Nanotroopers Episode 6: I, Lieutenant John Winger...

by Philip Bosshardt

Nanotroopers

  Episode 6: I, Lieutenant John Winger…

  Copyright 2016 Philip Bosshardt

  A few words about this series….

  1.Nanotroopers is a series of 15,000- 20,000 word episodes detailing the adventures of Johnny Winger and his experiences as a nanotrooper with the United Nations Quantum Corps.

  2.Each episode will be about 40-50 pages, approximately 20,000 words in length.

  3.A new episode will be available and uploaded every 3 weeks.

  4.There will be 22 episodes. The story will be completely serialized in about 14 months.

  5.Each episode is a stand-alone story but will advance the greater theme and plot of the story arc.

  6.The main plotline: U.N. Quantum Corps must defeat the criminal cartel Red Hammer’s efforts to steal or disable their new nanorobotic ANAD systems.

  Episode #TitleApproximate Upload Date

  1‘Atomgrabbers’1-14-16

  2‘Nog School’2-8-16

  3‘Deeno and Mighty Mite’2-29-16

  4‘ANAD’3-21-16

  5‘Table Top Mountain’4-11-16

  6‘I, Lieutenant John Winger…’5-2-16

  7‘Hong Chui’5-23-16

  8‘Doc Frost’6-13-16

  9‘Demonios of Via Verde’7-5-16

  10‘The Big Bang’7-25-16

  11‘Engebbe’8-15-16

  12‘The Symbiosis Project’9-5-16

  13‘Small is All!’9-26-16

  14‘’The HNRIV Factor’10-17-16

  15‘A Black Hole’11-7-16

  16‘ANAD on Ice’11-29-16

  17‘Lions Rock’12-19-16

  18‘Geoplanes’1-9-17

  19‘Mount Kipwezi’1-30-17

  20‘Doc II’2-20-17

  21‘Paryang Monastery’3-13-17

  22‘Epilogue’4-3-17

  Chapter 1

  “Double Agent”

  Engebbe, Kenya and Table Top Mountain,

  Idaho, USA

  November 4, 2048

  10:45 p.m.

  Johnny Winger fought back the rising tide of panic by following an old atomgrabber’s trick: reciting the Nanotrooper Code of Conduct….

  “Nanotroopers don’t leave any troopers behind…nanotroopers fight only the enemy…nanotroopers don’t harm those who surrender….”

  He found that by repeating well-known phrases and verses—the Nanotrooper’s Code, favorite songs and nursery rhymes, pieces of well-known speeches—he could occupy his mind enough to keep from dwelling on the fact that he was completely lost in some kind of historical simulation of an alien race, seemingly lost in space, with no way out.

  After he grew tired with that, he started describing what he was seeing, sort of a personal log of sights and sounds.

  “Well, there are a lot of stars, to begin with. Stars and galaxies and things I have no idea what they are. Spirals and pinwheels and barred spirals and blobs and globs of stars. I keep wondering about that black hole or singularity or whatever the hell it is over there to my right…what role does a black hole play in a sim…why put one in a sim at all? It has to mean something….”

  ***converging on a --***

  The snippet of chatter came through his quantum coupler like a bad dream. What the hell was that?

  “ANAD…ANAD, is that you…ANAD, what channel are you on? ANAD--?”

  For several minutes, he cycled through his coupler channels, trying any comm he could find. Nothing. Not even static. Then:

  ***-ports ready in all respects…ANAD to…ggghhu,anlhdlbc…ANAD operating as before…anyone there?***

  Winger would have leaped for joy if he hadn’t been floating in the middle of interstellar space without so much as a hypersuit on.

  ‘ANAD…hold on…ANAD…wait a minute…let me tweak this—“ He adjusted the coupler gain…damned quantum crap…adjusted the entangler circuit…then, the voice of the little bot came in loud and clear, as if he were right inside Winger’s head.

  ***Johnny Winger…good to hear your voice--***

  “ANAD, where the hell have you been?”

  ***Physically, resident in the containment capsule, of course…right where you put me…I had a coupler malfunction, then my processor went offline…I was drifting…just drifting…then I was in some kind of crystalline lattice, solid-phase structure, but arranged differently…Johnny, there’s more to the coupler than we realize…***

  Winger was just glad to have some company. “I was going looney out here…wherever here is…ANAD, we’ve got to figure a way to get out of here….what were you saying about the coupler?”

  ***The quantum coupler has functions we were not aware of…I saw that in the lattice I was in…it was like I was inside a coupler, operating at quantum scales…entangled, superposed, fluctuating at the edge of existence…it was weird***

  Winger was intrigued. “I’m sure…what kind of functions? What are you talking about?”

  ***Well, you know what a quantum coupler is supposed to do?***

  “In a general sense, yes.”

  ***Remember this?*** ANAD played a snippet of vid, showing Dr. Irwin Frost explaining the coupler’s design to Winger…only a month ago at Northgate U.

  Frost diagrammed his explanation on a board. “The coupler allows ANAD to send extremely large bandwidths of information of all types—all senses, such as visual, olfactory, audio, tactile as well as direct sensing of the molecular environment—directly to a special hypersuit headset that connects with the proper sensory channel of the wearer or directly into a special ANAD junction inside the wearer’s skull, a sort of server that routs the data stream to the corresponding lobes of the brain.”

  “You mean I could see…sense…exactly what ANAD senses?”

  Frost nodded. “In a way. You and ANAD will be coupled in a quantum sense…exchanging entanglement states, to use the correct wording. ANAD now has a quantum coupler and multiplexer embedded in his processor core. The quantum states that represent what he senses go through this coupler to an interface, which will be part of your implant. This interface will disentangle the quantum state signals from ANAD, send the signals on to a buffer that transforms them into something your brain can accept—specific voltages and ionic concentrations—and then splits the buffered signals into patterns of firing neurons for different sensory channels, the final direct coupling into your sensory cortex.”

  Winger’s head spun just thinking about it. “If you say so, Doc. I have just one question…will it work?”

  The vid came to an end.

  “Very funny…,” Winger said. “So what else can a coupler do?”

  ***I found some details in the archives of this alien race, accessible, by the way, through the very same coupler. It turns out that the quantum coupler can be used to re-locate the wearer in time and space***

  “Are you serious? It’s not just for comms?”

  ***Absolutely…I found a way to alter the entangler circuit. Here…I’ll prove it to you--***

  For a moment, Winger was dizzy and disoriented. He shook his head, then realized with a start that he was back in the vast swarmship. The sim unfolded and the great Mother Swarm came at last to a world Winger was sure he recognized…a world of blues and greens, a world of great oceans and steaming continents. He rode down with a detached element of the main swarm, descending through thick carbon dioxide-rich air and purple, lightning-racked clouds to a hover over what looked like a primordial swamp.

  It was Earth. Earth from millions of years ago.
/>
  The same scene they had just experienced. “ANAD, how’d you do that? We’re right back at Earth, billions of years ago—“

  Chapter 3

  “Configuration Zero”

  Outside Nairobi, Kenya

  Ngongolo Hills

  November 8, 2048

  1900 hours

  “…two minutes to drop! Troopers on standby! Close your visors! Suit boost to PRIMED AND READY!”

  The lifter that Quantum Corps Balzano, Italy had furnished banked slightly to swing around to its approach heading and settled down in the bumpy night time air over the Serengeti plain at seventy meters altitude. Ahead, the black humps of the Ngongolo Hills loomed on the horizon like shoulders poking above the acacia trees, with the blood-red eye of the simmering volcano of Mt. Kipwezi stabbing through the faint mist.

  Lieutenant Johnny Winger closed down the SOLNET report he had been viewing and tapped a button on his wristpad, changing his eyepiece display in an instant. He methodically checked and noted every trooper’s status.

  Barnes, D’Nunzio, Nguyen, Reaves, Glance, Gibbs. 1st ANAD, Special Detachment Alpha. Tasked with entering an Assimilationist sanctuary covertly, a few kilometers outside of Nairobi. Q2 drones had tracked Symborg to these coordinates. Nobody’s kicking bot ass today, though. Just planting a few sensors and doing a little recon.

  Winger shook his head. Brass was like that. When you sent nanotroopers into harm’s way, you had to let ‘em kick a little ass. Recon shit was for the birds…drone birds, to be exact. Alpha had packed a bevy of them as well.

  “Thirty seconds to drop! Troopers in position NOW!”

  Winger stood up and worked his way aft down the center aisle of the lifter’s cargo bay, securing his hypersuit to the safety lines. The rest of the unit did likewise. When the ramp popped open, they’d be about sixty meters above the grassland and savanna of nighttime Kenya, popping out into the airstream in their hypersuits and propelling themselves down to the ground on suit boost. After securing their gear and taking their bearings, Detachment Alpha would head out to the target coordinates, recon the base of Kipwezi, then emplace the Q-POD sensor package and call for exfiltration.

  With any luck, any enemy swarms around the perimeter of the Assimilationist camp would still be dozing by the time they lifted off.

  The final seconds ticked down and the lifter ramp slid down and open, exposing the cargo bay to the cool night time air rushing by.

  “GO…GO…GO…GO…!”

  One after another, the nanotroopers leaped into the night sky and lit off their suit boost. Had anyone been watching from below, they would have witnessed a maneuver that resembled a fireworks show on the Fourth of July. Shadowy forms flitted out the back of the lifter and suddenly flared briefly into brilliance as their thruster plumes lit off. Each trooper tucked his arms in and let his suit’s guidance program drop them quickly to the ground in a controlled descent, stirring up little poofs of dust as each one touched down.

  It was all over in less than thirty seconds. The lifter disappeared as quickly as it had come.

  Winger got on the crewnet and checked the status of every trooper in his command. Eight down and secure, all chirping back clean and green.

  “Good, drop, ladies. Get your gear together and rally beside me in two.”

  Winger took a moment to scan the area. The drop zone had been ID’ed from satellite and drone imagery a few days before. A smattering of acacia trees. Made for decent cover. Humps of volcanic rock…kopjes in the local dialect. Dried stream beds. Some bones nearly, probably gazelle or wildebeest, picked clean. “DPS, what’ve we got?”

  D’Nunzio was Defense and Protective Systems tech. She hand-launched a Superfly drone and the thumb-sized ornithopter chittered into the sky, orbiting fifteen meters overhead, sniffing the surroundings for anything out of the ordinary. Momentarily, Deeno reported back.

  “Nada, Skipper. No unusual thermals, no EMs or acoustics beyond baseline. Looks like we’re clear…for the moment.”

  “Good, Deeno. Let’s keep it that way.” The rest of the Detachment formed up in a tight circle around Winger. “Okay, here’s the deal. We’re going to recon the perimeter of this big rock—it’s called Kipwezi-- for the next few hours. Out to one kilometer radius from the foot of the mountain. Target coordinates for planting Q-POD are about halfway around, the other side of the mountain. Kipwezi’s an active volcano…ya’ll can see that for yourselves—“ he pointed up to the coppery glow emanating from the summit of Kipwezi, wreathed in steam and smoke—“so watch your step. The geos say she won’t blow anytime in the next forty-eight hours, but she burps a lot…kind of like you guys at the canteen. So we keep Superfly up and keep sniffing, telltale gases…seismic shudders, that sort of thing. Procedure in a big blow is this: light off your suit boost and punch in ESCAPE 3…that’s been pre-programmed to lift you out of here in a hurry. Just make sure you’re configured for quick launch at all times. Any questions?”

  Glance had one. “Lieutenant, what about the bots? All these Assimilationist camps have bots. I know we’ve got Superfly. But bots sometimes look like these bushes. Or those rocks. Even animals. This place is supposed to be a key base. It’s a cinch they’ve got sentries or guards of some type.”

  It was a question Winger knew he couldn’t answer. At the planning meetings, he’d had the same question himself. Nobody had an answer. Nobody knew just how well the botswarms could hide. It wasn’t beyond possibility that Symborg or Red Hammer had infiltrated the Detachment itself and one of the troopers was an angel, a damn good one.

  “Al, just keep your eyes and ears open, okay? If something looks and smells fishy, it probably is. Don’t be shy about letting the rest of us know.”

  With that, Detachment Alpha gathered up its gear and headed out, north by northeast, circumambulating Mt. Kipwezi in a clockwise direction at a kilometer radius from the base of the mountain. With any luck, they’d be at the target coordinates in an hour or so.

  Intel said the Assimilationists, and possibly even Symborg himself, had some kind of camp up on the side of the mountain.

  The glare from the top of Kipwezi gave the only illumination on an otherwise mostly cloudy night. All the troopers had night-vision gear. They hiked for a few minutes through bush country and across a few dried-up stream beds. Shapes moved along visual fields—gazelles, mostly, although Reaves, the other DPS tech, was sure she’d seen a trio of lions skulking through some brush, stalking something.

  “You’re seeing things,” someone cracked over the crewnet.

  But everyone was still edgy, jumpy.

  Nguyen was the jumpiest. To no one in particular, he whispered over the comm: “What the hell is this Symborg anyway? We should just friggin’ fry the whole area with HERF bombs and be done with it.”

  “Some badass ayatollah master bot, that’s what he is,” replied Gibbs.

  “Naw, man, you’re both cracked,” said Barnes. “Symborg’s a friggin’ genius. Think about it…that cloud of bugs is like the perfect politician. All things to all people, literally. You like handsome vid star looks…he can do it. You like Churchill or Roosevelt…some kind of strong father-type leader…he’s got the config. You like some kind of sensitive, weepy kind of weenie, he can do that too. It’s friggin’ perfect, man.”

  “Symborg, my ass,” Glance came back. “He’s just a pinch from something bigger, that’s all. Part of Red Hammer’s mother swarm. See, I got it all figured out. He’s whatever you want him to be…whatever your fantasy may be. With this gizmo Nguyen’s carrying, we should be able to listen in on his pillow talk.”

  “Maybe we’ll learn something.”

  “Yeah, like what a real scumbag he is.”

  “Hey,” Winger broke in on the crewnet. “Pipe down back there…cut the chatter. And keep your eyes and ears open. Glance, get your ass up here…you’re on point.”

  Ser
geant Al Glance hustled up to where the LT was pointing. He unslung his HERF carbine and made sure it was charged. Ahead of them, a few humps materialized out of the darkness…black volcanic rock outcrops, weathered into shapes that looked like swollen corpses. Serengeti had some of those too. It wasn’t uncommon to stumble across a pile of skeletons, picked clean by predators stalking the night. Winger called a quick halt to take their bearings.

  “CQE, how far to the target?”

  Halvorson was the Detachment’s quantum engineer. He checked his eyepiece, tapped keys on his wristpad to call up the nav screen. “I make it six hundred forty two meters, Skipper. Heading zero eight five. That’s the little hollow the drones showed us…good clear side lobes of entanglement space there. Lots of decoherence waves mixing…we’ll get our best signal pickup there for sure…if nothing changes.”

  “Hey, Skipper—“ It was D’Nunzio. She’d just seen a few alarms on her own eyepiece. “There’s something—“

  Winger came back to stand next to his DPS tech. “What’ve you got, Deeno?”

  The tech adjusted the gain on his sensors. Overhead, Superfly had seen it too and wheeled about to investigate. The chittering of the ornithopter’s blades could clearly be heard circling above them.

  “These rocks, sir…I’m getting above-normal EMs, thermals…some serious atom-grabbing…it’s almost like—“

  But he never got to finish the sentence.

  In an instant, the circle of black volcanic rocks that surrounded them were no longer pitch black rocks. Instead, they glowed cherry-red, flaring into incandescence in seconds, like miniature suns erupting out of the ground.

  “BOTS!” someone yelled over the crewnet. “Swarms…all around us--!”

  “HERF ‘em!” Winger yelled. “Light em’ up!”

  “Fry the bastards!”

  The volcanic rocks had already changed config and quickly enveloped the unit in a flashing fog, a thunderstorm in miniature, with lightning streaks and a shrill keening buzz like a horde of angry bees.

  The entire assault lasted only four minutes. When the glare and the shrill buzzing finally died off and the swarm dissipated into the night sky, only dirt and ash remained.

  Detachment Alpha had reacted just in time, slammed the defensive barrier bots with everything they had. It was close.