***Affirmative, Base…com…zzzz…stowing effect…zzzzhhh…receiving…zzzhhh…will maintain config--***
“Doc, listen to me…stay in place…anyway you can…transmit updates every hour if possible.” Winger knew that if Doc could stay attached to Jupiter and transmit at least some information back regularly, and if he could be coaxed into new configs as the situation demanded, Quantum Corps would have an intel source of inestimable value. If…if…if…a lot of ifs. But it was worth a shot.
“Do you have him?” Mighty Mite Barnes asked. She stood up, scanning the town below them, wondering how they would get back to Mesa de Oro. “Decent signal?”
Winger got up too. “Intermittent. But he’s there. I told him to cling to the target like bad news to a politician.”
Taj Singh was studying something from his wristpad. “Skipper, I just took a navigation hack off the grid…we’re about twenty kilometers from base. I hope we don’t have to hike our way back…through all that jungle.”
“No, Taj, you won’t have to get your boots dirty in the jungle. I’ll let Ops know we’re here. We should be able to get a lifter to pick us up.”
The debriefings and after-action reports took several days. Winger made a full commander’s report, noting that Corporal Lucy Hiroshi had died in the line of duty. He, Barnes and Singh attended a memorial service at the base chapel for Hiroshi, along the rest of 1st Nano. Winger did a brief eulogy at the end.
For the next several weeks, Quantum Corps’ intelligence office, Q2, followed faint but detectable signals from the Doc II swarm embedded with Dmitri Kulagin. Triangulating decoherence wakes and plotting coupler signal paths determined that the ship Kulagin had boarded off Yucatan had crossed the Atlantic in four days, transited Gibraltar and entered the Med, then turned south through the Red Sea and emerged into the Indian Ocean, on a direct bearing for the Indian coast.
Major Lofton was head of Q2. He came to Winger’s office on the top floor of the Ops building one afternoon with the latest. Winger had his nose buried in plotting out tactical maneuvers in a war-sim being run on his desktop, a 3-d panorama projected out of his wristpad. He paused the action when Lofton showed up. The desk was thick with ghostly fleets of bots, lifters and dirttracs, all maneuvering to assault an imaginary target…all now frozen in mid-action.
“Got the latest burst from Doc,” Lofton said. He used his own wristpad to lay down a map on the corner of Winger’s desk. It showed Doc’s position in real-time. “We’re getting better and better at plotting those deco wakes.”
Winger studied the plot. It showed a small dot just approaching the northern shores of the Bay of Bengal, moving ever so slightly with each plot.
“If it’s truly a geoplane,” Winger decided, “he’ll probably come ashore near Kolkata…below ground.” Winger laid down an imaginary heading with his finger, drawing the tip of his finger toward the Tibetan highlands hundreds of kilometers north. “Straight shot to the Paryang Monastery. Lofton, I’ll bet you a dinner at the commissary that’s where he’s headed.”
Lofton shook his head. “I’ll pass on the dinner, thanks, but that’s my thinking too. Have you been able to maintain contact over your coupler?”
Winger sat back in his chair. “Very intermittent. I was hoping Doc would be able to give us some visuals, maybe even some electronic signatures from his surroundings….see all around inside that boat, maybe listen in on some meetings and talks. I’ve had snatches of that—we know Jupiter dumped his nanobotic wet suit not long after leaving Yucatan. He’s met with others onboard. But most of his processor has been used just to hang on…he’s still embedded in the target’s hair follicles.” Winger smiled wanly. “At least, our target hasn’t taken a shower yet…he must smell like a barnyard about now. I’m not sure Doc can hang on in a shower…I’ve been working with him on changing configs to maintain position in all kinds of situations. But it’s dicey.”
“If Jupiter heads to Paryang, and Doc can maintain his position, he could give us really valuable intel on Red Hammer’s home base.”
Winger acknowledged the observation. He indicated the war-sim still frozen in mid-action hovering over his desktop. “That’s what all this is about, Lofton. I’m working out scenarios for an assault on that base….from what we know now. You know old Doc Frost did spend some time there after he was kidnapped some months ago.”
Lofton nodded. “We debriefed him after he and Mary Duncan escaped. We got some intel but Frost wasn’t really a trained observer. Even memory trace didn’t turn up that much. Hopefully Doc will do better. Any chance you can config him to do a little sabotage while he’s there?”
Winger’s face tightened. “Dicey, at best. Right now, with the intermittent comms we have, I’ve got Doc configged to just hang on, stay with the target. If Kulagin winds up at Paryang like we think, I’ve been working on some ideas to have Doc replicate a daughter swarm, small scale, to leave Jupiter’s person and do a little recon, gather some data on defenses, layout, other swarms in the area, maybe pickoff some of their comms, signature stuff. I want Doc’s main element to stay physically engaged with Jupiter…we know Kulagin’s Ruling Council so he’s got to be in contact with some pretty high-ranking people. Intel on them will help us too.”
Lofton conceded the point. He glanced out the window at the jungle canopy beyond the base perimeter, noting dark clouds building from the south. Lightning veined the sky, lending a surreal glow to the tops of Hombres Grandes, the big step pyramids at Kokul Gol. “You know, I miss the Buffalo Range, Winger…all those snow-capped mountains and that clear cold mountain air. This is like living inside a sauna all the time.”
“Amen to that,” Winger said.
“You think we can truly assault this place…assuming UNSAC approves anything? The Chinese have to know what’s going on at Paryang. Getting in and out without stirring up an international incident won’t be easy.”
Winger nodded sadly, punching a button on his wristpad. The war-sim instantly vanished, leaving only Lofton’s plot map of Doc’s position still displayed. The dot signifying the bot master had moved north, over…or more likely, under, coastal Bangladesh.
“Damned near impossible, if you ask me. But we have to give UNSAC options. Having Doc on site and able to communicate, however intermittently, is a blessing. We should take advantage of it.”
Now Lofton changed his wristpad to display a satellite image of Paryang valley, showing the monastery complex and the surrounding mountains in real-time. “I’m Intel, not Ops, but I am curious…spooks like me are always curious. Can you give me an overview of possibilities?”
Winger arranged to have Lofton change his wristpad’s projected display slightly, zooming out to show the region of the Gangdise Shan Mountains and the surrounding plateau.
“Two realistic possibilities…we go in by air, maybe disguising a swarm assault as some kind of snow storm. That takes less time but it’s also more likely to be detected...and defended. Or we go in below ground, using ANAD swarms to tunnel all the way up to Paryang from a borehole sight along the Nepal border. Takes longer—actually it could take several weeks, even with optimized boring ANADs, but we stand a better chance of surprising our friends inside. We can improve the time by making most of the journey by geoplane…but Red Hammer’s got geoplanes too, remember, so there’s still a chance of being detected. But there is one advantage of using subterranean ops.”’
“What’s that?”
“We can use ANAD to kick off tremors and quakes, pretty much when and where we want, as long as we have good tectonic maps and fault data. We could wind up damaging, even destroying the monastery and Red Hammer base and making it look like a natural disaster. That could come in handy with the Chinese.”
“Good point.” Lofton rose to leave. “I’ll keep our trackers busy following Doc, as best they can. You work on whatever configs you think best, but give me as much intel as you can, Winger
.”
After Lofton had left, Winger pulled up his own wristpad display of Paryang Valley. It was a real-time sat image, and it was clear from the fuzziness of the image that a snowstorm was moving in from the west.
A snow storm and a series of earthquakes. Winger mulled over the possibilities.
Maybe I can hack out a config for assault ANADs to do both.
But first, he had to know as much as Doc could find out about where and how Red Hammer’s main base was weakest, where the soft spots were in their defenses.
If there were any soft spots. The growing realization that the cartel was probably in regular communication with an offworld intelligence made that problematic at best.
As suspected, deco wake plots showed Doc, and his target Dmitri Kulagin, were clearly heading for Paryang. Nearly two weeks after leaving the port of Sisal on the Yucatan peninsula, the geoplane bearing Jupiter and his unsuspected nanobotic companion stopped moving completely when it reached the coordinates of the eight-hundred year old Buddhist monastery.
Jupiter was home. And Doc was now right inside the mouth of the dragon.
The monastery was huge, multi-level compound, all columns and turrets and gables, resembling in the late afternoon sunlight more a bird about to take off than a building. Lion’s heads and gargoyles of fantastic beasts guarded the porticoed entrance of the main hall. There was a pebbled path lined with Buddha sculptures of every imaginable shape, size and color leading up the hall…jade Buddhas, ceramic Buddhas, stone and rock Buddhas, a few black coral Buddhas, even paper lanterns done up to resemble Buddhas glowing with Enlightenment near the stairs below the portico.
Wooden doors guarded the monastery entrance, which gave onto a vast, multi-storied hall, its perimeter lined with stone statuary and pediments. Above them, at the top of a broad curving staircase, a gray stone Buddha beamed down with an enigmatic smile, while the hall was surrounded by vats and pots and urns in dizzying variety, every size and shape imaginable. Some of the urns steamed and smoked with pungent incense, or scented candles, lending a smoky, acrid taste to the air.
Kulagin was expected and when he came to the guard station, he scanned in quickly enough and was escorted by a saffron-robed staff aide to a small lift in the room behind the great hall. The aide was a frail, balding older man with a beatific smile that seemed pasted on. He pressed a combination of buttons and the lift opened. Ushered in with a wave of a hand, Kulagin boarded the lift and the aide reached in to press another button.
That’s when Doc executed the latest config change that Johnny Winger had sent by coupler, sent only a day before, as the geoplane homed on Paryang valley.
Still clinging to Kulagin’s hair follicles, Doc rode the lift down into the bowels of the Paryang complex. The effect of the config change was to fold all Doc’s effectors, minimize processor action and otherwise go as inert as possible…no atomgrabbing, no acoustics, no thermal spikes.
Winger didn’t want Doc tripping any alarms or security sensors. Passive recording would now be the rule of the day.
The lift took Kulagin down six levels below the ground. Now little more than a speck of dust on top of the Russian mafioso’s head, Doc didn’t have the sensor capability in this config to witness what they were passing: two levels of scope works, with rack after rack of shelving, filled to overflowing with the leafy plants, growth tanks, fab labs, containment cells, assorted swarms in loose configuration drifting around the complex, even a comm center and controls for the pulser array that was mounted atop the gabled turrets of the monastery above ground.
The lift reached the bottom level and Kulagin exited, heading for the Ruling Council chambers, located near the center of the circular level. Passing through increasingly stringent security scans, Doc ceased virtually all processor activity, lying as dormant as he possibly could, while Kulagin scanned in.
Inside the chamber, which resembled an enormous cavern, holographically projected, Kulagin approached the central Keeper sphere, mounted on a low pedestal in the midst of a firepit, flickering with smoldering flames and ash.
That’s when Doc’s processor went haywire. And the coupler comm link back to Base, back to Johnny Winger, fell off to intermittent snatches of garbage.