Platoon had suffered three wounded and one dead—not a bad casualty ratio, actually, for space combat, where even minor damage to vacuum armor can very easily mean a fast and unpleasant death. We’d lost Lance Corporal Stalzar going in; the others we’d been able to treat or stabilize. We still didn’t know about Private Donohue … wouldn’t know about her until we could get her to a proper med facility. I didn’t have a report yet from 1st Platoon. I tagged HM2 Michael C. Dubois, the 1st Platoon Corpsman, over the company Net. If he needed help out there on the rock’s surface, he could yell for me.
“Carlyle!” Lieutenant Singer called. “What are you doing?”
“Grabbing suit recordings, sir,” I replied.
“That can wait. I need you sweeping the station for goo threats.”
I sighed. No rest for the Wiccans …
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“That includes the prisoners. Especially the prisoners. We can’t allow the medevacs in until the mining station is declared clean.”
Shit. “I’m on it, sir.”
I wondered whether that order was coming down from Washington, or if it represented the technoparanoia of the local brass—at a battalion or company level, or even of Second Lieutenant Singer himself.
No matter. Orders were orders. I pulled out my N-prog and began resetting it.
Gray goo. That was the old and fear-entangled term invented by Eric Drexler, one of the twentieth-century fathers of nanotechnology—though he’d later said he wished he’d never come up with the phrase. Back in those early days, before the first molecular disassemblers had even been brought on-line, there’d been a widespread concern about nanomachines programmed to take apart raw materials and create more of themselves. Since human beings are as good as sources of raw materials as an ancient landfill, the fear was that nano-D would keep on eating and eating until the entire planet was converted to so-called gray goo.
It couldn’t happen, of course. Run until the raw material is used up is a piss-poor way to program molecular machines, first off. They also require energy, a lot of it, to break molecular bonds, and are generally fairly limited in range. Nanodisassemblers are designed to reach an end point and quit. They’re also easily shut down by an ultraviolet radiation bath, or by transmission of a seek-kill signal in their immediate vicinity.
But Humankind has had a love-hate relationship with nano since the beginning. Medical nano has effectively tripled our expected life span, ended the tyranny of pain, overturned the death sentences of cancer and heart disease, and even holds out the eventual promise of … if not immortality, then the next best thing: lifetimes measured by millennia rather than years. Some people with full-course nananagathics in their systems have been around for well over a century, now, and still look like they’re in their thirties. Not only that, nanotechnology has completely transformed the way we control and interact with our material surroundings, allowing us to grow everything from a sizzling steak to a house, and pull what we need from the background matrix—furniture, workstations, nanufactories, anything that can be stored in digital AI memory and retrieved by a thoughtclick.
But the term gray goo remains a bugaboo, a terror phrase for anyone nervous about the ever-increasing pace of our technology. Washington in particular was afraid of what would happen if terrorists got hold of so-called black nano, which when released would proceed to chow down on Earth’s ecosphere.
Ecophagia—devouring the ecosphere.
Machines—even very tiny ones—only did what humans told them to do.
But then, humans were always the weak part of the equation, capable of the most incredibly stupid or irresponsible of acts.
I started scanning the compartment with my N-prog, looking for the telltale electronic signature of nanobots. The trouble was, there were ’bots everywhere. When my N-prog detected active nano, it transmitted the data to my in-head, which painted green pinpoints against my vision, marking objects that otherwise would have been invisibly small. I looked at the station bulkhead in front of me, gray-painted and consisting entirely of massive pipes running from deck to overhead. The biggest, I knew, were sorting pipes, carrying the component elements of Atun 3840 into storage and assembly bays. The thinner tubes were nano-D feeders, sending microscopic disassemblers into the depths of the captive asteroid. The pipes were silent at the moment, the mining process shut down. But they showed as solid masses of green, each packed with trillions upon uncountable trillions of live nanobots—motionless, but still powered and on standby. Most of the Marines around me showed diffuse green masses within the outlines of their bodies—the medical nano we all carried to improve our combat efficiency, react to wounds, and keep us healthy.
There was loose nano drifting in the air too. The damned things are so tiny that there’s always leakage, and any environment with active nano running will have escapees. I pointed my N-prog at several, interrogating them; a lot of the floaters actually were disassemblers—leftovers from the rounds the tangos had used. They’d shut down but were still broadcasting. Damn, they were everywhere.
This was freaking hopeless.
“Lieutenant Singer?”
“Go ahead.”
“We’ve got nano soup in here. It appears inert, but there’s so much it’s overloading my readings. I recommend a UV bath. The whole station, top to bottom.”
Facilities like Capricorn Zeta were required by law to have ultraviolet lights installed in every compartment, a means of turning off any loose nano that leaked into the environment or came inside on workers’ spacesuits. It was the simplest solution, and the only one we had time for.
“Very well,” Singer said. “But check out the tangos. One of them might be a carrier.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
The prisoners were being held in the next compartment out from the rock, a common area that served as lounge and mess hall for the miners. One entire bulkhead was transplas, looking down on the cloud tops hugging the Earth. We were crossing the terminator into night, and the clouds were red and flaming orange. The planet looked fragile and terribly vulnerable.
Sergeant Aguirre and a couple of privates had the tangos under guard—five of them. They’d been yanked out of their spacesuits, stripped naked, and tied hand and foot. We were taking no chances with these animals.
They watched with large, dark, and angry eyes as I scanned the first one with my N-prog. No RFID tag, no edentity. “Name?” I asked him.
He spat at me, the shimmering glob of saliva drifting past my helmet in microgravity to splat against the transparent bulkhead at my back. I shrugged and kept scanning. There was, of course, nothing.
Neo-Ludds. They’ve been with us forever, I think. When Tharg the caveman first discovered fire, there were probably members of the tribe who wanted to make the stuff illegal, a clear and present danger to the community. The original Luddites had been early-nineteenth-century textile workers who’d sabotaged the machinery introduced by the Industrial Revolution, machinery that was putting them out of work. Toward the end of the twentieth century neo-Luddism had arisen—a rejection of those technologies perceived as having a negative impact on both individuals and communities.
Nanotechnology was at the top of the neo-Ludds’
