***Analysis continuing, Major. Do you request special config for probe of the target? Covert study could provide useful intelligence***
Doc was asking about an insert…replicating a small formation of bots to do a covert insert of the Freeman swarm, or whatever the hell it was. It would be risky. But as Doc indicated, they might be able to pull it off and gain some idea of what Freeman was about, why he was here at Phobos Station. Winger knew he also had the same configs…he could just as easily pinch off a sub-element and do the insert himself.
It was tempting and tactically it was sound. But his better judgment argued against any moves like that just yet. Better to play it straight with Freeman, not let him know he had been detected and just recon the situation from the macro world.
But he knew he had to let Al Glance and the rest of the Detachment know and soon.
Winger checked the time. He was due at the officer’s mess, and the Mariner Bar, in less than half an hour. Stella would be there…Freeman too, most likely. The newbie’s tradition of buying a few rounds for the old hands would certainly have to be upheld.
Winger headed out of his compartment into the central gangway. It would be interesting to see if Freeman would be at the mess, and if so, just how he would handle his drinks. Maybe the swarm had a way of quickly breaking down beer molecules and disassembling them in such a way as to simulate slamming back a few pitchers.
That he would have to see.
Winger pulled himself along the gangway corridor by the handgrips and turned the corner, running headlong into Al Glance.
“Headed to the bar, Skipper?”
“We have a solemn duty, Al,” Winger said.
The two of them crawled and scooted through several corridors and passages before finding a compartment labeled Mariner Bar. They slipped inside.
It was a cramped space, like most places at Phobos Station. The bar itself curved along one wall, forming a large U. Opposite the bar were positioned a dozen or so tables, complete with foot and seat restraints to keep the inebriated from drifting off too far. Beyond the tables, one wall was filled with three observation cupolas, huge hexagonal portholes with stunning vistas of the surface of Mars turning slowly below.
Winger spied Captain Stella at one table. He and Glance joined the Captain and Winger ordered a round.
“Glad to see you could make it, Major. We’ve got a big day tomorrow. Archimedes’ final outfitting. Crew briefings. Onloading all your gear. We depart in three days…window’s about ten minutes long for our first burn.”
Winger simmed tasting the local beer, processing the molecules using Dr. Falkland’s ‘drinking’ program. “Tastes like sewer water.”
Stella laughed. In spite of Winger being an angel, the captain was impressed. “You’re not far wrong. All the water at the station is recycled…from urine, sweat, other uses. They say it’s safe and potable. Me…I’m not so sure I want to know the details.”
Winger kept eyeing the nearest cupola. “Captain, shall we--?” He indicated the cupola.
“It’s the view,” Stella sympathized. “It gets all the newbies. Sure…bring your drink—“
They drifted over to the porthole and strapped themselves down at the pedestal. Outside the perspex windows, the great blood red scar of the Valles Marineris drifted by on the surface, faintly obscured by high thin clouds.
“I have a question, Captain,” Winger said.
“Shoot.”
“I’m curious about your exec…this Lieutenant Freeman. What do you know about him?”
Stella smiled faintly, sniffed at his beer. “If you’re asking whether I know that the Lieutenant is an angel, the answer is yes.”
Winger wasn’t surprised. “You know? “ He shared a look with Al Glance, who just shook his head. “But…how the hell—“
Stella finished off his own beer, looked expectantly at Winger, who got the message and ordered another round. The servbot hummed over with a new tray of drinks in a few moments and expertly secured the tray to the pedestal, whisking the old tray away.
“You were going to ask…how the hell is this permitted? “ Stella stifled a chuckle, looked furtively around to make sure no one was listening in. Mariner Bar was a small place…only the low and plaintive plucking of some country guitar in the corner covered their voices. The vocalist was some ecotech off shift, gamely trying to pick out a Roy Orbison tune. “Let’s just say Frontier Corps works in mysterious ways…like your Quantum Corps, I’m sure. Orders from Mars Command…that’s really all I can tell you.”
Winger understood. “In a word, politics. The Symbiosis project, Frontier Corps-style. Blending men and machine. Creating a super trooper…or in your case, ship crewman. Continuous improvement and all that crap.”
“Exactly, Major. Look, I’m an old cycler captain. I’m used to spinning around the Sun in a nice easy stable orbit…not too much excitement, nothing to see, nothing to do. I’m for anything that makes my life easier. The Corps started integrating swarm para-human ‘crewmen’ into our normal rotations about five months ago. Call it efficiency. Cost savings. Latest technology upgrade. Politics. Call it whatever you want. Just don’t give me something that makes my life harder. Cycler captains like routine. We don’t like surprises. And so far—“ Stella shrugged, worked his beer for a moment, “—it’s worked like a charm. Lieutenant Freeman—that’s the name the Corps gave us…his real designation is something like Config CXT-209987—has been a most able crewman and second-in-command. Does everything I ask. Doesn’t get the rest of the crew riled up…anymore. We had some issues in the beginning…I’m sure you Quantum Corps types do too. You know…dinosaurs, troglodytes who can’t accept change. Everybody has those types. But Freeman’s worked out pretty well.”
Winger tried some peanuts and crackers. Better than the beer, he realized. “I have to admit I was going to warn you about Freeman, but since you already know—“
“Surely you nanotypes have something similar. Even yourself—“ But Stella decided not to finish that thought and smiled hesitantly.
Winger nodded. Al Glance added, “Worse than that…we’ve got embeds. Every trooper carries a small ANAD master assembler in a containment port implanted surgically in his shoulder. We’re all hybrids now.”
“We’re not even sure how much to trust our own embeds, Captain. Especially now, what with Config Zero.”
“Bad juju, that is,” Stella agreed. “Makes me glad I’m not down there.” He watched the Valles slide out of view. “You know, Major, I’m always most impressed with the Tharsis bulge…Olympus Mons, all the volcanoes. After the Big Smack, GreenMars says all that will be forest land someday, maybe a few thousand years from now. The bots are down there, making it all green; it’s already starting to show up to the naked eye. I’m going to miss that red desert. So stark. So bare. Kind of elemental. Maybe that’s why I like being a cycler captain. You go out into space and you have to confront it on its terms…or you die. None of this symbiosis crap…altering and transforming everything for Man.”
Winger understood. “You’d fit right in with Quantum Corps. We’re fighting the same battles. It’s a complicated relationship we have with ANAD now.”
“We both need each other,” Glance said, ‘But neither side really trusts the other either. In the old days, when the Major here was a nog fresh out of the Academy, we controlled the nanobots. We ran ANAD, programmed it, piloted it into combat and the little buggers did what we said. Nowadays, somehow, they’ve become equals. They’ve got rights, for heaven’s sake ….how crazy is that? It’s like giving rights to your washing machine…back when there were washing machines.”
Stella was sympathetic. “We fight the same battles in Frontier Corps. But what choice do we really have, gentlemen? The swarms are part of us now, part of our culture and technology. We don’t have much choice but to trust them. We can no longer live without them. An
d there are more and more angels.” Immediately, he wished he hadn’t said that.
Winger stared into his drink, reluctant to try another taste of the swill. Maybe a fruit juice. “It’s okay, Captain…I’m getting used to all the stares. Really, it’s not so bad. I only hope this kind of dependence doesn’t lead to the end of everything.”
“Well, not to worry,” Stella brightened up. “With Archimedes, we have our own little world. At least, for the next few months, we don’t have to worry about fighting bugs, Config Zero, swarms’ rights or any of that bunk. Just trot along the spacelanes out to Jupiter—“
“Yeah,” said Winger “and try to find what’s responsible for all this mess.”
Glance shook his head. “One way or another, it’s always about the swarms.”
(Three months later…)
Aboard UNISPACE Transit Ship Archimedes
Three Days from Jupiter Orbit Insertion
December 8, 2050 (Earth U.T.)
Three months, two days and a handful of hours after departing Phobos Station, Mighty Mite Barnes and Nicole Simonet were sitting at a table in the crew’s mess, aboard Archimedes’ crew deck, nursing a few beers. Simonet fiddled with the gain on the main viewer to bring Jupiter into full resolution. They were well beyond the outer fringe of the Belt now, in trans-Jovian space and Jupiter lay directly ahead, now swollen to a readily discernible disk.
“Looks like a fuzzy beach ball,” Barnes said. “With hair—“
Simonet pronounced herself satisfied with the view. “Yeah, a beach ball with enough radiation to fry your pretty little brain in about two seconds.”
“You’re assuming I have a brain…I checked mine at the recruiting station when I signed up for nog school.”
It was a salmon-hued world, mottled and banded with oranges, reds, browns and ambers, a cauldron of clouds, storms and majestic seething turbulence. Alternating strips of light and dark wrapped the planet in a calico shroud and several small red spots boiled away in the north tropical zone, companions to the Great Red Spot in the south, a centuries-old hurricane churning since the time of Cromwell and King Charles.
For several days, Archimedes coursed through the Jovian skies in a steeply inclined orbit, skirting the shoals and reefs of her radiation belts, until at last they found the first of several holes in the sheath of charged particles. Captain Stella passed the word to all hands that the ship was about to begin a series of maneuvers which would end up bringing them into orbit around Europa. Archimedes dropped to a lower orbit through the first of these holes, like navigating a minefield in a wartime harbor.
After a few days had passed, the ship settled into orbit half a million kilometers above the cloud tops. By now, the planet filled nearly a third of the sky and hundreds of frothing spicules and cells of gas swept by beneath them. The speed of its rotation flattened Jupiter at the poles and widened it to a bulge at the equator. Ferocious winds resulted and they smeared the columns of gas into all sorts of grotesque and beautiful shapes. Barnes and the rest of Bravo Detachment that came by the crew’s mess watched the scenery below for hours at a time. Barnes found herself transfixed by the ever-shifting palette of colors and shapes. She could well imagine the planet’s visible face as a giant’s palette, where Nature worked as the artist to create an ever-changing panorama of colors, forms and brush strokes.
Definitely not Kansas, she muttered to herself.
In time, Archimedes made her way into orbit about Europa. Johnny Winger himself joined some of the crew in the mess compartment, as the cracked billiard-ball of a world turned slowly below them.
“Gives me the creeps,” Sheila Reaves said. She shuddered involuntarily and sucked at her drink.
“All those cracks are seams in the ice plates,” Vic Klimuk marveled. “And to think that’s where we’re going, right into one of those seams.”
“And below—“added Winger. He decided it was time to finish up their final briefings and get ready for the landing. “All right, boys and girls, all hands lay aft to the Service deck. I want to go over last minute details before we head down.”
The Detachment assembled on C deck, amidst all their gear and equipment—hypersuits, camou-fog generators, coil guns and HERF weapons, all the gear a Quantum Corps detachment took into operations.
Winger, with help from his new CC2 Vic Klimuk, briefed the troopers on what was known of the Europan environment from Farside’s analysis, what was known of past encounters with the Spheres (notably Paryang Monastery in Tibet and Engebbe, Kenya), tactical intel from Q2 on what was suspected of this particular device and what the spooks thought the Chinese were really up to. Last minute checks on their equipment and final run-throughs of unit tactics were to be completed by 2200 hours that night, in preparation for Archimedes’ final orbit insertion burn. Ten hours later, the Detachment would be embarking on the lander Trident for the surface, and the formal start of Operation Jovian Hammer.
There was clearly still some unease among the troopers about conducting an assault on a Sphere with quantum displacement capabilities with ANAD as part of the unit.
“Can we really trust them now, Skipper?” asked Mighty Mite Barnes, as she re-assembled a coilgun carbine she had been servicing.
Winger knew he was going to have to face this issue head on. “Corporal Barnes, you know perfectly well that ANAD swarms are fully integrated into all Quantum Corps operations and any anomalies are part of the normal learning curve. ANAD systems are our tactical partners and the Symbiosis Project has been a resounding success for the Corps.”
Several troopers snickered when Barnes put down the coilgun and looked straight at Winger.
“Begging the Major’s pardon, sir, but that sounds just like some kind of crackerjack press release from CINCQUANT.”
Winger knew he had been had. “I know it does, Mite, but that’s the official line. We have to trust our ANAD units. This operation has no hope without ANAD fully involved.”
“She’s right, Skipper--” said Nicole Simonet. Simonet was at another work stand, working on a SuperFish probe for use at Europa. “With all that’s going on back home, Config Zero and the swarms on the loose, what’s to keep our own ANADs from deciding we should become extinct? How can I trust any ANAD system when it may be looking at me like some kind of dinosaur? Hell, even our commanding officer is a—“ She bit off her words and looked around a little sheepishly.
“It’s okay…let’s air this out now and be done with it. One word, trooper: programming. You get in tight with your bots and you know their guts backward and forward. You fly the swarm like a pilot and see what life looks like from nanoscale. You slog your way through all that sleet and crap and get bounced around from Brownian motion like some kind of carnival ride. You eat, sleep, pee and poop with the bugs until you know ‘em inside out and upside down. You know everything there is to know about everything inside that device and that’s how you become sure the thing will do what you say. Is that clear…to everybody?”
There was a chorus of ayes and assents around the compartment.
“Very well,” Winger went on. He looked around at all the troopers. The Detachment’s combat ANAD didn’t seem to be on hand. That was odd. The swarm was supposed to be mustered in some form or fashion anytime the Detachment had a briefing. Of course, the bug cloud could easily be on hand, but not visible as a swarm. Winger decided he would need to check into that. All troopers were expected to be present when an all-hands briefing was called, even if they were in reality a cloud of nanobotic devices that swarmed like dust flies.
“Finish getting your gear together and start moving equipment into the lander. Trident departs at 1130 hours…that’s four hours from now. Dismissed!”
The Detachment resumed sorting out their gear while Winger decided to hunt down ANAD for a little ass-chewing. Disciplining a formation of nanoscale assemblers wasn’t something he had learned from the Commander’s manual. After half an hour
of looking, he found the swarm already aboard Trident, drifting like an iridescent mist just on the edge of visibility on D deck, Stores and Supplies.
“ANAD, what the hell are you doing in here? You were supposed to be at the briefing in the crew’s mess.”
The swarm brightened momentarily as Winger approached.