***ANAD recommending use acoustic channels…ask questions and ANAD will provide answers…this is normal procedure for single-config entities, is it not?***
Calderon snapped his fingers. “I get it, Skipper. He wants to be treated like one of us. Like he’s in a doctor’s office…we ask where does it hurt and so forth.”
Winger shook his head. “This can’t be. You sure there isn’t some anomaly in your readings?”
Calderon studied the console. “Nothing, Skipper. Normal bond activity…a few atoms being grabbed, but that’s just to maintain structure. Normal EM levels, normal thermal signature…everything’s copacetic from here.”
“Except he’s acting like a four-year old. ANAD, what’s this about? Confirm…you are refusing to go back into containment? You are refusing a direct order?”
The swarm seethed and pulsated and flickered, shifting around the cubicle. Part of the swarm drifted toward the open capture port on the containment tank, like a finger reaching out to touch, then recoiled away.
“Bond activity going up—“ said Calderon. “Thermals going high…he’s grabbing a lot of atoms, breaking bonds left and right.”
“He’s thinking,” Winger observed.
The swarm began to shrink, but its internal glow brightened, and then with the finality of a finger snap, the swarm curled into a ball of flickering light and made for the capture port. In seconds, the last of the swarm had flown into the port.
Winger cycled the port shut. ANAD was in containment at last.
“Finally,” he breathed a sigh of relief. “Status of assembler master…”
“Thermals are still high, EMs too…master cycling between config states…like he can’t make up his mind.”
“Send a hard signal, Chris…maintain config state one. I want to get the scope on that assembler and see what the hell’s going on.”
Calderon was already powering up the imager. The shaky, grainy view of the trellis-shaped scaffolding in the center of the tank slowly materialized and settled into view. “You think it may be the Sphere, Skipper?”
“I don’t know what it is,” Winger told them. “Maybe the Chinese…but this is happening more and more…ANAD refused a direct order…he’s already disobeyed my orders several times. That can’t happen on this mission. If I can’t get ANAD back on track or find out what’s wrong, he may have to stay in containment.”
By 1100 hours, all of the Detachment had boarded Trident and secured themselves and their gear. Captain Stella was in the commander’s seat on B deck, with Lieutenant Freeman in the right hand seat. Winger had secured himself in a jump seat behind, alongside Vic Klimuk.
Klimuk shot Winger a look, while Stella and Freeman went through their checklist. Even from close behind, it was nearly impossible to tell about Freeman. The swarm had a texture that belied its true nature. From two meters away, you could not tell that Julian Freeman was an angel, a collection of nanoscale assembler bots.
Klimuk’s eyes told the story. So real looking, it’s creepy. Winger nodded. He wondered what Klimuk thought of him, then decided not to dwell on it. They had a mission to perform.
“Ten seconds to separation,” Stella called. The captain scanned his boards and instruments, pronounced himself satisfied with what he saw. Trident was docked at the forward nose port of Archimedes, a giant sausage stuck on a plate, secured to a kebab skewer, as Mighty Mite Barnes had termed it.
“Three…two…one…separating now—“
There was a gentle shudder and the sound of capture latches releasing. Stella pulsed Trident’s aft thrusters and the ship backed off at a stately pace, eventually settling into a co-orbiting position several thousand meters from the home ship.
Below them, Europa turned like a cracked golf ball, dimpled, rutted with deep ice canyons and odd brown streaks. As Trident backed away, the huge banded disk of Jupiter itself poked over the Europan horizon, at a crazy angle. The moon was in a three and a half day orbit about the giant planet, averaging three quarters of a million kilometers above her cloud tops, bathed in hard radiation.
Johnny Winger was glad Trident and Archimedes both maintained active rad defensive shielding and emitters. Otherwise, they would have all been fried to cinders days ago.
“Thirty-two minutes to de-orbit,” Stella announced. “Make sure everything’s secured. This will be quite a kick in the pants.”
Freeman acknowledged and went about his duties with aplomb. The angel had the appearance of a lean, even gaunt human being, with close-cropped dark hair and rather large ears…perhaps a minor flaw in the config. As Trident closed on her de-orbit point, Winger studied the surface structure of the angel, looking for any sign of defect, any frizzing, shadowing or edge irregularity. There was none. He tried imagining what kind of config, indeed what kind of effectors and atom grouping, could pull off a stunt like that. He was a little jealous but he was damned if he was going to admit it.
Fantastic engineering, he told himself. Quantum Corps had nothing that could match the realism of Freeman. Even on his best days, Winger knew that even he showed some fuzziness around the edges, when he assumed a human-like config. Who the hell designed this system, he wondered?
“De-orbit burn in five seconds,” Stella announced.
Winger took a peek out the nearest porthole. Two hundred kilometers below, the surface of Europa looked dingy gray white, wrapped in dark lines and crevasses like a ball of yarn, oddly smooth in general appearance but definitely textured and shadowed in bizarre, even menacing ways. Somewhere down there, scores of kilometers below the icy surface, was an ocean of night, and some kind of device that was talking with something buried in the ruins of Paryang.
Somehow, some way, Bravo Detachment had to get down there and find the Sphere or whatever the hell it was, then put it out of commission, before the Chinese and their Red Hammer dropouts got to it.
“…three…two…one…engine arm—“
Trident shook and shuddered like a wet dog, as her engines lit off, slowing her down for a steep descent toward the surface. The ship was attached to a landing platform that contained her descent and ascent engines and provided a stable base to set her down on just about any surface. If all went well, the assembly would make landfall at a site 168 degrees west by 42 degrees north, near the end of a meandering dark reddish-brown chasm called Minos Linea, in a territory known to the astros as Falga Regio.
From there, Trident would trundle off the platform onto the surface and begin boring her way downward, toward the subsurface ocean said to be about thirty kilometers below. Once submerged, she would head east by southeast, toward the presumed coordinates of the Sphere, triangulated by decoherence wake analysis to be a full three-day voyage away in a region known on the maps as Rathmore Chaos.
Aptly named, thought Winger, as he eyed the surface coming up fast through the porthole. And there was still the Chinese ship and its lander to look out for.
Stella and Freeman were busy with the landing, calling out waypoints and targets with cool efficiency.
“Two hundred meters,” said Freeman, his voice crackling with a slight buzz…angels often had that as the bots struggled to form up acoustic waves into something approximating a voice. “One eighty…coming down at ten, drifting to the right…five forward…now five forward….”
Trident had cut her forward velocity almost to zero and was now descending almost straight down. Outside the porthole, the linear vent opening that was their landing zone loomed larger and larger, a seam of streaked warmer ice separating two churning ice rafts, dozens of kilometers square. Winger watched the ground coming up fast. If he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine himself on a ski lift at Breckinridge, Colorado, coming down the slope toward the lodge.
“One hundred meters…three forward, on target, throttling down ten percent…fuel is good…looking good, Captain—“
Stella worked the controls and gently stabilized Triden
t as she dropped closer and closer. Europa’s gravity was about a tenth of Earth’s, so movement in and around the surface would be no problem. Beyond the porthole, Winger could see the surface rising higher and higher in his view…rugged boulders and icescapes tumbled all over like some giant kid’s play toys.
“—contact light…okay, engine stop…that’s it, Captain! You did it!”
Trident settled onto the surface with a last minute lurch and suddenly, everything went silent.
“We’re down,” Stella announced. “I’m reading off target by about twelve meters…not too bad for an old cycler captain.”
Europa gave them a fantastic vista outside the portholes. The sky was black, mostly filled by the lopsided half-crescent of Jupiter itself, the banded, striated giant filling nearly a quarter of the sky. Deep shadows accentuated the chasms and gouges along the top of the ice surface, which was a blocky, jumbled mess of frozen forms and shapes.
“Looks like an ocean frozen in time, Skipper,” said Vic Klimuk, craning his neck to see. “Waves washing up on a beach, then zap! Freeze it right there.”
“You’re not far wrong,” Winger said.
Stella scanned his controls and instruments. “Outside temp is about a hundred degrees Kelvin…that’s about minus two eighty Fahrenheit, boys and girls. Just another beautiful day in the neighborhood…let’s get going.”
The crew unstrapped and set to work preparing Trident to leave her landing platform. After half an hour, Stella recalled everybody to their seats.
“I’m firing the capture latches now,” he announced. A loud series of staccato bangs reverberated through Trident’s hull. No longer secured to the top of the platform, the borer submersible was free to move out on her own.
“Engage treads,” Stella ordered.
Lieutenant Freeman flipped several switches. Trident’s treads, three longitudinal tracks mounted circumferentially around her waist, spun up. A low frequency vibration could felt throughout the ship. The submersible was coming alive.
“Drop the clutch,” Stella said. Freeman complied. Trident lurched forward, grinding against her restraints. “We’re underway on treads.”
The giant sausage began crawling off its plate. Stella worked his steering through a tiny joystick at the center console, nudging it forward. Trident’s nose dipped as she dropped onto the ramp and trundled like a fat pig down onto the surface of Europa. For Winger, the maneuver brought back distant memories of the geoplanes on which Trident’s design had been based. Instead of boring into the Earth, however, this beast would be boring into the icy crust of Europa itself.
“I’ll drive off about five hundred meters and set up for boring,” Stella told them. He twisted the joystick and fought the rough surface as Trident ambled forward, rocking against boulders and tilted ice cliffs. “I don’t want to start boring too close to the lander. We’ll need the platform to get off this big ice cube.”
A ten minute drive brought them rocking and bouncing to a small ledge, overlooking a narrow chasm, filled with darker ice. Stella braked to a halt and edged over the lip of the chasm, pointing the nose of the submersible toward the chasm floor. Lieutenant Freeman sounded the surface with radar, and pronounced the ravine approachable.
“Temps reading twenty degrees warmer…ice may be thinner here too. Recommending we breach here, Captain.”
Stella agreed. He parked the sub perched on the edge of the chasm. “Let’s get the borer set up. Major, if you please—“
Winger unstrapped and headed with Stella forward through the central gangway to A deck, where the borer and containment systems were located. Once released from containment, the borer lens would be filled with uncountable gazillions of ANAD bots, optimized for disassembling solid-phase structures…like ice.
Trident would literally chew her way through Europa’s ice crust to the subsurface ocean thirty kilometers below them.
Inside A deck, Stella worked at the borer controls, prepping the bots for release. Winger helped him with configuration management.
“This should only take a few minutes,” Stella was saying. “These bugs are optimized for speed of disassembly. They like to eat things…like ice.”
“Master config loaded and verified,” Winger’s fingers flew over the keyboard.
“I’m cycling the capture port…coming open now….” Through the vid screen, the lens and parabolic emitter at the nose of Trident became hazy with a blue-white glow, an incandescent glow as bots flowed out of containment, stripped atoms and began building the borer lens. When stable and fully formed, the lens would be a hemispherical swarm of disassembly nanobots, blue-white hot from bond breaking, the teeth of the whole array. Trident would lower herself to the ice and the borer would chew a path through…thirty kilometers through, if the thing worked properly.
“Lens forming up—“ Stella studied the seething globe of fire that formed at the front of the submersible. “Looks steady, config is stable, normal bond energy levels, just a little edge effects, from what I see. The tunnel may be a little ragged at first, but the dimensions look good from here.”
“I concur,” Winger said.
“I’m setting us down on the ice now—“
Stella flipped a few switches and Trident’s treads folded, lowering her nose to the ice. At the same time, the borer lens began slicing into the surface, its swarm of bots snapping bonds and obliterating atoms like a hot knife through butter. The entire front end of the sub was soon bathed in the blue-white glow. Slowly, imperceptibly at first, Trident slid forward, her nose inclining down at an angle. In moments, as the borer chewed into the ice, the sub began sinking lower and lower, until her portholes were below the surface and covered with the dingy gray murk that was Europa’s icy crust. A faint vibration could be felt throughout the hull and slight groans from her outer skin flexing could be heard.
In less than five minutes, Trident was fully below the surface, melting and boring her way through the ice, sliding ever so slowly down a tunnel of her own making.
Operation Jovian Hammer was underway in earnest now. If all went well, the trip through the ice crust to Europa’s subterranean ocean would take nearly thirty hours.
The ship’s 1MC chirped.
“Captain, this is Freeman…there’s a message coming in on coupler wideband…flash traffic from UNISPACE.”
“On my way.” Stella stayed on A deck for a while longer, just to monitor boring operations and see that Trident was on course, nose down at a twenty-five degree angle and on a heading that would take her to an emergence point some three thousand kilometers from the triangulated coordinates of their target. After emerging from the underside of the ice, Trident would be in her true element, operating as a submarine at a depth of five hundred meters below the bottom of the ice, some thirty-two kilometers below the surface of the moon.
Then the real mission would begin.
Stella went back to B deck and scanned the message. He looked up at Winger.
“UNISPACE says the Chinese ship Shen Feng went into Jupiter orbit about ten hours ago. Some kind of lander put down on the surface here less than an hour before we did…other side of the Chaos. I didn’t see anything.”
Winger sucked in his breath. “So they’re here…and probably underway too, headed for the same coordinates. I guess this means the race is on.”
Stella grimaced.
Winger decided to head aft and find something hot to drink in the crew’s mess on C deck. On the way, he ran into Lieutenant Freeman, just emerging from B deck into the central gangway.
“I’m headed aft for some coffee, Lieutenant. Care to join me?”
Freeman turned about and regarded Winger cautiously. “I’m sorry, Major. I am headed to F deck…routine maintenance inspections on the power plant. And, as you can see, I am not like the others…I couldn’t drink coffee. Same as you, sir…” There was a faint attempt at a smile…the effect was more like a H
alloween mask than a real smile.
“Of course,” Winger said. He held on to a rail as Trident lurched slightly. The central gangway deck was canted upward and Winger had to pull himself along to maintain balance. “I almost forgot. You know…for both of us, our likeness with human form is remarkable. Must take a lot of processor qubits to do that. And a helluva config as well.”
Freeman maintained the ‘smile.’ “Thank you, Major. This configuration is the latest in bipedal form simulation…evolved from over a hundred and twenty thousand iterations in the lab. My texture and skin reflectance achieves congruence in over ninety eight percent of all measured parameters.”
And I’m sure you’re a swell guy too, Winger thought but didn’t say. “My compliments to the chef, Lieutenant. Carry on—“ He watched as Freeman made his way further aft, eventually disappearing into the hatch for F deck.
Winger ducked into the crew’s mess and found several troopers on hand. One of the yeomanbots was scuttling around the mess handling plates and trash…it looked like Armand2. Winger ordered himself up a coffee and some pastries and found a spot between Ray Spivey and Mighty Mite Barnes, both engaged in a heated debate.
“Skipper, maybe you can settle this—“ Barnes said. “Spite here says he just brushed by Lieutenant Freeman…grabbed a few molecules, he says and he wants to do a lab check…see how Freeman compares with our own ANADs. I’m saying that’s insubordination…Freeman’s a superior officer—granted with UNISPACE—and any such thing is against regs. And anyway, why would he think UNISPACE has better bots than we do?”
Winger munched on a gooey jelly-filled something, wiping the mess from the corners of his mouth. He smiled sheepishly, noting that his drinking and eating program needed a little work. “That right, Sergeant? You got a few atoms from Lieutenant Freeman?”
Spivey wasn’t sure whether to be proud or contrite. “Yes, sir…it was kind of unintentional…see the Lieutenant and me were passing by each other in the tunnel out there and it’s kind of narrow. Well, sir, the ship kind of lurched and we bumped into each other. Felt funny, too…my hand didn’t exactly go through his arm, but it was like jamming your fingers in a pile of sand…about that kind of consistency.”
Winger admitted he had just seen Freeman himself. “Lieutenant Freeman is a full-fledged officer in UNISPACE…you guys know that--”
“Yes, sir,” they both answered.
Winger wasn’t sure how to handle this. Plus who knew what eyes and ears were listening in? They all had doubts about Freeman, even Captain Stella. “And you know it’s UNIFORCE policy to employ and promote angels and swarm entities into responsible positions in the Corps at every opportunity—“
“Yes, sir—“
“It seems to me,” Winger said, swallowing the rest of the pastry and washing it down with a swig of coffee –at least that part of his disassembly program worked--, “that a good trooper follows Corps policy and regs to the best of his ability and doesn’t question orders and actions by a superior officer.”
“Skipper, I don’t even know if I’ve still got those molecules…it was on my arm here—“ he started to show Winger, but the Major waved it off.
“Save it, Spite. I know what happened. I just saw Freeman myself. It just happened. “ He studied the sleeves of Spivey’s uniform. “Sergeant, looks to me like you’ve got something that needs attention on that arm.”
“Sir?”
“Get down to the shop and see if you can get that taken care of…and anything you find, see that it’s contained. We don’t want just any old crap floating around the ship, now do we?”
Spivey looked puzzled for a moment, but Barnes understood immediately and elbowed him in the ribs. “Come on, Spite, you heard the Major. Let’s get that arm taken care of.”
“I’ll be by to check on it after awhile.” Winger told them. The two troopers left for E deck and Winger looked casually about the small mess compartment, over the steaming lip of his coffee cup. Hopefully, anybody hears that, they won’t suspect a thing. Armand2 went on about his work, tidying up the crew’s mess.
He waited about ten minutes, a decent interval, he figured, then headed to the shop and utility spaces on E deck himself.
Barnes and Spivey were already there, near the quantum imager. Spivey’s shirt was off and the sleeve of the shirt was secured in the objective tray of the imager. The screen showed a grid-like array, populated with vibrating fuzzballs that flitted from one cell to another.
“Anatomy 101, Major,” Barnes said. “We managed to capture a few of the molecules from the Lieutenant. Jumpy little buggers, too. Had to spray ‘em a few times with HERF to get them to stay still long enough for an image.”
Winger studied the image. “Those bots are souped up like hot rods, for sure. Can you go to higher res, Spite? I want to check out the effector array.”
“Sure thing, Skipper.” Spivey twiddled with some controls. The grid grew larger. The fuzzballs became slightly more distinct and a few structures were faintly discernible.
Winger looked a little closer. “What the hell are those doodads?”
Spivey examined the image. The structure was one of two cones, inverted tip to tip. The cone surfaces were festooned with undulating arms and appendages. “Jesus, it must have a gazillion effectors…the whole damn thing is effectors.”
“Fantastic engineering…look how the surfaces are dimpled—“Winger said.
“Quantum traps, I’ll bet,” Barnes added.
“This bugger’s got it all: pyridine probes, bond disrupters, enzymatic knife…look at that one—“Spivey pointed to a hook-shaped effector. “I’d bet a month’s salary that’s a fullerene grapple.”
“But what makes the texture of the swarm so lifelike, Skipper? I mean, we’re seeing incredible stuff here, but it’s still just a nanobot.”
“All in the config, Mite,” Winger told her. “Just like me. It’s the pattern. Which means that somewhere inside those cones is one hell of a processor…with algorithms and configurations we’ve never imagined. To be able to pull off something like a Lieutenant Freeman has to take a processor with speed and memory and pattern buffers maybe even old Doc Frost never imagined. Which gives me an idea—“Winger cycled open the capture port on his web belt. “I got Doc II with me. Spite, open that tank. I’ll insert Doc II and let him take a quick look.”
He opened the quantum coupler circuit to his embedded botswarm. Right away, Doc II was enthusiastic.