they come…hit the deck!"
Johnny Winger swatted at the clouds of stinging mechs closing on their position. Red Hammer had discharged clouds of the mechs around the top of the mountain, hoping to penetrate the Quantum Corps barrier and snare the intruders before they could escape. ANAD had already been safed and inerted inside TinyTown. It was too late to launch countermeasures.
"Fall back!" he shouted, running for cover. "Fall back to the lifter!" He got on the crewnet. "Helix One," He yelled to the lifter pilot-- "get that jalopy spooled up fast! We're making a run for it!"
The Red Hammer horde of micron-sized bots fell on the Detachment with a fury.
"Arrrggghhh--my head--!" cried Deeno D'Nunzio. She stumbled across the rocky ground, slogging through the lifter's downwash, as she flailed wildly at the swarm engulfing her. "--my eyes!--"
Winger dove for D'Nunzio and flung her to the ground, covering her body with his. He heard the high keening whine of trillions of mechs buzzing at them. They were dumb bots, without the smarts or the assembler coding of an ANAD, but dangerous all the same. Unprotected, a soldier had about ten minutes before his skin was flayed open and he was sucked dry by the little bastards.
"Reaves? Where's Superfly?"
"Assembling now, sir!" DPS's voice was shaking, as she pecked out commands on her wrist keypad, calling the unit's own microfliers to the rescue. Superfly couldn't match the Red Hammer mechs in numbers, but it could drive a wedge in the enemy swarm, carve out a bubble and let the troops make it the last few meters to the lifter.
Reaves swung and swatted at the buzzing cloud around her head, finally sending the command to the lead bot. From well down the slopes of Shih Ho Mountain, a mass formation of mite-sized fliers formed up and raced up the escarpment, homing on Reaves' transmitter, seeking gaps in the camou barrier.
Deep in her bones, Reaves shuddered. Come on Fly, get…up…here…now….she could feel the mechs whirring away on her neck and forearms--"get the hell up here…."
Suddenly, the air thickened to a gelatinous mist and the shriek of the mechs became unbearable, tearing at their eardrums. The nighttime glitter of Kowloon dimmed momentarily as Superfly swarmed onto the mountaintop and enveloped the Detachment. The shriek of the attack screeched into inaudibility, a scream of rage no longer heard but felt in the interstices of every bone of her body.
"Attack config--" she squeezed out, nearly out of breath, burrowing as deep as she could against the cold rock of the mountaintop. "Give it to 'em, Superfly! Right in the chops!"
The onslaught slackened for a moment, but it wasn’t enough. Too many bots. Reaves groaned, pressing forward, finally crawling and clawing at the barrier that had fallen into place around the lifter. The thing glowed blue-white and every time she pushed, it pushed back.
They weren’t going to make it.
“Come on…push--!” Winger cried out over the crewnet and as one, the troopers of 1st Nano propelled themselves forward for one final lunge. That’s when the Red Hammer MOBnet dropped out of the sky and draped itself over the lifter and every one of the troopers. One by one they were forced down to the ground, squeezed, crushed, flattened, trampled and compacted as uncountable trillions of enemy mechs pressed them to the ground.
Only D’Nunzio and Mighty Mite Barnes were able to slip out from under the net…barely. They scrambled together on all fours, at first clawing their way across the rocky ground, then breaking into a run. Unseen, they headed up a narrow winding path, up toward the Han dynasty castle that dominated the peak of the mountain. Still somehow undetected, they plunged through a ground-level window, and fell heavily to the floor of a darkened room. There, they waited, listening for the shriek of mechs, the high-keening buzz that would warn them of an approaching swarm.
They heard nothing but the crackle of HERF guns, then…the deafening concussion of a fiery explosion.
For the moment, it was all over…but the screaming. That went on for a few more minutes, as Red Hammer troops scrambled up on to the top of the mountain. Coilgun fire lanced the ground and Johnny Winger stopped squirming when one of the beams gouged out a seam of rock and dirt. Chips and debris flew into his eyes and he was momentarily blinded. The lifter was hit too, and its fuel tanks cooked off, erupting into spires of flame which seared the ground for fifty meters all around.
Cautiously, like ghosts in a twilight horror movie, the Red Hammer troops advanced forward through burning pyres and smoke and flickering fog. Winger squirmed and pushed against the MOB barrier for as long as he dared. Then a single trooper bent down to where Winger was pinned to the ground. He used the end of his carbine as a bayonet and poked and prodded at the Lieutenant. When Winger resisted and kicked out at the trooper’s leg, the Red Hammer soldier discharged his weapon right into the MOBnet.
Before he blacked out completely, Johnny Winger felt like he had fallen into a vat of a billion boiling needles. The mag weapon had fried his skin and he soon went tumbling and falling down a deep spiraling tunnel, into unconsciousness.
He awoke to a feeling of spiders crawling all over his skin. Slowly, he lifted his head. He saw faces—with effort, he could make out the faces of Gibbs and Nguyen somewhere in the distant, distorted faces like a circus funhouse. But this was no circus funhouse. With a groan, he realized that when he saw solid rock walls behind their faces.
They were in a holding cell inside Lions Rock.
Hands helped him to sit up. They belonged to Gibbs. Nguyen dabbed something wet on his face.
“Take it easy, there, Skipper. You’re were magged pretty bad up there—“
Winger sank back and rested. “Where are we?”
Gibbs shrugged. “A cell. Made out of rock walls. Red Hammer did something up top…overwhelmed ANAD…dropped a MOBnet on us through some kind of seam they found or created in our defenses.”
“What…what happened to ANAD.”
Nguyen shrugged. “We don’t know, sir…but best guess is that Red Hammer has the master.”
Winger took a deep breath, rubbed his stinging eyes. His skin was red, tender where the magnetic loops had burned him. “Great. Just friggin’ great. How about Barnes, Deeno, Reaves…where are they?”
Gibbs was running hands all along the rock wall, feeling for any kind of seam, weak spot, a Get Out-of-Jail button, anything. “We don’t really know, Skipper. Either dead, swarmed or like us, in a cell. Unless somehow they got away—“
Johnny Winger made a herculean effort to stand and managed to pull himself upright. He was about to join Gibbs in examining their cell when a commotion sounded outside the cast iron door. Someone was coming. There was a brief flash of light.
The door rattled and its lock squealed. The door swung open.
There stood Jiang Hao Bei, Security Affairs Commissioner of the United Nations. UNSAC.
Winger forced his fingers to unclench. “The rumors were true. I see you’ve found a new employer…sir.”
Jiang scowled. “And they pay well, Lieutenant Johnny Winger. Welcome to Lions Rock. I trust you’re finding the accommodations suitable.”
Winger had taken an instant dislike to Jiang, though he had never met UNSAC in person. The Commissioner was a short, rotund man, balding on top. Scuttlebutt had it that UNSAC dabbled in some kind of unpronounceable martial arts discipline…Tibetan in origin, went the stories.
“We have one of your mechs, sir…it seems to be an ANAD clone. We’ll be examining it and developing countermeasures soon…Table Top won’t take long to put this whole circus out of business. And where are the rest of my troopers?”
Jiang seemed to fill the entire door, though Winger could tell there were guards just outside. He could see the reflections of their gun muzzles in the iron hinges of the door. “I doubt that, Lieutenant. As for the rest of the Detachment, rest assured they’re well…at least as well as you are. We have them in similar quarters. We’re not animals here, you know. You’ll be treated properly
…depending, of course, on how willing you are to cooperate with us.”
“Won’t be happening, sir. We’ve still got ANAD with us…and we’ll be taking leave of your hospitality as soon as we can…”
Jiang’s hard-edge resolve seemed to momentarily weaken, but perhaps it was only a shadow. He checked with one of the guards, conversing in some dialect Winger had never heard, then turned back to the troopers.
“Oh, I doubt that, Lieutenant. You were all thoroughly scanned before you became our honored guests. No, I’m sure we’ll be working quite closely together on many projects…I have so many ideas, actually—we’ll have to talk over dinner—really, I can’t wait to discuss them with you. You’ll be my guest for quite some time here, I’m afraid.”
“Unwilling guests. Quantum Corps knows all about your little lion’s den here. They’ll be swarming all over this mountain in a few hours, maybe sooner.” He didn’t want to go any further, but he knew that Major Kraft had upgrades to ANAD in the works already; he was confident ANAD 2.0 would soon make quick work of whatever Red Hammer could put out.
Now, Jiang turned serious. His face hardened in the dim light, looking for all the world like a statue…or maybe it was just nanoderm patches…Winger had heard of people spending fortunes for the things…bots in your facial tissues sculpting you into any look you could afford. It was