***Prime Key requires only proper medium, proper conditions, for swarm activity…First Rule is invoked…evolution of swarm requires necessary alterations to environment…some entities will be absorbed to permit swarm growth, replication and propagation of critical entities***
So there it is, Winger thought. He moved out into the corridor, began pulling himself along the handholds toward the mess hall. He could hear Mendez’s voice filtering up from the briefing one level below.
Could he even think of ANAD as a nanotrooper any longer? He was something else now, something different. The Rules had been changed. ANAD’s programming had been changed, maybe by that last quantum wave that had caused such a disastrous Big Bang here and on Earth. Somehow, like an elemental substance, a phase change had occurred. Maybe it was something else.
ANAD was now working to prepare Earth for the arrival of an ancient relative.
He ran right into Taj Singh, also making his way through the corridor. Singh was in full hypersuit, dragging his helmet behind. He stopped short.
“Lieutenant, I was hoping to catch you…could I speak to you for a moment, sir?”
“Make it quick, Taj. In fact, follow me. We’re due in the mess compartment right now and I don’t want to get left behind.”
Taj Singh then proceeded to describe what he had seen Sergeant Al Glance do to ANAD on Galileo’s outbound flight to Hicks.
“He definitely loaded something, sir. Loaded files into ANAD’s main processor. I didn’t see what kind of files. But not long afterward, ANAD started going wacko.”
Winger halted just outside the mess compartment. “Taj, just what exactly are you saying? Sergeant Glance is CC2 for this detachment. Maybe he was just checking configs.”
Taj shook his head. “I don’t think so, sir. The Sergeant didn’t see me. But he was looking around, kind of suspicious-like, like he didn’t want anybody to see what he was doing. When he was done, he sealed containment and left and we almost ran right into each other. He had a look on his face…kind of like oh, hope you didn’t see me in there. You understand what I’m saying, Lieutenant?”
Winger took a deep breath. “Not exactly, but I get that you think Sergeant Glance may have done something to corrupt the ANAD master…am I understanding what you’re saying, Corporal?”
Taj lowered his head. “Yes, sir. Perhaps, sir, if the ANAD master could be thoroughly checked…all files, all templates, all configs.”
“Taj, we don’t have time to do that now. Maybe once we’re done…if we get down. You and I need to have a longer talk then. Now, get inside…Mendez is going over the details.”
“Yes, sir.” Singh pulled himself through the hatch. Winger was right behind him, now more confused than ever.
What if Taj was right? ANAD had been acting oddly the last few days. And there was the Bang on the surface of the asteroid….
He dropped through the transfer tube down to A Level and slid in behind Barnes and Tsukota, where Mendez had already started the briefing.
The mess compartment was jammed with troopers in full hypersuits and crewmen floating at every angle, in every corner. Mendez and Kamler were leading the briefing, both hanging onto the drink dispenser up front.
“Here are the lifeboat assignments,” Mendez was saying. “We’ve got three. For some reason, we call them A, B, and C. Two scoutships as well, Scout 1 and Scout 2.” He read off the assignments. Winger was assigned to A Boat, along with Mendez, Turbo Fatah and Sheila Reaves.
“Lieutenant,” asked Winger from the back, “what about Lucy?” Hiroshi was still recovering from injuries sustained in the borehole collapse at Charlie site.
Mendez knew the injured CQE would need special care. “Stu here will take your trooper down with help from Klimuk…Boat C. I’ve doubled up the other assignments to make room. Don’t worry, Lieutenant, we’ll take good care of her.”
Chris Calderon had a question. “How long does this drop take?”
Mendez shrugged. “Who knows? It’s not going to be a walk on the beach. These lifeboats are just basically big cans with oxygen and seats. Extremely limited maneuverability. Basically, you’ll be making a ballistic entry…in fact, you may hit seven or eight G’s on the way down. Plus the scouts have an additional maneuver to perform…separating their service and entry modules. You can’t enter the atmosphere attached…don’t worry, it’s all automatic but it’s still a potential complication. We haven’t had time to do much more than a quick check of systems on these boats. So to answer your question, Sergeant, the best answer is: it depends. Every boat’s going to make this entry differently. A nominal profile should put you on the ground in half an hour after hitting the upper atmosphere…entry interface. About a hundred kilometers above ground.”
“And we are headed for ground, aren’t we, Lieutenant?” asked Al Glance. “As in… solid ground. What’s our projected landing point?”
“Central Australia,” Kamler cut in. He ran a quick video snippet on a nearby screen. “This was a training vid some years ago, back when these boats were used more often. Gateway and UNISPACE Control both say we’re headed for an elliptical landing zone near Woomera…mostly desert I’m told but at least there’s a lot of it. Of course, as Pete says, every ship will enter the atmosphere slightly differently. Your landing sites could be scattered all over the place.”
“I guess that about covers it,” Mendez announced. “Stay in your suits all the way to the ground. I can’t guarantee these boats will hold up. Hell, the last time they had a thorough checkout, Galileo was still on the regular Earth-Mars milk run. Six years ago at least. But it’s the best we have.” His lips tightened, thinking of the big ship’s fate. “Galileo’s doomed. She was a good ship. And we’re lucky we departed Phobos Station with any lifeboats. UNISPACE was scavenging her for parts before this mission.”
“Okay, troopers…let’s move out!” Winger hooked up with his lifeboat crewmates as they drifted down the central gangway.
Galileo’s lifeboats and scoutships were docked to a ring between the command deck and the Hab and crew deck. With a great deal of jostling and thumping, the hypersuited nanotroopers pushed down the central gangway in a tense silence and boarded their assigned boats.
Atmosphere entry was less than an hour away.
Mendez took the pilot’s seat with Winger beside him. Fatah and Reaves were squeezed in behind them. It was like being in a closet.
“Powering up,” Mendez announced. “Auto sep in ten minutes.” He checked with the other boats, coordinating and synchronizing.
As Mendez went through his departure checklist, Winger stared grimly at the changing cloudscape three hundred and twenty kilometers below them. It was just dawn. The day-night terminator was sliding westward like a great curtain, revealing the dappled surface of the eastern Atlantic Ocean, with the tan and ocher sand dunes of the Sahara rolling into view.
“One minute to auto separation,” Mendez told him. “Check your harnesses. Go to max on your suit oxygen. Close your visors and button up. This is likely to get hairy before we’re all done.”
“Lieutenant,” Winger reminded him, ‘you got us down to Hicks-Newman in one piece. Whenever I have to go diving into some planet’s atmosphere, I’m asking for you.”
Mendez smiled a taut smile, his eyes rapidly scanning instruments. “Thanks. I’d rather not make a habit of this.”
The separation maneuver was a series of loud bangs, followed by a mild jolt as A Boat undocked cleanly. Her aft thrusters fired briefly to put her on a path up and away from Galileo. Winger spotted two other lifeboats out of the corner of his eye. All seemed to have made the separation cleanly. Mendez soon confirmed that.
“Four boats and two scouts away…that’s a good start.” Mendez had piloted A Boat on a curving path that soon put Galileo below and ahead of them. “We don’t want to be anywhere around her when she starts breaking up,” he explained.
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Thirty minutes later, Galileo was a speck of light and Mendez was busily configuring the cramped little ship for their imminent plunge into the atmosphere.
“I make us at about one five six kilometers above entry point,” he said. “Setting up for ballistic entry now.”
Winger stared out the porthole beside his head. The west coast of Australia had just drifted into view, streaked with ruddy desert and deep brown blotches. Comforting thought, he told himself. At least we have land under our feet.
“How well does this garbage can fly?” piped up Sheila Reaves.
Mendez maneuvered them around to make entry, flying with their backs to the Earth.
“About like a garbage can,” he replied. “I’ve got an offset center of lift, so I can roll us left and right and shift the trajectory that way, if I want. Beyond that, we’re basically making a big dive into the atmosphere.”
Turbo Fatah was strapped in next to Reaves. “I just hope we stay dry. There’s an awful lot of ocean down there.”
Lifeboat A was shaped like a squat ball with a rounded top. With the broad bottom now facing into the direction of flight, Mendez rolled the little ship first one way, then the other, trying to keep a blinking red dot centered between lines on his attitude display. “Too shallow and we may skip off the top of the atmosphere. Too steep and—“
“We’re toast,” finished Winger. He tugged on his shoulder straps a little tighter and wondered how ANAD was doing, snugly cocooned inside his shoulder capsule.
The first reddish-orange streamers appeared outside the porthole a few moments later, tongues of flame licking up the side of the lifeboat as the ship plunged steeply into the atmosphere.
As they settled deeper, he felt a weight pressing down on his chest. Deceleration was already generating measurable forces on the crew.
“Two g’s,” Mendez announced. “I’m rolling sixty degrees left…trying to null out a little drift. We’re in the corridor okay…a little high but still in the green.”
Winger wondered about the impactors from what was left of Hicks-Newman. The asteroid debris that couldn’t be diverted would be hitting Earth’s atmosphere about half an hour after the lifeboats.
I just hope they don’t come down on top of us. Gateway had estimated Hicks-D would impact in the western Mediterranean. But even a few minutes error in the calculations could put the biggest rocks right in the middle of the Indian Ocean. If that happened, there was no telling what the shock wave would do to them.
“Three g’s…” Mendez said. Winger didn’t need an announcement. The grunts and pants behind him from Reaves and Fatah told him everything he needed to know. The Detachment had spent several months in space, enduring everything from one-third g aerobraking around Mars to weightlessness to near zero-g at Hicks. They were all becoming seriously deconditioned.
“Passing through four hundred k,” Mendez muttered. He tweaked a hand controller and the tiny capsule rolled to port, shifting her offset center of lift to bend the trajectory a little shallower. “Going shallow…I’m trying to cut down on the g’s a little, give us a break.”
They were now below one hundred twenty kilometers altitude, enveloped in a white-hot sheath of ionized plasma, streaking earthward at twenty four thousand kilometers an hour.
Mendez and Winger were both soon bathed in sweat, while outside the ship’s portholes, orange flames lapped at the edges of the glass, forming ribbons and curlicues and tree branches and fantastic nameless shapes of incandescent pink. A pearlescent bow formed a few centimeters beyond Winger’s porthole, bending and twisting as if it were alive.
And through it all, the g’s rose steadily on all of them…three, three and a half, four...five…six g’s.
Winger forced out short oomphs of breath, as he had been taught in the sims, but breath was steadily becoming precious. He tried focusing on the instrument panel, on the porthole, anything to take his mind off the crushing weight sitting on his chest.
“Under two hundred k,” Mendez gritted out. The pilot zeroed in on their corridor, his eyes glued to the graph on the panel and the red dot indicating their position. “Drogue should be coming out in fifty seconds.”
The lifeboat was now falling faster, picking up speed again, through the upper levels of the stratosphere. Mendez’s maneuvering had forced them beyond the nominal corridor; the dot had moved outside the lines on the graph. They were landing long, overshooting the original impact zone in central Australia. The pilot deployed the periscope once the worst of the plasma sheath had vanished and quickly realized what was happening.
“Coastline up ahead, folks. Looks like we’ve gone past the original landing zone.”
Winger saw the same thing. He sucked in a few deliciously deep breaths, then forced out, “Can you tell where we are?”
“Eastern Australia,” Mendez grunted. “Computer’s projecting touchdown just off the east coast, off Queensland.”
“That sounds like the ocean to me,” Reaves grumbled.
Mendez concentrated on steering them back on course, but the lifeboat’s descent path was too steep. “Drogue chute in less than five…four…three…two…one…mark!”
Almost before the words were out of his mouth, a great shuddering jolt slammed the little pod. Through his porthole, Winger could see the chute reefing lines stream out, snapping and twisting in the slipstream, then snapping smartly into the welcome sight of a red and white canopy. The drogue filled quickly with air and Lifeboat A jerked and slowed its descent from several thousand kilometers an hour to less than three hundred.
Mendez studied the view on his periscope. “It’s the ocean, for sure. There’s the coastline.”
Winger watched the clock carefully, counting down the last seconds to main chute deployment. “Maybe we can still steer back toward land. Isn’t the main chute pretty maneuverable?”
“Here go the mains—“
Another series of jerks and jolts was followed by a sharp deceleration force, throwing the crew of Lifeboat A forward against their harnesses. The little pod shimmied and shuddered like a wet dog before the chutes stabilized her oscillation and damped out the swaying. The mains filled with air and billowed out to their full twenty meter dimensions, looking like a huge inflatable wing…a paraglider.
“I’m banking now…” Mendez told them. “Hold on to your hats…this can be a bit of a carnival ride.”
The Lieutenant used the paraglider’s extensible risers to alternately bank and turn, trying to steer them back on shore. But their descent and the prevailing winds worked against Mendez’s efforts.
“Still ocean,” Winger told him. “We’re through ten-thousand…down at forty two…landing bag deploy coming up.”
The last few minutes of Lifeboat A’s descent seemed to flash by in a blur of frantic activity, punctuated by jerks, jolts, bangs, pops and whistles.
The impact, when it came, was a careening slap against the side of the pod’s hull. When he peered out his porthole, Winger saw only water, frothing, bubbling seawater. Then the little ship rolled upright as her flotation gear hissed out into place and the welcome view of sun and sky replaced the underwater scene.
That’s when Winger saw the sharks cruising by right outside the hatch.
“Uh, Lieutenant…looks like we’ve got company.”
Mendez had already seen their unwelcome visitors. “We’ll be okay inside.” He studied the locator screen for a moment, trying to figure out just where they were. “We’ve come down right on top of the Great Barrier Reef, best I can figure. Off the coast of Australia. Shark grottoes all over the place.”
From the rear seat, Sheila Reaves let out a yelp. “On the horizon…look!”
A trio of black dots had materialized. Now growing visibly larger with each passing moment, the dots soon resolved themselves into the familiar shape of lifters; their black fuselages were emblazoned with the golden sunburst emblem of the Quantum Corps.
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nbsp; “Must be our reception committee,” Winger concluded. “Probably staged out of Singapore.”
“See any other pods? Any other lifeboats?” Fatah asked.
“Zip,” said Winger. “Just us and the sharks.”
Mendez was already cycling through frequencies, trying to contact the rescue lifters. “Rescue force, this is Lifeboat A detached from Galileo, now at stable one, awaiting your orders.”
Seconds later, a loud twangy voice boomed in their headsets. “Lifeboat A, this is… ah…Rescue One. Assume nominal rescue configuration immediately. We’re going to have to hoist you out of there one by one. Be advised…ah…we don’t have much time…we’ve got inbound fragments coming in, projected impacts in the central Pacific…less than an hour from now—“
Mendez didn’t need to hear any more. “Okay, crew…you heard the man. Get your asses moving. Let’s get the hell out of here!”
The operation was done in less than ten minutes. Aboard Rescue One, Mendez, Winger, Reaves and Fatah gratefully sucked in breezes of warm tropical air and topped it off with chilled canteens of water and lemon drink. It tasted better than the finest wine. Even as they settled back, Rescue One’s pilot banked the lifter sharply to port and lay in a speed course north by northwest toward Quantum Corps’ Singapore base.
The little fleet had just settled onto the tarmac at the base when the first impactor, a jagged mountain-sized fragment from Hicks-Newman, slammed into the ocean…ten thousand kilometers northeast of them.
Over the next hour, the undiverted remnants of Hicks-Newman shotgunned the Earth’s surface along an arc nineteen thousand kilometers long, from the western Mediterranean to the central Pacific.
The largest impactor, as expected, was Hicks-D, which impacted as predicted by Gateway in the Med, some thirty-five kilometers northwest of the city of Tunis.
The effects of all the impacts would be felt for years afterward.
UNIFORCE Special Report to the Secretary-General
Principal Impact Effects from 23998 Hicks-Newman (Fragment D)
12 June 2049
Impactor Hicks-Newman D impacted the earth’s surface at 061510Z, 25 May 2049. Point of impact was 37N by 11E, approximately one hundred and sixteen kilometers north-northeast of the Tunisian coastal city of Bizerte. The point of impact was located at the center of a triangle between the Tunisian coastline, bounded by Sardinia on the northwest and Sicily to the northeast.
At impact, the impactor was moving at an estimated velocity of 16.99 kilometers per second.
Energy released at impact was estimated to be approximately 6.04 x 10 exp 16 Joules.
Due to the water impact, an estimated 2.35 x 10 exp 6 tons of seawater was vaporized. Most of the vaporized material was lifted as steam into the earth’s atmosphere.
Oceanic effects included a series of seismic events and transients, culminating in three succeeding tremors of Richter magnitude 5.4, 5.1 and 4.1, all occurring in the first two hours after impact.
Shock waves and tsunami effects are appended to this report as Attachment A: Impactor Hicks-D Oceanic Effects on the Mediterranean Basin. Notable effects included wave heights of over a hundred meters measured at Bizerte, Algiers, Barcelona and Marseilles. Similar destructive wave effects of lesser magnitude were measured at Naples, Palermo, Messina and Tripoli.
U.N. Quantum Corps efforts to ameliorate destructive shock wave and tsunami effects through nanobotic shielding were only partially successful, owing to the short time frame involved. Shielding was most effective at Bizerte, where observed wave heights reached one hundred and seventy meters approximately two kilometers offshore. Wave energy was substantially dissipated by nanobotic shielding along the waterfront west and east of the center of the city. Measured wave heights at the port entrance did not exceed one hundred and ten meters.
Impactor Hicks-D partially disintegrated in the lower atmosphere, yielding multiple fragments to impact the ocean surface. Disintegration effects were most pronounced at an altitude of five thousand meters above MSL. Peak overpressures from this event exceeded 17.7 bars (approximately 251 PSI) at a point two kilometers from the center of the impact field. Because the impact site was well offshore, little overpressure damage was sustained to land structures. Some shipping in the area was damaged.
Casualty reports are appended to this report as Attachment B: Casualty Effects from Impact of 23998 Hicks-Newman (Fragment D). Note that known casualties that can be directly attributed to this event will exceed 800,000 around the Mediterranean basin alone.
Long term meteorological and climatic effects are detailed in Attachment C: Forecast Climatic Effects from Impact of 23998 Hicks-Newman (Fragment D and Lesser Impactors). Note that long-term climatic effects incorporate estimates of seawater and seabed excavation and dynamic lifting of excavated materials into the atmosphere integrated into current forecast models over the next two years.
For latest results of forecast model iterations, see World Meteorological Organization “Proceedings of Conference on Climatic Effects from Recent Asteroidal Impacts”, 3-5 June, 2049, Madrid, Spain, appended to this report as Attachment D.
UNIFORCE casualty and environmental remediation efforts continue and are expected to be required at current levels of effort for at least the next two years.