Chapter 3
“Into the Ocean of Night”
Aboard UNISPACE Submersible Trident
Europa Coordinate System: Lat. 41N, Long 160W
Underway at 30 KT, 325 meters below mean ice level
December 12, 2050 (Earth U.T.)
Johnny Winger was scrolling through some notes in his bunk when the master alarm sounded through the ship. Instantly, he sprang up and headed out into Trident’s central gangway. As he headed aft toward the sound of the klaxon, he collided with Ray Spivey, coming down from B deck.
“What the hell’s going on?”
Spivey was grim. Right behind the CEC1 was Captain Stella.
“It’s coming from G deck…there are vital systems down there. Come on—“ Stella pushed past both of them and pulled himself along the gangway rails. When he got to the hatch, he slipped inside and came up short.
Half the compartment was enveloped in some kind of bot swarm. And Trooper Barnes was crouched behind some pallets nearby, steering her own embedded swarm into engagement.
Stella saw the problem right away. The hull valve was fully enveloped in a swarm. And already a thin stream of water was spraying into the compartment.
“The hull valve—watch out!”
Even as Johnny Winger dove head first for Freeman, the valve gave way and high-pressure water screeched into the compartment in an ear-splitting whine. Barnes was knocked off her feet and lost control of her own swarm. Winger plowed into Freeman, or what was left of Freeman, for by now the Lieutenant had almost fully dematerialized into a cloud of bots, filling one corner of G deck with a flashing, pulsating fog. Water shot across the compartment floor, knocking equipment off nearby shelves, scattering pallets of gear and rapidly filling the compartment.
Through it all, the Master Alarm klaxon shrieked.
Stella couldn’t get any closer to the valve assembly; Winger grabbed the Captain’s arm and held him back. “Don’t get too close!” he yelled over the din. “You’ll be atom fluff in no time….”
Stella tried to twist free. “The valve…I’ve got to—“
“Forget it! It’s gone—“
Water was rising rapidly from the floor of G deck. “At least, shut that hatch! It’s watertight…let me get back to B deck and counterflood…try to stabilize the ship! Maybe I can open enough air flasks to keep the breach from getting worse!”
Winger released Stella. For a moment, the Captain and Winger looked at each other. Stella knew the situation was grave and getting worse. “Get your people out of this compartment, Major. Right now. Once that hatch is shut and I empty the air flasks, you won’t be able to get out. You’ll all be killed.”
Winger bodily shoved Stella through the hatch and into the central gangway. “If I don’t stop that swarm right here and now, Captain, nothing else will matter!”
Stella shrugged and nodded grimly and disappeared up the gangway. With Ray Spivey’s help, Winger dogged the hatch shut and made it fast. Then he turned to the Freeman swarm.
The entire far wall of the compartment was now thick with bots, the swarm replicating at max rate, now that it no longer needed to maintain structure. Mighty Mite Barnes was sloshing around in the freezing water, trying to get herself upright, while Trident lurched and listed heavily to starboard, as G deck took on more and more water. Her own embedded swarm had disappeared, absorbed, probably destroyed by Freeman.
Winger knew there was only one thing to do. Barnes’ instincts had been right. The best way to fight a swarm was with another swarm. As he pulled up a new config for himself and released it, Winger took a last look at what Lieutenant Julian Freeman had now become.
The angel still had not fully dematerialized. From its head down to its waist, all human structure was gone, replaced by a fuzzy, pulsating blob of bots, like a tree enveloped in fog. Below the waist, most of Freeman’s trunk and legs were still faintly visible, in shadowy outline, as the swarm changed config and assumed its natural state. The effect was something half-man, half-swarm, a hybrid thing, steadily breaking down into its smallest elements.
Winger motioned to Spivey to release his own swarm. “Let’s get small!” he yelled over the shriek. He grabbed a nearby stanchion to stay upright as Trident lurched again, and her list became even more pronounced. Up on B deck, he knew Stella was fighting to keep the ship under control. “Mite, come over here and keep me steady. I’m going small—“
Barnes sloshed and splashed through the water, now knee high and rising, and grabbed Winger to hold on. She secured another arm around the stanchion and tried to brace them both.
“I’ve got you, Skipper! Let ‘em have it!”
Winger went over the ‘waterfall’, breaking down his own structure, pulling on a new config as if he were trying on pants and quickly found himself in a sleet of polygons and tetrahedrals. His propulsors spun up to full power and he sounded ahead, hunting for the signatures he knew had to be there.
Sixty meters above them, Captain Stella was frantically fighting the boat, trying to regain some kind of stability. He strapped himself into the commander’s seat, as the ship lurched yet again, and his fingers flew over the keyboard.
“Counterflood…counterflood, damn it!” he muttered to himself. “Come on, come on—“
Stella managed to open valves on several ballast tanks, overriding all safeties and inhibits, letting tons of seawater in to trim Trident and level her out. A quick glance at the board told him all he needed to know.
They were listing slightly to starboard, with a ten-degree up angle on the planes, sinking tail first through four hundred meters and their rate of descent was picking up. Trident was stern heavy and she had lost almost all forward way. Stella ran the throttles on her power plant to full, trying to counter the tail drag with as much forward speed as he could but it was a losing battle. Trident’s waterlogged stern was dragging her down by the tail faster than her engines could move her forward. She was losing speed and sinking, crabbing her way through the water.
Got to counterflood and get her stern up, Stella told himself. His fingers flew over the controls. If he couldn’t stop their descent and soon, Trident would rapidly descend below crush depth. Below a thousand meters, her hull would crumple like a wad of paper and all aboard would perish in a particularly gruesome way.
“I hope to God that compartment is secure,” he muttered. He checked the panel to his right. Indicators showed the hatch had been shut and secured.
It was time to open the emergency air flasks. Emergency blow and pray to God they had enough air to evacuate the compartment and put Trident back up at the ice level.
Then it would be a race to see if she could bore her way back up through the ice before her air ran out and she slid back down to the depths again.
“Time to get the borer started,” he said. He went through the start sequence.
Then he took a deep breath. When the emergency air flasks were open full, air at several hundred psi would begin screaming into the compartment on G deck and into all Trident’s ballast tanks. He wasn’t sure if the troopers trapped in the compartment would survive the blow. If there was a merciful God in heaven, they would all drown before that happened.
Stella swallowed hard and pressed the buttons to start the blow.
A blast of high-pressure air shrieked into G deck.
For Johnny Winger, now configured at nanoscale, it was like riding a gnat through a hurricane, like riding a roaring river down a waterfall. He immediately retracted all of his effectors in an attempt to ride out the storm. Then he hunkered down and slogged his way forward, trying to get a read on anything unusual up ahead, high thermals, high EMs, an acoustic signature, anything.
Somehow, some way, he had to locate the bots of the Freeman swarm and engage.
Winger got on the crewnet. “Spivey, you and Mighty Mite take your embeds and fab some kind of shielding for that valve. See if you can stop the water o
r slow it down.” The inrushing water was already pooling up to their knees and rising fast. “Maybe that’ll help Stella.”
“I’m on it, Skipper.” Ray Spivey sloshed through the cold swirling water toward the stanchion where the breach had occurred.
Just then, Winger got an acoustic ping. He checked his sensors. Sure enough, his sensors had detected something unusual up ahead, through the driving sleet of water molecules, a faint echo, maybe a spark of thermal activity above average. Could be some bots assembling something…or disassembling something. He revved up propulsors to max and steered onto that heading.
The reading ebbed and flowed so he steered as best could through the maelstrom, tacking first one way, then another, trying to work upstream against the onslaught of molecules from the flood.
There. Gotcha.
Winger chopped propulsors and probed ahead with electromagnetic fingers. Density going up. Those ain’t no water molecules, he told himself. Cautiously, he probed some more and brought himself around to approach from the side, gaining a different aspect view of the target.
Slowly, ghostly shapes began to materialize out of the fog. Freeman bots, thousands of them. As he closed in, he could see the elongated multi-lobed form of the assemblers…squat barbells festooned with all manner of effectors and grabbers. Whirling propulsors at both ends, spinning into a blur as the bots fought to maintain position.
It was like nothing he had ever seen before.
Winger worked his config controls, setting up to engage. Carbene grabbers, enzymatic knife, bond disrupters, everything was ready. Winger flexed his nanoscale fists and drove forward, spoiling for a fight. Sometimes, it was just plain good to be an angel.
The two formations came together and sparks flew, as bond disrupters ripped at effectors, liberating millions of electron volts. The bots thrashed and hacked, searching for weak spots, closing, then backing off to find another angle. It was a boxing match, feint here, jab there, grasp and thrust, parry and kick.
In the last seconds before the grapple, Winger had noticed an open seam in the Freeman bots’ outer casing, right amidships, between whirling effectors above and below, almost like a waist belt. He surmised it was a structural joint, a connection drawing together segments of the bots’ scaffolding. Could be a weak spot.
If I could just get a bond disrupter in there—
Throughout the battle front, Winger had replicated uncountable trillions of assemblers and each one was slaved to the master. Whatever move and maneuver Winger made was instantly copied and repeated by every replicant. Now, Winger twisted and turned to bring his forward disrupters to bear on the enemy bot’s midsection.
Just a little further—he shuddered as his leading bots were ripped by the enemy’s carbene grabber. Winger recoiled slightly, losing effector tips in a spinning puff of atoms. Ouch. That hurt….
He closed in again, shielding himself from assault, extending his own disrupters as far forward as they would go. Just a little bit further….there!
He let it go. The disrupter tore at valence electrons that hovered like a cloud over the mid-section seam. Instantly, the seam buckled and gave way. An explosive cloud of electrons erupted, sparking and sizzling like oil on a gas grill. The bot’s outer casing buckled and tore away in a frenzied thrashing, as more bonds were severed. Its props and effectors spun down and the momentum of the bond break sent the bot cartwheeling away.
It had worked.
Johnny Winger knew that in every nanoscale combat encounter, there were always weaknesses in the enemy bots. The point of all the tactics was to find that weakness and exploit it, before the enemy did the same to you.
All up and down the battlefront, Winger replicants duplicated the maneuver, closing with their opponents, grappling and punching, searching for the midwaist seam. Any opening, any letdown, and his bond disrupters were there, zapping at the weak spot.
The water was soon churning and frothy with atom parts and molecule fragments.
And the Freeman swarm would soon be so much atom fluff.
Winger made sure his embedded bots were running the assault as he had demonstrated. Now, he had to do something about containing what was left of the Freeman swarm. Bots could be slashed and cut up, but if the master was intact, replication was just a matter of time. You had to go for the head, go for the brains. Find the master and its controller and shred the config engine. Once you did that, the bots couldn’t re-assemble.
He shifted back to macroscale, fighting off the disorientation that always came with shifting back and forth, and surveyed the situation.
Spivey and Barnes were close by, clinging to a stanchion to stay upright, while they maneuvered their own embeds to replicate a patch for the hull valve breach. Icy cold water still poured in, but the water flow seemed to have slacked off. A shrieking blast of high-pressure air was still sweeping the compartment. It was Stella’s effort to contain the flood, and drive the inrushing water out of the compartment, into Trident’s drains and bilge, where it could be flushed back into the sea.
Winger watched and Spivey covered his ears and screamed at the top of his lungs, trying to equalize pressure inside his head. They had to find some kind of containment for the Freeman swarm while the bots were still neutralized. Then Winger hit on an idea. Why not just fabricate one?
Winger worked his config controls, stealing a small element of replicants from his main swarm. He hacked out a quick config for a containment vessel and set the replicants to work fabricating it. Then he programmed his master bot to steer all captured Freeman bots toward the vessel. It wasn’t pretty but it should work. He’d have to make sure there weren’t any Freeman bots left over. A final, very thorough sweep of the compartment would have to be done.
As he drifted around the compartment, he realized that the patches Barnes and Spivey had fashioned seemed to be working. The water flow had been greatly reduced, now to just a thin stream. Around the bulkhead where the hull valve had once been, a shimmering globe of bots held back the water, except for the thin stream.
“Good work, guys,” Winger told them. Just above the water surface, a faint mist drifted toward the containment vessel that his own bots had just fashioned. The small capsule floated on top of the water. “Roundup time. The sooner we get these bastards corralled, the better.”
“Amen to that, Skipper,” said Barnes. She shook her head, trying to equalize pressure.
Winger located the intercom and told Stella the situation was under control on G deck. “Kill the blow, Captain. We’re all getting a splitting headache.”
Moments later, the emergency air died off and the shriek that had deafened them for the last few minutes dropped down to a faint whistle. The hull breach had been stopped and the worst of the water, now swirling around at ankle depth, had been driven down into Trident’s drain system.
The ship seemed stable enough. “I’m reconfigging, heading forward,” Winger said. “Make sure all these bots get contained. Stella and I need to have a word.” He slipped out into the gangway, chose a more suitable config, reforming his own diffuse swarm into something vaguely human and made his way along the railing all the way to the command compartment on B deck.
Stella was in the commander’s seat, scowling over a map on his board.
“We’ve got to return to base camp, Major.” Stella tapped the map; it displayed an ice-level view of Europa’s surface. Trident’s position was indicated with a blinking red dot.
“What’s our status?” Winger asked. He studied the map, the track of their course and their current calculated position. “According to this, we have two more days to EUROTOP’s position.”
“Trident’s taken a hell of a beating. And we don’t know what’s ahead. I need to surface the ship and do a thorough inspection. The best place to do that is back at base camp.”
Winger took a deep breath. Although he was nominally the mission commander, he knew h
e had to defer to Stella when it came to Trident. “We got the Freeman swarm contained, Captain. And my troops have patched the breach on G deck…it should hold just fine.”
Stella rubbed his eyes wearily. “All true enough, Major. But Trident’s my responsibility. My job is to get you to your target safe and sound. I can’t guarantee that unless I can do a thorough inspection and make necessary repairs. That hull breach may be patched for now but it needs to be looked at. And my controls, especially the stern planes, are sluggish. Maybe Freeman did something to the mechanism back there. Then there’s the buoyancy control system. You don’t go through an emergency blow like that without checking everything out. Hell, we could blow a seal or another valve an hour from now and be in even worse shape. No—“Stella was firm, “we bore through the ice at the very least and put Trident back on the surface. If necessary, she can be careened on the ice and checked over visually.”
Winger wasn’t fully convinced. “What’s Trident’s condition now?”
Stella shrugged. “Where do you want me to start? We’ve got propulsion and some buoyancy control. The borer seems to be okay. But I don’t want to test the hull at any greater depth, until she’s checked out. With all due respects, your bots that patched the hull are just bots. I want something stronger before we go on…we have no idea what’s ahead.”
“You’re recommending we surface the ship, do inspections and make repairs?”
“That’s what I’m recommending. Not only proper procedure but common sense dictates we check ourselves out thoroughly. We could lose the whole ship if we don’t…then what happens to your mission?”
Winger knew this would have to be sent back to Quantum Corps and UNISPACE for a decision.
“We can’t lose any more time, Captain,” he told Stella. He looked out a nearby porthole. Nothing to see. Europa’s ocean was black as night. They might as well have been swallowed by a black hole. “The mission’s too important. A lot depends on whether we can find and disable EUROTOP before the Chinese get there. Freeman must have been a plant but at least we stopped that. Now every hour’s delay could costs lives.”
“What good can we do them if Trident’s destroyed or disabled?”
Winger had to admit Stella had a point. “I’ve got swarms that can help,” he said. “We’ve got the best configs. You need any patches, any tools, anything at all…Quantum Corps swarms can make it.”
“Can we even trust our own swarms?” Stella asked. He checked his board, saw that Trident was nosing down again and he trimmed her bow planes to level the ship. They were still losing buoyancy somewhere. “Look at Freeman…how many more Freemans are there around here? I knew he was an angel. But I didn’t know he’d been turned. Can I even trust you? Any more surprises? Can you even trust your own people, Major?”
Finally, after more heated discussions and a few consultations with Quantum Corps and UNISPACE, the decision came in: Trident would make all necessary repairs while underway and the mission would proceed.
Stella wasn’t satisfied but there was little he could do. Of necessity, he accepted Winger’s offer and the Detachment’s embedded swarms were put to work making repairs, clearing debris and patching things up.
After a few hours, Stella gave the word to all hands: Trident was resuming her course, three hundred meters below the ice surface of Europa, heading for the suspected location of EUROTOP.
Rathmore Chaos and the calculated coordinates of the objective were still two days away, by Stella’s reckoning. Somewhere hundreds of meters below the Chaos, EUROTOP lurked. Somehow they had to find it.
If Trident and Operation Jovian Hammer couldn’t locate and destroy it before the Chinese ship got there, the situation back on Earth would be bleak. A re-opened portal to the Old Ones would be bad news for everybody.
Trident was cruising serenely at thirty knots, in level trim, when the first alarm sounded. Captain Francisco Stella had been lightly dozing on the command deck, dreaming of boyhood and rocket-hopping across the Sea of Tranquility with Ralphie and Archie and the others. He was just about to win the race when an insistent beeping awakened him from his slumber.
He realized as he startled himself awake that it was the sonar alarm. Trident had detected something ahead, something big from the looks of it. Auto-helm was engaged and she had already begun slowing.
Stella came fully awake and rubbed his eyes. He studied the sonar plot. Whatever it was, it was a large object, some ten thousand meters dead ahead. A smaller return could also be resolved, near the larger one.
Probably the target, he surmised. The small return had to be the Chinese ship Shen Feng. From the nav console, he could see Trident had just about made the predicted coordinates, hundreds of meters below the ice at Rathmore Chaos. But Shen Feng was already there. The Chinese had beaten them to the objective. He got on the intercom.
“Major Winger to the command deck….Major Winger to the command deck at once….”
Stella disengaged auto-helm and took the controls himself, slowing the ship to a crawl. He didn’t want to run Trident into something this big without studying it first.
Johnny Winger’s head popped into the compartment a few moments later.
“What gives, Captain?”
“Take a look at the plot. Our competitors are already on the scene.”
Winger slid into the second seat and studied the sonar return. “Could be what we’re looking for. Can we get a little closer?”
“We can try,” Stella said.
Slowly, Trident closed on her target, dead ahead. The subsurface ocean below Europa’s ice surface was completely devoid of light, black as night. But the returns from Trident’s sonar indicated that the object could very well be their objective: the submerged EUROTOP target.
Eventually, Stella brought them to a complete stop, five hundred meters away.
The two men discussed their options.
“That’s about as well as our sonar can resolve the target,” Stella said. “From the returns, it seems to be a large, probably buoyant platform, with some kind of structures on top. I’m getting faint returns around the main one, too, smaller objects of some type. Looks like the Shen Feng is still closing, moving in. They’re braver than I plan to be.”
Winger nodded. “I’ll check with our CQE’s…see if they’re detecting anything.” He called down to Mighty Mite Barnes. The CQEs were in the crews mess, C deck, playing cards.
“Mite, check your entangler readouts…we’ve got a large object dead ahead. It may be EUROTOP. I want to know about quantum disturbances, decoherence wakes, that sort of thing.”
Barnes replied, “We’re on it, Skipper…” she waved at Tsukota, grabbing a coffee and doughnut. “Oz, get your gear…we may be tango on our target—“
Five minutes later, Barnes’ voice crackled over the intercom on the command deck.
“Bingo, Skipper…you were right. We’ve got a real strong source nearby, something emitting quantum waves at a very hard to detect entanglement level. Definitely a quantum device.”
Winger considered the situation. “Captain, I’d like to get a visual…can we get in a little closer…put some lights on that thing?”
Stella was reluctant. “Water’s a little turbulent ahead of us. I don’t want to get caught in something we can’t get out of.”
“Just enough to get some light and better look…”
Stella mumbled something but started up Trident’s propulsors again. The ship eased forward.
At that moment, Trident’s sonar beeped again. The smaller return, Shen Feng, had disappeared.
“What the hell—?” Stella adjusted the sonar pulse, tried active pinging, but there was nothing. “Sucker just up and disappeared.”
Winger felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Of course, he didn’t have any real hairs. But the memory was still there.
“I was afraid of that. Captain, move forwar
d with extreme caution.”
“What happened to the Chinese?”
Winger just shook his head. “If I’m right, EUROTOP is a quantum source…and it just yanked Shen Feng out of existence…at least, this existence. Quantum displacement, Captain. Unfortunately, we’ve run into this sort of thing before.”
Stella glared at Winger as if he were some kind of disease. “A quantum what?”
“Ahead, slowly, Captain. Very slowly—“
“Major, you’ve got to be kidding.” But forward they went. A hundred meters away, they were rocked gently by turbulent currents. “That’s as close as we’re getting,” Stella announced. “Here go the spots—“He flipped a few switches.
The water was murky, thick with sediment and ice chunks, but the general outlines of the structure were dimly visible. It was indeed a large buoyant platform, roughly rectangular in outline, easily four to five hundred meters in its longest dimension.
“Look at the size of that mother,” Winger marveled. “Half a kilometer, easily—“
Both top and bottom surfaces of the platform were surmounted by some kind of spherical structures. The structures were fuzzy and indistinct, whether from the murky water or some other reasons, could not be determined. And they seemed to be rotating.
“Seems to be floating freely,” Stella observed. “I don’t see a tether holding it in position.”
“Maybe it has thrusters…those extensions below the platform that look like legs, maybe…?”
Even as they watched the EUROTOP platform, its shape began to change, morphing right in front of them, shifting and transforming itself from one state to another. It was like a funhouse mirror distortion, a crazy collage of images superimposed, one upon the other.
“How can an object that big--?”
“Quantum device,” Winger said. “We’ve seen that effect before. I’m thinking this whole big platform is nothing but a giant swarm.”
“Gives me the creeps,” Stella admitted. He checked Trident’s position. She was holding one hundred meters away, level and trim, at all stop.
“Some say it’s a portal,” Winger told him. “We’ve seen similar devices, at Paryang in Tibet. The Engebbe object. All quantum devices, capable of being here and elsewhere at the same time. We don’t know if it’s a true portal to the Old Ones, whoever or whatever they are, or just a big radio…like some kind of comm device. The cartel Red Hammer used the Sphere at Paryang to somehow access a library or archive of some type. That’s how they got the technology to build quantum couplers and things like that.”
Stella shook his head. “I don’t really want to get any closer. Your call, Major. You’re the mission commander.”
Winger watched the huge platform, deeply shadowed in Trident’s spotlights, morphing and changing right before their eyes. It was like a series of waves engulfed the thing, starting at one end and working its way rhythmically down its length, making the structure into something new over and over again.
“Any sign of the Chinese?”
Stella checked Trident’s sonar again, pinging for any kind of return. “It’s like they just vanished. But I’m sure we were tracking them a few minutes ago. We had multiple returns and OSCAR pegged the smaller one as a signature consistent with what we knew about Shen Feng. Did that thing eat them or what?”
Winger was grim. “I don’t know. The only way we’re going to know for sure what we’re dealing with here is to go out there. Examine it from close up.”
“I was afraid you would say that. I’m thinking that’s not such a great idea, Major. Look how turbulent the water is around those legs.”
Winger shrugged. “We’ve come all this way to confront EUROTOP. Now we’re here. We’ve still got a mission to carry out. If we don’t disable this thing, the Chinese may re-establish some kind of link with the really bad guys out there. And that puts all of us in danger.”
Winger called a briefing in the crews’ mess. He had decided to form a small recon squad of three nanotroopers: Mighty Mite Barnes, Ray Spivey and Al Glance. The remainder of the Detachment would stay aboard Trident for the time being, operating as backup. Two troopers would partially suit up, just in case.
“What’s the mission, Skipper?” asked Barnes.
“Straight reconnaissance for this trip. We go outside, get as close as we can and see what we’re dealing with here. If it’s a big swarm, we have tools to deal with that.”
Glance sipped at a steaming cup of tea. “I’m guessing our HERF guns won’t be too effective here. That bugger’s the size of a small city.”
“Take ‘em anyway,” Winger said. “We’ll fit out for opposed entry, full gear, hypersuits and all. I’ll load some new configs for me too.”
That made Barnes wince. “Skipper, is that such great idea? I’m not sure any ANAD-type swarm can be controlled in the vicinity of this thing. No disrespect, sir, but we’ve seen what happened with other encounters. ANAD goes haywire.”
“I can manage myself…I’m putting myself in direct pilot mode, so the master bot only runs the configs I send.”
“I hope that works, Skipper,” said Ray Spivey. His eyes caught a quick look from Glance that said: we’d better keep an eye on the Skipper too.
“Let’s move,” Winger ordered and the recon team headed aft for G deck and the lockout chamber.
Suit-up took an hour. The hypersuits had been rigged out for deep diving in Europa’s sub-ice ocean. All troopers had been respirocyte-treated; their bloodstreams were thick with nanobots shuttling boosted amounts of oxygen back and forth. But the Europan ocean was cold and dense and the troopers would need pressure and temperature protection, as well as personal propulsors.
The three divers entered the lockout chamber and cycled through. Winger was the first to exit the ship.
His first impression was cold. Numbing, penetrating needles of cold. Winger switched on his suit lamps, saw only a fuzzy blur. Too much sediment, too much something in the water. He dialed down the light intensity, and kicked off under one-quarter propulsor, sounding ahead. For good measure, he checked his escape port; when the time came, he could change configs and exit into the water in minutes.
Barnes and Spivey joined him a few moments later.
The recon team gently felt their way forward along Trident’s underhull, until they came at last to the borer head.
“End of the line, here—“Winger muttered. He checked his own sonar scan. EUROTOP was out there somewhere, giving off intermittent returns. There was a fuzzy patch near the center of his scope.
That has to be it.
“Stella, this is Recon One…can you move in just a little closer…put more light on the target?”
Stella obliged. As soon as the team was clear, the sub inched forward, cranking up her spot and floodlights, trying to bring as much illumination to bear on the platform as possible. It was like shining headlights through a dense fog.
“Launching Uncle One and Two, “came Stella’s voice. The underwater drones would accompany the recon team on its excursion around the platform. Presently, the murmur of their jets could be heard nearby.
“Got ‘em,” said Barnes. “I have full control…both bots…steering straight ahead…you want sonar, Skipper?”
“Sound away,” Winger said. “I’ve got nothing but scrambled eggs on my scope. Platform’s morphing too fast to give a solid return.”
The EUROTOP platform was a vast complex, more accurately resembling an underwater cloud. The huge platform was studded with structures top and bottom, rotating, swirling water around in small-scale whirlpools. There were murky blobs floating nearby…nanobotic swarm elements, said Barnes—forming a loose protective sphere around the platform. Water flow was turbulent. Winger found a steady current pushing him away and he had to adjust his propulsors to stay in position.
“I’m calling up Uncle One,” he told them. “Let’s see what the drones can find ou
t.” He pressed a few keys on his wristpad and the underwater bot surged forward, its jets whirring gently. It plunged into the murk and was soon lost to view. Winger patched in to the bot’s sensors. Soon, the whole team was getting sonar, EM and visuals back from Uncle.
“Definitely a swarm,” said Spivey. The CQE hung off to Winger’s starboard side, testing for deco waves. “I’m seeing decoherence right now, wave after wave, mostly small stuff.”
“The whole thing’s nothing but a giant quantum generator,” Barnes marveled.
Winger agreed. “This thing’s bigger and stronger than what we saw at Paryang or Engebbe. We could be seeing only a shadow of the real thing. Devices like this can be in multiple places at the same time. We’d best go slow and feel our way in.”
Uncle plunged closer and closer toward EUROTOP. Winger turned on visual.
The view, when it came up, was like flying through a sleet storm. For a brief moment, the troopers of the Recon team saw inside the platform. Clumps and clots of nanobotic devices came at the imager like hail stones in a hurricane, while Uncle banked and careened to fly through the maelstrom, plowing through on auto while tickling the great swarm with electromagnetic fingers.
“Each of those clumps is like a swarm in itself,” Spivey said. “This is one massive mother—“
Then, just as the swarm mass had begun to thicken and Uncle had slowed to negotiate the traffic, the signal dropped out. Everything went blank.
“I got nothing,” Winger said. His fingers flew over the keys on his wristpad—not easy in hypersuit gloves—but Uncle didn’t respond.
“Me neither, Skipper,” said Barnes. She tried several channels, but Uncle seemed to be lost.
“Time for Uncle Two,” said Spivey.
“Belay that, Spite,” said Winger. “We need to find out what happened—“
“Hey, I’m getting big deco waves now—wow!—one right after another. Decoherence waves big time, Skipper. Something’s really got this bugger riled up—“
Turbulence increased and the team was jostled and thrashed by waves pushing through the water from EUROTOP.
“Major—“it was Stella, aboard Trident, “something’s happening out there. My sonar is showing aspect changes all along that platform. The thing’s moving, morphing—“
That was when the lights went out.
For Johnny Winger, the first impulse was like a giant fist had grabbed him and started squeezing. He was whirling and spinning, dizzy, round and round, he could feel the force of the water against his helmet, pressing, crushing him—
He had a fleeting glimpse of one of his troopers—maybe it was Barnes, maybe Spivey—and he nearly vomited at the sight. It was all the wrong…the image was wrong and his mind refused to accept it—there was Barnes, with two heads, now three, now four, now eight heads, popping out of her hypersuit like geraniums in fast motion video, Barnes with her head missing, distorted in a cracked mirror, and he closed his eyes, couldn’t look at it anymore—
…and then it came. An image of geometric forms—icosahedrons, polygons, trapezoids—all compressed into a tunnel, a long curving corridor and he found himself hurtling at breakneck speed down this corridor, until—
With a hard bump, his whole body jarred from the impact and when he opened his eyes, caught his breath and came to his senses, he was in.
Inside the lockout chamber aboard Trident.
Johnny Winger let the chamber stop spinning and his eyes settle down back into their sockets. Something heavy lay against his side. He craned his neck up. Another hypersuit. With a start, he realized it was Mighty Mite Barnes.
What the hell—?
“Mite…Mite…get up…”
The hypersuited trooper stirred and moved away from his leg. Somehow, the lockout chamber had been cycled and the water pumped out.
Winger got to his feet, a bit unsteadily, and helped Barnes up as well. That’s when they realized a face was peering at them from inside G deck. It was Stella.
Stella’s voice crackled over their suit comms. “Okay, you two, I’m cycling the lock. Get ready…that water’s cold outside—“
Winger felt a chill race down his spine. They were back aboard Trident, displaced back in space to the lockout chamber. And not only that…somehow, they had been displaced back in time as well. He recognized everything and a glance at his wristpad clock confirmed it: they were right back where they had been…starting out on the recon mission. They had done this before.
As if to confirm his idea, more faces appeared in the hatch window. It was Spivey and Al Glance, ready to cycle out after Winger and Barnes. Just like before—
“Hold up, Captain,” Winger said. “Don’t cycle the lock just yet—“
It took a few minutes of explaining to convince Stella of what had just happened.
Winger and Barnes de-suited on G deck, along with Spivey and Glance. Stella was skeptical.
“You mean to say you were just outside, approaching the platform…and now you’re here? That’s nuts, Major. You’ve been right beside me the whole time—all of you—prepping for the dive. I was just about to operate the lock.”
Winger understood. “I know it’s hard to believe, Captain, but we’ve seen this effect before—“
Glance added, “These systems are quantum devices. They can be in many places at once and they can entangle other objects, like us, and move us around in space and time. Usually, we don’t get that close.”
Stella was still having a hard time with the idea. “Are you going to dive now…I mean again…I mean--?”
Winger was peeling off the rest of his hypersuit, handing his helmet and web belt to the yeomanbot. It scuttled off to D deck, to rack the gear in Stores and Supplies.
“We need to sit down and think about this one. How the hell do you fight something that can displace us to just about anywhere in time and space?” He went to a comm panel nearby, flipping on the 1MC. “This is Major Winger…all nanotroopers…briefing in ten minutes. Crew’s mess on C Deck…out!”
The gathering on C deck spilled out into the gangway. The entire Detachment was on hand. Winger briefed the rest on what had happened.
Al Glance spoke up. “That EUROTOP system should be viewed as nothing more than a giant swarm. Fantastic configs, to be sure, and individually, I’m sure the bots far surpass ANAD or anything else we have. But in the end, it’s still a swarm.”
Mighty Mite Barnes said, “When I was a young nog in Tactics school, I learned that the only sure way to fight a swarm is with another swarm. What about you, Skipper…any effects on you from this displacement?”
Winger said, “None that I can detect. I’ll run full diagnostics on myself to make sure.”
Kip Detrick, the Detachment’s IC2, added, “Why should we trust any ANAD system now? We know about these Old Ones now…they’re all suspect in my book. I’m thinking we don’t trust our lives to something that may turn on us.”
“That’s a crock, Detrick, and you know it,” said Barnes. “Major Winger is just as reliable as you…or me, for that matter. How do I know you won’t go bonkers? How do any of us know there aren’t more Lieutenant Freemans around here?”
“That’s enough,” Winger stepped in. “We won’t solve anything going down that road. We’ve got each other. We’ve got to work together.”
There was an awkward silence. Ozzie Tsukota, ever the thoughtful one, had an idea.
“I say we probe EUROTOP with everything we have, try to get detailed structure on the configs, operating patterns, maybe use Uncle to capture some of the bots for analysis. Bring ‘em back here and let’s take a look. Maybe we’ll see something we can use.”
“I like it, Skipper,” Barnes said. “Gives us something to do. If EUROTOP is just a cloud of bugs, we ought to be able to find some weakness. After all, we are nanotroopers, aren’t we?”
A chorus of nods and yes’s circled the compartment. Winger
took that as a good sign. No commander wanted to take his troops into battle when they weren’t sure what they were fighting.
“Agreed. Spite, you and Mighty Mite work with Captain Stella and get another Uncle ready. Let’s hang every sensor we can on him…see if we can’t find out makes this sucker tick. We don’t want to wind up disappearing like the Chinese ship. ”
“We’re on it, Skipper,” said Barnes.
Winger went back to his bunk to work up a tactical plan, something that had been brewing in the back of his mind for several hours.
Reconnoiter first. He remembered a line from Sun Tzu, the great Chinese nanowarrior ….
He who is skilled hides in the most secret recesses of the earth.
Maybe, just maybe, there was a way to trick EUROTOP into letting them in.