***And I have the greatest respect and admiration for Dr. Singh and what he has been able to accomplish in renovating Michelangelo, with limited time and resources***
“A secretary and a cheerleader…Vik, anytime I need an ego boost, I know where to come. Now how about a little trip to see Big Mike?”
“Follow me.”
Singh and Hawley made their way down the station’s central gangway to an airlock at the end of C Deck. They cycled through and found themselves aboard Michelangelo’s Service and Support deck, the bottom onion on the kebab skewer.
“Let’s go forward…to the command deck. If I’m right, your exec’s already aboard.”
“Liu? I didn’t know she had arrived.”
Singh smiled. “Captain, there’s a lot you don’t know about what goes on around here.”
The two men made their way forward through the ship’s central tunnel, past wire and cable bundles, exposed ventilation ductwork and workbots drifting from deck to deck, carrying tools, supplies, lunch buckets and everything else crews needed. Finishing Big Mike was priority number one at Phobos Station and every able-bodied man and bot had been drafted for the work, which had proceeded around the clock for the last few months.
A Deck was command and control center for the ship. Hawley followed Singh through the hatch and settled onto a landing just outside the main control station. They entered the space and found the compartment jammed with electricians, workbots and floating clumps of terminal boards and junction boxes.
A woman sat at the commander’s station, checking off switch positions against a tablet strapped to her knee. She had short jet black hair and high, angular cheeks, giving her a haughty, almost arrogant look to her vaguely Asian face. Her uniform said UNISPACE and Hawley instantly recognized Commander Victoria Liu from the back.
“Attention on deck!” he snapped, partly in jest, just to see what would happen.
Liu’s head snapped around and she was already springing out of the seat when she realized Hawley’s joke. She stood up, clinging to a nearby stanchion and the tablet banged against the seat.
“Captain Hawley…I heard the shuttle dock a while ago…didn’t know you were aboard her. Er…welcome to Michelangelo…I was just checking settings on the main panel—“
“At ease, Commander…don’t stop what you’re doing. I just wanted to see things for myself. It’s been a few years since I served on a cycler.”
“Yes, sir…she’s coming along nicely…all the controls are powered up…we’re just running continuity checks today, sir. You know how the schedule is, sir.”
“Insane as usual. Glad to have you on the crew. I heard you’ve got some special orders…right from CINCSPACE?”
Liu nodded. “I do, sir…came in just two days ago.” She pulled out a small disk, handed it over to Hawley. “Recorded off the secure circuit…encrypted TOP PURPLE.” She glanced uneasily at Singh, wondering—
Hawley pocketed the disk. “Oh, don’t worry… Vik’s cleared to that level, Commander. Just give me a quick rundown.”
“Well, sir…according to CINCSPACE and the orders, I’m to head down-sun in a week…Lunar Farside. Intelligence briefings with the people that discovered Devil’s Eye. Then I’m to head Earthside and get a personal mission tasking from CINCSPACE himself…eyes only.”
Hawley winced. “That’s a six week trip…and the next cycler’s not due for what…ten days? Orlov must have a burr up his ass for this kind of briefing. Any idea what it’s about?”
“None, sir. Just that I was to come alone and it had to be in person, UNIFORCE Paris…the Quartier General, you know.”
“Yeah, it’s better than the Paris Zoo. You’ll love it. By the way, have you seen the crew manifest for this little jaunt into the void?”
“Briefly. Lieutenant Kohl is a first-rate navigation officer. He’s the only one I know personally.”
Hawley pulled a commandpad from his pocket and called up the duty roster. “Check out the Engineering Officer, Commander.”
Liu studied the names, reading aloud as she went down the list. “—Engineering Officer…Commander…er, Element B…excuse me, sir. What exactly is that?”
Hawley shrugged. “UNISPACE’s latest fad. Now, we’re just like Quantum Corps. Commander, your engineering officer is a swarm angel. A cloud of bugs.”
Liu stared back, swallowing her irritation. Clearly, Hawley didn’t know she was enhanced herself. She didn’t feel the need to hit people over the head with it, but really… who wasn’t nowadays. “You’re kidding. We have swarm entities now serving as line officers…on actual ships…underway?”
“Get ready, Commander. Further adventures in outer space…that’s what I call it. I can’t wait till we muster the crew for the first time.”
Vikram Singh cleared his throat. “Perhaps, a tour of the ship, Captain…I can show you some of the new stuff we’ve installed on Big Mike.”
With that, Hawley and Singh headed aft through Michelangelo’s main gangway. Victoria Liu was left alone on the command deck, with her blueprints and wiring bundles, wondering.
The trip down-sun to Lunar Farside took nearly six weeks by cycler ship. Victoria Liu spent most of that time going over the prints and specs for Big Mike and the tactical scenarios from past UNISPACE deep space ops, of which there were precious few. She sat velcro-ed into her seat at the Andromeda Bar late one evening wondering what they would encounter in the Great Beyond. Andromeda was the only dive worth hanging out in aboard cycler ship Candide as the ship approached T day, when the shuttle would zip up from Gateway Station and dock with the cycler. Liu was one of three passengers destined for the Moon, and the only one with clearance for Farside. The trip down from T-point to Farside would take about two days.
She sipped at something the barbot had called Bug Juice, some kind of local concoction that tasted like a mixture of kerosene and cat piss and scanned mission reports from past trips UNISPACE ships had made out beyond Saturn. There were only three, all research and recon jobs. One mission, Operation Far Trails, had nearly met with disaster on approach to the Uranus system, when the ship, a converted cycler like Big Mike, had lost one of her plasma engines in an explosion. Investigators had called it an accident… but scuttlebutt around the Corps had whispered sabotage…or worse, for several years. Liu had heard some of the stories herself.
Now Michelangelo would be traveling further from the Sun than any crewed ship ever, out into the very fringes of the Oort Cloud, where the Sun’s influence dropped off rapidly and you were on the front porch of interstellar space itself. Liu chuckled at the quotation someone had appended to the report she was scanning: Here Be Demons.
In the days of Columbus, mapmakers had done things like that around the edges of their maps, to denote the fact that nobody knew what lay beyond the edge of the world.
She figured she knew how they felt.
Liu finished off her drink and watched the shuttle approaching Candide through a nearby porthole, lining up for docking at the forward port.
Guess I’d better get my gear together, she decided. Two more days aboard these crates and she’d thankfully be on the ground again, if you could call moon dirt and lunacrete flooring the ground. Anyway, she had a lot to learn about Operation Sentinel and CINCSPACE would want a full report when she made her way down to Paris in a week.
From an approaching shuttle, Farside Observatory looked like a pimple on the dirt floor of Korolev crater. A half dozen domes, buried in regolith, connected by tunnels and dirt roads, the complex housed a few score astronomers and technicians, with a smattering of engineers and assorted dirtbags, Farside was the epicenter of a growing uneasiness about what was now happening in the outer solar system.
Victoria Liu had come to the Moon to get the latest intel on what had become known over the last few months as Devil’s Eye. It would be her job, and the crew of Big Mike, to find out just what the hell Devil’s
Eye really was.
The shuttle touched down on landing pad C, a few kilometers north of the complex and Liu rode the crawler in and cycled through the airlocks. She went through the Immigration preliminaries, had a quick med checkup and stowed her gear in an apartment in Kepler wing, the southernmost of Farside’s domes.
Then she went looking for Percy Marks and caught up with the astronomer outside SpaceGuard Center, housed in Newton wing.
After exchanging pleasantries, Marks introduced her to Dr. Ernesto Bertelle, another astronomer and they all relocated to the Watch Command Station inside SpaceGuard.
“It’s no apparition, Commander,” Marks was saying. “Despite what you may have heard or read and there is a lot of crap being put out by the media about this…here, I’ll bring it up on optical…just takes a few minutes for the scopes to track it and zero in.” He massaged a keyboard and explained that several kilometers away, the south and north lateral and central arrays were in motion, forming a giant virtual telescope to resolve energy sources billions of kilometers away, sources as small as a few meters in diameter. “This board controls our Resolution Optical Interferometer…we call him Roy. Roy here will let us take a fuzzy peek at Devil’s Eye…there’s not too much to see in visual bands but the infrared bands show what kind of energy source we’re dealing with.”
Ernesto Bertelle hung over their shoulders. His breath was thick with garlic and Liu put a little distance between them. “Not only infrared…this bugger’s a beast in quantum bands as well. It’s been shaking and rattling space-time like a wet dog lately…we’re getting prodigious output in quantum signals, to and from the anomaly.”
Liu studied the image that Roy had collected. “Doesn’t look like much… like some kind of gauze curtain. You’re sure that’s not a gas cloud or something?”
“Check the quantum output,” Marks suggested. “This display here—“ He pointed to a window on the display with bar graphs and curves dancing across the screen. “We haven’t been able to decrypt a thing but whatever the hell it is, it’s yakking across the solar system like my wife’s mother on a party line. We’ve isolated one link…the quantum entanglements are particularly dense around Jupiter, decoherence wakes are all bunched up…so we assume the Keeper at Europa, assuming it’s still active, is in contact. But what they’re saying to each other—“ Marks shrugged. “Who knows? We need Quantum Corps’ help on this one.”
“I’m headed Earthside next week,” Liu told them. “I’ll ask that question. “So what’s your best guess? What the hell is this thing?”
Marks sat down and traced his fingers across the optical display, fingering the faint outlines of the gauze curtain. “In reality it’s several thousand kilometers in breadth, but basically, here’s what we know officially and for sure about Devil’s Eye: the anomaly is a diffuse energy source radiating in multiple bands, from infrared to quantum entanglement states, and the sucker becomes more bizarre the more it is studied. It is in motion, seemingly in a distant orbit around the Sun but at an extreme distance of nearly ninety A.U….that’s fourteen billion kilometers from us.”
Bertelle took up the explanation. “Exactly. Officially, Farside has taken the position that this cannot be a natural phenomenon. We’ve had some disagreements about what it is—“
Marks snorted. “To say the least-“
“—in any case, one of the more popular theories is that Devil’s Eye is some kind of micro-black hole roving through space which has somehow been grabbed by the Sun’s gravity. And then there are some theories about other things….”
“That the Old Ones have arrived,” Liu said.
“Exactly. My understanding is that Operation Sentinel is designed to investigate and find out for sure.”
“Officially, that’s our mission,” Liu agreed. “The next—“ She was interrupted when two others joined them inside SpaceGuard Center. One was a gaunt, balding man in a Farside jumpsuit, an engineer Liu learned later, from the Systems office. His nameplate read Gortz.
The other visitor wore an odd variant of a Quantum Corps outfit and Liu knew right away the guy was a nanotrooper. He had that look: in equal parts, a faraway look in his eyes from too much time going ‘over the waterfall’ and twitchy fingers from banging away at a wristpad hacking configs for nanobot swarms. The guy was an atomgrabber for sure and Liu straightened herself up to regard the newcomer with regulation seriousness as he entered the watch center.
His nameplate read Karst.
Gortz made the announcement. “This is Captain Jason Karst…just came up yesterday on the Gateway shuttle…you two may want to talk.”
Liu introduced herself. “Commander Victoria Liu, Frontier Corps, Mars Phobos Station—“ She shook hands with Karst.
Karst was tall and wiry. “Captain Jason Karst, UN Boundary Patrol—“
Liu was instantly intrigued. “BP? I’ve heard of you guys…new kids on the block. Is it true what they say…you guys scuttle around like moles underground? What’s that like anyway?”
Karst wanted to say something like: Yeah, Semper Fi to you too, asshole. But captains didn’t mouth off to commanders in any UNIFORCE outfit and get away with it. He maintained an even keel and gritted a smile out.
“Pleased to meet you, Commander. We moles have jobs too. All those earthquakes, you know.”
Liu understood. “I’ve heard a lot of scuttlebutt about that. What are you doing on the Moon?”
Karst smiled faintly. “Orders. We’ve been chopped directly to UNSAC. Q2 has intel showing some kind of correlation between these tremors and quantum signals coming from someplace off-Earth. I’m here to investigate, see what Dr. Marks has to back that up.”
Liu found that intriguing. She explained her mission, the details of Operation Sentinel. “Looks like we’re in the same game, Captain. Parallel missions. Sometimes, at UNIFORCE, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.”
Karst said, “Maybe, Commander. I prefer to call it OPSEC. Operational Security. I know one thing. You know another thing. If something happens, neither of us can spill enough beans to make any soup.”
“I’ll contact CINCSPACE…see if we can’t work together. Dr. Marks…is there anything to what Karst is saying? I’ve seen a few scraps from Q2.”
Percy Marks consulted a schedule. “There’s a vidcon with Major Folkes at 1530 hours…that’s about an hour from now. We’ve been meeting about once every two or three days…he’s Quantum Corps Earthside…I think Intelligence. He may be able to enlighten you. All I know is this: Farside is registering a steady stream of quantum signals, so far not decrypted from off-Earth. We’ve managed to localize the main signals to Europa. It’s probably that Keeper system that Quantum Corps went after ten years ago. We think it’s become active again.”
Bertelle spoke up. “There’s more than one source, though. We’ve also seen other signal streams from several point sources in the outer solar system, at a great distance from the Sun, possibly a body in the Oort Cloud.”
“Or possible from this Devil’s Eye phenomena…we have arguments about it day and night,” Marks said.
Bertelle acknowledged that. “Pinning down the source of quantum signals from the trail of decoherence wakes is damnably hard, as you know. It’s an inexact science. Best guess is Devil’s Eye may be one source… but there are indications of multiple sources out there…we’re still working the problem.”
“And the signals are intermittent,” Marks added. “We think we’ve got a good handle on one burst and it just up and vanishes, right in front of us. There some kind of signal hopping scheme going on as well…some very complex entanglement structure. Whoever or whatever is sending these signals is able to manipulate quantum states in a way we can only dream about…I’d love to get my hands on that system.”
“Where is this vidcon, Doctor?” Liu asked.
“My office…if you want, I can have you paged…set your b
adges to my number and Farside will send you instructions on how to get there…right to your wristpads.”
Both officers did that. “I think we’ll head for the canteen,” Liu told them. “Captain Karst and I have some things to discuss.”
The canteen at Farside was located in Kepler wing, the southernmost of the domes that made up the complex. A hand-painted wooden sign had been nailed over the hatch. It read: Fiji Island Lagoon. Inside, the place had been done up with ersatz palm trees, bamboo seats and a general Polynesian theme. Another wooden sign nearby was angled to point upward, toward the ceiling. It read: Bora Bora 238,565 miles.
Victoria Liu pointed out the containment pod on the bar, containment for swarms of nanobots. It was shaped and decorated to look like an old-timey beer keg.
“Must be the theme of the day…this place can probably change themes in a minute. Polynesian today…who knows, maybe African safari tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” said Karst. “Nothing like a little piece of home on the rump side of the Moon.”
They took seats at the bar and ordered beers, some kind of local concoction.
Liu regarded the Karst coolly. “What’s it like burrowing like moles, Captain? You ever get claustrophobia?”
Karst took a long pull on his beer and belched slightly, making a face. It tasted like cat piss. “We’re too busy, Commander. There’s a lot going on inside a geoplane when you’re underground…what with the borer, the treads, maintaining depth and heading, scanning rock layers, all the systems…we don’t have time to think about it.”
“What kind of speeds can you get out of those things?”
Karst smiled. “A blistering three kilometers per hour, if we floor it. Pedal to the metal, a geoplane does well to average two klicks. If you’re sliding through shales and quartz strata, that’s some of the hardest rock around. We have to chew our way through that and hope we don’t set off any tremors, loosen things up too much.”
“You go pretty deep?”
Karst shrugged. “Geoplanes are rated to four thousand meters, depending on the subsurface composition. It’s a pressure rating on the hull…like a submarine. Too deep and we either get crushed or the stuff’s just too hard for the borer to push through.”
Liu understood. “I’ve ridden damaged shuttles through some pretty hair-raising reentries in my lifetime. I’ve ejected from a shuttle in a launch abort…that was out of Mariner City, Mars about ten years ago. I’ve been through explosions and fires and nanobot big bangs aboard ships in deep space…that’ll get your attention. But I can’t say I’ve ever gone underground in a ship like you guys. How many of these geoplanes are there?”
Karst pressed a few buttons on his wristpad. “I just sent you a standard TOE for Boundary Patrol. We’re organized into detachments…there are five, stationed at tectonic plate boundaries around the world. Plus each plane has two crews: Red and Gold, just like the Navy’s boomers. Really, geoplane ops are a lot like submarine missions in the way they’re organized. Probably like Frontier Corps too, I imagine.”
Liu regarded the suds foaming on top of her beer. “I don’t know about that, Captain. I’ve been with Frontier Corps for twelve years, the last five with Inner Planets detachment. Cycling around Earth, Mars and Venus like some kind of taxi service. You know how it is: weeks and weeks of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. Now with this business in the outer system, we may finally get to see some action…get our hands dirty and fry some bots for a change. Most think Frontier Corps is run by nannies and grannies. At least, you’re on the front lines….”
Karst wasn’t convinced of that. Initially, he’d pegged this female O-5 as some kind of hardass space cowboy, but he could see her point. Atomgrabbers, geoplane drivers, space cowboys...they were all the same: everybody wanted to get in tight with Config Zero and blow the cloud of bugs to kingdom come.
“We’re all tired of negotiating and maneuvering and collecting intel, for Chrissakes,” Liu went on. “We know all we need to know. We know where Config Zero is located. I say blast the sumbitch with everything we’ve got and see what happens.”
“Yeah, maybe that’ll work,” Karst said. “Unless Zero’s got big brothers out there in the Great Beyond. I guess that’s where you guys come in…we’ll stay Earthside and clean up the neighborhood and you guys make sure the fence is up and working, so we can keep the place clean.”
“Amen to that.” Liu and Karst toasted their obvious tactical genius and finished off their beers. Liu belched like a man and ordered them both another round from the servbot, which took away their empty mugs and whirred off to get some more. “Then after we’ve cleaned up the whole solar system, we can see about these Assimilationist goons…nothing but spies and saboteurs, if you ask me.”
Karst heard his wristpad chime. They had five minutes to make the vidcon in Percy Marks’ office over in Newton wing. “It’s political correctness run amok. So many people have fallen for this Assimilationist crap that nobody’s sure how to deal with Config Zero anymore. And you’ve got this Symborg character stirring things up…he’s just a cloud of bugs, for crying out loud.”
Liu agreed. “People get their panties all in a wad about assimilating with the bots, the Old Ones, the Messiah, some kind of New World…they’re just machines. And we created them. ANAD technology has ruined us all. I’d sooner turn my washer-dryer into some kind of god as faint and swoon in front of this Symborg creep, like so many people do.”
The chime sounded again. Karst took his refill straight from the servbot and chugged it in one gulp. “Guess we’d better get moving, Commander. We both want to be well informed for our big day in Paris next week….”
The Frontier Corps space cowboy and the geoplane driver staggered out of the canteen together and made their way through the buried tunnel to Newton wing just in time for the vidcon, clutching and grabbing at every post and stanchion along the way to keep from pitching head first to the floor.
Percy Marks already had the vid up and running, with the gnome-like face of Major Brian Folkes, Quantum Corps Q2 officer, filling the screen. Folkes’ face was centered among a mosaic of tiled data windows. Marks showed the two officers the best seats to take for proper cam shots back to Folkes. The Q2 officer was billeted at UNIFORCE Paris headquarters…the Quartier General.
Folkes dispensed with the niceties. “The purpose of this briefing is to bring both of you up to speed on what Q2 knows about these quantum signals. I presume Dr. Marks has filled you in on what Farside has found?”
Victoria Liu had already taken an instant dislike to this officious little prick. Intel types were like that, she had long ago decided. “We have, Major. There’s a steady stream of quantum signals coming from off-Earth…not yet decrypted. Decoherence wake analysis shows one locus at Europa…probably that Keeper unit and another locus from the outer solar system. That’s what we know at the moment, Major.”
Folkes’ eyebrows lifted. Liu figured that was about as dramatic a response as the gnome was capable of. “Very good, Commander. But there’s more. Sigint’s been working these signals for some time…they come in bursts—“ he paused while one of the tiled data windows animated the signals streaming in toward Earth, like a hail of arrows fired off by Indians. “Both Farside and Q2 have been working on this. I won’t bore you with the details—“
“Thanks,” Liu said sourly.
“—in any case, we’ve run correlation analyses and the results show that these signal bursts correlate well with increased earthquake activity. Also BioShield detections of increased swarm activity are showing up.”
That got Karst’s attention. “Showing up where exactly, Major?”
Folkes leaned off cam for a moment, pressing buttons. The data windows changed to show geo maps, fault lines snaking around the Earth’s upper crust. Some were outlined and flashing to draw attention. “Locations are near tectonic plate boundaries, as you can see.
Somehow when these decoherence waves increase, swarm activity increases and severe earthquakes and tremors result. It’s not random. Somehow, Config Zero is loading these plate boundaries with swarms and they’re triggering quakes.”
Karst studied the maps. “We’re setting up Boundary Patrol sectors and stations near a lot of these fault lines right now. We can react to the swarms but life would be better if we could cut off these command signals at the source.”
“That’s my bailiwick,” Liu said. She explained Operation Sentinel in general details, not knowing if Folkes was fully cleared. “Both of us are in Paris in two days, for more briefings. This Devil’s Eye anomaly may well be some kind of command post or transmitter or something, sending along orders to Config Zero. Seems to me we should work on disrupting their command and control at this end too, bollix up Config Zero so orders don’t get down to the little troops. That would help Captain Karst too, with his counter-swarm ops underground.”
“I’m part of those same briefings you’re in, Commander.” Folkes adjusted some kind of data glasses on the bridge of his nose, looked up at the cam like a weary professor lecturing a particularly dense student. “UNSAC himself is driving the show. I happen to know tactical coordination is a key theme of the briefings. Frontier Corps, Boundary Patrol, Quantum Corps, Q2 and BioShield…there are a helluva lot of hands in this pie.”
“Probably too many,” Liu decided. But that was for The Big Guys in Paris to figure out. “Major, what does Q2 know about Config Zero right now…about its tactics, comm protocols, weapons, defenses? I’m wondering if there shouldn’t be some kind of special op against Config Zero itself…something to at least disrupt the chain of command here.”
Folkes worked his keyboard and the data windows blinked and scrolled more data. “Unofficially, there’s something in the works along those lines. I can’t say much more at the moment. But that’s on the agenda for your briefings.”
Karst had a question. “What about this Keeper unit at Jupiter…at Europa, I believe. That’s a lot closer than the Oort Cloud or wherever it is you’re off to.”
Liu tried not to be too patronizing. Karst was young. He didn’t know about the Golden Horde case and Operation Jovian Hammer ten years ago. It was in the Quantum Corps archives and it was supposed to be required study for QC officers. But Karst had been in diapers. She suppressed a faint smile.
“Ask that question in Paris, Captain. General Winger will be only too happy to enlighten you. He commanded the mission that tried to disable the Keeper.”
Karst shook his head. “Guess I should do my homework, huh, Commander? I’ve heard of Jovian Hammer but I don’t know all the details.”
“Study your enemy, Captain. Always sound military advice. Major…are we through here?”
Folkes scanned his board. “You’ve got the basics from Q2. And Dr. Marks has briefed you in. The rest can wait…till you get here.”
“Very well.” Liu turned to Karst. “Looks like we’ve got a date, Captain. Once we drop Earthside, I’ll show you around Paris…we’ll see all the sights and have a grand time, I’m sure.”
Karst chuckled uneasily. This commander from Frontier Corps was truly beginning to get on his nerves. Maybe they were supposed to be fighting the same enemy. But space people had always seemed creepy to Karst. Maybe they spent too long circling around and around in the void. Maybe it was cosmic radiation or loneliness or some strange virus. You never could tell with space people.
He smiled inwardly. She would probably say the same thing about me. Burrowing underground like moles, wriggling under mountains and oceans and cities like some kind of worm. That’s what Config Zero and the Bugs have done to us. The enemy’s everywhere and nowhere at the same time. When we can’t find any enemy to fight, we fight each other.
The drop via shuttle from Gateway Station would take the better part of two days.
Johnny Winger and the Great Rift Zone Page 28
