CHAPTER 15
Aboard the Michelangelo (UNS-212)
Sedna Approach Trajectory Waypoint S-1
Orbit Injection Minus Two Minutes
December 15, 2110 (U.T.)
0015 hours (Ship Time)
“Injection burn in two minutes.”
Element B’s voice was dry, almost mechanical as the exec looked over all of Michelangelo’s systems. In less than two minutes, her plasma torch engines would flare into operation and the great rebuilt cycler ship, often described by the dock jockeys at Phobos Station as a big kebab skewer with rockets, would begin slowing down just enough for the planetisimal Sedna to capture them into orbit. If all went well, Big Mike would drop speed just enough for the tiny world’s faint gravity to grab them and bend their flight path into a stable orbit.
Cory Hawley acknowledged the status check. “Engine status, Lieutenant? Everything copacetic back there?”
Lieutenant Dean Kohl was sitting in the Systems seat up on the command deck, right behind Hawley. His eyes wandered around the board. “She’s all hot and ready, Skipper. Temps, pressures, everything’s clean and green back here.”
“One minute to burn,” came Element B. Big Mike’s executive officer stole a quick glance at the approaching world through his forward portholes. “Just coming up on the sunlit side…terminator approaching.”
Hawley looked too. “Looks like something my dog dug up in the backyard…a dirt clod with acne.”
Indeed, the planetisimal Sedna, at eight billion miles from the Sun on the inner edge of the vast Oort Cloud, was a rocky, coppery red world with battered plains and crumpled mountains, tortured by eons of meteor bombardment into a frozen, desiccated rubble pile of a world, not even a planet by official reckoning.
Dean Kohl just shook his head. “A frozen dirt clod, if you ask me. Amazing there isn’t more ice on the surface. Something blew it off. What a great place for Sentinel to set up a network and command post. Garden spot of the Oort Cloud.”
“Ten seconds to burn…everybody secure loose items.”
“B…you sound like my mother…telling me to wear my rain coat when it rains—“ Kohl nonetheless performed the last minute inspection that all Frontier Corps troops knew so well.
There was a brief jolt and the ship shuddered as her engines fired. Big Mike’s central mast bent and swayed momentarily until vernier thrusters could damp out the oscillation.
“Twang damping,” said Element B. “Oscillations smoothing out on schedule.”
“Ride ‘em, cowboy…” Kohl said. “I’ve got three engines up and operating…thrust is good…pressures are good. Big Mike’s slamming on the brakes—“
The burn lasted four minutes. When it was over, cycler ship Michelangelo had dropped into a stable circular orbit above the 1800 kilometer-wide world, an orbit less than a hundred kilometers over her battered red-brown surface. Below them, the day-night terminator slid by and full sunlight fell upon her tortured plains and hills…as much light as the Sun could muster from a distance of twelve billion kilometers. The visual effect was of a planetscape illuminated as if at dusk, filled with shadows and black valleys.
“Okay, secure the burn,” Hawley commanded. “Let’s get moving. Mission briefing in the galley in half an hour.”
Big Mike’s galley was the largest space aboard ship, located on B deck, just off the central gangway. Half an hour later, the ship was secured for orbital operations and Hawley assembled his crew for a talk.
“Okay, here’s the deal--” Hawley told them. They were all there, Kohl, Element B, Westerlund, Favors, Grant and Ng, Moskowitz and Ernst…the entire twenty-person crew crammed into the galley or clinging to davits and hold-downs in the gangway just outside. “It’s been a long haul but we finally made it to our destination…believe it or now, that dirt clod outside the portholes is what we came for. It’s not exactly a tropical paradise but it is important. Here’s why: CINCSPACE thinks there may be something…an alien swarm or something like that…poking around out here. We’ve already detected something ourselves co-orbiting with this dirt clod…Element B, what’s the latest on that anomaly?”
The Exec was situated near one of the tables. Other crewmen gave the angel a wide berth. “Twenty hours before the injection burn, we had an anomaly under long-range scan. The anomaly looked like a dust cloud but it could have been a swarm, or part of a swarm. Electromagnetic signatures suggested that, anyway. After the injection burn, I did a sweep of space around Sedna. No anomaly. Whatever it was, it may have dispersed.”
Lieutenant Kohl snorted. “Well, that’s just friggin’ great, ain’t it? No idea what this anomaly might have been?”
Element B shook his head. Nobody noticed whether his facial features tracked with the gesture. “There were similarities to swarm formations, but there were differences too…we didn’t get a good track on it.”
“Well, is it your cousin or something--?” said Roy Favors, one of the Systems Techs.
“Yeah, did you send greetings or—“
“That will be enough of that,” Hawley cut in. “We’ve got a mission and any sniping or whining that interferes with it will be dealt with…by me, personally. Is that clear?” Hawley looked around the wardroom, daring anyone to challenge the order. Nobody did.
“That’s better,” Hawley went on. “Like I said, CINCSPACE has assigned us a mission…to deploy a Sentinel network of detectors on and around this dirt clod of a world and in nearby orbits…a network that the Corps can use to keep an eye on things. Nobody knows what the hell’s going on out here…but we got a real live enemy on Earth named Config Zero and he may have buddies snooping around these parts. The Sentinel net is just a tripwire. If Config Zero’s got help coming from deep space, the Corps wants to know about it. Kohl--?”
“Here, sir.” The Propulsions Systems officer was stashed in a corner by the galley’s tiny bar, underneath a hand-lettered sign that read South Seas Bar. Pre-fabbed miniature palm trees were sprinkled around the area.
“You checked out Icarus?” Icarus was the Sedna lander attached to Big Mike’s central mast between B and C decks.
“She’s fueled and ready to go, Skipper. We did an all-up test of every system just a few hours ago, fixed a few bugs and checked her out completely.”
“Very well. The landing party will be five people: I’ll command the detail. I also want Lieutenant Kohl, Sergeant Westerlund, Sergeant Ng and you, Favors. We need a good Systems tech on the surface to set up the base module and get the Network going. Landing party will meet me on C deck right after this briefing. And Element B will be in command while we’re away.”
“Skipper?” It was Favors.
“What is it?”
“We taking any weapons with us down there? I mean, you know…HERF guns. Mag weapons. That sort of thing.”
Hawley understand his concern. “Nobody knows what’s down there, Roy. Hell, nobody’s been out this far before.” He cringed, even as he said that. He didn’t want to remind the crew of what already had half of them spooked. “What I mean is this: yes, we are taking weapons. It’s possible that anomaly we detected is down there, or part of it. We take weapons as part of our normal equipment. But seek and destroy is not our mission. In other words--don’t go looking for trouble. Our mission is to deploy the base module and get the Network controls up and operating. After that checks out, we return to Big Mike and head out from here, seeding this orbit and nearby space with all those dozens of detectors we’re got stashed on C deck. Once we get all the units deployed and everybody’s talking to everybody, we make a burn and scram back home. Any further questions?”
Nobody had any. But Hawley could feel the unease. It was thick enough to cut.
“Briefing is over. Get to your duty stations. Landing party, come with me. Icarus departs in two hours.”
Hawley and the landing team went over their equipment and the mission details while ga
thered around the racks of detectors stored on C deck. During the briefing, Element B showed up with final information about their landing site.
The swarm angel carried a small disk and used it as a projector. Angels usually didn’t sport wristpads. There wasn’t enough ‘skin’ to attach them to.
“Nominal landing zone is at these coordinates—“ the angel rattled off latitude and longitude figures, then tagged the landing site on a map that he displayed. “Near the equator, in the middle of a large crater…thirty kilometers wide. There’s a central hill complex in the middle of the crater. And some long rilles or cracks in the surface…some kind of mass wasting is the likely cause. No evidence that Sedna ever experienced any kind of volcanism.”
“Thanks for Geo 101, Professor…” muttered Favors. “What’s the ground made of?”
“Basaltic rock. And subsurface ice too, most likely. It’s a low-grav environment, so you can hop for dozens of meters if you aren’t careful. Ground scan has found several clear areas that seem like good spots for the base module.”
“We’re coming down a few klicks from those hills,” Hawley added. “Corps Engineering thinks the peaks may be a great place for a transmitter station. Funnel all the detector data back to the base module. Favors, you and Westerlund will scout that…the rest of us will deploy the base and get it set up. Questions?”
There were none.
Several hours later, the landing detail was aboard Icarus and the lander was signaling Big Mike that she was ready to depart.
Roy Favors and Sheila Westerlund were strapped into their seats in the back, Sammy Ng between them. Hawley and Kohl were up front, in command.
Favors smacked his chewing gum loudly, a nervous habit that made everybody roll their eyes. “This bugger reminds me of a stack of pancakes, folks.”
“Yeah,” said Westerlund. “With legs and three sausages on top. Does everything remind you of food, Favs?”
“Knock it off back there,” Hawley ordered. “Okay, Michelangelo…we’re secure and ready. Give me the count….”
A few minutes after everybody was through bitching and moaning and had gotten themselves secured and strapped in, Hawley punched up the departure program on the ship’s computer and counted down the last seconds before separation.
“Five…four…three…two…one…bingo!”
There was brief shudder and lurch as Icarus’ thrusters fired to make a positive separation.
“Icarus away…” he announced. Hawley and Kohl watched through the forward windscreen as the gaping mouth of Michelangelo’s side-mast docking ring receded into the distance. From two kilometers off, when Hawley had stopped their motion and re-oriented Icarus for de-orbit, the great cycler ship looked like a massive bird soaring off into the heavens.
Kohl counted down the last moments to the initial burn that would start Icarus on her long curving descent to the surface of Sedna. The limb of the reddish world could barely be seen through the portholes, dim and shadowy.
“Ten seconds to PDI,” Kohl announced. He checked over his console: track, engine status, attitude…everything seemed ready. “Get ready for a major kick in the ass—“
The burn, when it came, made Icarus shake and shudder like a wet dog. Roy Favors felt the acceleration build up rapidly. After months of microgravity, the ship’s descent felt like an elephant had planted its posterior right on his chest. He forced a sideways glance at Westerlund in the next seat.
The trooper was exhaling out in quick, forced breaths, as they had been trained. She met Favors’ eyes and grunted back.
“Favs…remind me to…put in…for a…transfer…when we get back….”
Hawley and Kohl watched the trajectory plot on the board carefully as Icarus began her initial pitchover and slowed noticeably. The plot showed several lines, indicating nominal and actual course, all converging on an actual window in space, the entry point called High Gate, where the lander would begin firing her descent engines continuously, maneuvering and navigating across Sedna’s tortured and battered surface as they fell toward the LZ in the middle of Cone Crater…so named by Roy Favors because the formation reminded him of a big ice cream cone.
The descent and landing took half an hour.
“Touchdown…good job, Skipper,” said Dean Kohl. Icarus settled with a bump onto a mostly level plain pocked with craters and strange blood-red hillocks. More hills surrounded them. “Right in the crosshairs.”
“Okay, boys and girls, let’s get moving,” Hawley unstrapped himself and headed for the lockout in the aft compartment.
The first order of business was to use Icarus’ crane and robot arm to lift and deploy the base module. The cylindrical module had been mounted on top of the three modules that constituted Icarus’ crew compartment and stores modules. Kohl handled the crane and gently placed the base module on the ground with the arm. The module treads would eventually be extended and the whole thing driven off to its final deployment site, half a kilometer away.
Hawley pronounced himself satisfied. “That went better than expected. Favors, you and Westerlund get into your gear. I want that hill surveyed and ground prepped for the transmitter.”
“Yes, sir,” came both replies. The two Systems Techs headed for the lockout, located in Icarus’ starboard compartment.
In the meantime, Kohl and Hawley went back to the command compartment.
“Dean, let’s do a full scan of the area, all bands. I don’t want anything creeping up on us out of nowhere.”
“Amen to that,” Kohl said. Left unsaid were the words Element B had used to describe the anomaly Big Mike had been tracking on their approach to Sedna: Whatever it was, it must have dispersed.
Hawley knew full well that real-life swarms could easily disperse into nothing and re-assemble in no time. Better to keep their HERF guns charged up and ready, just in case.
Westerlund and Favors were on the surface of Sedna an hour later. They were followed in short order by Ng and Kohl, who would head for the base module and get it powered up.
Sheila Westerlund surveyed the landscape. “Garden spot of the universe, Favors. This is where I want to build my vacation cottage.”
Favors was bounding and hopping around, trying out the low-gravity, like a bloated white kangaroo. “Yeah, what’s not to like: piles of rubble, craters everywhere, no air and temps colder than a witch’s—“
“Hey, what’s with that hill?”
Favors came to a halt a few dozen meters away, kicking up rooster tails of dust. “What hill? Our destination’s over there.”
Westerlund pointed toward the horizon. “No, where that fog or dust cloud is…that was a hill a second ago. Now—“
They both saw the dust cloud. Westerlund insisted the cloud had been a low hillock just moments before. Now, a geyser of dust sprayed in slow motion into the vacuum, like a slow-motion flower bursting to life.
“Must be an ice pocket or something, sublimating to space. Come on, let’s go…we ain’t got all day.”
They turned back to the complex of low hills on the other side of Icarus. Favors did a sighting with his suitscope. “I make ‘em at two kilometers from here, give or take a crater or two. Horizon’s close on this little slagheap of a world.”
“Hey, I’ll race you, vacuumhead. Come on—“
They gathered up their gear and hopped off toward the rounded humps on the horizon.
For the next hour, the area around Icarus was busy with activity, as the landing party went about their work. Pallets of cargo and gear were unloaded by Sammy Ng, using the robotic crane, and distributed around the landing site, around the perimeter of Icarus.
Hawley and Kohl climbed into the base module and powered the cylinder up. The module came equipped with its own track system and motor, so it could be driven for short distances.
Wedged into the tiny cockpit up front, Hawley engaged the clutch and the module—they had taken to calling
it Igloo—lurched off to a rumbling crawl across the regolith.
“What a speed demon this jalopy is…I saw a small rise not far from here when we came down,” he explained. “Probably make a good site to install this bugger and get it up and operating.”
Kohl scanned out the side porthole. “God awful desolate place, if you ask me, Skipper. The sooner we can get out of here, the better. I can’t help feeling we’re being watched…by who or what, I don’t know…but I can’t shake that feeling.”
“Me too,” Hawley admitted. Igloo bounced and slid and skidded across the dusty surface, riding up and over shallow crater rims and down into crater floors like beating against ocean waves. “That anomaly we detected on approach makes me nervous. I’m not sure how much I believe about this Old Ones crap, but it looks like something’s out there and nearby too. CINCSPACE has reports from Intel that there may be advance scouts in this sector…some of the eggheads think that’s what Devil’s Eye really is…some kind of early recon of our solar system. Me…I’m not so sure. But it pays to be cautious. You loaded those weapons?”
Hawley fingered a small case at his feet. “Two HERF carbines right here and I checked the charge before we left. Plus, two magpulsers in the aft compartment. Anything shows its friggin’ face around here gets blasted into cheese puffs.”
They drove on for several kilometers, while Kohl sighted to the horizon, triangulating their position and checking it with the gyros. Igloo’s motors strained slightly as she began a gentle climb and moments later, Kohl announced, “I think this is the spot, Skipper. Coordinates match.”
Igloo braked to a halt and dug herself into the frozen dirt, anchoring herself with small charges that momentarily liquefied the ground and letting her settle lower before the regolith froze again. The two of them set to work, activating systems.
Kohl pulled out one of the carbines. “I’ll check around outside. Make sure we’re level and stable.”
“Good idea…while you’re at it, get that comm pod out and set up too. We’ll need to check transmission quality…make sure we can handshake with the transmitter Favors and Westerlund are setting up. See of you can raise them.”
Kohl exited Igloo’s airlock and went around the rear of Igloo to find the lanyard that dropped the comm pod and its work table. While he was waiting for the device to spring into position, he used his suitscope to locate the other two troopers, by now three plus kilometers away, heading for the hills south of Icarus. Soon enough, he spied two white dots hopping like fat kangaroos up the lower slopes of what the maps called Pyramid Hill. He called up to them.
“You jokers look like drunken clowns up there….you sure Favors didn’t grab some hooch from the galley on the way out?”
Word came back from the slopes. It was Favors. “Wish’d to hell I had, you bozos. Sheila and I are making like goats and working our way up this hill…the dirt’s loose, so it’s two steps up and ten steps back. But we’re getting there—“
“Yeah,” said Westerlund, already twenty meters ahead, “some of us are better goats than others.”
“Hey watch that boulder—“ Favors said. A small stream of rocks came tumbling down in a slow-motion landslide. Favors dodged the worst of it. He leaned into the climb and scrambled to stay upright in the slide. “Another one like that and I’ll wind up in a heap at the bottom. How far’s the peak, anyway?”
Westerlund stopped to let the other Systems Tech catch up, and to get her breath. They could use their suit boost, but the regolith was so loose, they might only succeed in setting off another slide.
“Looks like another couple hundred meters. There’s some kind of ravine up ahead, like a big gash in the side of this mountain. And I don’t know what all those hillocks are…I’ll check ‘em out.”
All up and down the rise were spotted small humps, rock hills that in another time and place might have looked like anthills. Knee-high, flat on top, coppery red in the dim shadows, they were hard to distinguish from the shadows themselves.
Jesus, they look like they’re moving. Must be the light-- Westerlund cautiously approached one.
“These suckers are just made out of dirt, looks like, Favs. Must be some kind of charge that holds them together…Cripes, they are moving—“
She had been about to stick a suit toe into the side of one hump when it exploded right in front of her. It wasn’t a real explosion and it was in slow-motion, but the entire hump disintegrated before her eyes. That’s when she realized what the hump was.
“Jesus, they’re bots…they’re mechs…coming after me—!“ She flailed wildly, trying to drive the attack off, but it was useless. She lost her footing in another slide and went down hard on her side, skidding downslope a few meters. In that moment, the swarm fell upon her.
“Favs, help….hellllllpppp!! Aaaarrrggghhh, they’re getting inside…they’re on me--!!”
Westerlund rolled and kicked but it was too late. Favors saw what was happening and kicked and clawed his way toward his buddy, but a pair of nearby humps disintegrated and the bots were on top of him before he could reach Westerlund. He found himself half-buried in regolith, twisting, turning, kicking and scratching, but a shrill squeal in his earphones, inside of his helmet told him the pressure suit had already been punctured…it was just a matter of time now…already the fog was forming….his eyes and ears were bursting….
In the end, neither Systems Tech had been able to get off any warnings. As one, the swarms that had formed the humps dotting the hillside broke down and assumed their normal amorphous configuration. From a distance, the assault would resemble nothing more than a dust devil churning along the hillside, a faint mist glinting in the wan light that passed for daytime on Sedna. In a few minutes, the mist had dissipated. For a few moments, nothing remained…nothing but dirt and regolith, craters and tendrils of dust, lifted by errant charges washing across the surface.
From Icarus, no one noticed what happened next, up on the slopes of Pyramid Hill. The rest of the landing party was too busy, setting out equipment, starting up the base module Igloo, scratching their heads over recalcitrant equipment that wouldn’t work like it was supposed to.
From the atomic remnants of Roy Favors and Sheila Westerlund, new facsimiles were slowly but steadily re-assembled. During the disassembly of the humans, a thorough scan of their atomic geometry and maps of bond energy configurations had been done by the bot master. This data was used to re-assemble both humans into a nearly perfect simulacrum, an angel entity not unlike Element B or Commander Liu, for that matter. Down to the last valence electron and nucleus, the two Systems Techs slowly materialized and took form, building form and structure, a hand here, an arm there, a leg, a nose and lips, their hypersuits, even down to the kits and cases they had been hauling up the side of Pyramid Hill.
Like a photographic negative slowly being developed, the form and appearance of Roy Favors and Sheila Westerlund came into being. Soon, enough structure had been assembled for animation to begin. The forms moved. A leg twitched. A hand grasped at nothing. Bodies lying half buried in the dirt began to shift. One after the other, the two angels sat up, flexed new arms and legs, then struggled to their feet.
Even on close inspection, the angels looked just like Favors and Westerlund. They did not resume their climb up the hill. Instead, the two angels turned about and worked their way carefully downslope to level ground. The distance to Icarus base camp was less than two kilometers. The bot master, now animating Roy Favors, calculated that such a distance could be traversed in less than twenty minutes.
The two angels set out for Icarus.
Sammy Ng was the first to spot the techs returning to base camp. “Hey, you two…what the hell happened up there? I saw that dust cloud hit you…you get the transmitter up…I’m not getting anything….you forget to turn on the thing or what?”
The two angels walked into the base camp. Roy Favors…or what Sammy Ng
first thought was Roy Favors…attempted to climb the ladder to the crew compartment. That’s when Ng saw something that made his blood run cold.
In the debriefings that followed, Sammy Ng could only point to one thing that made him suspect Roy Favors was not what he seemed. It was a small thing…perhaps electrostatic charges from cosmic particles sweeping across the surface of Sedna…perhaps a configuration control glitch in the Favors angel…perhaps an explosive outburst of sublimating ice from beneath the ground…at any rate, it caught Ng’s eye immediately.
Roy Favors’ hands went right through the lower rungs of Icarus’ ladder.
If he hadn’t been looking right at Favors, it was doubtful that Sammy Ng would have ever noticed the anomaly. But he did see it.
And the alarm bells went off inside his head.
“Bots! Swarm bots! Right here—Swarm bots and I’m engaging—!“ As fast as his bulky hypersuit permitted, Ng unslung his HERF carbine and charged it up, then let fly a volley of rf at the intruder. The radio freq waves blasted through the Favors angel and momentarily disrupted its config, scattering atoms and molecules in a spray of light and sparks. Ng pumped and fired, again and again, trying to destroy that the thing that had walked right into the midst of camp.
A kilometer distant, kangaroo-hopping around Igloo as he and Kohl activated systems, Cory Hawley heard Ng’s scream on the circuit. He dropped the crate he was carrying, looked downslope at Icarus in the distance, squatting like a shiny bug on the surface and saw the whump and puff of dust as Ng pumped round after round of HERF fire into the angels.
“Come on….we gotta go--!” They couldn’t ride Igloo back; she had already been anchored into Sedna’s regolith. All they could do was run, skip and hop their way back down the gentle incline and cover the two kilometers as fast as they could.
It took six minutes and when they arrived, the gear around the base of the ship had been scattered and blasted into piles of debris and splinters. A sparkling mist was coagulating between them and the ladder leading up to Icarus.
Ng had positioned himself behind what was left of the crates he had been lugging around. Scrambling and slipping in the dust, knocked sideways with each blast of the HERF gun, Hawley and Kohl managed to make it to Ng’s side. They dropped to their knees, their suit servos whirring to stabilize them despite all the scrambling.
“What the hell--?”
Ng filled them in. “I saw Favors and Westerlund coming back. Didn’t think anything of it…maybe they needed something else from the ship. When Favors…or whatever the hell that thing is that looks like Favors, starting going up the ladder…” Ng shivered in spite of his hypersuit…”—I could see it wasn’t real…just a swarm…a cloud of bugs. Jeez, his hands and arms went right through the ladder and it was having a time grasping the ladder…I pulled out my gun and opened up. Skipper…it’s both of them. Westerlund and Favors. The bugs are here! The bugs got ‘em!”
“All right, all right, Sammy…keep your pants on. You did the right thing—“ Hawley chanced a peek over the top of the crate pile.
The swarms had not been able to re-assemble owing to Ng’s HERF fire. But the sparkling, flashing light of atoms being grabbed and slammed together told him where the swarms were. For the moment, both had been scattered into faint dust clouds, like mist floating in the wan daylight of this rock pile of a world. It was only a matter of time before the swarm master bots pulled enough atoms together to build visible structure.
“Sammy, keep firing! You, too,” he told Kohl. “We’ve got to drive them away from that ladder. They get aboard Icarus and we’re sunk.”
The three of them took turns blasting away at the cloud of bugs, trying to scatter it, trying to drive it away from Icarus. Kohl boosted himself over twenty meters off to one side, behind one of the ship’s landing legs, to get a better angle.
Persistence began to pay off a few minutes later, even though Ng’s carbine was running low on charge.
“It’s working!” Ng cried. “We’re pushing them back—“
“We can’t let the master near Icarus…” Hawley decided. “Kohl, three more pulses…then we make a dash for the ladder—“
Kohl pumped three more discharges into the swirling, roiling, flickering mass…each time, scattering it a little more…each time, thinning out the mass, making it harder for the master to sling atoms together. Each pulse shook the landing site like a thunderclap, even though Sedna didn’t have the barest wisp of an atmosphere. A percussive whump, followed by ground shaking and shuddering like a bucking bronc, then poofs of dust lifted into the sky and rained down on everything and everyone in slow motion.
“That’s good!” Hawley said. “That’s good…okay, on my mark, head for that ladder…Sammy, you first, then Kohl, then me. Ready--?”
“More than ready, Skipper,” Kohl gritted out.
“Three…two…one…go! Go Sammy….gogogogogogo!”
Ng scrambled and scratched his way through the intervening distance and leaped toward the bottom rung of the ladder, just snagging it with his outstretched hands. He shimmied up the ladder as fast as he suit would let him, giving himself a slight burst of suit boost to help. In seconds, he had disappeared into Icarus’ lockout chamber.
“Your turn,” Hawley told Kohl. “Hold up a sec…I’ll give the bastards another shot of rf—“ He discharged his own rifle and the ground concussion stirred up a gale of dust. “Now…gogogogo--!”
Like Ng before him, Lieutenant Dean Kohl took three leaps and with assisted suit boost, made the ladder in under six seconds. His legs disappeared into Icarus just as Hawley let fly another round of HERF.
Now, it’s my turn, Hawley told himself. He studied the swarms for a moment. A steady diet of HERF had disrupted their configs and it was taking time to re-assemble the mob. That they were trying to re-assemble, he could easily tell. The faint cloud…mist…fog…whatever you wanted to call it…could easily have been mistaken for dust stirred up. Except for the sparkling and light flashes that popped on and off, almost beyond visibility. Evidence of some furious atom-slamming, he knew.
“Okay, you buggers…here goes another dose—“ He let fly another volley of radio freq waves…his last full charge…thunderclapping the landing site with a percussive whump and stirring up a miniature slow-motion gale around the base of Icarus.
At the very same moment, Hawley leapt out of his cover and streaked as fast as his hypersuit would allow toward the crew ladder. He was airborne and half-cartwheeling the last few meters but just managed to snag the lowest rung. Then, he lit off his suit boost and propelled himself up and into the lockout.
As he rolled free of the hatch, Ng and Kohl slammed the lockout door closed and dogged it shut tight.
Hawley was already undoing his helmet and twisting it free of its neck ring. “Get her powered up for launch, Lieutenant! Essential systems only…emergency ascent! Let’s get the hell out of here before those bugs grab onto something and ride up with us.”
“Already started, Skipper. “ Kohl climbed through a small overhead hatch and disappeared into the command compartment. Ng helped Hawley with his suit.
The three of them completed an abbreviated systems check. A last sensor sweep was made of the landing legs and engine bell…no sign of the swarms could be found. Icarus was humming and ready to fly when Hawley counted down the last few seconds.
“Three…two…one…mark. Ignition…!”
The tiny lander shuddered and leaped off the ground, balanced on the gimballing thrust of her single engine.
“Pitchover…looks good,” Kohl announced. “Right on the money…Big Mike…here we come.”
Hawley thumbed a bead of sweat from his forehead. It had been close…too close. “Amen to that. I just hope we’re not carrying some unwanted passengers.”
Icarus made her approach and docked with Michelangelo in just under three hours, rocking slightly as the capture latches g
rabbed hold.
“Hard dock,” Kohl announced. “Couldn’t be a sweeter sight in the whole universe.”
“Fastest rendezvous I ever did,” Sammy Ng decided.
Hawley had already radioed up the details of what had happened to Element B.
“Before we open that hatch,” he decided, “we’d better make sure we’re all clean. Break out the sniffers. I want to make sure we’re not carrying any bugs onboard Big Mike.”
The scans lasted nearly an hour and each crewman was examined from head to toe, as the sniffers looked for anything out of the ordinary, high thermals, EM signals, acoustic pulses, anything indicating abnormal atomic activity. Nanobots made noise, if you knew what to listen for.
But the sniffers found nothing. Hawley signaled for the hatch to be opened and scheduled an all-hands briefing in the galley in half an hour.
“Poor Favors…and Sheila too,” said Electronics Tech Dan Rice. “What happened, Skipper? Nobody saw anything?”
Hawley sipped at a coffee and realized he needed something stronger for nerves. “Nothing that caused any alarms. We had HERF and mag weapons. We took precautions. But the Bugs were already there…hiding in plain sight. There were some strange looking humps or mounds…maybe that was them.”
“Now we know where Element B’s anomaly went,” muttered another crewmen.
The angel ignored the jibe. “That may be true, gentlemen. If it is, we have a bigger problem. Most of our Sentinel Line gear is down there on the surface. If the anomaly we were scanning is a swarm, and somehow associated with the Old Ones or Config Zero, they’ve got our latest equipment to study and possibly de-construct or assimilate.”
“He’s right,” Hawley agreed. “We’ve got to go back down there and either retrieve or destroy that stuff before the Bugs can learn how it works. That’s our mission…to set up a sentinel line. If it’s compromised, we have to destroy it. And deal with the Bugs later.”
“How do you plan to deal with ‘em?” asked Rice. “We can’t even find ‘em.”
All eyes turned to Element B, who was standing rigidly at one end of the main table, his hands more or less grasping the edge. No edge effects or blurring, Hawley noted. Pretty good config. It made him feel a little better.
“There are techniques for locating nanobotic swarms,” he told them. “All bot swarms produce a signature. Swarms have to assemble atoms to maintain structure. They have to assemble lots of atoms. That leaves electromagnetic, thermal and quantum effects. You just have to know how to look for them.”
“Well,” said someone in the back, “it takes one to know one.”
Hawley ignored the jibe. “I’m going to form a small detachment. Myself and two others. We’re going back down there, with every weapon we can find, every sensor we can find. Commander—“ he addressed Element B, “—I want you to check out our sensors and detectors. Make sure we’re tuned to detect these bastards, preferably from a distance. We’re going to seek out and destroy those swarms…even if they look like Westerlund and Favors. Believe me, we’ll be doing them a favor.”
Rice spoke up. “Skipper, what if we can’t find them?”
Hawley knew that question would be asked. “If we can’t locate and destroy those swarms, then we destroy or render inoperable all our equipment down there. Then we come home. I’ll work it out with CINCSPACE. I’m commanding this ship and it’s my job to get the ship and her crew back to base.”
Rice seemed mollified. There were murmurs of assent and head nods around the galley. Someone said, “The problem is you can never be sure when you’ve gotten all the bugs.”
Hawley went over the assignments. Rice would come. He decided to take Kohl too. “Commander Element B will be in command here. Do what he says. Now, let’s get moving.”
Hawley was making his way aft through the gangway intending to unlock the ship’s armory on C deck and haul out every weapon they had for inspection. A Service Tech from C deck caught up with him. It was Sergeant Lucy Likasi. She was black as coal and had shaved her head for the mission, but she was tall and wiry strong.
“Captain, could I speak with you?” She looked behind her. Other crewmen were scrambling up and down the gangway, poking in and out of hatches, getting Icarus ready for her return to the surface.
“Sure, Sergeant…what’s on your mind?”
Likasi’s eyes narrowed. “It’s the exec, sir…Commander Element B. Some of the crew…a lot of the crew…well, sir…we’re not sure how good an idea it is to leave the Commander in charge up here. After what happened below, sir…with the swarms and all. And there could be others in space around this rock heap of a world. Sir, I am respectfully requesting someone else be put in charge of Big Mike during the away mission.”
Hawley hated having to fight this battle, over and over again. He understood it. Hell, it made sense. Big Mike was fighting a running battle with a cloud of bots and, when you got right down to it, that’s what Element B was. Who could say how they were related?
“Sergeant, let me be clear about this. Element B is the ranking officer. I gave him a field promotion because he has the experience and the skill to do the job. After Commander Liu—“
“But, sir…that’s my point. Commander Liu was a bad swarm…she was Config Zero or something like that. How do you know Element B isn’t part of the same swarm…a spy or a saboteur or rogue cloud of bugs…whatever you want to call it? We shouldn’t be taking the chance….sir. A lot of the crew want Element B to be put into containment.”
Hawley had heard enough. Every minute they wasted up here was time the swarms could be picking their gear apart on the surface. “Sergeant, I hear you and, believe me, I understand. We’ve all got duties here and Element B’s is running the ship when the Captain is away. The exec has almost a decade’s experience in the Corps. He’s been through fitness checks same as you, every year. He’s got an exemplary record…Sergeant, not every swarm is bad. Get that through your pretty little bald head, okay? There are good and bad people. There are good and bad swarms. Same deal. How do we distinguish them? By what they do. That’s all we can do.”
Likasi had a pained expression on her face. Her eyes pleaded. “Sir, we’re in close proximity with enemy bots…it just seems prudent to take some precautions…in case, Element B is turned or corrupted…we all know configs can be corrupted….”
Hawley shut off the debate. “That will be enough, Sergeant. Carry on—do your duty and help your crewmates complete this mission. That is all.” With that, Hawley shoved past the tech and headed for C deck.
Two hours later, Icarus undocked from Big Mike and maneuvered to de-orbit position several kilometers away from the ship. Hawley, Rice and Kohl were aboard. Kohl did the count for the burn.
“Three…two…one…mark…Ignition.”
Icarus shuddered and began her long, curving descent toward the dark coppery red surface of Sedna. Nobody said a word.
Fifteen minutes later, Hawley was throttling Icarus’ engines and zeroing in on the original landing site. “Got it in my crosshairs, Dean…just a little tweak…there…and we’ll head for that open area to the north. See anything?”
Kohl was on the scopes, studying the terrain in high resolution. “Nothing but debris, Skipper. There’s Igloo. There’s a cargo pallet. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Anything on the bot sensors?”
“Negative…nothing stands out. Background atomic…probably cosmic rays spalling electrons off the surface. Thermals are steady…no spikes. No quantum effects that I can see. Seems quiet.”
“Any sign of Favors? Westerlund?” asked Rice, from the back of the cockpit. He was eyeing the surface uneasily as Icarus maneuvered to land.
“Negative on that…they probably disassembled when we left. Maybe we disrupted them for good.”
“Yeah, right…and maybe Sedna’s really Cancun and we can go skinny-dipping down there
.”
“All right, you two, cut the chatter…I’m going vertical…a hundred ten meters, drifting to the right a little. I’m setting her down here.”
Icarus settled onto the surface with a bump and a shudder and Hawley killed the engines.
“Break out the guns, Lieutenant…time to go hunting.”
The three of them cautiously descended to the surface. Rice scanned around the landing site, strewn with equipment, pallets, hastily discarded gear everywhere.
“Anything?” Hawley asked. He adjusted his own suitscope to zero in on the Igloo module, some two kilometers distant, across a rolling, crater-pocked plain.
Rice scanned the landing site and its perimeter. “This gizmo has a decent range of about a hundred meters. Nothing unusual…normal background…or what passes for normal around here. No unusual signatures.”
Kohl was wary. He kicked experimentally at a discarded box. “Check out the gear pretty closely. These bugs have great config control. They could masquerade as anything.”
Each and every piece of equipment was closely examined. When they were reasonably sure the bot swarms weren’t hiding around the landing site, Hawley made a decision.
“Let’s stick together. Nobody gets more than a few meters from the rest. We’ll hike up to Igloo, see if we can power her up and complete the setup.”
“What about those transmitters?” Kohl asked, eyeing the hills in the opposite direction. “That’s where Favors and Westerlund got it.”
“We’ll have to check those too…try to get ‘em up and operating. Come on…we’ve got a job to do. Keep your weapons charged and ready.”
The trio took off for Igloo, kangaroo-hopping in great leaps, two and three meters high, at times. It was Rice who tried out his suit boost on one hop. The little thrusters around his legs launched him twenty meters off the surface; he nearly came down on his head.
“Stop horsing around,” Hawley growled.
“Sorry, Skipper…just wanted to try it.” Thereafter, Rice confined himself to normal kangaroo hops.
They made it to Igloo without incident. Hawley called a halt some twenty meters away from the module.
“Give me a scan, Dan,” Hawley told Rice. The Electronics Tech swept his instrument around the area. Igloo looked like a fat sausage with treads, now half buried in the regolith, anchored to bedrock.
“Hmm—that’s odd—“
“What have you got, Sergeant?”
Rice tuned his scope to filter out extraneous signals. “I’m getting something on the quantum bands…hard to be sure. First, it’s there…then it isn’t. Nothing on EMs, not at Igloo. There’s a spike when I point back the way we came.”
“We stirred up a lot of dust,” Kohl theorized. “It’s getting charged by cosmic influx before it falls back to the ground. I’ve seen that before.”
Hawley crept uneasily toward Igloo’s hatch, still ajar from their hasty exit hours before. He was about to take a step inside, when a shadow fell across his helmet faceplate. He turned around and was suddenly face to face with Roy Favors. He started and backed quickly out of the module, nearly losing his footing. As he backpedaled, he realized that the Favors-thing was still half-formed. Only his upper torso and face had formed. Below his waist, the bots were still loose, a dark sparkling mist slowly gathering shape.
He didn’t react at first, but merely glared back at the apparition. Maybe it was some sense of recognition; here was a face he knew, something familiar on this godforsaken little potato of a world. Instinct and recognition…that stilled his trigger finger.
The delay was just long enough for some of the bots to drift toward him. In seconds, his left forearm was enveloped.
“BOTS!” Hawley yelled. He backpedaled more, falling to his butt, as he scrambled to get off a burst from his HERF carbine. “BOTS inside--!” He let fly a round and the thunderclap of rf waves blasted the angel into loose atoms in an instant, in a flash of light and electron sizzle. Dust swept through the area and Hawley scrambled to his feet and backed off to fire again.
Rice and Kohl came hopping up and saw the angel beginning to gather form again. As one, the two crewmen sought cover behind a half-buried pallet and pumped more HERF into the angel.
Each discharge shook the ground and stirred up a small gale of dust, but the rounds kept the angel off balance and kept it from forming up into anything too dangerous.
After a few rounds, Hawley called a cease-fire. He had dragged himself to a half-prone position fifteen meters away. They could still more or less see the outline of the swarm against the lighter background of Igloo, a sparkling mass flickering and flashing with light like a miniature thunderstorm, grabbing atoms as it tried to reconstitute itself into something structured.
“Skipper, we ought to try to locate the master,” Kohl said. “If we could find that and destroy it or capture it, the rest of the swarm ought to fall apart.”
“If the bugs are organized like our swarms,” Rice came back. “Who knows how these bastards are configured.”
“He’s got a point,” Hawley said. “Dan, scan that thing. See if you can find a spike in any bands, any kind of concentration of energy. That could be the master.”
Rice inchwormed and slithered his way a little closer, sliding through loose dirt like a caterpillar. The swarm continued to sparkle and flash, as it tried to re-build structure. He scanned the apparition with his probe and announced, “There’s something there—just to the left of the hatch. Lots of thermals and EMs…in fact, there’s several spikes. Maybe more than one master?”
“Maybe,” thought Hawley. “Question is: can we grab it or destroy it and be sure we got it?”
“I’ve got a containment capsule here,” Rice offered. He extracted a small cylinder from a leg pocket and thumbed it to active status. Two lights on top glowed green. “The only thing I can think of to do is open the capsule and run like hell through that area the Lieutenant’s scanning…maybe I’ll get lucky.”
Hawley shook his head. “That’s suicide, Sergeant. We need to think of a better way—“ but before he had finished, Rice had already boosted himself upright and was hopping and sliding toward the swarm. “Sergeant Rice--! Rice…stop…that’s an order--!!”
But the Electronics Tech was already bounding toward the swarm, kangaroo-hopping from foot to foot, sliding and slipping in the dust as his hypersuit fought to keep him upright.
He plunged into the swarm and the swarm suddenly brightened as Rice appeared, like feedstock atoms to the bots swirling and sparkling by Igloo’s hatch.
“Skipper—?” Kohl started to rise and go after him, but Hawley grabbed his leg.
“Stay put…you can’t do anything for him! Hose him down with HERF!”
The two of them discharged their carbines and the thunderclap of rf shook and shuddered the area, lifting great clouds of disturbed dust as if a gale had swept through. Lost in the dust and the swarm, Rice was only partially visible, a throbbing mass of light as the bots attacked and disassembled the crewman. For a few moments, while Hawley and Kohl pumped blast after blast into the swarm, what was left of Rice shone like a miniature supernova, a big bang in slow motion.
“I’m running out of charge, Skipper!” Kohl yelled. He slung his carbine to the dirt and pulled out a magpulse weapon, going through the activation sequence as fast as he could.
“Me too…Jeez, look at that thing…it’s swelling…like an explosion in slow motion.”
“It’s got a lot of mass to work with now,” Kohl said. He emptied his magpulser at the swarm, shifting around to get a better angle. High-gauss magnetic rings slammed into the formation, but seemed to have no effect. “What the hell…how’s it holding together…this should be tearing the swarm to shreds…that sucker should be atom fluff now--!”
“Look—“ yelled Hawley. He pointed to a small dust devil swirling on the other side if Igloo. Only it wasn’t a dust devil. T
he twister spun toward them and then lifted and merged with the greater swarm that was still flashing and roiling by Igloo’s hatch. “Another swarm…and maybe more—“ They could see more tendrils of dust lifting and churning in the distance, as if a great wind was sweeping a wave of regolith toward them. “Is that dust?”
“I don’t think so, Skipper…maybe we’d better get back to the ship…before we become breakfast—“
“Good idea….I’m out of charge anyway. We’ve got more weapons in the ship. Come on—“
They left their cover and beat a hasty retreat back down the slope toward Icarus. Inside the ship, with the hatch secured, Hawley and Kohl unzipped their helmets and pulled them off. Both men pawed through cabinets on either side of the cabin, extracting new carbines and pulsers.
Kohl thumbed sweat from his forehead, took a drink from his drink bag. “Can we fight that, Skipper? Looks the whole friggin’ planet’s made of bots.”
Hawley pulled down a scope and zeroed in on Igloo, several kilometers distant. “I don’t know, Dean. Hey, it looks like that swarm’s dissipating. The light’s fallen off. Now it’s just a glow…you can see right through it. Maybe we did something to it.”
At that moment, a chime sounded in the cabin, indicating comms coming through. It was Element B, aboard Michelangelo.
Hawley quickly briefed the exec on their situation.
Then Element B said: “It gets worse, Captain. That anomaly we were tracking on approach to Sedna has shown up again…long-range scan just put a large diffuse mass about thirty-thousand kilometers away. It’s in an orbit that intersects us, in about forty-five hours, if nothing changes. Mass and signature analysis indicate it’s the same phenomena as before…possibly a dust cloud, but I don’t think so. We’re getting lots of quantum effects on all bands, thermal blooms, EMs, the works. It’s a swarm and it’s a big one.”
Hawley shook his head and scrounged for a food bar in his suit pocket. Munching and slurping from his own drink bag, he said, “This just keeps getting better and better. Well, this place is full of bots, that’s for sure. They got Rice…he was trying to grab a master, but it didn’t work. We’ve both seen bot clouds all over the place….this rockpile’s infested with them. We can’t take ‘em on with what we have. But I don’t want to leave all our gear for them to pick over either. Kohl and I can’t do any more good down here. We’re coming back up. We’ll use Big Mike’s coilgun batteries to blast the landing site and scatter our stuff. Maybe that’ll help.”
The truth was it didn’t make tactical sense to have their forces scattered in orbit and on the ground, not if the Big Cahuna was coming. Hawley and Kohl secured Icarus for launch and twenty minutes later, the little ship blasted her way into orbit.
As they closed on Michelangelo, Hawley kept going over CINCSPACE’s orders in his mind. Set up Sentinel and hold that line…hold that line.
Hawley sniffed. Hold with what? He’d never given much credence to theories and tales about the Old Ones. Even after Q2 had briefed them at Phobos Station, he’d thought of the Old Ones as some kind of advanced fairy tale…a bogeyman concocted by others to explain how we’d let our own nanobot creations get the better of us.
Now, he wasn’t so sure. It wasn’t a fairy tale that Big Mike was tracking. There were bots on Sedna and they had already taken Favors and Westerlund and, now, Rice. Hell, his own exec, Victoria Liu, had turned rogue and tried to destroy the ship. Config Zero was the real bogeyman…whatever the hell it was.
Hawley decided, as Michelangelo’s docking ring came into view and they were smoothly captured and hard docked to the mother ship, that some fairy tales had just enough truth in them to warrant caution. You didn’t tickle the tail of the dragon without checking your escape routes first.
If the crew of Big Mike really was staring right into the teeth of advance scouts from the Old Ones, Hawley knew that he and the crew had some serious strategizing to do. And CINCSPACE would have to decide what the next step would be.
Hawley was pretty sure that Big Mike wouldn’t be able to fight this fight all by himself.
Johnny Winger and the Great Rift Zone Page 38