Nanotroopers Episode 13: Small is All!

by Philip Bosshardt

  Chapter 4

  “Convergence”

  9 degrees North by 21 degrees West

  Copernicus Crater, the Moon

  February 6, 2049

  0000 hours (Universal Time – U.T.)

  Corporal Deeno D’Nunzio burst out of the cave, stumbling and sliding, and ran right into Ozzie Tsukota. The two of them went sprawling to the ice.

  The rest of the Detachment was there too, having finished its recon of Tian Jia. Reaves and Tsukota had worked with M’Bela and Barnes to scour the terrain along the steep walls of Copernicus, looking for some sign of Winger and D’Nunzio.

  It was Tsukota had had detected high thermals at the well-concealed opening to a series of lava tubes.

  Both troopers scrambled to their feet, boosting back upright in the Moon’s low gravity.

  D’Nunzio explained what had happened. “Lieutenant’s going to take on that thing himself…it’s insane, Sergeant.”

  Mighty Mite Barnes listened to the story and decided it was time to do what they had come to do. “I’m not sending anyone else in there. Witchy, you and Deeno get over here. Bring the MOB canisters. We’re going to seal that cave once and for all.”

  “With the Skipper inside…that’s suicide, Sarge,” said D’Nunzio. “Nanotroopers don’t leave buddies behind. It’s the Code…you know that.”

  “Don’t quote Code to me, Deeno,” said Barnes sharply. “We have a mission. We did our recon and now we’ve got to stop this horde of bugs from doing any more damage. Lieutenant would say the same thing—“

  M’bela and Tsukota hustled across a cratered ravine to the cave entrance. Barnes told them to prep the canisters.

  “Witchy, you and Ozzie go forward…keep an eye on the main swarm. Once this cave is sealed, we’re taking on the big mama.”

  M’Bela and Tsukota planted the MOB canisters and pressed buttons on their hypersuit wristpads. Small panels on the canisters flashed lights, cycling from red to yellow to green.

  “MOB enabled, Sarge,” M’Bela announced.

  Barnes studied the cave entrance. “I don’t know what the hell’s down there, but our orders are specific.”

  D’Nunzio shook her head. “That’s Lieutenant Winger down there, Mite. Maybe we should try comms, see if he’s still cooking.”

  Barnes gave the order and D’Nunzio tried every frequency she could think of. There was no reply.

  “I could go in and scout around,” D’Nunzio suggested. She knew it wouldn’t look good if they left a living legend of an atomgrabber behind, sealed up in a cave.

  Barnes eyed the main swarm, now swirling gray and swollen like a slow-motion tornado only a few hundred meters away, swirling across a series of chasms, barreling toward the cliffs. “I don’t like the looks of that. If we seal up the cave, we won’t have to worry about the bastard getting behind us.” To M’Bela, she gave the order. “Okay, Witchy, fire the MOB.”

  M’Bela stabbed the button and instantly, a burst of white fog erupted from each canister. The Mobility Obstruction Barrier would envelope the cave entrance in moments, closing off the entrance with a fine mesh of nanobots, able to actively resist any penetration efforts from inside or out.

  The fog drifted toward the cave, contracting as it fluttered and wafted on trillions of embedded picowatt propulsors, aiming right for the cave. Seconds later, the fog collapsed over the cave entrance, solidifying and forming a barrier that they hoped would stop any Keeper bots from escaping.

  “That should do it,” Barnes decided. “Now, let’s go after the main swarm.”

  The Detachment boosted over a series of sinuous chasms and came to light on a narrow ledge, just below the tortured and buckled plateau where the Keeper swarm was boiling and churning. Shrouded in dust from geysers punching through the lunar crust, the swarm looked like a distant dust devil thrashing its way across the surface.

  Barnes directed placement of the HERF and magpulse weapons. “Let’s try to bring multiple fields of fire on the thing. Deeno, you and Buddha go left. Sight in from the end of this ledge, over by those humps. Sheila and I’ll go right. See that flat rock or boulder or whatever the hell it is? That would make a great mount for your weapons. That should give us nearly a hundred and eighty degrees of coverage.”

  D’Nunzio pointed out the Keeper was still advancing on their position. “Mite, is it my imagination or is that thing coming right at us?”

  Barnes saw it too. She judged the speed of advance to be slow enough to give them a chance. “It’s not your imagination. Get into position and enable your weapons. We’re not out here to admire the view.”

  The flanking maneuvers took about three minutes. In that time, Barnes felt her throat go dry. The Keeper swarm had somehow picked up speed. By the time both teams had reached their firing positions, the Keeper was almost on top of them.

  Barnes boosted up to the top of a small hillock to get some fire at a higher angle.

  “Fire now!” she yelled, even though she knew the teams weren’t ready yet. “Fire away…max rate!”

  It was M’Bela and Tsukota who got it first. Before either trooper could get off any rounds, the front edge of the Keeper had coiled an arm of bots out and encircled their position. The men were steadily shrouded and encased in a cloud of bots, flailing and swatting helplessly at the oncoming swarm.

  “Aarrrggghhh! Get ‘em off…get ‘em off…!”

  Tsukota let fly a volley of rf and hosed down the end of the ledge with everything he had but already he knew it was too late. In seconds, he got the first tone, the shrill tone indicating suit breach…vitals falling, life itself being sucked out into the vacuum. The spray of sublimating oxygen and water was lost in the maelstrom of nanobotic disassembly. Bots burned like a miniature supernova at the end of the ledge. It would be over in less than a minute.

  Barnes signaled D’Nunzio and Nguyen to fire. “Light ‘em up!” she yelled. She boosted back to find some cover behind a few humps, stumbling as she settled down to a defilade position. She pumped round after round into the swarm, to little effect.

  “The damn things regenerate as fast as I fry ‘em!” Reaves complained. She cycled her own HERF carbine and saw she was quickly running out of charge. A few more bursts….

  Deeno D’Nunzio was already spooked. “Maybe they’d like a taste of this—“ She burst from cover and boosted herself over the chasm, heading right for the main body of the swarm, pumping magpulse rounds left and right, to no obvious effect.

  “Sergeant…Deeno, get back…get back to cover!” Barnes ordered, but D’Nunzio ignored her and headed straight for the Keeper. “Deeno…!”

  But it was too late. The swarm rolled over her and she was gone in seconds, shredded into atom fluff and feedstock for the geysers boiling away behind.

  Barnes saw Nguyen starting to boost himself, afraid he would try the same thing. “Corporal—fall back! Fall back to the hopper now!”

  But before he could light off his suit boost, Nguyen saw out of the corner of his eye the shadow of an arm of the Keeper swarm, descending over his own position. In the split second it took to react, he saw the banded crescent shape of Earth peeking through the twinkling fog of the swarm, looking for all the world like a pair of blue and white horns hanging down from heaven.

  The devil’s own hands, came his last thought.

  Then he made sure his finger was locked on the carbine trigger. He pulled the trigger even as the high keening buzz of the bots was already chewing into his hypersuit laminate outer shell. The thud of the rf discharge deafened him, but the next few blasts were drowned out by the shrill whistle of air violently escaping his already breached suit. That, and the tones. The tones shrieked over all, the deathsong of a hypersuited trooper being rapidly disassembled into particles.

  The Moonglow mission was over. Mission logs would show that Lieutenant John Winger and most of his away team had perished in an ultimately hopel
ess assault on a Keeper swarm trolling around on the dusty surface of Copernicus Crater. The vast formation of bots continued to churn its way across the moonscape, as it spalled off pieces of itself and sent them into space. Some of the bots it ejected promptly oriented themselves toward Earth and spun up their propulsors. They would cover the nearly four hundred thousand kilometers in a month, maybe less.

  Of Alpha Detachment, several troopers— Barnes and Reaves-- survived and made their way back to Farside, clinging desperately to an overloaded, mangled hopper for the six–hour, four thousand-kilometer trip. M’Bela, Tsukota, Nguyen and D’Nunzio were listed as KIA. Lieutenant John Winger was listed as Status Unknown – MIA.

  The surviving members of Alpha Detachment recuperated for several weeks in the infirmary of Farside’s Kepler Wing, unaware that well beyond the orbit of Jupiter, some five hundred million kilometers from Farside’s Fiji Island canteen, a small, insignificant asteroid named Hicks-Newman-Rivera-Vargas (cataloged as HNRV 23998) had just found itself nudged from its eons-old trajectory onto a new course. The bump had come from a series of quantum displacement pulses emanating from Copernicus Crater on the Moon.

  The new trajectory would send the five-kilometer long, potato-shaped rock onto an intercept course with Earth in less than a year.

  And inside the Keeper swarm, a faint but unmistakable pattern persisted against all efforts to absorb it into the greater swarm.

  END

 

  About the Author

  Philip Bosshardt is a native of Atlanta, Georgia. He works for a large company that makes products everyone uses…just check out the drinks aisle at your grocery store. He’s been happily married for 25 years. He’s also a Georgia Tech graduate in Industrial Engineering. He loves water sports in any form and swims 3-4 miles a week in anything resembling water. He and his wife have no children. They do, however, have one terribly spoiled Keeshond dog named Kelsey.

  To get a peek at Philip Bosshardt’s upcoming work, recent reviews, excerpts and general updates on the writing life, visit his blog The Word Shed at: https://thewdshed.blogspot.com.