Chapter 17
Mercury orbit
January 30, 2156
0100 hours (ship time)
Ten days after the Johnny Winger swarm found itself imprisoned on the surface of Mercury, the expedition known as Mercury Hammer was launched, on a speed trajectory to the inner solar system. Two months later, Colonel Nguyen Thanh stared out the observer’s cupola on his corvette command ship, UNS Meiji, at the forbidding terrain of Mercury as the ground slid by beneath them. Meiji and her sister ship UNS Khayyam had dropped into orbit after an uneventful trip to the inner solar system and now the bell was about to ring for the big show.
He didn’t know if they were ready but the time had come to find out. He only hoped that the rest of Mercury Hammer would fare as well.
The expedition had been divided into two parts, a Mercury squadron, which had been given the innocuous sounding name of Detachment Bravo, and a Sun Ring squadron, known as Detachment Alpha. Meiji and Khayyam were part of Detachment Bravo. The Sun Ring task force also consisted of two Frontier Corps corvettes, UNS Tycho and UNS Aristotle, both re-purposed from cycler duty on the Venus-Earth-Mars bus run.
Two thousand, one hundred men and women and a shelf full of containment capsules crammed with ANAD systems of every conceivable configuration made up the expedition. That and each ship’s complement of HERF, magnetic loop and coilgun batteries and the two squadrons sported enough firepower to reduce a small planet to rubble.
Mercury was a small planet, Thanh told himself, but early sensor indications were that she would be a particularly hard nut to crack. As he watched the cratered, sun-blasted landscape roll by below, he saw the first rugged walls of Caloris Basin sliding into view from the horizon. A bulls-eye hit by some big asteroid, he figured, as he watched the grid of lights of the enemy’s base winking at him like a baleful eye from a hundred kilometers beneath them. The whole basin was nearly fifteen hundred kilometers wide, with walls two kilometers high all around. And there in the middle, snugged up against some low hills, was their primary target….the Bug base that Johnny Winger…whoever or whatever he was now…had warned them about.
“Standard orbit, Colonel.” The voice startled him out of his reverie. It came from Captain Gabriel Lynx, Khayyam’s skipper and Thanh’s exec. Long-standing practice aboard Frontier Corps ships was to assign an angel, a para-human swarm entity, to the executive officer spot, but CINCSPACE had nixed that. Nobody trusted the ANAD descendants in such close proximity to the Bugs. They could be turned or bollixed up too easily by alien bot clouds from outer space that probably had powers no Normal could even imagine.
“Anything more on that barrier?” Thanh asked. Khayyam’s sensor suite had detected a nanobotic barrier draped over half the planet, centered on the Caloris Basin facility.
Lynx shrugged. He was nominally ship’s captain, second only to the Detachment commander. Bald and scarred from a run-in with a rogue swarm on a mission long ago, Lynx said, “We’re studying it now. It’s made out of bots, we know that much, but we can’t get a lot of structure on them. Sensors don’t have the resolution…they’ve got a multi-lobed bodies, probably effectors out the wazoo, but we need a closer look.”
“You think we can punch a hole when we drop Hawk and Griffin? I’ve got two assault teams I need to put on the ground. Plus we’ve got the hoppers.”
“Only one way to find out, sir.”
Thanh gave the order. “Commence drop preparations.”
Aft of Khayyam’s command deck, CSO Sergeant George Namibe squeezed past LP Corporal Sanjay Viyawanda and parked his butt in a web seat along one wall of Hawk’s rear troop compartment.
“Hey, Sanjay, can’t you make these seats any more comfortable? This thing feels like I’m sitting on a head that hasn’t been sanitized in about ten years. You prang this crate on some mountaintop while we’re landing and it’ll take me a day to get out of this.”
“The head’s right where you belong, Nimbo,” retorted Viyawanda. “At least you know what the hell you’re doing in there.”
Namibe settled himself in as best he could and checked the action on his HERF carbine for about the millionth time. He was buttoned up tight in a glorified straitjacket that the engineers called an X-suit…all armored and servo-ed to the heavens, and the damned thing felt wrong, too tight here, scraping something sensitive there…OUCH! that hurt... and he wanted to scream and claw his way out of this madness but he didn’t. He’d done enough drops to earn another stripe but they never felt right and he often dreamed of better things.
Riding Hawk down to any kind of gravity surface was like falling down a lift shaft without a helmet. When it was all over, you couldn’t even count up all the things that hurt.
Assault Team One—the Bug Smashers!—consisted of five troopers: Lieutenant Moncke, the CC1 and a quartet of assorted lowlifes. Sergeant Sly was HERF1. Sergeant Berkowitz was MAG1. Namibe was CSO1…that meant Combat Swarm Operator. And the LP, lander pilot, was Corporal Sanjay Viyawanda. A finer team could not be found anywhere inside the Corps this side of Mercury or anywhere else in the System and the Bug Smashers had the awards to prove it.
Both assault teams boarded their landers at Captain Lynx’s orders. In less than an hour, assuming the Captain and the Exec could figure out how to breach that orbiting barrier, Hawk and her sister lander Griffon would be descending like angry bees toward a combat landing somewhere inside Caloris Basin.
Several minutes later, the landing detail of Assault One was aboard Hawk and the lander was signaling Khayyam that she was ready to depart.
Randy Sly and Rod Berkowitz were strapped into their seats in the back, George Namibe between them. Viyawanda, the lander pilot and Lieutenant Ty Moncke were up front, in command.
Sly smacked his chewing gum loudly, a nervous habit that made everybody roll their eyes. “This bugger reminds me of a stack of pancakes, folks.”
“Yeah,” said Berkowitz. “With legs and three sausages on top. Does everything remind you of food, Sly?”
“Knock it off back there,” Lieutenant Moncke ordered. “Okay, Khayyam…we’re secure and ready. Give me the count….”
A few minutes after everybody was through bitching and moaning and had gotten themselves secured and strapped in, pilot Viyawanda punched up the departure program on the ship’s computer and counted down the last seconds before separation.
“Five…four…three…two…one…bingo!”
There was brief shudder and lurch as Hawk’s thrusters fired to make a positive separation.
“Hawk away…” he announced. Moncke and Viyawanda watched through the forward windscreen as the gaping mouth of Khayyam’s side-mast docking ring receded into the distance. From two kilometers off, when Viyawanda had stopped their motion and re-oriented Hawk for de-orbit, the great cycler ship looked like a massive bird soaring off into the heavens.
Moncke counted down the last moments to the initial burn that would start Hawk on her long curving descent to the surface of Mercury. The limb of the dark reddish world could barely be seen through the portholes, dim and shadowy.
“Ten seconds to PDI,” Viyawanda announced. He checked over his console: track, engine status, attitude…everything seemed ready. “Get ready for a major kick in the ass—“
The burn, when it came, made Hawk shake and shudder like a wet dog. Randy Sly felt the acceleration build up rapidly. After months of microgravity, the ship’s descent felt like an elephant had planted its posterior right on his chest. He forced a sideways glance at Namibe in the next seat.
The trooper was exhaling out in quick, forced breaths, as they had been trained. He met Sly’s eyes and grunted back.
“Randy…remind me to…put in…for a…transfer…when we get back….”
Even as Hawk was already descending, Khayyam and her sister ship Meiji had moved off to punch holes in the bot barrier that hovered over their target LZ like a faintly shimmering vei
l. If all went well, both ships would pump a few gazillion joules of mag gun and HERF rounds into the barrier, opening up holes for Hawk and Griffon to slip through, like trolling through a minefield in a wartime harbor.
Viyawanda and Moncke watched the trajectory plot on the board carefully as Hawk began her initial pitchover and slowed noticeably. The plot showed several lines, indicating nominal and actual course, all converging on an actual window in space, the entry point called High Gate, where the lander would begin firing her descent engines continuously, maneuvering and navigating across Mercury’s tortured and battered surface as they fell toward the LZ in the middle of Cone Crater…so named by Randy Sly because the formation reminded him of a big ice cream cone. The crater was officially known as Landing Site Hawk, some ten kilometers northwest of the big Bug base and inside Caloris Basin.
The descent and landing took half an hour. No bot barrier disturbed their descent, or Griffon’s. The mother ships had done their job, though already they could see in the sky above the shimmering veil of the barrier closing up again.
“Open sesame,” muttered Berkowitz nervously as they slipped below the barrier.
“Touchdown…good job, Skipper,” said George Namibe. Hawk settled with a bump onto a mostly level plain pocked with craters and strange blood-red hillocks. More hills surrounded them. “Right in the crosshairs.”
“Okay, boys and girls, let’s get moving,” Moncke unstrapped himself and headed for the lockout in the aft compartment.
The assault plan called for AT-1 to make tracks, mostly by suit boost, from landing site Hawk along a northwest to southeast bearing, closing on the Bug base from over a low hill and digging in on top of that hill--designated Witches Tit by common agreement—while AT-2 moved from landing site Griffon from the southeast. Terrain favored both assault teams but the aurora-like bot barrier over their heads made everybody nervous.
“Stick together,” Lieutenant Moncke ordered. “Boost on low…let’s go—“
The troopers of Assault Team One lifted on rooster-tails of dust as one and soared ten meters over the crater-pocked landscape, as they settled onto the proper heading for approach. Ahead of them, Witches Tit and other low-rise hummocks loomed like crumpled bed sheets of rock.
Thirty three kilometers southeast of their position, Assault Team Two was also on the move. Soon enough, Mercury’s short horizon dropped Landing Site Griffon far behind them.
It was Doc’s idea to hide in the converter control box of one of the rectenna field’s huge antennas. Winger and Doc were both hunted prey now, surrounded by gusts of patrol bots and angel cops scouring every crater, every piece of gear, every wireway and box that made up the Caloris Basin base. Once they had found their way into the innards of the converter control box, the combined swarms settled like dust and kept their figurative heads low, all the while understanding that the quick flashes of light they had detected overhead meant something was happening outside, something was slamming the bot barrier big time.
“Maybe it’s the expedition,” Winger said, with more hope and conviction than he felt.
***Detecting thermal and electromagnetic fluctuations in the barrier…signatures consistent with elevated bond breaking, elevated atomic activity…something’s disturbing the barrier and it’s trying to reconstitute***
“Here’s hoping it’s the cavalry. Doc, is there anything we can do to help?”
***It is possible that the excavator we sabotaged also supplies feedstock to this barrier, as well as the Sun Ring. I am detecting additional barriers at ground level, concentric rings surrounding the main base, Johnny***
“Maybe we can do something to weaken those ground barriers…but we don’t have any HERF weapons…what do we have, Doc? What can we use around here?”
***We are in part of the control system for receiving beamed power from the Sun Ring…perhaps I can determine how to move some of these rectennas…convert their output and focus it toward the main base…I must study the wiring and layout of this box***
“Hurry, Doc…if we’ve got troopers on the ground, we’ve got to do anything we can to help them. Otherwise, they’ll be overwhelmed.”
***We may have to reveal our position to the patrols, Johnny, if we try to move any of these antennas***
“Do it anyway, Doc. If we can help put this base out of commission, we’ll be throwing a wrench into the Central Entity’s plans…and maybe helping UNIFORCE as well.”
The two Assault Teams closed rapidly on the Bug base. Ten kilometers away, though, the Bug Smashers ran head on into another nanobotic barrier.
Lieutenant Moncke called a halt to their advance and all troopers de-boosted down to the ground. Towering before them was a faintly visible, glowing throbbing wall of flickering light, shimmering and popping even in the strong sunglare.
Moncke got on the crewnet. “CSO, get up here. Bring your bot pack.”
Namibe came up with his mobile containment pack and studied the barrier.
“Can we boost over it?” Moncke asked.
Namibe doubted it. “I doubt it, sir…I’m guessing it’s semi-sentient…it can detect us and shift to block any moves we make. See how it reacts as we move about.” He demonstrated by making a short lunge toward the barrier. Immediately, the wall flared in front of him and extended tendrils of bots, which Namibe batted away as he retreated. “Best bet is to hose it down with HERF and mag, then let me config something—maybe C-77, the porcupine I call that—and engage directly.”
Moncke didn’t need any more convincing. “Berkowitz, Sly, get up here. Set your weapons on max. Fire when I give the word.”
The two troopers hustled forward, taking up firing positions to either side of the CC1.
“HERF primed and enabled,” said Sly.
“Ditto mags,” reported Berkowitz. “You want original recipe or extra crispy, Skipper?”
“Just smash the Bugs good and open a path,” Moncke ordered. “Nimbo, get that config going and tell me when you’re ready.”
It only took a few minutes for Namibe to hack out a configuration and launch his ANAD combat swarm. The containment pod on his backpack frame flared into brilliance as it discharged the bot master. It was like watching a slow motion thunderstorm emerge from Namibe’s back. The faint mist formation coiled and drifted forward, stopping less than a meter from the barrier.
“Swarm up and running, sir.”
“Very well. MAG and HERF, let ‘em have it!”
The troopers opened fire at the same time. Round after round of rf pulses and magnetic loops pummeled the bots of the enemy barrier. The barrier glow faded and fought back, throbbing and pulsating at it absorbed and tried to deflect the energy of the blast.
That’s when Namibe sent his combat ANAD swarm into battle.
The line of engagement was easily visible as a jagged crack of light whipping in front of them like a snake on fire. Inside the melee, trillions of bots collided and discharged their bond disrupters. The effect was of two storm fronts colliding overhead, throwing lightning and popping flares bright enough to momentarily wash out the sunglow.
Shadows writhed on the ground and the troopers of Assault One backed away from the barrier to let the swarms duke it out.
“Another blast!” Moncke ordered.
Berkowitz and Sly hosed down the barrier, now weakened from battle with ANAD, with everything they had. Soon a visible hole in the wall opened up, then as if dissolving in translucent flame, the barrier began shrinking right in front of them. After a few more rounds, a ten-meter gap in the barrier was pried open by ANAD.
“Open sesame,” muttered lander pilot Viyawanda. “I just hope it stays open—“
Moncke had the same concern. “Nimbo, make configs to hold that opening. The rest of you, come with me.”
Moncke was first through. Sly, Berkowitz and Viyawanda followed, eyeing the thrashing edges of the barrier cautiously.
“ANAD’s kickin
g butt,” Sly muttered. “Just don’t let the door shut behind us.”
Inside the barrier, Assault One advanced another half a kilometer, bounded down into a shallow ravine still on the ground and came upon a row of strange blood-red hillocks spotting the ground, a line of low mounds spaced several meters from each other, extending to the horizon in every direction. The space between the hillocks seemed agitated, disturbed, as dust and pops of light crackled and swirled like miniature tornadoes close to the ground.
“What the hell are those?” asked Viyawanda. “Are they natural formations? More bots, maybe?”
“Looks like a pile of crap to me,” Sly decided. “With flies buzzing around.”
“Let’s try boosting over,” Moncke said. As one, the troopers lit off their suit boost and rose quickly ten meters above the line of hillocks. But as soon as they jetted forward, the hillocks erupted in dust clouds and they found themselves enveloped in dust and light.
“Hey—what the--!”
“I’m spinning…out of control—“
“Jeez…what the fuck--!”
The dust and light that had enveloped them now tore them from that exact moment of time and flung them backwards, through a spinning kaleidoscoping tunnel of crazy, spinning, whirling things and they hurtled at breakneck speed down the tunnel, dodging polygons and cubes and tetrahedrals and things they couldn’t describe until at last, they came to hard, bumpy, bone-rattling landing right on their butts.
Assault One had just taken an unexpected trip in space and time right back to the Hawk lander.
***It’s an entangler field, Johnny…that’s what the expedition encountered…the mounds are Keeper-style bots able to generate a quantum disturbance…anyone or anything in the field is displaced in time and space…when the field is interrupted, probability states collapse into a single reality depending on initial conditions***
Winger had a sinking feeling, if an angel could be said to have a sinking feeling. “I was afraid of that, Doc. We’ve encountered that before. Is there anything we can do to help the expedition?”
***Given time, I believe we can operate the converter controls in this box and re-direct some of these rectennas. It’s possible we can disrupt the entangler field that way…however, the ultimate effects are unknown***