Nanotroopers Episode 14: The HNRV Factor Read online

Nanotroopers

  Episode 14: The HNRV Factor

  Copyright 2016 Philip Bosshardt

  A few words about this series….

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Episode #TitleApproximate Upload Date

  1‘Atomgrabbers’1-14-16

  2‘Nog School’2-8-16

  3‘Deeno and Mighty Mite’2-29-16

  4‘ANAD’3-21-16

  5‘Table Top Mountain’4-11-16

  6‘I, Lieutenant John Winger…’5-2-16

  7‘Hong Chui’5-23-16

  8‘Doc Frost’6-13-16

  9‘Demonios of Via Verde’7-5-16

  10‘The Big Bang’7-25-16

  11‘Engebbe’8-15-16

  12‘The Symbiosis Project’9-5-16

  13‘Small is All!’9-26-16

  14‘’The HNRIV Factor’10-17-16

  15‘A Black Hole’11-7-16

  16‘ANAD on Ice’11-29-16

  17‘Lions Rock’12-19-16

  18‘Geoplanes’1-9-17

  19‘Mount Kipwezi’1-30-17

  20‘Doc II’2-20-17

  21‘Paryang Monastery’3-13-17

  22‘Epilogue’4-3-17

  Chapter 1

  “Archimedes’ Lever”

  “Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world.”

  Archimedes

  Farside Observatory

  Korolev Crater, the Moon

  February 10, 2049

  0130 hours (Universal Time – U.T.)

  Like Percy Marks was always saying, nightfall at Korolev Crater came abruptly, too abruptly, thought Adam Bright.

  Bright watched the black creep down the crater walls and ooze across the crater floor like a spreading stain. It was always depressing…another two weeks of night with only the stars and a platoon of bathing-challenged astronomers for company. Even the faux decorations in the Fiji Island canteen over in Kepler Wing couldn’t drive the demons from Bright’s over-active imagination. Although maybe one of RoboBob’s fiery mai-tais could. Drink enough of those things and you could sleep for months, maybe even long enough to make it to the end of your tour at Farside. He’d seen people do that.

  Bright was pulling graveyard shift today, although in the lunar night, every shift was like graveyard shift. Tending the radars and telescopes of Farside Array, a key node in the SpaceGuard System that scanned the heavens for anything approaching the Earth-Moon system, was a critical job, especially now that the Keeper that Red Hammer and their Chinese overlords had dug up below Copernicus had started bollixing everything from here to Timbuktu.

  Bright took one last look out the nearest porthole and begrudged the final wisps of daylight before Farside was fully enveloped in the nightfall. At that same moment, he heard a beeping from his console and turned his attention back to the array controls.

  What the hell…

  Adam Bright looked over his boards, controlling the positioning of the great radars out on the crater floor and the optical and radio telescopes that accompanied them. He quickly pinpointed the source of the beeping…Nodes 20 through 24…the south lateral array…was picking up some anomaly.

  He massaged the controls and tried to focus the array better, get better resolution on the target. SpaceGuard didn’t beep without reason. Somewhere in its nearly infinite memory were ephemeris data and trajectory details for nearly every detectable piece of space junk in the solar system, out to several billion miles. Like an overprotective mother, SpaceGuard knew where everybody was supposed to be, right down to the nearest centimeter.

  She only beeped and chirped when someone was out of position.

  A quick perusal made the hairs on the back of Adam Bright’s neck stand up. The system displayed a list of likely targets, based on radar imaging and known ephemerides. He scanned the list.

  Right at the top was the culprit: an asteroid…a small, insignificant asteroid named Hicks-Newman-Rivera-Vargas (cataloged as HNRV 23998) had just found itself nudged from its eons-old trajectory onto a new course.

  Something had happened to Hicks-Newman. The half-mile wide asteroid had changed position, just enough to trigger a SpaceGuard alert.

  Before he could decide what to do next, Bright was interrupted by the sound of a door opening…it was Max Lane, the shift supervisor.

  Lane was a heavy-set bear of a man, who appreciated the Moon’s one-sixth gravity more than most. He had thick eyebrows and a perpetual scowl.

  “What gives? SpaceGuard’s sending out an anomaly alert. What’s on the board?” Lane sat down at a console next to Bright and began tapping at the keyboard.

  Bright shrugged. “She’s indicating HNRV 23998, but that doesn’t make any sense. We haven’t had any anomalies in that sector in, like, forever.…unless the Keeper’s pulled a quick one on us.”

  “Won’t be the first time that’s happened,” Lane muttered. He pointed to a display in front of them. “Check out the delta-vee. That’s almost half a kilometer a second.”

  Bright clucked. “That shouldn’t even be possible. What gives? Can you get a read on the new trajectory?”

  Lane said, “I’m trying…but SpaceGuard’s showing Doppler fluctuations…she’s still thrusting…still changing velocity. Bright, check your east and west arrays. Let’s zero in on the vicinity of the asteroid and see if something’s around that might be tugging her off course. I’ll send this to UNISPACE too…they need to know something’s horsing around with a good sized rock out there.”

  For the next few minutes, the huge radar arrays probed deep space with beams of radio energy. At the moment, Hicks-Newman was several hours away by light signal. They wouldn’t get any returns until nearly midnight, local time. In the meantime, Lane washed the raw trajectory feed from the first returns through the computers. “It’ll give us an idea of what we’re dealing with here.”

  The analysis, when it came back an hour later, made their blood run cold.

  Max Lane shook his head. “This can’t be right. It doesn’t make any sense. Better set up another run through SpaceTrack and see if we gave it bad data before.”

  “I don’t know, Chief…the numbers seem to match up.” Bright brought up a projected plot on their main displays. It showed the nominal trajectory the asteroid was now following. A dotted line showed SpaceTrack’s projected new path, after the velocity change had been factored in.

  The path intersected Earth in late May, next year, right before Memorial Day in the U.S., Bright noted. He always took his family to the beach on Memorial Day.

  “This thing’s showing an Earth-intercept path and the doppler shows velocity is still changing. We’d better get UNISPACE on the line right away.

  The telecom spanned several hundred thousand miles in a three-way hookup: Farside Observatory patched in with UNISPACE offices aboard Gateway Station and UNIFORCE headquarters in Par
is.

  Kaoru Nakamura was the Earthside chief of UNIFORCE Surveillance Operations. He was emphatic on the screen, as he scrolled through Farside’s data.

  “Gentlemen, you’re sure of these numbers? I mean, I know the data’s good…but believe me, this cannot happen, short of an actual impact. Do your instruments show anything striking the asteroid? Like something big and moving real fast?”

  UNIFORCE was represented by a sleepy, rather morose Galen Bosch, the assistant Director-General.

  Adam Bright was emphatic. “There’s nothing in the data. Something is or has clearly tugged on Hicks enough to change its delta-v by about three-tenths of a kilometer per second.”

  “And the current trajectory, assuming no more changes…?”

  Bright had checked and re-checked the analysis, washed the data through SpaceTrack half a dozen times. The result was always the same.

  “Earth intercept, sometime in the last week of May…next year. We’re still tracking,” he hastened to add. “And we’re still seeing some velocity change even now. But doppler indicates the rate of change is slowing.”

  Galen Bosch was grim. “Then Red Hammer has made good on their threat. Somehow they’ve managed to divert this thing from its intended orbit. I thought we had that Keeper thing reasonably well contained. Dr. Nakamura…can a quantum system, assuming that’s what the Keeper is, do something like this? Can Red Hammer do this?”

  Nakamura’s image went off screen while he ran down the numbers. Momentarily, he reappeared. “Apparently, they can, Director. It’s basically impossible to quarantine a quantum system anyway.”

  Bosch was working out an idea in his head. “If you could land some kind of device, a mass-driver or a rocket engine…something like that, on the asteroid, then you should be able to counteract this…force, or whatever it is, that’s diverting and tugging on Hicks.”

  Nakamura nodded. “In theory, yes. In fact, we’ve already drawn up scenarios like this as an option to the Science Board. We may well be facing this very problem with another asteroid called Apophis. There’s a one in a hundred thousand chance of this baby striking Earth in April 2068. In fact, the Board’s meeting right now at Gateway. But the devil is in the details. Until we know the nature of the force—is it continuous or intermittent?—what’s the magnitude of the force?--where is the source?...I’m not sure we can counteract. Obviously, something has to be done. But UNISPACE has a lot of options and there’s still a lot of time between now and next May.”

  “Any data to help out Dr. Nakamura?” Bosch asked. The A-DG would have to brief UNSAC soon and he wanted as many options as he could get his hands on.

  Adam Bright had noticed additional effects beyond the course change of Hicks-Newman. “At the same time we got anomaly alerts from SpaceTrack on Hicks, the system started giving us a bunch of perturbations…everything going haywire in the outer Solar System. Beyond the orbit of Jupiter, it’s like a big gravity wave just pushed everything aside—“ he waved at Lane to pull up the ecliptic plots so the others could see. “—anomalies with almost every satellite, man-made or otherwise. At Saturn, Calypso, Helene and Epimetheus…at Uranus: Ophelia and Caliban. These are just the early ones, the biggest shifts. There are dozens of these. Even the bigger bodies…Oberon and the like, have shown measurable shifts in position and velocity. It’s like something massive just passed through the Solar System. But we’re tracking no unknown or unreported bodies.”

  Galen Bosch was studying something off screen. “Gentlemen, I’m willing to bet the source of all these disturbances is much closer to home. Quantum Corps just ran an op down on the Moon’s surface, nearside at Tian Jia…the Chinese base at Copernicus…some kind of weird quantum disturbances there. Recon team found a large swarm under the surface. They tried to contain it and took some casualties. Then the thing up and stopped moving, went deep underground. Nobody has a believable explanation. I haven’t seen all the reports yet but I’m willing to bet there’s a connection.”

  Nakamura was intrigued with the phenomena described by Bright. “There’s a theory about what you’re describing, Farside. I heard a talk on the idea over the Net last year…a conference on perturbation effects caused by extra-solar processes. As I recall, the authors of the paper described ways to effect large-scale perturbations by manipulating local cosmic string structure. Like tugging on the basic fabric of the Universe. All very theoretical…there’s no evidence such a thing is even possible.”

  Bosch wasn’t so sure. “Maybe there is, Doctor. At this point, I don’t think we can exclude anything. I’ll brief UNSAC right away. I expect there will be a full meeting of the Security Council after that. Whatever the cause of this shift in the asteroid’s path, the effect is the same: Red Hammer is making good on their threat. Either we find a way to put Hicks-Newman back on the right path, or we run out of options pretty fast.”

  He didn’t have to add that one of the cartel’s long-standing demands was that Quantum Corps itself be shut down.

  Custer Inn

  Haleyville, Idaho, USA

  February 10, 2049

  2200 hours

  Johnny Winger downed the last of his beer and let fly a belch worthy of an entire platoon of nanotroopers. Even the lampshade over the table rattled with the blast.

  Mighty Mite Barnes hoisted her own mug. “Deeno would be proud of you, Skipper. Right from the heart—“

  Sheila Reaves concurred. “Or somewhere nearby. Hey, let’s not make this a wake, okay? It’s was a tough go with Moonglow. Yeah, we lost some good people but that’s life in the Corps. Nanotroopers know how to party—“ she licked the frosting off the mug, then off her lips, “—no matter where they wind up.”

  Custer Inn was a faintly shabby, log and shingle mountain lodge of a hotel, nestled in the piney brow of a small turnout valley off the main road, a mile or so before Highway 7 broadened into Main Street, which was lined with gift shops, bait and tackle joints and hiking suppliers. The pale blue glow of a parasailing shop, closed for the evening, threw enough light across the road, so everyone could find the turnoff readily enough.

  Ostensibly, the old geezers of 1st Nano had invited the newbies and latest nog school grads to the Custer Inn for a round of slamming down beers, telling bad jokes, and getting to know one another. The unit had lost four troopers during Operation Moonglow: D’Nunzio, Nguyen, M’Bela and Tsukota. Barnes had thought to bring some academy pics and set them up in the center of the table, propped up against various foaming pitchers of beer. That had inevitably evolved to naming the pitchers themselves for the respective photos.

  “Here—“ offered Reaves, hoisting a pitcher, “let’s finish off D’Nunzio before we start on Nguyen.” That brought another round of laughter.

  “Lieutenant, what was it like, skedaddling from the Keeper?”

  Winger studied his newest CC2, Quantum Sergeant (QSgt) Al Glance. Glance had a red-haired buzzcut, with a horse’s face and rather feminine lips that always had that pouty look. He was slated to become 1st Nano’s CC2, a command and control rating second only to Winger. Sometimes, he gave Barnes and Reaves the creeps though. Glance had a way of appearing out of nowhere without warning, like some kind of wraith. “That’s a good way to get your ass HERF’ed, mister,” Barnes had warned him. But Glance knew his stuff and he had come out of nog school with high marks.

  “I was going to let my own ANAD disassemble me and allow me merge with the Keeper swarm…don’t know what I was thinking, but you know—“ he shrugged, “heat of battle and all that. Then, common sense prevailed. I like beer too much to do that.” He belched again, for emphasis. “So, I saw a tunnel, actually some kind of lava tube the geos said, and squeezed in. Took a couple of hours—I thought I was going to suffocate—but I came up about halfway to the crater wall. That’s when Mite here spotted me.”

  “Yeah, “Barnes added, “he looked like a prairie dog with a helmet. We hoppered dow
n and scooped him up, none the worse for wear.”

  “Sounds like you were lucky,” said Sergeant Nicole Simonet. Simonet was Belgian, already checked out on ANAD systems as the new IC1 for the platoon. She was a brunette, had a bowl for hair and could peck out a config for ANAD faster than anybody Winger had ever seen. Winger figured he wanted Simonet on his team when time came for the annual Code and Stick games at Table Top.

  “Or maybe he just gave that Keeper indigestion,” said Hoyt Gibbs. Gibby was slated to be second rating to Simonet for 1st Nano as IC2. He didn’t have Simonet’s fingers---or her dreamy onyx eyes—but Winger figured he would be a valuable addition to the platoon in any kind of cat fight with adversary swarms.

  The last newbie was Corporal Lucy Hiroshi, Japanese DPS1 for the outfit. She had come out of nog school with unbelievable scores for mag gun marksmanship and the scuttlebutt was she could pick off a fly’s moustache at two kilometers. Not that flies had moustaches, but you got the point and even better, she was cooler than a polar bear’s teeth under fire.

  “I’m going to miss all of them,” Barnes muttered over the top of her mug. “Deeno wisecracking and Witchy forever fondling those amulets and trinkets…like he was a witch doctor.”

  “Wonder what else he fondled?” asked Reaves.

  “Yeah, and Buddha was always praying to his ancestors…it was like they were part of 1st Nano too.”

  Winger decided that was enough for one night. “Okay, troops, I’m officially calling a halt to this funeral service.” He held up a mug. “One last round and we’re out of here.”

  They toasted their fellow troopers, those lost and those new, and polished off all the mugs. After some belching and farting, the troopers got up and meandered outside. A few minutes’small talk and liberty was over. Most headed back to Table Top. Major Kraft had called an all-hands meeting for 0700 hours at the Mission bunker at the north end of the mesa the next day.

  Only Al Glance lingered behind. When his fellow atomgrabbers had departed and much of the crowd inside Custer had spilled out into the gravel parking lot, firing up turbos and bikes and revving their electrics, Glance had other business down at the hotel end of the compound. Personal business.

  He rolled down the decline toward the lower parking lot, and parked his scooter in the shadows, somehow feeling comfort in the cloak of anonymity. Through the windows, the bar and restaurant still shone with boozy conviviality, laughter and saloon music spilling out through the front doors.

  He went inside the hotel.

  As instructed, as he had several times before, he went to Registration and secured a room for the night. Number 127, the Geronimo wing and would he be needing any help with his luggage, sir, we do have bellhop service--

  Glance ignored the offer and went looking for the room. He turned up and down several corridors, crossed a breezeway to another building and eventually stumbled upon Room 127. He unlocked it and went inside.

  He waited, uneasily, for about half an hour.

  As before, the knock, when it came, was soft, almost inaudible.

  "Housekeeping--" purred an accented voice.

  Glance let the woman in, shutting the door quickly behind him. The lights were low in the room, only a single lamp over the bed lit. The staff woman was Oriental. Chinese, perhaps, from the look of her.

  Glance hadn't seen her before. She was short, petite, straight black hair tied in a severe bun. Her maid's outfit was impeccable: white skirt and apron, white shoes, black and white blouse and latex gloves.

  She glared coldly at Glance. "You're late."

  The Q-Sergeant attempted a shrug, but realized it wasn't visible in the shadows. "Couldn't be helped…I had a get-together, with the platoon. Meet all the new guys. Knock back some suds, sniff each other’s tails, you know…unit cohesion stuff.”

  Her real name was Wei Ming, but Glance didn't know this. Nor did he ask. It was understood that identities weren't important. Only results were important. That much was understood quite well.

  Wei Ming pursed her lips, paced deeper into the black of the room. She drew the shades aside, scanned outside, satisfied, she came back, partially into the light. Her face was a half moon, pale and unblemished as a ceramic figurine. "Why?"

  Glance watched her, hoping to detect something, some inkling of where he stood with them. Maybe a twitch, a clench of her fist, but there was nothing. "1st Nano lost four troopers on the Moon. I’m new to them. Winger wanted everyone to get to know each other. I did get the CC2 slot okay, but questions were asked. I told them what I was supposed to.”

  "Mmm." A question or a statement? He wasn't sure.

  Glance found the silence uncomfortable. "They don't have a firm connection yet. Just suspicions."

  "That is enough." Wei Ming's face hardened. "What happened at Copernicus? You were supposed to have stopped them--"

  Glance knew that was coming. He'd spent hours, trying out different answers, none of them any good. Quietly, resigned, he explained the mission at Tian Jia, what had happened at the Tombs during the excavation, how Johnny Winger--damnable Winger--had managed somehow to beat back the Keeper for awhile, even grab some bots for examination before they'd been driven off. He tried to put a spin on the story, a certain inevitability, factors beyond my control, I wasn't prepared for--but she brushed him off and went pacing again, this time more abruptly.

  When she came back into the light, her face was no longer a half moon. It had morphed into a hard, impassive mask, a carnival mask, an angry clown. Was it the light…maybe nanoderm patches changing with her mood? He'd heard of the trick--

  "This is no good," she told him. The undulations on her cheeks and forehead seemed to settle down, take on a firmness. "If Quantum Corps' got one of our mechs, that's no good at all." She frowned. It was almost a relief to see a normal gesture, something he understood. "With one of our mechs, they'll surely develop countermeasures."

  "It will take some time--"

  Now she was visibly angry. The skin kneaded itself into a hard fist, making her cheeks bulge slightly like a lioness with fresh kill in her mouth. "They're not stupid, Glance. Don't make that mistake. You've made enough already." She was thinking, her cheeks returning to normal planes, sleek and alabaster. "The Keeper must be allowed to develop and expand globally. The Project depends on it."

  Glance had heard of The Project before. He wanted to ask, but he decided against it. But he was curious.

  "Maybe if I knew more about--"

  But Wei Ming wasn't listening. She had new instructions from Red Hammer. "You're being paid well for your services, Sergeant. Yet you continue to fail us."

  "I can't work miracles."

  "Leave the miracles to us. Just do your part." There was an unmistakable menace--had her voice changed timbre? An echo, a frequency shift, multiple tones superimposed. He shook his head. Had Red Hammer mastered that too?

  She went on. "You must sabotage any more efforts to develop countermeasures. ANAD must not be allowed to interfere with the Project. This is a critical time now."

  Glance's throat constricted. No…it was a normal reflex. He told himself that, reassured himself he still controlled his own throat muscles. "That's not the agreement. I agreed only to provide intelligence, not perform sabotage. It's too dangerous."

  Wei Ming was stern. Nanoderm rolled across her face, an earthquake of skin, reflecting her emotions. "Your mission is changed. You'll be paid well for your work…if it is successful. We've always paid well, have we not?"

  Glance nodded glumly.

  She reached into her apron, withdrew a small disk. She placed it in Glance's hand. He willed his palm to remain still.

  "It is a small bug. Load it into ANAD's kernel. It will weaken ANAD, subtly, a little at a time. This will make it harder for Quantum Corps to counter the Keeper. Install this at the right time--you will be signaled when. And keep sending intelligence back…the usu
al way."

  She vanished from the room almost before Glance realized she was gone, blending into the shadows. He stayed a few minutes more, breathing rhythmically, testing arms, legs, facial muscles. Making sure he still had control of himself. Red Hammer did that to people.

  Then he left the Custer Inn and sped back to Table Top Mountain.

  It was near midnight when he parked the turbo outside Missions Ops. He walked through stiff breezes across the quadrangle to the Barracks, right in the center of the base. Outside his quarters, he ran into Mighty Mite Barnes and Sheila Reaves, having a smoke, huddled together to shield themselves from the wind, beneath the overhang.

  Barnes was contemptuous. "What happened, Sergeant? You didn’t come back with the rest of us. Bitch wouldn't put out for you?"

  The hard drive along Highway 7 had helped Glance clear his mind. He snorted. "I left her panting…for more. She couldn't get enough of what I have."

  "Right," said Barnes. Whatever the hell that is.