Johnny Winger and the Hellas Enigma

by Philip Bosshardt

  Major Fordham studied the scene through a porthole. “In Kolkata, some things never change.”

  The Shavindra temple compound was west of the city center, set in a tree-lined park called Bhattan. From the Hanagar Street roundabout, the ornate stepped pyramids of the main temple poked above the trees, a brooding presence in the early morning mists. Traffic thinned out as the crewtracs navigated the circle and accelerated out along the Varanasi Road connector.

  Johnny Winger had been studying a layout diagram of the temple on his eyepiece when the crewnet voice circuit crackled to life.

  “Skipper—“ it was the lead DPS tech, Sheila Reaves—“I’ve got high-freq decoherence waves slamming away…all around us. Working on a fix now…but whatever it is, it’s big.”

  Winger saw the same pattern on his eyepiece…Reaves had ported the readings to the crewnet. Whatever it was, the source was undoubtedly nearby. Something was shaking and snapping spacetime like a wet rag, sending out massive waves of collapsing probability states.

  “Try to get a fix on it, Sheila. And start recording. I want Table Top to see this too.”

  “Lots of thermals too,” added Taj Singh. Singh was the Detachment’s second Defense and Protective Systems specialist. “All bands…EM, acoustic, whatever it is, it’s intense. Reading big nano ahead.”

  Winger trained the crewtrac scope on the ornate spires—the gopuram—of the huge temple. Elaborate carvings of lions’ heads and fanciful creatures leered back at him. The visual shimmered in the morning haze and it wasn’t humidity that caused the shimmer.

  “Barrier bots,” the atomgrabber muttered. Not entirely unexpected. The entire temple compound was shielded by a screen of nanobots, with enough density to haze the air around the compound. “Work us in as close as you can,” he told Sergeant Victor Klimuk, who was up front driving the crewtrac. “Third Swarm…config state one…prepare for opposed entry.”

  At Winger’s command, the loose swarm of ANAD bots that had been riding the crewtrac in the back corner of the crew compartment began changing shape, losing its para-human form as the assemblers re-distributed themselves and configured for the combat insertion that Winger had commanded.

  The crewtracs eased through a huge iron gate adorned with serpents’ heads and tiger paws in stone, and stopped a few feet away from the shimmering barrier that shielded the temple. Through the translucent shield, crackling with bursts of light, the Sacred Pond of the Lillies reflected morning sunlight from an inner courtyard. A stone relief of Lord Shiva rose from the pond and a slender spire brooded over a frozen gathering of spirits, also in stone. Beyond the water, a colonnaded portico surrounded the courtyard. Inside, the Hall of a Thousand Pillars was dark, save for clots and denser swarms of bots moving along the colonnade.

  “We’re going in at Tactical One,” Winger decided. “Get your embedded swarms ready to engage. Coilguns and HERF batteries…prepare to barrage on my command. We’ll shock ‘em with rf and see if we can burrow inside while they’re chewing on that.”

  Alpha Detachment dismounted from the crewtracs and scurried into position for the assault.

  “DPS…give me your best bearing to those decoherence waves. Are we in the vicinity?”

  Sheila Reaves studied her readouts on her eyepiece, moving laterally around the colonnade to get a better angle. “Dead ahead, Skipper. Whatever’s slamming quantum states is inside…Jeez, it’s like an earthquake.”

  “Maximum barrage,” Winger ordered. He was hunkered down in the shadow of a grinning sculpture of Shiva, propped up against one of the deity’s legs. “GO…GO…GO!”

  The air burned with multiple thunderclaps as Alpha Detachment opened up. The High-Energy Radio Frequency bursts rhythmically pounded the temple barrier. At the same moment, a barrage of coilgun fire swept across the inner courtyard and pond, sending geysers of stone chips and dust everywhere.

  Nanoscale assembler bots shrieked as waves of HERF thundered across the courtyard, ripping the barrier to shreds. The clatter of fried bots tinkling onto the stone pavement could be heard between coilgun rounds.

  “MOVE OUT!” Winger yelled. Each nanotrooper, now enveloped in a protective cocoon of personal assembler bots, surged ahead through the shredded remains of the barrier. Bursts of light, like fireflies flickering on a summer night, tickled all along the edges of the barrier.

  The Detachment moved as one across the courtyard, through a line of columns and toward the massive oak doors of a large chamber—the Hall of a Thousand Pillars—Winger’s eyepiece annotated on his viewer. Winger switched views to check on 3rd Swarm and see how the assembler formation was doing.

  Third Swarm had replicated like crazy and was busily engaging the nanobots of the temple barrier, even as the rest of the Detachment zeroed in on the fix Reaves had given them. Winger wanted to see what kind of bots ANAD was dealing with.

  The momentary disorientation when switching to nanoscale passed quickly enough and Winger soon had a view like flying through a sleetstorm. Shadowy shapes—polygons, tetrahedrals, dodecahedrons—flitted by as he settled into the view. Moments later, the image resolved to a clearer view of the battlefield.

  The ANAD were advancing on full propulsor along a ragged line. At the point of the advance, several replicants had already engaged the enemy. Winger tweaked the gain to get a better image.

  The barrier bots were all effectors, whirling and slashing as they blocked ANAD’s path. Bursts of light erupted like firecrackers going off as ANAD tore at the enemy’s appendages, liberating thousands of electron volts with each slash.

  Debris and loose atomic fluff thickened into a sort of fog, reflecting acoustics everywhere. The image fritzed and careened as the combat intensified.

  Use your enzymatic knife, ANAD, Winger muttered. The tiny assembler had been slashing with his bond disrupters but it was like hacking through thick vine in a dense forest. The enzymatic knife was a broader area weapon. It would slice through the churning melee easily.

  ***Third Swarm engaging…*** came the report back on the quantum circuit. ***Enemy bots are multi-effector config…pyridines and carbene grabbers mostly…no bond weapons yet…ANAD is reconfigging now…altering outer effectors to enzymatic***

  Good man, Winger agreed. ANAD…3rd Swarm…whoever was in command—had come to the same conclusion. The enzymatic knife would make quick work of those carbenes.

  Winger kept a close eye on the nanoscale combat, while he crept along the colonnade toward the oak doors. Beyond his eyepiece view of ANAD’s engagement, he saw other troopers converging on the same point. Reaves, Barnes, D’Nunzio, Tsukota, Singh…one by one, the Detachment appeared.

  “Blow those doors!” Winger ordered. The DPS techs leveled a coilgun barrage at the sturdy wooden doors. They dissolved in a fiery blossom of red flame and black smoke.

  First in was Singh, sweeping his sector with a coilgun.

  “Clear left!” he shouted. Right behind Singh came Calderon and Victor Klimuk, pouring into the dimly lit chamber right on Singh’s heels.

  “Clear center sector!” That was the Russian Klimuk, crouching forward.

  “Clear right sector!” yelled Calderon.

  The rest of the Detachment, following Reaves’ last fix on the quantum interference, burst in.

  Reaves studied her nav screen. “Just got one big decoherence pulse on the scope, Skipper…dead ahead…about two hundred yards!”

  In the dim, fire-lit shadows of the great Hall of a Thousand Pillars, the decoherence wave front had a most startling effect. It was like an invisible scythe slashing through the grid of columns, sweeping from left to right. One by one, an invisible front swept toward them, expanding outward in all directions. The passage of the front could be detected visually, as row after row of columns wavered, then dematerialized for a few seconds, finally re-appearing again after the probability waves had passed.

  And in the split second the deco wave passed each row of pilla
rs, the row unfolded like an origami sheet into a shadowy infinity of columns, marching off in every direction. The effect of collapsing probability states lasted less than a second, but the image was visual proof of the massive quantum disturbance nearby.

  For Johnny Winger, it brought back unwelcome memories of the original Sphere, buried now under the rubble of the Paryang monastery in Tibet, and the assault that had nearly cost him his life.

  His memory was jolted apart when a stitch of beamfire flashed out of one corner of the Great Hall. Winger took a sizzling round across his right arm but his own personal ANAD shield blunted most of the energy. A brief sting was all that was left. Winger hit the ground.

  More beamfire erupted from the shadows, slicing through several of the ornate gold-plated columns. Rubble and dust soon choked the air.

  “Ozzie!” Winger called out to Sergeant Hiro Tsukota. “You and Mighty Mite move left! Flank ‘em that way!” Winger jabbed a finger at Singh and Reaves, crouching behind a nearby column. “You two…the other way!” The Defense techs scooted off into the dim recesses opposite.

  Standard tactics dictated a double envelopment when confronting an entrenched defensive position. Screw the manual! Winger waited through several bursts of enemy fire before the four nanotroopers signaled they were in position.

  Whoever they are, he thought, they’re well armed. Probably not temple priests either. Laser carbines and beam rifles could make life tough for the unprepared squad. But this was no ordinary squad.

  Winger got on the acoustic channel to 3rd Swarm.

  “Third Swarm leader…I want to flush those nasties out. Execute config seven…clampdown NOW!”

  Configuration Seven was an assault maneuver they’d practiced many times out at the Hunt Valley range near Table Top. The tactic required a forward movement by the swarm, followed by a big bang-style replication to overwhelm the enemy’s position and literally suffocate the daylights out of him. When the enemy was flushed, choking and gasping and screaming for air, from his redoubt, he became easy pickings for the Detachment’s sharpshooters.

  The only real defense was to counterswarm and throw up a shield before the clampdown got started.

  Winger watched as the swarm billowed out through the columns, replicating madly, densifying the atmosphere as each assembler grabbed atoms and built structure. Through the thickening and flickering fog of bots, the garish faces of unknown gods and demons leered back at them from columns illuminated by the glow.

  Soon enough, the enemy felt the first effects. Screams and groans tumbled out of the shadows.

  Seconds later, the first gunmen emerged, choking and flailing into the dim light. Two enemy soldiers ran blindly among the columns, staggering until they collapsed, thrashing, under the weight of the swarm.

  “MOB’em!” Winger ordered. “And spray that whole corner…flush ‘em all out!”

  Taj Singh unhooked a canister of MOB bots and fired a few rounds at the hapless soldiers. The Mobility Obstruction Barrier mechs quickly formed an impenetrable web over the enemy. They gasped and clawed for air and flailed wildly, as the barrier drove them inexorably down to the floor.

  “Skipper—“ it was Reaves. “Deco waves all over the place…dead ahead…bearing one five oh. That corner of the hall—“

  Winger had seen the wave front at the same moment, rippling through the pillars, even as Reaves’ gear had detected it.

  “Whatever’s causing this disturbance…it’s just beyond this chamber. Detachment…converge on Sheila’s last fix. And let’s get a perimeter guard up around this chamber…in case we have more visitors.”

  The nanotroopers eased forward toward the far corner of the great hall. Serpent’s heads and mythical beasts glared at them from each pillar as they converged.

  “Place gives me the creeps,” muttered Mighty Mite Barnes as she crept cautiously forward.

  “Yeah…” agreed Tsukota. “A nightmare in stone…even in my worst dreams, I never saw shit like this.”

  More decoherence pulses slammed the hall and the pillars ahead wavered in and out of view like heat waves on a highway.

  “Contacts?” Winger inquired.

  Reaves and Singh scanned the vicinity. “Nothing living on this side,” Reaves came back.”

  “All bands clear,” Singh concurred. “I’m getting high thermals on the other side of this wall ahead…may be nano…”

  The Detachment came to a massive door, almost a gate in itself, carved from solid oak, with elaborate figures of Hindu gods and goddesses covering every square inch. The DPS techs examined the door closely. Singh put out a finger experimentally. The door gave slightly to the touch, then a small wave rippled outward from his touch. The door quivered and gave off a faint flickering glow.

  “I thought so,” said the DPS tech. “Barrier nano…look at the details of the config. Even up close, you can’t tell visually.”

  “How come I’m not getting any thermals?” Reaves asked. She scanned the door with her imager. “Reads just like background…no spikes in any band. What is this stuff…voodoo?”

  Winger touched the door himself. “Your background’s screwed up, Sheila. The imager looks for spikes. But the background level of atomic activity is elevated…all over Kolkata. It’s the fabs. Matter engines going off all over the place…we’ll have to re-calibrate to pick up unusual activity. Make a note.”

  “Can we breach it?” asked Klimuk.

  “We’ll have to try a config and see what works,” Winger decided. “The programming and design of these barrier bots is so good, it looks like solid oak. I’ve got a feeling it’s pretty adaptive, too. Third Swarm, front and center—“

  The rest of the Detachment parted as a pulsating mist poured through the columns and assembled itself into a vague para-human form. Just faintly visible in the dim light of the hall, the swarm had assumed a shape resembling a medieval English longbowman, complete with quiver and arrows. Winger was mildly annoyed but didn’t make a scene about it. Sometimes, uncontained ANADs like 3rd Swarm had a warped understanding of human history and values.

  ***Swarm reports ready in all respects, Major…what is the nature of the mission?***

  “Swarm master, I want you to scan this structure and assume a configuration to breach it. Config is pretty sophisticated but do what you can.”

  ***Swarm will comply…scanning now…***

  Winger stepped back and motioned the others back too, as the swarm surged forward. In seconds, the massive door was blanketed in a thick, flickering mist. Small light bursts rippled up and down the length of the door, as the two swarms engaged.

  Reaves followed 3rd Swarm’s progress with her imager. “Skipper, looks like he’s going to something octahedral, unusual grabbers…haven’t seen anything like those before—“

  Winger studied the image himself. But before he could say anything, the door flared to a white-hot light, too bright to look directly at, then came a piercing shriek as the massive structure super-nova’ed into incandescence. The fierce light strobed and throbbed like a living thing for a few moments, then faded, not completely, but to a hot translucent membrane.

  Inside the antechamber beyond, the scene resembled a view from underwater.

  The air was thick with nanobots, clotted like clouds and clumps and myriad other shapes, floating and swimming as if they were a thousand feet undersea. Lightning and flashes erupted in a chaotic symphony, spotted through the dense medium that filled the room. A few humans, or at least, human-forms, moved languidly about their business, attending to a large device in the center.

  As Johnny Winger scanned the room with his own imager, a massive decoherence wave erupted from the device, momentarily washing out everything, so that only a milky white glow was visible. For a brief, almost imperceptible instant, the glow collapsed into a careening kaleidoscope of images, like a slide show gone mad, as an infinite parade of probability states swept outward. A great ti
dal wave of all possibilities collided into each other right before them.

  The wavefront passed by in less than a second but in that single second, Alpha Detachment disappeared from view and was instantly re-assembled into a facsimile of its previous state. Johnny Winger blinked hard and saw Reaves, Tsukota, Singh—all of them wink out, then split apart into pinwheels upon pinwheels of themselves, carved into ever smaller slices that whipped by too fast for the eye to comprehend.

  Then it was gone and Winger shook his head, feeling his arms and legs, as if to reassure himself that he was still there. He saw the others doing the same.

  The curtain of roaring silence lifted and he heard someone saying—“…the hell was that?” It was Klimuk, shaking himself like an animal startled from a deep sleep.

  Winger got his senses back and realized that they were staring face to face with the very source of the quantum disturbances.

  He signaled for 3rd Swarm to execute the breaching, but there was no response…nothing from the swarm at all. The door was still there, open or not, he couldn’t tell, but translucent enough for them to see through.

  Inside, at the very center where the entanglement wave had emerged, Johnny Winger squinted and could make out the faint contours of some kind of platform. He remembered the great Sphere at Paryang but this was smaller, different.

  About the height of an average man, four tetrahedral legs supported the small platform. Atop the platform, a quartet of spheres was mounted. Each sphere was studded with scores of small projections and protuberances, so that the spheres resembled puckered lemons. The whole thing resembled a big basket of fruit gone bad.

  “Third Swarm…prepare to breach the barrier. Assault configuration—“ but there was nothing. No swarm, no signal. “Victor…have you got ‘em?”

  Sergeant Klimuk pecked at keys on his wristpad, trying to get a fix on the swarm. “That last pulse must have dispersed them, Skipper. Or altered config. I’ve got nothing.”