Quantum Troopers Return Episode 4: Deep Encounter

By Philip Bosshardt

An object from space has crashed into the Indian Ocean. It’s not just a meteorite but rather something sent this way by an alien presence on Jupiter’s moon Europa. Called a Keeper, the object becomes the target of intense conflict between the Chinese and their Red Harmony cartel companions and UNIFORCE.
Johnny Winger and a detachment from Quantum Corps are given a mission to reconnoiter what the Chinese and Red Harmony are doing and why they are so interested in the Keeper, now buried in the seabed near Madagascar. Finding that Red Harmony seeks to exploit some of the object’s unique capabilities, Winger tries to grab as much intelligence as he can but the Keeper’s displacement ability sends him and a Chinese sub back in time seven years. Now Winger and his detachment partner Joe Vinh have to find a way to get back to their own time with the intelligence.
The Mumbai Institute of India has also been researching the nature of this object. They have developed a small timeship called Vimana and with a crew of the original Quantum Corps detachment, they travel to the same time as Winger and Vinh, ultimately locating the stranded troopers. One trooper, Stella D’Garza, has an idea: why not use the bots that comprise Winger and Vinh to develop a special ANAD master bot optimized for rapid disassembly. Emplace this ANAD unit where they know the Keeper object will impact in seven years and let ANAD disassemble the thing before the Chinese and Red Harmony arrive and cordon off the area.
The ANAD unit is completed and emplaced in a canister at the forecast impact point in the Indian Ocean. Now all the quantum troopers have to do is use Vimana to get back to their own time. But they don’t reckon on a nasty surprise that Red Harmony has in store for them, a surprise that may make return impossible.
Fourth episode in the Quantum Troopers Return serial.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Philip Bosshardt
• Release date: May 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463945315

Philip Bosshardt

Philip Bosshardt is a native of Atlanta, Georgia. He works for a large company that makes products everyone uses...just check out the drinks aisle at your grocery store. He’s been happily married for over 20 years. He’s also a Georgia Tech graduate in Industrial Engineering. He loves water sports in any form and swims 3-4 miles a week in anything resembling water. He and his wife have no children. They do, however, have one terribly spoiled Keeshond dog named Kelsey.For details on his series Tales of the Quantum Corps, visit his blog at qcorpstimes.blogspot.com or his website at http://philbosshardt.wix.com/philip-bosshardt.

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Quantum Troopers Return

Episode 4: Deep Encounter

Published by Philip Bosshardt at Smashwords

Copyright 2020 Philip Bosshardt

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A few words about this series….

Quantum Troopers Return is a series of 25,000-30,000-word episodes detailing the adventures of Johnny Winger and his experiences as a quantum trooper with the United Nations Quantum Corps. This series continues the original serial stories of Quantum Troopers, Episodes 1-22 (formerly Nanotroopers).

Each episode will be about 40-60 pages, approximately 30,000 words in length.

A new episode will be available and uploaded every 4 weeks.

There will be 10 episodes. The story will be completely serialized in about 12 months.

Each episode is a stand-alone story but will advance the greater theme and plot of the story arc.

The main plotline: U.N. Quantum Corps must defeat the criminal cartel Red Harmony’s efforts to use their nanorobotic ANAD systems for the cartel’s own nefarious and illegal purposes.

Uploads will be made to www.smashwords.com on approximately the schedule below:

Episode # (*) Title Approximate Upload Date

1 (23) ‘Fab Lords’ 2-7-20

2 (24) "Free Fall’ 3-6-20

3 (25) Forbidden City 4-3-20

4 (26) Deep Encounter 5-8-20

5 (27) HAVOC 6-12-20

6 (28) The Empty Quarter 7-10-20

7 (29) The Hellas Paradox 8-14-20

8 (30) Twist Pirates 9-11-20

9 (31) The Better Angels 10-9-20

10 (32) The Ship of Theseus 11-13-20

(Note *: Episode numbers start with Episode 1 in this new series but the continuation of episode numbers from Quantum Troopers is also provided)

Chapter 1: Impact

Europa

September 11, 2060

On Europa, there is only ice…to the naked eye. Ice cliffs and ice valleys. Ice ravines and ice canyons. Ice bergs, buttes, badlands. Ice continents. Above the ice is the vacuum of space. Below the ice is a vast ocean, black as night. Normally, the two don’t mix.

In the late summer of 2060, as people on Earth reckon time, a small channel of sluggish, slightly warmer ice surged upward through the badlands of Conamara Chaos, embedded in a column known to geologists as a diapir, and burst through the surface crust. A geyser erupted into space, not in itself an unusual occurrence on Europa. However, this geyser extended over several square kilometers, flinging tons of ice and steam into the heavens.

This geyser caught the attention of observers on Earth and at Korolev Crater’s Farside Observatory, on the Moon.

After the Jovian Hammer mission some years before, an orbiting detection network had been put into place around Europa. Known as Europa-Eye, it was designed to provide intelligence on what the Keeper, still thought to be buried in the Europan sea, was doing. The network contained numerous instruments: visual cameras, mass spectrometers, neutron flux devices, radiometers.

On the first day of September, Europa-Eye detected evidence of some kind of vast swarm movement under the ice. Increased thermals, spikes in electromagnetic activity, even acoustic signals well above baseline were detected and processed through SpaceGuard Center at Farside.

There was no consensus on what the signals meant, just a growing suspicion that the Keeper, a colossal swarm of nanobotic devices, seemed to be stirring after more than a decade of quiescence. Analysts at SpaceGuard Center, vidconferencing with their colleagues at the UNISPACE Watch Command Center in Paris, concurred that something was happening on the surface of Europa, something different, something unexpected.

Visual analysis from Europa-Eye was inconclusive. But it was plain to see from the imagery streaming back from Jupiter’s huge satellite, that a newly formed geyser had just erupted on the surface. After some discussion, UNISPACE analysts finally decided to log the event as an icequake, a shifting of ice plates and ice continents, that had opened up a channel to pressurized water beneath. That water, rising through the newly formed channel from the Europan ocean, was now sublimating into space, in a series of spectacular geysers. The phenomenon seemed to be mainly centered along a series of ice grooves, known as linea, starting in the Conamara Chaos and ending at the southern end of Radamanthys Linea, longitude 192 degrees, latitude 12 degrees north.

Or so they thought. The report issued to CINCSPACE made the conclusion that the geyser field was nothing more than an unusual series of ice plates shifting about, despite growing evidence of massive swarm movements in the ocean below. Europa-Eye would continue to observe and record the event, providing thesis material for astronomers and geologists and glaciologists for years to come. Farside and UNISPACE would continue to monitor the activity that had roiled the surface of Europa.

But the report was firm in its principal conclusion: natural forces were responsible for a series of new ice geysers erupting on the surface of Europa. It was more violent and spectacular than before, but nothing the investigators hadn’t seen before on countless worlds, even on Europa itself.

What Europa-Eye could not see, however, was what was actually embedded in the main geyser, hidden from view, obscured by the violence of tons of ice sublimating into space every second. The Keeper swarm itself, once a target of Quantum Corps investigation from close range during the Golden Horde case, was no longer submerged in Europa’s ocean of night. Instead, the Keeper had bored through more than thirty kilometers of ice and arisen to the surface of the satellite. Now residing in a steep ice ravine, surrounded by towering ice cliffs, hidden by geysering spouts of water, the vast swarm boiled away like a festering sore, slamming atoms to maintain itself and expand in the maelstrom of erupting ice and water.

As it settled onto the icy surface, the Keeper had begun to bud off trillions of replicant bots from its main structure. The Keeper was shedding parts of itself.

These bots sloughed off and drifted upward, some riding on droplets of water, particles of ice sublimating into the vacuum. Most of the bots managed to achieve escape velocity through infinitesimal nano-scale thrusters, using the available water as propellant. Orienting themselves toward the Sun, the swelling swarm of nanobots collected themselves into a variety of structures and soon entered a steep, elliptical heliocentric orbit, an orbit which would intersect the orbit of Earth in less than four years.

Disguised by the geysers, the swarm escaped Europa and the Jupiter system completely. They now drifted sunward…and Earthward.

Chinese Academy of Sciences Space Watch Observatory

Mount Kailash, Tibet Autonomous Region

September 1, 2064

1730 hours, Earth Universal Time (EUT)

Nightfall at Mount Kailash came abruptly, too abruptly, thought Ling Fong. She stared out the porthole of the Space Watch Center and watched the shadows drop like a black curtain across the face of the mountain. Kailash was a massive place, fully six thousand meters in height with stairstep rim walls and sheer gray-black cliffs choked with deep snow. Building an observatory here had been an engineer’s nightmare—scores had died in construction--but Beijing had wanted it done and poured billions into the project.

The mountain was also sacred to four religions.

Ling Fong watched the black creep down the mountain slopes and ooze across the valley floor like a spreading stain. Somehow, it seemed depressing…another night with only the stars for company. Cosmic grandeur, my ass, she muttered to herself. Give me a beach in the South Pacific and some native boys and I’ll tell you a thing or two about cosmic grandeur.

Ling was pulling late shift today…tonight…whatever the hell it was. Tending the radars and telescopes of the Cassegrain 80-meter Cixin reflector, a key node in the SpaceGuard System that scanned the heavens for anything approaching the Earth-Moon system, was a critical job, especially now that GreenMars had started moving rocks around and tossing them sunward.

That ought to be a spectacle, Ling thought. She’d seen the sims often enough, the ones GreenMars had put out for public consumption, the ones that showed asteroid 2351, better known as Wilks-Lucayo, barreling down the sun’s gravity well and smashing the bejeezus out of Mars. Impact was scheduled for less than a year from now and Ling and her fellow techs would have a ringside seat to a great show.

Ling took one last look out the nearest porthole and begrudged the