Johnny Winger and the Battle at Caloris Basin Read online

  His heart went into his mouth. He had to do something. He had to stop her.

  Dietrick Vogel felt for the alarm panel by the hatch and stabbed the Master Alarm button. Instantly, a warning klaxon sounded throughout Herschel, screeching and warbling through all decks.

  Polansky turned around and spotted him. He saw that her hand was gone…or more accurately, had broken down into a cloud of bots. A steady stream was flowing off the stump at the end of her arm into the hull valve assembly.

  There was only one thing he could do. All the HERF and mag weapons were locked in the armory on A deck, three levels away.

  Vogel closed his eyes and clenched his teeth, then lunged at the Jana Polansky swarm with every ounce of force he could muster.

  The only sure way to kill a swarm was with another swarm. He’d learned that on day one in nog school tactical class. But he didn’t have a swarm. He didn’t have a HERF gun. Not even a wrench or a hammer.

  All he had was his own mass and momentum. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Vogel was dimly aware that his chances were, to put it mildly, remote. It would have been easier to cold-cock a cloud of smoke. But he realized as he lunged forward that he really didn’t care.

  It was high time to kick the bejeezus out of this scumbag swarm.

  Akiro Murasawa was scrolling through some notes on ship systems in his stateroom when the master alarm sounded through the ship. Instantly, he sprang up and headed out into Herschel’s central gangway. As he headed aft toward the sound of the klaxon, he collided with Lieutenant Dean Kohl, the ship’s propulsion systems officer, coming down from A deck.

  “What the hell’s going on?”

  Kohl was grim. Right behind the officer was Sergeant Roy Favors, ship’s machinist mate, just coming off shift.

  “It’s coming from C deck…there are vital systems down there. Come on—“ Murasawa pushed past both of them and pulled himself along the gangway rails. When he got to the hatch, he slipped inside and came up short.

  Half the compartment was enveloped in some kind of bot swarm. And what was left of Dietrick Vogel lay writhing in a swirling cloud of pulp on the deck, a chewed-up mass of half-disassembled tissue and blood, rapidly disintegrating into atom fluff.

  Murasawa saw the problem right away. The hull valve was fully enveloped in a swarm. And already a thin stream of air was squealing toward the valve, now partially open to space. Dust, debris, papers, tools and anything else not locked down was flying through the air, now fully entrained in the escaping airstream. A cold fog had formed in the sudden pressure drop and Murasawa felt his eardrums close to bursting.

  “Kohl…get to the armory…get some HERF weapons! And get Sergeant Favors in here right away!”

  Kohl was already on the move toward the ship’s central gangway. “What about you, Skipper?”

  Murasawa was reaching for a small control panel near the hatch. “I’m hitting EOS…got to flood this compartment with air and secure that hatch! Get moving--!”

  Kohl vanished in the growing hailstorm, his ears already popping in the falling pressure. As he fell out into the gangway, he saw Favors sliding down from B Deck.

  “What’s happened?”

  Kohl quickly filled him in. “Get in there…Captain needs help fast! It’s a swarm…the EO, Commander Polansky…it’s trying to breach the hull at the airlock—“ Kohl squeezed by and headed up to B deck. Just outside the captain’s stateroom, a locked cabinet contained the ship’s hand weapons: HERF rifles and mag pulsers. He had to get up there, grab a few guns and get back fast, before Murasawa secured the C deck hatch permanently.

  “I was in the shop when I heard the master alarm…I think ISAAC’s running the ship now…I saw pressure sensors going off down here—“ Favors slipped by Kohl as he headed up. The machinist squeezed through the deck hatch, already swinging shut, and immediately saw what was left of Jana Polansky now fully enveloping the airlock and hull valve assembly. Tendrils of bots streamed off her arms and were fast approaching Aki Murasawa, who waved his hands and arms, even as he fought to stay upright in the falling pressure, pelted by a rain of debris swirling around the airlock.

  Favors plowed through the hailstorm toward Polansky, or what was left of Polansky, for by now the Commander had almost fully dematerialized into a cloud of bots, filling one corner of C deck with a flashing, pulsating fog.

  Murasawa lunged instinctively toward his engineering officer, then stopped, realizing that the angel was probably their only chance to stop a catastrophic hull breach. For a moment, the two looked at each other. Murasawa knew the situation was grave and getting worse.

  Favors’ voice was firm. “Get everybody off this deck, Captain. Right now. Once that hatch is shut and I empty the air flasks, you won’t be able to get out. If that hull valve or the bulkhead goes, you’ll all be killed.”

  “I’ve got to get control of Big Herk, before we lose everything!”

  Favors bodily shoved Murasawa through the hatch and into the central gangway. “If I don’t stop that swarm right here and now, Captain, nothing else will matter!” It was the least he could do after what had happened to Dietrick Vogel.

  Murasawa shrugged and nodded grimly, then disappeared up the gangway. Once he was clear, Favors dogged the hatch shut and made it fast. Then he turned to the Jana Polansky swarm.

  The entire far wall of the compartment was now thick with bots, the swarm replicating at max rate, now that it no longer needed to maintain structure.

  Favors knew there was only one thing to do. Murasawa’s initial instincts had been right. The best way to fight a swarm was with another swarm. As he extracted a tiny capsule from his pocket—the thing had somehow made it through Security and even his best friend Vogel didn’t know anything about it—he cycled the capsule’s port controls to discharge a formation of bots. Favors took a last look at what Commander Jana Polansky had now become.

  The angel still had not fully dematerialized. From its head down to its waist, all human structure was gone, replaced by a fuzzy, pulsating blob of bots, like a tree enveloped in fog. Below the waist, most of Polansky’s trunk and legs were still faintly visible, in shadowy outline, as the swarm changed config and assumed its natural state. The effect was something half-human, half-swarm, a hybrid thing, steadily breaking down into its smallest elements.

  Favors thumbed a control stud on the side of the capsule, giving commands to the tiny swarm now emerging from containment. “Time to get small!” he yelled over the shriek. He grabbed a nearby stanchion to stay upright as Herschel lurched again. Up on A deck, he knew Murasawa would be fighting to keep the ship under control. “Now going loose….enabling Config Delta seven seven—“

  Through it all, the master alarm klaxon continued shrieking.

  Outside in the gangway, Dean Kohl knew what the last lurch meant…a huge bubble of air had just been explosively expelled from C deck. The blast acted like a thruster, careening Herschel on her side. Kohl was thrown head first against a nearby stanchion, gashing his forehead. Blood spurted out but he didn’t fall to the deck. Instead, his head was quickly enveloped in a cold, bloody froth as the bulkhead began to collapse.

  He staggered to the nearest 1MC circuit and punched TALK.

  “Hull breach!” Kohl said. “Pressure drop on C deck… now the flight shielding…shielding’s gone. Rad levels rising rapidly—“

  Murasawa was already up on the command deck. His voice was ragged.

  “Get a message off…I’m ejecting the emergency beacon…we’ve got to let UNISPACE know what’s out here!”

  Alarms sounded and lights flashed on Big Herk’s command deck. Auto sequences were engaged and ISAAC, still functioning albeit at reduced capacity, shutdown the plasma torch engines as a precaution against explosion …or worse.

  But no one responded on the command deck any longer. No one responded on B or C decks either.

  Explosive decompression
had already started and in the final seconds of the swirling gale that engulfed the C deck, Lieutenant Dean Kohl had one remaining thought before falling down the great black tunnel of unconsciousness.

  The Old Ones aren’t seven billion kilometers away at all. They’re right here. The buggers have been here all along.

  Then the swarm that had once been Jana Polansky enveloped Herschel completely and began catastrophic disassembly of all remaining structures.

  Over the squeal, then the roar of escaping air, the plaintive sounds of ISAAC bleated out emergency warnings over and over again.

  “Level One Emergency…level one emergency…hull breach all decks and sections…all personnel, man the escape pods, man escape pods immediately…all personnel—“

  Nothing was ever heard from UNISPACE corvette UNS-230 again.

  And out of the rapidly expanding bubble of debris that had once been Herschel, a small wisp of nanobots drifted away from the wreckage. In time, over the course of several days, the wisp would gather itself together into a small configuration of bots and power up its picowatt propulsors. The nearly invisible swarm would then re-orient itself toward Earth and set off.

  The trip would take several weeks but in time the de-materialized essence of Jana Polansky would reach its target and begin drifting down through the atmosphere like the meteoric dust it was designed to resemble.

  There was still another mission to perform.

  Chapter 10

  Inside the Mother Swarm

  Date: Unknown

  Time: Unknown

  It took several hours, but Johnny Winger eventually made it to the top of the mountain, as the old farmer had said. He didn’t find Ford’s Creek there. Instead he found something even stranger.

  It was his old boyhood home from Pueblo, Colorado, the ranch-style thing with the garage and breezeway, the place the Wingers had lived before Jamison Winger had bought up an old ranch and tried to convince himself he knew something about cattle-raising.

  As Winger cautiously approached the house, he heard a noise. Someone was hammering away in the back. He went around the garage and found Jamison Winger.

  Johnny wasn’t surprised that much.

  “Hi, Dad…what are you building there?”

  Connected by a breezeway to the back porch of the ranch house, a grid of concrete foundation footers had been poured and framing was going up. Jamison Winger looked up, wiped sweat off his face and smiled.

  “Johnny, you’re back finally. Thought you’d never get here. Did you have any trouble?”

  Winger was about to say Yeah, Dad, I’ve been bouncing around in some kind of dream lately or maybe I’ve been tumbling through some kind of space-time bubble, or didn’t you notice? But he didn’t say any of that.

  “I got here as soon as I could.” Even to his own ears, that sounded pretty lame.

  “Well, give me hand here with these trusses. I want to get these walls erected before lunch.”

  Jamison Winger was building a shed, connected to the house. Johnny knew that in real life, no such building had ever been built. He was pretty sure none of this had ever happened, that it was something the Shadow Man had concocted out of his memories and made to look and feel real.

  He set to work with Jamison Winger, wielding the nail driver like he’d been born with it.

  The two of them worked for what seemed like hours. Several times, Johnny thought to ask Mr. Winger a question, but each time, he stopped. The Jamison Winger-thing—he couldn’t quite think of it as Dad—gave only canned answers, programmed responses that Johnny knew had never been spoken before.

  After what seemed like forever, Johnny Winger was tired, his neck and shoulder muscles sore and aching.

  “Could we stop awhile and rest, Dad? I’m getting pretty tired over here.”

  Jamison Winger replied but didn’t look up. He kept measuring, marking and nailing as if nothing had happened. “Using muscles you didn’t even know you had, huh, son? You ought to help me more often…you might actually learn something. It’s good you’re out here helping me. You’re building new some muscles. Where you’re going, you’re going to need them. This is what happens when new configurations are loaded and tested.”

  “Where am I going, Dad? What do you mean?”

  Now, Jamison Winger took a quick glance up, then went back to his nail driving. “You’ve got your whole life ahead of you, son. Where you’re going’s up to you. If you help me out, learn what you’re supposed, and build those new muscles, only good things can happen.” Jamison Winger looked up at the clouds scudding by over the treetops, perhaps seeing things only he could see. “The sky’s the limit, son.”

  They nailed and talked for what seemed like days. Johnny Winger grew fatigued but his Dad wouldn’t stop or take a break. Apparently, it was all part of the tests the Shadow Man had set up.

  “Dad, what are you going to do with this shed when it’s finished?”

  Jamison Winger put down the nail driver and the laser guide and sat back on his haunches. He wiped some sweat and blew his nose. That sounded real enough.

  “Oh, you know me. I’ll tinker a bit, build some things, try ‘em out. Got me an idea for a microflyer I could build. Saw the plans on the Net. You’d love something like that.”

  Bailey? Winger tried to remember when the drone he’d loved as a pet had first come into the family. His Dad had never built a shed. His tinkering workshop had always been the barn out back of the house at the North Bar Pass Ranch. They’d never had a drone at the Pueblo house. Or a shed or a workshop.

  The Shadow Man was starting to mix and match memories.

  Winger silently opened the coupler link and spoke to Doc under his breath, while Jamison Winger went back to nailing.

  “Doc, none of this ever happened. I’m sure of it. I’m mean, parts of it did. I’m not sure what I remember anymore.”

  ***Johnny, the Central Entity does not have a complete record of your memory. It’s adapting compatible glutamate traces and trying to match equipotential concentrations along many pathways…it’s possible some of this may be corrupted…perhaps in the de-materializing, I made some poor mapping choices***

  Winger snorted. “Well, that’s just great. Now I don’t know what I remember and what never happened. It’s all kind of mixed up.”

  ***This sequence is part of the configuration changes the Central Entity is executing…you must pass this test, Johnny…achieve some kind of new configuration state…in order to advance to the next level***

  “You mean I have to help Dad finish this shed, even if this never happened. Doc, is this the only way I can penetrate the main swarm, learn what their plans and tactics are?”

  ***Unknown, Johnny…but it would seem so. Everything you see and hear is a symbol. It’s a constructed simulation designed to cause your primary config to change in certain ways. Best to follow what seems most natural…if you tried to deviate, or out-think the Central Entity, it would be like fighting against yourself, against your own memories. The Central Entity—what you call the Shadow Man—has the ability to create in your processor-mind memories of things that never happened. You won’t be able to tell the difference.”

  Winger looked over at Jamison Winger. He looked strong and vigorous, way stronger than Johnny remembered the man. “Doc, I think the Shadow Man can play tunes with my emotions as well…I always felt a little guilty I didn’t help Dad more after Mom died. He withdrew into a kind of shell after the accident, depression and all, you know. He took all the treatments, had the patch, but there was just something missing. Brad and Joanna and I talked about it a lot. But we had a ranch to run. We didn’t have time…we didn’t take the time. That always made me feel bad.”

  ***Johnny, remember that your emotions are neural traces like any other memory…they’re attached to certain more factual traces, to give them extra weight, extra meaning and emphasis. The Central Entity can access all thi
s and create new traces…it’s just a matter of adjusting some chemical pathways***

  And at that moment, almost as if the Shadow Man were eavesdropping on his talk with Doc, Brad Winger and Joanna Winger emerged from the back porch door, each bearing a tray of snacks and drinks.

  Somehow Johnny wasn’t surprised at that either. That his sister and brother might show up in this unending nightmare, conjured, so it seemed, right out of nothing, appeared to be the most natural thing in this crazy world.

  “Hey, take a break, you too…cookies and lemonade.” Joanna looked almost perfect. Same blond bob, her ponytail stuck out the back of a baseball cap. Brad had his black frame glasses, the full law school look, with his hair slicked back. They brought the snack trays over to the shed and all shared a few moments together.

  Johnny hadn’t seen Joanna since the funeral, since his Mom had died. After the accident, Joanna had changed her hair, worn it loose, swept up in the front.

  This has to be before the accident, Johnny reasoned. But that made no sense because he was sure none of this had ever happened. Still, as Doc had suggested, it would be best to play along. Everything meant something, everything was important.

  “You keeping your grades up, son? Last report card I saw, you came up with a C in History. Got to do better than that if you want to get into engineering school.”

  “Yes, sir…it was that mid-term, sir. It was harder than I expected…Mr. Watt asked questions on stuff we never covered.”

  Jamison Winger wiped his mouth, gave his paper plate back to Joanna and hoisted himself up. His sister and brother went back into the house. Mr. Winger triggered his naildriver a few times. It whirred smoothly. “Uh, huh…I’m sure this has more to do with Katie Gomez than Mr. Watt. Am I right?”

  How the hell did he know that? “No, sir…it’s just that we had questions on the Spanish-American War and we didn’t spend an hour covering it in class.”

  “Mm-hmm. Get your gun and let’s get back to work.”

  Johnny figured it was best not to mention his little tryst with Katie in the cabin. Did that really happen? Did Jamison Winger…or for that matter, the Shadow Man…know about that? Was his Dad the Shadow Man?