Johnny Winger and the Battle at Caloris Basin Read online

  Salaam waved his hand over a photoeye and the thing came alive instantly. Lights blinked on and a faint mist began issuing from the spout of the lamp.

  Five minutes later, Colonel de Britt stood at attention before Salaam’s desk, a near-perfect simulacrum of a mid-twentieth century Dutch naval officer. That had been Miriam’s idea too.

  This angel was good. By now, ANAD tech was advanced enough so that there were no longer any edge effects. The angel’s hands and feet were as solid as the rest of him. No pixelating. No motion tracking effects, with arms and hands blurring out as the angel moved about. You couldn’t tell, even on close inspection, that de Britt was nothing but a para-human swarm entity.

  We’ve come to this, Salaam realized. Real and virtual all mashed together…you can’t tell one from another. De Britt’s voice was deep and just slightly atonal, like was talking out of a barrel.

  ***General Salaam, how may I be of assistance, sir?***

  Salaam pressed a button on his wristpad, squirting the details of Farside’s NOTAP to his chief’s processor. The angel brightened slightly as the data went out.

  “Chief, this one’s big. Farside doesn’t send NOTAPs without cause.”

  De Britt’s face seemed frozen for a second, as its processor crunched the details. Then its officious smirk came back…somebody’s idea of what a chief of staff should look like when awaiting orders. Salaam could change the default setting; he just hadn’t gotten around to it, what with all the awards ceremonies and other busybody affairs he had to attend to.

  ***KB-1, sir…should I notify the rest of the staff…command protocol calls for a briefing within two hours of receiving said NOTAP.”

  Salaam leaned back in his chair and swiveled around far enough to watch the night time spectacle of Paris out his windows. The security screenbots dimmed slightly to avail a clearer view. He watched tourist jetcabs circle the Eiffel Tower like so many moths drawn to a light.

  “Yes, Colonel, go ahead and set up a briefing. Make it one hour from now…command briefing theater. And get me the status of all our ships beyond Gateway, specifically Station P and T. UNSAC will want to know what we’re doing about this.”

  De Britt nodded slightly. ***At once, sir…I am accessing UNISPACE general registry now…accessing…accessing…Station P, Phobos, reports frigate UNS Korolev is in dock, depot-level maintenance. She is scheduled to be ready for duty in six weeks…plasma engines currently undergoing teardown and level three upgrades***

  “What about Stations E and T? Anything we can send out on twenty-four hours’ notice?”

  De Britt continued accessing. His face cycled between the normal smirk and something that reminded Salaam of a constipated salesman. ***Yes, sir…accessing…Station E reporting frigate UNS Archimedes and corvette UNS Xerxes both at PSA…post-shakedown availability. Both just returned from shakedown following Level One overhaul and mission refits. Station T, Titan, reporting frigate UNS Tycho within one week of full patrol readiness. Normal mission load onboard and Gold Crew finishing up their quals and training requirements in two days***

  “Good, de Britt. Good. Thanks.” Salaam continued watching heavy night time traffic circle the 5th Arrondisement below the Quartier-General. The black of the Bois du Bologne lay off to his left, De Britt’s reflection hovering in the window glass above his view of the huge park.

  Tycho and Korolev. Salaam pecked out a command on his wristpad, summoning the crew rosters for both ships. Tycho was captained by one Jim Loudermilk, the old dog. Korolev Gold Crew was Jeremy Lao’s boat and therein could be a problem. Lao was a walking casualty, nearly killed after a scoopship accident at Jupiter and he should have been cashiered out of the service for the harebrained kamikaze stunt he had pulled in the upper atmosphere of that gasbag planet. But Lao had friends in high places and now he was skippering the Gold Crew of a Frontier Corps patrol frigate out at Station T, the bleeding edge of UNISPACE authority.

  Sure don’t want to send Lao to do a man’s job, Salaam thought. He stroked his black moustache, turned back to de Britt. But I might have no other choice.

  “Colonel, I’ve got to send some eyes out to check out this ‘astronomical phenomena.’ But it’s ticklish. Worse, it’s political. Which means if I don’t send Lao and his Gold Crew on some kind of mission soon, UNSAC will jump down my ass with both feet. I don’t know how much longer I can keep Lao bottled up at Station T with upgrades, new training requirements, wargames and sims and more upgrades.”

  De Britt seemed sympathetic, but Salaam was reminded that any sympathy, indeed any response by the angel, was an artifact. Programmed in. A behavioral module called up.

  ***Begging the General’s pardon, sir, but Captain Lao has shown excellent marks in all recent wargame exercises and training sims. Perhaps an assignment of this magnitude, investigating a Level One NOTAP in the outer system, would allow the Captain to demonstrate just how far his command skills have come since his rehabilitation program concluded***

  Salaam sniffed. “Exactly. Give me the man enough rope and see if he’ll hang himself, that’s what you’re saying. Well, de Britt, you may just be right. I’m following the book on this one. Cut orders now for Korolev and Tycho to get underway in twenty-four hours. Whatever this KB-1 thing is, we’ve got to get some eyes on it. Farside can’t tell us much more than something’s approaching the Sentinel outer line, something big…like a swarm. If it’s our long-awaited friends, I can’t think of any better welcoming party than Jim Loudermilk and Jeremy Lao. ‘Loud I don’t worry about…he’ll follow orders and investigate before salvoing his big guns. As for Lao…” Salaam just shook his head, “…who knows what the man’ll do.”

  De Britt said, ***Perhaps such unpredictability works to our advantage, sir, especially against an unknown adversary***

  “How do you mean, Colonel?”

  ***Just this, sir…if Captain Lao is unpredictable to us in his tactical responses to an unknown adversary, he surely will be just as unpredictable to the adversary as well. As Sun Tzu has stated: “…that general is skillful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend, and he is skillful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack.”***

  Salaam said, “Well spoken, Colonel. Just cut the orders. And spit out an agenda for that briefing too. I want to get the troops in here by 2100 hours.”

  Thirty kilometers west of the Quartier-General, Solnet reporter Dana Polansky was arguing with her daughter Jana about attending yet another Assimilationist rally coming to Paris.

  Not for the first time, Dana wanted to throttle her daughter around the neck.

  “No, you absolutely cannot go to that rally. And you’re not leaving this apartment dressed like that either, young lady. Go put on something longer. And cover up your chest…I’m not raising a hooker here.”

  Jana protested, “Mom! All the girls at the academy are wearing these—“ she stuck out her new leggings, the ones with holes in strategic places and threw back her hair. ““Come on, Mom…come with me…it’ll be fun…we’ll have a great time…get to see Symborg…isn’t he just so riff…and watch all the freaks get vaporized…it’ll be a great day—“

  Dana told her daughter to watch her mouth. “That’s not funny. And they’re not freaks…just terribly misguided. This is a serious thing, Jana…you know that. I’ve tried to explain what Assimilationists think and believe…the whole thing’s a serious threat and I don’t want you to encourage them by showing up.”

  “I’ll be one person out of a million, Mom…nobody’ll notice. Plus I’m going with friends. Come on…I want to go see Symborg…in person. I want to see if he can really change shape right in front of everybody—wouldn’t it be so cool to be deconstructed and become an angel?”

  “No it most certainly would not be ‘cool.’ And don’t you have some homework? I haven’t seen you spend two minutes studying this afternoon.”

  Jana was almost in tears.
“You never let me spend any time with my friends. This place is like jail. They’re all going…why can’t I go, huh? What did I do wrong?”

  Dana was growing exasperated with her daughter. Raising a teenager was tough at any time but when you were a Solnet reporter and traveled most of the time, it was especially difficult. She worked hard to find the right balance…giving Jana enough space to be herself and have a normal life but not enough to get into serious trouble. It was a high-wire act and most of the time, Dana felt like she was already teetering off the wire.

  “There’s nothing wrong with Symborg…or the Assimilationists,” Jana insisted. She grabbed a light jacket from the front closet of their appartement along the Avenue Emile Zola—not two hundred meters from the Seine—and jerked open the front door. “You just don’t like him ‘cause he’s popular…and he’s gorgeous too.”

  “He’s a cloud of bots, Jana. It’s an act. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I’m going. I’m almost fourteen years old and I can decide for myself—“

  “Jana—so help me, if you—“

  But Jana Polansky had already slipped out the door. She stalked off down the sidewalk, heading no doubt for the Metro stop a few blocks away. The Assimilationist rally was set for 8:00 that night, at the Place de la Concorde. The Metro would get her there in half an hour, tops.

  For a long minute, Dana glared at her daughter’s back, noting with a combination of envy and worry Jana’s broad hips and long legs. She’d certainly picked up the ‘walk’ in recent years and she knew how to get attention, which wasn’t hard for Jana. Her long blond curls and easy smile did that. No boy ever stood a chance.

  Jeez, she looks like a hooker, Dana thought. At least, she looks high-class…what the hell am I saying?

  Dana slammed the door and bit her lip, wondering if she ought to call the police. She tried out a few sentences: my daughter’s run off with a boy…she’s lost…she went to the big rally…she’s been kidnapped by a cloud of bugs…none of them worked.

  Then she remembered. The beige jacket. It was Jana’s favorite, the one with the supple suede front, the fringe around the neck…almost elegant.

  Even better, it was one of several jackets that Dana had planted spybots on. No, she wasn’t proud of that. She’d sweet-talked a contact at UNIFORCE into loaning her a pair of the things…they were the size of molecules, but contained within their hundred-nanometer casings enough smarts and power to keep an eye on any subject and send back visual and audio feeds over a distance of tens of kilometers. And these were programmable bots as well. A few of them, including the one planted on the jacket her daughter was wearing, could be commanded to replicate into a Mobility Obstruction Barrier, a MOBnet, that when fully expanded, would envelope the wearer in a makeshift cocoon and immobilize them on the spot. With its locator beacon transmitting away, it would then be a simple matter for police to track down the recalcitrant subject and take them into custody.

  Dana found the control pack in the back of her little black clutch and set it up on the nightstand beside her bed. She turned the thing on, following the on-screen instructions and then fiddled with a few knobs to activate the bot and tune in to its transmission. After some finagling with the imager, she studied the grainy image for a second…

  Yep, that was Brie…Jana’s best friend, tapping out something on her wristpad. And there was Louelle, beyond her, putting on some lipstick, eyeing her lips critically in a compact. Dana realized they were on the Metro, on a train. Others shuffled in and out of the picture.

  Dana felt like a prying voyeur but she couldn’t tear herself away from the images. She tweaked more knobs and got a tinny sort of audio for her efforts.

  The train must be stopping. Passengers had begun standing, crowding around the doors. The image shifted—Jana was now standing too—and Dana could see big sheepish grins of anticipation on Brie and Louelle’s faces.

  “Come on…”Brie said. The girls dove out the door, pushing and squeezing through the throng. Dana strained to see better….

  The whole affair was set to start at eight that night, in the Place de la Concorde, with stages and lighting set up around the great Obelisk at the center of the plaza. Even as they exited the Metro station at Concorde, Jana, Brie and Louelle were crushed by the surging waves of the crowds, with hundreds of thousands moving up the Champs Elysees from Tuilerie Gardens en masse.

  News drones and aerial porters circled low overhead like black crows, and bright stage lighting had been erected all around the Place, focusing attention on the huge Obelisk at the center—a long ago gift from Egypt—and the theatrical stage built up around it. A cordon of gendarmes formed a tight security perimeter around the stage and clustered in knots up and down the boulevard, trying to keep some kind of order.

  The crowd pushed forward, a single organism with a single thought: get as close to Symborg as possible. As they were carried along, Dana spotted a row of assimilator booths just this side of the stage. Manned by uniformed technicians, draped with bunting, banners and flags from the Church of Assimilation, seeing the booths send a chill down her spine and automatically, she tried to will Jana away from them, back toward the center of the crowd.

  Girl, no way you should be going anywhere near those death traps.

  Near on to eight o’clock, the girls had parked themselves alongside the entrance to Rue Royale and the Hotel Crillon beyond. Stage lighting started to strobe and the crowd surged forth in anticipation. Music from somewhere blasted across the promenade, a fanfare fit for a king. Dana half expected to see a horse-drawn carriage with imperial guards trotting alongside. Instead, a single man mounted the platform and the lighting changed again, narrowing down to the single bright beam of a spotlight.

  In spite of herself, Dana felt a lump in her throat. Assimilationists knew how to put on a show.

  It was Symborg. And the crowd, which had been jostling and vibrating like a stirred pot, suddenly came alive.

  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. In fact, Dana realized, it had changed. Now Symborg had acquired a lighter skin tone. Subtly lighter, to better blend in with the crowd.

  “PEOPLE OF PARIS…THE TIME HAS COME FOR A CHANGE….” His voice boomed out across the plaza and the crowd grew more and more frenzied, pressing ever tighter against the police cordon.

  The angel worked the crowd like a practiced stage actor.

  “PEOPLE OF PARIS…WHAT IS IT THAT ASSIMILATION BRINGS?”

  The response roared up out of the crowd like a thing alive.

  “PEJERU…PEJERU…PEJERU!!”

  A radiant smile came to Symborg’s face, beamed by cameras to screens throughout the rally ground.

  “Peace. Ecstasy. Joy. Enlightenment. Rapture. Unity with the Mother Swarm. You are right!”

  The crowd roiled and throbbed like a frenetic horde, as one, surging again and again against the stage and the police barricade. Dana watched her daughter’s friends with growing alarm. Brie and Louelle chanted in unison with the crowd…PEJERU! PEJERU! It was a nonsense phrase, an acronym, but it hypnotized both of them. Dana could see it in their faces: the glazed eyes, the smiles frozen in place, their hands punching the air in syncopated rhythm.

  It gave her a chill. Her own daughter was caught up in this madness.

  The rally went on, with Symborg calling for witnesses to come forth and soon long lines had formed at the assimilator booths, lines of people waiting to die, to be de-constructed and absorbed
into the mother swarm. Despite the jostling and shoving of the crowd, Dana’s eyes stayed with the image. Right beside her, Brie squirmed and squealed like a teen-ager at a concert, bit by bit pushing her way ever forward toward the stage. Louelle and Jana tried to stay close. Surrounding the plaza, giant screens, even 3-D renderings of Symborg’s face, lent an Olympian grandeur to the gathering.

  Dana paid little attention to Symborg’s words. She was more concerned with the girls’ reactions. In between following Solnet coverage of the rally on her pad, she studied her daughter’s surroundings with growing dread and alarm.

  “…TAKE…AND DRINK…AND YOU WILL KNOW THE LOVE OF THE MOTHER SWARM…”

  For a moment, Dana wasn’t sure what Symborg was referring to but then she saw the drones circling overhead, aerial porters with trays of some kind of drink. En masse, they swooped down to drop off paper cups to a sea of outstretched hands.

  That’s when Dana decided to trigger the MOB feature on the control pack. She stabbed the button and watched in growing horror as the image wobbled and careened, then collapsed to the ground, graying out as trillions of bots replicated into a mesh cocoon right in the middle of the crowd.

  Oh my God, what have I done…she could be trampled in that riot.

  Checking her Solnet feed, she found a dronecam view of the rally on one channel. As she panned the scene, she saw a commotion along one edge of the crowd. She had no control of the dronecam…another reporter was covering the rally. But as the drone zoomed in, she could see a small army of black-jacketed people carrying something that looked like a body bag…with a start and a chill down her back, Dana realized it was Jana they were carrying. Jana encased in a MOBnet, writhing, thrashing, with the attendants forcing their way against the crowd like a ship nosing through water.

  She tried to swallow but her mouth was dry.