Guardian (War Angel Book 1) by David Hallquist (best contemporary novels .TXT) 📕

has always remained in zero gravity, or nearly so. Some of the Marines have been here before, off duty, so finding their way around isn’t the problem. The problem is the entire asteroid seems deserted.

Systems are down throughout the dark tunnels—not that lack of light affects the Marines’ sensors in any way. Environmental systems will have to be brought back online after the fight, but it should take days before air quality or temperature become a problem on a facility this size. So why do it? All the running systems could have masked enemy electrical signatures or been used to actively help the enemy track our positions…so why shut everything down?

Searching for answers and survivors, the Marines float ever deeper into Eros.

* * *

The Marines find the first group of survivors locked up in one of the large storerooms near the middle of the asteroid. They’re banging on the door and telling the Marines to hurry up as they check for traps or explosives. The door has been powered down and welded shut; they have to cut through.

On the other side is a huge gallery full of floating, desperately sick people. Their faces are sweating from fever, and their skin has a scaly, flaky appearance. Some are coughing or throwing up blood. The sickest ones are nearly unconscious and have discolored blood vessels tracing away from wounds of darkened flesh. This reminds me of something I’ve heard of…what was it again?

A cry of outrage and disgust erupts from the corpsman as he identifies what it is, “Nano!”

The alarms start going off on the Marines’ armor, one by one.

The Marines rush out of the contaminated room, followed almost instantly by the least ill of the asteroid colonists. They’re setting up a perimeter in the corridor and calling in medical and engineering teams to deal with the insidious nanotech replicators floating through the air of the corridors and attached to their own power armor.

Medical and engineering crews are on the way from the fleet. They’ll be getting to work on preventing the spread of this synthetic cyber disease, and then they’ll work on decontamination and curing people. The Marines will have to have their armor decontaminated and will likely need the outer surface of their armor repaired. The colonists are going to need a full spectrum of anti-nano treatments, and many of them look like they’ll need tissue regeneration afterwards. Still, it looks like we may have gotten here in time to save most of the people’s lives.

Nano isn’t as fast as the holos make it out to be. It takes hours to get sick, and days to die. There’re limits to how fast the chemical processes can take place in order to fully replicate. The fever is from your body realizing something is wrong and trying to fight it, but it can’t—the invader is too alien. Advanced cases look like radiation sickness, with lots of connective tissue falling apart and internal bleeding. It’s a disgusting way to die.

One kind of nano doesn’t do everything, though; the kinds that make people sick are usually mixed with different variants that attack composites, superconductors, metals, or even bare rock. Those kinds grow more slowly, depending on available energy, and are usually used to eat through a spacesuit or make a vessel or space station contaminated and unusable.

Why would anyone use nano?

Nano is basically an area-denial weapon that creates an invisible hazard. Unlike smart mines or loiter missiles, though, you can’t just turn the stuff off. It also doesn’t discriminate; it’ll try to eat anything and anyone, and slowly keep on spreading. While it’s a terror to civilians and anyone else caught out in the open, it’s not that effective against armored military forces that have medical teams and field engineers. Before the day is out, this asteroid will be evacuated, then irradiated and sprayed down with counter-nano. It should be safe here at Eros after we clean this stuff up…but I’m not sure I’d want to live here afterward, just in case.

With the right medical nanotech treatments in time, we should be able to save everyone here. Our internal augments and nano cyberware should be able to fight off most kinds of nano weapons, or at least delay their progress if they manages to get in through a breach in our armor. Still, long, unpleasant hours of medical checkups and treatments are up for everyone who went into the asteroid.

All in all, it’ll probably take us a few days to get everything cleaned up and everyone treated. Then, there’s all the damage that was done to the asteroid’s systems during the fighting and because of nano-corruption. Repairing all that could take a lot longer, though I bet we can fabricate most of the critical components.

Now I know what the delays were for—to make sure all the civilians were infected and to allow nano to spread throughout the asteroid. That’s also why the systems were all off inside, because they’d report errors or fail as the non-organic breeds of nano attacked them.

Whoever did this (and I think we all know it was Saturn) used a banned weapon to kill scores of people and almost wipe out an entire settlement just to delay us and leave us stuck out here. Why?

Probably to delay us and leave us stuck out here, Mike. Whatever’s really going on, they want our Navy running from little crisis to little crisis and out of their way. It’s going to be bad, whatever it turns out to be, if they’re willing to accept the grief and outrage from the rest of the solar system for using nano on a civilian settlement.

I wish I could get my hands on whoever did this and twist their head right off. I’d like to drop down through the clouds of Saturn right now and blast the Supreme Undermind into stray neutrons. If I could just…

Alarms sound