CHAPTER 12
Aboard the Michelangelo (UNS-212)
Trans-Pluto Trajectory Waypoint P-7
Post-Boost + 45 days
December 2, 2110 (U.T.)
0355 hours (Ship Time)
The signal from Triton Odyssey had been lost over three weeks ago and nobody knew why. From what Captain Cory Hawley could determine, in time-delayed comms from Earth and Phobos Station, there had been frantic activity at Farside and JPL for days afterward. Engineers had tried everything in the book to regain comms with Odyssey, for now the only eyes and ears they had to follow and inspect the phenomena known to all as Devil’s Eye.
But nothing had ever been heard again from the little probe and Hawley could well imagine the recriminations and the head-scratching and ass-kicking that must now be going on at Farside and throughout Frontier Corps. The astros who kept a non-stop watch on Devil’s Eye were certain that nothing from that anomaly had done anything to interfere with Odyssey that they could detect. Even the quantum bands had been quiet, though no one was sure that every quantum state could ever be located, let alone monitored. It was possible Devil’s Eye had exerted some kind of remote influence on Odyssey, but the distance was so great, it was hard to come up with any theories on how that could have happened.
Hawley was alone, for the moment, on Big Mike’s command deck and he liked it that way. Solitude was good for the soul, some wag had once said. Solitude may be good, but growling stomachs aren’t, he told himself. He called down to the galley, ordering up an early morning snack.
“Right away, sir,” came the reply. “I’ll get a tray up there in five minutes.”
Hawley nodded. “Very well.” Sugar and caffeine…high-octane propellants for any Frontier Corps mission. He decided he needed a little company after all and got on the 1MC. “Commander Liu to the command deck at once….”
The exec popped her head through the hatch less than three minutes later, bearing a tray of sweets from the galley.
“The galley said you ordered a tray, Captain. I’m your waitress today.” She came in and propped the tray on a console behind the main control station, then settled into her right-hand seat.
Hawley was already lacerating a jelly doughnut. “I’m sure this will show up in your next fitness report, Commander. Help yourself.”
Pointedly, Victoria Liu avoided touching anything on the tray. “Sir, I’ve been replaying some of the tapes of Odyssey’s encounter a few weeks ago. Looking for patterns in the data, patterns in the returns from Odyssey, correlating that with known signatures of likely objects.”
Hawley slurped some coffee and wiped crumbs from his mouth. “And?”
“Best fit with the data is to assume that Odyssey detected some kind of swarm. A formation of dust particles couldn’t give a signature like this. At least, not any dust or debris we can imagine out that far. The signature is denser, thicker and the spectrum details match pretty closely with likely returns from a swarm of nanobotic devices, or something like that.”
“Not comet debris or anything like that? Farside said Odyssey was scanning in the direction of known remnants and particles from the Oort Cloud.”
“Not likely, sir. Unless Oort Cloud objects produce signatures that closely resemble nanobotic devices.”
Hawley considered that. “What’s a swarm of bots doing out this far from the Sun? Maybe Odyssey was detecting advance elements of the Old Ones? I’m sure that’s being discussed at Farside and back home. Maybe they’re already here, if you believe in that sort of thing.”
“Our mission is to find out, sir,” Liu reminded him. She scanned a few displays on the board. “In less than four days, we’ll be at closest approach to the Pluto-Charon system. After that, Big Mike will be entering space no human has ever seen before. Odyssey is one of the few ships to ever come this far. Voyager was the first, back in the late 20th century, then New Horizons. Then Odyssey and now…us.”
“I know a lot of the crew are uneasy about being this far out. I think we need an all-hands meeting to clear the deck, get everybody prepared. If we’ve got bots from someplace else, poking around out here in the sticks, Big Mike better be ready, for anything. Commander, post a notice on the shipnet…make it 1200 hours sharp, all-hands meeting in the galley. We’ll find a way to cram everybody in.”
Liu eased out of her seat and headed for the hatch. “Right away, sir.”
“One more thing, Commander. I know long-range scan has acquired Pluto visually now. Looks just like a gray smudge with some crumbs floating nearby. But I want the crew to have a sense of where we are and what we’re about to do. We’re four days from the burn. Post the long-range visuals on all monitors. If I can get the crew focused on Pluto and the mission, they’ll be less inclined to focus on themselves and all their aches and pains. I need everyone as sharp as possible now. Everything by the book, no shortcuts. Shortcuts lead to mistakes. And out here, we can’t afford any mistakes.”
“Of course, Captain. I’ll see to it at once.” Liu disappeared through the hatch.
Cory Hawley wondered how Big Mike would perform once the phasing burn at Pluto was done. She had a good crew and the ship was operating satisfactorily for a re-purposed cycler ship. But the last two weeks of drills had seen performance steadily falling off. People made mistakes. Procedures weren’t followed. One crewman assumed something and nobody checked to make sure it was true.
It was hard to put your finger on it, but any good ship commander could read the pulse of his crew. Big Mike’s crew was uneasy. It was rational to have some concerns about where they had come and what they were tasked to do. Cripes, we’re four billion miles from home. Who wouldn’t be scared? Fear of the unknown was healthy. It kept you on your toes.
But a well-trained Frontier Corps crew should be able to make that fear work for them. In the old sailing days of Columbus and Magellan, crews who went beyond the maps of the known world almost mutinied, thinking they were about to sail off the end of the earth. We’ve got to be smarter than that, Hawley told himself. Follow your procedures. Follow the checklists. Watch your comrade’s back. Don’t assume anything.
And expect the unexpected, a little voice said in the back of his head. How the hell do you train for that?
Victoria Liu worked with several techs on C deck to get the long-range scan of Pluto ported over to the ship’s monitors and displays, so every crewman could see. A slight buzz in the back of her head annoyed her and once she was sure the techs knew what Captain Hawley wanted, she set them to work and went back to her bunk on B deck, advising Lieutenant Dean Kohl, whom she encountered outside her bunk, that she had a severe headache and needed some meds and a little rest.
“Just a headache…I know how to take care of it, Lieutenant. I’ll be in-bunk if anyone needs me.”
Kohl was the ship’s propulsion systems officer. “Sure thing, exec. I’ll keep it quiet around here.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant.” She pulled the bunk door shut and then she was alone in the tiny space.
She knew what that buzz was about.
Undetected by the humans, a high-capacity quantum band had been established between Config Zero and angel Victoria Liu. The buzz alerted her to an incoming message. After she had shut herself into her bunk compartment, Liu lay down in the bunk and closed her eyes.
The message came.
It instructed her to execute Command 56644828. The operational details of this command and all subroutines, steps and procedures were already fully loaded in her main processor, from the day of her first assembly in the Paris hotel room of the human Victoria Liu. Now came the instruction to execute this command, fully authenticated and verified. The instruction had come through Config Zero, direct from the Central Entity itself.
Angel Victoria Liu was required to acknowledge the command and she did so, returning verification according to the standard protocols.
She lay on the bunk
and closed her eyes, visualizing what she had to do.
In less than an hour, angel Victoria Liu would leave her bunk compartment and make her way aft to Michelangelo’s C Deck, Service and Support. There she would change the config in her right arm and hand, allowing the bots which made up her skin and fingers to operate in loose formation, out of tight mesh.
According to Command 56644828, she would then begin disassembling the interior hull structures of C deck, which would ultimately have the effect of breaching the ship’s pressure hull, exposing the crew and everything inside to catastrophic decompression and explosive collapse.
Big Mike would be lost in trans-Plutonian space, with no explanation and nothing left to detect or salvage.
And the Central Entity would be free to continue operations as before.
Northgate University, Autonomous Systems Lab
Pennsylvania, USA
December 3, 2110
0945 Hours (U.T.)
Dr. Ryne Falkland had spent the last few weeks massaging config scan data, using multiple interview sessions with Johnny Winger and Dana Tallant, to fill in gaps in the scan and make a more accurate representation of what daughter Rene had been like. The next step was to put the Config Engine to work with this digital model of Rene and see what it could create.
He had warned Winger and Tallant that multiple iterations might be needed. Someone had mentioned Frankenstein as a crude analog of what they were trying to do.
The big day came and Winger gathered with Tallant and Dr. Falkland outside the containment chamber in Galen Hall, headquarters of the Autonomous Systems Lab. Inside the chamber, a small bed had been placed, for Rene to lie on when ‘she’ was fully assembled and formed. Just in case, electron beam injectors were primed and ready.
“We can’t violate safety protocols, even in this situation,” Falkland explained.
Tallant groped for Winger’s hands and interlaced her fingers with his. “I don’t know how to feel, Wings,” she admitted. “I don’t really know what to think.”
“Happy. Feel happy and blessed, I guess. We’re getting Rene back. We’re going to be a family again.”
Tallant was doubtful but said nothing, while Falkland scanned his board and made some adjustments. “I’ve got the Config Engine loaded now. From the scans we did of you two, we have lots of data. I had a quite a time massaging and tweaking and converting all that data, trying to get something clean. You don’t know it, but I’ve already run some tests…last week. Things looked promising.”
Winger was curious. “What kind of tests, Doc?”
Falkland was reluctant to go into details now. Clients were sometimes sensitive about these matters. “Oh, just little tests. I extracted some of the data and ran it through the Config Engine…you know, assembling small things, simple structures.”
“Of Rene? What kind of simple structures?”
“It was just a test—“
“What kind of structures, Doc?” Winger asked, a little more firmly.
Falkland shrugged, went back to his instruments. “A finger here, a hand there. Really, it went well.”
Tallant nearly choked. “A finger? You assembled one of Rene’s fingers? And a hand? What are—“
Winger squeezed her hand hard and cut in. “What happened?”
“The test went fine. The Config Engine performed as expected. I examined the…er, the structures and found them well formed, molecularly correct, consistent with the templates from your data. It was…what can I say?…a finger.”
“And a hand.”
“Exactly.”
“What did you do with them?”
Falkland looked surprised. Sometimes, he figured it was better if the clients didn’t know all the details. People reacted differently. “I let it go. That is, the Config Engine broke them down, disassembled them. Back into feedstock.”
Winger swallowed hard. Maybe Dana was right. Normal families shouldn’t be able to just conjure up limbs and fingers of their loved ones. But then again, since nanobotic assemblers had been invented right here fifty years ago, maybe they could. It was all very confusing.
“Okay, Doc…I guess we really didn’t need to hear about that. What’s next?”
Falkland turned back to his control station. “Next is releasing the feedstock into the chamber.” He pressed a few buttons and on the monitor, a faint mist began issuing from a row of ports. The chamber quickly filled with the mist. “Just raw stock. A bunch of atoms and molecules…standard stuff…oxygens, irons, phosphorous and nitrogens…you name it. Ingredients for the cook….” Immediately he wished he hadn’t said that. Every client reacted differently. And this one was Commander in Chief, Quantum Corps.
The filling took about three minutes. “All the templates of Rene are loaded in the Config Engine now. When the previous…uh, version of Rene was scanned and disassembled, I took a memory field map of all those atoms in structure, combined it with similar data scanned from you two, and created these templates. We should be able to put together a new Rene better than ever, just like your daughter.”
Tallant just shook her head. “This is just creepy, Doc, hearing my daughter talked about like this. Get on with it—“
“Of course.” Falkland pressed a few more buttons.
Inside the containment chamber, the master assembler had just been released. The master was a nanobotic device that orchestrated assembly of feedstock atoms and molecules into whatever structures were contained in the template.
The monitor showed a mist filling the chamber, like an early morning fog, only this mist sparkled as if a billion fireflies were embedded. The mist thickened until the bed was lost to view. Minutes passed. Falkland followed his instruments, adjusting the Config Engine on the fly.
“Threshold density,” he announced. “Memory field steady….all parameters in the green.”
The first hint of structure emerged from the fog, in the form of a faint, translucent, almost ghostly hand, alongside the edge of the bed. Fluctuations in the fog caused more structure to become intermittently visible: several fingers, part of a forearm, a brief glimpse of a knee. From these structures, Winger and Tallant both silently estimated where Rene’s head and face should be. But nothing was visible yet.
More minutes passed. Then, Tallant gasped softly. She pointed.
The barest outlines of a face materialized into view, slipping in and out of the fog like a wraith. There was the upturned nose, the same mole beside her lips. And the lips—
“It’s her!” Tallant breathed. She clutched Winger tightly, leaning against her husband. “It’s Rene—“
“I see it…I see it.” Winger watched in amazement as more and more structure came into view. From everything he could see, it was Rene. He knew how the technology worked. He understood how assemblers slammed atoms together according to a template. He’d designed and ran more configs than Falkland had ever dreamed about. But this…this was different.
The thing seemed as real as Dana Tallant leaning on his shoulder.
Falkland watched the monitor and his instruments carefully, making some minor adjustments. “Config still stable. No alarms…no issues. She’s coming in beautifully. Everything within tolerances, right in the middle of the band. I’m adding more feedstock… we’re approaching minimum density….what do you think, General?”
Winger let his eyes play across the prostrate form of his daughter, inside the containment chamber. Part of his mind told him this couldn’t be Rene…it was a sim, a near-perfect likeness, but still a likeness. But his own feelings and Dana’s reactions overruled that hard logic and he felt a lump in the back of his throat. It couldn’t be Rene.
But it was Rene.
To keep control of himself, Winger focused on the instruments, on the swarm inside the vault, on critiquing the process, on config stability, anything to smother all those feelings that were bubbling up. His shoulder ached from wh
ere Dana had been clutching him and, gently as he could, he extricated himself.
“How long, Doc?”
Falkland studied the board, watched as more and more of Rene emerged from the mist into solid structure. “Well, scans are showing about sixty-five percent complete. This should be done in about two more hours. After we reach target density, I’ve got to run some tests. See how stable the config is. Make sure the pattern buffers are cleared out. And we’ll spot check the config against the original memory field. That’ll be another hour.”
“This is unreal,” Tallant said. “She looks so lifelike. I just want to get in there and hug her to death.”
By mid-afternoon, Falkland pronounced himself satisfied. Looking through the portholes of the containment chamber, Rene was lying on her side on the bed, seemingly asleep. She seemed to be breathing; her chest rose and fell with a rhythmic pattern. Johnny Winger knew full well that it was part of the config, in effect, a breathing simulation program was running on the main processor. But the physical impression was so real, it was so easy to imagine—
“I think it’s safe to let her out now,” Falkland decided. He enjoyed the look of anticipation on Dana Tallant’s face. He also took a quick peek at the electron beam injectors, just in case. Angels sometimes developed glitches and hiccups in their program during assembly. It happened. You couldn’t take too many chances. “I’m shutting down security systems. Latches coming un-done.” A few clicks, pops and squeaks sounded at the hatch. Then a hiss, as pressures equalized. Falkland went over and dogged the hatch open.
Winger pushed past him with Tallant right on his heels. Dana could hardly believe her eyes.
Rene turned over on her back and her eyelids fluttered open. She yawned and tried to sit up.
“Honey, let me help you—“ Dana went to her daughter and helped her sit up on the side of the bed. She was completely naked and shivering. “Can we get her some cover—“
While Falkland scrounged around for a blanket, Winger bent down to kiss Rene on the forehead. He came away from the kiss with a puzzled look. No angel ever had skin like this.
His eyes met Dana’s, full of tears. “It’s really her…her skin…it’s so—“
“Lifelike,” Winger completed. He stroked Rene’s forehead, brushing back a lock of blond hair. Experimentally, he rubbed the skin. It felt real. No nanobotic swarm had ever been able to replicate the look and feel and texture of human skin…this, this was extraordinary….
Falkland returned to the containment chamber with a robe and some slippers. He handed them to Dana, who helped Rene get dressed.
“Dr. Falkland, her skin….” Dana said, shaking her head, kissing her daughter lightly on the cheek. “I can’t believe it…she’s…she’s Rene…it is Rene. Oh, sweetie….”
Falkland beamed. “We’ve been doing our homework. It’s the configuration. That and the good data we got from you two. You can’t tell the difference, can you?”
Dana turned back to Rene. “How do you feel, honey?”
Rene stretched and smiled faintly. Even the mole at the side of her lips looked real. “Weak. Kinda hungry.” She looked a little dazed, glassy-eyed.
“Are you all right? Here, why don’t you lie down and rest.” Dana helped the girl recline on the bed. “Maybe she just needs some water.”
“I’m…I’m confused….” Rene closed her eyes. “Where am I? I don’t—“
“It’s okay, honey. Mom and Dad are here. Liam too…he’s back at the hotel.”
“Mom…what Mom?”
The hairs on the back of Dana’s neck stood up and a chill went down her spine. She looked at her daughter. It was Rene lying there on the bed. But the look…it soon became apparent that she didn’t recognize either her or Winger. The puzzled look, the crooked half-smile…it wasn’t affection. It wasn’t recognizing her loved ones. It was wariness. Maybe even a little fear.
Dana looked up helplessly at Falkland, then at Winger hovering nearby. “She doesn’t know who I am. Rene, don’t you recognize me? I’m your mother…this is your father. You’ve been…sick for awhile. A long while.”
“M..m…mother…what is a mother—“ Rene blinked hard right back at Dana and pulled the robe to her chin. Her lips were quivering. Her whole body was shaking.
Falkland bent down. “We may have some work to do with memory. Neural patterns aren’t easy to capture. The memory field buffer had incomplete data to work with, so it has an interpolation algorithm. It did the best it could…with what it had.”
A few more minutes confirmed Falkland’s explanation. Rene…the new Rene…had few memories of her previous life. Fragments of memory surfaced under repeated questioning, but Dana couldn’t help but think Rene was just going along. She didn’t remember anything, not even her own mother and father.
“She’s like an infant,” Dana said, standing up, brushing back her own hair. “She’s a teen-ager in appearance but she’s an infant in what she knows. She doesn’t know anything.”
“Then we have to teach her,” Winger said. “That’s all there is to it.” He took Dana by the hand. “Look, it’s Rene. We’ve got her back. We just have to teach her to be Rene…we can do that. You, me, Liam…we can do that.”
Dana looked helplessly from Winger to Falkland to Rene and back. “I guess you’re right. It’s just that—“
“We all expected more,” Winger put the words in her mouth. “I mean, what you’ve done, Doc, it’s extraordinary. Truly it is.”
Falkland bent down to examine the girl himself. “I worked on the memory field and the Config Engine for the last several years. We concentrated on getting the physical side right. The part everybody sees. It’s just damnably hard to capture memories, you know. They’re just patterns of neurons firing, waves of potentiation sloshing back and forth across the brain. All my equipment can do is capture a few time slices of those waves…fragments of memory is all we can get. We’ve got a little more work to do on this aspect of reconstruction. But I have some ideas.”
“So do we,” Winger said. “But as long as the capability is there…we can bring her back. We can teach her to be Rene again. Doc, with your permission, I’d like to take Rene back to the hotel. Put her in familiar surroundings.”
Falkland agreed immediately. “Of course, that may trigger something. Help her knit some of these fragments together. I’d like to run a few more tests, but certainly…that’s a good idea.”
And so, after another hour of physical function and capability tests, Falkland signed the paperwork and released the new Rene to her parents. Clothes were found elsewhere in the Lab and Rene got fully dressed, then walked unsteadily out of the Lab, supported on both arms by her parents.
Outside, the sun shone like a bright daub of butter through early December clouds. The smell of snow was in the air.
Winger buckled his daughter into the car seat. Dana sat in the back seat, cradling the girl’s head in her lap, stroking her blond hair. They drove off to the hotel.
Winger wondered: What have we gotten ourselves into now?
Solnet/Omnivision Video Post
@anna.kolchinova.solnetworldview
December 5, 2110
1950 hours U.T.
SOLNET Special Report:
“The Church of Assimilation”
Anna Kolchinova reporting…
The growth and spread of the Church of Assimilation in the last six months of 2110 was nothing short of phenomenal, even meteoric. Almost as amazing was the rapture and celebrity surrounding the man who first established the Church and who continues today as the leading figure in the Assimilationist movement. I’m speaking, of course, of Symborg himself.
CofA churches, missions and temples are rising in cities and towns all around the globe, fed by an insatiable popular hunger for spiritual certainty in a time of overwhelming, near-Singularity rates of change. For many believers
, and they now must be numbered in the millions, Assimilationism seems to offer a way forward that makes sense, that is in accord with all the changes and that speaks to the needs of these millions of believers for a strong, yet compassionate leader. Some call Symborg a new Messiah. And, truthfully, Symborg has done little to discourage this adoration.
A new wrinkle was suddenly thrown into this mix of celebrity and spiritual hunger last summer…the stunning revelation at an archaeology conference in Leipzig, Germany of physical evidence that Man did not descend from his ancestors by natural means, but rather that Evolution was programmed from the beginning by ancient, robotic progenitors. In recent weeks, sources within the Assimilationist movement have been putting out the story that Symborg himself is directly descended or somehow evolved from the ancient robotic remains that Dr. Rudolf Volk uncovered at Engebbe, Kenya.
The truth is that the world has no experience with a celebrity who’s not even human. What does that say about what we value?
The evidence for Symborg’s ancestry remains sketchy at best, pending further analysis of the finds at Engebbe. But the Assimilationists are wasting no time or effort to benefit from the public’s fascination with Engebbe. Making a connection between Engebbe and Symborg has become an explicit part of Assimilationist tactics and Symborg has done nothing to discourage this. The hunger for leadership, for vision, and for certainty at a time of extraordinary change is so great that millions of people are making this connection for themselves.
Hardly a day goes by without news of more and more “awakenings”, as the Assimilationists call their gatherings. Thousands of people are voluntarily submitting to the de-construction process and allowing themselves to be disassembled into atoms, to presumably join with the greater Mother swarm. Authorities from Bangladesh to Bolivia, from Surinam to Sierra Leone are at odds on how to deal with these mass suicides. Some have banned the meetings outright, effectively driving the Assimilationists underground. Others have monitored and tried to control the frenzied crowds that always flood the gatherings, in an attempt to keep some kind of order. Some authorities have no idea what to do and just leave the gatherings alone.
It doesn’t help that scientists and philosophers are themselves in violent disagreement about the technology involved in assimilation, about whether there is any chance that disassembled believers could ever be re-assembled in living form. What happens to those who de-construct? Are they truly absorbed into the Mother Swarm, as Symborg preaches? Or are they just atom fluff, loose particles blown around like so much dust? Or is the truth somewhere in between…between Science and Engineering and Faith?
This reporter has recently learned from highly-placed sources in Paris that UNIFORCE is working hard to counter the growth of Symborg and the Assimilationist movement. Sources have confirmed the existence of psychological ops being run at some of these “awakenings” to discredit and disprove what Symborg is saying. There are also reports, as yet unsubstantiated, of operations to smear Symborg himself, even counter-swarm ops to contaminate the swarm of nanobots that make up Symborg…a sort of long-range disruption effort to keep Symborg from assembling into human likeness. How successful these have been is not known, but sources confirm that the effort was approved at the highest levels of UNIFORCE, is massive, well-funded and growing in scope.
The true nature of what Symborg is has long been controversial. Is he a bot? Is he a collection of bots, in effect an angel, albeit of superior quality? Is he something else—
“…two minutes to drop! Troopers on standby! Close your visors! Suit boost to PRIMED AND READY!”
The lifter banked slightly to swing around to its approach heading and settled down in the bumpy night time air over the Serengeti plain at seventy meters altitude. Ahead, the black humps of the Ngongolo Hills loomed on the horizon like shoulders poking above the acacia trees, with the blood-red eye of the simmering volcano of Mt. Kipwezi stabbing through the faint mist.
Lieutenant Justin Cannon closed down the SOLNET report he had been viewing and tapped a button on his wristpad, changing his eyepiece display in an instant. He methodically checked and noted every trooper’s status.
Kaminski, Halvorson, Ng, Rice, Mehlkopf, Usher and Zammit. 1st ANAD, Special Detachment Alpha. Tasked with entering the East African Sanctuary covertly. Nobody’s kicking bot ass today, though. Just planting a few sensors and doing a little recon.
Cannon shook his head. Brass was like that. When you sent nanotroopers into harm’s way, you had to let ‘em kick a little ass. Recon shit was for the birds…drone birds, to be exact. Alpha had packed a bevy of them as well.
“Thirty seconds to drop! Troopers in position NOW!”
Cannon stood up and worked his way aft down the center aisle of the lifter’s cargo bay, securing his hypersuit to the safety lines. The rest of the unit did likewise. When the ramp popped open, they’d be about sixty meters above the grassland and savanna of nighttime Kenya, popping out into the airstream in their hypersuits and propelling themselves down to the ground on suit boost. After securing their gear and taking their bearings, Detachment Alpha would head out to the target coordinates, recon the base of Kipwezi, then emplace the Q-POD sensor package and call for exfiltration.
With any luck, the swarms would still be dozing by the time they lifted off.
The final seconds ticked down and the lifter ramp slid down and open, exposing the cargo bay to the cool night time air rushing by.
“GO…GO…GO…GO…!”
One after another, the nanotroopers leaped into the night sky and lit off their suit boost. Had anyone been watching from below, they would have witnessed a maneuver that resembled a fireworks show on the Fourth of July. Shadowy forms flitted out the back of the lifter and suddenly flared briefly into brilliance as their thruster plumes lit off. Each trooper tucked his arms in and let his suit’s guidance program drop them quickly to the ground in a controlled descent, stirring up little poofs of dust as each one touched down.
It was all over in less than thirty seconds. The lifter disappeared as quickly as it had come.
Cannon got on the crewnet and checked the status of every trooper in his command. Eight down and secure, all chirping back clean and green.
“Good, drop, ladies. Get your gear together and rally beside me in two.”
Cannon took a moment to scan the area. The drop zone had been ID’ed from satellite and drone imagery a few days before. A smattering of acacia trees. Made for decent cover. Humps of volcanic rock…kopjes in the local dialect. Dried stream beds. Some bones nearly, probably gazelle or wildebeest, picked clean. “DPS, what’ve we got?”
The Defense and Protective Systems tech was a buzzcut Vietnamese atomgrabber named Ng. He hand-launched a Superfly drone and the thumb-sized ornithopter chittered into the sky, orbiting fifteen meters overhead, sniffing the surroundings for anything out of the ordinary. Momentarily, Ng reported back.
“Nada, Skipper. No unusual thermals, no EMs or acoustics beyond baseline. Looks like we’re clear…for the moment.”
“Good, Ng. Let’s keep it that way.” The rest of the Detachment formed up in a tight circle around Cannon. “Okay, here’s the deal. We’re going to recon the perimeter of Kipwezi for the next few hours. Out to one kilometer radius from the foot of the mountain. Target coordinates for planting Q-POD are about halfway around, the other side of the mountain. Kipwezi’s an active volcano…ya’ll can see that for yourselves—“ he pointed up to the coppery glow emanating from the summit of Kipwezi, wreathed in steam and smoke—“so watch your step. The geos say she won’t blow anytime in the next forty-eight hours, but she burps a lot…kind of like you guys at the canteen. So we keep Superfly up and keep sniffing, telltale gases…seismic shudders, that sort of thing. Procedure in a big blow is this: light off your suit boost and punch in ESCAPE 3…that’s been pre-programmed to lift you out of here in a hurry and propel you out of the Sanctuary into
Normals territory. Just make sure you’re configured for quick launch at all times. Any questions?”
Zammit had one. “Lieutenant, what about the bots? I know we’ve got Superfly. But bots sometimes look like these bushes. Or those rocks. Even animals. This place is supposed to be home base for Config Zero. It a cinch they got sentries or guards of some type.”
It was a question Cannon knew he couldn’t answer. At the planning meetings, he’d had the same question himself. Nobody had an answer. Nobody knew just how well the botswarms could hide. It wasn’t beyond possibility that Config Zero had infiltrated the Detachment itself and one of the troopers was an angel, a damn good one.
“Zammit, just keep your eyes and ears open, okay? If something looks and smells fishy, it probably is. Don’t be shy about letting the rest of us know.”
With that, Detachment Alpha gathered up its gear and headed out, north by northeast, circumambulating Mt. Kipwezi in a clockwise direction at a kilometer radius from the base of the mountain. With any luck, they’d be at the target coordinates in an hour or so.
The glare from the top of Kipwezi gave the only illumination on an otherwise mostly cloudy night. All the troopers had night-vision gear. They hiked for a few minutes through bush country and across a few dried-up stream beds. Shapes moved along the edge of their visual fields—gazelles, mostly, although Rice, the other DPS tech, was sure he’d seen a trio of lions skulking through some brush, stalking something.
“You’re seeing things,” someone cracked over the crewnet.
But everyone was still edgy, jumpy.
Usher was the jumpiest. To no one in particular, he whispered over the comm: “What the hell is this Config Zero anyway? We should just friggin’ fry the whole area with HERF bombs and be done with it.”
“Some badass ayatollah master bot, that’s what he is,” replied Zammit. “Symborg too.”
“Naw, man, you’re both cracked,” said Rice. “Symborg’s a friggin’ genius. Think about it…that cloud of bugs is like the perfect politician. All things to all people, literally. You like handsome vid star looks…he can do it. You like Churchill or Roosevelt…some kind of strong father-type leader…he’s got the config. You like some kind of sensitive, weepy kind of weenie, he can do that too. It’s friggin’ perfect, man.”
“Symborg, my ass,” Zammit came back. “He’s just a pinch from Config Zero, that’s all. Part of the Mother Swarm. He’s whatever you want him to be…whatever your fantasy may be. With this gizmo Halvorson’s carrying, we should be able to listen in on his pillow talk.”
“Maybe we’ll learn something.”
“Yeah, like what a real scumbag he is.”
“Hey,” Cannon broke in on the crewnet. “Pipe down back there…cut the chatter. And keep your eyes and ears open. Zammit, get your ass up here…you’re on point.”
Sergeant Mick Zammit hustled up to where the LT was pointing. He unslung his HERF carbine and made sure it was charged. Ahead of them, a few humps materialized out of the darkness…black volcanic rock outcrops, weathered into shapes that looked like swollen corpses. Serengeti had some of those too. It wasn’t uncommon to stumble across a pile of skeletons, picked clean by predators stalking the night. Cannon called a quick halt to take their bearings.
“CQE, how far to the target?”
Halvorson was the Detachment’s quantum engineer. He checked his eyepiece, tapped keys on his wristpad to call up the nav screen. “I make it six hundred forty two meters, Skipper. Heading zero eight five. That’s the little hollow the drones showed us…good clear side lobes of entanglement space there. Lots of decoherence waves mixing…we’ll get our best signal pickup there for sure…if nothing changes.”
“Hey, Skipper—“ It was Ng. He’d just seen a few alarms on his own eyepiece. “There’s something—“
Cannon came back to stand next to his DPS tech. “What’ve you got, Ng?”
The tech adjusted the gain on his sensors. Overhead, Superfly had seen it too and wheeled about to investigate. The chittering of the ornithopter’s blades could clearly be heard circling above them.
“These rocks, sir…I’m getting above-normal EMs, thermals…some serious atom-grabbing…it’s almost like—“
But he never got to finish the sentence.
In an instant, the circle of black volcanic rocks that surrounded them were no longer pitch black rocks. Instead, they glowed cherry-red, flaring into incandescence in seconds, like miniature suns erupting out of the ground.
“BOTS!” someone yelled over the crewnet. “Swarms…all around us--!”
“HERF ‘em!” Cannon yelled. “Light em’ up!”
“Fry the bastards!”
But Detachment Alpha was too late. The volcanic rocks had already changed config and quickly enveloped the unit in a flashing fog, a thunderstorm in miniature, with lightning streaks and a shrill keening buzz like a horde of angry bees.
The entire assault lasted four minutes. When the glare and the shrill buzzing finally died off and the swarm dissipated into the night sky, only dirt and ash remained.
Two thousand meters above the hollow, the summit of Mount Kipwezi glowed fiery red, casting deep blood red shadows across the ground. But there was no blood. Config Zero was a predator who consumed everything, down to the last molecule.
Only atom fluff…free radicals, an electron here, a scattering of protons there, was all that remained of Detachment Alpha.