Johnny Winger and the Hellas Enigma

by Philip Bosshardt

  Then there was that scuttlebutt he had heard at the canteen about a problem with the asteroid…it was drifting off course, or something to that effect.

  All very curious, this business of the missing Chinese meteorologist.

  Perhaps, he’d spend the next few hours perusing the Net, see what more he could find out about this fellow Dao.

  Price found Nygren easily enough two days later. The Green Mars engineer was tall, thin, red-haired with a faint beard. He had brought along two other engineers: Gellar and Hamil, both young serious types.

  Price was supervising the provisioning of the marscat by packbots. “You three treated?” he asked. Treated meant they had gone through the respirocyte treatment. When you had the treatment, your blood was full of nanobotic blood cells, able to boost oxygen delivery hundreds of times over the body’s natural way of doing it. Respirocyte-treated people could venture outside with only a small emergency oxygen pack and a basic pressure suit.

  “I am,” Nygren admitted. “These two…no, not yet.”

  Price checked off supplies against a list. “Me too. That’ll give us some more room in the cat. By the way, what exactly is your interest in this spot up in the canyonlands?”

  Nygren gave up some small crates for loading to the packbots, which whirred off happily to continue outfitting the vehicle. He explained how some kind of massive gravitational disturbance had altered the trajectory of 2351 Wilks-Lucayo.

  “We don’t know what causes it, though there are theories about cosmic strings and so forth. But we can detect the decoherence waves that come from collapsing probability states. So it’s some kind of quantum state generator. One of the sources is here…or rather, out there, “ Nygren indicated. “Tracking data from Farside has localized two sources actually: one on Earth and this one. Green Mars needs to locate the Mars source right away and shut it down. It’s keeping us from getting the asteroid back on course. There’s less than a year to go, you know…before the Big Smack.”

  “Then we’d best get started,” Price decided. The inspector was a qualified marscat driver and took the left hand seat up on the command deck.

  Several hours after sunup, the cat whirred and trundled through Southlocks and out onto the dusty road that led off into the Tectonic Hills to the northwest.

  The transway to the north landing zone was a two-lane hard-packed dirt road, well traveled by trucks, trams and cats as it was the main artery from the north pads to the City. Price sped up to nearly thirty klicks and turned past the landing zone, surrounded by wire fencing, then headed out into the open countryside.

  The terrain was all ruddy desert, rolling hills with craters bordering both sides of the road, between the bulldozed humps and berms from road construction. A steady rise in elevation indicated they were climbing onto the lower slopes of the Tectonic Hills. Past the hills, the hummocky fall of ejecta from massive Orion Crater lay like splayed fingers on gently undulating upland, tending higher and higher in altitude as the cat climbed west by northwest.

  “Coordinates coming up ahead,” Price announced presently. Right after a hurried lunch of sandwiches and tea, he slowed the cat and the wheel motors whirred as they spun down. The vehicle had ridden to nearly the top of a long curving mesa and was now approaching the abrupt end of a promontory overlooking a vast desert hardpan that stretched to the horizon. In the distance, the shadowy forms of Pavonis and Ascraeus Mons poked above the horizon, backlit by a rising sun, blood red in the suspended dust stirred by local wind devils.

  “Looks like two big eyes peeking over the limb of the planet,” Nygren muttered. Creepy at twilight, he recalled from earlier trips, but then next year, after the Big Smack, it would all change anyway and Mars would be on her way to something better. As Price parked the marscat, Nygren fiddled with a small, palm-sized instrument in his lap. Seeing the inspector’s curiosity, he explained.

  “This gizmo detects decoherence waves from quantum state disturbances. I’m trying to get a read on the source, kind of calibrate it. From the gridsats, I know our position. It’s just a matter of tuning in where the waves read strongest.”

  Price was already out of his seat. “Let’s get suited up. The coordinates you gave me are about half a klick from here, further out on the mesa.” He peered through a porthole. “Ground drops away over there…maybe a gully or a crater. Looks like we’ve got some climbing to do.”

  Half an hour later, the four of them exited the marscat. Price and Nygren were clad only in light blue skinsuits and breathing packs. Hamil and Gellar, having not been treated, were in full pressure suits. Dinosaurs, thought Price, as Nygren waved his gizmo about, trying to orient them for the hike.

  They marched up the rubbly slope of a nearby hill and across a narrow ledge to a shallow ravine, then slipped and slid their way down to the ravine floor. They found themselves in a sort of natural amphitheater.

  It was Gellar who first saw it.

  “What the hell is that?” he muttered.

  Planted at the far end of the ravine, the platform with the pyramidal tower seemed innocent enough. It bore a vague resemblance to dozens of weather stations all over the planet. But the tower on top was rotating slowly, in the middle of four spheres studded with small projections.

  Price took some pictures with a camera and felt the hairs on the back of his neck bristle. He tapped on his wristpad, checking out the latest photos he’d taken and then shifted the displays on his eyepiece viewer. “Hey, I just called up a log from Public Security. The most recent expeditions in this sector. Looks like this baby’s supposed to be a met station.”

  Cautiously, the four of them made their way through a small boulder field to within twenty meters of the platform.

  “Barrier nano,” Nygren observed. “See how it blurs every so often?”

  The platform was enveloped in what Price had originally thought was dust. On closer inspection, he could just make out the flickering bursts of light, like fireflies on a hot summer night. Only these were no fireflies. A thick swarm of nanobotic assemblers swarmed about the platform in a faint keening buzz.

  “This must be the place,” Hamil said uneasily. “What’s your detector show, Greg?”

  Nygren withdrew the deco wave detector and fingered a control stud on the side. He circumnavigated the platform, about the size of a large bed, carefully keeping his distance.

  “No pulses at the moment, but gridsats say this is the place. Inspector…if I’m right, this device is no weather station. It’s some kind of quantum state generator. And it’s powerful enough the move an asteroid off course from a distance of two billion kilometers.”

  Price approached the platform warily, aware that he could trigger a swarm assault without warning. He didn’t want to find out what might happen if barrier nano started chewing on his respirocytes. Unknown to the others, he’d taken the liberty of bringing along a few weapons, among them an rf gun, handheld, to spray radio frequency waves into any swarm he had to. HERF guns were a well tested means to beating off attacking nanobots. It was cheap insurance, nothing more than a hunch, really. But he’d long ago learned to pay attention to hunches.

  Even in the thin atmosphere, they could all hear the swarm buzzing louder as Price got closer, no doubt detecting his thermal signature, or maybe pressure wave differences, measurable even in the thin air. He stuck out a gloved hand, pressing tentatively into the edge of the barrier.

  “I’d be careful about that, Inspector,” said Nygren from a few dozen meters away. “We don’t know what might trigger this thing to go off.”

  “They’re just barrier bots,” Price said, more bravely than he felt. “Dumb assemblers screening out unwanted visitors.”

  “Yeah, like us—“ muttered Gellar.

  Price let his fingers penetrate the flickering fog surrounding the platform.

  Instantly, the whine increased to a shriek. Price felt pressure pushing back against his fingers. Before h
e could react, his forearm was enveloped in a glowing film of nanobots. He pulled it back…and the bots were on him.

  “Arrrrrgggggghhhhh!!” Price staggered backward, stumbling to the ground. The skinsuit was a simple pressure enclosure. If it were penetrated, Price’s blood would boil in less than a minute…if the bots didn’t strip his respirocytes into atom fluff first…

  Nygren, Hamil and Gellar recovered from the shock of the assault and started toward the inspector but they were helpless to assist.

  “My…gun!” Price yelled. “Get…my…gun!” He started rolling, writhing in the dust, as the swarm fully streamed off the platform and fully enveloped him. Immersed in a blanket of smothering disassemblers, Price thrashed about wildly, rolling over and over across the dirt. He knew it would be only seconds before his skinsuit was breached. Already, he could imagine trillions of shearing effectors slicing away at the laminate.

  Price had tucked his rf gun in a belt loop but it was now underneath him as he flailed and rolled, trying to fight off the swarm.

  Nygren approached cautiously, not wanting to trigger a secondary swarm. “Roll over more, Inspector…I can’t reach it! Can you pull it out…toss it this way?”

  Somehow, Duncan Price managed to unholster the gun and fumble it outside the swarm perimeter. With a foot, he kicked it further way. Nygren grabbed it and charged it up.

  “FIRE IT!” Price screamed. “They’re all over…starting to get in--!”

  A hot thunderclap of rf waves boomed across the ravine, shattering rock overhangs on the ravine wall. A small dirt slide followed, billowing red dust in a choking cloud.

  Price felt the pressure of the swarm momentarily lessen. Uncountable trillions of the bots had been shattered by the radio pulse. But the rest clung fast and set back to work disassembling his skinsuit.

  “More pulses—hit ‘em again!’ he cried out. He was only seconds away from a full breach. Already he could picture a blizzard of tiny saws tearing into his skin. He shuddered at the thought. Bots with the right effectors and a bad news algorithm could reduce a man to loose molecules in less than ten minutes.

  The only question was: would he die from the swarm or the sudden pressure drop first?

  Nygren slammed him with several more booming pulses. For a few seconds, Price was sure his suit had been penetrated. He thought he heard a faint whistle of air escaping but it was only his own lips. He realized he’d been holding his breath.

  Gellar and Hamil helped the detective to his feet. His skinsuit was tattered and torn; it resembled an abstract art painting with mottled discoloration and hundreds of slices where the bots had chewed into the fabric. But at least the suit had held pressure…barely.

  Price watched the swarm reorganize itself into a new defensive barrier. They had no real way to shut down the swarm or draw it off. The little rf ‘pop’ gun Nygren had used was good for a few discharges at best. Swarms like this could rebuild themselves pretty fast, as this one was already doing right before their eyes.

  “We need something stronger,” he said. Possibly Public Security had a counter-swarm system; he’d always heard that the best way to beat a nanobotic swarm was with another swarm. But such things were tightly controlled on Mars. It wouldn’t do to have rogue swarms of bots roaming the countryside. Martians were too vulnerable to allow that.

  “Inspector—“ it was Nygren, working his way cautiously around the platform, keeping well clear of the defensive screen. “…I’m getting something here—“ He tuned his deco wave detector, fiddling with a few dials, and held it over his head, sniffing spacetime for a quantum disturbance. “Just trickles now but something, or someone, was jiggling spacetime pretty aggressively a few moments ago.”

  Before Price could collect himself and come over to see, the first great quantum pulse suddenly erupted.

  The only visible evidence of the pulse was a slight flicker in the ambient light filling the ravine, as if someone had turned off the Sun and turned it back on again.

  Instinctively, all four men scanned the skies for an object approaching. The flicker had seemed like a shadow passing over the ravine.

  But there was nothing overhead.

  Then, without warning, the entire ravine, the entire mesa seemed to shudder with a silent vibration, an eerie tremble rumbling through the ground, like a marsquake, though it had been eons since Mars had seen seismic activity. Something more felt than heard. Small geysers of tan and ocher dust poof’ed into the air, as the vibration passed.

  It was Hamil who witnessed the strangest effects of all.

  “Look!” he cried out, pointing at the top of the ridge surrounding the ravine. “Look at the hill!”

  The ridge line overlooking the ravine seemed to blink, as if a great light had been turned off, then on again. At the same moment, the ridge seemed to waver and shift, as if sliced by an invisible knife. For a few seconds, the entire side of the mountain was distorted, smeared out, like a reflection in a funhouse mirror.

  Then the low grade shudder they had all felt in the ground stopped, as suddenly as it had started. The smeared distortion vanished. The hill and ridge ‘snapped’ back to normal.

  “What the hell was that?” muttered Gellar. He looked down at his boots. Red dust covered them nearly to his ankles.

  Nygren was staring bug-eyed at his instrument. “Jeez, this thing’s off the scale! We got walloped! Massive quantum disturbance…I’ve got decoherence aftershocks all over the place! Something just whacked local spacetime like a bell and it’s still ringing!”

  Price was dusting himself off. Below them, the platform was a blur, throbbing in and out of view, enveloped in swirling dust. The Frontier Corps inspector decided there was little more they could do here.

  “Let’s head back to the cat, gents. We’re going to need reinforcements to deal with this bastard. I’ve got nothing to take down that barrier. And I don’t want to be around if that thing goes off again.”

  Nygren tried to put through a call to the Green Mars Ops center. “I want to see if this pulse somehow affected Wilks-Lucayo.” Again and again, he tried to link with the Ops center dispatcher, but nothing was getting through. “What the…?”

  Gellar and Hamil were the first to climb back up the ridge, reaching the top to scout an easy route back to their ride,

  “Hey--!” Gellar’s voice was sharp. “What happened to the marscat?”

  The rest of the party climbed up to the ridge top.

  Price had parked the cat at the end of a low promontory surrounded on three sides by small hills. As he finished climbing, he looked down on the rise where he had left the cat.

  “What the--?” The four-wheeled vehicle looked like it had been dropped from a great height. The roof was caved in and the cat’s suspension and wheels had collapsed. Doors, antenna and stowage racks lay strewn about the ground. The frame of the vehicle was twisted like a rag, distorting everything else.

  “Did some dust devil toss it around?” Gellar wondered.

  “That’s not caused by any wind,” Nygren realized. “Gentlemen, what you’re looking at is something that had long been theorized about but never observed at the macro scale: quantum displacement.”

  Price could see, even from several hundred meters distance, that the cat was junk. “We’d better get an emergency message out…contact Dispatch and get a rescue squad out here. You two—“ he indicated Gellar and Hamil—“ have O2 limits.”

  “Quantum displacement?” Hamil asked.

  Nygren was already fumbling with a camera, to get pictures of the sight. “When a massive enough disturbance is generated, everything in the path of the pulse is displaced momentarily, sort of decomposed into probability states and stirred up like a drink at the City Bar. When the quantum pulse passes, these probability states collapse. All but one go away. The one that remains collapses back to its original form. That’s what’s supposed to happen.”

  “Something w
ent wrong?”

  Nygren shrugged, a gesture not really visible in his skinsuit. “Hard to say. Theory says the probability state selected for collapse should ultimately yield the original structure. The decoherence wave disturbs the original state but after it passes, the state returns and should be unchanged from before. However, there is a separate part of the theory –it’s called displacement theory—that says perturbations can occur, interference can occur—and things might not return to normal. Probability states can get mixed up when they collapse. The quantum world has little eddies and currents that can cause this to happen.”

  “So the marscat’s like Humpty Dumpty…all the King’s men couldn’t put it back together again?”

  “Something like that.”

  Price was already scrambling down the rubbly slope to see the spectacle for himself. What had been the marscat was now a misshapen pile of junk. He reconnoitered the debris, trying to imagine what kind of power it had taken to disassemble a two-ton tracked vehicle and drop it like a broken toy flung away by a bored child.

  This was no nanobotic swarm, like they had encountered at the platform. There were recognized defenses, established procedures, for dealing with uncontrolled assemblers.

  But this--? How could you fight quantum effects? How could you fight an enemy who could manipulate the very fabric of spacetime itself?

  Price realized the investigation into Dao’s death or disappearance had taken an ominous new turn. This was no longer just a local case, with Mars Public Security and his little Frontier Corps office arguing over turf.

  “I’d better get a rescue squad moving,” he decided. He dialed up the emergency dispatch center on his wristpad. The operator was a woman, a voice he hadn’t heard before.

  “Level One emergency,” he told the dispatcher. “EXP permit 080-151 out of Mariner City Southlocks. We are a research expedition in the lower Tectonic Hills—“ he rattled off the gridsat coordinates—“ requesting vehicle assistance. Our marscat is—“ he studied what was left of the cat, now enveloped in late afternoon dust and shadows as the sun had dropped below the ridge. “—our marscat is disabled. Two of our party are non-treated. O2 limits will be reached in about three hours…requesting immediate assistance—“