Johnny Winger and the Hellas Enigma

Johnny Winger and the Hellas Enigma

  Copyright 2014 Philip Bosshardt

  “In looking at Nature, it is most necessary to keep the foregoing considerations always in mind, never to forget that every single organic being around us may be said to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers; that each lives by a struggle at some period of its life; that heavy destruction inevitably falls either on the young or old, during each generation or at recurrent intervals.”

  Charles Darwin

  On the Origin of Species

  November, 1859

  PROLOGUE

  Summer, 2080

  Ten Thousand Feet Above the Hellespontus Montes

  Mars

  General Dao Wen-Hsien studied the terrain two miles below the long gossamer wings of the Archimede rocket glider and thought to himself: how much like Tibet this place seems…the mountains could be the Tien Shan and the plains are so sere and desolate...except for the rust and ocher sands….

  But it wasn’t Tibet. Paryang was twelve long years ago and Dao tried to block out the memory of all the rubble and destruction. Quantum Corps had destroyed Red Hammer’s main base at the monastery. The Keeper of the Sphere had been buried under thousands of tons of rock and debris. Cartel operations had been severely affected, almost stopped completely. They had lost billions in scope and twist profits, not to mention all the fabs that would no longer work.

  The cartel had struggled and limped along for several years, but without the steady stream of tricks from the Keeper, without the help of the Old Ones and their vast technical archive, Red Hammer had been unable to withstand a determined assault from Quantum Corps.

  By the end of the ‘70s, Red Hammer had almost ceased to exist.

  Almost. Dao smiled wryly as the great lip of Hellas Basin eased into view below them, a rounded bulge just nosing over the horizon. Dust devils twisted along the desert floor as Archimede banked sharply and began her long glide toward the dirt strip near the center of the great crater.

  He remembered a meeting the Ruling Council had held in Hong Kong, just two years ago. Zhong, Berensky, Kulagin, Souvranamh, all of them had been there. Souvranamh, the great Thai neuro-traficante, had brought them the startling news.

  “The Keeper lives…at least a part of it still exists.”

  They had all been incredulous, but the evidence was there for everyone to see. Somehow, in ways no one could understand or explain, the Keeper…the operating system of the Sphere that maintained the gateway between Red Hammer and the Old Ones, had transmitted a partial copy of itself to another Sphere, buried under the desert sands at Hellas Basin, Mars.

  Communication with the Old Ones was still possible, and more than ever, essential, if the cartel were to survive. But in order for the link to be opened up and stabilized, someone would have to go to Mars. Someone would have to couple with the Keeper directly and re-establish the link…reset the quantum channels, re-initialize the buffer and amplifier so that humans could talk with their distant mentors once more.

  “Something’s wrong with the coupler,” Souvranamh had told them. “There’s a lot of static and drop-out. I get a few signals…nothing intelligible. But it’s definitely a Keeper signal. If we get one of us inside that Sphere, it should be possible to re-configure the link and open a channel.”

  So Dao Wen-Hsien was chosen to make the trip.

  Dao watched the dusty sand dunes of Hellas rushing up at them. Archimede’s pilot battled some tricky crosswinds and floated them down to a soft skidding landing on the dirt strip at Hellas Station. With a grinding bump and a rooster tail of red dust, the rocket glider slid and skewed her way to a stop only a few hundred feet from the station complex.

  A muffled voice came over the cabin intercom. “All passengers, secure for towing. We’ll be underway for about ten minutes. Please remain seated until I turn on the EXIT lamps. And remember, two people per airlock cycle and watch your first steps outside. Traffic control just informed me they had fresh dust storms this morning and the footing is loose. Captain, out.”

  To the other passengers and crew of the glider, Dao Wen-Hsien was a Chinese meteorologist, newly arrived on Mars from UNISPACE to do research on the possible weather impact of the Green Mars Initiative, the big terraforming project that MarsFed had just approved. Dao had received permission from the Council to make the long trip to Hellas Station, to set up some special instrumentation, carried in several trunks in Archimede’s belly and monitor current wind, dust, and other conditions before the Initiative started radically altering the planet’s environment.

  Dao’s real reason for coming was quite different. The Ruling Council of Red Hammer had tasked him with locating the new Keeper of the Sphere, making contact, and re-configuring its quantum coupler so that the cartel could regain contact with the Old Ones.

  The rocket glider was towed by tractor to the station complex. From Archimede’s windows, Hellas Station was little more than a collection of dusty humps and a few cranes and other pieces of equipment strewn about the gentle rise on which the base had been sited.

  When the tow was over, each pair of passengers suited up and made the fifty foot hike through shin-deep dust to the lockout chamber on the side of Base Central.

  After putting his bags away, Dao attended an orientation briefing for new arrivals in the wardroom. The speaker was a ruddy, big-boned Texan named Hugh Spalding.

  “Listen up, ya’ll,” Spalding boomed over the din of the meeting. He had a toothpick stuck in the corner of his mouth. Some kind of juice dribbled out onto his chin as he spoke.

  “We’ll organize parties and details by specialty right after this meeting. Before anybody goes outside, ya’ll read that little booklet you received when you checked in. Memorize it. It’s got all the safety procedures for expeditions. I don’t want anybody wandering around getting lost or falling into a crevice while you’re outside. While you’re here, I’m the expedition boss. Outside these walls, you do what I say. If you don’t, you stay inside and we ship you out on the next shuttle. Got it?”

  There was a chorus of nods and mumbled assents. The meeting droned on for another hour. Dao listened politely but concentrated on his own notes, then watched ocher dust swirling outside the portholes.

  Somewhere out there, a Keeper was buried. It was his job to find it and soon. If he failed, Red Hammer was finished.

  The first parties were scheduled for the next morning. Dao was assigned to a detail of six scientists and one expedition leader from the Station crew. The leader was a balding Russian named Fedorov, built like a wrestler. There were two geologists from Japan, an astronomer from India, an American physicist and an English meteorologist named Colin Plunkett.

  The party climbed aboard a snorting marscat and secured their gear. Fedorov drove the cat and they soon trundled off through heavy dust fall toward a line of low hills in the distance.

  “The Saucer Hills,” Fedorov explained, as he settled in for the three-hour drive. “Looks like a flying saucer, to some people. We stop there, have lunch, and get out for a walk, set up some equipment, take measurements, whatever you like. Two hours at the Hills, then on to our next objective.”

  Dao quietly checked the coordinates the Ruling Council had given him. Forty-five degrees south by seventy-one degrees east. He scanned a small map of Hellas basin on his wrist computer. The Keeper was there, just at the far base of the Saucer Hills.

  At least, someone had done their homework, he thought.

  Hellas basin was a big bowl of sand dunes and ridged terrain, with a few sinuous mountain chains crumpling and buckling the ground for relief. As the marscat rumbled south
by southwest from Hellas Station, Dao studied the monotonous yet stark ground bouncing by the portholes. The cat followed a curving route through undulating dunes, rising and falling like a ship on a dusty red ocean. Massive boulders and craters dotted the landscape. The view reminded Dao of a giant sand table.

  He knew that much of the terrain was likely to change over the next century, if the Green Mars Initiative was successful. Others in the expedition must have been thinking the same thing.

  Plunkett, the Englishman, hmmphed. “Better enjoy it while you can. Once the first changes come, this will probably be a big lake.”

  “Like before,” said Suwarthy, the Indian astronomer. He was sweating in his suit, a sheen of perspiration shiny on his forehead. “Some think Hellas was an inland sea or lake once.”

  The expedition discussed and debated the issue heatedly for awhile. Dao half-listened, concentrating on what he had to do. The Keeper signal had been weak, staticky quantum states spritzing through spacetime, on and off. Souvranamh thought he might be able to detect it within a few hundred feet, maybe even a mile away. The Chinese meteorologist eased forward to sit near Fedorov up front, eyeing the nav screen. It had a projected route overlaid on video of the terrain ahead. The Russian had to keep the pipper representing the marscat centered between the route’s red dotted lines.

  “Getting close?” Dao inquired of the Russian. Fedorov grunted. He stretched his back and neck, trying to get some feeling back into his shoulders.

  “Another half an hour. We stop and get out.”

  Dao noticed the flashing dot on the screen. “That’s our objective…that dot?” He figured the Keeper coordinates were easily several miles from the spot.

  Fedorov yawned and nodded. “Camp Chaos. See this region--?” He swept his hand over a region of tortured and fractured terrain to the southwest. “It’s called Hellas Chaos. Could be a river or lake outflow…who knows? The camp is on a promontory at the end of this ridge. We’re following that ridge right now.”

  Dao did some quick calculations. It would take an hour, maybe more, to walk the several miles to the Keeper coordinates. Somehow he’d have to get away from the party and doing that would be almost impossible.

  But General Dao Wen-Hsien was nothing if not prepared. He got up and made his way back into the marscat’s main cabin. The others were drowsy and lost in thought; only Suwarthy was staring out a porthole, eyeing a pair of dust devils dancing across the valley floor below. Dao smiled politely as he eased past the Indian astronomer, and slipped into the service compartment at the rear of the cat.

  Marscats were like huge, articulating caterpillars on treads. Three compartments were strung together, each free-swinging. From front to back, the cats were made up of a command compartment, a crew compartment and a service compartment. The service bay contained the galley and the lockout and stores lockers, including the expedition’s pressure suits and suit supplies.

  Dao made a show of rummaging through the galley, ostensibly looking for something to munch on. When he was sure no one was looking, he slipped into the cabinet where suit supplies were stored and located all the chest control packs, which regulated each suit’s environment. In his coverall pockets, Dao had five small “buttons,” one for each pack. With each button, he stripped off an adhesive patch, and placed the button on the bottom of one pack, out of sight. As he fixed the button in place, he fingered a tiny stud, activating the device.

  When the right time came, each button would do its job.

  Dao was returning to the crew cabin when the marscat lurched slightly and began perceptibly slowing. Fedorov’s gruff voiced called back from the command deck:

  “Break out the rations and let’s eat. The camp’s just around the next hill. And start getting your gear together. I don’t want to stay here a minute longer than necessary. We got to make Camp Tracy before nightfall.”

  So they ate, munching their sandwiches and fruits in sullen silence, while outside sporadic wind gusts rocked the cat back and forth.

  Wheelock, the American physicist, shook his head, slurped coffee from a thermos. “Air’s thicker here in the Basin. Just enough mass to move the cat. Away from Hellas, I doubt we’d even feel that wind…not enough molecules.”

  Suwarthy eyed the swirling dust outside. “Someday, we won’t need pressure suits here…we’ll be able to get by with skin suits alone…like a winter day in the Himalayas.”

  They finished their lunch and suited up. Fedorov personally examined each crew member’s fittings and suit setup, tugging at connectors and hoses, snapping belts and harnesses. Dao watched the Russian carefully. The buttons he had just placed were never detected.

  Outside, the party moved off in all directions. Ostensibly a meteorologist, Dao worked with the Englishmen Plunkett to unload a suite of instruments and load up the packbot. Others were examining a rock fall a few dozen yards away, selecting specimens to take back.

  Fedorov found a small rise near the lip of a nearby crater and hauled himself up to take in the view. The crater had no name in the catalogs, only a number…H-8741. The rim was lined with light frost and several columns of fine red dust, fine as talc powder, danced around the edge.

  Beyond the crater, the scalloped edge of a low escarpment encircled the small promontory they had driven up on. Hellas basin seemed flat and featureless from a great enough distance, but up close, it was anything but featureless. The western slopes of the Chaos were a tortured and crumpled landscape fractured and smashed by eons of bombardment and water-ice flow.

  Fedorov had driven the marscat up a long curving slope to the top of a mesa that overlooked an irregular bed of desiccated dunes and boulder fields. The Saucer Hills surrounded the mesa on three sides, like enveloping arms hugging a child.

  Dao and Plunkett started up the packbot and set off for an exposed ledge not far from the Russian. They climbed carefully, making sure the bot’s treads stayed directly behind them. A few feet either way and the bot would take a plunge of several hundred feet into the ravine below.

  At the ledge, they set about unloading the instruments and siting the gear for best readings. Plunkett’s voice became labored as he worked; Dao could hear the wheezing as the Englishmen struggled for oxygen. Several times, he stopped to adjust something on his wristpad.

  Trying to open up the regulator, Dao thought to himself. It won’t be long now. Even as he continued setting up the mesoscaph he’d been working on, he saw several others stop and do the same thing.

  The buttons were actually small containment capsules full of nanobotic disassemblers. As Plunkett fell to one knee, now gasping for air, Dao went over to investigate, knowing full well that the devices had finally reached his air regulators and valves. In less than a minute, the Englishman had fallen heavily to his side. His air supply and all the internal regulators had become so much atomic fluff. The capsules had done their job.

  Dao stooped down to study the Englishman’s face, now blue and distended with fear. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw several others in the party drop to their knees.

  But Fedorov had reacted more quickly.

  The Russian was having trouble; Dao could see that. Fedorov fumbled with the controls on his wristpad and chestpack. Then he stumbled forward and loped down from the ledge, limping back toward the marscat from the edge of the crater.

  Dao moved to intercept him but the Russian was an experienced expedition leader and knew how to react in an emergency. He didn’t panic but made his way deliberately to the marscat and cycled himself through the airlock.

  Dao was right behind him. There couldn’t be any witnesses…or survivors.

  Dao cycled himself through the airlock and emerged into the stores compartment. Fedorov was up on the command deck, already putting out a distress call. Dao crept forward.

  “…any station, any station…this is Marscat M-22 out of Hellas Station. Mayday…mayday…we’ve suffered multi
ple decompression casualties…any station…any station—“

  The Chinese meteorologist shook his head to link in with his angel and felt the momentary dizziness of the coupler making its connection. Buried a few inches below his left collarbone, the angel stirred, its nanobotic swarm ticking over, ready for release.

  As Dao crept into the main cabin, Fedorov sensed his presence and turned in mid-sentence from the commander’s seat….

  “…any station—“

  Dao had already removed his helmet, unsealing the neck ring and quick-disconnecting the slide. He regarded the Russian coolly and without words, he let the angel loose.

  Unseen at first, the nanobotic swarm ejected from his shoulder capsule. For a few moments, the Russian continued his distress calls but when the faint sparkle of replicating bots in exponential overdrive swelled in the air between them, he swallowed his words and started to get up.

  “You’ll never get away with this—I’ve already notified Hellas Station—“ Fedorov’s eyes widened as the faint sparkle blossomed into a coruscating, iridescent fog, quickly filling the cabin. He tried to back away but the swarm was on him in no time, forcing him to the deck in a writhing mass.

  His pressure suit afforded Fedorov some protection, just long enough to grunt out: “I’m willing to make a deal here…we…can…talk…arrgghh!!”

  Fedorov’s squirming form was soon enveloped in the glowing fog, as uncountable trillions of bots did their job. Dao elected not to watch, busying himself with safing the airlock, making sure they were alone.

  Outside, Hellas basin was still and bright. The winds had died down but a faint ruddy glow still hovered over the ground as fine dust settled out of the air in the late afternoon sun. He hadn’t tried the coupler link to the Keeper since they had left Hellas Station. But he had the right longitude and latitude. Marscat M-22 was only a few miles from the predicted spot.

  Up on the command deck, the fog was subsiding, leaving a fine particulate film on the deck…all that was left of the Russian. Dao scraped it away with the toe of his boot and snapped off a quick command to the angel swarm.

  ***Return to base***