Johnny Winger and the Europa Quandary

  Chapter 8

  UNIFORCE Headquarters

  The Quartier-General, Paris

  February 4, 2121

  1130 hours

  In all the years she had been a UNIFORCE Inspector, Valerie Patrice had never been to the Quartier-General and, as she climbed out of the taxi at the front entrance to go to her briefing on the sixtieth floor, she knew why. It was like being some kind of specimen on a slide under a microscope. Too many curious eyes peering down at you studying, picking and probing, slicing off pieces of your ass…only bad things happened to microscope specimens.

  Better to be out in the field and taking your chances with natural predators. The worst thing they could do was eat you. The ones at Headquarters were worse. They made you suffer through briefings.

  Inspector Valerie Patrice was mad, as she took the lift up to UNSAC’s suite of offices. Maybe not mad. She was sad. How about depressed? Maybe all three. She was just coming off bereavement leave and had just finished putting her Mom in the ground two days before after a long battle with cancer. She could still hear the doctors talking…we tried the latest…oncobots couldn’t save her…tissue re-gen didn’t work…the pancreas was too far deteriorated…there was nothing….

  Patrice liked to think of herself as a professional. UNIFORCE officers completed the mission, no matter what. Obstacles were just chances for greater glory. But it was hard and Patrice was enough of a realist to understand that the grieving had just begun.

  And why, exactly, had the oncobots failed to seek out and destroy the cancer cells? Something about unusual configs, aggressive responses, effector malfunctions, blah, blah, blah. Wasn’t UNIFORCE the parent of Quantum Corps? And wasn’t Quantum Corps like a magician with nanoscale robotic mechanisms?

  It didn’t make any sense. As she reached the sixtieth floor and had herself scanned in through Security to UNSAC’s quarters, Valerie Patrice realized that what she wanted more than anything else, more than lame excuses and explanations laced with jargon, was just to have her own Mom back. Didn’t the Assimilationists promise such things?

  The briefing was scheduled to be held in a small situation room that was part of UNSAC’s suite of offices. Patrice stuck her head in and immediately saw more brass than she’d seen in months. Whatever this was about, it was big enough for field-grade to show up in force.

  Evelyn Lumumba was just coming in through another door when Patrice took her seat. The Security Affairs Commissioner always commanded any space she occupied, rather like a lethal lioness lording it over a den full of snarling cubs. Officers lined both sides of the table and the back chairs, some real, some avatars, some virtual.

  Lumumba waved everyone to be seated.

  “We’re launching a special mission,” she announced, without any forewarning. “Now that the S-G has seen fit to release Symborg from containment, it seems expedient to form up a covert surveillance team to keep an eye on the slimebag. This op is called Operation Quantum Mirror.”

  General Jake Argo, CINCQUANT and physically located at Table Top Mountain, spoke up. His virtual sat across from Patrice, almost as lifelike as the real thing, right down to the mole on the side of his cheek. “What’s the tasking?”

  Lumumba waved a hand over her haptic pad and brought into life a mélange of images, dancing over the bowl-shaped stage at the center of the table. “The official purpose of Quantum Mirror is to determine if Config Zero has become active again. There’s intel from Q2 that physical couriers…actual humans…are entering and leaving Kipwezia and this is how Config Zero’s getting orders and instructions out. Q2 has actually narrowed their suspicions down to one person—“ Lumumba waved her hand again and a new face materialized on the small stage—“Assimilationist delegate Kwan Keyser. Keyser—this image was taken just the other day outside the UN in New York—is a delegate from the east African Sanctuary. He’s also a card-carrying member of the Church of Assimilation. General Argo, you’ve got something--?”

  Argo had beeped for attention. His virtual stood up and went to a board in one corner, where a mosaic of images emerged like a pointillist painting.

  “Q2 has strong indicators from our most recent intel sweeps that Config Zero, perhaps in concert with this Keeper on Europa, is behind recent increases in cases of angelizing. We’ve all seen the stories, on vid, on WorldNet, you probably have neighbors who’ve done this. Angels are everywhere and it’s a growing menace.”

  General Pacer, CINCCYBER, had a virtual at the opposite end of the table. ‘Pacer’ came up to the board to stand alongside the Argo virtual. “The Net itself has become affected. We’ve had glitches, outages, malware attacks, worms, viruses, Trojans and other assaults to deal with the last few weeks and the frequency is increasing. I’d sure like to know if this bag of bugs is behind all of it.”

  Argo went on, the virtual indicating several images on the display. “Kipwezia is surrounded by disentanglers and a huge MOB net. Quantum Corps accomplished that a decade ago, during the Great Rift Zone mess. The eggheads say there’s no way Config Zero should be able to communicate anything, even by quantum signals. Yet that seems to be happening.”

  UNSAC twirled a finger in one of her long hair braids. “Anything we can detect?”

  “Not yet, ma’am. If Config Zero’s active, it isn’t through any channel we know of. And we can’t locate any comm signatures either. By every intel indicator we have, Config Zero’s been quiescent, deader than dirt, for a long time.”

  UNSAC addressed the Pacer virtual. “General, you just sent me a message about a theory one of your techs had…something from CyberLab, I believe.”

  “I did, Madam Commissioner. CyberLab has lots of theories, you have to understand. They get paid to blue-sky theories. Some of them, well—“ Pacer shrugged a bit sheepishly, “—they’re more like bad dreams. But one tech, James Tsu, has this idea that the Net has become infected with something more than just malware, something more than your average garden-variety virus. Tsu thinks there are nanobotic entities travelling around the Net, creating havoc.”

  That made Valerie Patrice sit up and take notice. Bots inside the Net? Even Evelyn Lumumba stopped twirling her braids and sat up straighter.

  “Did I hear that correctly, General…bots inside the Net?”

  Pacer was dismissive. “The evidence isn’t conclusive, Madam Commissioner. It’s just a theory…somehow, according to Tsu, bots have come from these meteor showers, in other words from the Keeper at Europa, and penetrated into the Net and now they’re running amok, causing all kinds of mischief… little nanobotic pixies and fairies, if you ask me. I don’t put much stock in this, but I wanted all theories to be properly aired.”

  Lumumba waved a hand over her haptic pad and Pacer’s briefing sheets appeared in mid-air. UNSAC circled her index finger, highlighting one paragraph in particular. She read the words aloud: “Your words, General—‘The Net is now acting as a sort of bloodstream for infecting all of Earth and its inhabitants with angels and assorted swarm entities, all under the presumed control of Config Zero, through the Keeper.’ You put this in your briefing for a reason. You’re saying that Config Zero’s behind all this and bots are falling out of the sky and somehow getting into the Net.”

  Pacer smiled, trying not to be too ingratiating. Putting Evelyn Lumumba into UNSAC’s seat had been a political earthquake several years before. The snickering and the grumbling hadn’t stopped since. One day, she’s a Cameroonian tribal chief. The next day, UN Commissioner of Security Affairs. Proof of the old saying: the cream rises until it sours. Pacer swallowed his politically incorrect inner thoughts and tried to explain.

  “We’re looking into every possibility to get at the root of what’s happening to the Net. At this point, I can’t afford to discount anything, however bizarre it may seem. I’ve already appointed an investigative team. It’s headed by Captain Anson Leeds, out of our Cyber Corps.” Pacer nodded to Patrice. ?
??He’ll be coordinating closely with parallel efforts inside UNIFORCE.”

  UNSAC acknowledged Patrice for the first time. “Inspector Patrice will be heading up our investigation. I’ve already had her detailed to lead Quantum Mirror. She’ll be working closely with our investigator, Major Evan Metcalf, who’s up at Gateway right now, looking over the MARTOP samples.”

  And that was how Valerie Patrice found out she was in this mess up to her neck.

  An hour later, Valerie Patrice was on vid with Evan Metcalf. Over the vidlink, Patrice fell back on an old habit, a way she had developed over the years of how to appraise people quickly and accurately.

  “I like to follow the mouth, the lips of a suspect,” she had once told a colleague of hers at a London pub. “Some people look at eyes. Some people look at hands. Lips are full of muscles. I’ve studied this. Orbicularis oris…that’s what all your lip muscles are called. Think how truly expressive lips are. They smile. They frown. They laugh. They pout. They kiss and bite each other. You can learn a hell of lot about a person from their lips…whether they’re for real, whether they’re lying or pulling your leg or hiding something or not paying attention. Take angels, for example. With all our nanobotic technology, angels don’t have believable lips. You can tell an angel by the lips…they don’t look right, they don’t track right.”

  With all this analysis going on, Valerie Patrice decided that Evan Metcalf was real enough. You could see it in the lips, even over the vidlink.

  “Special Investigations Branch,” Metcalf told her, by way of introduction. “UNIFORCE Paris, U-808 office.”

  Patrice decided she could be just as abrupt. She put on her best interrogator face. “Counter-intel, Section U-7, London office. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, what can you tell me about this MARTOP?”

  Metcalf smirked and relaxed a little. Patrice was just another cop. “Strong match with archival data about the Keeper. I read up on a little ancient history yesterday…the Jovian Hammer mission from 2099. General Winger and all those characters. The analytics are close enough to make most of us think MARTOP’s from the same source.”

  “The Keeper.”

  “Exactly. The gift that keeps on giving, straight from Europa, if you can believe what the astros at Farside are saying.”

  “I’m curious,” Patrice decided to pursue another avenue, “about what kind of containment systems we have around Kipwezia. What’s keeping Config Zero under wraps? Know anything about that?”

  Metcalf decided he would show this female cop a thing or two about what Special Investigators actually knew. “Sure. We got several dozen Mark III disentanglers spotted about the island. All they do is scramble known or detectable quantum signals—“

  “I know what they do…I wasn’t born an hour ago, you know. Are they working? Are they operational? What about service life, maintenance, that sort of thing?”

  Metcalf wasn’t going to get sucked into something he had little actual knowledge of. “Sure they’re working. They self-test every day…we’ve got years of self-test results. You think UNIFORCE would emplace crap they couldn’t trust?”

  “I don’t think you want me to actually answer that, do you? So we have disentanglers to bollix up Config Zero’s comms. What else do we have?”

  “What are you…my mother? There’s the MOBnet too. Big shield of bots that covers the whole island. Class A mesh too…you couldn’t squeeze an atom through that shield.”

  “Even below-ground.?”

  Metcalf was caught off-guard by that question. He couldn’t even fake knowing the answer. He didn’t try. “Actually, I’m not sure. But it’s something we should look into. Bots with the right config can burrow like prairie dogs when they have to.”

  Patrice smirked. It felt good to catch Metcalf in something he didn’t know. Touché.

  “So, UNSAC thinks this Kwan Keyser is acting as a courier,” she went on. Metcalf had followed the briefing from Gateway. “If that’s so, how’s he getting in and out? Config Zero can’t send comms the usual way. A physical courier needs an entrance, a hatch, a door of some kind.”

  “Maybe Keyser’s an angel too. Disassembles himself and percolates up from belowground.”

  That was nuts, but Patrice knew they couldn’t discount anything. “It’s a mystery,” she agreed. “Maybe Symborg has something to do with this.”

  The two of them agreed that a detailed surveillance effort would have to be mounted. They had tasking from UNSAC to follow Symborg. Keyser would have to be added to the list, which meant more resources, more time.

  “Keyser needs to be shadowed,” Patrice decided. “Symborg too. I’ll requisition some spybots from Branch. We’ll need human eyes as well. You’ve seen the TOE?”

  Metcalf had already scanned the Table of Organization and Equipment and decided it would never do. First rule of investigating: never let a Security Affairs Commissioner do a man’s job. “I have. It needs work.”

  “I’ll draw up a more detailed list of what we need and submit it. I think UNSAC’ll play ball with us. She can’t afford to appear weak, now that the S-G’s let Symborg go, against all advice. I’m thinking a minimum of five or six humans, maybe more ANAD systems. And we’ll need the right configs, drivers, et cetera. Lot of work.”

  “I have to stay here at Gateway for a while longer,” Metcalf told her. “UNIFORCE needs to know exactly what these MARTOP bots are capable of…testing and more testing. That’s the only way we can develop countermeasures that’ll work.”

  “I’ll get started,” Patrice said. “We should vidlink everyday…this a good time?”

  “As good as any.”

  “Metcalf, I’ve decided I like you. You’re a credit to your gender and a hard-nosed asshole to boot. UNIFORCE needs more like you.”

  So they agreed that Patrice would work Earthside for the time being and Metcalf would handle the investigation at Gateway and Farside. Patrice figured the arrangement had possibilities.

  Every Sherlock Holmes needed a Watson.

  Training and equipping for Quantum Mirror got underway almost immediately.

  Valerie Patrice gathered her entire Quantum Mirror surveillance team in the tactical containment center, on the twentieth floor of the Quartier-General. They were all there: Benes, Lourdes, Kaminski, Cain and Kastanek. They came to take a look at the newest team member.

  “It’s called Sherlock,” Patrice told them. “The latest in surveillance and spy bots. Take a look—“

  The imager displayed a trellis-like scaffolding inside the containment tank. Attached to the trellis was a small nanoscale bot, looking for all the world like a bunch of beads strung on a pole. The beads were hardened casing segments, housing the processor, comm system, actuator and effector controls, memory cells and the config driver. All up and down the beads were hung arms and appendages, the bot’s numerous effectors.

  Patrice rattled the details off like a proud mother: “Main platform and actuator mast are reinforced carbon nanotube fiber, very strong and light. Flexible too. Propulsors up the wang…flagellar screws and quantum wave, something new. Actuators enough to make a mother cry: pyridine probes, carbene grabbers, enzymatic knife, fullerene grapples, photon lens. Plus full picowatt power cells, ten of them. This bugger’s like a freight train.”

  Benes cocked her head. “What about defenses, Inspector?”

  Patrice grinned in spite of herself. “Uprated bond disrupters. Sherlock can rip the bejeezus out of any other bot. A regular bulldog, that’s what this guy is.”

  Kastanek nodded appreciatively. “A hot rod. A spybot with teeth. We’ll need it.”

  And he was right. UNIFORCE spybots often were emasculated poor cousins to common ANAD systems. They could cling to anything, go anywhere, but they had the growl of a Chihuahua. Sherlock was something new. He could replicate with speed and accuracy. He could bite like a lion. And he could grab p
hotons with the best of them and make images of anything.

  “So when do we deploy, Inspector?”

  Patrice had hand-picked the team that made up Quantum Mirror. To a man, and to a woman, they were like bloodhounds with a prey’s scent in their nostrils, straining at the leash. “We’re deploying to New York tonight. You’ve all got tickets on commercial flights, hyperjet flights. You’re going separately, some of you non-stop, some with one or two stops. We’ll rendezvous at the UN, Secretariat Building, eighteenth floor Tactical Command Post, at 2300 hours tomorrow night.”

  “And targets, Inspector?” asked Benes. She wore her black hair short, page-boy style. Eschewing ocular implants, she wore last-century black-rimmed eyeglasses. It made her look like a librarian. She was also a three-time UNIFORCE champ in HERF and magpulse marksmanship.

  “The targets are two: Symborg, whom you know was just recently released from containment at Table Top, by order of the Secretary-General. And this clown named Kwan Keyser. He’s human, we think, but he’s a delegate from East Africa, the Sanctuary. So he’s in tight with the swarms. One bad-ass Normal, if you ask me. We know Keyser’s in New York, attending the General Assembly sessions. As for Symborg—“ Patrice’s lips tightened perceptibly “—who knows? Q2’s trying to run him down now. But the slimebag’s an angel, so he could be anywhere, or in multiple anywheres. Intel thinks if we follow Keyser long enough, we’ll find Symborg.” Patrice looked each trooper in the eye. “The mission is surveillance, period. Comprende? Do not engage. Is that fully understood?”

  There were murmurs of assent, most of them reluctant.

  “Once we rendezvous at TCP in New York, we work out a surveillance schedule. First team has the big job. Your mission will be to take Sherlock here and put him somewhere on Keyser’s physical person. Once in place, I guarantee you, Sherlock won’t be leaving his target. That’s the nice thing about using ANAD systems for spybots versus the traditional kind. Sherlock can keep an eye on the target, no matter where he goes. And if does something we don’t like, we send the command and Sherlock drops a MOBnet right then and there. The target is immobilized and ready for pickup. Even better, with authorization from UNSAC, Sherlock can do even more. He can permanently disable the target and disassemble the bugger into atom fluff.”

  Benes eyed the bot inside the tank with growing respect. “That’s better than my Aunt Katie’s little Shih Tzu.”

  “Yeah, a bot that bites,” said Kastanek. “I like it.”

  “That’s it, then. Get down to the ready room and pick up your gear. I’ll see everybody in New York tomorrow night, 220 East 42nd Street. You’re going civvie tonight, so look like civilians. Lose the bad-ass. Pretend you’re all salesmen, back from a convention.”

  Kastanek snorted at that. “Yeah, right. Salesmen. Kwan Keyser won’t much like what I’m selling.”

  One after another, the Quantum Mirror surveillance detail headed for the lift that would take them down to the crew quarters and its maze of ready rooms.

  Valerie Patrice took one last look at Sherlock.

  After the techs button you up, you’re riding with me, pal. You’re going to stick to Keyser like bad news to a politician. And even better, you’re going to take us right to that bugfreak Symborg, so we can finally do what should have been done years ago.

  Patrice then gathered up her own gear and headed downstairs.