Johnny Winger and the Great Rift Zone

CHAPTER 13

  Aboard the Michelangelo (UNS-212)

  Trans-Pluto Trajectory Waypoint P-12

  Post-Boost + 46 days

  December 4, 2110 (U.T.)

  2205 hours (Ship Time)

  Big Mike was four days past Pluto when the master alarm sounded throughout the ship. Barely five minutes before, Detrick Vogel had decided that he just couldn’t stay in his cramped bunk compartment a second longer. It was hot, stuffy, noisy and what the hell was that smell, anyway? Better to slip out and head for the galley. A sandwich and a beer…or what passed for beer aboard Big Mike…that ought to do the trick.

  But before he could exit the crews’ berth on B deck into the gangway tunnel, a shadow had drifted by the hatch opening. Instinctively, he held back to let whoever it was pass by.

  It turned out to be Commander Liu, the swarm angel exec, moving quickly aft.

  When asked about the incident later, Systems Tech Vogel could never give a convincing reason for why he decided to follow the angel to wherever it was going. Instinct, maybe. Suspicion, for sure. Curiosity. All these were suggested as motives for what he had done.

  Regardless, Vogel waited for a full five-second count, then slipped out into the gangway. Down at the end of the tunnel that ran through the center of Michelangelo, giving access to all decks and compartments, he saw the back of Liu’s head. She turned and slipped into the hatch for C deck.

  Why’s she going that way, Vogel wondered? C deck was for Service and Support. It contained the lockout chamber for crewmen to enter and leave the ship while she was underway. Vogel instinctively headed down the gangway in the same direction. C deck also provided access to Big Mike’s tail mast, and a narrow tunnel aft where equipment and controls were housed for propellant tanks, her reactors and the plasma torch engines.

  Vogel crept down the gangway with a growing sense of unease. He could feel the ship settling in for cruise after the Pluto phasing burn. Vibration was steady and she was settling on to her trajectory for the run out to the Big Beyond. Vogel didn’t want to think too much about that. The truth was they were already millions of kilometers beyond where anyone had ever been before.

  If anything went wrong here—

  At C deck hatch, Vogel peered cautiously into the deck compartment. At first, he didn’t see anything, didn’t see Commander Liu, didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. He wasn’t even sure Systems personnel were allowed down here. He certainly wasn’t familiar with any of the gear or systems on C deck.

  Vogel slipped through the hatch.

  That’s when Systems Tech Vogel spotted Commander Victoria Liu. Behind some starboard rack-mounted shelving, Liu…or whatever the hell she was…had lost a bit of structure, so that the swarm was no longer quite so human-like, more like a slightly misshapen funhouse mirror distortion of a human. The swarm had gathered around some gear mounted on the hull itself.

  With a start, Vogel soon realized the gear which had attracted Liu’s attention and efforts was a hull valve, part of the logistics airlock system. The valve assembly allowed air in and out of Big Mike’s pressure equalizing tanks. The hull valves helped Michelangelo ship supplies and gear from space without having to de-pressurize the whole deck.

  From his memory of a distant briefing before they had left Phobos Station, Vogel recalled that the hull valves were fully exposed to the vacuum of space. It was a critical system. The hull valves had to work. If they failed closed, Michelangelo couldn’t expel air from the airlock and the outer hatch couldn’t be opened. If they failed open, the entire interior pressure hull, all spaces, could be exposed to vacuum. A catastrophic de-pressurization casualty could result…Captain Hawley had been quite clear about that.

  What the hell is she doing? Vogel wondered. He eased into the deck compartment and then it hit him.

  Victoria Liu was letting some of her swarm bots infest the hull valve.

  His heart went into his mouth. He had to do something. He had to stop her.

  Dietrick Vogel felt for the alarm panel by the hatch and stabbed the Master Alarm button. Instantly, a warning klaxon sounded throughout Michelangelo, screeching and warbling through all decks.

  Liu turned around and spotted him. He saw that her hand was gone…or more accurately, had broken down into a cloud of bots. A steady stream was flowing off the stump at the end of her arm into the hull valve assembly.

  There was only one thing he could do. All the HERF and mag weapons were locked in the armory on A deck, three levels away.

  Vogel closed his eyes and clenched his teeth, then lunged at the Victoria Liu swarm with every ounce of force he could muster.

  The only sure way to kill a swarm was with another swarm. He’d learned that on day one in nog school tactical class. But he didn’t have a swarm. He didn’t have a HERF gun. Not even a wrench or a hammer.

  All he had was his own mass and momentum. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Vogel was dimly aware that his chances were, to put it mildly, remote. It would have been easier to cold-cock a cloud of smoke. But he realized as he lunged forward that he really didn’t care.

  It was high time to kick the bejeezus out of this scumbag swarm.

  Cory Hawley was scrolling through some notes on ship systems in his stateroom when the master alarm sounded through the ship. Instantly, he sprang up and headed out into Michelangelo’s central gangway. As he headed aft toward the sound of the klaxon, he collided with Lieutenant Dean Kohl, the ship’s propulsion systems officer, coming down from A deck.

  “What the hell’s going on?”

  Kohl was grim. Right behind the officer was Commander Element B, Big Mike’s engineering officer.

  “It’s coming from C deck…there are vital systems down there. Come on—“ Hawley pushed past both of them and pulled himself along the gangway rails. When he got to the hatch, he slipped inside and came up short.

  Half the compartment was enveloped in some kind of bot swarm. And what was left of Dietrick Vogel lay writhing in a swirling cloud of pulp on the deck, a chewed-up mass of half-disassembled tissue and blood, rapidly disintegrating into atom fluff.

  Hawley saw the problem right away. The hull valve was fully enveloped in a swarm. And already a thin stream of air was squealing toward the valve, now partially open to space. Dust, debris, papers, tools and anything else not locked down was flying through the air, now fully entrained in the escaping airstream. A cold fog had formed in the sudden pressure drop and Hawley felt his eardrums close to bursting.

  “Kohl…get to the armory…get some HERF weapons! And get Element B in here right away!”

  Kohl was already on the move toward the ship’s central gangway. “What about you, Skipper?”

  Hawley was reaching for a small control panel near the hatch. “I’m hitting EOS…got to flood this compartment with air and secure that hatch! Get moving--!”

  Kohl vanished in the growing hailstorm, his ears already popping in the falling pressure. As he fell out into the gangway, he saw Commander Element B sliding down from B Deck.

  “What’s happened?” the angel asked.

  Kohl quickly filled him in. “Get in there…Captain needs help fast! It’s a swarm…the exec, Commander Liu…it’s trying to breach the hull at the airlock—“ Kohl squeezed by and headed up to B deck. Just outside the captain’s stateroom, a locked cabinet contained the ship’s hand weapons: HERF rifles and mag pulsers. He had to get up there, grab a few guns and get back fast, before Hawley secured the C deck hatch permanently.

  “I was on the command deck when I heard the master alarm…ISAAC’s running the ship now…I saw pressure sensors going off down here—“ Element B slipped by Kohl as he headed up. The engineering officer squeezed through the deck hatch, already swinging shut, and immediately saw what was left of Victoria Liu now fully enveloping the airlock and hull valve assembly. Tendrils of bots streamed off her arms and were fast approaching Cory Hawley, wh
o waved his hands and arms, even as he fought to stay upright in the falling pressure, pelted by a rain of debris swirling around the airlock.

  Element B plowed through the hailstorm toward Liu, or what was left of Liu, for by now the Commander had almost fully dematerialized into a cloud of bots, filling one corner of C deck with a flashing, pulsating fog.

  Hawley lunged instinctively toward his engineering officer, then stopped, realizing that the angel was probably their only chance to stop a catastrophic hull breach. For a moment, the two looked at each other. Hawley knew the situation was grave and getting worse.

  Element B’s voice was firm. “Get all your people off this deck, Captain. Right now. Once that hatch is shut and I empty the air flasks, you won’t be able to get out. If that hull valve or the bulkhead goes, you’ll all be killed.”

  “I’ve got to get control of Big Mike, before we lose everything!”

  Element B bodily shoved Hawley through the hatch and into the central gangway. “If I don’t stop that swarm right here and now, Captain, nothing else will matter!”

  Hawley shrugged and nodded grimly, then disappeared up the gangway. Once he was clear, Element B dogged the hatch shut and made it fast. Then he turned to the Victoria Liu swarm.

  The entire far wall of the compartment was now thick with bots, the swarm replicating at max rate, now that it no longer needed to maintain structure.

  Element B knew there was only one thing to do. Hawley’s initial instincts had been right. The best way to fight a swarm was with another swarm. As he cycled his own config controls to slough off a formation of bots, Element B took a last look at what Commander Victoria Liu had now become.

  The angel still had not fully dematerialized. From its head down to its waist, all human structure was gone, replaced by a fuzzy, pulsating blob of bots, like a tree enveloped in fog. Below the waist, most of Liu’s trunk and legs were still faintly visible, in shadowy outline, as the swarm changed config and assumed its natural state. The effect was something half-human, half-swarm, a hybrid thing, steadily breaking down into its smallest elements.

  Element B gave the command and started to dematerialize himself. “Time to get small!” he yelled over the shriek. He grabbed a nearby stanchion to stay upright as Michelangelo lurched again. Up on A deck, he knew Hawley would be fighting to keep the ship under control. “Now going loose….enabling Config Delta seven seven—“

  Through it all, the master alarm klaxon shrieked.

  For Element B, life at nanoscale was like riding a gnat through a hurricane, like riding a roaring river down a waterfall. He immediately retracted all effectors in an attempt to ride out the storm. Then he hunkered down and slogged his way forward, trying to get a read on anything unusual up ahead, high thermals, high EMs, an acoustic signature, anything.

  Somehow, some way, he had to locate the bots of the Liu swarm and engage.

  There’s just no way to convey to the Humans what this is like, he told himself. Maybe the closest thing would be falling through a cloud or floating in an ocean…a sense of peace, serenity, even in a gale like this. An understanding that this was the way life should be lived…indeed every human had lived like this for the first nine months of its life.

  Just then, Element B got an acoustic ping. He checked his signals. Sure enough, his sensors had detected something unusual up ahead, through the driving sleet of air molecules, a faint echo, maybe a spark of thermal activity above average. Could be some bots assembling something…or disassembling something. He revved up propulsors to max and steered the master assembler on that heading.

  The reading ebbed and flowed so he steered as best he could through the maelstrom, tacking first one way, then another, trying to work upstream against the onslaught of molecules from the hurricane.

  There. Gotcha.

  He chopped propulsors and probed ahead with electromagnetic fingers. Density going up. Those aren’t air molecules, he told himself. Cautiously, he probed some more and maneuvered around to approach from the side, gaining a different aspect view of the targets.

  Slowly, ghostly shapes began to materialize out of the fog. Enemy bots, thousands of them. As he closed in, he could see the elongated multi-lobed form of the assemblers…squat barbells festooned with all manner of effectors and grabbers. Whirling propulsors at both ends, spinning into a blur as the bots fought to maintain position.

  It was like nothing he had ever seen before.

  Element B worked his config controls, setting up his own swarm to engage. Carbene grabbers, enzymatic knife, bond disrupters, everything was ready. Now girded for battle, he flexed nanoscale fists and drove forward, spoiling for a fight.

  The two formations came together and sparks flew, as bond disrupters ripped at effectors, liberating millions of electron volts. The bots thrashed and hacked, searching for weak spots, closing, then backing off to find another angle. It was a boxing match, feint here, jab there, grasp and thrust, parry and kick.

  In the last seconds before the grapple, Element B had noticed an open seam in the enemy bots’ outer casing, right amidships, between whirling effectors above and below, almost like a waist belt. He surmised it was a structural join, a connection drawing together assembled segments of the bots’ scaffolding. Could be a weak spot.

  If I could just get a bond disrupter in there—

  Throughout the battle front, Element B had replicated uncountable trillions of assemblers and each one was slaved to the master. Whatever move and maneuver he made was instantly copied and repeated by every replicant. Now, Element B twisted and turned to bring his forward disrupters to bear on the enemy bot’s midsection.

  Just a little further—he shuddered as his master bot was ripped by the enemy’s carbene grabber. Element B recoiled slightly, losing effector tips in a spinning puff of atoms. Ouch. That hurt….

  He closed in again, shielding himself from assault, extending his own disrupters as far forward as they would go. Just a little bit further….there!

  He let it go. The disrupter tore at valence electrons that hovered like a cloud over the mid-section seam. Instantly, the seam buckled and gave way. An explosive cloud of electrons erupted, sparking and sizzling like oil on a gas grill. The bot’s outer casing buckled and tore away in a frenzied thrashing, as more bonds were severed. Its props and effectors spun down and the momentum of the bond break sent the bot cartwheeling away.

  It had worked.

  Element B knew that in every nanoscale combat encounter, there were always weaknesses in the enemy bots. The point of all the tactics was to find that weakness and exploit it, before the enemy did the same to you.

  All up and down the battlefront, Element B’s replicants duplicated the maneuver, closing with their opponents, grappling and punching, searching for the midwaist seam. Any opening, any letdown, and his bond disrupters were there, zapping at the weak spot.

  The air was soon churning and frothy with atom parts and molecule fragments.

  And the Victoria Liu swarm would be so much atom fluff.

  Element B made sure his embedded bots were running the assault as he had demonstrated. Now, he had to do something about containing what was left of the swarm. Bots could be slashed and cut up, but if the master was intact, replication was just a matter of time. You had to go for the head, go for the brains. Find the master and its controller and shred the config engine. Once you did that, the bots couldn’t re-assemble.

  He shifted back to macroscale and surveyed the situation.

  A hurricane of debris still swirled toward the partially dismantled hull valve assembly. The fog had thickened, indicating that pressure was still falling. Element B knew he had to do something to patch the hull breach and secure that valve.

  He spalled off more bots from his arm and called up a different config.

  Config Delta Five fifty two…execute….!

  All throughout the ship, the crew of Michelangelo had responded to
the master alarm with practiced speed and calm. Hawley made his way back to A deck and secured himself into his command seat, checking ship systems, querying ISAAC on status.

  “Approaching hull breach on C deck, Captain,” came ISAAC’s smooth voice. “Configuring gangway for emergency depressurization casualty….Level One procedures in effect on all decks and spaces…now compensating thrust asymmetry with A and B thruster banks primed to counteract un-commanded roll rates….”

  “Very well,” Hawley came back. His eyes roved across the board. Big Mike was in a slow counter-clockwise roll, the result of air escaping through the airlock and hull valve on C deck. ISAAC was already countering that. “What about the crew, ISAAC?”

  “No casualties at this time, excepting Commander Liu. Safe haven shelters activated and secure. Vital monitors all reading green. All parameters nominal. Commander Liu is offline and does not respond to alert messages.”

  “No shit, ISAAC. I don’t think we’ll be hearing from the exec again…not in this lifetime. Any signs of swarm activity beyond C deck?”

  “Checking sensor readings now, Captain…one moment, please--“

  He knew Big Mike had nine safe haven shelters scattered around the ship for her crew of twenty. If what ISAAC said was true, everybody had either made it safely into shelter or was otherwise secured from the hull breach. The real question was what would they have to do to fully sanitize the ship from further swarm out breaks? He knew he would have to rely on Element B for that.

  ISAAC came back online. “No sensor indications of un-commanded swarm activity outside C deck, Captain. No spikes or activity on any normal band…electromagnetic, acoustic, thermal…all activity is concentrated on C deck.”

  “Maybe we were lucky after all,” Hawley muttered to himself. But he needed eyes, human eyes, on the scene too. He killed the master alarm klaxon and got on the ship’s 1MC. “Lieutenant Kohl, this is Command…Kohl come to A deck immediately.”

  Two minutes later, the Propulsion Systems Officer popped his pressured-suited head in and climbed onto the command deck. He unsealed the helmet and took it off with a grunt as the deck hatch sealed behind him. “Sir, I was just checking safe haven status. Looks like—“

  “I know, I know…ISAAC already checked. I need you to head down to C…give me a report on what’s happening. What’s Element B up to…he’s not responding. Is the deck safe? Is that breach secure? According to ISAAC, we’re still venting air and the ship’s bucking like a bronco…we’re using up a lot of fuel trying to maintain stability. Get down there and see what’s happening.”

  Kohl was already re-sealing his helmet. “Yes, sir.” He ducked through the hatch and disappeared down the gangway.

  Hawley settled back in his seat and closed his eyes. This had been a close call, a very close call, and Big Mike wasn’t out of the woods yet. Repairs, if they could be done at all, would take a few weeks and all the skills the crew and their robotic assistants could muster.

  The smart thing to do would be to abandon the mission, turn Michelangelo around and let her limp home, or at least closer to home. That alone would take months. And it would have to be approved by CINCSPACE.

  Hawley decided to fire off a report to HQ and alert the brass as to what had happened. It would take the signal at least six hours from this distance to reach Earth…twelve hours plus for a response. He dictated a quick report to ISAAC, with a request to alter the mission, and got the message off. Then, assured that ISAAC had the ship under control, he decided to head aft and see the damage for himself.

  He found air pressure restored to near normal in the gangway spaces and Lieutenant Kohl huddled with Element B outside C deck. Element B had re-assembled himself into something approximating a Frontier Corps officer, although his hands were a little off, a little blurry and foggy, like the structure wasn’t quite there. It was an effect Hawley had seen before and he tried to ignore it.

  “Sir, “ Element B reported, “the hull valve assembly is fully re-constituted and is being tested right now. There is still a lot of cleanup to do on C deck. And the airlock needs to be fully checked. I was waiting for results from the hull valve test, before going back inside.”

  Hawley peered through a small porthole in the hatch. The deck looked like a tornado had swept through, which, in essence, it had, with the de-press emergency and things flying around like missiles. Racks and shelves were upended. Debris drifted on faint air currents. A mist had formed around the airlock, like a small halo. “What about Commander Liu…or whatever she or it was…?”

  Kohl spoke up. He held out a small containment capsule in his hand. “Right here, Skipper. We managed to corral the master bot…Element B did, that is. The rest is atom fluff. But we got the brains, right here—“ He turned the capsule end for end, then handed it to Hawley.

  “You’re sure you got everything?”

  Element B nodded. Even his face was a little blurry, as if the config manager couldn’t quite maintain an even structure. If you weren’t used to dealing with swarm entities and angels, the effect could be a bit unnerving. Hawley figured it was best not to stare at his engineering officer and focused on what he could see inside the hatch porthole.

  Element B described the effort. “I was able to disengage a small formation and match configs with Commander Liu. Config Delta Fifty Two did the trick, sir. Extra bond disrupters and a new geometry for my enzymatic knife. New pyridine probes as well as new design carbene grabbers.”

  Kohl pumped a fist in the air. “Element B kicked nanobotic ass, sir. I saw it from out here. You should have seen it, sir…like two dueling thunderstorms…even saw some lightning bolts in there—“

  Element B nodded. “That would have been my bond disrupters, working at severing certain covalent bonds, which liberate an average of seven thousand electron volts when—“

  Hawley held up a hand. “I get the picture. Element B, you’ve earned yourself a field

  promotion. I’m making you full executive officer of this ship. Big Mike needs someone like you in command.”

  Element B displayed no outward emotion…angels didn’t have the facial texture or the fine muscle control to do much more than generic smiles and frowns…plus they all looked alike. It was the same program, the same config.

  “Thank you, sir. Such an honor is most unusual in this situation. A quick scan of Frontier Corps mission files indicates only four other similar incidents in the last ten years. I will try to perform the duties of the executive officer with courage and requisite skill….there are many command duties and responsibilities I must learn.”

  Hawley brushed all that off. He knew there might be some grumbling among Michelangelo’s crew. Angels or swarm entities in positions of responsibility aboard Frontier Corps ships had always been controversial. Not every vacuumhead thought it was a good idea. Frankly, Hawley thought to himself, some of them were just troglodytes anyway. But he was sure it was the right move.

  “You’ll do fine, Element B. Study up on the Officers’ Manual and you’ll be up to speed in no time.”

  Kohl looked worried. “Skipper, we can’t go on with the mission like this, can we? I mean, we’re a crippled ship. C deck needs to be thoroughly checked out, what with the hull valves and the airlock. We lost of lot of O2. There’s damage in there that needs to be repaired, if we can repair it. Some of it we can fab if we need to. And the propulsion plant’s acting funny…I’m thinking a few bots may have drifted through the aft tunnel…we got to sweep it clean, sir…if any bots get to the reactors or the plasma engines….?

  “I know, Lieutenant, I know. Form up a detail with Element B here and take a look. You may have to send a party outside too, for an exterior inspection. As far as the mission goes, I’ve fired off a message to CINCSPACE explaining what happened. I asked for permission to abort and head back sunward, even though it’ll take months…this trajectory’s no good for any ki
nd of quick return. It’ll be half a day before we hear anything.”

  They discussed inspection and repair priorities for a few more minutes. Then Hawley went back to A deck to check the crew roster, see who might have EVA time in his log. Going outside here, hundreds of millions of kilometers beyond Pluto, in the middle of nowhere didn’t appeal to him. It would take a special kind of courage and focus to do the job and not be overwhelmed by what the docs politely called cosmic euphoria syndrome. It was all fine and good to be at one with the Universe embraced in celestial love but you still needed air, water and food. He’d have to pick an inspection detail carefully. Maybe ISAAC could help.

  Hours later, Hawley had drifted off to a fitful, restless sleep in his bunk when the message chime sounded gently. He sat up abruptly and saw the alert bar flashing. It was from CINCSPACE.

  He rubbed his eyes, stretched and yawned, and read.

  Orlov’s chubby face came on the vid screen. Hawley turned up the volume.

  “…to the extreme nature of the Operation Sentinel mission, your request to abort is denied…sorry about that, Captain… I’ve directed Frontier Corps stations to send all available data…. to help you cope with the situation…I’ve reviewed your incident reports…concur with your decision to field-promote Element B…good luck, Hawley….”

  Hawley turned the sound off, even as CINCSPACE continued to stream platitudes and official blather into the viewer. He had heard enough. Hawley sank back into his bunk and stared up at the ceiling.

  So we’re on our own out here. The crew will take this hard. There’s been more than the usual bitching and whining for weeks now. They don’t understand the mission. Hell, I don’t understand the mission. Search for a cloud of bots or whatever this Devil’s Eye anomaly is. Put detectors up to let us know if any bugs come calling.

  The crew was going to be his hardest challenge. Big Mike could be repaired. The damage done by Commander Liu could be fixed. But he wasn’t sure the crew could be fixed. They were uneasy as it was, flying off into the Big Beyond, farther than anyone had ever gone before. And the C deck incident hadn’t helped. Now no one trusted anybody. Somehow he had to get them to focus on the ship and the mission, focus on things they could do, things they could see and trust.

  He figured an all-hands meeting might help clear the air. He was already composing some ideas in his mind when the 1MC chirped.

  It was Element B, up on A deck, in command.

  “Captain, I’ve just finished a long-range scan of the region where Triton Odyssey was lost, where comms stopped from that probe. Something’s showing up…something you should see yourself.”

  Hawley sprang out of his bunk, thankful for something to keep his mind occupied. “On my way.”

  He was on the command deck in less than a minute, easing into the left-hand seat.

  Element B seemed at full config, all edges and perimeter structures sharp, his hands and fingers not blurry or fuzzy at all. Hawley was grateful.

  “What have you got, Commander?”

  Element B called up a display on the main board. “Infrared, sir. There an off-nominal spike in temperature above ambient, this sector—“ he highlighted a region of space, with the temperature spike color-enhanced. “It could be a cloud of dust or debris, but no other sectors show anything. Normally, debris clouds cause a smooth increase and decrease in temperature…the dust is distributed according to a normal distribution…but this, sir…this is a quick and large rise in temperature. Statistically unlikely.”

  Hawley studied the plot. Big Mike was forty-seven days past Pluto and weeks away from approach to the detected coordinates for Devil’s Eye. What the hell was this?

  “Have you got Farside’s latest figures on Devil’s Eye? Has it moved…or drifted our way?”

  Element B ran his hands quickly over the board. The blurring effect kicked in—it was like looking at someone’s hands through a distorted mirror-- and Hawley decided not to focus on that. He changed the display to bring the region of elevated temperature into greater contrast.

  “Here’s the latest known position of the Devil’s Eye anomaly, sir.” Element B had merged Farside’s data with their own sensor readings. Hawley could read from the scale that the two were separated in distance by several million kilometers.

  “Then this can’t be Devil’s Eye, Commander. There’s too great a gap…that’s three million kilometers.”

  “Unless Devil’s Eye has partitioned and this is a subset of that phenomenon.”

  Hawley looked over at his new exec. “What, exactly, are you saying?”

  Element B never changed expression. His face could best be described as determined concentration…or perhaps, official Frontier Corps poster-boy determination…or even some kind of weary resignation. No extra lines for character, no wrinkles. Just a bland face, fully there but somehow waiting for Life to draw lines on it.

  “Sir, there is one possibility. Statistically unlikely, but it should be considered.”

  “So, spill it, Commander.”

  “The temperature spike does have some resemblance to the temperature profile of a nanobotic swarm. Not a perfect match, but I have been running some correlation routines and the probability is not zero for this possibility.”

  Hawley took a deep breath. “I was afraid you’d say that. So it’s possible, remote but possible, that we could be looking at some kind of swarm?”

  “That is affirmative, Captain. It’s a remote possibility, but it can’t be discounted.”

  Hawley studied the plot. “What about the latest data from Triton Odyssey? Are we looking at the same thing it saw?”

  Element B called up more displays. “I ran the correlations, Captain. There are similarities in the data, but it’s not a strong match. However, the correlations suggest that Triton Odyssey at least saw something similar to what we are seeing.”

  “Something similar…what the hell does that mean? And how close is this….anomaly, whatever the hell it is…to our trajectory?

  Element B chose to answer the second question. “The anomaly covers some six thousand kilometers in extent. Our current trajectory takes us directly into its path. It appears that the mass is in a coordinated orbit with us…heliocentric and approximately twenty days ahead of us.”

  Hawley sat back in his seat and rubbed his eyes wearily. “Great, Element B. That’s just friggin’ great. My ship’s nearly chewed up by a rogue swarm masquerading as a Frontier Corps officer. Now we’re heading full speed into another swarm. What about our target…Sedna? Can we get there another way?”

  Element B’s fingers flew over the board again, doing the calculations and setting up displays. “Not without a substantial delta-v maneuver, Captain. Here are the details—“ he indicated reams of numbers. Nearby a 3-D plot showed the trajectories from a perspective above the solar system. “—a retrograde burn and a phasing burn could put us into a different orbit, which would cause us to intercept Sedna by traveling inside the orbit of the anomaly. Time to target is only four days longer, but the burn requirements use a lot of fuel.”

  Hawley studied the results, saw it was a bad idea and nixed the thought. “Okay, so we stay on our current course. Maybe, we can tweak things to arrive at Sedna and use that planetisimal as a shield. Run that scenario….”

  The two of them tried out different options and let ISAAC do the math. There were no good options. Every feasible approach to Sedna, where they were supposed to construct the base station for Operation Sentinel’s network of detectors, took them close to, if not directly into, the anomaly.

  After what had happened with Commander Liu, Hawley was reluctant to chance that. But he saw no other realistic course.

  “Stay on this trajectory,” he decided. “Maybe this thing is just a cloud of debris or dust. But we’d better get Big Mike’s HERF mounts and coilguns checked out and primed for action, just in case. We may have to fight our way thr
ough.”

  Element B said, “I’ll see to it right away, Captain.” The exec left the command deck and headed aft to check on repairs at C deck and to form a detail to inspect and charge up the HERF batteries. Hawley stayed behind, studying the trajectory plots Element B still had running on the display.

  A shiver came over Hawley and he buttoned up his tunic reflexively. He dimmed the lighting on the command deck, killed the displays and let his eyes wander outside the portholes for a moment, spanning the rim of stars that encircled the ship.

  What was out there, waiting for them? A cloud of dust? Or another rogue swarm, maybe advance scouts from the Old Ones, already poking around the outer precincts of the solar system? Hawley wasn’t sure he even believed in all the crap he’d heard about the Old Ones. Maybe they were just a myth, like something between the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. Maybe it was the Devil himself out there. Plenty of people believed Judgment Day was coming.

  A thought nagged at Hawley and he kept trying to swat it away, bury it before it came to his full attention, but like a persistent gnat, the thought wouldn’t go away. What if Element B and Commander Liu were part of the same swarm, cut from the same cloth, as it were? Could he trust Element B? He had no reason not to…the angel officer had distinguished himself (itself?) over a service career that spanned nearly a dozen years, serving on cycler ships, lighters, corvettes and frigates throughout the Corps. He had a service record that could only be described as exemplary.

  But so had Victoria Liu. That realization brought another shiver and Hawley turned up the heater on the deck.

  If there were some kind of rogue swarm of bots out there, waiting for them, how would Element B react when the bugs came calling? Hawley turned that over in his mind, looking at the possibility from every angle. Would he perform as he always had, under fire, a frontline Frontier Corps officer on a space raider corvette in combat against a formidable enemy? Would he welcome the bots as some kind of long, lost cousins from the Great Beyond? Would he freeze up? Maybe lose config and disintegrate and disperse like fog?

  Hawley understood that there could be no answer to questions like this and all he really could do was go on instinct and what he knew. Maybe I should hash this out with Kohl and the other officers. Maybe I’m just paranoid. But it wasn’t paranoia that had nearly destroyed Big Mike a few hours ago. That was very real. The damage that was even now being repaired on C deck was quite real.

  It was enough to drive a ship captain to drink. Hawley abruptly swung himself up and out if his seat. He was restless. He had to do something…anything…to keep from following these lines of thought.

  Maybe I’ll check on our HERF batteries myself and make sure they’ll work when they’re supposed to.

  Out in the gangway, he headed aft and almost collided with Lieutenant Kohl, coming up from the aft tunnel. Kohl had spent the last hour checking out the ship’s propellant tank quad and her reactor bay and plasma engines. He had a grim look on his face, as he wiped grease from his cheeks and hands.

  “What have you got, Lieutenant? What’s it look like back there?”

  “Pinhole leak in tank number four, Skipper. And the shielding’s penetrated along a bulkhead seam…looks like the bots got into it. I came up to grab some rad sensors and tools. We’ll have to re-config something soon or we’ll all be dead in a month. And that outside EVA we were talking about….I’d say we’d better get to it right away…that tank’s losing xenon gas faster than I thought.”

  Hawley made a snap decision. “Dean, how’s your spacewalking legs?”

  Kohl’s eyes widened. You serious, Skipper? I haven’t been outside in over a year…I’m not even sure my certificate’s any good.”

  “Get Stolz and the other qualified guys to give you a quick refresher. You and me are talking a walk…outside Big Mike…tomorrow. I’m not trusting this to anybody else.”

  Fourteen billion kilometers away, sunward of Michelangelo, Mount Kipwezi glowed a faint crimson red through wispy late evening clouds. The ground rumbled and local Masai tribesmen chanted all evening long around campfires, trying to placate the gods they were sure were angry.

  Inside the cave complex near the summit, sparkling mists flashed and strobed with activity as Config Zero received and processed new signals, signals relayed through the Keeper at Europa. The signals advised Config Zero of status updates, new operations, new configuration changes and new trajectories for Subunit 99 and all elements. Elements 10899773 thru 4983376 had separated themselves from the primary formation and were approaching their target coordinates, Object 222876. Landfall would occur in a few hours. Disassembly operations would proceed thereafter.

  Config Zero acknowledged the update and stored it in memory.