Johnny Winger and the Battle at Caloris Basin Read online

  It was all very confusing.

  After another ten minutes of measuring, sawing, and nailing, Jamison Winger sat back and wiped sweat from his face. “So what do you really want to be when you’re grownup, son?”

  Johnny Winger sensed that how he answered this question was important…perhaps, critical. “I’m not sure, Dad. Maybe a pilot. Maybe design bots, like you.”

  Another ten or twenty minutes later…or maybe it was an hour.—Johnny couldn’t tell, Jamison Winger announced a break. “Follow me. There’s something I want to show you.”

  They left the partially-finished shed and went across the backyard to the other side of the house. There, Johnny saw a silvery old barn, sagging on its foundations.

  He was certain there the barn hadn’t been there when he’d come up to the house. Wow…the Shadow Man is creating things even as this ‘memory’ unfolds. Mr. Winger pushed through a door and went inside, Johnny right behind him.

  The floor was dirt and straw but inside, the barn was otherwise a reasonably well-equipped workshop. There were table saws and lathes and workbenches and drill presses, and shelving crammed with parts and multimeters and spools of wire and odd pieces of gear. One table supported some kind of flyer, with its casing open and cabling spilling out onto the table.

  Mr. Winger went to the table. “Meet Bailey. My newest idea. I took an old drone shell from Thornton’s salvage yard and added some new gadgets, souped him up with a processor and soldered on new props and propulsor tubes. Once I get him painted, he’ll better than new.”

  Johnny went to the table. My God, it is Bailey… Growing up, he’d loved the drone like a pet. He tinkered with micro-flyer himself, added sniffers and haptic sensors and all kinds of gizmos to kind of personalize the bot.

  Many times late at night, when Dad had gone to bed and the house was real quiet, Johnny would fling open his second-floor window and summon Bailey from the top of the barn. He had a nest or a docking station up there. He'd taught Bailey to respond to some whistles, some basic voice commands. Later, he'd found an olfactory program on the WorldNet, picked up some gizmos around the barn, paid or filched the rest from the store, and cobbled up a basic sniffer nose for the dude. He trained it to search out and home on certain smells, especially his own. Wasn't that a hoot? Bailey trained to sniff him out like a bloodhound, ferret out his own bad breath and body odor.

  He figured, after some tests, the dude could sniff him out from as far away as several kilometers.

  Not bad for a kid inventor. Dad would have been proud. Dad would also have whipped him to Denver and back for messing around with Bailey too. But Bailey had become his best friend, especially after Mom had died. Late at night, hours after he called Bailey into his room for a chat, he'd drift off to sleep, then awaken just enough to catch the drone hovering gently in the corner with his big red eye winking on and off softly, or maybe just perched on the old Navy trunk at the end of the bed, quietly whirring in sleep mode.

  Winger ran his fingers lovingly along the flyer’s carbon-fiber wings. It all seemed real enough. “He’s going to be a real hot rod, Dad. I’ve got about a million ideas for Bailey.”

  Mr. Winger chuckled. “Small steps, Johnny. Small steps. Let’s get back to the shed.”

  They left the barn and headed back around the patio, cutting through a pine straw bed. Johnny looked back as they rounded the corner and wasn’t terribly surprised to see that the old barn had vanished.

  Just like everything else around here, Doc. It’s all a dream…nothing more than a dream.

  ***Johnny, this is no dream. I can’t detect any signatures compatible with nanobotic action…only background bond breaking and atomic activity. Perhaps this is a kind of quantum projection…templated from neural traces in your file…I’m trying to evaluate status of the config buffer status check file to see if anything is reading the file, but so far, nothing…very peculiar***

  The file was all that was left of the original Johnny Winger. “Hey, don’t change anything, okay, Doc. That’s me in there.”

  Jamison Winger looked up from his miter saw, where he was fitting two boards into a joint. “What did you say, son?”

  Johnny froze. “Uh, I said I’m glad I came by, Dad…to help out. I enjoyed this…a lot. We should do this more often.”

  His Dad had a most peculiar look on his face, sort of skeptical, quizzical, like he wasn’t understanding what was being said. Dad looks like that when he can’t really believe that you said what you said.

  Maybe he and Doc shouldn’t have—

  “How do you feel now, Johnny?”

  Winger shrugged. “Tired, I guess. My wrist’s sore, from all the nailing. But good. Actually, pretty good. I could go another hour—“

  “Oh, that won’t be necessary. Shed’s almost done anyway.”

  Maybe I’m talking to the Central Entity himself, Winger thought. The idea gave him a chill, but he kept up a plastic smile anyway, flexed his arm muscles for his Dad to see.

  “What’s next? Where should I go now?”

  His Dad gave that some thought, rubbing his chin like he did when some big idea was brewing inside his head.

  “You go into the house, now, Johnny. You’ve passed the third test…go see your Mom inside….it’s going to be a special day at the Winger house.”

  So Johnny put down his driver, unbuckled his tool belt and went inside.

  Chapter 11

  Gateway Station

  Earth L2 Point

  November 8, 2155

  0030 hours (U.T.)

  The two SpaceGuard duty officers watched with dismay as the telescopic image flickered across their display screens.

  “Distance to debris cloud,” snapped Lieutenant Sheila Danzig. “Is that Pegasus or Herschel ISAAC was focusing on?”

  “Both,” said Corporal Joseph Mwate. “Long-range array shows the main debris cloud at just under two million kilometers.”

  Danzig shook her head, sucking on her lower lip as the image refreshed, and the cloud of debris visibly expanded right before their eyes.

  “What the hell happened? One moment, we’re tracking Herschel approaching her initial drop point and then—“

  “Some kind of explosion or structural casualty or catastrophic decompression, Sarge,” Mwate suggested. “ISAAC’s showing strong thermal signatures and electromagnetics indicating nanobotic activity in the area…maybe some kind of element of KB-1, already on our doorsteps.”

  “Crap,” Danzig muttered. “Is there anything but debris out there?”

  “Soon as the arrays lit up, I pulled resolution back to get a bigger picture. I was slaved to Herschel but then sensors following Pegasus went off too. Whatever happened, it may have happened to both ships.”

  “Get a Level 1 alert out to UNISPACE. Looks like we’re tracking anomalies on two ships. What about Copernicus and Tombaugh?”

  Mwate’s fingers flew over his keyboard. “I’ve got B array at Site 2 now…both ships are still a few days away, but I’m tracking nothing unusual. Both thrusting and maneuvering nominally, no unusual signatures. Want me to zoom in?”

  “Keep B and C arrays on both…and send a threatcon to both. My authority. SpaceGuard warning: approach deploy site with caution…tracking unknown formations at Site 1…will advise…”

  Danzig and Mwate spent the next few hours gathering spectrographic data, thermal data and visual imagery on the expanding debris clouds that had once been Herschel and Pegasus. Both ships had been manifested for deployment of elements of Earthshield at Earth’s L1 point, along with the necessary anchor satellites and positioning buoys to shepherd the deployed net bots into the proper configuration. Now, all of Gateway’s long-range arrays were slaved to zero in and stay synched with the remains of the two Frontier Corps corvettes.

  In the hours ahead, theories and scenarios would blossom like weeds in a soggy garden, all around Gateway Station. Whispe
rs echoed up and down Gateway’s corridors as station crew huddled in small knots, spinning conspiracies and plots and possibilities like so many spider webs.

  And before Mwate and Danzig’s shift was up, word had come from UNISPACE Paris, through Gateway’s comm center to the two remaining ships, still on cruise to the Site 2 point and the second shield deployment starting position. Tombaugh and Copernicus were to abort their mission immediately, deploy nothing and set course for return to Gateway. The two remaining ships would arrive back at the station in about three weeks, after a speed run around the Earth and several emergency course changes.

  Meanwhile, Gateway trained all of her sensors, scopes and arrays on near-Earth space, probing and listening for any signatures of nanobotic activity inside of a sphere of space two million kilometers in diameter.

  Throughout the station and at UNISPACE headquarters in Paris, there was growing dread that Earthshield was stalled and the mother swarm, the KB-1 swarm thought to be beyond Saturn, was in fact right on Earth’s doorstep.

  UNIFORCE Headquarters

  The Quartier-General, Paris

  November 9, 2155

  0215 hours (U.T.)

  Angelika Komar had been UNSAC for only a little more than two years, but as the faces attending the emergency conference assembled on her screen and materialized as avatars across her office, she figured it might as well have been two hundred years.

  “I didn’t take this job to preside over a defeat,” she told the assembled participants. “We’re not beaten yet. KB-1 and the Bugs may be kicking the crap out of us out there but we’ve still got a few cards to deal.”

  “Just not a particularly strong hand,” CINCSPACE muttered. General Mahmood Salaam studied a report from the Herschel and Pegasus incidents and took a deep breath. “The main force may be half a billion kilometers the other side of Saturn but this mess tells me we’ve got saboteurs right here in our lap, already in place.”

  “We just don’t know what they want,” said Komar.

  “They want to assimilate us,” CINCQUANT, General Lamar Quint, said. “We’ve known that for years. And that silly Church of Assimilation is like a fifth column, helping them out. We ought to round up the lot of them and put them away. Angels, my ass—they’re doing the enemy’s work for them and we’re letting them, all under the guise of freedom of worship.’ Give me a break.”

  “Look—“ said Salaam, “Solnet’s doing a report on them—some kind of historical footage.“ CINCSPACE pointed to a small display window floating between the avatars…a new report was coming in…

  Solnet Special Report

  “Symborg and the Mother Swarm”

  Solnet/Omnivision Video Post

  @dana.polansky.solnetworldview

  November 9, 2155

  0215 hours U.T.

  For Jana Polansky, the rally for candidate Julius Ngombe was the biggest thing she had ever seen in Kibera. The Solnet reporter hoisted herself up on a pile of trash, balancing herself precariously, as she steered the fleet of dronecams about Kibera Fields, gathering footage for her report.

  “Cam Three and Four, come left and drop down to ten meters…get me some footage of the stage and the podium…it really stands out.” Several hundred meters above, the twin ornithopters wheeled about and took up their new headings. Polansky watched the image on her wristpad. “That’s good…that’s good, right there. Edit can add sound and graphics later….Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what a shot. The stage and lights, right in the middle of a sea of tin-roof shacks. There must be half a million people here.”

  Indeed, the vast slumland of southwest Nairobi, hadn’t hosted a gathering this large in decades. Julius Ngombe, the Assimilationist candidate, would be there, just days before the big election. But Dana knew it wasn’t Ngombe that was the real draw. It was the candidate’s front man Symborg. People shrieked and fainted for Symborg. That’s why they had come.

  The Solnet reporter steered dronecam four closer to the stage. “Hover and zoom in…I want to get those assimilator booths…there’s already a queue outside.” The ‘copter obeyed and took up a tight hovering orbit some ten meters over a line of coffin-shaped booths along one side of the stage. The booths were already working, already taking in volunteers. People were pushing and shoving in a ragged line just beyond some barriers, barely contained by a platoon of khaki-clad Kenya Police. One man, Inspector Shadrick Nziri, barked out commands to his force on a megaphone.

  The rally was set to begin at 7 pm, according to the flyers and brochures that had littered Nairobi for days. But already the assimilators were at work, manned by volunteers. Dana Polansky manipulated her wristpad controls and Cam Four zoomed in tight, picking up the sweaty, ecstatic faces in the queue. The first in line was a heavy set woman. Dana fiddled with the audio, caught snatches of words over the roar of the crowd.

  “…name is, ma’am?” The assimilator tech wore a light blue uniform. His nameplate read Gavin.

  Her name was Anna Kigale. She was tall, maybe with a bit of Masai in her, proud, a bit fluttery and nervous. She grinned sheepishly as one of Gavin’s men helped her into the assimilator booth.

  “A great day,” she muttered. “Great day...so proud.”

  Gavin sat at a console just outside the booth, while another tech helped Anna inside and made her comfortable on the seat. The tech shut and latched the door, pressing a button to begin the seal and containment process. In seconds, a tight bot-proof seal had been formed around the interior of the booth, a barrier formed of electron injectors and a dedicated botscreen.

  “Let’s do it,” the tech told Gavin. Gavin pressed buttons.

  Inside the booth, a fog had formed…that was the first layer of nanobots released into the compartment. Anna disappeared into the fog, only a leg and a shoulder could be seen.

  The fog thickened. A faint buzz could be heard from inside the booth. Dana steered the dronecam in closer, hovering only a few meters over the scene, like a giant gnat, watching as the cloud of bots inside the booth thickened. More and more bots were released and replicated, swelling to fill every cubic millimeter of the booth.

  Anna didn’t move. Dana zoomed in through the front porthole on her right leg. At first, it was unchanged, a smooth black leg with a section of her print dress showing, hitched up just above her knee. But even as she watched, the black of her skin had begun to fade. In moments, it was almost gray, like the fog itself, oscillating between darker and lighter, but still gray. Then the gray became a translucent shimmer, almost like a ghost, flickering slightly, but growing ever dimmer. Her shoulder was the same.

  Anna Kigale was slowly but steadily being disassembled. She was being steadily broken down into a pattern, a pattern of atoms and molecules.

  The end came softly, almost as if the woman were walking away in a light rain. Her body, the physical Anna Kigale, began to fade inside the booth. At first, it had been barely perceptible, just a faint blurring of her skin, her extremities, a smearing of her legs and shoulder, as if a photo had lost contrast.

  In time, and the time was less than five minutes, Anna Kigale had devolved—that was the commonly accepted word now—into a nearly translucent shadow, still recognizable in form, but without substance. You could see right through the form and the shadow to the other side of the booth.

  And then she was gone. Enveloped and enmeshed and at one with the greater swarm of nanobotic mechs that was the Mother Swarm.

  Dana Polansky swallowed hard… steering DroneCam Four away from the booth. She muttered into her lip mike: Rotate and hold…I want shots of the faces in the queue…” The cam obeyed and soon her wristpad screen was filled with joy, ecstasy, laughter, joking…whatever you wanted to call it. She held her breath, trying not to think that something like this must have been what happened to Jana.

  The woman known as Anna Kigale had just let herself be disassembled into atom fluff. And behind her, people were jostling in line t
o be next.

  Involuntarily, Dana Polansky shuddered. She would never understand Assimilationists.

  Something was happening. The crowd was stirring. Dana craned her head, trying to see over the mass of humanity. It looked like a wave surging and sloshing back and forth between islands of tin-roof shacks and rubbish piles. Imagery flickered on her wristpad. Men were mounting the stage. Serious men in dark suits and white open-neck shirts.

  That’s when she saw him.

  Of course, Dana knew all the stories about Symborg: that he wasn’t human, just an angel, a para-human swarm of nanobots, a cloud of bugs. Still, she found herself shoved and jostled as the crowd surged forward. She steered the dronecams closer for a tight shot, muttering “In tight, on his face, hover at twenty--“ She checked the shot on her wristpad, found it good.

  Julius Ngombe was hard to miss. Wide as he was tall, blacker than coal, he strode up onto the stage and raised both hands in a victory salute, beaming at the crowd that now lapped against the stage and the police cordon like ocean waves in a storm. Beside him were more staff people. Symborg was to his right, there to lead the introductions to the candidate, to whip the crowd into furious adulation.

  Dana found herself shoved forward like a raft adrift, until she was nearly impaled on the baton of a policeman at the stage. Quickly, she flashed her press pass and was shoveled off to the side. Her arms were pinned by the crush and she couldn’t reach her wristpad controls. The story would have to go with the shots the dronecams were getting now.

  Symborg acknowledged the crowds with a wave and moved to the center microphone. The angel was good, Dana could see that. Very few edge effects…often, angels fuzzed out at their extremities, where the swarm didn’t have good config control. This one was tight and dense over its entire surface…only an occasional pop or flash in the torso area, one or two in the face, gave away the fact that the angel was a para-human, a swarm of nanobots configged to look human. In stature, he was a smallish man, dark of color but that could be easily enough changed. His height contrasted with Ngombe’s beefy frame, and his face was dominated by a black moustache.