Johnny Winger and the Great Rift Zone

by Philip Bosshardt

  ***ANAD understands….attempting to withdraw…I am now fully engaged with the enemy…master bot coming about…I’ll have to sacrifice replicants…***

  “Do it, ANAD! Hold your position…we’ll swing by.”

  At Mendez’ command, Robles steered for ANAD’s position. The replicated daughter bots could be abandoned. By design, once the coupler link with the master was broken, a timer circuit ensured the replicants committed atomic seppuku and were disassembled so there was nothing for the enemy to capture.

  “I’ve got the signal!” said Nguyen. “BOP, steer right and center on heading zero eight five.”

  Robles complied and Gopher was slammed again by another round of tremors. Creaks and groans echoed through the hull. “She’s sluggish…we may have lost some tread, Skipper.”

  “Just keep going,” Mendez told him. “We’ve got to get out of this stratum before Gopher’s crushed.”

  The ship shimmied and shook like a wet dog as Robles drove them to ANAD’s position. Mendez had killed the coupler link. The last remnants of the swarm were quickly being overwhelmed by Config Zero’s bots…no sense in following that.

  “At least, the borer’s still operating,” Robles muttered to no one in particular. If Gopher lost that, she’d be stuck but good, trapped ten thousand feet below the Zagros Mountains of northern Iran.

  “ANAD bot master signal less than ten meters away,” Rounds reported, fiddling with the acoustic and EM detectors. “He may have been damaged…I’m seeing some signal dropout, intermittent spikes and drops.”

  “ANAD,” said Mendez, “do you read? Make your way to the capsule port…full propulsor. We can’t wait forever.”

  Gopher had several launch and capture ports spotted around her hull. ANAD masters and swarms could enter and exit quickly from the ship through their own dedicated lockouts.

  But there was no reply over the coupler circuit. “Looks like we’ve lost comms, Sensor. What’s the little guy doing out there?”

  “Hard to say with all the seismic noise,” Rounds replied. “Best guess: he seems to be in motion…I’m getting acoustic returns that read like propulsor operation. And the signal’s getting stronger.”

  “Okay, as soon as he comes aboard, we’re out of here.”

  Word came less than a minute later, as Gopher rolled and porpoised and shook from more tremors and quakes.

  “Got ‘em, Skipper!” said Rounds. “That’s the port cycling…positive ID on capture signal…and something else too…I’m getting EMs forward, looks like ANAD…maybe part of the swarm came back too.”

  “What are they doing forward?”

  The answer came seconds later. Robles saw an immediate drop in borer ops. “Borer swarm mass down ten per cent…I’m compensating, loading new config to make more bots—“

  “Is the bot master aboard?”

  “Affirmative, Skipper,” said Rounds. I’ve got positive signal from inside the port. It’s ANAD, all right.”

  “Borer still losing mass!” Robles said. The BOP1’s fingers flew over his keyboard, countering the effect. “I’m trying another config—“

  “Config Zero…it has to be…” Nguyen muttered, checking weapons status: HERF was charged, magpulsers were ready. “Skipper, Config Zero somehow infected ANAD, rode back home with him. That has to be what happened. Remember ANAD said he was fully engaged with the enemy. We may have some onboard…maybe even inside the borer.”

  Mendez didn’t want to believe it but his tactical sense told him the DPS was probably right. The question was: now what? If Config Zero had infected their borer with his own bots, Gopher was sunk. And if ANAD had brought enemy bots onboard—

  He made the difficult decision. “Robles, shut down the borer. Shut it down. And isolate that capture port. We’ve got to scrub Gopher from bow to stern…then we can re-boot the borer.”

  “Sir, if I shut down—“

  “Do it now!”

  Robles managed the shutdown and Gopher’s forward momentum died off.

  “What about that capture port?”

  Rounds didn’t like what he was seeing. “I’m getting mixed signals, like the port’s both open and closed. ANAD’s inside, I’m sure of that. But there’s something mixed in…I’d better go take a look—“

  The SS1 unbuckled himself, steadied himself against more pitching and heaving of the command deck, and disappeared down the central tunnel. The capture port that ANAD had reached was aft, amidships on D Deck, Stores and Supplies. Rounds slipped into the tunnel and worked his way to D deck, holding on to anything he could as Gopher slid and rolled and vibrated from the tremors. It was like being inside of a barrel going over a waterfall.

  When he got to D deck, he spun the hatch wheel and shoved himself inside.

  Stores and Supplies was filled with crates and boxes and pallets of gear. It was Gopher’s pantry and attic closet. But that wasn’t what caught Rounds’ attention.

  Drifting in among the crates was a glowing fog, slowly filling every vacant space on the deck. The fog was flecked with pinpricks of light, like a silent thunderstorm building overhead.

  It wasn’t ANAD.

  The SS1 was just able to get off a warning. “Attention from D deck…we’ve got—“ and then the swarm was upon him, enveloping him, smothering him. “---arrrggghhh…I can’t—“

  Complete disassembly took about seven minutes. Mendez left the command deck and was poking his head onto D deck in eight. He saw what had happened…what was left of Rounds and quickly slammed the hatch, dogging it shut. He hustled back to the command deck.

  Before he could make it, Gopher shuddered violently and began a slow clockwise roll, with a sickening screech coming from somewhere forward. Mendez crawled and staggered up to the command deck. Chaos and panic filled the space.

  Rono, the geo tech, was barely clinging to her console. “---P wave coming, high magnitude transverse waves, lots of ‘em, coming this way—“

  The crew of Gopher didn’t know it at the time but the Config Zero swarms had somehow managed to lubricate the rock strata surrounding the geoplane. A punishing series of tremors radiated outward through the region, oblique convergent plate boundaries letting go as the rock underlying the Zagros Mountains gave way in a spreading fracture zone, propagating outward like a sheet of glass cracking.

  The swarms of nanobots had insinuated themselves into multiple fault zones and disassembled enough rock to release the massive strain which had built up over the centuries. Massive seams of slate and feldspar, hundreds of kilometers long, suddenly wrenched forward with crushing force, sending shock waves and seismic energy halfway around the Earth, as crustal plates rebounded and jostled each other.

  Geoplane Gopher was caught like a bug in a vise. Mendez shouted over the din of the crushing force now slamming them downward.

  “ANAD…ANAD, if you can hear me…ANAD, launch NOW! I’m sending a config to form up a shield…try to hold back this—“

  But he never finished the sentence. Seconds later, the plates shifted again, twisting and crumpling Gopher even further downward, wrenching off her nose and borer lens and crushing the ship into a twisted pile of wreckage.

  Geoplane Gopher was destroyed, smashed into oblivion, and all aboard her were lost.