wrist pad.

  “The chamber is a vacuum,” she said. “It’s not exactly the conditions of space, but it’s close. We can’t replicate battle conditions, though. So this is by no means an accurate depiction of how the NanoCloud will operate in war. This is simply to give you an idea of what we’re going for.”

  Black smoke billowed into the chamber from a vent in the wall, like an old coal chimney puffing out soot. Only it wasn’t smoke or soot, Lem realized. It was nanobots. A swarm of millions of microscopic bots, pouring into the chamber.

  At first they moved like normal smoke, spreading out, dissipating, moving in what appeared to be a random pattern. But there were no air currents in the room obviously, so they had to be moving in a preprogrammed manner—spreading out to form a wall. Then, as if they had solidified into a single object with an intelligence, the cloud descended onto the hull of the ship. The NanoCloud broke as it hit the hull, but nothing bounced off. The separate pieces—or crowds of nanobots—split up and targeted different apertures, gathering at the edges or where the blades of the apertures met.

  “This part takes a few minutes,” Benyawe said. “Bear with me.”

  Lem watched the cluster of smartdust, but nothing seemed to be happening.

  “Each little speck of black you see,” said Benyawe, “is thousands of nanobots clustered together.”

  “What are they doing exactly?” Lem asked.

  “They’re seeping into the incredibly small gaps between the aperture blades. Widths only a few atoms wide. The blades appear airtight, and by our standards they are. But down at the atomic
level, they’re not. We can’t see the slight divots and gaps and chasms between them, but they’re there, and thousands of our nanobots are flowing through those gaps like a river, penetrating the ship at the microscopic level.”

  The large aperture opened, as if someone had thrown a switch, and the Formic cannon began to extend and unfold itself, reaching outward, preparing to unleash its firepower.

  And then the cannon split into three pieces at the hinges and detached itself from the hull. The pieces drifted away and softly collided with the padded walls of the chamber. The aperture remained open. A gaping, inviting hole.

  Benyawe turned to Lem. “The cannon, fortunately, is not made of hulmat. It’s mostly iron. So we simply had to program the bots to disassemble the hinges. Another group of bots is programmed to override the mechanism that controls the aperture, which they will then keep open. Other groups descend into the smaller apertures in the immediate vicinity and turn off the nozzles that unleash gamma plasma. The hope is, once the aperture is open and the cannon removed, a team of marines in a tiny craft can pilot right to the hole and enter the ship. This will require expert piloting. They’ll have to fly directly to the hole. If they deviate, even slightly, they’ll expose themselves to other apertures that can unleash gamma plasma.”

  “Like Imala’s flight in the last war,” Lem said.

  “That’s where we got the idea actually. So the system isn’t without risk. It requires the NanoCloud and trained marines to work flawlessly. But it at least gives us a tactic for hull penetration that doesn’t involve us trying to damage an impenetrable alloy. We’re going to lose that battle every time.”

  “You’ve programmed these bots to open this specific ship,” Lem said. “But we don’t know if the new enemy warships will look like this one. They may have a completely different design.”

  “The principle is the same,” Benyawe said. “We identify the ship’s access points and use the nanobots to open the hatch or aperture or whatever. Basically we find the door and we open it for our marines. It’s not a perfect system yet. I recognize that. We still need to figure out how to get external scans of the ships. Probes are probably easiest. We send a few of those ahead to relay back to us detailed renderings of the skin of the ship. That will give us mathematically precise measurements to work with. We’ll know exactly where the access points are located.”

  “What about inside?” Lem asked. “You were able to program the nanobots to disassemble the cannon because you knew exactly where it was located and what it looked like. We won’t have that luxury with any new ship design. A scanner probe won’t be able to see inside the Formic ships. How will we learn the ship’s internal layout?”

  “We send in a NanoCloud,” said Benyawe. “Only its mission is to map the interior of the ship. The bots broadcast back a three-dimensional rendering of what they find. Like injecting dye into the bloodstream.”

  “What about a delivery system?” Lem asked. “How do you get the cloud to the enemy hull?”

  “That’s what everyone is working on now. We have some promising preliminary ideas, but they’re not precise. We’ve got work to do.”

  “Find a way,” Lem said. “And hurry. Act like you’re three years behind schedule. Because you are.”

  “That sounds like criticism. But I know you well enough to know you’re pleased.”

  “It doesn’t matter if I like it, Benyawe. What matters is that the tech improves our chances of winning the war. This does. Drastically. But I’m not foolish enough to think that the odds just tipped in our favor. Our chances remain low. Even if every ship in the IF were to have this weapon, we would likely still lose spectacularly. So yes, I’m more optimistic than I was before I came in here, but we’ve got a long way to go.”

  Lem left her with the nanobots and the cross section of the hull and made his way out of the building, hopping over the man in the sleeping bag again, this time with a little more spring in his step. He had given Benyawe a restrained response. His CEO face. Good job, keep it up, etcetera, etcetera. But inside he was soaring. NanoCloud. It seemed so obvious now it was almost a little embarrassing. They should have had this years ago. But of course they probably did. It just took years to create the process and hone the tech enough to make it happen. In fact, achieving that in just three years was nothing short of miraculous.

  He left the facility and climbed back into his skimmer, secured in an underground docking station. He had taken his wrist pad off for the hospital event and left it on the dashboard. It was chiming quietly now, begging for his attention. The device was a simple AI. It monitored which news stories and electronic messages seemed to interest Lem the most, then it assigned every incoming message or holo with a priority rating. Messages deemed urgent were brought to Lem’s attention immediately. Casual matters were stowed away for later.

  The chime the device made now meant it had received a message from an infrequent contact the device deemed of high importance. Lem picked up the device.

  The message was from Victor Delgado, which surprised him. An e-mail. With images attached. The screen on Lem’s wrist pad was too small to view them properly, so he turned on the skimmer’s batteries and turned on the dash’s holofield. A round shape appeared in the first image, floating in space. Lem didn’t know what to make of it. A small, oddly shaped ball? Or a round sack of some sort. But no, if it was coming from Victor, it had to be Formic in design. But what? A mine? A tiny probe?

  He read the e-mail and finally got a sense of the scale. It was not something that would fit in his hand, he realized. It was an asteroid.

  He punched in the exit code.

  The docking bots lifted the skimmer to the platform, and the platform rose to the surface. Lem lifted off and flew across the pockmarked and powdery lunar landscape, heading toward the city of Imbrium—a series of massive iron domes clustered close together on the sunlit side of the moon. His father would already be asleep, but Lem would wake him. Assuming I can get through security, Lem thought. Most of the city was underground now—protected from the constant bombardment of micrometeorites and solar radiation. The original city, Old Town, still stood above the surface under the domes. After the First Formic War tourism there had come to a grinding halt. It wasn’t until Father had established the headquarters of the Hegemony in Old Town that the neighborhood had found new life. Instead of tourists, however, sidewalks now filled with ambassadors, lobbyists, and defense contractors, the suits that made the world, IF, and Hegemony go ’round.

  Lem flew up to the gate of North Dome and landed on the transitional pad. The bots maneuvered his skimmer through the airlock and into the oxygenated interior of the dome. Once through, Lem took off again, flying over Old Town. The city’s artificial lights were turned off, and most of the borough was asleep.

  The Hegemon of Earth had chosen a modest penthouse apartment for his private residence. Ukko Jukes might be one of the wealthiest men on Earth, but he understood that lavish living tended to annoy his constituency. Not that Father had to worry about voters. He had been appointed by the United Nations and ratified by votes from general assemblies throughout Earth.

  A voice came over the speaker. “Skimmer 7002, you are approaching restricted airspace. Identify.”

  Lem rolled his eyes. “It’s Lem. I’m here to see my father. You have my skimmer in your database. You know it’s me.” He decelerated and hovered in place a distance from the docking platform above Father’s apartment.

  “You know the policy, Mr. Jukes. I can’t allow you to land without a signed entry pass.”

  “Inform my father that I have critical information regarding the Formics.”

  “I apologize, Mr. Jukes. The Hegemon is not taking visitors at the moment. He has already retired for the evening.”

  “Soldier, you’re a smart individual. You would not be manning such an important post otherwise. So I’m sure I need say this only once: I have irrefutable evidence that the Formics have already infiltrated our solar system rig
ht under our noses and may be plotting an attack as we speak. If you would like to be the reason why this information is delayed to the Hegemon, Polemarch, and Strategos, then by all means, cling to your insignificant flight-control rule book. Otherwise, wake my father and let me land.”

  There was a long pause on the radio. “One moment, please.”

  Lem waited for five minutes before the uncertain voice of the soldier returned. “The Hegemon will see you, Mr. Jukes. You are clear to land.”

  Lem rolled his eyes again. The Hegemon will see you. Is that what you make them say, Father? As if you’re some king or sultan who has granted me the great privilege of basking in your royal presence?

  Lem landed the skimmer and moon-hopped up to the security entrance. The scanner lights wiped across his body, and the soldier standing guard waved him through. Father was waiting in the living room, completely dressed and very much awake.

  “You’re up late,” Lem said, engaging his boot magnets and walking across the carpeted floor. “I guess your security detail was misinformed. You look like death, Father.” It had been months since Lem had seen him last, and the months had not been kind. Father looked weary, exhausted even. His hair seemed grayer. He had lost weight. He was still Father, however. Cool, impatient, and all business.

  “What do you have?” Father said.

  Lem held up his wrist pad. “Any of these walls projection-ready?”

  Father gestured to the wall to Lem’s left.

  Lem pointed his wrist pad, entered the necessary commands, and the first image appeared large on the wall. The image showed the cocoon encircling the asteroid, with the tail end of the Formic ship protruding from one side.