Johnny Winger and the Great Rift Zone

by Philip Bosshardt

CHAPTER 17

  Aboard the Michelangelo (UNS-212)

  In Orbit Around Sedna

  December 22, 2110 (U.T.)

  0230 hours (Ship Time)

  Hawley watched from the gangway as the landing party slipped into the docking tunnel and headed into Icarus. Stoltz, Ng, Demetrious, Grant, to a one, they were all grim and tight-lipped. Element B was the last one.

  “Commander—“ Hawley wanted a final word with his executive officer. “Hold up.”

  Element B was not dressed out in a hypersuit. It wasn’t necessary for an angel, not when you could fab any protective covering needed in a few minutes. Humans could fab a suit too but the Corps had policies and policy said you wore a hypersuit when leaving the ship for an away mission.

  “Yes, sir?”

  Hawley came up to Element B, although not too close. The angel seemed human enough on close inspection, but your mind still rebelled, knowing that the bots that made up B could change in a heartbeat…one minute a human, the next minute something else. It was instinctive to keep your distance…when you weren’t sure what might happen, what might trigger a change. Hawley silently berated himself for his reaction but there it was.

  “Whatever happens down there, Commander, go by the book. Don’t take needless chances. I don’t want Icarus’ coming back up here with a load of dead heroes. Is that understood?”

  Element B nodded some kind of understanding. Hawley had always thought the angel had dead eyes, flat eyes, no real life behind them. “I will endeavor to fulfill all mission goals and objectives, Captain. Risk factors have been calculated and assigned to all foreseeable contingencies.”

  “Great,” Hawley said. “Just don’t do anything stupid.”

  With that, Element B boarded Icarus and the lander was made ready for departure. Hawley went back to the command deck.

  The undocking and descent took an hour. When the lander had settled gently onto the cratered plateau a few hundred meters from the Igloo base module, Corporal Eddie Stoltz turned to Sammy Ng—both were riding in Icarus’ rear compartment-- and said, “It just don’t get any better than this, Ng-baby…another beautiful day in paradise.”

  “All hands make ready for egress,” said Element B over the 1MC. “Full suits…make ready for opposed entry. Weapons to full charge and safeties off. I will egress first and make a sweep of the area.”

  “Suits me,” Ng muttered.

  The angel left the command deck and made his way aft to the lockout chamber. It seemed strange for a crewman to be going outside without a hypersuit. Once inside the lockout, Element B cycled the de-press system and stabbed a button to open the hatch. Outside, dust devils danced around the lander’s legs.

  Element B decided to change config as he egressed. In seconds, the angel had lost structure and form and deconstructed into an amorphous cloud of bots that drifted out of the lockout and down onto the surface. The bot master executed a search of the area. Almost immediately, high thermals and EM spikes could be detected. Element B homed in on the spikes…they were coming from the direction of the Igloo base module.

  “Picking up spikes on heading zero nine five…centroid approximately one hundred meters…no side lobes…highly concentrated…Corporal Stoltz and Corporal Ng…make egress and follow me. Set HERF to maximum charge—“

  Inside Icarus, Stoltz rolled his eyes. “I guess this means no afternoon nap, huh?” He zipped up his hypersuit and followed Ng into the lockout. Moments later, they dropped to the surface. “Commander, where the hell are you?”

  Element B had formed a small sparkling cloud, which drifted like a scintillating mist across the surface of Sedna, toward the EM spikes. “Here, Corporal…I’ve changed config. Follow this heading and stay back twenty meters…I’m going to close on the target and reconnoiter.”

  Stoltz and Ng could barely make out the sparkling mist in the distance. Just distinguishing it in the dim light from Sedna’s ever-present dust devils was hard. Stoltz set his suit for Element B’s heading and kangaroo-hopped in that direction, leaping five meters or more in Sedna’s low gravity.

  From his own scan, Element B could see that the target was surely another swarm, prowling around the perimeter of Igloo. Deconstructed and maneuvering on three-quarters propulsor, Big Mike’s executive officer probed ahead with electromagnetic fingers, trying to get some structure on the swarm, trying to resolve the bots and locate the master.

  He closed the remaining distance in a few minutes, with Stoltz and Ng right behind. Acoustic and EM returns showed the enemy bots were roughly spherical in shape, festooned with effectors and propulsors. “Stoltz and Ng…spread out. Move laterally twenty meters and hold that position. I’m going to engage—“

  Stoltz came down from a leap and skidded to a stop, cascading a sheet of dust into the sky. Ng nearly collided with him. They separated and went to take up flanking positions. “Excuse me, sir…but shouldn’t we hose ‘em down first…scatter the formation with HERF?”

  The twinkling cloud that was Element B continued closing on the outer bands of the enemy bots. “Under normal assault conditions, you would be correct, Corporal. However, I am endeavoring to approach the master bot…to contain and capture it. If I can do that, the rest of the swarm will lose all combat effectiveness. Hold your position—“

  Stoltz shrugged. That’s why you’re the exec, he thought. He dropped to one knee and let his hypersuit scour out a man-made defilade, partially burying him in the loose regolith. Then he sighted his HERF carbine on the center of the enemy bot cloud.

  “Closing now…I have detected a large spike in EM activity, with high thermals…assuming this is the master bot, I’m closing on that vector—when I give the word, open fire—“

  To Eddie Stoltz, the hell of nanoscale combat was that you couldn’t see anything. It wasn’t like anything he’d ever trained for. He squinted through his helmet scope, upped the magnification and still couldn’t make anything out. There was Igloo, half-buried in the soil, now enveloped in what looked to the untrained eye like a faint dust halo. Stoltz knew that was no dust however. Something inside of him wanted to see explosions, big booms and crackling bolts of beamfire. That’s what combat was supposed to be like.

  Instead, he saw what looked like a swirling thunderstorm in miniature. Popping and flickering lights flashed on and off along a line of engagement all around the end of Igloo. You couldn’t tell who was who, or what the hell was going on. Stoltz had been a Frontier Corps crewmen for ten years, and like all crewmen, he knew about bots and swarms and Quantum Corps. But it might as well have been magic to Stoltz. Real men didn’t fight this way. Real men didn’t break down into clouds of bugs and disappear.

  “Sammy—I can’t tell what’s what…can you?”

  Ng, not ten feet away, defiladed as was Stoltz, sighted through his own carbine scope. “Nope. Looks like a dust devil to me, with a lot of light bulbs going off.”

  “That’s what I thought…Commander, could you let us know what we should do back here?”

  Element B was deep into the assault. He’d detected what he thought was the bot master, and had maneuvered to intercept. Now his own swarm was entangled with the enemy and bots were colliding all up and down the line of engagement, slashing, thrashing and zapping each other in a wild melee that nobody bigger than a few nanometers could see. The space around Igloo churned with ferocious bond breaking as bots collided and slammed each other, grappling and pinching and banging until atom fluff and loose electrons swelled outward in an ever-expanding supernova in slow motion.

  “Corporal, I am attempting to engage and contain the bot master…I have him in sight but defensive shielding is strong….hold your position and be ready to lay down a barrage of rf when I give the signal….”

  “Okay, Commander…will do…it’s just that we can’t tell what’s going on up there.”

  Element B bore down on the spherical bot master and closed the rema
ining distance in less than a minute. He thrust carbene grabbers toward a midsection seam in the bot’s outer housing, thinking the thing would be weakest there. But the enemy bot skittered just out of reach and let fly a jolt from its own bond breakers. Ouch! Element B swerved away when the pulse pinched off a few grabbers. Have to try a different vector—

  Stoltz found his mouth dry. “I don’t like this, Sammy. How can we tell who’s winning? We should just zap the lot of them and be done with it.”

  Ng disagreed. “Hey, just ‘cause we can’t see them doesn’t mean we don’t follow orders. Commander said hold tight and that’s what I’m going to do.”

  Stoltz wasn’t buying it. “For all I know, Element B’s one of them. Jeez, they got Favors and Westerlund. What’s to keep the bastards from grabbing Element B, you know…zapping his config and turning him into a zombie or something, like one of them.”

  “Just cool it, man…keep your pants on and lay low, like the Commander said.”

  But Stoltz was spooked by the whole affair. The damn Bugs were everywhere, inside the ship, inside people…hell, even people you thought you knew turned out to be angels. Look at Commander Liu…and she’d tried to destroy the ship. Who could tell what Element B really was? Assimilationists wanted to make Bugs out of everybody, turn all of us into swarm angels.

  Stoltz decided he was having none of it. He boosted up from his defiladed position, shedding sheets of dust everywhere, and stood upright, then crouching, moved toward Igloo and the firefight that no one could really see, but they both knew was there. He raised his HERF carbine to fire, thumbed the selector to Auto.

  “Stoltz…Eddie…what the hell…get down, man! You’re a sitting duck…you’ll get swarmed—“ Ng started to get up himself.

  That’s when Stoltz opened up, hosing down the whole area with one massive barrage of rf.

  The thunderclap of a radio freq wave swept across the site like a hurricane, scattering dust and parts and equipment everywhere. Stoltz cycled his carbine and let fly volley after volley, stirring everything into a dusty haze. Through the haze, the faint flicker of nanobotic combat could still be seen, jagged veins of light popping on and off as the combat zone was scrambled and thrashed again and again.

  Sammy Ng knew he had to do something. Element B was in that maelstrom, trying to engage the enemy bots. If Stoltz hadn’t already mix-mastered everything in sight, he soon would.

  “Eddie…Corporal Stoltz, cease fire! Cease fire…you’ve got friendlies in the area…Demetrious…Grant, get the hell out here!”

  Inside Icarus, Demetrious and Grant were already closing up their suits and scrambling into the lockout. In minutes, they had dropped to the surface and were kangaroo-hopping up the slope toward Igloo and the firefight.

  In the very midst of the melee, Element B had to break off the assault and withdraw. The bot master containing the config driver that created and maintained Element B as a human-like angel pulled out of the engagement and sought refuge in a forest of silicon atoms, dust atoms that swirled like a raging river in the rf pulses that Stoltz was letting fly. Like riding a kayak down roaring rapids, Element B surfed and staggered his way through the gale, hunkering down as best he could. The rest of Element B’s swarm had long since been blown to pieces. There was no point in replicating now, not while the sleet of atoms and molecules roared past.

  “Surface team…cease fire…cease fire immediately!” Element B sent the signal out on all bands. “Breaking off the attack….withdraw and cease fire!”

  That’s when Sammy Ng tackled Stoltz and the two of them went flying into the regolith headfirst.

  There was a scramble to disengage, feet and arms and legs flying everywhere. Stoltz had lost his carbine but before he could crawl forward to retrieve it, Julie Grant slid to a halt and kicked the weapon further away. Corporal Demetrious was right behind. Ng hauled Stoltz back to the ground.

  “MOB him--!” Ng yelled over the circuit. “He’s gone nuts…put the MOB on him!”

  Stoltz wrestled and kicked and punched and gouged trying to squirm free. “Let me go, assholes…don’t you see…it’s our only chance…we can blast the sumbitches right here and now—“

  Ng wrestled him back to the ground, just as Demetrious triggered his own MOB canister. A fog of bots sprayed out and covered the writhing mass of Ng and Stoltz in seconds. Ng pulled out just in time, letting the tightening mesh of bots do its job. In seconds, the Mobility Obstruction Barrier had contracted and tightened, pinning Eddie Stoltz to the ground, a squirming mass in a dusty hypersuit. A few more kicks and grunts and the corporal finally relented to the inevitable and gave up with a loud hmmpphh.

  “You stupid friggin’ bastards…can’t you see?” Stoltz’ voice was muffled, strained with the effort of resisting the barrier. “Element B’s one of them…it makes sense…him and Commander Liu—“

  Ng kicked at the squirming Systems Tech. “Shut up…what about Element B…is he still on tactical?”

  Element B had heard the whole melee over the crew circuit and replied, “Surface team, I am endeavoring to survive the HERF bursts…I’ve lost all replicants but the master is functioning normally…all systems returning to nominal status…I will try to disengage from this silicon lattice and seek out the enemy again—“

  Ng stood up and scanned around the Igloo work site. Dust still rained down on them but a quick look showed no EM spikes, no thermals, no acoustic anomalies. “Commander, I’m not getting anything nearby. Unless those reddish hills are bots, it’s all quiet. Stoltz must have dispersed them.”

  “I will scan at lower band strengths,” Element B told them. “Now going to max rate rep, re-building my swarm—“

  And even as Ng, Demetrious and Grant looked on, a tiny pulsating light materialized ten meters from Igloo, growing by the second into a miniature supernova as Element B grabbed atoms and slammed structure together. The light flickered and scintillated in rhythmic waves as it grew in radius, becoming a small star with spirals of dust soon entrained in a swirl that enveloped the ground in a slow-motion cyclone. Behind the dim vale of dust, structure began to take shape…first a face, then shoulders, then arms, then an entire upper torso.

  Right before their eyes, Commander Element B’s human form gradually took shape, at least most of it. Only his feet and lower legs remained unformed and incomplete. The angel swept forward like a ghostly wraith and came up to the troopers, still thickening into human-like consistency but no hypersuit.

  “Commander, you look like you’re ready for an afternoon stroll,” Ng observed.

  “Unfortunately, I had to break off my attack…I had detected what I believe to be the bot master for this swarm, but HERF fire disrupted my tactics—“

  The ball of the MOBnet containing Corporal Stoltz squirmed and flexed on the ground. Demetrious kicked at the ball. “Pipe down in there, will you? Commander, what do you want done with this?”

  Element B examined the MOB net closely. “The mesh config needs work. Perhaps I can improve the barrier design sometime…take the Corporal back to Icarus and secure him in the cargo hold. Make sure he can move about and breathe okay. Corporals Grant and Ng, you’re with me.”

  “Will do, Commander.” Demetrious took hold of the MOB and dragged it bumping and bouncing across the ground toward the lander. Locked inside, Stoltz would have a painful ride back to the ship.

  Sammy Ng scanned the area around the Igloo base module. “I’m not picking up anything, Commander. Stoltz must have dispersed the swarms when he fired.”

  “Don’t be too sure, Corporal,” Element B said. “These bots have amazing configuration control. They can assume any form, any shape.” He stared at the Igloo module for a moment, scanning the cylindrical structure. “Even forms familiar to us. Corporal Ng, I’m going to go small again, Config One, and probe some of those reddish hillocks nearby. You come along…when I give the word, you fire your HERF weapon. Anything
nanobotic around here will quickly lose config in an rf wave like that. I believe I can deal with any swarms we encounter…the trick is to know what is a swarm and what isn’t.”

  Amen to that, Ng thought but didn’t say. He watched Element B carefully as the Exec started to de-construct before his eyes.

  What do you want me to do, Commander?” asked Grant.

  By the time he replied, Element B was already halfway to a cloud. “Go inside Igloo, Corporal. Get started activating systems. Igloo’s the control center for the whole network. Once Captain Hawley starts laying down the bot probes in space, we’ll need that control to shape and interpret the data from the probes.”

  “Very well, sir…I’m heading inside Igloo.”

  “Corporal Ng, I’m moving out on heading two two five degrees relative. Arm your HERF gun and follow me…my objective is that group of hillocks on the rise one hundred and ten meters up the slope.”

  Ng followed cautiously, keeping the flickering swarm that was Element B more or less in sight. It was hard in the dim light and shadows to distinguish Element B from Sedna’s persistent dust devils.

  Maybe Stoltz was right, Ng thought. Following a swarm to locate and fight another swarm. How nuts was that?

  Julie Grant made the outer hatch of Igloo just as Ng and Element B moved out. She did a quick recon around the perimeter of the module, just to check, just to make sure. She kicked at a few pebbles and they rolled like pebbles. She brushed against a small mound of dirt and it crumbled like dirt.

  “This is silly,” she muttered to herself. The swarms had everybody spooked. Nobody trusted anybody. She didn’t see anything out of the ordinary and came back to the hatch, spinning the latch until a hiss escaped from the interior compartment and the hatch was open. Grant cycled the latch fully and the small motor drove the hatch wide. She peered inside, saw nothing, then hopped up to the bottom rung of the ladder and started to pull herself in.

  That’s when she came face to face with Sergeant Sheila Westerlund.

  Grant stifled a scream and fell backward.

  Seventy five kilometers above Sedna, Michelangelo had just completed her exit burn and was heading out of orbit, on a course paralleling the tiny planetesimal.

  “Residuals look good, Skipper,” said Dean Kohl. “Nearly zero rates in all axes…just some minor damping and trimming going on. Big Mike’s on course and settled in.”

  Hawley barely heard his Propulsion Systems Officer. He was studying returns off the long-range scan they had been running, sweeping space around Sedna for anything that might pose a threat. “Dean, I don’t like the looks of this—it may be Element B’s anomaly again…diffuse signal, spikes in certain EM bands…ISAAC’s saying it could be a swarm…or a dust cloud.”

  “What’s the distance? What bearing?”

  Hawley tapped a few buttons on the screen. “Thirty six thousand kilometers to the leading edge…bearing one one two…it’s on an intercept course, too. Heliocentric orbit, so it’s not in orbit around Sedna.”

  Kohl saw it. “What do you want to do, Skipper? Our mission is to complete this Sentinel Net and get the hell out of here.”

  “That’s what we’re going to do, Dean…but this thing’s on an intercept course…an intersecting orbit with ours. I make closest approach in about ten hours, give or take.”

  “We could maneuver around it. Change orbit.”

  Hawley shrugged. “We could. But mission parameters say this is the preferred orbit to lay down the sensor grid. The base module on Igloo is sited to accommodate sensors in this orbit. We change that…we’ll have to re-calculate where Igloo goes…maybe not even on Sedna….”

  Hawley studied the long-range scan. “I can’t tell from this distance what the anomaly is. But ISAAC’s giving it a forty percent probability of being a swarm of some kind, based on EM spikes and spectrum analysis. We have to stay in this orbit for now, to get the grid started. But I want to be ready for anything. Dean—“

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Big Mike’s no battleship but we do have weapons. Get a couple of techs up to the weapons bay. Make sure everything works…if we have to make a fight, I want to be ready.”

  “Yes, sir…I’ll grab Petty and Graebel…they’re both electronics techs. They were with the ship from day one of conversion.”

  Kohl went aft down Michelangelo’s central gangway and soon found the two techs. He explained what the Captain wanted.

  Petty complained, “Lieutenant, this ship’s not built for combat. Hell, she’s nothing but an old cycler, with a paint job and some new parts. Begging the Lieutenant’s pardon, sir, but isn’t this slightly nuts?”

  “Probably, but it doesn’t matter. Come with me.”

  The three of them went back to A deck and climbed through a small access tunnel that surrounded the main compartment.

  Converted at Phobos Station months before, Sergeant Petty was right. Michelangelo had once been a cycler ship, flying the Venus-Earth-Mars route for years like an old city bus. The shipyard had made her ready for deep space ops at Phobos and, as an afterthought and on the specific orders of CINCSPACE, a suite of weapons had been literally bolted on to her forward compartment—A Deck.

  When she had departed Phobos Station on the Operation Sentinel mission, Big Mike sported pods containing HERF guns, magnetic impulse emitters, high-power microwave emitters, and, for good measure, a coilgun and a magazine full of kinetic rounds. Now wedged into the weapons bay that topped A Deck like a rooster’s crest, it was Kohl’s job to make sure all the gadgets worked as designed.

  For the next few hours, Kohl and his party checked out Big Mike’s weapons suite, while Hawley worked with comm techs on C deck to prime and launch a series of sensor pods along Michelangelo’s route. Each pod contained a few racks of instrumentation capable of detecting nanobotic signatures at extreme distance, tuned for known EM bands and thermal effects that bots most often used. Nobody knew if the Old Ones worked the same way, or even if they were nanobotic in nature. But then nobody had a better idea either.

  When their entire complement of pods had been laid down and all systems synched, the pods would form a detector grid capable, through the magic of interferometry, of being able to detect normal nanobotic activity at great distances from the solar system…some engineers even boasted the grid could read bot signatures up to a quarter light year from the Sun. Not everybody believed that and Cory Hawley didn’t know what to believe…only that the grid had to be laid down in specific orbits and specific distances from each other, then linked with the base module on Sedna for the whole contraption to work.

  Hawley let the techs do their work and spent most of the day on A deck, checking in with Kohl on the checkout of their weapons and watching, with growing unease, as the ‘anomaly’ they had detected grew larger with each passing hour. He spent hours with ISAAC, the ship’s command AI, studying and massaging the data on the anomaly, trying to tease out some kind of indication that it was or was not a swarm.

  Three hours from intercept, ISAAC upped the probability of the anomaly being a swarm to sixty two percent. A few moments later, Dean Kohl popped his head onto the command deck.

  “All checked out, Skipper. Petty and Graebel fixed a few things…one of the HERF oscillators was installed backward. But everything works now. We’re fully charged. All elements work. And the coilgun’s loaded for bear.”

  Hawley frowned at the display ISAAC had put up on their main screens. “Just in time, Lieutenant. Look at the size of that mother…it’s bigger than Sedna…must be ten thousand kilometers wide at least.”

  Kohl came in and took a seat at the main console. “Hell of a dust storm, if you ask me.”

  “ISAAC says it’s no dust storm…it’s one hell of a cloud of bots…and it sure as hell ain’t one of ours.”

  “The Old Ones?”

  “Maybe advance scouts. I’m going to squirt this back to Farside and see what they
think. We could be the first ones ever to see or engage the Old Ones. Dean…this may be Devil’s Eye we’re looking at.”

  “I don’t suppose we can go around it.”

  “Not and lay down the grid where we’re supposed to. ISAAC, what are we looking at here? How far to the anomaly?”

  The ship’s AI spoke in a measured tone. “Estimating distance to formation leading edge at thirty thousand one hundred and fifty five kilometers. The formation is in heliocentric orbit which will intersect our orbit in two hours ten minutes, present speed and course.

  “ISAAC, can you resolve what this thing is…dust or bots or something else?”

  “Long-range scan indicates that the formation is a diffuse cluster of discrete elements of mean size approximately twenty-five nanometers main dimension…smaller than normal dust particles. Detecting increased energy levels in certain electromagnetic bands, consistent with assembler activity as we understand it. Probability that this formation is a swarm of nanobotic elements now approaching seventy four percent.”

  “Swell,” Hawley muttered. “Dean, it looks like Big Mike will have the dubious distinction of being the first humans to engage the Old Ones. One for the history books. Let’s make it a good one—enable HERF and magpulse weapons.”

  Kohl strapped himself in and set about enabling the weapons systems from the main console.

  “HERF cells now at full charge, primed and ready. I’m slaving the emitter array to ISAAC’s coordinates for swarm centroid. Magnetic impulse battery also at full charge. All emitters on line and tracking. Targeting sensors have acquired—“

  Hawley studied the orbit plots of Michelangelo and the swarm, overlaid on his console display. “I wish Element B were here…I’m not a Quantum Corps guy but I do know one thing…the best way to fight a swarm is with another swarm.”

  “I think we can jolt ‘em pretty good with what we have,” Kohl decided.

  Michelangelo steadily closed the distance toward the intersect point, even as she dispatched several sensor pods into position along the way. Hawley was heartened as the pods were ejected from Big Mike’s C Deck canister and took up their positions exactly as programmed. Moments later, the pods had established a comm link and were sending back data on the nearby swarm, just as designed.

  “At least the pods seem to work. Two down, a hundred and eighteen more to go. ISAAC, how far to the swarm centroid now?”

  “Twenty thousand four hundred and two kilometers. Coming within effective range of our main batteries.”

  “Let’s give them a taste of what we’re about,” Hawley decided. “On my mark, max discharge pulse on HERF…maybe we can break up the cloud enough to clear a path for our next pod deploy—“

  “HERF is ready—“ Kohl poised his finger over the button.

  “Five…four…three…two…one…mark! Let ‘em have it, Dean!”

  Kohl pressed the button and a pulse of high-frequency radio waves shot out of the emitter array on top of Big Mike’s A Deck. The pulse traveled the remaining distance in a few seconds, slamming into the swarm, scattering, shredding and obliterating bots along the outer perimeter of the cloud.

  “ISAAC, report…any effect?”

  “Scanning now…scanning…edge effects only…some reduction of EM activity, some drop-off in thermal effects…definite effects, there is a hole in the side of the formation, but it’s filling rapidly…swarm is reconstituting, changing config…centroid is maneuvering…changing course to intercept….”

  Hawley could see the story on his console. They had managed to bash the thing but it replicated fast and grew back. Now the swarm was turning, wheeling about to intercept Michelangelo directly, presenting itself front-on to their approach.

  Kohl was exultant. “We stung it, Skipper! Look how that front edge is scalloped and misshapen…we did something to it.”

  “I think we just made it mad, Dean. Fire away, three pulses HERF and mag! Set a twenty degree spread.”

  Michelangelo rocked slightly as the pulses discharged and streaked toward their target. Through the forward screens, both men could see jagged flashes erupt in space, like slow-motion lightning bolts, where the radio waves and mag fields intersected the swarm. Atoms were ripped apart and bonds sheared off, liberating untold energies into the vacuum. A series of flashes and bolts lit up space ahead of them, still more than ten thousand kilometers distant.

  “ISAAC, did we hurt ‘em?”

  Estimating swarm has been reduced by two point one percent in frontal dimension…swarm is reconstituting…possible aspect change…detecting possible config change—“

  Months later, when the first moments of the Battle of Sedna were replayed and analyzed, the report that ISAAC made indicating a ‘possible aspect change’ was considered to be the first known instance of quantum displacement effects seen in the encounter with the Devil’s Eye phenomena. Displacements effect had been observed before, in the Jovian Hammer operation some ten years before, when UNISPACE and Quantum Corps units had engaged the Keeper entity submerged in the subsurface ocean of Jupiter’s moon Europa. That encounter had produced evidence that Config Zero / Keeper entities possessed the ability to displace themselves and nearby structures to different times and spaces by manipulating entangled quantum states…a technique far beyond anyone’s ability to analyze or understand.

  Now it seemed that the swarms surrounding Sedna and probing the outer reaches of the solar system possessed the same ability.

  It was ISAAC who first reported on the phenomena.

  “…detecting possible config change…all aspects have changed…swarm has…swarm has…re-calibrating…now re-analyzing…I have no explanation for this phenomenon…swarm has relocated to…analyzing sensor inputs for continuity…”

  Even ISAAC had trouble explaining what had happened. In the blink of an eye, the Devil’s Eye swarm had vanished and re-appeared hundreds of thousands of kilometers from its last position. Now, instead of following an intersecting orbit with Michelangelo, the entire swarm had jumped to a new trajectory behind the ship, moving away on a diverging orbit inside of Big Mike…an orbit that looped inside of Sedna’s orbit, thousands of kilometers closer to the Sun.

  Hawley shook his head, rubbed his eyes. “What the hell just happened? ISAAC, can you explain this--?”

  ISAAC took a few moments to respond, uncharacteristically for the AI. “Still computing new trajectory…still computing aspect change and config change…no data yet….”

  Dean Kohl gave up on their instrumentation and tried using his own Mark I eyeball, looking out the command deck’s portholes. “Did that thing just move through space like I think it did…from over here—“ he pointed ahead, “-to over there, like in a split second?”

  “Yeah, I think so…I read reports from the Jovian Hammer mission…General Winger’s trip to Europa ten years ago. That Keeper did the same thing…somehow, it could displace you in time and space if you got too close. Nobody could explain it then…some kind of weird quantum effect was what I heard…and now we’re seeing something similar. ISAAC, best fix on the swarm’s current position.”

  The AI crunched data for a few moments, then downloaded a new calculated position to their displays.

  Kohl sniffed. “Even ISAAC can’t believe it. How the hell do we engage something that can do that?”

  Hawley noted another sensor pod deployment was coming up. “We don’t. Maybe the Bugs don’t want to fight. It’s like they just went right around us.”

  “Then what are they doing here? Where’d they come from?”

  “Beats me, Lieutenant. All I know is we’ve got a job to do and the next deploy is two minutes away. Setting EJECT to Auto…interrogating pod command system…everything looks clean and green here…standby to launch—“

  Two minutes later, Michelangelo deployed her second sensor pod.

  “Looks like we’re moving away from that swarm now,” Hawley noted. “If ISAAC’s
computed their position right.”

  “Yeah, but if they jump again, they could show up right in front of us. What’s to keep them from doing that?”

  “Nothing I suppose. Better keep weapons enabled and fully charged. The ship will remain at battle stations for the time being. ISAAC, we’ve got several hours before the next pod launch…you have the conn. I’m calling an all-hands briefing in the crew’s mess…we have to figure out what we do next.”

  “ISAAC assuming command,” the AI replied solemnly. All the display screens blinked and a red triangle appeared on the main display…indicating that ISAAC was in control. Hawley and Kohl left the command deck and gathered everybody into the crew’s mess one deck below.

  “We did sting ‘em, didn’t we, Skipper?” asked Ndinka, the ship’s Congolese chief machinist’s mate. “I mean, we did hurt the bastards, didn’t we?”

  Hawley ran down the results of the brief engagement. “The bottom line is this: we hurt the swarm, but I’m not sure how much. It moved off---maybe re-located is a better term—and I’m not sure we had anything to do with that. Right now—“ he checked a report he’d brought from the command deck “the swarm’s several hundred thousand kilometers behind us. Don’t ask me how that happened…I need Element B to explain that. Even ISAAC has no explanation.”

  Norred, one of the Service techs from C deck, spoke up. “Skipper, does this mean we’re heading home?” There was a chorus of ‘yeahs” and agreements around the galley.

  “It does not. We’ve got a mission from UNISPACE to deploy a sensor net out here and we’re going to complete that mission. We’ve already dropped off two pods…the next one’s coming up in about fifteen hours. Once the pods are in place and the net’s working, we go home.”

  “Skipper, what about the landing detail?”

  “We’ve been trying to establish contact with Element B for the last hour…no luck so far. I can’t answer your question. After the next sensor drop, I’m turning Big Mike around and we’re heading back to Sedna and pick the detail up. They’ve got a job to do as well…getting that transmitter going. The network won’t work without it.”

  “We ought to leave Element B on that dirt pile of a world and be done with it,” a voice from the back muttered.

  “Belay that crap,” Hawley ordered. “Element B is the executive officer of this ship. You take orders from him just like you would me. Right now, he’s leading a critical part of this mission. As soon as I make contact, I’ll pass the word on how they’re doing.”

  With that, the briefing ended and Hawley and Kohl headed back to A deck.

  “Skipper, there’s a lot of scuttlebutt about the Exec. You know that. A lot of the crew don’t trust him…especially with what happened with Commander Liu…now this swarm out here. They think he’s one of them.”

  Hawley slipped into the left-hand seat on the command deck and checked for messages from the landing party. There were none. “I know, Dean, but Element B’s in the chain of command. We start letting the crew vote on who they like best as commander, we’re in trouble. This is not a popularity contest.”

  “No, sir, I understand that …I was just trying to see how this impacts command effectiveness. Crew cohesion and command effectiveness…that’s always important…especially way out here on the edge of nowhere, fighting off Bugs that can jump around in space. Skipper, Norred and the others are right…we shouldn’t be out here…not a puny little ship like ours. The Corps should’ve formed up a whole friggin’ armada to do this job.”

  Hawley waved a hand. “I’ll take that under advisement…now see if you can raise the landing detail….I can’t get a thing.”

  Julie Grant fell in slow motion and hit the ground in a poof of dust, scrambling away from the ladder as fast her hypersuit would allow. In the same motion, she let fly a few rounds of magpulse and blasted at the thing…the ghost…whatever the hell it was…that had just appeared in the hatch, hosing down Igloo with mag beams as fast as she could cycle the carbine.

  “They’re here!” she yelled over the crewnet. “Inside Igloo…get over here—“

  Sammy Ng heard the cry and came hopping to her rescue. The two of them holed up behind a pallet of crates that the loadbots had already lowered to the surface. Ng cycled his carbine and let fly a HERF round of his own. The hatch end of Igloo shuddered and shook from the impulse and a gale of dust swirled, obscuring everything, coating everything.

  “Hold off, Sammy,” Grant warned him. “We can’t just fire away at Igloo…we’ll destroy the module. Whatever I saw, it’s inside—“

  “I’m not going in there,” Ng told her. “Not without backup.”

  “I’ve got an idea.” Grant knew that any self-respecting nanobotic angel could pinch off parts of itself…it could literally be in two or more places at once. “Commander Element B…we could use some help here.”

  “I’m in the middle of a recon sweep, Sergeant…what is it you wish?”

  Grant described the tactical situation. “Something’s inside Igloo, some kind of swarm of bots. Corporal Ng and I both think it unwise to open fire on the module…with all that equipment inside. Could you, er, come help us? Detach a formation and help us deal with these bastards?”

  “Sergeant, that is sound tactical thinking…I will detach a sub-element and be at your coordinates in seven minutes.”

  It was Steve Demetrious, rear guard on Element B’s force recon mission, who saw the swarm ahead of him momentarily brighten, then partition itself. One part continued ahead, drifting up a low slope toward some red hillocks that needed investigating. The other part spun away and drifted back downslope, heading toward Igloo. An easy maneuver for any angel, which Demetrious was not and he was glad of it. Still, there were times when it came in handy.

  Ng and Grant watched the approaching swarm drift toward them with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension. Sub-element B-1 was for all practical purposes invisible, except for the faint twinkling and sparking that popped in and out of the ever-present dust devils. When it was less than ten meters away, a voice crackled on the crewnet.

  “Sub-element B-1 approaching…Corporal Ng, Sergeant Grant, I want you to assume flanking positions five meters on either side of Igloo’s hatch. Sight your weapons on the egress platform and ladder.”

  The two Frontier Corps troopers crab-walked through the dust and regolith to take up their new positions. “What are you going to do, sir?” Grant asked.

  “I will enter Igloo and engage the swarm directly. If I manage my configuration properly, I should be able to disable and disassemble the enemy swarm. If I cannot do that, I will endeavor to drive it out of the module. If that happens, fire your weapons on my command…but not before. Is that clearly understood?”

  “Yes, sir,” they both said in unison.

  Sub-element B-1 maneuvered toward the open hatch. It looked like a dust devil with a mind of its own, climbing the ladder, then flowing inside. A few flashes of light lit up the hatch opening, then all of a sudden, an intense jagged vein of light flashed brighter, like a slow-motion, soundless streak of lightning.

  Julie Grant knew it was some kind of battle line, a line of engagement they were witnessing. Sub-element B-1 had just gone into action.

  Grant crept a little closer to the module.

  “Where the hell are you going?” Ng asked.

  “I want to see…he may need help.”

  “Yeah…like a tornado needs help…keep down, will you? Stay back—“

  But Grant crouched her way up to the ladder, climbed a few steps and peered in, keeping her HERF carbine charged and ready.

  Inside, a miniature thunderstorm was underway, in slow motion.

  “I’m engaging now—“ Sub-Element B-1 reported.

  Like a collision of miniature weather fronts, the two swarms went at each other, slamming atoms, ripping bonds. Jagged lines of flashing light marked off the battlefront. Grant knew l
ittle about nanoscale combat. She tried to imagine a herd of bots the size of molecules wrestling and grappling with each other, ripping atoms from each other, and reconcile that with the pinpricks of light flashes she was seeing.

  An entire battlefield the size of a desktop, with armies of bots beating the snot out of each other. How the hell do you tell who’s winning?

  “Element B-1, give us a status report, sir…should we engage and support you?”

  “I’m at Config Five…replicating max rate…enemy bots are multi-lobed structures…I am endeavoring to maneuver for bond-breaker assault…maintain your position…I will signal if fire support is needed—“

  “Very well, sir.” Julie Grant had to keep reminding herself that part of the swarm she was watching had once been Sheila Westerlund. She didn’t want to wind up like the Comm Tech…or like Roy Favors either. Grant backed down the ladder, took five steps back and hand-motioned Ng to move forward.

  “Keep your weapon on that hatch…we give him fire support if he needs it.”

  Ng came up.

  For a few minutes, nothing seemed to be happening. Nano-combat was like that. Soundless light shows like a swarm of fireflies in a jar…that’s what it looked like. They had no way to tell who was winning, what battles were being fought inside, what heroic charges and staunch defenses were happening, at the level of atoms and molecules. A thousand Verduns could have occurred in the space of a fist and neither Grant nor Ng would have known.

  Then Sub-Element B-1’s tinny voice came over the crewnet. “Bond breakers are working…I am able to penetrate bot defensive perimeter with sequence of feints and diversions…swarm mass has decreased by sixty-five percent…I am attempting to limit swarm effects on Igloo equipment…containment ops now underway…Igloo should be clear in four minutes twenty seconds…”

  Grant breathed a loud sigh of relief. “He did it! He’s mopping up, Sammy…he’s smashed the bastards into atom fluff!”

  Ng shook his head, lowered his carbine. “I never saw a thing.” He climbed up the ladder to see for himself.

  Inside, Igloo’s crew cabin seemed enveloped in a light fog, full of sparks and pops of light. Most of the pallets and racks were intact, but a faint residue rested on the cabin floor, dust maybe? Or worse.

  Ng cautiously climbed in. “Seems okay. Sub-element B…are you in here?”

  “Right behind you, Corporal. The enemy bots have been dispersed. I am endeavoring to clean up all remaining loose atoms and ensure the bot master does not reconstitute.”

  Ng whirled about, finding himself face to face with…what exactly? A faint mist. A few specks of dust. And the hell of it was this was the detail senior officer…or at least a piece of a senior officer.

  The rest of Element B was still outside with Demetrious, climbing that slope toward the red hillocks.

  “Sergeant Grant, Corporal Ng, I want you to finish setting up Igloo. Get her gear up and running for a comm check back to Michelangelo in two hours. Demetrious, you’re with me.”

  So Grant and Ng went to work. And just as Commander Element B had surmised, Captain Hawley called two hours later.

  Hawley and Element B conversed on the ship-to-ground circuit. Big Mike was still two days out from making orbit around Sedna. Element B gave him an update on what had happened with the swarms on Sedna, and the status of Igloo’s setup.

  “We engaged the main body, B,” Hawley told him. “I’m not sure how much damage we did, but we stung ‘em pretty good.”

  Element B had already analyzed the downloaded combat record, including all Big Mike’s maneuvers, the firing pattern, moment by moment details of the entire engagement.

  “Captain, it appears that you did indeed engage elements of some kind of massive swarm formation. The question is: are these swarms part of the Devil’s Eye phenomena…are they associated with what has been termed the Old Ones?”

  “I don’t know about that, Commander, and I don’t intend to hang around long enough to find out. We’ll make orbit in thirty hours. Finish setting up Igloo and prepare to come back to the ship. Whatever the hell you encountered down there is part of the same thing we encountered…I’m sure of it. I want to get these probes deployed and get the hell out of here.”

  “Understood, Captain. Ng, Demetrious and Grant are making good progress. But there is still Corporal Stoltz to deal with.”

  “Leave him in the MOB. I’ll deal with him when the landing party is back aboard. Hawley, out.”

  Hawley settled back in his command seat for a few moments, to take stock of the situation. He knew he’d soon have to get a report off to CINCSPACE on the engagement, and deployment ops at Sedna and nearby space. Already he was composing it in his mind, even as his mind rebelled at venturing back into deep space to finish laying down the sensor grid. Somehow, being in orbit around Sedna seemed safer than engaging unknown clouds of bugs in deep space. But they had a job to do and the sensor grid was vital to getting Frontier Corps the intel it would need to deal with Devil’s Eye, the Old Ones and anything else that came poking its nose into the solar system.

  The sooner they got the sensors deployed, the sooner they could leave and head home. For now, it seemed that the swarms have been driven off…at last check, they seemed to be in a distant orbit about the Sun, nearly 9 billion miles away, but not moving further or deeper into the Solar System.

  Hawley chewed on the tip of his finger as he finished up the last bit of his message to CINCSPACE.

  They would have to do some serious re-thinking about tactics and overall strategy when it came time to engage the swarms again. Hawley was certain that time would come and soon.

  He wasn’t so certain the outcome would be the same. Whatever they were dealing with, it had abilities far beyond anything Frontier Corps or anyone had ever encountered before. Just the quantum displacement capability alone would make life miserable for any would-be defender.

  There was no telling what else these damned Bugs could do.