Nanotroopers Episode 14: The HNRV Factor

by Philip Bosshardt

  ***ANAD sounding for vital signs now, Base…detecting vibrations ahead…still faint thermals…breaching final solid layers now…there…ANAD has reached the target…target is hypersuited trooper beacon number Q225577…sending soundings--***

  The ANAD swarm had flooded the void in which Hiroshi was buried with acoustic pulses. From the returns, a trained interpreter could read heart and lung vibrations, respiration products, a variety of vital signs.

  “She’s weak,” Glance announced, after studying the results. “Weak but alive. Looks like her body temp’s dropping…she’s probably in shock, or going into shock. We need to get her out of there quickly.”

  “Is her suit intact? Any breaches?”

  “Soundings indicate pressure’s holding…for now.”

  Winger saw Taj Singh crouching on the precipice of the Chasm, his booted legs only centimeters from the faint white flicker inside the borehole.

  “Okay, Taj…in you go. And the rest of you, keep those swarms shoring up the edges. I don’t want the borehole to collapse.”

  Singh lit off his suit boost. His hypersuited body lifted a few meters over the ground in a swirl of dust, then translated smoothly over the center of the tunnel entrance. Slowly, carefully with tweaks on his controller, he adjusted his thrust and gently lowered himself down into the hole. It was going to be a tight fit. Dust fluttered outward in a fan-like spray as he disappeared. When his helmet had dropped below the opening, a lone voice crackled over the crewnet.

  It was Turbo Fatah, two kilometers away over the horizon at Site Bravo. The other teams had been following the rescue over the crewnet.

  “Safe journey, Taj…just get Lucy out of there—“

  Winger watched Singh disappear down the borehole. “Keep those swarms cooking,” he ordered. “Keep shoring up around that tunnel. I don’t want another collapse.”

  Al Glance busied himself supervising the others. “I guess all we can do now is wait.”

  “Wait—“ said Chris Calderon “—and pray.”

  Singh took the better part of an hour to slide down the borehole. Presently, his voice came back over the crewnet.

  “I’m in the void…my feet just broke through…ANAD’s bored out just enough for me to turn…looks like…yeah, it’s Lucy…don’t see anything in her visor…too dark in here—“

  “What’s her status?” Glance asked.

  “Unknown,” came the reply. Taj Singh was twenty five meters below them, in a narrow tunnel carved out of rock fall and rubble. Glance knew the Chasm walls could let go again at any moment. And he wasn’t sure what ANAD might do next.

  “Al—“ Winger reminded him, “we don’t have time to check her out…Taj has to bring her out now.”

  “I know, I know…I just didn’t want to make her worse. If she’s injured…if she’s got broken bones—“

  “None of that will matter if we can’t get her out. Taj, this is Winger. Can you hook up Lucy to your suit and start lifting her out. I don’t like the looks of the Chasm walls up here.”

  Singh’s voice grunted and strained for a few moments. Then: “Got it, Skipper. I got her shoulder eyelets hooked to my leg harness. I’ll try a little boost here…see if I can take up the slack.”

  Glance and Winger could both visualize the tight confines of the borehole. Singh was having to do a lot of the work by feel alone.

  “—it’s working,” he reported. “The line’s holding. Looks like my boost can move her okay. But it’s going to be a bumpy ride up.”

  “Can’t be helped,” Winger told him. “Bring her out, Taj. Get going now.”

  “We’re on our way,” Taj Singh finally reported. “Ascending on one quarter boost…we’re coming up slowly and carefully.”

  The ascent took nearly an hour and a half. When the white helmet top of Taj’s hypersuit emerged from the flickering blue white dust of the borehole, a great cheer erupted from all the troopers gathered around.

  Singh rose up through the borehole, dragging the prostrate form of Lucy Hiroshi with him. He lifted over the edge of the Chasm and hovered while other troopers disconnected Hiroshi from the makeshift sling and set her down gently on the ground. Then Taj maneuvered to a landing himself a few meters away.

  “She’s alive!” Nicole Simonet announced, peering into her helmet, faceplate to faceplate. “But I see a lot of bruises…she’s probably in shock.”

  “Check out her suit,” Winger ordered. “Check O2, pressure, seals, everything. Taj, you may have to hook back up and boost her up to Galileo. Check her suit boost too. “

  Calderon, Spivey, Simonet and the rest fussed over the fallen trooper for the next few minutes, checking everything. There wasn’t much they could do for first aid inside the hypersuit. Simonet felt especially close to the fallen trooper; she and Hiroshi had come to 1st Nano out of the same class at nog school.

  “Looks like she’s got some open cuts and lacerations, Skipper,” said Spivey. “She took one hell of a beating in that slide.”

  Winger examined Hiroshi for himself. Spivey was right. Lucy’s face was battered, puffy and blood-streaked. “I’ve got several configs stored in my embed for nanoderm patches. I’ll get that going and load the master into her suit port. Get her hooked up to Taj’s harness. What about her suit boost?”

  Chris Calderon had been checking every inch of Hiroshi’s suit. “Intermittent, Skipper. Probably she sustained some valve damage in the fall. Plus most of the nitrogen’s leaked away. Lucy’s suit boost is no-go.”

  “Otherwise, her tin can’s holding up pretty well,” Simonet announced. “This laminate’s pretty tough…it probably saved her life.”

  “Any comms?”

  “Negative, Skipper. She’s pretty much out of it anyway. She may have suffered head trauma.”

  “Okay, Taj…it’s all up to you. Boost her back to Galileo. I’ll let Kamler and Mendez know her condition. She’ll be better off aboard ship than down here.”

  “Roger that, Lieutenant.” Singh waited until the harness was secure, then gently lit off his own boost. In a swirl of dust, he lifted away from the surface of the asteroid and rose steadily skyward. Lucy Hiroshi’s limp, hypersuited form swayed beneath his legs, steadied by extra tensioning lines as they headed up toward the ship.

  Taj’s voice came back over the crewnet. “Trooper Singh…inbound for Galileo…estimating arrival in about thirty minutes…I am buddy-lifting Trooper Hiroshi on this trip…repeat, this is a medevac lift to Galileo…we’ll need medical assistance on arrival in thirty minutes—“

  The two of them soon disappeared among the stars and the faint cloud of dust blown off the surface by solar wind. A steady stream of particles streamed off Hicks-Newman and the two troopers were soon lost in the haze. A few hundred meters above them, Galileo floated like a great kebab skewer, tethered to the surface by her anchoring lines.

  As they rose toward the ship, Taj could just make out the spiderweb of anchor lines, glinting and reflecting faintly in the sunlight. Though he knew otherwise, he had always wondered about the lines: would they hold? Were they strong enough? You couldn’t tell it from up close, but the asteroid was dragging the ship around a tight nine-hour rotation by those lines. If they snapped—

  His suit boost labored with extra mass of Hiroshi that he was dragging along. Control was sluggish and he had to pay attention to keeping the center of thrust aligned with her body. Already, a few unexpected oscillations had set her to swaying back and forth like a pendulum.

  “Sorry about that, Lucy,” he mumbled to himself. He listened for any response over the crewnet. Only static came back, interrupted by crew chatter from the ground. Skipper’s getting everybody back to their stations. That was good. They had a job to do.

  Casualties occurred on any mission. You had to deal with it and move on. Complete the mission.

  Taj took a quick glimpse downward at the white lump harnessed to his waist and wondered.
Was she conscious? Was she badly hurt? He imagined a broken neck, internal injuries, punctured lungs, then tried to shrug it off and focus on their approach to Galileo

  Lucy Hiroshi had always been a trash-talking, wise-cracking San Franciscan, a muscle gal,…into kickboxing, tai chi, power lifting and any weirdass physical stunt she could think of. Lucy was a show-off, no doubt about it, but she was also one of the Corps’ best quantum engineers. Lucy could lick a swarm conflict with one hand and one eye. She was, in that way, much like Johnny Winger himself. A natural in the quantum world, a whiz kid who intuitively understood entanglement states and superposition and probability waves. She’d been a nanotrooper with the 1st for three months.

  Taj looked up when a bright flash attracted his attention. At first, he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Galileo loomed above them, a great trusswork skeleton festooned with cylinders and spheres.

  Maybe a hundred more meters to the airlock. He could see the oval eye of the hatch already, shadowed in the recesses of the service deck sphere…the third onion on the kebab skewer.

  Then he saw the debris…his eyes detecting the glint of sunlight on a cloud of particles and matter swelling outward from Galileo’s engine bay, aft of the quad of her huge propellant tanks. Debris was definitely streaming outward in all directions from the plasma torch engines that powered the ship.

  What the hell--?

  “Trooper Singh to Galileo…do you copy? I am on approach to your service deck…something just happened…I don’t know what…there’s all kinds of debris streaming off your engine and reactor bay. Galileo…I’m going to have to abort this approach…I’m about to boost right into a big debris field. Galileo—“

  Singh tweaked his hand controller, pulsing his suit thrusters and veered off toward the command deck at Galileo’s forward end. As he maneuvered, struggling with the oscillations caused by the extra mass of Lucy below and behind him, he saw the cloud of debris around Galileo’s engine bay swelling rapidly.

  Finally, the ship responded. It was Kamler’s voice on the line, thick and frantic. “Trooper Singh, break of your approach immediately. Be advised we have had an aft bay casualty…some kind of explosion or impact back there. We’re venting propellant and parts right now…keep your distance, Trooper.”

  Singh snorted. I can see that much for myself. “Galileo, I am inbound with a medevac casualty from the surface. It’s Trooper Hiroshi…she has extensive injuries…needs medical attention immediately.”

  Kamler was insistent. “You can’t use the service deck airlock, Singh. It’s right in the debris flow…it may already have been damaged. Translate forward to Scout/Recon Vehicle Number Three. I’ll cycle the airlock there and you can bring her aboard that way.”

  Singh acknowledged. “Maneuvering now….”

  He tweaked his boost and thrusted forward along Galileo’s central spine, passing by the sphere of the Hab deck, momentarily peering in through the cupola at the mess compartment, where the last briefing had been held only a day before. It seemed like an eternity ago now. Past the Hab, he soon saw the trio of scout ships fastened to docking collars along the spine, each ship capable of carrying a crew of four. The docking collars were located between the Hab and command deck spheres, strung like ornamental vegetables along Galileo’s central mast.

  Singh translated and maneuvered until he found ship number three. The airlock was a small elliptical hatch on top of the ship’s crew compartment. Already, he could see motion through the portholes. Kamler was inside, prepping the lock.

  “Okay,” came Kamler’s voice, “I’m ready…you see the hatch handle to the left?”

  “I see it.”

  “Grab that handle and twist left, then squeeze and pull.”

  Singh dragged himself and the tethered Hiroshi along the top of the scoutship and floated directly in front of the hatch. He twisted the handle. The hatch loosened and Singh pushed it open, then maneuvered the two of them inside the airlock. There was barely enough room for the two of them. He dogged the hatch shut and stabbed a button on a nearby panel. Air hissed into the compartment and the re-pressurization cycle began.

  Moments later, the inner hatch opened and Kamler’s face appeared.

  “Let’s get her helmet off,” he suggested.

  “She may be in shock,” Singh warned.

  The two of them managed to quick-disconnect Lucy’s helmet at the neck ring and remove it.

  Her face was battered, swollen and bruised, her eyes puffy and weak. Her head lolled to one side.

  “Come on, help me get her to sick bay…we need to get her warmed up…out of that suit…and get her fluids built back up.”

  Hiroshi then mumbled something incoherent, her mouth ejecting spit and a little blood in a mist of droplets that floated through the airlock.

  “What’d she say?”

  Singh lowered himself closer to her face. “…it’s her leg…her right leg. May be broken.”

  “Come on…let’s move.”

  Kamler and Singh wrestled Hiroshi through the airlock out into the central passage and aft along Galileo’s spine to the Hab deck. A small compartment opposite the exercise bay served as a clinic and sick bay. Microgravity aboard the ship made the move a little easier. Hiroshi was carefully extracted from her banged-up hypersuit and strapped into a gurney. A few moments later, Mendez appeared. He had come aft from the command deck to see how their patient was doing.

  “We’ll know in a few minutes,” Kamler told him. He began his examination with Lucy’s head and face.

  “What the hell was that impact I saw coming up, something around the engines?” Singh asked, while Kamler checked Lucy from head to feet, pressing and squeezing to feel for fractured ribs, arms, pelvis, following a line of bruises and contusions like a map.

  Mendez shook his head. “We took a hit on the propulsion plant, engine bay…dead on, whatever it was. Ruptured a propellant tank too…xenon gas is already down a quarter. To answer your question, I don’t know yet. I was headed back there to check things out.”

  “I’ll come too,” Singh offered. He looked over Lucy’s battered and bruised body. “I hope she’s going to be alright—“

  Kamler had already hooked up IVs and tubes. Two medbots purred around the gurney, making last minute adjustments, attaching probes and catheters, drawing blood, scanning. Kamler perused the results on a nearby screen. “Mmm…looks like a broken hip…broken right ankle…no obvious internal bleeding, but there’s evidence of a concussion—see those EEGs? I’m sure she’s in shock, so we’ll have to work on building up her fluids. And then there’s that…see the shadows around her lower cerebrum?”

  Singh saw them. “A tumor?”

  “Maybe. More likely, from the signature, it’s internal swelling around the skull. One of these bots has a program for hemicraniectomy…we may have to do that pretty soon—“

  Singh bent down, bringing his face closer to Lucy’s purplish cheeks and whispered.

  “Be tough, kid. We’ll have you patched up and back in shape in no time.”

  Kamler waved him back. “Step over there, Corporal. I’m bringing up a biostatic field…these buggers will bite if you stay inside.” He pressed a few buttons and the swarm launched from a port on the side of the gurney. In seconds, it had expanded to a light, flickering fog, enveloping Hiroshi and her gurney, cocooning her in a sterile wrap of static nanobots. “I’m prepping an insert too…put a few bots into her skull and see what’s causing that swelling.”

  “Thanks,” Singh murmured. A hard swallow caught in the back of his throat.

  Mendez hovered just outside the sick bay, impatient to head aft and see what had happened to Galileo. “Let’s move out, Corporal.” To Kamler, he added, “We’ll be down in 08 Level for awhile, Jim. I’ve disabled auto-maneuver until we get back. We’ll just have to take our chances with the anchor lines and hope Hicks doesn’t snap them while she rotates.”

&nb
sp; But Kamler was only barely listening. He was already deeply engrossed in his checkout of Hiroshi.

  They crawled and floated down Galileo’s central tunnel to an observation cupola just aft of the service and support deck. A small control station inside the cupola operated systems around the ship’s propulsion plant.

  Mendez anchored himself at the station and began flipping switches.

  “Launching Durwood now…” he announced. Outside the cupola, the Dexterous Utility Robot uncradled and lifted away from its hold, maneuvering toward the ship’s crippled engine bay. “I’m translating aft,” the pilot said. “Approaching the reactor shields—“

  On the screen, they saw what Durwood’s cameras saw. Past the reactor shields, the entire engine bay was enveloped in floating wreckage, jagged chunks of metal and parts forming a debris cloud that surrounded the entire propulsion plant of the ship.

  Singh uttered a low whistle. “In the name of Vishnu—“

  Mendez fiddled with the video, massaging better resolution out of Durwood. “Boy, we took one hell of a hit from something…two of the three engines are junk…and we’re venting something too…probably xenon from one of the tanks.”

  “What the hell happened?”

  Mendez ran archival footage from the aft videos, while Durwood maneuvered gingerly closer and closer. “Look at this—“ he pointed to one screen. “Something hit us square on…right there—“ he tapped the screen “…about two hours ago. Maybe something streamed off the asteroid…look at all that debris—“

  Singh studied the footage, watching closely as a flash suddenly erupted and wreckage rocketed away from the impact site. In seconds, the debris cloud had swollen to encompass the entire aft third of the ship.

  “Let’s see what Durwood can show us.” Mendez manipulated a small joystick, driving the bot deeper into the debris field. Plowing through floating wreckage, he came at last to a jagged tear along one engine bell, just where it joined the central spine of the ship. “Whatever it was, it unzipped one whole side of that bell…then it must have caromed around and hit the next one a glancing blow.”

  They studied the video that Durwood was sending back. Mendez cautiously maneuvered the bot through the wreckage.

  “Is it repairable?” Singh asked.

  Mendez snorted. “Well, we don’t exactly carry spare engines for Galileo…look for yourself. The ship has only a minimal machine shop up on the service deck. And we didn’t have a lot of time for a complete outfitting.” He stared glumly at the images. “Looks like we’re going to be staying here for awhile.”

  “What do you mean ‘staying here’?”

  “I mean we’re anchored to Hicks-Newman with no way to depart the vicinity. We’ve got maneuvering thrusters but that’s all. The entire engine complex is shot to hell. And what’s worse, two of our xenon tanks are holed. We’re leaking propellant into space.” Mendez re-oriented Durwood to scout forward among the tank debris. “No sir, Galileo’s stuck like a fly in a spider web.”

  Singh felt a cold gnawing in the pit of his stomach. Through an overhead porthole in the cupola he could see the rapidly growing blue-white half-sphere of Earth, now only eighteen days away. Inexorably, 23998 Hicks-Newman was drawing nearer to the planet, dragging Galileo and her crew along for the ride. In less than three weeks, the spider web and its fly would be crushed and incinerated into oblivion.

  Singh decided, “I’d better inform Lieutenant Winger…you’re sure there’s nothing we can do?”

  Mendez shrugged, returned his gaze back to the screens and drove Durwood back forward to its docking collar by the service deck. “The only way I can see to fix the propulsion plant is to space-dock the ship and tear out the whole section. We’re talking months at the least. Right now, Galileo’s like a big boat anchor, attached to this rock pile.”

  Singh had heard enough. “I’ve got to get back to the comm center and let the Lieutenant know the situation.”

  He went forward to Galileo’s command deck and radioed down to the surface detail.

  The Lieutenant was still at the cave-in site, Site Charlie, a few hundred meters uphill from the huge, gaping Chasm of Asgard. Singh related Hiroshi’s condition and described what had happened to the ship.

  Winger’s face was hidden behind his hypersuit helmet, but from his voice, Singh could well imagine the Lieutenant’s expression: icy resolve leavened with a little disgust.

  “What else can go wrong? There’s no way to repair the damage?”

  Singh described the scene and zipped some footage onto the crewnet.

  “Mendez says it’s hopeless. He said it would take months, even in space-dock.”

  The heavy groan was audible even over the distance of five hundred meters. “That big blue thing in the sky’s getting bigger by the hour. And we’re a day or more from splitting up the asteroid…assuming no more accidents.”

  Singh swallowed hard. “Skipper, with Galileo disabled, what happens to us? When the mission is over, I mean.”

  Winger was running scenarios through his mind as fast as he could. “Taj, we’re in a world of hurt right now. Truth is, we’re stuck here for awhile. But Galileo’s got lifeboats and scoutships. I’d better put in a call to Gateway. Table Top too. The brass has some decisions to make. Taj…stay there with Lucy. I’m going to make sure the dig here at Charlie is shored up properly, then boost back to the ship myself. The mission comes first…we’ve got to keep ANAD chewing away at this rock…we’ve got to get her split up so UNISPACE can divert the pieces from Earth-intercept. Everything else is secondary.”

  “Aye, aye, sir…I’ll see if there’s anything I can help Kamler or Mendez with.”

  “Hiroshi…she’s going to make it, right? We need every hand we can get.”

  “That’s affirmative, sir. Lieutenant Kamler has already got med swarms fixing her up inside now. Special configs for surgery and tissue repair, he told me.”

  “Very well, Taj. I want a status report on her condition every two hours. If she’s coming along by midday, you drop back down here and re-join Charlie team. They’ve got the diciest cut of all of us and they’re gonna need your embedded swarm soon.”

  “Will do, sir.”

  Johnny Winger got on the crewnet to all sites and described what had happened.

  “All sites…all teams, listen up.” He laid out the details and the consequences. “For the moment, we’re stuck here. We’re along for the ride but we’ve still got a mission. I don’t have to remind you what’s at stake. Keep your ANADs primed, set on config seven seven and carving away at your digs. Somehow, some way, we’ve got to break this big rock into manageable pieces.”

  At Site Alpha, in a narrow hollow between Loki Crater and Odin’s Fissure, Sheila Reaves and Kip Detrick glanced across at each other. Each stood in full hypersuit on opposite sides of the growing chasm churned up by ANAD, shrouded in dust and faint blue-white light. Deep inside the chasm, ANAD swarms continued their work, speedily disassembling unending molecular arrays of olivine and pyroxene, chewing their way through toward the centroid of Hicks-Newman.

  “Not exactly my idea of a family vacation, Kip,” Reaves said. Her hypersuit was streaked with dust and dirt kicked up by the swarm operation. On the surface of Hicks, electrostatic forces made everything cling and clump together. “So when is the cavalry coming to the rescue?”

  “We are the cavalry,” Detrick wisecracked. He was working a beam transit, periodically measuring the alignment of ANAD’s cut. The dig had to be precise to ensure their end of Hicks would separate cleanly. “We get to rescue ourselves.”

  Reaves looked up into the black sky, through haloes and rainbows of dust, at the blue-white marble over Detrick’s left shoulder. Earth was close, too close, less than three weeks away the Lieutenant had said and growing visibly larger with each rotation of the asteroid. “I hear Galileo’s got lifeboats. Know anything about that?”

  “Nothing go
od. Only that Phobos dock crews didn’t have time to check out all ship systems before we boosted out of there. Hell, there might not even be enough room for all of us. But you can sit in my lap, if you want.”

  “Thanks,” Reaves lied. “You’re a real winner. Hey, maybe we should detach an element of ANAD and put him to work building us some life boats.”

  “Now there’s an original idea. Wonder who has the configs for that? Or how long it might take? Why don’t you suggest it to the Skipper?”

  At the other end of the asteroid, some seven and half kilometers away, Bravo Team felt like lost sheep. Mighty Mite Barnes toggled her viewer back and forth, first following ANAD’s progress at nanoscale view, then scoping in on the wreckage of Galileo’s engine bay, trying to ascertain the extent of the damage Lieutenant Winger had reported.

  “See anything?” Vic Klimuk asked.

  “You mean besides gazillions of molecules being unzipped? Not really…let me try a different filter on this gadget.” Barnes hmmm’ed. “Well, something hit the back end of Galileo, just like Skipper said. I see a lot of debris floating around…not much else.”

  “So we’re sticking around for awhile…that sucks.” Klimuk was nominally in charge of the Bravo site dig. Turbo Fatah had kangaroo-hopped up to Charlie site when Hiroshi was hurt in the cave-in, to lend assistance. Simonet was still around, hovering over their dig, trying to keep ANAD aligned.

  “Yeah,” said Barnes, “we’re the ass-end of this rock pile, that’s for sure. So what do we do now?”

  Klimuk climbed a small tuff of dirt and rock to check out the impulse engine arrays nearby, Polar Arrays A and B. “We do what the Skipper says and keep digging. Nicky—“ he called down to Simonet beside the cut, some twenty meters below, “how’s it looking to you now?”

  “ANAD’s on track, Sergeant…within specified tolerance and approaching level eight. I read centroid depth as sixteen point six meters below mean radius level. About three more meters to go to reach target coordinates.”

  “Just don’t go splitting us off from everybody else, Nic,” Klimuk reminded her. “Stop the dig at one meter to target. We’ll let ANAD recon what’s left and then Skipper can decide how to proceed.”

  “Copy that, Sarge.”

  Some three kilometers away, up-sun to Bravo site, Johnny Winger was in a quandary. He stood at Charlie site while the dig at Asgard proceeded on course. Extra shoring in the form of nearly invisible lattice structure had been hastily assembled by a detached element of ANAD. Now the cut could proceed more safely.

  “I’d better get back to the ship, Al,” he was telling Al Glance, who stood alongside supervising the dig. “Get a vidcon set up with Gateway and Table Top. Major Kraft needs to know about the damage to Galileo.”

  The two hypersuited nanotroopers looked like dusty polar bears about to plunge into a river after dinner.

  “It’s pretty bad, isn’t it?” Glance asked. “We’re not getting out of here, are we?”

  “I don’t know that,” Winger tried to be truthful. “We’ve got a mission to perform…if we don’t get this rock broken up, it won’t matter whether we get back to Earth or not…there won’t be much left. UNISPACE and Major Kraft have to work out a strategy.”

  Glance was already thinking ahead. He’d done his part, loaded malware aboard the ANAD master. Now he just had to get home to collect the money. “I’m gonna research the config archive. Maybe there’s something in there that we could use as a lifeboat.”

  “Galileo has lifeboats, Al.”

  “There’s not enough room for all of us. I already checked. But if ANAD had a config for a lifeboat—“

  “Don’t detach anything from the main swarms…we need every bot we can get chewing away at this asteroid. The faster we split up Hicks-Newman, the faster we can get out of here.”

  “If we can get out of here.”

  Winger moved off a few dozen meters to light off his suit boost for the hop up to the ship. “You have the conn, Al. Don’t let anything interfere with the digs until I get back.”

  He pressed the ENABLE button on his wrist keypad and lifted gently into the black sky in a cloud of dust. Moments later, he was lost to view, riding an invisible rail straight up to Galileo’s command deck airlock.

  Glance decided to occupy his mind by following the details of the Asgard dig. Doesn’t hurt to look in the archive, he told himself. He checked with Calderon, making sure the ANAD borer swarm was on course, then pressed a few buttons on his own wristpad, scrolling through page after page of config routines on his helmet viewer.

  There’s got to be something here we can use, something we can scrounge up to make more lifeboats….

  The vidcon had been set for 1900 hours, ship time, and Winger fidgeted like a five-year old in the command deck’s comm shack, while connections were being made across the interplanetary net. Winger mentally ticked off bullet points in his mind, prepping himself to brief the participants in crisp, Quantum Corps fashion.

  At least the time delays would be minimal. Hicks-Newman was screaming toward Earth, drawing closer every day and the comm distances would be annoying but manageable.

  No need for subtleties now, he reasoned. We’re less than three weeks from impact and there’s only one question that matters: can the Detachment get Hicks-Newman split up in time for UNISPACE to divert it?

  Major Kraft’s dour face came up on one half of the screen. Doc Frost was with the Major; both appeared to be in Kraft’s office at Table Top. Nygren from UNISPACE’s Paris office occupied the other half of the screen. Kaoru Nakamura, the UNISPACE engineer at Gateway Station, Earth, filled in a small window next to Nygren.

  Kraft was impatient. “What’s this all about, Winger? The doctor and I were going over some new ANAD configs.”

  Winger squirted his report onto the InterplaNET and let the others study what had happened; the cave-in and the damage to Galileo. Transmission delays were less than ten seconds.

  “Mendez says it’s not repairable, Major. Not out here. We’ve got some lifeboats, but space is at a premium.”

  Nygren ran a worried hand through his blond buzzcut. “How much longer to split up, Lieutenant? We’re running out of time.”

  Winger had just updated the calculations with Galileo’s ship computer. “At the current dig rate, at least another two days, maybe three. Both Mendez and I want to pull the teams off the asteroid before the final split…use the ship’s coilguns to break up Hicks from a distance. The trouble is that Galileo’s only got maneuvering thrusters, so any separation maneuver will take some time.”

  Nakamura floated off-screen for a moment, then returned. “I just sent you an analysis we did yesterday of what will happen if the split doesn’t work. Run it—“

  Winger watched the animated scenario unfold on his screen. Kraft, Frost and Nygren also watched.

  A mottled, potato-shaped object slammed into the Earth’s upper atmosphere in slow-motion, igniting a fiery column of incandescent air all the way to impact. Deceleration forces caused the asteroid to explode as it slowed down, sending out concentric rings of shock waves around the globe. As Hicks plowed into an ocean, a two-thousand-kilometer wide mushroom cloud billowed outward, following close behind the initial shock waves, excavating billions of tons of seawater and lifting the ejecta plume high into the atmosphere, nearly to the edge of space. Hurricane force winds and the planet’s own rotation smeared out the plume and began distributing impact debris around the globe. As the sim went on, a long wintry cloak of dust began to descend over the entire planet, shrouding the world from the Sun’s rays. The sim ended just as mass extinctions and glaciers began bringing continent-wide death to the biosphere.

  “Of course, it’s just a sim,” said Nakamura. “But the scale of effects is quite real. Gentlemen, this…or something very much like it is what we face in the next two weeks…if we don’t get Hicks diverted. This is a Torino Scale Level 9 event, at least
.”

  “Torino Scale?” asked Kraft.

  “It’s a method for categorizing impact hazards from near-Earth objects, like Hicks-Newman. Level 9 is bad. Widespread regional destruction, just like the sim showed.”

  “This seems to be a matter of timing,” Kraft growled. He turned to Frost. “Doc, have you got any magic configs up your sleeves, to speed ANAD up?”

  Frost consulted his wristpad for a moment. “I’m working on several changes…they should help optimize ANAD for boring and digging. New effector designs. I’ve changed the bond angle geometry on his carbene grabbers. It’s—“

  “Just upload the new stuff, Doc,” Kraft cut Frost off. There wasn’t time for lengthy explanations.

  “I don’t want Galileo anchored to the surface when the breakup comes,” Mendez told them. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “You said you have no engines,” Kraft reminded him.

  “I’ve got maneuvering. When the Lieutenant’s team is about a day from breakup, I want to pull Galileo back a few kilometers and finish the job with our coilguns.”

  Winger could see the pained expression on Nygren’s face. Nakamura didn’t look too happy either.

  “Lieutenant, there’s a risk in what you’re proposing. If you don’t do the final cut right, Hicks may not break up cleanly. Or at all—“

  “There’s too much risk in staying attached,” Mendez insisted. “My ship’s already been damaged by debris flying off the asteroid. I’m not taking any more chances.”

  “Like I said, it’s all in the timing,” Kraft repeated. “Nygren, what does UNISPACE think? Can we make Hicks separate cleanly with coilguns firing from a distance?”

  “I’ll have to run the calculations…look at the morphology of the surface and strata below that. Your coilguns may not put out enough energy to do the job. I’ll get back to you today on what the analysis shows.”

  “We’ll stay on the ground until we’re sure Hicks can be split up,” Winger decided. “I’ve got all three teams working around the clock now. I can send progress reports to Nygren and Nakamura every hour, if they want. Video and geo analysis from ANAD.”

  “Do that,” Nakamura said. “That will help us understand the mechanics of the asteroid…how close we are to breakup.”

  “Winger,” Kraft had made a decision, “get your lifeboats powered up and checked out. But keep the Detachment on the surface until you’re three days out from Earth intercept. Do our UNISPACE people think you can divert the pieces that close to Earth?”

  “We’ve done some scenarios,” Nygren admitted. “Based on breaking up Hicks according to the original plan, our impulse motors can maneuver the remaining pieces away from Earth intercept up to about a day before. After that, we can’t generate the delta-vee to do the job. Inside of a day out…we’re going to have an impact…somewhere.”

  Kraft’s lips tightened perceptibly. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Doc Frost dabbing at his forehead with a handkerchief. And it wasn’t because of the temperature in Kraft’s office.

  “Lieutenant Winger, I’m sure you heard that. We’ll just have to do whatever we can to breakup Hicks before H-hour. Unofficially, I can tell all of you that UNIFORCE is already prepping their ground lasers and killsats…interceptors too—to throw everything at Hicks, if it comes to that. The Secretary-General has already had a series of vidcons with other leaders, trying to coordinate evacuation and emergency plans.”

  Winger and Mendez glanced at each other. Galileo’s comm shack was close quarters and stuffy. “Doc, if you could send up your new configs, we’ll load them into ANAD and see if they make a difference. We need every bit of help we can get.”

  Frost acknowledged. “They’re on the way, Johnny. Table Top Dispatch already has them. They’re just being held for any last minute changes. You should be getting the files soon. Oh…and Johnny: I’ve taken the liberty of using a new encryption scheme for some of ANAD’s most critical files. You’ll get the encryption key in a separate transmission. I did this in case there are any more quantum signals out there…unknown Keeper systems that might affect his processor. Just a precaution—“

  “Good idea, Doc.”

  Kraft scowled on the screen and interjected. “Nygren, get that analysis on coilgun dynamics to Winger ASAP. If we can do the job from a distance, I want to do it.”

  Nygren nodded. “I’ll have it today and send it right off.”

  Kraft crisply cut the meeting short. “Then let’s everybody get back to work. We don’t have any time to waste.” The Major chopped the transmission short and sank back in his chair, rubbing tired eyes. “Doc, is there anything else we can do from here? Do you think those new configs will help? UNSAC wants a progress report every four hours…I’d sure like to give him something more that ‘No change, sir.’”

  Frost shrugged and took off his spectacles to wipe them down. “Unknown, Major. The configs are an evolutionary improvement to ANAD’s effector operation. They should help…but there are still glitches and unknowns in his main processor. That autonomy code and this so-called Prime Key—I’ll be honest, it’s got us all stumped. The code is so subtle, so complex…it was part of the original viral genome and we’ve barely scratched the surface of its possibilities.” Frost sighed heavily. “I don’t like something I can’t understand. I designed ANAD…and now he seems to be headed down a developmental road I never dreamed of.”

  Kraft didn’t like the sound of that. “I guess ANAD wouldn’t be the first child to disappoint a parent. But it doesn’t sound so good, Doc. This encryption you mentioned…you really think there might be more Keeper systems around? Or quantum generators?”

  “Major, I have no idea. But from what I can glean from ANAD’s autonomy code, these ‘Old Ones’ seem both thorough and determined. To me, it seems unlikely they would give up so easily on a prospective world they had been cultivating for billions of years. Of course, we really don’t know if the Old Ones have even survived to the present day.”

  “If they’ve really had the hots for Earth for so long, why let a group of flunkies like Red Hammer smash it up with an asteroid? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Maybe it’s’ a way of starting over,” Frost surmised.

  Kraft stood up abruptly, yawned and stretched. “All these meetings, sims and videos wear me out. I wish there was more I could do. All I can do now is wait on Lieutenant Winger and ANAD…everything depends on them now.”

  “I’m sure Johnny won’t let us down.”

  Kraft gathered an armful of papers and his palmpad. “I’ve got a briefing with General Linx in ten minutes. Doc, if you would be so kind, get over to Dispatch and make sure those configs get out on time, coded properly. It may be just enough to help ANAD chew up that asteroid even faster.”

  Frost stood up too and shook hands with the battalion commander. “Of course, Major. I’ll just stop by the containment lab and get my files. I can check them against what is being transmitted.”

  Kraft left for his briefing and Doctor Irwin Frost headed outside the Ops building crossing the snowy quadrangle and walking briskly along the walkway toward the south end of the mesa and the low domes of the Containment building.

  Inside Containment, Frost made his way through a labyrinth of corridors and hatches to Cell Three, where a test version of ANAD was kept. He ran into his long-time assistant, Dr. Mary Duncan at the containment chamber control station, outside the massive vault. The petite Scotswoman was running the ANAD master assembler through some new configs, accompanied by two techs from Quantum Corps; Sergeants Philcox and Royce.

  “How’s the test going?” Frost asked. He studied the imager view of a tetrahedral structure mounted on a scaffolding inside the tank. The experimental ANAD was beating to some internal rhythm, systematically flexing and safing a bewildering array of effectors.

  “A few glitches,” Duncan admitted. “We’re stepping through one config
routine now…trying to troubleshoot a bit of a hang-up with his ribosomal pick tool.”

  “What’s happening?”

  Duncan, with help from the techs, explained the problem. When she was done, she added, “It must be the geometry, Irwin. I’ve tried everything else. But the bond angles and energies are supposed to be already optimized, so I’m not sure—“

  Frost hmmm’ed. “Could be the containment medium. Why don’t you transfer the ANAD core to the mobile tank…see if that makes a difference?”

  “We thought of that, Dr. Frost,” said Sgt. Royce. The tech was impossibly young, practically a teen-ager, with a flaming red buzz cut. He can’t be more than a month out of nog school. “This version of ANAD has never left primary containment. He’s got an accelerated replication engine…new algorithms.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Philcox, “this bot reps like his hair’s on fire. We really souped him up. If we do a transfer, we’ll have to inert the core…go to Stable One on all effectors…so a stray signal won’t kick off his rep engine.”

  Frost scoffed at that. “Nonsense. ANAD is ANAD. I’ve transferred live assemblers without shielding or inerting a thousand times. All it takes is a little care and common sense. Put all effectors at zero state and load up the processor with some bogus config that barely exercises the controller. Even a stray signal won’t matter then.”

  “If you say so, Doc. It’s just that standard procedure calls for more safeguards with live bots.”

  “Try it, Sergeant. You’ll see the wisdom of what I’m saying…believe me, I know ANAD.” That wasn’t always true, he admitted to himself, but these young colts didn’t need to know that.

  Sergeant Royce pecked out a few commands on his keyboard. “Safing all effectors now, Doc.”

  Inside the containment tank, the ANAD master assembler responded to the command by folding all its grabbers and probes. Safing the effectors and inhibiting them from being used during the transfer prevented the assembler from causing any trouble. As an extra precaution, Quantum Corps practice was to power up electron beam injectors around the perimeter of the tank, in case a stray signal caused the assembler to begin replicating.

  Frost studied the image. “ANAD now at Stable One, Sergeant. Let’s get his core ready to move…”

  Royce sent the commands. The result was to put the assembler master in sleep mode, its quantum processor barely ticking over, while the bot was physically moved into the mobile tank.

  Royce studied the readouts. “Nighty night, Doctor Frost. ANAD’s in dreamland now…ready to transfer.”

  Frost’s eyes roved the panel along with Mary Duncan, satisfying himself that the tech had done the safing procedure correctly. “I think the little one’s all set…EMs, acoustics, thermals, all in the green…zero position on all effectors…inhibits locked in…Sergeant, is the tube ready?”

  Philcox stood by the launch and capture port. “Transfer tube ready, Doc.”

  Frost was satisfied. “Okay, let’s launch.”

  There was a slight whoosh as the slug of high-pressure air pushed the assembler off its scaffolding and up to the transfer tube. The tube vibrated as the slug settled inside.

  “Got him.” Philcox said. He toggled a switch to close off the tube end. “I’m inserting at the mobile tank port….” Philcox snugged the other end of the transfer tube into the capture port on the mobile tank.

  At the very moment Sergeant Randy Philcox inserted the ANAD transfer tube into the mobile containment pod and opened the port, so that air could push ANAD into his new home, an unseen, undetected spread of quantum decoherence waves washed across Table Top Mountain. The waves were the residue of a single transmission of quantum state signals that had originated nearly four hundred thousand kilometers away, beneath the dusty mare of Earth’s Moon, near Copernicus crater.

  The Keeper was waking up.

  Floating in an ice-flecked underground cavern, clad in a pressurized, armored subterranean structure, the Keeper system transmitted multiple signals, broadcast all-azimuth throughout the solar system, to activate ANAD swarms anywhere in range of the transmitter. The signals, when they arrived at Earth, were detected by tuners inside the cores of every ANAD master assembler, no matter what state they were in.

  The effect was to activate configuration one, the primary replication algorithm embedded inside the assemblers’ main memory. Added to the signals was a single multiplier bit, a subtle twist in the entanglement states of the quantum wave, which told the ANAD bots to accelerate their replication rate to the maximum limits of available mass.

  In other words, ANADs were ordered by the Keeper to begin replicating as fast as they could.

  The first indication that something was wrong came when the transfer tube in Sergeant Philcox’s possession snapped out of his hand like a thing alive. The tube clanked off the side of the main containment tank and narrowly missed clipping Mary Duncan in the head.

  “Look out!” Philcox yelled.

  Even before the tube had come to rest on the floor, the swelling mist of sparkling, incandescent, burning ANAD replication was evident, spilling out onto the floor of the lab like a biblical plague. For a few stunned moments, no one reacted and the swarm had time to billow up and outward like a malevolent fog, spreading fast, grabbing atoms and building structure like a frantic brick mason. In the few seconds that it took for the techs to respond, the swarm had ballooned into a throbbing misshapen sphere nearly a meter across…and it was growing fast.

  “Get out of here!” shouted Royce. He grabbed one of the electron beam guns from its mount and cycled the charger. “It’s a Big Bang…it’s loose…head for the hatch…I’ll try to zap ‘em!”

  Irwin Frost grabbed Mary Duncan and hustled her toward the hatch.

  As they stumbled out of the way of the swelling swarm, kicking blindly at the first tendrils of replicating bots snaking along the floor, Royce fired the gun. The crack! stitched a beam of high-energy electrons toward the nearest flank of the swarm. The effect was to tear a hole in the accelerating mass, stripping electrons off the new assembler bots and shredding their cores with a ten billion electron-volt discharge.

  But the big bang barely slowed and Philcox was already stabbing at the ALARM button on a panel by the hatch. Instantly, a loud klaxon sounded throughout the Containment building.

  Before they could reach the door, Frost and Duncan were cut off by an arm of the swarm that had risen like smoke in a gale and enveloped both of them.