Quantum Troopers Return Episode 9: The Better Angels

By Philip Bosshardt

A global phenomena called Symborg threatens civil stability and public order in dozens of countries. A robotic messiah has appeared, hugely popular with millions. Symborg embodies a new cult called the Assimilationists. The Red Harmony cartel has piggy-backed on this phenomenon to gain new customers for their halos and drugs. The UN is faced with a crisis, as hundreds of thousands of followers willingly allow themselves to be deconstructed in an insane desire to merge with Symborg and his mother swarm.
Symborg has to be stopped. Quantum Corps and Johnny Winger are given a mission to infiltrate Symborg’s inner circle and corrupt the angel, so that he can’t perform in public. But one disgruntled quantum trooper, Stella D’Garza, has become a double agent, working for Red Harmony inside the Corps, providing intelligence. D’Garza is instructed to sabotage Winger’s mission, even as she outwardly works within the Corps’ operation to infiltrate Symborg’s circle.
Detected and arrested by the Corps, D’Garza is forced to assume multiple identities, as a trooper for Quantum Corps and a deeply embedded agent for the cartel. Torn between loyalties, given a job of protecting Symborg during an upcoming rally in New York and bearing an internal halo to keep her subservient to the cartel, D’Garza faces the hardest choice of her life. Will she submit to the dictates of her cartel halo and sabotage the Quantum Corps operation? Or will she overcome her fears and the halo to fall back on years of training as an atomgrabber and years of loyalty to Johnny Winger?
Her decision shocks everyone.
Ninth episode in the Quantum Troopers Return serial.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Philip Bosshardt
• Release date: Oct 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005390723

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.

Book preview

Quantum Troopers Return

Episode 9: The Better Angels

Published by Philip Bosshardt at Smashwords

Copyright 2020 Philip Bosshardt

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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: A Robotic Messiah

The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Abraham Lincoln

March 4, 1861

Nairobi, Kenya

Campaign Rally at Kibera Fields

September 10, 2067

1900 hours

For Evelyn Ndinka, the rally for candidate Julius Akamba 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. Ndinka 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 Akamba, the Assimilationist candidate, would be there, just days before the big election. But Ndinka knew it wasn’t Akamba that was the real draw. It was the candidate’s front man and staff aide…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. Ndinka 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. Ndinka 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 Ngombe. 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. Evelyn Ndinka 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. Ndinka 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 Ngombe 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 Ngombe, 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 Ngombe 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 Symborg would soon be calling forth.

Evelyn Ndinka 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.

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

Involuntarily, Evelyn Ndinka shuddered. She would never understand Assimilationists.

Something was happening. The crowd was stirring. Ndinka 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, Ndinka 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 Akamba 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.

Ndinka found herself shoved forward like a raft adrift, until she was nearly impaled on the baton of a policeman at