Nanotroopers Episode 13: Small is All!

by Philip Bosshardt

  Chapter 2

  “Tremors”

  9 degrees North by 21 degrees West

  Southeast of Copernicus Crater, the Moon

  February 5, 2049

  1815 hours (Universal Time – U.T.)

  Sector Six and Sector Five had been assigned to An Nguyen and Deeno D’Nunzio respectively. Their mission called for the two nanotroopers to boost along their sectors until they reached the edge of Copernicus, stop there and initiate the first of several all-band signal sweeps, scooping up everything they could from the Tian Jia base. After sweep one, they were to circle the upper edge of the vast crater, itself over ninety kilometers in diameter, reconnoitering at staggered elevations to continue sweeps and observations of anything they could pick up from the Chinese. In particular, both troopers carried special gear to search for decoherence wakes, signatures of quantum coupler emissions. If any deco wakes were detected, UNISPACE and Q2 would have solid evidence that Red Hammer was on site and that something big was up.

  When the troopers heard weak, nearly incoherent emergency calls from CC1, over in Sector Seven, they both immediately threw away their assigned missions and boosted toward the source of the calls, homing on intermittent signals. The Nanotroopers’ Code was inviolate…you didn’t leave a buddy behind.

  After a few crisscrossing sweeps of the area, they eventually found the hypersuited figure of Lieutenant John Winger, his suit now streaked with lunar dust, lying prone at the bottom of a small crater overlooking the gaping , city-sized chasm of Copernicus.

  Nguyen was the first there. He dropped to the bottom of the crater. At least, the Lieutenant seemed alive.

  “Lieutenant—“ Nguyen fiddled with the comm freqs for a moment. “Lieutenant—are you hurt? Can you talk…can I help?”

  Winger was trembling; even through the hypersuit, Nguyen could see that. His voice was scratchy and weak.

  “…can’t move my arms…or legs…my head’s about…about to explode—“

  That’s when D’Nunzio noticed Winger’s helmet. His face was veiled with a swelling, flickering fog…a swarm inside the hypersuit, loose and uncontained.

  “Buddha! Look--!”

  They both turned Winger over so that his helmet faced up. Now, the glowing mist of a nanobotic swarm inside was clearly visible. And it was thickening.

  “Jesus H. Christ, his ANAD must have launched—“

  “It’s replicating…fast…we’ve got to do something—“

  At the exact same moment, Nguyen and D’Nunzio both remembered a class in nog school they had taken months before at Table Top. Molecular Ops 201…Colonel Hendricks. Henny had drilled into all their heads what he called Rule Number One: if you run into an unknown swarm, HERF it. If you can’t HERF it, divert it. And if you can’t divert it, contain it.

  They sure as hell couldn’t HERF Lieutenant Winger. And in the hard vacuum of the lunar surface, they couldn’t just unzip his suit.

  “Get your MOB canister out!” D’Nunzio yelled.

  Nguyen was already unslinging his device. “But MOB’s not airtight. And it’s got a set config…can’t be programmed.”

  “I’ll launch my own embed,” D’Nunzio told him. “I can augment the MOB bots with ANAD…if I can hack out the right config.” Already, she was tapping out commands on her own wristpad, opening her shoulder capsule, revving up her own ANAD for launch. As she did that, Nguyen got on the Detachment command freq.

  “All units…all sectors, CC1’s down. Converge on sector seven immediately. Need assistance asap! All units…all sectors—“

  Over the next few minutes, one after another, the rest of Alpha Detachment had boosted and hopped their way to the edge of Copernicus, and descended on the little crater where Winger lay trembling and writhing inside his hypersuit.

  D’Nunzio quickly finished her hack. “Launching ANAD now…soon as we get a good seal, Skipper can yank that hat off. His own ANAD must’ve gone haywire…”

  “Hey, what the--?”

  The ground beneath them suddenly began a rolling tremor, an undulating up and down motion like they were all riding a roller coaster. The ground tremor lasted twenty seconds. All around them, the crater walls started sloughing off rubble and dirt. Small slides drifted down the crater walls in slow motion. Dust churned around them, boiling off the surface like gray-brown steam. They were soon caked in the dust. Then, M’Bela noticed something else.

  “Look—“ he pointed down into the center of Copernicus, dozens of kilometers distant. A huge anvil of dust began roiling across the center plain of the crater. The cloud throbbed and swelled like a thing alive. It wasn’t a swarm, so it seemed. There were no obvious indications of swarm activity.

  Then there were more tremors. Waves of tremors and small quakes shook and rattled the tops of Copernicus. All across the terraced stair steps of the huge crater’s walls, tracks of tumbling boulders and sheets of regolith cascaded down to the crater floor. Choking clouds of dust settled and billowed all along the base of the walls, covering fully a third of Copernicus’ diameter.

  “The biggest cloud’s near that base…” reported Sheila Reaves. Reaves had cranked up her helmet scope and zeroed in on a magnified image of the base complex. Blocks of Q2 intel annotated and augmented her view with known facts and figures and she scrolled down what was known of the Tian Jia base. “It almost seems to be emanating from the area…my scroll says that furrowed terrain to the north is called The Tombs…muzang, in Mandarin, it even says. What the hell are they doing down there…it looks like some kind of excavation…or mine pit.”

  “Maybe they’re excavating with explosives,” said M’Bela.

  Now, D’Nunzio had something she could work with. Even as small tremors continued to shake and roll them, she commanded her small ANAD swarm to collapse around the MOB net still forming over Lieutenant Winger. The flashes and flickers of the ANAD swarm could barely be seen through the still-settling dust.

  “It’s working…it’s working,” D’Nunzio said. “We’ll have an airtight seal in a few minutes…hold on, Skipper, just hold on…Buddha, hold him still, will you?”

  Nguyen pressed hard against Winger’s arms and legs, while the enclosure formed around him and began to solidify.

  He was trying to say something, but his voice was weak. The words could barely be made out: “…not ANAD…this is…can’t explain…keep…MOBnet up…”

  Just then, Winger’s weak voice was interrupted by a much stronger voice, a panicked voice, crackling in their helmets. It was the public frequency, LunarCom One, the emergency frequency, only to be used in the direst situations….

  “Jingbao! Jingbao.,..alert…alert! Ji…Ji…this is an emergency…Xuanbu jinji zhuangtai…declaring emergency!”

  Every trooper looked up. A guttural string of Chinese filled their ears. Someone was calling an emergency on LunarCom One…someone from Tian Jia was in trouble, practically screaming on the open freq. Someone at or near the base below them.

  “Stay with him!” D’Nunzio yelled over the ruckus. “We’ve got to get the Lieutenant secured.” While she and Nguyen guided the MOBnet and Deeno’s embed swarm into position, all the while trying to keep a writhing Winger from wriggling out from underneath the swarm, more tremors shook the area, lessened in strength but generating more dust and shifting ground that made it hard to stay in one place.

  Reaves, Tsukota and Barnes perched themselves on the edge of a cliff and scanned the crater floor below them, looking for anything that could be the source of the tremors…or of the distress call.

  The Chinese voice continued its alarm. “Ji…Ji…Mayday, Mayday…any station—“

  Barnes swallowed hard. She could hear the quaver of serious terror in that voice. “Maybe these quakes collapsed something down there. See anything?”

  Reaves adjusted the scope fixture on her helmet, zooming in and scanning the crater floor for kilometers in all directions. “Just a lot
of dust. I see the base. Nothing’s moving though, except the dust.”

  Tsukota turned the volume down on the emergency calls. “Treaty says we have to respond to a LunarCom one emergency…we’re the closest rescue force.”

  Barnes sniffed. “We can’t just leave the Lieutenant like this…plus we have a mission.”

  Winger’s scratchy voice cut in. “It’s getting…getting a little better...”

  The MOBnet had fully collapsed around the Lieutenant, now augmented with an ANAD barrier from D’Nunzio’s embed. The shield was like a translucent blanket, inside of which Johnny Winger continued to squirm and writhe with the bots infesting his helmet.

  D’Nunzio was on her knees next to Winger. “Skipper, the seal’s good. Try to remove that helmet—“

  Winger fidgeted and finagled and thrashed about inside the enclosure, until he managed to unseal his neck ring. He swung his head and gripped the helmet through the enclosure, fighting against the resistance of the bots as he did so and, with some grunting and effort, managed to slide his helmet off. Immediately, the enclosure was thick with bots, like a billowing smoke cloud. His face was red with exertion and sweat poured down his cheeks.

  “Whew!” He fanned at the bots with his hands. Dana, please back off, will you? he said to himself. “Look, fellas, I’ll be okay…this is—“ he couldn’t tell them it wasn’t ANAD. His own ANAD was still secure in his own shoulder capsule. “—this is just a small leak…probably a few bots stayed outside on the last recovery…really, I’ll be okay. See to that emergency call.—“

  “Skipper-“ D’Nunzio said, “we can’t leave you here like this.”

  Now Winger knew it was time to be a little more firm. “Moonglow’s still our mission. Q2 needs the intel. Send a detail—Reaves, you and Barnes and Tsukota—get down to the base, see what’s going on. This is a perfect cover for some close-in recon. The rest of you…keep up your surveillance by sectors, all bands, scoop up everything you can find. Check out that dust cloud by the excavation too.” The ground around them shuddered and shimmied with more slight tremors, sending up small poofs of dust. “And stay away from the crater walls. I don’t want anybody getting buried in a landslide.”

  So it was decided; D’Nunzio would stay with Winger, just to make sure he had that weird swarm under control; already it was dispersing throughout the MOB enclosure, fading away to a barely visible shadow around the Lieutenant’s face and neck. Barnes, Reaves and Tsukota would respond to the LunarCom emergency by boosting down to the base, to render whatever assistance they could. The Lunar Treaty required that. The rest of the Detachment would continue their surveillance of Tian Jia and its surroundings and try to determine the source of that swelling ball of dust boiling out of the excavation northwest of the base.

  M’Bela and Nguyen set off on their sector scans while D’Nunzio worked with Winger through the MOB enclosure to give the Lieutenant extra water and rations and make sure the odd swarm didn’t erupt again into something bad.

  Barnes, Reaves and Tsukota lifted off on suit boost and took dead aim on the Tian Jia base, some forty kilometers distant. The trio would be the visible face of their response to the emergency call, while the rest of the Detachment continued its mission.

  Tian Jia was a compact quad of domes and structures, situated some ten kilometers north of Copernicus’ central peaks. As they homed on the alert beacon, Barnes called up the Q2 file on the base, watching the text and pics scroll down her helmet visor with the rectilinear lights of the base itself growing in the background as they approached.

  The four domes had names, according to the intel: Shenyang, Hangzhou, Kunming and Chongchin. Each was connected to the other by buried access tunnels, along with wireways, and other service piping. Crawlerways circled the compound, and two of the domes sported what looked like growths along the sides of the domes; these were crawler garages and workshops. A longer crawlerway snaked off to the northeast, ending at the excavation site known as Muzang, which the Q2 analysts had translated as ‘The Tombs.’ This was where the roiling dust cloud, still slowly expanding in the low gravity, was thickest. Something around the excavation, something around The Tombs, was generating a hell of a lot of dust.

  “Let’s put down about half a klick this side of the domes,” Barnes suggested. “We can walk or kangaroo hop the rest of the way.”

  “Any airlocks?” Reaves asked.

  “That closest dome should have one, according to my specs. Treaty-standard gear, the usual interfaces. We should be able to get in.”

  “I’m keeping my mag gun primed, just in case,” Tsukota said.

  Moments later, the three nanotroopers touched down to a smooth foot landing on the ground. Little poofs of dust surrounded their boots. The domes were ahead, a few thousand meters. They covered the distance in ten minutes, leaping like Olympic athletes ten meters high with each bound.

  They came to the airlock and cycled their way through with no problem.

  “The LunarCom channel is still open,” Barnes noted, ‘but our Chinese screamer seems to have vanished. I’ll try to raise him—“ Barnes keyed her own mic, then “Farside Survey One to anyone, Farside Survey One to anyone, responding to LunarCom emergency…we’re inside the Tian Jia base. Responding to an emergency call…here to render assistance and aid—“

  But no one answered the call.

  The troopers cycled out of the airlock into a room crammed with gear, a crawler parked in its bay, hooked up by cables and wires, several suits hanging from support frames from the ceiling, consoles winking with lights and an odd patch of white ash next to one of the seats.

  Reaves bent down, her suit servos whining to adjust, to examine the patch. She dragged her fingers through the ash. “I’ve got a bad feeling, guys. Put your scopes on this patch…ten to one, this is atom fluff.”

  Tsukota examined the patch with a portable analyzer from his web belt. “Bingo! Readings off scale…high thermals, high EMs, some badass atom smashing right here and not long ago either. Whoever or whatever this was, they were disassembled in a hurry and it’s not ANAD signature either. I don’t recognize the graphs at all…something new.”

  “And plenty nasty,” muttered Barnes. “Come on…and keep your weapons primed.”

  They pushed through and found themselves in a circular corridor, a hallway that appeared to circle the dome along its outer circumference. They passed hab spaces, berths and beds and bathrooms and shower stalls. They came to a compact commissary, with counters, and refrigerators and cabinets, all well stocked with supplies.

  They also passed two more patches along the corridor flooring, the last one near an escape hatch. The hatch was closed but not fully sealed. A thin high-pitched squeal of air could be heard.

  “Better launch an ANAD subswarm and get that sealed,” Barnes told them. “My ears are already popping.” They paused for a moment, while Tsukota did the honors, launching his own embed and pecking out a basic config to form a seal over the hatch ring. The small swarm was barely visible, only an occasional pop of light gave away the fact that a formation of nanoscale assemblers was hard at work. Moments later, the hatch was sealed and the leak had been stopped.

  “We’ll send ‘em the bill,” Reaves said. “Where the hell are we? And where is everybody?”

  “My specs say this is Kunming Dome,” Barnes replied. “Mostly hab spaces, residential units, this—“ but her words were suddenly interrupted by a commotion up ahead. A short, stocky man clad only in a long-john undergarment, came barreling around the curve of the corridor, the cooling tubes of his undergarment flapping and spraying water everywhere. His face was scrunched up in some kind of frozen scream and his hands were waving and flailing about his head.

  He stumbled and went head first to the floor when he saw the hypersuited troopers.

  Tsukota and Reaves immediately had their mag carbines trained on the crewman, who struggled up to his feet and immediate
ly raised his hands. His face was shiny with sweat, pocked with lacerations and his voice hoarse and halting, Mandarin Chinese mixed with snatches of English.

  “Tamen laile…tamen laile…they’re coming…inside the dome…get away while you can!”

  His face was wild and strained and only a maggun barrel in the chest forced him to calm down and take stock of his own situation.

  “Who’s coming?” asked Barnes. “What’s inside the dome?”

  Bit by bit, haltingly at first, the words came tumbling out. Chinese mixed with English, punctuated with great heaving gasps for air and arms still waving about, the crewman admitted he was actually the Chief Engineer for the whole base. His name was Liu Wei Fong.

  “Got to be Red Hammer,” muttered Reaves. “Or some kind of angel…we should haul him back to Farside with us…or slam him now and be done with it.”

  “No,” said Barnes. “Intel, remember? We need intel. Engineer Liu, what happened? Where is everybody?”

  They moved to the commissary, where Liu took a seat at a table. Tsukota managed to get some tea going. Liu sipped greedily and gratefully, warily eyeing the troopers through steam from his cup.

  They could hardly believe what he told them.

  Liu reported that it was true: the Chinese had been digging up by the Tombs, excavating another of the strange spheres that had turned up at Engebbe and was also buried beneath the Paryang monastery in Tibet. A quantum sphere, able to give anyone who mastered it unprecedented access to the archives and knowledge of a race not of the Earth.

  “We call them Lao bufen…the Old Ones,” Liu reported. “This sphere…this lingyu…he is like a door. Like a portal to their library…all kinds of knowledge is there…new devices, new sciences, a fabulous discovery—“

  “And more for Red Hammer, I imagine,” Barnes said sourly. “We know they’re here…we have deco wake evidence—“

  “Yes, yes, Hong Chui…they have three here…researchers, I was told. But when we uncovered the sphere, we found something else…very bad.”

  Reaves was skeptical. “Oh, yeah…like what? A gold mine?”

  Lui shook his head vigorously, downing the scalding hot tea in one gulp. “No, no…a swarm…a massive swarm, like never encountered before…it’s already escaping the muzang—“

  “Like a dust cloud, maybe?” surmised Tsukota. “That must be what we saw boosting in.”

  Lui agreed. “This swarm…he is massive. It’s underground, below the excavation. Moving below the surface, hundreds of meters below the surface. Truly it is big, maybe half a kilometer in dimension, maybe more. This is what is causing the tremors, all the quakes and seismic activity. Truly a danger—“

  Even as he spoke, another tremor rocked the dome and pots and pans fell clattering to the floor from shelves along the galley walls. Liu’s eyes widened in terror.

  “You must help us now…the Treaty—this swarm is damaging Tian Jia…one of our scientists thinks it could even consume the entire Moon.”

  “We did see a lot of landslides on the way across Copernicus,” admitted Barnes.

  “Sinkholes too,” said Tsukota. “Remember that big ravine just before we got to Copernicus, along that ridge of ejecta?”

  “How many of you are left?” Reaves asked.

  Liu shrugged. “Few. Maybe I am the only one. But we need help. This swarm –this Guanli ren…your own people have called it a Keeper, I believe…is moving toward the surface. What you see as dust clouds are only the farthest projections of the formation…it isn’t dust at all. Small robots, nanorobotic devices, emerging from fissures in the surface…some are even leaving the surface. They have propulsors---we’ve examined some in our labs. They can move under their own power…some may even have left the Moon entirely.”

  Reaves had a dark scowl on her face. “Lieutenant Winger’s mentioned something called a Keeper before…like a master swarm…or something. When we were in that cave collapse at Engebbe, I think we might have run into one. Maybe there’s more than one.”

  “Please—“Liu pleaded with his eyes and hands. “Please…you must help us defeat this force…this dragon. We can’t stop it…it’s consuming the ground below Tian Jia, causing seismics everywhere. Surely, you feel this even at your Farside and Shackleton Crater bases. If Guanli ren can’t be stopped, even your own bases will be in danger.”

  “Possibly true,” Barnes admitted. “But I can’t authorize anything. I’m just a sergeant. This is way above my pay grade. We’ve got to get this back to the Lieutenant…or get him here.”

  “Remember our mission,” Reaves said. She looked around. The whole base nearly unoccupied. One engineer in underwear scared out of his wits. A perfect chance to do a little reconnoitering around this place.

  “The treaty changes everything, Sheila. You can read as well as I can. Even UNIFORCE missions have to take a back seat when lives are threatened up here. We can’t let Red Hammer control or use this Keeper thing. I think both sides have the same interest here, in stopping this swarm, this Keeper, from doing any more damage. I wouldn’t want what’s happening here to wind up in my backyard…or yours either.”

  “So what do we do?”

  Barnes was nominally in command of the small detail, though she didn’t want to wave that in anybody’s face. “I say somebody goes back to sector seven and informs the Lieutenant. Better yet, if he can travel, boost back here and let him see for himself. I don’t see a real conflict here…treaty versus the mission. But the Lieutenant will have to sort all this out.”

  They discussed options for a few more minutes, then Barnes told Reaves to take Tsukota and go back to the Lieutenant. “See if he can boost…he needs to see this.”

  Reaves didn’t argue but she wasn’t happy about the idea. She and Ozzie Tsukota went back to the airlock, exited Kunming Wing and boosted away, flying low across the crater floor. They homed on Nguyen’s signal. The trip would take about half an hour…a long, boring ride across kilometer after kilometer of rubble and dirt, then gain some altitude and clear the crater walls.

  Inside Tian Jia, Barnes told M’Bela: “We’ll take this joker with us and do a little snooping, see if we can find out what caused all this.” M’Bela hoisted the shaking Liu Wei Fong to his feet and they set out to reconnoiter the compound, occasionally holding onto the walls as the ground shook and shimmied beneath them.

  Outside, Reaves and Tsukota eventually boosted themselves over the craggy, crumpled walls of Copernicus, wide-eyed at the occasional landslides that the tremors were triggering. To the north of the track, the roiling ball of dust had grown visibly wider, billowing out to cover fully a third of the ground beyond the base itself. Now, for the first time, they could both see sporadic discharges of light, pops and flashes, indicating that this was no ordinary dust cloud.

  “Bots,” Reaves muttered. “Lots of bots. Eventually, we’re going to have to confront that thing.”

  It gave Sheila Reaves the creeps. Involuntarily, she shuddered. “I’m just hoping the Skipper’s okay. He’ll know what to do. How far to that crater?”

  Tsukota checked the nav screen on his helmet faceplate. “Deeno’s’s signal says about three hundred meters…steer left five degrees.”

  They closed on the small crater and eventually, Tsukota announced they were there.

  But the crater was empty. Some MOBnet remnants were scattered across the regolith.

  There was no sign of either D’Nunzio or Winger.