Johnny Winger and the Europa Quandary

  Chapter 28

  Buckland Center, Alaska and inside the WorldNet

  November 27, 2121

  0130 hours (Earth U.T.)

  It was Thanksgiving Day and the Quantum Sweep / Cyber Sweep assault on the Buckland Data Center had already begun. Valerie Patrice rode Sweeper One to the battlefield. The packet cruiser made the trip in seven seconds.

  I’ll bet even Genghis Khan can’t beat that, she told herself.

  It was a lurching, shuddering ride through a dozen nodes and switches but when the battlefield finally streamed into view, Patrice swallowed hard at the sight. She squirted off a message to Tsu, back at the Cyber Corps Watch Center:

  Just arrived…scanning ahead for bad guys. Gettysburg was never like this.

  The battlefield turned out to be part of a memory array in server rack five, a T-7 hub, at Buckland. Patrice fiddled with Sweeper One’s sensors and soon enough, an infinite plain of regular spheres settled into view. The checkerboard pattern was all she could see in every direction, arrays of memory dots in a regular lattice-like structure.

  That’s when Sweeper One’s sensors started going nuts.

  “What the hell--? Patrice scanned her board, twisting and eventually unhooking herself from the acceleration scaffolding to reach more controls. “…EM returns going haywire…thermals off the chart…acoustics beating liked a drum…James, whatever’s out there…it’s big…but I don’t see anything yet—“

  The signal went back to Herndon and Tsu’s smooth reply made her feel a little better. “Just watch your step, Val…better start replicating now…those bots can be on your back in no time.”

  The same thought had occurred to her. Patrice squeezed her way into Sweeper’s lockout bay and cycled through the airlock. Outside the cruiser, she toggled her config driver and set it to max rate. In seconds, a growing squad of replicants had appeared, like bees swarming to nectar, and were slamming atoms like frantic brick masons, quickly adding to the crowd. Patrice felt better and better as the party grew.

  That’s when she first saw the enemy.

  Long-range scan wasn’t that helpful. She could tell from the acoustics that the enemy bots were arrayed as inverted pyramids, joined at their apexes. A ring of effectors and propulsors wrapped around the equator of the bots, like a girdle with a dozen arms and hands. Atom groups hung off the main structure like bunches of grapes, cleaving, folding, extending and retracting at blazing speed.

  The swarm had filtered out from the memory array like a malevolent fog and was already turning in her direction. Patrice realized that one titanic collision was about to occur.

  Hope my guys are ready for the big dance.

  The final distance was closed in less than five minutes. Patrice waded into the fight with bond disrupters sizzling.

  James Tsu and the wunderkind at Cyber Lab had spent many a sleepless night devising new weapons and effectors for Patrice to use. They’d even called in some atomgrabbers from Quantum Corps to work with the Lab on tactics. Patrice was still getting used to working in this new environment of atoms and molecules, “still learning how to swim,” was how she had put it. Now they were giving her torpedoes and spear guns and all kinds of doodads to carry while she was still trying to figure out which arm to use.

  Fighting bots in the land of atoms was all about leverage. Kind of like ballroom dancing, with fists, Patrice had once remarked to Tsu.

  The first bot came up and Patrice gave it a taste of her bond disrupters. The electron discharge snapped off a few effectors and sent the thing spinning off into the distance. But no sooner had she done that than a squadron of them fell on her and she found herself engulfed in no time.

  Patrice had learned a thing or two about her effectors in the weeks since her last encounter with bad bots. The secret was to keep your propulsors churning, keeping driving forward, keep your energy up. If she did that, she found she could slip out of almost any grapple and brain a bot with whatever effector was free. She particularly liked her carbene grabbers and she had developed a dance step she liked to call the kiss and clobber…she’s let herself be grappled, momentarily shut off her propulsors and almost relax. When the bad guy had retracted and moved in for the kill, she did a quick left-right spin, fired up her propulsors and slashed right across the bot’s mid-section—where most of them had fewer effectors—knocking the bejeezus out of the thing and pulling free to pinch and slash some more.

  It worked every time. Patrice had in the meantime gone to max replication, at Tsu’s suggestion, and the melee was underway. All up and down the lattice of memory arrays, like a collision of bird flocks, the swarms engaged…twisting, slashing, grabbing, zapping. Slowly, using her new maneuvers, Patrice was able to push back and contain the enemy swarms.

  “It’s working, James!” she exulted over her coupler link back to Cyber Corps. “It’s working! These bozos are getting smacked and spanked like you wouldn’t believe!”

  James Tsu’s voice was distant but reassuring. “I believe it …I believe it…I told you it would work, Val. Just keep after ‘em…I’m reading mass fluctuations at the margins…that means your guys are holding their own. Try your enzymatic knife when you get in close.”

  So she did. Everything she tried worked. Maybe the enemy bots were slow. Maybe their configs were wrong. Whatever it was, Valerie Patrice found she was winning a battle she’d never dreamed she would have to fight. This wasn’t half bad, this living like an atom. You had to watch your momentum and things stuck to each other like glue. Van der Waals and Brownian motions were a bitch, but it was the same for the enemy.

  Leverage and momentum, that was the key.

  Inside of half an hour, the battle seemed to be won. The fog that had drifted over the memory arrays seemed to be lifting as the last few bots were swept up. The node at the T-7 hub was almost clear. Somehow, with a little luck and lot of smack, she’d been able to disperse the enemy bots and quarantine and isolate any stragglers.

  Now it was time to go police the rest of the hub and make sure all the Net connections into Buckland were clean and green.

  “I’m heading back to Sweeper One, James. Got to grab a few more tools and change out my power cell. The master’s running low.”

  “Roger that…I’m sending you a link to another node…this one’s a T4 hub. When you’re all gassed up, take that link and be ready. We’re reading all kinds of bad packets and malware all over that node.”

  “Understood.” Patrice ran hard on her picowatt propulsors, hunting down the packet cruiser. She knew she needed she to toggle another round of replication and her configs needed a little tweaking. But that could be done quickly back at Sweeper One. She breathed a sigh of relief when the cylindrical vessel that was her home inside the Net suddenly materialized out of the fog.

  Home, sweet, home, she muttered.

  Unknown to Patrice, the Quantum Corps assault aboveground was turning into a real slog. Just before daybreak, Major Zhao Zhiyang’s Detachment had lifted in to a clearing just outside the Inuit village of Nanatuvik. Alpha and Baker Squads disembarked and set up for the assault.

  Zhao and Alpha’s leader, Lieutenant Versich, conferred over a holomap of Buckland’s above-ground structures, the lift-gates.

  “Intel shows a modest force on site,” Zhao was saying. “Simple weapons, a bare-bones barrier. Config your ANAD system for opposed entry and use C-75 for the initial engagement.”

  “HERF the place first, sir?” Versich inquired. The rf batteries could lay down a barrage of radio waves that would shatter most bot screens in seconds.

  “Give ‘em a blast when your people are in position.”

  Versich saluted and trotted off to get Alpha Squad ready. Meanwhile, Zhao went to see how Baker Squad was doing.

  Baker had the hard job, transiting permafrost and solid rock to assault the compound from below-ground. The squad leader was an Egyptian lieutenant, Hanif Khan. Khan saluted
as Zhao came up.

  “Baker Squad prepping now, sir…we’re just going through last minute suit checks.”

  A light snow had started falling, swirling in strong wind gusts. Khan grabbed the tread of his squad crewtrac to keep steady.

  “How about your ANAD system?”

  Khan signaled the CEC1 (Containerization and Environmental Control rating) over. It turned out to be Sergeant Miriam Quinones, buzzcut with the muscles of a champion body-builder, just starting to crawl into her hypersuit. Quinones saluted as she trotted up.

  “Give the Major a rundown on ANAD status, Sergeant,” Khan ordered.

  The CEC1 hauled up a small spherical tank, roughly a half meter in diameter, with projecting horns and tubes studded around its surface. The tank was a containment chamber for ANAD.

  “Clean and green. ANAD reports ready in all respects, sir. He’s champing at the bit, ready to chew rock and kick ass.”

  Zhao studied the small display on top of the tank. Everything was lit up green. He still found it hard to believe that the chamber contained the equivalent of an entire army in miniature, ready to take on thousands of tons of rock and ice, and enemy bots to boot.

  “Very well, Khan. Commence your operation now.”

  Khan saluted and helped Quinones and two other troopers wrestle the tank into position. They positioned the chamber so that an exit port was flush with the ground, set against a small ice mound in the lee of a short cliff. Over top of the cliff, cooking fires from the Inuit village could be seen wafting into the early morning sky, twisted into smoky threads by the gusting winds.

  "Launch ANAD," Khan commanded. The launch tube extended from the containment pod into a small six-inch hole that had been drilled into the hard tundra above the village.

  There was an audible swoosh as the vacuum system pulsed and discharged the small swarm with the ANAD master into the ground. The drone-snap of the discharge was followed by a momentary rumble as the horde transited the surface ice and flew down the borehole they had drilled shortly before.

  Soon enough, the snow blazed with a fierce blue-white radiance as the assembler swarm filtered into the snow bank and attacked the hard frozen ground below. In minutes, the entire ravine was bathed in a white hot incandescence, as the globe of light gradually subsided into the earth, like a miniature sun setting beside Nanatuvik Mountain.

  Quinones softly muttered a hex on their enemies as she secured the containment pod for ANAD's return. "Master away, Lieutenant."

  "ANAD reports transiting….ready in all respects, sir," said Sergeant Glance, almost at the same time.

  Khan studied the IC panel. "Very well…this is going to be ticklish for awhile. Time to reach the end of the borehole?"

  Quinones checked ANAD's progress, a few other gauges. "About twenty minutes, Lieutenant. After that, he's on his own."

  Sergeant Glance studied the imager screen on his panel, silently willing an image, something, to show up. Q2 had predicted intermittent comms. The ice and limestone cliff they had bored into was dense rock, structurally tight crystalline lattices of silicon and calcium and iron and half a dozen over things, with little room even for nanoscale bots to maneuver. Getting through the rock plates, let alone sending an acoustic or EM signal back, was dicey, and there were even bets around the Detachment on when comms would drop out altogether.

  When it did, if it did, ANAD would be completely on his own, until he breached the wall seals of the Buckland compound.

  "Getting something--" Quinones announced. She tweaked a dial, boosted the gain, and waved her hands around the imager, imploring a signal to come back--"--come on, baby…come on…give me a peek, just one little peek--"

  Gradually, the imager settled down to a dark, staticky, grainy picture--of what? Khan squinted, leaned forward. The view slowly materialized--a dense, regular lattice of throbbing, quivering spheres.

  "Crystalline structures," Glance reported. "Looks like calcium. Maybe carbons—

  Khan was mesmerized by the perfect geometry. "Oxygens too, Sergeant." He pointed to long rows of tiny darkened blobs, marching off into the distance like a fence. "A cubical lattice, just like the micrographs. A crystalline solid--"

  "Limestone's mostly calcium anyway, with some oxygens and carbons mixed in. Interlocking crystals--it's beautiful."

  "And damned hard to navigate. Like a jungle…this stuff's so dense, ANAD's speed is way down. Enable the voice link--"

  Glance, Quinones and Khan studied the soundings, following the progress of the swarm as it wound its way laboriously through denser rock, climbing slightly to negotiate a nearly impenetrable outcropping of black-streaked breccia. On the imager, the acoustic return revealed a solid wall of atoms, pressed together like layers of a pie. The image buffeted and quivered in a maelstrom of atomic forces and Brownian motion.

  "ANAD, this is Hub…report status--"

  There was a slight delay, then the distant voice came back, muffled and scratchy, sounding tinny through the speaker. "ANAD at forty percent propulsor…density dropped off a third…ANAD cruising through brecciated shale…larger lattice, atom forces reduced--"

  And it was true. The imager view had lightened considerably. Dimly seen in the murk, the acoustic image vibrated with row upon row of tangled, irregular dark blobs, undulating and weaving back and forth in unseen currents of electron force. The shale was an amorphous solid, a loose agglomeration of atoms rather than a regimented crystalline structure. ANAD had probed and found an easier route up to the Buckland complex.

  "ANAD…all stop…" Khan commanded. "Hold your position--"

  "What's up, Skipper?" Glance looked up, puzzled.

  Khan pursed his lips. "Just thinking, that's all." He studied the grid view of the complex, fingering several approaches into Level 4. "ANAD needs to look for a seam in the foundation. And he'd better probe for any guards too. I don't expect a barrier of nano down here, but we'd better be sure. No sense waking everybody up if we don't have to."

  Glance was tuning the acoustic sounder, sampling reflected echoes from the subsurface structures a kilometer north of their position. "Mmmm…don't see any breaks in the thing…nothing like a seam, Lieutenant. If ANAD has to filter himself through the foundation--"

  But Khan had made up his mind. "We're going in like we are, even if it slows us down. ANAD'll just have to squeeze through. I'd better let him know. Hub to ANAD, report status--"

  The voice was hollow, as if deep inside a tunnel, which in effect it was. "ANAD to Hub…ANAD group stable…stationkeeping seven minutes from foundation outer surface…ANAD embedded in chalk stratum now…effectors partially extended…feels much better--"

  Hanif Khan's eyebrows went up at ANAD's last statement. Wonder what the little guy's feeling--"Hub to ANAD, config down to outer shell…fold in all effectors. Transit the foundation structure in this config."

  The message went through the link. Comm was spotty through the solid rock. It took nearly a minute for ANAD to reply. The signal was weak.

  "ANAD to Hub…config to outer shell…collapsing effectors now, collapsing all outer structures…enzymatic knife, pyridine probes, electron lens…folding in planes…standby, Hub…standby a minute--"

  ANAD breached the data center’s subsurface outer walls less than five minutes later.

  “Report assault tunnel status,” Khan ordered. He got on the crewnet to his squad. “Bravo Squad, get in position . You’re going through in two minutes….” He checked the time. “Alpha should be firing in sixty-five seconds. Once they light up those lift gates on the surface, you go.”

  The rest of the squad scrambled in their hypersuits to get ready. There were five of them: Truscott, Pentz, Oliveira, Kang and Zhukov.

  Corporal Olivia Oliveira was DPS1 for Bravo Squad. She looked at the assault tunnel with only slightly more anticipation than rectal surgery.

  “Once more, into the breach,” said the other DPS tech, Corporal Su
e Kang. Kang contorted herself and ducked into the opening, scraping her hypersuit shoulders and helmet as she burrowed in.

  “Looks more like a gopher hole,” Oliveira observed. She burrowed in right after Kang, followed by the others.

  Each nanotrooper checked his gear one last time. Inside the borer tunnel, they would be assisted in navigating by small portable propulsors attached to their hypersuit legs.

  “All copacetic, Skipper,” Oliveira announced. She slung her small-bore coilgun into a shoulder harness and checked the action on her HERF sidearm one last time. Then she lowered herself head first into the sleeve around the tunnel, kicking her way in and was gone from view in seconds.

  As a child, Oliveira had been locked in a tiny closet by her sister Miriam for half a day. This was like that, only worse. She had done enough tunnel assaults to know how to deal with the claustrophobia, though you never really got over it.

  So she concentrated on following procedure, going by the book. Insert, light off suit boost, keep yourself tucked, watch the pretty lights on her head-up display and pray that ANAD had made a good tunnel.

  Pentz, the CEC1 was always wisecracking. “It’s probably going to be a bumpy ride. Close your eyes and think of something more pleasant—“

  “Yeah…like what? Like you naked on the beach.”

  She continued her painstaking traverse for what seemed like hours, maybe days. She soon lost all track of time and space.

  Only the labored sound of her breathing—her helmet visor was getting pretty fogged up—and the bang and crunch of her hypersuit scraping along the tunnel walls gave her any sense of motion.

  She tried reducing the suit boost to see if it had any effect on the scraping but it didn’t.

  Guess I’m going to be a billiard ball when I get to the target, she told herself. She wondered how long that would take. She would have given anything to know where she was, how close to the Buckland complex she was. Pitch black, in a narrow tube the size of a coffin, with no idea where she was or where she was going.

  It was enough to drive a girl to drink.

  How much time had passed, she didn’t know. But her mouth was bone dry and there wasn’t any liquid in the chin tube; she must have sucked it all dry. Her shoulders, neck and legs throbbed from the incessant banging and battering.

  Maybe I’m not going anywhere, she thought. But that couldn’t be. How else to explain the steady thrummm at the soles of her feet—the liftjets pulsing on and off had made her feet go numb hours ago. They had never been designed for extended duty like this.

  At least, ANAD’s tunnel seemed navigable, if a bit snug.

  After what seemed like days, the CC1, Sergeant Truscott, announced: “Structure coming up. Looks like this is the end of the ride, folks. Cycle your weapons. Opposed entry. We’re gonna come out of the walls like Superman through cardboard.”

  Oliveira shook herself out of the stupor she had been in and checked all her weapons. HERF: batteries in the green. Magpulsers on Level 1, ready to rip somebody’s head off. MOBcanisters primed and ready.

  She could sense the boots of Kang just above her helmet. They were slowing down; her boost dropping down to one-quarter, auto-sensing the slowing advance of the troopers ahead of her. A simplified diagram of the structures ahead lit up her eyepiece and she studied the diagram for a moment.

  There was the tunnel end, dotted line showing where ANAD had already chewed through structure enough to make the bust-out a snap. There were Kang’s legs and her carbine dangling in its web harness, slapping against the tunnel perimeter.

  “Fire in the hole!” Truscott yelled. Just then, a blinding light swelled into her helmet. The CC1 had burst out of the assault tunnel and landed upright in one, smooth, well-practiced motion, allowing his suit servos to keep him level and on his feet.

  One after another, Pentz, Zhukov and Kang followed, sweeping individual sectors with their weapons.

  “Clear left!” called out Pentz. He ducked and tracked his own sector, seeing nothing but row after row of server racks.

  “Clear right!” yelled Kang, moving laterally to cover a nearby door.

  Oliveira was next. She exited and assumed a covering stance. “Clear center!” she announced. Only a few desks and consoles stood in front of her.

  That’s when the door burst open and the room lit up with billowing swarms supernova-ing in a big bang right in front of them. The entrance was soon fully engulfed in a sparkling, swelling fog that, even as they watched, started consuming one of the desks.

  “We got company!” yelled Truscott. “Light ‘em up!”

  Instantly, every trooper hosed down the server room with HERF and magpulse fire. RF waves thunderclapped and reverberated off the walls, knocking cabinets and gear flying. Mag fire burned circuits and smoke soon filled the room, mixed with the expanding sphere of the enemy bots.

  “Tracking ANAD!” yelled Zhukov. “He’s to the left…going max rate, max propulsor!” Zhukov looked left and saw a small sphere of light building, burning like a small star as the ANAD swarm slammed atoms and built mass, moving out to engage the enemy bots. The collision, when it came a minute later, was like two storm fronts colliding, with veins of lightning flickering and whipsawing through the air.

  Truscott had seen the speed at which the enemy expanded into the server room. We’re gonna need more, he decided. More mass, more bots. He knew every trooper carried an embedded ANAD master bot in their suit shoulder capsules. It was supposed to be a last ditch, personal defense system, but that didn’t matter now. They needed bots. Lots of bots.

  “Deploy embeds!” he ordered over the crewnet. “Deploy and go max…we got to stuff these bastards right here and now!”

  Oliveira stabbed a button on her wristpad and immediately felt the sting-snap of the launch. A port on her hypersuit shoulder swung open and a thin stream of mist began issuing out, her own embedded ANAD swarm, coming out to join the fray.

  The other troopers did the same and the server room was soon filled with smoke and fog and sparkling mist, as swarms collided and engaged. Flickers of light and a swelling ball of heat soon made conditions unbearable. The room shook from staccato bursts of HERF and mag fire.

  Eighty meters above Level 4, Alpha Squad had already secured the lift gates and was making its way down level by level, in turn engaging any defensive bots and securing each level as it did so.

  Truscott got the call on his coupler and acknowledged Alpha’s quickening approach. “Troops, Alpha’s just one level above us. Let’s finish off these Bugs and sweep the corridors outside. We’ll link up with Alpha and move down to the core levels as one.”

  Meter by meter, Bravo’s ANAD swarms swept the server rooms and corridors clean, smashing clouds of Bugs, HERF’ing concentrations of bots to scatter them. Truscott ordered several config changes, when new bots were encountered. “Just to keep the bastards off balance…”he announced. The eggheads at Q2 had done their homework on the Bugs and designed effectors and configs that made fairly quick work of the enemy.

  And it didn’t hurt that Valerie Patrice was working behind the scenes, inside Buckland’s nodes and switches, to harass the Bugs and report out tactics and configs from behind the lines.

  It was like having your own eyes and ears behind enemy lines.

  Alpha and Bravo Squads effected a hook-up two hours after the start of the op, just outside a lift tube on Level 4. The glassed-in platform of the control room was a wreck, with consoles half-eaten away and smoke streaming out of racks and cabinets, where ANAD had engaged the Bugs in a free-for-all. Truscott shook hands with Messier, the squad leader from Alpha. But their camaraderie was short-lived. The lift tube was operating and someone was coming down.

  It turned out to be Major Zhao.

  The Detachment C/O scanned the carnage. “You guys did a hell of a number on this place…every level looks like a tornado swept through it. Cyber Corps’ going to ge
t one hell of a bill from this.”

  “Couldn’t be helped, sir,” Truscott admitted. “We had to slam ‘em with HERF to break up the concentrations. We had good configs but the Bugs could replicate fast and maneuver like pixies. In the end, we just big banged ‘em with mass and overwhelmed ‘em.”

  Zhao nodded. “Q2 gave us good intel on MARTOP. We knew what they had better than they did. At least, now we know they’re not ten meters tall. They’re not indestructible.”

  The Major strolled through the control room, shoving aside some smoking wreckage and debris that had once been a control console. Chewed-up cable littered the floor. “What’s in that room over there?” He pointed to a door in the corner.

  Truscott replied, “Don’t know, sir. In all the chaos, we sort of overlooked it.” He snapped his fingers and Zhukov, Kang and Oliveira hustled over. “Open that door…keep your weapons ready.”

  Sue Kang tested for any barriers. “No bot screen, sir. Clean and clear.” At a count of three, Zhukov melted the frame and door lock with a few mag rounds. Oliveira and Kang kicked the slag in. A nearby sign read: Server Bank Eight.

  Inside, row after row of cabinets and racks held hundreds of servers, nodes and switches. Cables and loose wireways littered the floor.

  Both DPS techs crept inside, sweeping the room for swarm activity. Oliveira and Kang peeled off and circled the outer perimeter in opposite directions. It was Oliveira whose voice crackled over the crewnet first.

  “Picking up heat, thermals and some EM…something’s here….”

  “Nothing over here,” Kang called out.

  “There it is…”Oliveira was about to lift her HERF carbine and fire but some sixth sense caused her to hesitate.

  At the end of one row of server racks a faint shadow could be seen on the wall.

  “Show yourself!” Oliveira called out. “Show yourself now or we will open fire!”

  Oliveira and Kang closed on the position, pinching in from opposite sides of the room. At the door to Server Bank Eight, Truscott and Zhukov charged their own carbines.

  In the debriefings later, it was never clear who first understood what they were dealing with. By agreement, the after-action reports would show that all four troopers sighted the apparition, for that was what they all agreed it had to be, at same time.

  Oliveira halted, catching her breath.

  The shadow belonged to General Johnny Winger.

  Oliveira and Kang stopped short.

  “General—I didn’t—“

  But Winger really wasn’t Winger. Or so the after-action reports would read several days later.

  Winger leveled at even gaze at the troopers as they came to halt. “It’s not what you think, guys,” came the voice.

  It sounded like General Winger. It looked like General Winger.

  But just moments after Oliveira and Kang came upon the living legend of an atomgrabber, it was clear to all that what they were looking at was not General John Winger.

  Even as they stared open-mouthed at the sight, Johnny Winger began to fade, to dematerialize right in front of them.

  It took several seconds for Oliveira and Kang to react. The General was nothing but a swarm, a cloud of Bugs, masquerading as Johnny Winger.

  By the time, Oliveira and Kang opened fire, the barest outlines of the General were all that remained. Before they could fire, before they could disperse or contain the resulting swarm of bots, the thing that looked like Johnny Winger had essentially vanished in front of them. Only a hint of form remained and in the draft coming from the melted door, that was quickly dispersed and was gone.

  A faint trail of twinkling lights remained, a trace of where the bot swarm had once been. The trace pointed like a ghostly finger in the air, right to one of the server racks along the wall. It was a T7 hub, near Rack five. Node 2271.

  The angel Johnny Winger was gone now, scattered among atoms of dust and air in the server room. It had disappeared into the node and slipped off into WorldNet.

  Moments later, out in the data center’s smashed control room, Bravo Squad’s Lieutenant Hanif Khan caught a few scraps of a panicked call made by Valerie Patrice over the coupler circuit, a call back to the Cyber Corps Watch Center in Virginia . He couldn’t catch quite all of it; the link was scratchy, probably their entangler was on the fritz again.

  “—don’t know what it is, James…er….—ry powerful, whatever it is…new presence…swept through the Net near….position….node near…trying now to move closer….”

  Patrice had reported her position aboard Sweeper One as just approaching trunk line switch Evergreen Seven, a few hundred kilometers south of Buckland, a main switching complex that routed data into and out of the data center from West Coast sites. She anticipated being at the Buckland central switching point in a few seconds.

  That was when she ran into the thing that had once been Johnny Winger.