“Then let’s do it,” Winger decided. “If the expedition can’t get past those hillocks, they’ll never be able to put this base out of commission.”
Doc II re-configured part of his swarm into something new and insinuated himself into a junction box nearby. For several minutes, surrounded by speeding electron currents, he probed and examined connections, resistors, amplifiers and inverters. He tasted and tested different branches and transformers, analyzing everything, trying to learn what worked what.
Outside the wiring, the Winger angel studied a control pedestal and tried to determine which control performed what function. Though he was an angel and a botswarm, he knew he was still different from the mother swarm. He knew that anything he did or even thought might be detected…how do you sabotage something when someone was looking right over your shoulder?
Finally, the Doc swarm emerged from the junction box and linked in.
***Johnny, I have just traced some critical control voltage pathways…if you activate these two controls at the same time, that should give us control of all the antennas outside. It is a sort of maintenance mode…placing the antennas in a controllable condition for servicing…press these buttons at the same time, Johnny***
Doc swirled around several buttons at the bottom of the panel, flashing and highlighting them with his own bots.
“Ok, Doc…here goes—“Winger had learned how to solidify his own swarm elements to give him the semblance of a hand and finger. Hovering in mid-air like a ghostly, disembodied palm, Winger reached out for the buttons…and depressed them….
…and was instantly transported down the same curving corridor he had seen before…dodging a sleet of shapes, triangles, pyramids, polygons and tetrahedrals until at last he came to a teeth-jarring landing right on his butt…
…and found himself once again at the fishing camp at Ford’s Creek.
When he had come to his senses and regained some balance, he got up and knew for sure that the whole scene—the rustic wood cabin with the sagging door and front porch, the creek hissing and foaming behind the cabin, the log-splitting stump where his Dad had taught how to swing an axe without killing himself—all this was a metaphor. Or a simulation. It wasn’t real.
It couldn’t be real.
He saw motion through the light snow among the trees behind the cabin and realized it was his father, Jamison Winger. Even as he began shuffling through ankle deep snow, he saw his father slip on something and pitch headlong into the creek, falling heavily with a loud cry.
Johnny Winger raced to the creek edge and found his father sprawled face down in foaming hydraulics and bubbles among some rocks. His head and neck were badly cut and he was bleeding badly.
Johnny waded in and bent over.
“Dad! Dad… are you all right? Dad…can you—what happened?”
He helped the older man to his feet, unsteadily at first, then wrapped his arm around his neck and shoulders and dragged Jamison Winger out of the water, buddy-style.
They hobbled together, father and son, into the cabin.
It was warm and the stew on the wood-fired stove smelled great, but first things first. Jamison Winger had sustained a severe laceration and cuts to his face and he trailed a steady stream of blood as Johnny helped him limp to the nearest bed. He fell into the bed and moaned.
“John…Johnny…I need—“
“Just lie still, Dad…I’ll get some rags and water…we need to clean that off, right away.”
He raced to a small medicine chest, digging frantically for bandages, gauze, antiseptic, ointments, rags and cotton swabs, then in a fit of annoyance, dragged the whole chest over to the bed.
Jamison Winger was clearly going into shock and Johnny could not stop the bleeding. He tried pressure, he tried bandages, soaking the wounds, but the blood kept coming and Johnny quickly despaired, shaking his hands in frustration.
“Dad—“
He knew, of course, that none of this had ever happened but he couldn’t help himself. Angel or not, real or not, this was Dad in all the ways that mattered and he was severely injured, probably going into shock and needed help. He found a loose wristpad on a nearby dresser and pounded at the emergency button to get someone online but nothing happened and he wandered if the damn thing was dead.
This is the Shadow Man, doing this, he kept trying to tell himself. He came back to the bed, wristpad dangling from his hands and bent down to his Dad. They know what Doc and I are trying to do, they know about the expeditions and the assault teams and they’re trying to stop me from helping them.
He squatted on his knees beside the bed, dabbing at the still-bleeding cuts on Jamison Winger’s face and neck and his lips trembled. It was damned good, this simulation, but that’s all it was. That’s all it could be. This had never happened. Somehow the Shadow Man was managing his ‘reality’ to make all this seem real.
Winger looked up at the ceiling. “You hear me…? You got it wrong this time. This never happened.”
Jamison Winger’s face was deathly pale for an hour after Johnny’s outburst. No one answered the emergency call. He couldn’t stop the bleeding. His Dad moaned and murmured and twitched and Johnny knew, without understanding why, that his father…this sim of his father...had to die. If he lived, somehow that act of love and kindness would be used against him and the Shadow Man would have his hooks into Johnny even deeper and he’d never be able to stop the Bugs then.
Johnny Winger had to re-live the death of his father Jamison Winger again and again…once in a Denver hospital infested with Serengeti virus, his body riddled with pox against which the medbots were helpless and again in a terrible fall against some rocks in a stream at Ford’s Creek, where he had gashed his head, torn his carotid and nobody could stop the bleeding, and then again…and again…and again….in ever more horrible, grisly ways, scenes of indescribable brutality and gore…and he was shown these and forced to play a role in all these scenes of horror until he felt like his insides were being ripped out and torn from his body.
It was clear that he had to make a decision now.
Help his Dad. Save his Dad from an unending parade of deaths that never happened but in some weird entangled explosion of probabilities, could have happened and each one was a test.
Jamison Winger or the UNISPACE expeditions. The battle at Caloris Basin was as much an internal struggle, with guilt and remorse and helplessness assaulting him like a brigade of HERF and mag guns.
Once he had come to terms with this and refused to do anything about changing the past, all the pasts the Shadow Man was now showing him, Johnny Winger found himself hurtling down that circus ride of a curving corridor at breakneck speed again, dodging cubes and polygons, until he came back to the converter box and found himself hovering over the control pedestal.
***Press both buttons at the same time, Johnny…press them now***
He pressed both buttons, not knowing what else to do.
Outside, the converter control box, one row of receiving antennas slewed around to a new heading. Doc II had programmed new directions and now the antennas, the receiving end of the solar energy beamed down from the Sun Ring, was re-directed to a circumferential array of reddish mounds that encompassed the base.
Intense energy caused the mounds to disperse in a slow-motion explosion of bots and regolith. Each mound erupted in a faint cloud that quickly dispersed under the beams.
Two kilometers north of the main compound, the troopers of Assault One whooped with joy.
“Holy crap…look at that!”
“Zap! Something burned those friggin’ Bugs!”
“Hey, keep back, keep back…I don’t know what the hell that is!” Lieutenant Moncke waved his troops away from the slow-motion eruption of the hillocks.
Directly above each hillock, the background wavered and shimmered like a highway on a hot summer day. Then electrostatic forces dispersed the nanobots that comprised each mound and the path was
clear.
Moncke scooped up some regolith with his gloved hand and flung in the direction of the nearest mound. It sprayed out and fell to the ground with no obvious effect.
“Okay, I think it’s clear. I don’t know what the hell happened. Hawk troop, move out in squad order!”
Assault One continued its advance south across a cratered plain, cautiously edging past the mounds. Twenty two kilometers to their southeast, Assault Two resumed their advance as well.
A kilometer from the closest buildings, Moncke could see a faint haze shrouding the base.
“Nimbo, what is that crap? Dust? Or some kind of bot cloud?”
Namibe scanned the compound. “Reading high thermals, well above ambient, sir. High electromagnetics too…lots of atom smashing going on down there. I’d say what we’re seeing is a swarm or swarms of some type.”
From their distance, the base didn’t seem like much…a series of low domes, some cabling and smaller structures, and that eerie-looking haze.
“Okay,” Moncke decided, “this is as far as we go. Tactical plan says we hose down the place with coordinated HERF and mag fire first, then approach with suppressing fire and destroy or otherwise render inoperable each structure.” He tapped a button on his wristpad, called up Lieutenant Lyon, Assault Two commander. “Griffon, this is Hawk One…in position…ready for Phase 1, say status…over—“
Lyon’s voice crackled back reporting Assault Two ready. Time was checked and clocks were synched and at the appointed moment, both forces opened up on Caloris Basin.
In the vacuum of Mercury’s surface, no one could hear the booms of the rf pulses, but dust and regolith flew in all directions as all weapons were discharged at the same time.
The radio frequency beams shattered clouds of bots all across the base, raising geysers of dust and dirt in mushroom clouds of debris.
“Jeez, the whole place is nothing but Bugs!” yelled Berkowitz, kneeling on the lip of an oblong crater. “Every damn thing down there is nothing but a collection of bots.”
And it was true, though no one was surprised. Each dome and structure, each housing and assembly was in fact a tightly meshed swarm of nanobotic elements, a hive of Bugs that dissolved in the face of Assault One’s withering fire. Deprived of its shielding, the base became easy pickings for the troopers as they poured fire down into the valley.
“Squad One, move forward fifty meters, and flank left!” Moncke commanded. “Squad Two, maintain covering fire--!”
Squad One was Sly and Berkowitz. HERF1 and MAG1 scurried as fast as their X-suits would let them to a crater wall fifty meters left, then dropped below the wall and came up firing again.
Then Squad Two, CSO Namibe and Lander Pilot Viyawanda, pivoted forward to a flank right position, with Sly and Berkowitz providing covering fire.
Like an awkward infant just learning to walk, Hawk Troop worked its way steadily closer to the first structures of the base. The outer perimeter was a line of dish antennas—quantum coupler array, said the description scrolling on Moncke’s eyepiece, though he didn’t know where that intel came from.
Assault Two, Griffon Troop, did the same from the east.
Building by building, installation by installation, the men and women of Assault One and Two reduced the Caloris Basin compound to rubble and smoking ruins. As CSO, it was Namibe’s job to launch their tactical ANAD swarms and engage any Bugs not already fried in the HERF blasts.
Namibe found their ANAD bots a more than equal match for the Bugs. One skirmish happened on a humpback ridge overlooking the excavation trenches and catapult. Here, Assault One Squad Two ran into a dense swarm of Bugs trying to repair the catapult.
“Light ‘em up!” Viyawanda yelled. “Blast the buggers to hell and back!”
Namibe did just that.
The Bugs and the humans battled each other in a running series of skirmishes over the next few hours. Inside the base, both assault teams found the Bugs’ equipment and facilities puzzling but the troopers had no trouble reducing the base to ashes. Most of the structures weren’t solid anyway. When slammed with HERF or mag, the troopers found their targets little more than solid-seeming swarms of bots, which flew apart like leaves in a wind.
Devoid of its shielding and entangler fields, the Bug base was little more than paper to the Normals’ weapons.
Nobody was more surprised at this than Detachment Bravo commander Colonel Thanh.
Some hours after the troops of Assault One and Two had penetrated the main compound and leveled most of its equipment and structures to ashes, Thanh left his orbital command post aboard the Meiji and descended to the surface. There he met with Lieutenant Moncke and Lieutenant Lyon of the assault groups.
Moncke wandered across the rubble and ash of the compound with Thanh in tow. “We found that once the outer bot barrier and those blasted red mounds were breached, the rest of the base was essentially swarms of bots.” He pointed out small piles of smashed bots dotted across the floor of the huge crater. “The swarms were programmed to gather themselves together and perform certain functions. We’ve been trying to reconstruct what each swarm did: there were things that looked like domes for energy management…collecting and conditioning all the power beamed down from the Sun Ring. There were swarms for excavating and catapulting material to the Ring for expansion. There were antennas for receiving and converting the beamed power.”
Thanh was sobered at the scale of the base. “And it was all swarms of nanobots?”
“Yes, sir…all of it. Nothing solid. Once inside their barriers, we were able to smash the Bugs with HERF and mag fire. All that intel we had was pretty accurate.”
Thanh stopped on top of a low hill overlooking the now-destroyed excavation trenches and catapult. “I’ll have to check with Colonel Zheung and see how the Sun Ring squadron is doing. Detachment Alpha has a different nut to crack. And, for your information, Lieutenant, all that intel came from a rather unusual source, according to CINCSPACE.”
“What kind of source, sir…if I may ask?”
Thanh’s expression was invisible behind the glareshield of his helmet. The Sun was close, blasting the surface with radiation and heat and the glow washed out everything in certain directions. “What I heard was pretty incredible…I’m not sure I believe it myself. But there’s scuttlebutt inside UNISPACE that General John Winger somehow came back from the dead and is now an angel himself…somehow embedded in the big Bug cloud. He reconned this base and brought details to Earth himself. Right to UNIFORCE in Paris.” Thanh shrugged, though nobody could see it. “You can believe that or not, Lieutenant. But that’s what I heard.”
Moncke and Lyon walked behind the squadron c/o as he loped down toward the excavation pits. Moncke called after Thanh,“I’d be careful down there, Colonel…we still find knots of bots in places. Most of the base is secure but it’s like putting out fires. Here and there we run into a little hotspot of Bugs and we have to HERF the bastards.”
Thanh toured the rest of what was left of the base and eventually made his way back to the lander. Just as he was boarding, Moncke saw a faint haze swirling toward them from the ruins of the coupler array. Alarmed, he swung his HERF carbine up to disperse the Bugs; it could happen that fast.
But the haze stopped and began to solidify right before their eyes. At first, Moncke figured it was just a dust devil, glommed together from electrostatic forces, reflecting sunlight in an unusual way…that happened on Mercury.
But the form continued to gain mass and soon it was clear what the mass was. The form thickened and it wasn’t wearing any kind of protective gear either.
It was General John Winger…or his angel.
The Winger angel looked real enough, but they all understood it was an angel.
“Is this a trick?” Thanh asked. “Bugs resembling John Winger…some kind of weird maskirovka?”
The voice replied in their ear pieces, inside their suits. “No t
rick, Colonel. I just wanted to meet the man who put Caloris Basin out of commission.”
Thanh was skeptical. He had heard of this Winger apparition but never put much stock in the tales. Officer club banter, he figured. But Winger seemed real enough, hovering in front of Thanh, Moncke and Lyon like some kind of bad dream.
“I guess you’re real after all…General,” Thanh admitted. “If I didn’t know better, I’d figure you’re just a case of me having indigestion.”
“Oh, I’m real enough,” the Winger angel said. “Real as anything around this hellhole. I’m just glad I could get some intel back to your planners. And that you made use of it.”
Thanh surveyed the ruins of the base from the steps of his lander. “General, if you are General Winger, pardon me, sir…but what the hell are you?”
Winger sort of laughed at that. “Officially, you might say I’m a multi-configuration, para-human swarm entity. I am John Winger, to answer your question. I was…shall we say…changed in an ice cave on Europa. Took on the form and likeness of the adversary. Went native you might say.” The angel seemed to shrug. “It does have its benefits…like flitting around the solar system on a radio carrier wave. Looking like anything I have a mind to imitate. Colonel, if I wanted to, I could configure to look like you. But…there’s a downside. I can’t eat a hot dog, like you can. I can’t make love…in the conventional sense…I’ve got some more exploring to do on that score. I can’t really be you, or the old me or anything else. I can be like anything I have a configuration for. But it’s only a fake…a simulation. That’s what it’s like.”
Thanh glanced skyward, shielding his faceplate from the intense sunglare. “Operation Mercury Hammer has two parts, General. The ground phase here and the assault on that Sun Ring thing. Do you know anything about that? About how that’s going? We’re following strict emcon here, so no signals go in or out.”
Winger made an unusual set of gestures with his hands and an oblong form began to materialize in front of them…a sort of shroud hanging freely, black in the middle. “Colonel, one of the things I can do is grab photons from someplace, store them and make them show up someplace else. Kind of like recording a scene. I captured these signals on my last trip to Earth—“ The black interior of the shroud now began to glow and soon, images began forming, moving images, flickering like a vid at high speed. Recognizable images formed…there was a UNISPACE corvette, then another and Thanh realized they were looking at pixelated images of the Tycho and the Aristotle, approaching the boundaries of the Sun Ring. It was like a grainy sort of vid they were watching.