***No data to support or refute your analysis, Johnny. Sim may be a sequential stream of recorded time-stamped events, which you call a story***
It made sense. The sim went on for many minutes, or hours, Winger couldn’t tell which. They were captive travelers, traveling in time and space with a story of how the Old Ones had seen their home world destroyed in a supernova. As the story developed, Winger and Doc made ‘landings’ on various worlds. They watched as knots and groups of nanobotic mechs descended and seeded one world after another, leaving behind small samples of themselves on each world.
Maybe they’re trying to find a new home, Winger surmised. Maybe this is their story, like wandering in the desert of space for millennia, searching for their own version of the promised land.
The sim unfolded and the great Mother Swarm came at last to a world Winger was sure he recognized…a world of blues and greens, a world of great oceans and steaming continents. He rode down with a detached element of the main swarm, descending through thick carbon dioxide rich air and purple, lightning-racked clouds to a hover over what looked like a primordial swamp.
It was Earth. Earth from millions of years ago.
“Doc, this is like watching a vid—“
He spotted movement on the other side of the swamp and saw a figure coming into view. The figure was dressed in some kind of hypersuit. It stopped, seemed to have noticed him, and continued on, circling the swamp banks, coming around to greet them.
Reflexively, Winger’s fingers tightened their grip on the trigger of his HERF gun.
The figure was the Chinese captain. His name was Xi Kai-ling.
Winger heard a voice crackling through his helmet. It sounded like gibberish, then somehow he realized it was Chinese. He tuned the translator and Xi’s voice poured out of the speaker.
“…to understand…zzzhhh…where…zzzhhh…we are…”
Winger and Xi stood five meters apart, both clad in hypersuits, and stared in disbelief. “You understand me? Is the translator working?”
Xi waved, nodded. “Yes…I understand…the translator works…I hear you and get some of the meaning.”
Winger looked around. “Where are we? What is this place?”
Back and forth, the two commanders volleyed, exchanging bits and pieces of information.
Xi offered details Winger didn’t know. “They call themselves the Coethi…if my translator is working properly. This—“Xi spread his hands, “is some kind of story archive, illustrating what happened to them. A large, animated picture book.”
“I gather their sun went supernova.”
Xi nodded. “They were trying to boost the output of their own sun but the effort failed. Instead, it collapsed, went supernova, as you say. Many were destroyed. But some escaped. They have been wandering interstellar space for millions of years, looking for a suitable home world, seeding worlds, studying the results. From what I can determine, they came to Earth too…several billion years ago.”
Xi’s words were interrupted by movement below the surface of the swamp. Something was stirring. Waves lapped against the shore. A head emerged from the brackish water, then shoulders, then arms.
Johnny Winger stared in disbelief when his father Jamison Winger emerged, shedding sheets of water, and climbed up onto the bank. At the same time, Xi backed away, shaking his head.
“Mei Li…how--?” Xi shrank back and nearly fell backwards against a rotting tree stump, just recovering his balance in time. “I don’t—“
The creature from the swamp was both. As Johnny Winger looked on, it resembled his own father, Jamison Winger, in all the ways that mattered. Same circle of thinning gray hair, same deep-set eyes, same tweak of a nose and bemused half-smile. Yet when Xi Kai-ling looked on, the creature was Mei Li, a wife now dead ten years, drowned in boating accident in the Huang Po, dragged under by collision with another boat.
The creature was a reconfigurable form, nanobotic in nature, quantum-enabled, a chameleon, malleable and shifting.
“We appear as you wish to see us,” came a voice inside Winger’s helmet. “Familiarity makes our communication more effective.”
Xi recoiled. “But this…this is most strange…Mei Li died…her body was never recovered—“
The creature attempted a smile, though it didn’t quite work. “A reconstructed image…the patterns exist in your mind…traces of neurons firing which can be detected, analyzed, reconstructed. There are infinite configurations here…you see two of them.”
Winger was cautious, suspecting a trap, or worse. “What is this place? Where are we?”
The Coethi spoke carefully. “You also are a multi-configuration entity. This occurred when you encountered our local configuration, no? You understand how we live.”
Winger said, “I was almost consumed by Config Zero, if that’s what you mean. This was one of your…er, people?”
“In a manner of speaking. This place—“ the Coethi indicated the swamp, “—as you call it, is also a configuration. Your Captain Xi referred to it as a picture book. It is our story.”
Xi had regained some composure, gotten over the idea that he was speaking to a version of his dead wife Mei Li. “Did your sun go supernova…destroy your home world? We saw that happen.”
The Coethi who looked like both Jamison Winger and Mei Li responded. “We have seen many worlds. Including yours. Think of us as farmers.”
“Farmers?”
“Farmers of worlds. Like farmers, we prepare the ground. We plant and seed. We water and fertilize. Sometimes we remove weeds. And when all is ready, we harvest. Now it’s harvest time. There is a final seasoning still to be done, a final test. Both of you…come with me….”
The Coethi turned about and walked back down the banks of the swamp, wading out into the water. Neither Johnny Winger nor Xi Kai-ling moved. The Coethi turned around and beckoned them. “Come, come…it’s time.”
Winger looked at Xi. Nothing was said. Both of them then followed the Coethi into the water, which stirred in a freshening breeze. They waded in, finding the water cool and surprisingly deep. The Coethi disappeared below the surface.
Winger smiled faintly at Xi. “Well, I don’t know exactly what’s happening, but here goes.” He ducked under.
And that’s when everything changed.
Inside the Mother Swarm
Time: Unknown
Place: Unknown
Johnny Winger knew perfectly well, or at least he was pretty sure, that he was back somewhere inside the mother swarm of the Old Ones, the Coethi as they called themselves, but you couldn’t tell it from what he was looking at with his own eyes. It looked like the old fishing camp he had known as a young boy, the place called Ford’s Creek, Colorado. The same cabins. Same aspen trees, now yellowing in some kind of strange simulacrum of autumnal color…it had always been autumn at Ford’s Creek.
The camp seemed empty and deserted. The cabins were dark. The big stone fireplaces were cold. No cars were around. Then he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. A single figure was sitting on the end of the dock, fishing pole in hand. A man. It was dark as midnight and no campfires illuminated the grounds. The creek could be heard foaming and gurgling nearby, rushing out of the nearby mountains on its way downhill. There were clouds scudding by overhead. The moon was a white sliver.
With a start, Johnny Winger suddenly knew who sat at the end of the dock. It was the Shadow Man, the Two-Faced Man…the Coethi spokesman.
Without understanding why, he stepped onto the dock, listening as the weathered old boards creaked under his weight and made his way to the end.
The man was hooded and his facial features were indistinct in the diffuse light of the dock area. Winger figured this was surely the Coethi entity, somehow now in human form again. Without being invited, he sat down next to the Shadow Man.
For a long minute, nothing was said. Winger wondered if h
e should speak first. He had about a million questions. Strange thoughts came to mind and he tried to blank them out but it was like trying to stop the creek with your fingers. In his head, an image of old Mr. Burns, his sixth-grade English teacher came to mind. How did that get there? Could the Shadow Man put thoughts in his head? Was he even supposed to be having thoughts?
Old Battleaxe Burns…now there was something he hadn’t thought about in decades. Face like an angry pug with a corncob up its ass. Five foot five inches of pure hate.
When the Shadow Man spoke, it was like hearing a hundred voices at once, all coming out of a barrel. Winger stole a glance out of the corner of his eye, wondering if the Shadow Man was an angel…were there any edge effects, any blurring at his fingertips, swooshes of flickering bots in the air?
He saw none.
“Johnny, you have an important mission to perform. That’s why you’re here.”
Winger looked straight ahead at the rushing creek, foaming and hissing around rocks. There was a swirling hydraulic near the opposite bank…some buried tree roots, probably.
“Can you read my mind? This looks just like an old fishing camp my Dad used to take me to in the fall…but this can’t be real, can it?”
Now the Shadow Man lifted an arm and pointed to the hydraulic. “Do you see the cataract there?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you see faces and patterns in the water?”
Winger squinted. Try as he did, he saw nothing. “Am I supposed to? I just see water.”
“If you look long enough, with the right eyes, you’ll see faces. You are like the river, Johnny. Only patterns, ever changing, ever shifting. In this same way, your thoughts are only patterns.”
“You said there was an important mission…that it was harvest time.”
Now the Shadow Man shifted slightly. He turned so that he was facing Winger. Only there was no face inside the hood. Whether it was veiled or in deeper shadow, he couldn’t say. Only a deep nearly featureless black was visible, maybe punctuated by an occasional flash of lights…it could have been a reflection. It could have been the moon sliding in and out of clouds.
“Soon, you will be transformed, Johnny. You will become a kind of expediter.”
When his Dad had brought him to Ford’s Creek as a child, the two of them often spent time sitting on this very dock, sticking their bare toes in the cold running water of the creek, trying to make patterns and faces and swirls and curlicues in the foam. He always remembered how cold the water was, how it made his toes curl when he first stuck them in.
That was the trouble with being an angel. You couldn’t feel anything, not like before.
“Will this transformation be soon?”
“Very soon. Those whom you know as the Old Ones are here, very near here. You will help them in important ways. You do want to help them, don’t you?”
Jeez, now this character is starting to sound like Dad.
The Shadow Man went on, turning back to face the river. Silently, he stuck his feet into the rushing creek water. The water burbled, just like it always did.
Johnny Winger felt a cold chill down his back…at least, the part of him that Doc II maintained as a remnant of his original identity felt a cold chill.
“But before you are fully transformed, before you begin your special mission, you must undergo a configuration change. It’ll be like an adventure, Johnny. You always liked adventures.”
It was true. Tom Swift, Jr. The Hardy Boys. Amundsen and Scott. Neil Armstrong and the first Mars colonies…he’d always loved a great adventure. How did the Shadow Man know all this?
“What kind of adventure, sir?”
“The name and explanation isn’t important now. In the past, you might have called it the Prime Key. Are you ready for this, Johnny? The Old Ones hope you’ll say yes.”
Winger knew he couldn’t exactly say no but the problem was that he wasn’t sure just how much the Shadow Man really knew. Spies and saboteurs lived their lives in a funhouse hall of mirrors. Hadn’t some novelist said that once? Never knowing who to trust, who knew what. They wound up trusting no one, not even themselves.
Winger knew, and tried not to think about it, that Doc II was even now maintaining all that he had once been in a small file inside this angel config. His original identity, all his memories, the very fact that he would recognize this place as Ford’s Creek, when in reality it was probably just a collection of atoms formed into a pattern he would know. But then, the real Ford’s Creek was just a collection of atoms too. All this Doc II maintained in a nondescript file called Configuration Buffer Status Check. They both hoped nobody would notice this.
He was starting to get a headache just trying to think about all this.
The real question was what would happen to him in this adventure. Was it like a test? The Shadow Man had called it a configuration change. The Shadow Man had spoken of harvesting. Would Doc II be able to maintain ‘Johnny Winger’ through all these adventures, all these changes?
It wasn’t a question he could ask of the Shadow Man.
“Sir, where will this adventure be? How will I get there?”
In answer, the Shadow Man placed a hand on Winger’s right shoulder. It felt ice cold, a cold deeper and more painful than any he had ever experienced before.
At that same moment, the entire Ford’s Creek camp dissolved in front of his eyes and Winger found himself spinning out of control, hurtling at breakneck speed down a long, curving corridor….
Pueblo, Colorado (?)
Date: Unknown
Time: Unknown
Johnny Winger hurtled through some kind of long, curving corridor at breakneck speed, spinning spinning spinning until at last, he came to a stop, landing with a hard bump right on his rump, and rolling over with unspent momentum. When the world finally stopping cartwheeling all around him, he sucked in a breath and sat up. Looking around, he knew right away that he was in a familiar place for that was the way of the Shadow Man.
There was a test coming. A configuration change. Something to harvest. A challenge to overcome. He hoped Doc II could maintain what was left of Johnny Winger through all of it.
Now he staggered unsteadily to his feet. I know this place. He was standing by the shores of a small lake. It was Reynolds Lake, near his boyhood home in Pueblo. He remembered the setting too. It was that day in late summer when his best friend Archie Hester had dared him to swim the lake late at night, when nobody else was around. All by himself.
Sure enough, he spied movement in the bushes above the water line. A rustling came, then a head and a short, stocky form emerged. It was Archie himself, cutoff jeans and a dirty T-shirt.
Johnny wasn’t surprised at all.
The trouble was he knew he couldn’t swim that well and he wanted to tell Archie to kiss off. He wanted to decline the dare. In real life, he hadn’t. He couldn’t. But this wasn’t real life. This was some kind of test manufactured by the Shadow Man. He couldn’t turn it down.
Archie came up with that lopsided grin and ran hands through his greasy black hair. “I dare you, Johnny. Double-dog dare you. No way you can swim the lake by yourself. Double-dog and triple-dog dare you.”
Well, you couldn’t very well turn down a triple-dog dare, could you? His name would be all over school if he did. So he accepted the dare, as he had before but even doing that, Johnny realized there were some details that were different—Archie’s hair was different and he didn’t have that real bad scrape on his elbow from falling off his bicycle like he always did. So Winger knew this couldn’t be real. It was all staged, a simulation. But still it had a purpose.
He stripped down to his underwear and dipped a toe in the faint ripple of waves lapping the shore. Yikes! That was cold! Reynolds Lake was always cold, even in summer. Reynolds Lake gave you goose bumps.
There was only one way to do this. Dive in. So he held his brea
th, took a last glance at the sneer on Archie’s face and dove in.
It was freezing cold, so cold that diving in was like running full steam into a brick wall. Instantly, Johnny came up out of breath. The cold sucked the very life out of you. He flailed and splashed for a moment, then he saw Archie on the shore, laughing. That did it. He sucked and heaved in as much breath as he could, then turned back to the lake and began pulling, trying to get his complaining muscles in gear as fast as he could, trying to get some warmth flowing.
He tried to think about anything but the cold. Katie Gomez’s face and her luscious chest…that was good to think about. How he would lord it all over Archie when he finally made it to the opposite shore, if he made it. That was nuts. Of course he would make it.
If he could just get the blood flowing.
Just like he’d learned in Scouts, long, easy strokes. Concentrate. Think of yourself as a machine. Pull and catch, pull and catch. Turn and breathe. Turn and breathe. And don’t forget to kick once in awhile, too.
When you’re swimming across Reynolds Lake on a cool late August night in your underwear, you wind up thinking about a lot of things. things like: how much do they know? Can Doc II keep my file together? This midnight swim across Reynolds Lake was a test; in fact, the Shadow Man called it a configuration change. So what’s being changed? Me?
Winger continued stroking. His arms and legs had warmed up a little. He somehow got into a good rhythm…he’d always been a pretty good swimmer. And he had to show that slimebag Archie that no dare was too much for Johnny Winger.
Eventually, he found himself approaching a line of lights…the opposite shore. More cabins. Some light stands. He saw a few figures standing on the banks. The porky one was Archie.
But who was the other?
Finally, he scraped his knee on the lake bottom and realized he had made it. He stood up, shivering, coughing out a little water, doubled over to get some breath and waddled like a penguin up onto the muddy banks.
Archie was there, a little cock-eyed grin splitting his face.
“So you made it, you big twerp. Took you long enough.”
Winger spat some lake water at him.
The other figure turned out to be Jamison Winger.
His Dad handed him a few towels and helped him dry off, then gave him jeans and a dry T-shirt to put on.
“You did great, son. I’m very proud of you. You swam that lake like a champ.” He ruffled Johnny’s hair and for a few moments, Johnny basked in the affection. Then it struck him.
None of this was real. It was all a sim. A simulation with a purpose.
His Dad was saying something again…”I have a badge for you…a merit badge. You earned it.”
“Yeah, you were just lucky, that’s all,” whined Archie.
Johnny wanted to slug the fatso. How’d he get into the sim, anyway?
Jamison Winger handed Johnny a small box. Inside, the Scouts merit badge for swimming a mile in open water lay on a black velvet fabric. Johnny took it out, beaming.
“Your mother will sew it on your uniform tonight,” Jamison Winger promised. He squeezed Johnny’s shoulder.
Winger looked up at his Dad. He looked real enough: the same lock of hair down over his right eye, that he was forever brushing back. The blunt nose with the nostrils that flared like wings when he was mad. The slight quiver on his right eyebrow, like it might take flight. It was Dad.
But it wasn’t. It couldn’t be.
“The main thing, son, is that you passed the test.”
Jamison Winger squeezed Johnny’s shoulder once again and this time, it was like the whole world was jerked away and he was hurtling down that long curving, corridor again at breakneck speed. The trip seemed to last a lifetime but when he stopped, landing always right on his butt, he knew enough to let the dizziness fade away before trying to open his eyes and look around.
This time, he knew where he was. He had been here before.
It was that vast, undulating plain of waving grass and plants, like a Dakota prairie in the summer, stretching to the sky. Only the plants weren’t plants. When he got up and steadied himself, he took a few steps. Each stalk of grass poofed into a small cloud of dust, bots, Johnny knew, as he swished through them. There were gazillions of bots.
He was on the home world of the Old Ones again, or another sim perhaps, though this one felt awfully real.
He had been here before….
Aboard UNISPACE Submersible Trident
Europa Coordinate System: Lat. 25N, Long 72W
Station keeping 1500 meters from EUROTOP
December 16, 2050 (Earth U.T.)
Inside Trident’s airlock, Mighty Mite Barnes and Al Glance hurried through the lockout cycle. Ray Spivey was already outside the ship, maneuvering toward the outer boundary of the EUROTOP swarm.
Captain Stella’s voice came over the 1MC. “Still holding at fifteen hundred meters…I don’t want to get any closer. This thing looks like it’s about to blow.”
“Roger that,” Barnes said grimly. “Spite, what do you see out there?”
Spivey was maneuvering carefully along a tangent to the vast swarm. “Mostly speckles and swirls of light. It’s like watching a thunderstorm from close up. The whole thing appears to be spinning or rotating in some way. I’m detecting aspect changes too…it may be reconfiguring, maybe even re-locating…moving off in some other direction.”
“Why would it do that?” Glance asked. “Doesn’t make any sense…the whole glob’s probably been here for millennia.”
“I don’t know,” said Barnes. She waited impatiently for the lights to cycle through…red, red, red, come on…come on… now green and green. She stabbed a button and the airlock outer hatch opened, exposing them to the Europan sea. Both troopers drifted out and headed for Spivey’s beacon. “But something’s happening and I’ve just got a feeling—“
After days of relative stability and quiet, the vast cloud of nanobots that was the EUROTOP swarm was now spinning up and expanding outward, a vortex of bots rotating like a cyclone hundreds of meters below the icy surface of Europa. It was as if something had agitated the huge swarm and now it was thrashing about like a wounded beast, trying to fight off the source of the irritation.
Even from five hundred meters, the flashing, strobing light of the thing was visible. No longer just specks and pinpricks of light, the effect now was one of a revolving lamp, flickering on and off.
“Looks like a lighthouse,” muttered Glance as they closed with Spivey.
“Yeah and you know what lighthouses do…they warn ships of dangerous conditions,” said Barnes. “We’d best not approach too closely…Spite, what’s happening now from your position?”
Spivey had moved in a little closer. “Not sure…this thing looks like it’s about ready to blow. I am sounding something at bearing one six five relative…may be just a localized bot disturbance, bigger than usual…I’m keeping an eye on it.”
“Don’t get any closer,” Barnes warned.
“You don’t have to worry about that…hey, this eruption’s getting bigger and bigger. I’m laying to about two hundred meters away, but it’s like the swarm is swelling abnormally fast in that sector. Must be some hellacious bot activity going on there.”
“I see it from my position too,” Al Glance reported. He scanned his eyepiece indicators…”—lots of thermals, EMs, acoustics, every band. Not sure what’s happening, but the bots in that sector are going haywire. Maybe a big bang of some sort.”
Even in the black featureless void of the deep Europan sea, the general outlines of the EUROTOP swarm were dimly visible, backlit by the nanobotic fires of uncounted trillions of mechs slamming atoms. It twinkled like some playground carousel at night, spinning slowly, flickering and strobing, all the while expanding outward. The Europa Transiting Optical Phenomena was waking up and growing, consuming more and more ocean.
&nb
sp; “We’d better back off,” Barnes decided. She reversed propulsors and put some distance between her and the swarm. She also advised Trident of what was going on. “Captain, be ready to move out smartly if I give the word. We’re not sure what’s going on here, but the swarm may be coming your way.”
Stella’s voice came back, “I’ve got Trident turned around and her propulsors are already spinning up. First sign of trouble and we’re out of here. You’re on your own, Sergeant.”
Thanks a lot, she almost said back. “Understood. Detail…out.”
Spivey’s voice crackled over the crewnet. “Mite, Al…I’m getting a beacon…faint, but definitely some kind of beacon. Could be the Skipper…I’m going in closer—“
Skipper? Major Winger had been MIA for the better part of the last twenty hours. Most of the crew had given him up for dead…lost…consumed inside the swarm…probably broken down into atom fluff by now. How could a beacon--?
“What bearing, Spite? What’s the bearing?”
Over the crewnet, she could tell Spivey had cranked up his propulsors to max…the humming vibration in the background let her know that. “I make it as…hold on a sec…I make it as one six six relative…pretty much that eruption I’ve been monitoring. Soon as I zero in on that bearing, the beacon gets stronger. Mite, we’ve got to chance it…we’ve got to check this out.”
Barnes was nominally in charge of the detail. “Agreed. But hold up, let me and Al come to you…we may need to put some suppressing fire on that sector. If it’s the Skipper, he may need some help…are you getting anything else besides the beacon? Hard returns…like a hypersuit, propulsor noises, anything?”
“Hard to tell in all this crap,” Spivey said. He jetted forward, coming up to within several dozen meters of the outer edge of the swarm. The lights were dizzying and he darkened his helmet visor to cut down on the glare. Something was dead ahead…he could almost see it—
There! Something materialized in the still-bright glare of the light…a shape, a formless shape…”---looks like a MOBnet, Mite…it’s under prop, maneuvering toward me…I’m cycling my HERF…get over here quick, guys, this may be—“
There was a blast of static over the crewnet…then…silence.
“Spivey!” called Barnes. “Christ…Al, let’s go…max propulsor…get your weapons ready—“
“I’m at full charge now…right behind you—“
They traversed the last hundred meters in a minute, cavitating in an explosion of bubbles more than once and nearly collided with Spivey’s hypersuit. Just past Spivey, a huge mass loomed out of the darkness…it was a MOBnet alright, but it was different somehow…a full Quantum Corps mesh bag formed of nanobotic mechs but all the outer mechs were EUROTOP bots and the beacon they had all heard was now screaming in their ears.
Within moments of the near collision, the swarm had overtaken them all and they were enveloped in a swarm of enemy bots, coming at them from every direction.
“Light ‘em up!” Barnes yelled. “Everything you got…this is some kind of trap…not a MOBnet…some kind of bag of enemy bots—“
HERF and mag weapons went off simultaneously and the water soon churned white-hot, flashing steam, roiling with turbulence as rf waves and loops of magnetic energy fried the EUROTOP bots. The huge formless bag quivered and shed its outer shield of bots under the assault, while Barnes, Spivey and Glance pummeled the swarm with everything they had.
The melee went on for several minutes. It was Glance who noticed that the mesh bag was beginning to disassemble, right in front of them. While Barnes and Spivey pumped more and more HERF into the surrounding swarm in an attempt to keep from being overwhelmed, Glance saw the mesh that had looked like a MOBnet essentially dissolve right in front of him.
A form emerged from the disappearing mesh. A helmeted form. A hypersuited form. And the beacon flashed a familiar red icon on her eyepiece…it was the Skipper! Major John Winger, UNQC.
“Skipper! What the hell--?”
Barnes saw the same icon on her eyepiece. “Major…maneuver yourself toward me…you still got propulsor?”
Winger’s voice was weak but it was him. “Got propulsor…quarter power…got to save Doc—“
“What’s he saying?” Glance asked. “We’ve got to get the hell out of here…get back to the ship!”
“Skipper—“ Spivey maneuvered alongside and pulled out a towline from his belt, attaching it to a cleat on Winger’s hypersuit shoulder, then cinching it up. “Skipper, relax…I’ll give you a tow. Mite, Al…give me a bearing. And get these damn bugs off me, will you? Blast the suckers to kingdom come!”
“With pleasure,” said Glance. He let fly another volley and the water frothed and steamed and flashed with hot rf.
A few more blasts of HERF and the detail found itself at least momentarily free of the swarm. With Barnes leading the way and Glance following as rear guard to cut off any bots that followed, Spivey maneuvered forward, towing the crippled hypersuit of Johnny Winger toward the last known position of Trident.
Fortunately, Captain Stella had stuck around a while longer.
The return to the ship took the better part of an hour, as Stella wasn’t willing to bring Trident any closer than one kilometer from the vast swarm.
It was a raucous, boisterous reunion that occurred outside Trident’s airlock. Glance, Tsukota, Spivey and Barnes, with the rest of the unit, crowded around Winger and helped pull him out of the hypersuit.
“Skipper, you look like you’ve been through an eggbeater!”
“—maybe a blender, even—“
“What was it like…see any Old Ones?”
“Hey, help the man get out of his suit, why don’t you?”
Winger briefly described what had happened inside the swarm. “Check my suit’s containment cell real good. Unless I imagined the whole thing, Doc may have grabbed some pieces of the bastards from that sim we were in.”
Al Glance handed Winger something to drink. Winger sipped from the cup gratefully, wincing at the hot liquid. “Jeez, what the hell is this…?”
Mighty Mite Barnes was all smiles. “You like it? It’s my own special brew—came from—“
Winger held up a hand. “I don’t want to know…just make sure nobody dies from this stuff. And get that containment capsule into the Lab right now.”
The hypersuit was carried into the lab on Trident’s E deck. Meanwhile, Captain Stella indicated he was backing off from the Keeper a few more kilometers.
“I want as much distance as I can get from that cloud of bugs. And I don’t want the Major here to leave this deck. In fact, he should be put back in the airlock…until we’re sure—“
“Sure of what?” asked Barnes.
“Sure of what he is…who knows what he’s carrying.”
The nanotroopers looked incredulously at the Frontier Corps officer. Barnes scowled, “Are you off your rocker…sir? Take a look: it’s Major Winger, for Christ’s sake. Who else could he be?”
Stella was firm. “I’m in charge of this ship. And the safety of everyone on board. Major Winger’s an angel. We all know that. Angels can reconfigure. They can be anything, look like anything. The Major could have been turned while he was inside that big swarm out there. All I’m saying is we need to be sure. Take certain precautions. You know the protocol aboard ships like this, as well as I do. You don’t bring anything on board that could endanger the ship and crew.”
Barnes took a deep breath. She looked at Winger, who seemed real enough, if a bit pale and haggard. “It’s a damn good config if he looks like he just came through a washing machine, Captain. But I guess you’re right. Major—“
Winger held up a hand. “It’s okay. I’d do the same thing. Captain, you want me in containment, like a prisoner? Is that it?”
Stella threw up his hands. “It’s not me. It’s regulations. Protocol on quarantine of unknown threats. Major, please…it??
?s the right thing to do.”
Reluctantly, Al Glance produced a containment capsule. He held it up. “Will this do, Captain?”
Stella nodded affirmatively. “Perfectly. And when he’s in, seal it in the airlock.”
Winger looked around. Glance, Barnes, all of them looked down. No one would meet him eye to eye. “Okay, then that’s it. I’m the mission commander. I’m not beyond regs myself—here goes—“With that, the swarm angel that was Johnny Winger began dematerializing. Bit by bit, like smoke dispersing, the swarm uncoiled and broke down, forming an amorphous cloud of sparkling, flickering bots. It drifted, almost reluctantly, toward the open port of the containment capsule. When the capsule lit up green, Al Glance snapped the port shut and sealed it. Then, under Stella’s watchful eyes, he placed the capsule on a shelf inside the airlock. Stella himself cycled the lock shut, then seemed to breathe easier.
“Now, it’s time to get the hell out of here.”
Soon, the thrum of the ship’s propulsors could be felt as Trident maneuvered off to a new heading. It took three days for the submersible to return to the coordinates of her landing platform, then another ten hours to bore up through the ice layer. Mighty Mite Barnes had assumed nominal command of the detachment, with Winger in confinement. She assisted Stella reluctantly in getting Trident onboard her landing platform and readying the ship for return to Archimedes, still in orbit. The two said little to each other.
The Chinese ship Shen Feng was still in orbit and Barnes hailed them for a brief discussion of what had happened. Their own lander-submersible had been lost below the ice, presumably consumed by the EUROTOP formation.
“We’re departing Europa orbit in twenty hours, soon as our launch window opens,” Barnes told her Chinese counterpart. His name was Lieutenant Zhi Ru-gong. “We’re heading home. Speed run to Earth, via Venus gravity assist. It’ll take ten months, give or take.”
Lieutenant Zhi’s face was grim, lined with worry, on the intership vidlink. “We stay,” he announced. “Continue searching for the sub. We may have a signal we can follow.”
Barnes was dubious. “Lieutenant, you and I both know it’s not safe here. That cloud of bugs below the ice is growing. It’s expanding. It may breach the surface. Who knows where it’ll wind up?”
But Zhi wouldn’t be dissuaded. “Safe journey, Sergeant. We track you from here.”
The vidlink went dark.
Mighty Mite Barnes drifted down Archimedes’ central gangway to C deck and climbed through into Trident, now attached like a parasite to the central mast of the big ship, the docking collar adjacent to the top of the onion-shaped module. A small discussion was going on inside the crew’s mess—Spivey, Glance and Tsukota—but she declined to stop and went instead aft to Trident’s airlock on her own G deck. She extracted a coupler from her coveralls and opened a link to Major Winger, now tucked away inside a containment capsule inside the airlock.
It wasn’t right, what they had done. It just wasn’t right.
“Major, you there…it’s Mighty Mite.”
After some screeches and warbling, Winger’s voice crackled through the coupler. He sounded tired.
“Major, how are you? Anything I can do for you?”
“Mite, you can let me out of this bottle.”
“You know I can’t do that. Stella’s in charge. You and Doc have to stay confined…until we get home. Major, tell me: what was it like inside that swarm?”
There was a brief pause. Then: “Like nothing you could ever imagine, Mite. That swarm that we call EUROTOP…they call themselves the Coethi.” He tried to explain what had happened, what the Coethi were all about. “They seed worlds, Mite. They seeded Earth. They’re some kind of nomadic race and they’re looking for a new home. There’s nothing we can do to stop it. They wanted me and Captain Xi—the Chinese commander—to help them. They called it harvest time. Mite, I think they wanted us to be like ambassadors. Negotiate safe passage into our solar system. Help them settle into their new home.”
“You mean Earth. They want to come to Earth and settle there…that’s nuts.”
“No, Mite, they’re already there. Already on Earth. They’ve been there for billions of years. Nanoscale entities that were left there a long, long time ago. Viruses, Mite. We call them viruses. The Coethi are ancestors to all our viruses.”
Mighty Mite Barnes felt a cold chill go down her spine. “Major…I’m sorry, I’m just having a hard time with this…I need to sign off for now and get right back to you—“
She shut down the coupler link, thought for a moment, then headed forward along Trident’s spine, bumping her head twice on fixtures lining the gangway. The gathering was still going on in the crew’s mess up on C deck.
Ray Spivey reached out a hand and snagged Barnes as she went by. “Mite, get in here. Have a drink. We’re laying bets on when Stella will give up and let the Major out of prison. I say give him a week, two at most.”
But Barnes twisted free. “Later, Spite. I’ve got to see Stella myself. There’s something he needs to know.” She pushed on and re-entered Archimedes, navigating the huge cycler’s maze of tunnels and passageways. The captain was up on A deck, command and control, dozing lightly in the left-hand seat. Outside the front window, Europa loomed large, like a huge cracked billiard ball. Beyond, the banded crescent of Jupiter itself seethed and boiled like an eternal cauldron.
“Captain, could I have a word with you?”
Stella startled awake and sat up straight. Automatically, he checked the chronometer, displaying time remaining to their Trans-Earth Injection burn: two hours, four minutes and twenty-five seconds.
“Sure thing, Sergeant…what is it?” He rubbed tired eyes.
“Captain, I just talked on coupler with Major Winger up in Trident’s airlock. There are some things you need to know—about the Major--“
END
About the Author
Philip Bosshardt is a native of Atlanta, Georgia. He works for a large company that makes products everyone uses…just check out the drinks aisle at your grocery store. He’s been happily married for 25 years. He’s also a Georgia Tech graduate in Industrial Engineering. He loves water sports in any form and swims 3-4 miles a week in anything resembling water. He and his wife have no children. They do, however, have one terribly spoiled Keeshond dog named Kelsey.
To get a peek at Philip Bosshardt’s upcoming work, recent reviews, excerpts and general updates on the writing life, visit his blog The Word Shed at: https://thewdshed.blogspot.com.
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