“These images were grabbed from transmissions within the Sun Ring itself, the controller bots re-configging to defend the Ring from your attack. I just caught snatches of this on my last trip to and from Paris.”
The men studied the images flickering across the shroud that Winger had made in front of them, spalled right off his hands. The scenes seem to show the UNISPACE corvettes approaching, then beginning assault ops along the boundary of the Sun Ring.
As the scene unfolded, Moncke and Thanh watched the UNISPACE ships fire at the bot clouds composing the Sun Ring. Huge gaps in the Ring were opened up, then closed just as quickly as the Bugs reconstituted. To Moncke, it was like mowing grass in the summer, with weeds. Just plow along and right behind you, the weeds spring right back.
Yet, bit by bit, the density and scale of the bot clouds was reduced, a few kilometers at a time. With steady application of HERF and mag fire and close coordination of their assault, after a few days, it seemed as if the Sun Ring was only a pale haze in space and the light output of the Sun began to return to normal levels.
With the excavator cut off at Caloris Basin, the bots soon had no more feedstock to build out the Ring. Mopping up took a few more days and the Bugs were history.
The Sun Ring was little more than a few stray bots with no way to replicate or defend themselves. Indeed, pressure from the Sun’s flares soon dispersed even that.
Tycho and Aristotle swept up the last remnants of the Bug clouds and changed course for Earth orbit and Gateway Station.
The Winger angel let the viewing shroud dissipate and it was soon gone, washed out in the glare of the sun glow.
Thanh said, “It seems like we won, General. At least, we won this round. The Sun Ring is gone. The base here is in ruins. We beat the Bugs.”
Winger’s face morphed into something resembling skepticism; you could never really tell with angels.
“Two victories don’t necessarily end a war, Colonel. There’s still that big Bug cloud out there in deep space, out beyond Jupiter. It’s still coming our way, last I heard. A few billion kilometers wide, God knows how deep. There aren’t enough HERF guns in all creation to stop that. I don’t know what UNIFORCE will do.”
Moncke was curious. “What will you do, General? What can you do?”
Winger spread his palms. Bots streamed off his fingers in a thin dribble, perhaps pulled by Mercury’s ever-present electrostatic forces. Winger seemed to be breaking down right in front of them.
“Whatever I can, gentlemen. Look, I’ve got to get to that coupler array and get back to Earth…pass along what I know to Q2. If I stay here—“already his torso and shoulders were fading out, dispersing. “—well, as you can see, I’ll be scattered to kingdom come. That’s life as an angel. But I’ve got a few ideas on how to stop this big Bug cloud…I just need for the brass hats in Paris to listen to me. Colonel Thanh, when you make your after-action report, put in a good word for me, will you? Tell them their man inside the mother swarm is working night and day to find some weak spot we can use.”
With that, the Winger angel essentially fell apart, vanishing in the glare like dust scattered by wind…solar wind. Now, Thanh and Moncke saw only the ruins of the base and the pop and flash of small residual bot swarms being handled by Assault One and Two in the distance.
Thanh pulled himself up the ladder into the lander. “Lieutenant Moncke, detail a guard force to stay behind and smash any Bugs still hanging around. Put the rest of your people to work on recon…we need intel badly. Anything they think we can use, grab it. The more we can learn about how these Bugs work, the better chance we’ll have against the Big Cahuna out there.”
“Yes, sir…” Moncke replied. “Sir, do you think the General’s right. That there’s no way we can stop that Bug cloud with what we have now?”
“I don’t know, son. I think we’d better hope General Winger—whatever the hell he is—can find some weak spot, some critical node or something we can exploit. Otherwise---all this does—“he indicated the ruins of the Caloris Basin compound, “is slow the bastards down…and probably make ‘em mad as hell. It’s like what happens when you poke a stick inside a bee hive. If you don’t knock the hive down and stomp the bejeezus out of it fast, you’d better start running.”
Moncke watched Thanh disappear into the lander.
The Lieutenant thought to himself: Now there’s nowhere else to run.
Chapter 18
Nairobi, Kenya
February 3, 2156
2230 hours (U.T.)
Dana Polansky stayed in Nairobi after the failed negotiations had ended, to try and meet Symborg and plead for his help in getting Jana back. So far as she knew, Jana had died in that explosion aboard the Earthshield ship Herschel. But Dana was convinced that her daughter was still alive—she couldn’t really explain it, but a mother knew—somehow Jana had been deconstructed, if that was the word, and taken up into the Mother Swarm.
Dana found her feelings about angels increasingly ambiguous.
Outside Langata House, she hopped out of the matatu taxi, swiped her finger ID against the face of the driverbot and walked toward the veranda of the mansion.
At the veranda, she spied a gathering of men and quickly realized these were members of the Bugs’ diplomatic mission. One could have been an angel; it was hard to tell from a distance.
Dana broke into a trot, but the men climbed into a black limousine and the car sped off down the drive and turned out onto Kenyatta Avenue through the ornate bronze gate with the lions’ heads.
“Hey, wait--!” But the car was gone.
Dana made a quick decision. These were Bug men. They would know where how to find Symborg. She sprinted back to her own taxi, gave the driverbot more instructions to follow the limo and climbed in.
The matatu sped off in pursuit.
They cruised through Westlands and Hillsborough, then took the A-1 out of Nairobi, heading north by northwest through acacia scrubland and occasional clusters of tin roof shacks and dilapidated huts. Soon, the limo turned off down a dusty dirt road. The matatu followed, Dana threatening the driverbot when it warned that ‘these coordinates were in a restricted zone.’
They bumped and bounced along until they came to a fence. Inside the fence was a small airfield, with a single lifter on the ramp next to a small hangar. The lifter looked like a big black armored spider, squatting on its articulating gear.
Dana swiped her finger ID again and the driverbot turned the taxi about and was gone.
She scaled the fence and was immediately intercepted by a pair of burly Masai guards, bearing ceremonial sashes and authoritative looking weapons, which they leveled her.
“Nie mortangi…obseki wan lugonda…” said the taller guard. He brandished the carbine, motioning Dana down from the fence.
She was marched off toward the hangar.
Inside, she was roughly hauled before a single man in a dark suit with an open-neck white shirt. The man was bald and sweating heavily in the stifling humid air of the hangar.
“You’re that reporter,” he growled at her. He waved the guards back. “Solnet, wasn’t it…covering the conference?”
“Dana Polansky, sir—“ she pulled out her press ID, which made the gun-toting guards momentarily flinch, but dark suit waved them off. Dana gave the ID to the man, who studied it for a moment, handing it back.
“The conference is over…what are you doing here? This is private property.”
“Sir…aren’t you--?” It was an old reporter’s trick, to scare up a name she didn’t know.
“Enkare. Julius Enkare. I could have you arrested, you know…or worse.”
“Mr. Enkare, I’m not here as a reporter,” Dana told him. She related the basic details, how Jana had joined the Assimilationists. How she just wanted her daughter back. How Jana had ‘visited’ her from time to time.
That made Enkare smile faintly. “Yes, we angels can do
that.”
Dana blinked. “You’re an angel—I didn’t--?”
Enkare smiled more broadly. Seconds later, strange flickers of light erupted from his cheeks and forehead. Before she could react, Enkare’s entire head was soon enveloped in a swirling flickering mist, which roiled like a thunderstorm cloud for a few minutes, then morphed and regained solid shape, forming an entirely new countenance, a wholly new face. This one was older, scarred along one cheek bone, with a stiff bristly beard turning gray below. Enkare bellowed out a laugh.
“I am many things,” he told her. “Yes, to answer your question, I am an angel. You’re diplomat Mosely referred to me as ‘Harry,’, if I remember right. But names, individual identities…they’re just a convenience.”
“Can you help me?” Dana pleaded.
Now Enkare turned thoughtful. “I can take you to Symborg, if you want. I don’t know if your daughter can be retrieved, re-formed, as you like to think of it. That’s not up to me.”
Dana wiped away a few tears, looked around at her stern-faced guards and felt embarrassed. “I just want to see my Jana again. I want to hold her, hug her, feel her hair in my fingers. Whatever you could do—“
Enkare said, “When one is deconstructed, the atoms they came from are absorbed into the mother swarm…you know this from Assimilationist thinking, no? The pattern is what matters…the underlying pattern. Some patterns are preserved.” Enkare turned serious. “Some patterns are not preserved.”
Dana choked back a sob. “Surely Jana’s pattern—“
Enkare held up a hand. Dana noticed a thin stream of lights flowing off his fingers, as if he were swirling his hand through a jar of fireflies. “I cannot say. But we are leaving Nairobi now. I could arrange for you to come along…perhaps there will be a role for someone like you.”
Without thinking, Dana was grateful. “You don’t know how much that would mean to me, sir…anything I can do to get Jana back…I’d do it.”
Enkare was now stern. His face morphed emotionally in ways that both intrigued and repelled her at the same time. “Not as a reporter, you understand. As a mother.”
“That’s all I want now,” Dana said. “To see and hold Jana again. Where is this place you’re talking about?”
Enkare said, “It’s called Uliba. Come—it’s only an hour’s flight.”
By midafternoon, on a stiff northwesterly breeze, the lifter set off, bearing south by southwest on a direct vector to the Ngongolo Hills district and the Tanzanian border.
The hour went by quickly enough and Dana Polansky watched the pale blue oval of Lake Victoria slide by along the horizon, while she reviewed what she would say to Symborg once they met, over and over again in her mind. What could you say to a superstar like Symborg in a situation like this?
A grassy escarpment rolled by ten-thousand meters below them, as the lifter pilot maneuvered toward Ngongolo Hills. Acacia woodlands dotted an open grass range, with the shoreline of Lake Natron and the craggy faulted walls of Ngongolo crater making an impressive backdrop. As Dana looked on through scattered clouds, great herds of wildebeest and Thomson's gazelle undulated across the plain, kicking up dust for miles around.
"Impressive, isn't it?" Enkare observed. "I've been coming here on missions for the better part of ten years and I never tire of the view. Over there'--" he pointed through a porthole at strings of smoke issuing skyward from an encampment on the steeply sloping ramparts of Kipwezi volcano. "Cooking fires from the village. That's our destination…Uliba."
Moments later, the lifter pilot had circled the volcano several times to gauge the prevailing winds and set them down with a thump onto dark pebbly ground in a clearing southwest of the village. A quick infrared and EM scan of the surrounding rocks and black hills produced no obvious threat signatures.
Enkare got out, holding Dana’s hand as she exited the lifter on rickety stairs. The guard goons were right behind, she noticed.
Enkare formed up a procession of the lifter passengers and led them deeper into a tangle of acacia trees and scrubland to the village outskirts. The gathering of huts formed a tight circle, no more than a hundred meters across, nestled in the brow of a ridge from a nearby crater. Each hut was a crude twig and branch skeleton, draped with straw and cowhide. Antennas and cables snaked across the clearing, powering Uliba's telecom systems, the only concession to the 22nd Century.
Beyond the center of the village, a large tent surrounded on three sides with tables and benches dominated a nearby clearing. Flat screen displays hanging from poles flickered down on the villagers, with images of Bollywood action pics counterpointed by plaintive plucking from a mandolin player nearby. In the center of a knot of yelling, shoving, jeering customers, a swarthy man in a turban and dark green kaftan pecked at a keyboard. All around the arches, throbbing globs of nanobotic swarms swelled and gyrated to the music. Masala smoke was thick and acrid in the air.
Though he didn’t look like the most popular images of the great robotic messiah, Dana figured the vendor was in fact Symborg, in one of his many guises.
This version of Symborg was a small man, desert burning in his eyes, as his fingers flew over the keyboard. Presently, he stopped and noticed a very young child, a small girl, standing shyly a few meters away from Dana, playing hide and seek in the folds of her mother’s loose sarong.
Symborg, who sported a thick black moustache, beckoned repeatedly to the young girl. After a few minutes, her mother relented and let her child go. The girl inched her way into the clearing and stood in front of the vendor’s table, to applause and approving shouts and chants from the crowd.
Symborg reached into a canvas bag and pulled out a trinket for the young girl. He handed it to her and she took it, shyly, turning the small cylinder over and over in her hand.
“You have a djinn in that cylinder, little one,” Symborg announced, loudly enough for all to hear. “A very powerful spirit. He can grant you any wish you want. Make a wish, child, and the djinn will bring it to you, right here—“
The girl’s name was Menaka and she had huge brown eyes. Sad eyes, thought Dana, as she looked on from ten meters away, at the front of the crowd.
Menaka twirled the cylinder as Symborg had shown her and squeezed her eyes tightly shut. When she stopped twirling the cylinder, she felt it vibrate and was so startled, she dropped the cylinder to the dirt.
Instantly, the device was enveloped in a fine mist, a sparkling mist that billowed out and upward, swirling about the clearing in front of Symborg and his tables like a miniature cyclone. Gasps and shouts erupted from the crowd, and the spectators shoved back against each other, to give this growing apparition greater distance.
The mist gradually materialized into the faint outline of a man’s upper body, with a recognizable face, shoulders and arms crossed in front.
The ‘djinn’ then spoke out loud. “Little one, I have come from the clouds above to grant you a great wish. Make your wish now—“ The djinn’s voice was a deep bass profundo, so deep it rattled the beaded curtains that covered Symborg’s tent behind them.
Menaka stared wide-eyed, mouth open, at the apparition. She was speechless.
“Go ahead, child,” urged Symborg. “The djinn wishes you to make a wish.”
Shouts of encouragement and support came from the crowd. Gradually, Menaka worked up enough nerve. Shy, haltingly, she asked for a new pedcart for her father.
“His cart is broken, Great One,” she murmured. “It is our livelihood. Father needs a new cart to carry the tourists.”
The deep voice rumbled again, a little reverberation adding to the sense of barely contained powers.
“As you have spoken, child…so shall it be—“
At that moment, the swirling, twinkling apparition of the djinn dissolved into a maelstrom of churning, roiling clouds, streaked with flashes of light. It was like watching a thunderstorm in miniature, from the inside.
&
nbsp; When the storm began to subside, the barest outlines of a structure could be seen enveloped in the thick fog. The fog dissolved, slowly at first, then with speed, to reveal the front seat and handles of a new pedcart. Its wheels dripped with moisture and sunlight shone from the supple leather seats in the back.
The crowd was silent for a moment, then erupted into cheers and gasps. Menaka stared wide-eyed at the new pedcart, inching her way forward to tentatively put a finger along the handles, tracing the smooth curve of the metal.
For fun, Symborg reached down and honked the horn a few times, startling everyone. The crowd laughed.
“You see what a gift the great djinn has brought you, little one. The djinn I have in my possession can do the same for every one of you.” Symborg pointedly stared at each face in the front row of the circle of onlookers. “Such a powerful djinn, such a powerful servant is available to you, today, right now, for a very special price. You will not believe the deal I can make for you. My friends, you cannot leave this bazaar without experiencing what this amazing servant can do for you—“
Dana Polansky leaned over to Julius Enkare, standing alongside.
“Not bad nano, if you ask me. Config changes were quick. He manages to hide some of the frizziness with smoke.”
Enkare nodded. “Thank you. We angels always like to hear that we’re like smoke and mirrors to people like you, especially from single-configs like yourself.”
“No, that’s not quite what I meant—“
Enkare held up a hand. “It’s okay. Symborg likes to come back to Uliba. His roots are here. His people are here.”
“When can I meet with him?”
“Soon,” Enkare told her. “Soon…be patient.”