***Wings…you know we have to go down there…that cloud of dust is the answer to all your questions***
“Dana, not now…not here—“
“Excuse me, sir?” asked D’Nunzio.
Winger didn’t realize he had an open mic. “Sorry, Deeno…just muttering to myself.”
They both kangaroo hopped over to the edge of Copernicus. It was like staring into a gigantic bowl.
Fully a third of the bowl of the crater was cloaked in the vast cloud of dust. It boiled and bubbled like a thing alive and as they watched, the cloud seemed to be reaching out in the direction of the Tian Jia base.
“Barnes better not stick around there too long,” Winger said. “That whole base is about to be enveloped by that cloud.”
D’Nunzio was studying the thing with scopes inside her hypersuit. “Lieutenant, the way I see it, that cloud seems to be coming from an opening near the Tombs…look there, see that ring of dark shadows…looks like some kind of fissure in the ground. Several fissures. And look at those small craters…they’re split. The ground is widening at that point.”
“It’s erupting from below ground. I’m getting thermals and EMs off the chart. One bigass swarm, that’s what it is.”
“I concur.”
When he thought about the decision later, Johnny Winger could never say exactly whether the idea was his own or whether was it something the Dana bot had concocted inside his head. That was the problem when you had bots in your brain, especially bots that could massage nerves like a violin, stoke dopamine and serotonin flow and fiddle with your thoughts in ways nobody would ever believe. The truth was that any thought was a pattern of neurons firing, electrical potentials traveling down fibers, crossing synaptic gaps with chemicals and triggering more firing. When bots like Dana sat astride the whole process like championship riders, who could say what was real and what was created? Did it even matter?
Together, Winger and D’Nunzio boosted over the crater walls and headed for the fissures Deeno had spotted. They circled the outer bands of the dust cloud carefully before landing a few kilometers away.
“Better keep our distance for now,” he decided. “If this is a Keeper like I think it is, it could be a quantum system…we could wind up displaced to who knows where.”
Winger eyed the tawny-brown swirl of the swarm with growing dread. “I’d say we head out on foot now. And get your botshield up. It won’t be much protection if the Keeper blows up. But every little bit helps.”
So the two of them set out, trudging up and down the moonscape, leaping small ravines where they could in the light gravity, boosting over deeper chasms where they had to.
From their distance of several kilometers, the Keeper was a like spray of dust geysers shooting off into space, towering over them in sparkling rainbows like a magnificent fountain. Framing the blue crescent of Earth in the background, Winger could almost admire the majesty of the picture…the black of space, the blues and browns and whites of Earth and the iridescent streams of the geysers spraying the sky like artist’s fingers. Almost. He knew perfectly well that embedded in all that dust were uncountable gazillions of bots.
Just seeing the Keeper swarm in its full scope and power brought chills to the back of his neck. Over the six months of his active-duty career with Quantum Corps, he had encountered scores of adversary swarms, but none like this. The Keeper was a thing alive, malevolent, vindictive, just plain nasty. And unpredictable to boot. As they slipped and skidded and stomped their way closer, he wanted very much to be anywhere but here.
Yet somehow, he had always known it would come to this. Johnny Winger wasn’t much of a believer in fate. You make your choices and you live with them. Yet a month ago, when Jurgen Kraft had ended the Quantum Shadow mission and ordered Alpha Detachment to come home from Nepal, he had known, in ways he couldn’t really describe, that he would meet this malignant force once more, somewhere, sometime.
Now was the time.
The slow-motion explosion of dust grew larger and Winger studied the structure as they came closer. “This is as close as we should get,” he announced. They stopped on a low rise, overlooking a rumpled plain of loose rocks, jumbled and smashed over eons of moonquakes and meteor bombardment.
D’Nunzio stood next to Winger, in awe of the vast streams shooting off into space. “If I didn’t know what we’re looking at, I’d say it was a magnificent sight. Like a living sculpture…ropes of dust writhing…it almost seems alive.”
Then D’Nunzio shook just her head, fingered the HERF carbine slung from her hypersuit web belt. “I could pump a few rounds of rf into that beast with a clear conscience.”
“You’d just wind up making it mad,” Winger said. “We have to be smart about this. Get the one of your disentanglers out. Deeno—“ he looked over the terrain, considering defilade positions, fields of fire, prominent ground structures. “…I’d like to split us up. You go right, across that gully to that little cluster of hillocks over there.” He pointed to a distant position, maybe a thousand meters away. “I’ll head up to the edge of that ravine off to the left, right on the edge.”
D’Nunzio wasn’t about to question Lieutenant John Winger, but she needed some kind of explanation, just for comfort. “Tactics, Skipper?”
“Call it a hunch. We’ve got two disentanglers, between us. If we space them apart, we may be able to bollix up the quantum shifts the Keeper likes to make. At least long enough to give us a sporting chance of dropping this MOBnet over the bastard.”
D’Nunzio looked at the swollen jets of dust spewing up from the boiling caldron that now covered several kilometers of a deep trench ahead of them. “I don’t know about these MOBnets, Skipper. Seems like trying to corral a herd of bees to me. Some are bound to get out. And probably replicate like mad. Maybe we ought to HERF the bejeezus out of the thing first. Slam it upside the head and stun it, before we try anything else.”
Winger tried to explain his tactical thinking. “In general, that’s what I want to do. The disentanglers may or not may not work, but even if they don’t, they’re a useful distraction. While the Keeper’s dealing with the disentanglers, that’s when we blast the sumbitch with HERF and mag pulses. With any luck, we can force the thing to react and even contract a little, and that’s when I send the MOBnet flying. We got these newfangled net launchers…we may as well use them. I don’t want to use our embeds…we may not be able to control them.”
D’Nunzio took a deep breath, kicking at some dirt clods with the toe of her boot, watching them cascade downslope in the low gravity. “Now I know why I joined the Corps, Lieutenant. How exactly do you want to do this?”
“I’ll stay on this main axis. Grab your disentangler and get it primed. When you’re in position, let me know. I want to coordinate the assault as closely as we can. No telling how the Keeper’ll react when we sting him with this.”
The detail split up. Winger and D’Nunzio unpacked their disentanglers and got the units up humming and blinking green in a few minutes.
“All copacetic, Lieutenant,” D’Nunzio announced. She fiddled with a small panel of controls that popped out of the side. “We got juice, we got a good bead on the centroid of that monster. Circuits are active. Buffers, focusers, state emitters…everything looks green.”
“Very well, Corporal. Keep your shirt on and keep that thing boresighted right in the belly of the Keeper. I’m going to the other side of this gully….see if I can get a feel for what’s along the perimeter of the swarm…there may be stragglers we’ll have to account for. Cover me.”
“Will do, sir.” D’Nunzio hoisted his own HERF carbine and rested the barrel on the shoulder of a nearby boulder. “Watch your footing, sir. That dust looks like she’ll slide pretty easily.”
Winger loped down the foreslope of the gully like a drunken kangaroo, taking ten-meter leaps in the low gravity. He grunted hitting bottom but stayed upright with hel
p from his suit servos.
That’s when the Dana bot chimed through in the back of his head.
Nanotroopers Episode 13: Small is All! Page 12
