Nanotroopers Episode 14: The HNRV Factor

by Philip Bosshardt

  ***ANAD understands and will comply…swarm stable at config one…maintaining position--.***

  “Come on, Mite. You too, Turbo and Al, both of you. Lay forward to the Hab deck, my quarters.”

  Lieutenant Mendez was still worried about the swarm. “What about him? Or it…whatever you call it…shouldn’t somebody be on guard here?”

  “ANAD’s stable now, Lieutenant.” To Reaves, he added, “DPS, stay in the compartment with ANAD. Keep your HERF gun charged, just in case. Lieutenant, if you would come with us.”

  Mendez eyed the pulsating formation of assemblers uneasily, but tagged along with the others. Once they had clambered through the central passage and made the Hab deck, he pulled Winger aside.

  “Look, Lieutenant…that thing back there is a danger to my ship. I want it kept under guard all the time. Better still, it needs to go back in the box.”

  Winger regarded the Lieutenant coolly. “That thing, as you call it, Lieutenant, is what this mission is all about. ANAD has a few problems, but we’ll work them out. He’s a complex system, more complex than this ship.”

  “He or it or whatever you call it, may just get us all killed before we get to the asteroid. You can’t let the bug just go off half-cocked like that, replicating like mad. Keep it under control, Lieutenant…or I’m aborting the mission, for the safety of the crew. I’m the captain. I can do that.”

  Winger and Mendez glared at each other for a moment. “ANAD’s a trooper just like the rest of us. He’ll respond to orders. And he’ll get the mission done. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’ve got a message to format.”

  Mendez whirled about and left the Hab deck, heading forward to the Command deck, to check with Kamler and make sure Galileo hadn’t been damaged by the swarm.

  “We’d better let Table Top know what happened,” Barnes said. “Doc Frost too. I can’t say I blame Mendez for being a little uneasy. We all are. What are we dealing with here?”

  Winger ducked into his quarters, really little more than a closet and pulled out a comm pad. He had a determined set to his face. “ANAD may be a nanoscale machine but he’s still a trooper. What we’re dealing with here is a trooper in need of a little guidance.”

  “Or a good spanking,” Barnes thought. “We’d better work up something to tell Doc Frost. Maybe he’s got some ideas on how to fix ANAD.”

  Winger motioned Barnes to follow him. He told Glance and Fatah to meet them in the crew’s mess in an hour. Then he took the comm pad around the curving Hab deck to a cupola opposite the crew’s mess. The view outside Galileo was like a black velvet tapestry, shot through with hard points of light, all kinds of light. Winger saw a panorama of blue-whites, reds, greens and yellows. A faint ruddy dot out the extreme bottom window pane of the cupola was Mars, now falling farther and farther astern as the ship headed off on her intercept course with 23998 Hicks-Newman. Even the Sun was subdued and noticeably fainter at this distance, little more than a very bright star, with little visible breadth.

  Winger wedged himself into one seat and strapped in. Barnes found another seat and did likewise. He tucked the comm pad under a Velcro strap for the moment.

  “There’s something else that ANAD did, something I didn’t tell anyone else about. It happened just two days out from Phobos Station.”

  “Don’t tell me, sir…he short-sheeted your bunk.”

  Winger half-laughed. “That I would have understood…just like nog school. No, actually, the master ANAD tried to enter my shoulder capsule one night, while I was asleep. I woke and found myself surrounded by this faint swarm of bots and my shoulder hurting. He was down there trying to force the capsule port, actually disassembling the thing, right as I slept.”

  Barnes just shook her head. “Really? Even with an embed already loaded? What did you do? What happened?”

  Winger shrugged. “I woke up just as ANAD was about to force his way in. I asked him what was going on. He said something about the Prime Key. I think he was trying to release the ANADs in my shoulder capsule.”

  “You mean like let them out of containment…that’s his thing now.”

  “I suppose. Hey, we’d better get to work composing a report for Major Kraft and Doc Frost.”

  Winger and Barnes spent the better part of the next hour developing a message to squirt off to Earth. The report described what had happened to ANAD aboard the Galileo. They detailed the problems with getting the master assembler back into containment, the simulated combat replication that had gone haywire and the uneasy truce that now existed aboard the ship. Galileo was hurtling through interplanetary space toward a rendezvous with Hicks-Newman and none of the nanotroopers of the Detachment really trusted ANAD anymore.

  It wasn’t the best way to lead a Quantum Corps detachment into action.

  “Come on,” Winger said, after he had read the report one final time, massaging a few last words and lines. “Let’s get this off and go get something to eat.”

  “What about ANAD? You going to let him just roam the ship freely? I doubt Mendez will go for that. Every trooper has duties and has to follow orders. Even if you think of ANAD as just another trooper, he’s guilty of at least insubordination. Sir, it seems to me the commander needs to apply a little discipline here.”

  They went to the comm shack on the Command deck and fired off the message. The transmission time was approaching fifty minutes. There would be no answer from Table Top for at least several hours.

  For safety aboard Galileo, Lieutenant Mendez insisted that either ANAD go back into secure containment, or the swarm be confined to the Service deck and kept under constant guard.

  Mendez and Kamler were at the ship control station running through a pre-burn checklist. Galileo had a phasing maneuver coming up later that day, to adjust its course for intercept. Mendez was in no mood to compromise where ship operations were concerned.

  “So you’re telling me that there’s no way you can force that bag of bugs back into the box? I thought you controlled these things.”

  Winger tried to be tactful, mindful of the fact that Mendez was UNISPACE and he was Quantum Corps and, as Kraft sometimes said, never the twain shall meet. He was, after all, the ship’s captain.

  “What I said was we haven’t figured out exactly what’s wrong. Obviously, there are some glitches in ANAD’s processor. Something happened during the re-generation. Until we find out what that is, it’s best to let the swarm stay loose, but under guard. I can assure you, Lieutenant, my troopers won’t let ANAD go anywhere he shouldn’t.”

  Stu Kamler sat in the seat next to Mendez. “Gives me the creeps, if you ask my opinion. We ought to evacuate the Service deck, open the de-press valves and vent the whole damn place to vacuum. Then we wouldn’t have this problem.”

  “And we’d have nothing to deal with the asteroid either,” Winger reminded him.

  As the debate continued on the Command deck, Turbo Fatah and Sheila Reaves were quietly huddled with others of the Detachment in Turbo’s bunk space on the Hab deck. Reaves was laying out a plan.

  “So we’re all agreed…something’s got to be done. We’ve got to take active steps to defend ourselves and the ship from anything else ANAD does.”

  “I don’t like it…I mean going behind the Lieutenant’s back,” said Chris Calderon. Calderon was CEC2, responsible for containment and control of ANAD systems. “If we just put our minds to it, I’m sure we can figure out what’s happened to ANAD.”

  Sheila Reaves snorted. “We could go over that program the rest of the year and not find anything. Hell, even Doc Frost can’t explain it. Face it, guys…ANAD got fried in that last encounter with the Keeper. The re-gen wasn’t done right. We got ourselves a balky assembler here and we need to face the facts. I say, HERF the mother completely and we’ll kick that asteroid out of Earth-intercept some other way.”

  “Even the HERF guns didn’t work all that well this time,” Simonet
noted. “I’m thinking ANAD’s hardened himself somehow…maybe an EM cage or something like that.”

  Lucy Hiroshi was fingering the trigger guard of a radio frequency weapon. “So we tweak the frequency…zap the bugs with something a little different.”

  Turbo Fatah agreed. “Get on that, Lucy. You too, Sheila. We’ve got to have something we can defend ourselves with. In fact, Lucy, you take the coilguns and make sure they’re all charged up. We need every break we can get. Maybe even the MOB canisters…we could use them to counter-swarm a big bang if it happens again.” The CEC1 noticed that Kip Detrick, one of the interface controllers (ICs), had a sour look on his face.

  “What gives, Kip?”

  Detrick shook his head slowly. “What about our embeds? How far can we trust them? Can the ANAD master corrupt these too?”

  Turbo shrugged. “Who knows? We ought to dump our capsules and get rid of ‘em once and for all.”

  Reaves agreed. “It just isn’t natural to have swarms out of containment. Gives me the creeps.”

  “We may need our embeds,” said Calderon. “If the master assembler’s hosed, our embeds may be all we have left to chew up the asteroid. Or fight off another big bang.”

  “If we can trust ‘em,” said Detrick. “I haven’t launched mine in weeks. Hell, for all I know, he could have dried up and blown away.”

  Turbo hadn’t considered that angle. “We’d better hang on to them for the moment. Skipper may run another exercise where we need them,”

  Calderon was uneasy about the whole affair. “This isn’t right…the Lieutenant should know what we’re doing.”

  Reaves laid a firm hand on Calderon’s shoulder. “Chris, listen to me…any time you feel the need to inform the c/o, do yourself a favor. Lie down. Take a pill. The Lieutenant’s in bed with ANAD big time. Don’t get me wrong. Lieutenant Winger’s a good officer and a competent leader. But it’s always seat of the pants with him. At least Sergeant Glance here follows procedure. It’s up to us to make sure the Detachment is ready for whatever happens. That’s just taking initiative…remember your fitness reports? So…take some initiative already—“

  Fatah looked around the cramped bunk space. Nanotroopers spilled out into the corridor as well. In all, half the Detachment was there. “Anyone else having second thoughts? All we’re doing here is making sure ANAD doesn’t surprise us again. Taking these measures should better enable us to complete the mission. I don’t have a problem with that. Anybody?”

  Uneasy looks and stares followed Fatah’s words. Al Glance looked around at the others but said nothing. Nobody said a thing.

  “All right…we all have our assignments. Get to it.”

  Doc Frost’s reply came into the comm shack about four hours after Winger had sent off the report. It wasn’t very encouraging. Winger took the vid in his quarters. Mighty Mite Barnes came by a few minutes later; she had received the chime signifying an incoming message on her earpiece.

  Frost was in his lab at Table Top. Mary Duncan, the petite Scotswoman who had been his assistant for nearly twenty years was alongside. Major Kraft had assigned lab space and an office at the base for Frost for the duration of the crisis.

  Frost looked grim. “Johnny, we’ve spent the last several hours going over your report and running simulations here to try to determine what could have happened. ANAD shouldn’t have gone off big bang like that in a normal combat replication. The only way to determine what happened is to go through the processor code line by line. We may have a bug or a virus or some kind of malware that’s gotten into the code. We’re doing that now. For the record, I’m pretty sure it’s a conflict with this autonomy code, the Prime Key, that ANAD keeps referring too. We’re still looking it that. In fact, here at the Lab, we’ve been trying to work up a patch to get around this code but so far, no luck.”

  Frost scrolled through some papers on his desk, trying to find something. “—ah, here it is. My recommendation is that you limit the type of replications commanded of ANAD for the time being. I realize this limits what you can do at Hicks, when you get there. Best bet would be to use your own embedded ANADs for mass replication and pilot the swarms yourself. Treat the master ANAD as suspect and damaged. I would minimize what I did with this swarm.”

  Frost put down his papers and stared directly into the vidcam. “As to your last question—how to get ANAD back into containment—I can only offer this observation, Johnny: you and ANAD have always been especially close, from the first days. I’m not one to believe that the quantum processor ANAD uses is computationally capable of displaying or simulating complex emotional states, but the little guy may be jealous of the embedded ANADs you have. I know that sounds odd, coming from a scientist like me, but Mary here and I have discussed it and we both think there may be something worth investigating along those lines. There’s evidence that ANAD sees you as something not quite ‘self’ and not quite ‘non-self’…rather something in between, if that makes any sense. I’m not sure what this Prime Key is telling ANAD to do with ‘not-self’ entities, but the evidence points toward hostility. Make use of that confusion, Johnny. You’re so close to the assembler, he doesn’t know what to do about you…yet. Anything you can do to convince or trick ANAD back into secure containment, do it.

  “I’m sorry I can’t offer anything more concrete, but frankly, we’re as puzzled here at Table Top as you seem to be. Good luck, Johnny. If Mary and I come up with anything else, we’ll signal you right away.”

  Frost’s face faded from the viewer, to be replaced by a few words from Major Kraft.

  “Lieutenant—“ Kraft was saying, “—the success of this mission is paramount. I’ve been working with the UNISPACE people on different scenarios, should your ANAD system prove completely unreliable. I’m squirting the details up to you now—“ Kraft went off-screen for a second, then came back. “They’re on the way. The last scenario—the one labeled Direct Boost-- is a last resort. Kind of a worst case. Gateway engineers will be discussing this with your flight crew Mendez and Kamler today, so this is just a heads-up. In this scenario, an attempt would be made to attach and secure Galileo itself directly to the surface of the asteroid. There are some engineering studies showing your ship’s plasma torch engines might have just enough thrust to nudge Hicks off course enough to miss Earth. But it’s risky. Hell, it’s nuts. You might not be able to anchor properly. And there’s some question as to whether Galileo has sufficient thrust to do the job. You can discuss this more with Mendez when they’ve had a chance to study the idea. For now, using ANAD for surface disassembly at the asteroid is the preferred solution. I’ll follow up this report with more in a few hours…Kraft out.”

  The screen went blank and Winger regarded Barnes gravely.

  “What now?” she asked. “Table Top can’t help. And Mendez won’t like that last option the Major mentioned.”

  Winger nodded. “He’ll have a fit, I’m sure. Mite, we’d better get the whole Detachment to run diagnostics on their embedded ANADs. I don’t want anybody to launch, not just yet, not without some kind of controls. But have everyone run routine checks…power, effectors, propulsors, and especially comm links. Doc may be right. If the master ANAD is corrupted this bad, we may have no choice but to use our embeds. It’ll be a lot more work, but I don’t see a way around it now.”

  “And what about the master? What about the ANAD back on the Service deck?”

  Winger shook his head sadly. “We’ll have to think of some way to contain it for the duration. I don’t know how yet. But we’re running out of time. Galileo will be at Hicks in less than ten days. We’ve got to be ready to go with a workable plan then. We can’t afford to screw this one up. If we don’t get Hicks-Newman either whittled down to size so UNISPACE can divert it, or divert it ourselves—“

  He didn’t have to finish the thought. Both troopers left the comm shack in a grim but determined
mood.

  Neither of them saw the faint reflection of the desk lamps off errant dust motes drifting about the tiny compartment. The dust motes drifted for awhile longer after the troopers had left. Then the dust motes spun up their nearly invisible picowatt propulsors and set off on a new course down the corridor, heading aft for the Service deck and their home swarm.