Johnny Winger and the Battle at Caloris Basin

“Dana…what a pleasure. You don’t get up to the penthouse very often…” that was an ongoing joke. Drone ops was housed in a closet-sized space on the top floor of the Solnet building. Wags long ago had termed it the penthouse. “What can I do for you?”

  Dana described what she wanted. “Footage from the Assimilationist rally tonight, Henri. Between the hours of eight and ten…I know it’s a lot, but could you be a dear and port it to my wristpad? There are some things I want to check.”

  “Deadlines, huh?” Henri sympathized. “A reporter’s life…not for me. Give me about twenty minutes and what’s your pad code anyway?”

  Dana gave it to him. Henri went to work and Dana paced up and down the Rue d’Aguesseau for several blocks in each direction, fidgeting, nervous, eyes on a swivel, worried sick about her daughter.

  Come on, Henri…come on…come on…how long does this take?

  Then the squirt came in and her wristpad chirped. The vid footage blinked into view and immediately she began scrolling and studying the time stamps.

  “Not there…not there…” she thumbed her way through minute after minute of footage. Surging crowds, fainting teenagers, shoving and pushing and the gendarmerie pushing back, trying to control the crowd. Jeez, it was like trying to dam up the Seine.

  Then…there! She saw the commotion. The camera zoomed in, as she would have ordered if she’d been covering the rally. Yep. A figure in a cloth-like enclosure. The figure was writhing and kicking and she could hear some muffled screams over the din of the crowd as three men, wearing black and purple tunics and metallic mesh caps bore the struggling figure through a seam in the vast throng of people, like the Red Sea parting.

  On the stone steps of St. Michael, she watched the vid without breathing—nearly running into a couple strolling along the boulevard in the opposite direction…”pardon…pardon, s’il vous plait…” She stopped and studied the astonishing imagery…the men carrying Jana, still cocooned in the MOBnet lay her down gingerly, on the very steps Dana was now standing on, and somehow managed to collapse the mesh, so that the prisoner inside could emerge. Sure enough, the blond curls of Jana Polansky emerged like a butterfly, her head, shoulders and arms, and she was quickly helped out of the net and steadied as she regained her footing. The crowd ignored them…just another overcome teenager, fainting at the sights and sounds of Symborg.

  Then the three men hustled Jana inside through the heavy oak doors of the church.

  Jana! So she had been inside the church. Dana scowled and swore at that tiny gray gatherer she had just encountered.

  That lying, wrinkled old son of a bitch!

  The gatherer had said he knew nothing about a teenaged girl entering the church. But Solnet’s vid footage showed evidence to the contrary.

  Furious, now more determined than ever to get to the bottom of this and get her daughter out of the clutches of those damned haloheads, Dana stabbed the OFF button on her wristpad and barged right back inside the church.

  Chapter 3

  Inside the Mother Swarm

  Time: Unknown

  Place: Unknown

  Johnny Winger knew perfectly well, or at least he was pretty sure, that he was back somewhere inside the mother swarm of the Old Ones, but you couldn’t tell it from what he was looking at with his own eyes. It looked like the old fishing camp again, the place at Ford’s Creek. Same cabins. Same aspen trees, now yellowing in some kind of strange simulacrum of autumnal color…it had always been autumn at Ford’s Creek.

  The camp seemed empty and deserted. The cabins were dark. The big stone fireplaces were cold. No cars were around. Then he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. A single figure was sitting on the end of the dock, fishing pole in hand. A man. It was dark as midnight and no campfires illuminated the grounds. The creek could be heard foaming and gurgling nearby, rushing out of the nearby mountains on its way downhill. There were clouds scudding by overhead. The moon was a white sliver.

  With a start, Johnny Winger suddenly knew who sat at the end of the dock. It was the Shadow Man.

  Without understanding why, he stepped onto the dock, listening as the weathered old boards creaked under his weight and made his way to the end.

  The man was hooded and his facial features were indistinct in the diffuse light of the dock area. Winger figured this was surely the Central Entity, somehow now in human form. Without being invited, he sat down next to the Shadow Man.

  For a long minute, nothing was said. Winger wondered if he should speak first. He had about a million questions. Strange thoughts came to mind and he tried to blank them out but it was like trying to stop the creek with your fingers. In his head, an image of old Mr. Burns, his sixth-grade English teacher came to mind. How did that get there? Could the Shadow Man put thoughts in his head? Was he even supposed to be having thoughts?

  Old Battleaxe Burns…now there was something he hadn’t thought about in decades. Face like an angry pug with a corncob up its ass. Five foot five inches of pure hate.

  When the Shadow Man spoke, it was like hearing a hundred voices at once, all coming out of a barrel. Winger stole a glance out of the corner of his eye, wondering if the Shadow Man was an angel…were there any edge effects, any blurring at his fingertips, swooshes of flickering bots in the air?

  He saw none.

  “Johnny, you have an important mission to perform. That’s why you’re here.”

  Winger looked straight ahead at the rushing creek, foaming and hissing around rocks. There was a swirling hydraulic near the opposite bank…some buried tree roots, probably.

  “Can you read my mind? This looks just like an old fishing camp my Dad used to take me to in the fall…but this can’t be real, can it?”

  Now the Shadow Man lifted an arm and pointed to the hydraulic. “Do you see the cataract there?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you see faces and patterns in the water?”

  Winger squinted. Try as he did, he saw nothing. “Am I supposed to? I just see water.”

  “If you look long enough, with the right eyes, you’ll see faces. You are like the river, Johnny. Only patterns, ever changing, ever shifting. In this same way, your thoughts are only patterns.”

  “You said there was an important mission.”

  Now the Shadow Man shifted slightly. He turned so that he was facing Winger. Only there was no face inside the hood. Whether it was veiled or in deeper shadow, he couldn’t say. Only a deep nearly featureless black was visible, maybe punctuated by an occasional flash of lights…it could have been a reflection. It could have been the moon sliding in and out of clouds.

  “Soon, you will be transformed, Johnny. You will become a kind of expediter.”

  When his Dad had brought him to Ford’s Creek as a child, the two of them often spent time sitting on this very dock, sticking their bare toes in the cold running water of the creek, trying to make patterns and faces and swirls and curlicues in the foam. He always remembered how cold the water was, how it made his toes curl when he first stuck them in.

  That was the trouble with being an angel. You couldn’t feel anything, not like before.

  “Will this transformation be soon?”

  “Very soon. Those whom you know as the Old Ones are here, very near here. You will help them in important ways. You do want to help them, don’t you?”

  Jeez, now this character is starting to sound like Dad.

  The Shadow Man went on, turning back to face the river. Silently, he stuck his feet into the rushing creekwater. The water burbled, just like it always did.

  Johnny Winger felt a cold chill down his back…at least, the part of him that Doc III maintained as a remnant of his original identity felt a cold chill.

  “But before you are fully transformed, before you begin your special mission, you must undergo four configuration changes. They’ll be like adventures, Johnny. You always liked adventures.”

 
It was true. Tom Swift, Jr. The Hardy Boys. Amundsen and Scott. Neil Armstrong and the first Mars colonies…he’d always loved a great adventure. How did the Shadow Man know all this?

  “What kind of adventures, sir?”

  “Their names and explanations aren’t important now. In the past, you might have called them the Prime Key. Are you ready for this, Johnny? The Old Ones hope you’ll say yes.”

  Winger knew he couldn’t exactly say no but the problem was that he wasn’t sure just how much the Shadow Man really knew. Spies and saboteurs lived their lives in a funhouse hall of mirrors. Hadn’t some novelist said that once? Never knowing who to trust, who knew what. They wound up trusting no one, not even themselves.

  Winger knew, and tried not to think about it, that Doc III was even now maintaining all that he had once been in a small file inside this angel config. His original identity, all his memories, the very fact that he would recognize this place as Ford’s Creek, when in reality it was probably just a collection of atoms formed into a pattern he would know. But then, the real Ford’s Creek was just a collection of atoms too. All this Doc III maintained in a nondescript file called Configuration Buffer Status Check. They both hoped nobody would notice this.

  He was starting to get a headache just trying to think about all this.

  The real question was what would happen to him in these adventures. Were they like tests? The Shadow Man had called them configuration changes. Would Doc III be able to maintain ‘Johnny Winger’ through all these adventures, all these changes?

  It wasn’t a question he could ask of the Shadow Man.

  “Sir, where will these adventures be? How will I get there?”

  In answer, the Shadow Man placed a hand on Winger’s right shoulder. It felt ice cold, a cold deeper and more painful than he had ever experienced before.

  At that same moment, the entire Ford’s Creek camp dissolved in front of his eyes and Winger found himself spinning out of control, hurtling at breakneck speed down a long, curving corridor….

  Chapter 4

  SpaceGuard Operations Center

  Gateway Station

  Earth-Moon L2 Point

  April 10, 2155 (U.T.)

  Pluto was gone. The planet of the underworld, once a planet, then a dwarf planet, had been consumed thirty years before by the Delta P anomaly, though no one had any real explanation of how that could have happened. There were theories, of course, and papers, lots of papers and talks and conferences. One minute, the dwarf planet had been there. A few days later, nothing.

  Now, it was clear that the Delta P anomaly and the Kuiper Belt One phenomenon were one and the same thing.

  Delta-P had been detected thirty years before, something that had everyone scratching their heads. Opinions grew like mushrooms: it was a micro black hole, it was a rift in the space-time continuum, it was the mother swarm of the Old Ones, it was a cosmic tooth fairy. Passing by and through the 51 Pegasi star system, the phenomenon had been too distant to get much resolution on its structure.

  The story began in 2110. Lunar Farside had observed an unusual source of energy suddenly showing up around the star 51 Pegasi, located some 51 light years from Earth. Telescopic improvements yielded several theories: that a small mini-black hole had somehow developed and was devouring planets known to be orbiting this star. But because of developments on Earth and around the inner Solar System, there was another theory: that the Old Ones had arrived in the vicinity of 51 Pegasi and were consuming or disassembling planets in that system to add material for the Mother Swarm.

  There was spectroscopic and other evidence that this point source of energy was also moving on an intercept course with our Solar System and that the intercept would occur on or around 2155, some 45 years hence. Ultimately UNISPACE Frontier Corps decided to mount an expedition to the distant planetismal Sedna, to set up an orbiting command post on or around that tiny world, to develop and operate a robotic network of sentinels and scouts in the outer Solar System and the Oort Cloud. The purpose of the Sentinel Line was to detect and engage any swarms coming toward the Sun, especially from the direction of 51 Pegasi.

  All that had changed forever on March 25th , when the alarms came.

  Sergeant Erika Lindstrom and Corporal McLane Dawes had been on duty since 0400 hours station time. They both knew from the shift handoff meeting that Sentinel was soon to be engaged with forward elements of the vast swarm of the Old Ones. Oh, sure, the brass and the politicos like to blabber on about how “we don’t know anything for sure” and “indications point to a large mass moving into the solar system” and “we’ll have to analyze sensor readings from Sentinel to make a definitive statement,” but neither Lindstrom, nor Dawes nor any SpaceGuard operator on shift that morning had any doubts.

  The Big One was here. It was what they had trained and simmed and wargamed for at least the last ten years. The Big Cahuna was on the doorstep and the first punch was about be thrown.

  “Sentinel status report due any moment now, Sarge,” Dawes reported. He was a lanky, even gawky E4 fresh out of nog school at Table Top, so eager to get a taste of full-bore swarm combat he could practically taste it. “The sysops are betting two to one CAESAR’s already engaged the leading elements. Smack ‘em in the mouth before they know what hit ‘em.”

  Lindstrom was shift supervisor. “Yeah, then duck when the roundhouse swing comes back. Any more data from COBRA EYE? Like how big this sucker really is.”

  Dawes scanned a nearby console. “Latest readings from Farside show about four billion kilometers across. Pretty diffuse for a swarm, but covering a lot of ground out there. Thermals, electromagnetics, density…all signatures point to swarm activity. I just wish we could get a close-up of one of them. This has to be the mother ship.”

  “Distance to Neptune system?”

  Dawes tapped a few more keys. Plots and graphs came up on their displays. “Four point five million, give or take. At this rate of closure, the leading elements will be at Neptune in a few days.”

  Lindstrom mindlessly stroked the bob of blond hair on top of her head. Before joining UNISPACE and being assigned to SpaceGuard Ops at Gateway, she’d had decent tresses for a young woman, but they weren’t exactly regulation for low-grav duty. Now there was only a stub up top and she silently missed being able to twirl the ends of her curls when she was nervous.

  Not that Sergeant Erika Lindstrom, SpaceGuard Long-Range Surveillance Ops 3rd shift supervisor ever got nervous.

  “What kind of beast eats whole planets for breakfast?” she said to no one in particular.

  “A hungry one, I suppose,” muttered Dawes. Just then, a chime sounded. Dawes’ eyes darted to his center console. “It’s CAESAR…here’s our very first data from initial engagement….”

  The problem with deep-space combat swarm operations, as Lindstrom saw it, was that it all took place in slow motion, as in hours-long kind of slow. That was just physics. The Sentinel Line was over four billion kilometers away and any signals took half a day to get back and forth. Command and control was a bitch and the eggheads had long ago figured out that Sentinel would have to be run autonomously to be tactically effective. That autonomy was embodied in an AI the operators had labeled CAESAR. CAESAR had been programmed with the wiliness of Sun Tzu, the nerve of Patton, the strategic genius of Rommel, and the arrogance of MacArthur. Fighting an adversary at these distances was like engaging your opponent underwater, with you on one side of the ocean and the enemy on the other side.

  Nothing happened quickly and patience was essential.

  “CAESAR’s giving us all the details now,” Dawes said. Both of them were frankly stunned at the size and scale of their adversary. Diffuse in structure, nearly a tenth of a light year in extent, the mother swarm or KB-1 if you liked official-sounding names had swept through the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt in a few months, consuming small worlds and planetesimals like corn flakes, snacking on dwar
f planets, washing it all down with dirty comets, as if the thing were a whale cruising through a field of plankton, consuming and disassembling everything in its path.

  “Farside’s sending something…” Dawes said. A low chime beeped. It was ALBERT, the Farside AI, with an alert. “Looks like they’re detecting noticeable brightening in the Neptune system…luminosity spikes, elevated heat signatures…could be Triton or one of the smaller satellites. Definite nanobotic activity in the area.”

  “Engagement status?” Lindstrom asked. “Any pods deployed yet?”

  “CAESAR reports pods one two five through three four five deployed. Over two hundred of them. Swarms launched and engaged at four billion kilometers range from us. Inconclusive, CAESAR says. We’ve got some close-up data now…I’ll bring it up.” Dawes’ fingers flew over his keyboard. Ahead of and around them, displays blinked and shifted. Now instead of an ecliptic plot of the outer solar system, they were looking at close-proximity scans of individual elements of the mother swarm. One of the Old Ones, up close and personal.

  Lindstrom uttered a low whistle. “I’m no nanotrooper but that sure looks like an ANAD clone to me. Same effectors, same propulsors. But our guys are getting their asses kicked…what gives?”

  Dawes saw the answer in CAESAR’s report. “Mass is what gives. Individually, ANAD and the enemy are very similar. But there are so many more of them, ANAD’s getting overwhelmed. We can’t replicate like them. They’re hot rods. We’re jalopies.”

  The two techs watched as the reports filtered in from four billion kilometers away. CAESAR had done its best with what it had. In time, hundreds more of the Sentinel pods had been deployed, filling space with uncountable gazillions of bots but all to no effect. KB-1 rolled on, sweeping anything and everything in its path.

  They were both stunned when another report, this one from Farside, showed the leading edge of KB-1 approaching the Neptune system. Lindstrom felt a cold dead pile of rocks in her stomach as she scrolled through the raw feed from the Aristarchus arrays: luminosity spikes…thermal effects off-scale…massive debris fields…evidence of atom-breaking on a stupendous scale…gas and dust clouds…conclusion is that Neptune, Triton and the remaining satellites of this system are being steadily disassembled by forward elements of KB-1….