Johnny Winger and the Europa Quandary

by Philip Bosshardt

  Chapter 27

  Europa

  Rhadamanthys Linea

  November 5, 2121

  2200 hours (Earth U.T.)

  Lieutenant Walt Starnes burst out of the cave, stumbling and sliding, and ran right into Metcalf. The two of them went sprawling to the ice.

  Both men scrambled to their feet, boosting back upright in Europa’s low gravity.

  Starnes explained what had happened. “General’s going to take on that thing himself…it’s insane, Major.”

  Yamato listened to the story and decided it was time to do what they had come to do. “I’m not sending anyone else in there. Kwan, you and Singh get over here. Bring the MOB canisters. We’re going to seal that cave once and for all.”

  The two techs hustled across a cratered ravine to the cave entrance. Yamato told them to prep the canisters.

  “Starnes, you and Metcalf go forward…keep an eye on the main swarm. Once this cave is sealed, we’re taking on the big mama.”

  Kwan and Singh planted the MOB canisters and pressed buttons on their hypersuit wristpads. Small panels on the canisters flashed lights, cycling from red to yellow to green.

  “MOB enabled, sir,” Singh announced.

  Yamato studied the cave entrance. “I don’t know what the hell’s down there, but my orders are specific.”

  Metcalf shook his head. “That’s General Winger down there, Captain. Maybe we should try comms, see if he’s still cooking.”

  Yamato gave the order and Metcalf tried every frequency he could think of. There was no reply.

  “I could go in and scout around,” Metcalf suggested. He knew it wouldn’t look good if they left a living legend of an atomgrabber behind, sealed up in a cave.

  Yamato eyed the main swarm, now swirling gray and swollen like a slow-motion tornado only a few hundred meters away, across a series of chasms between the ice cliffs. “I don’t like the looks of that. If we seal up the cave, we won’t have to worry about the bastard getting behind us.” To Kwan, he gave the order. “Okay, Sergeant, fire the MOB.”

  Kwan stabbed the button and instantly, a burst of white fog erupted from each canister. The Mobility Obstruction Barrier would envelope the cave entrance in moments, closing off the entrance with a fine mesh of nanobots, able to actively resist any penetration efforts from inside or out.

  The fog drifted toward the cave, contracting as it fluttered and wafted on trillions of embedded picowatt propulsors, aiming right for the cave. Seconds later, the fog collapsed over the cave entrance, solidifying and forming a barrier that they hoped would stop any Keeper bots from escaping.

  “That should do it,” Yamato decided. “Now, let’s go after the main swarm.”

  The Detachment boosted over a series of sinuous chasms and came to light on a narrow ledge, just below the tortured and buckled plateau where the Keeper swarm was boiling and churning. Shrouded in mist from geysers punching through the crust of Europa, the swarm looked like a distant dust devil thrashing its way across the surface.

  Yamato directed placement of the HERF and magpulse weapons. “Let’s try to bring multiple fields of fire on the thing. Starnes, you and Singh go left. Sight in from the end of this ledge, over by those humps. Kwan, you and Metcalf, go right. See that flat top rock or iceberg or whatever the hell it is. That would make a great mount for your weapons. That should give us nearly a hundred and eighty degrees of coverage.”

  Kwan pointed out the Keeper was still advancing on their position. “Captain, is it my imagination or is that thing coming right at us?”

  Yamato saw it too. He judged the speed of advance to be slow enough to give them a chance. “It’s not your imagination. Get into position and enable your weapons. We’re not out here to admire the view.”

  The flanking maneuvers took about three minutes. In that time, Yamato felt his throat go dry. The Keeper swarm had somehow picked up speed. By the time both teams had reached their firing positions, the Keeper was almost on top of them.

  Yamato boosted up to the top of a small ice hillock to get some fire at a higher angle.

  “Fire now!” he yelled, even though he knew the teams weren’t ready yet. “Fire away…max rate!”

  It was Starnes and Singh who got it first. Before either trooper could get off any rounds, the front edge of the Keeper had coiled an arm of bots out and encircled their position. The men were steadily shrouded and encased in a cloud of bots, flailing and swatting helplessly at the oncoming swarm.

  “Aarrrggghhh! Get ‘em off…get ‘em off…!”

  Yamato let fly a volley of rf and hosed down the end of the ledge with everything he had but already he knew it was too late. In seconds, he got the first tone, the shrill tone indicating suit breach…vitals falling, life itself being sucked out into the vacuum. The spray of sublimating oxygen and water was lost in the maelstrom of nanobotic disassembly. Bots burned like a miniature supernova at the end of the ledge. It was over in less than a minute.

  Yamato signaled Kwan and Metcalf to fire. “Light ‘em up!” he yelled. He boosted back to find some cover behind a few ice humps, stumbling as he settled down to a defilade position. He pumped round after round into the swarm, to little effect.

  “The damn things regenerate as fast as I fry ‘em!” Metcalf complained. He cycled his HERF carbine and saw he was quickly running out of charge. A few more bursts….

  Sergeant Lucy Kwan was already spooked. “Maybe they’d like a taste of this—“ She burst from cover and boosted herself over the chasm, heading right for the main body of the swarm, pumping magpulse rounds left and right, to no obvious effect.

  “Sergeant…Kwan, get back…get back to cover!” Yamato ordered, but Kwan ignored him and headed straight for the Keeper. “Kwan…!”

  But it was too late. The swarm rolled over her and she was gone in seconds, shredded into atom fluff and feedstock for the geysers boiling away behind.

  Yamato saw Metcalf starting to boost himself, afraid he would try the same thing. “Major—fall back! Fall back to the cat now!”

  But before he could light off his own suit boost, Yamato saw out of the corner of his eye the shadow of an arm of the Keeper swarm, descending over his own position. In the split second it took to react, he saw the banded crescent shape of Jupiter peeking through the twinkling fog of the swarm, looking for all the world like a pair of salmon-hued, calico horns hanging down from heaven.

  The devil’s own hands, came his last thought.

  Then he made sure his finger was locked on the carbine trigger. He pulled the trigger even as the high keening buzz of the bots was already chewing into his hypersuit laminate outer shell. The thud of the rf discharge deafened him, but the next few blasts were drowned out by the shrill whistle of air violently escaping his already breached suit. That, and the tones. The tones shrieked over all, the death song of a hypersuited trooper being rapidly disassembled into particles.

  The Europa Forge mission had failed. Mission logs would show that Captain Hideki Yamato and his away team had perished in an ultimately hopeless assault on the Keeper swarm trolling around on the icy surface of Europa. The vast formation of bots continued to churn its way across the icescapes, as it spalled off pieces of itself and sent them into space, toward Earth.

  Frontier Corps ordered the Johannes Kepler, now under the command of her executive officer Commander Winston Smithers, to depart Jupiter orbit and return home, on a speed run that would take the ship past Venus on her way back to Gateway Station. The trip would take six months. K-Dog would be needed in operations now being planned in and around Earth-Moon space.

  And inside the Keeper swarm, a faint but unmistakable pattern persisted against all efforts to absorb it into the greater swarm.

  As a young child, Johnny Winger had always loved taking a bath. Lots of words could describe the feeling: security, serenity, safety, warmth, cocoon. Not words a three-year old would use, but you ge
t the idea.

  Thoughts like these and others came to Johnny Winger. He was a little disoriented.

  Where am I? What is this?

  He remembered being disassembled by Doc III…the Keeper was there…the cave…the brilliant light….

  He decided to open a coupler link to Doc III.

  ***We are inside the Keeper, Johnny…you have been de-constructed…I stored your identity and memory patterns in a small file called ‘Configuration Buffer Status Check.’ Just a few extra bytes***

  Doc, is that really you? Is this really me?