in one corner, toeing the hard dirt floor, clinking the beads nervously. The enkasa was on one knee beside the girl, murmuring spells and incantations under his breath.
"Just what exactly are you saying, Doc?" Tallant asked.
"Simply incredible." McTierney pointed out the dendritic branches of nearby nerve cell tissue. "Artificial nerve stimulation, gentlemen. I'm sure of it. HNRIV's been inserted into this poor woman's brain, then reconfigured itself as a sorting rotor. Now it's sitting alongside her synaptic clefts like a circus performer, pumping dopamine back and forth on command. Or more likely, according to a program stored in its processor. What you're looking at is in vivo stimulation of artificial nerve impulses according to programmed nanobotic control. Simply incredible."
Dana Tallant paled at the implications. "Is that what's infected this woman?"
McTierney shrugged, tugged at loose hairs on his red beard. "Impossible to say. HNRIV's undoubtedly spun off swarms of these buggers. Possibly the process isn't perfect. Or who knows? Maybe HNRIV just evolved to scramble the works…pump useless molecules of whatever its assembler brain decides…maybe formaldehyde or something…into the post-synapses. Your central nervous system seizes up and shuts down…death in minutes, if not in seconds. But the more likely probability--now that I see the bastard up close in a living victim--is more frightening. Nalinka's suffering from overstimulation. We've seen similar effects on addicts we've studied. But until now, we've never been able to get small enough to watch these buggers in action. HNRIV's too nimble. We even experimented with this ourselves a few years ago. Never could get it to work."
Winger pulsed ANAD's propulsors, maneuvering in for a close-up look. "I'd say somebody has."
McTierney shook his head. "Fantastic engineering, if it's what I think it is. Acetylcholine, dopamine, serotonin…the possibilities are endless. Synthesize enough of the right molecules and inject them across the synaptic gap here. You're basically in control of a nerve impulse."
Unnoticed by anyone, the swarm of HNRIV mechs had begun to re-orient themselves tail first toward ANAD. Their tail fiber penetrators quickly reconfigured, locking into attack position.
He is who is skilled in attack flashes forth from the topmost heights of heaven.
Out of the corner of his eye, Winger saw the maneuver on the imager.
"Look out!" Gibbs saw it too. "He's changing position…all of 'em, coming at us--"
"I'm ready," Winger muttered. His fingers flew across the keyboard. Instantly, ANAD brought all its defensive mechanisms to attack position. It cast off the hematite shield and closed for battle.
McTierney was stunned. "What the hell…?”
Winger said. "I'm need to get closer, grab one of those jokers for analysis--"
As ANAD sped forward, HNRIV grew and retracted appendages and surface structure with blazing speeds. The outer membrane of the mech seethed with motion, as atoms and clusters of atoms twisted, bonded, twisted again, rebonded, broke apart, recombined, straightened, undulated and whirled.
The gap between them vanished and ANAD grappled with the nearest mech. Other mechs swarmed to the battlefield.
Beside Nalinka's bed, the enkasa's voice rose and fell, repeating incantations in a shrill tongue.
Winger was stunned by the speed of the assault. A battalion of HNRIV soon engulfed ANAD. No time to replicate now…got to get free…signal daughters….Winger fired off a burst of instructions to gather all the daughters ANAD had replicated going in. It might be too late.
The imager screen shook with the collision, then careened sideways.
Several minutes passed. The imager view vibrated with the ferocity of the attack. Chains of oxygen molecules, pressed into service as makeshift weapons, whipped across the screen. The water was soon choked with cellular debris. HNRIV replicated several times, adding new molecule strings. It stripped off electrons to make an armor shield of highly reactive chlorine atoms. In seconds, ANAD was immobilized by the chlorine sheath.
"I can't hold structure!" Winger yelled. "I'm reconfiguring…shutting down peripheral systems!"
Sergeant Gibbs had taken a place beside Winger at the interface controls. "Got to disengage, Boss…emergency truncation. Everything not critical. We've got to get ANAD out of there before we lose him!"
"I'm trying…but the damn mech's penetrated the signal path…if he cuts the link…."
"I know, I know…just keep trying, Jesus…internal bonds on main body structure weakening…I've lost all grappling capability…."
As they watched, HNRIV systematically dismantled ANAD, molecule by molecule. ANAD was woefully unprepared for the assault. With ruthless efficiency, HNRIV mechs whirred and chopped every device ANAD could generate. ANAD tried to counter, replicating probes, inserters, jaws, cilia, pumps, blowers--but it was no use.
HNRIV mutated too fast. Somehow, the mech seemed to anticipate ANAD's every move.
Winger was awed by HNRIV's combat capabilities. "Incredible," he whispered. "The perfect warrior. Must have a hell of a processor."
Dana Tallant agreed. "Probably quantum, just like ANAD."
They were all stunned at the ferocity of HNRIV's response. "I thought these jokers went into hibernation when they got into your skull," Winger muttered.
McTierney just shook his head. "According to research at our lab in Geneva, that's exactly what HNRIV's supposed to do. I don't understand it…ANAD closes for a quick look and--"
"--the bastard blows up like we're some common virus."
Winger's fingers flew across the keyboard. "It doesn't make sense. The damn thing's actively trying to defend its position, trying to keep control of Nalinka's brain."
He had no choice but to disengage to save the ANAD master. Extract before ANAD was chopped to pieces and leave Nalinka to the HNRIV device.
Yet unseen by anyone, a small force of HNRIV mechs had detached from the main formation. Detected but not noticed, the force exited the ventral tegmentum and beat its way at flank speed toward the optic nerve, a bundle of fibers in Nalinka's visual cortex near the front of her brain. Passing the Nodes of Ranvier, the force silently cruised outward along the fiber bundle, steadily closing on the inner membranes of the addict's eyeball.
It was the quickest way for any mech to exit the brain.
Deeno, Mighty Mite Barnes and McTierney and a scattering of Detachment grunts stared at the speckling blooms of light winking on and off…the imager captured the sound and fury of nanomech battle deep inside Nalinka's immobilized skull and converted the acoustic waves to visual. It was like watching some mad kaleidoscope of swirling dots, washed with brilliant daubs of color.
"Like a thousand battles of Verdun," McTierney said. "All in a space the size of a walnut. Incredible--"
"Reading high heat signature," Gibbs reported. "Vascular grid's registering something like a hundred thousand picojoules, and rising."
Winger acknowledged the figure. "This lady's out like a slab of stone and she's emitting like a supernova." He refreshed the imager with more data. "Quick count, Doc…look at that, will you? ANAD's pulsing the plasma and the density's dropping."
McTierney saw the data. "Fewer mechs, maybe? Or a tissue leak?"
"Hard to say at the moment. Maybe ANAD's starting to hold its own. Sure wish we could get an image--"
"When the dust settles, Lieutenant. Patience." McTierney watched the same density readings Winger had pointed out. Sure enough, the numbers were falling. The original spike signaling the first thrashing moments of battle had now leveled off--all replications were done and Nalinka's brain was now thick with nanowarriors swarming to the melee--yet the density was steadily dropping.
And still unnoticed, the small detached force of HNRIV mechs had reached its objective. Slowing to transit the narrowing tube of interstitial fluid, the force passed through the lachrymal duct at the corner of Nalinka's eye and surfaced like a fleet of miniature subs through the cor
neal film to the outer surface of the eyeball. There they floated for a few seconds, until the replication order came.
A few dozen centimeters below the small fleet, uncounted trillions of HNRIV mechs had been cleaved and slashed into atoms before the enemy master had managed to stabilize the battlefront. Then, for several minutes afterward, ANAD and HNRIV stalked each other relentlessly, drifting on brief propulsor bursts, sounding the fluid swamp with acoustic jolts, then listening, always listening, in a deadly game of hide and seek. Both forces were exposed, both had suffered massive losses of replicants. Each sought refuge in the dendritic jungle of Nalinka's ventral tegmentum. One misstep, one maneuver too far could be fatal. A billion billion times smaller than their submarine ancestors, who had prowled the oceans like predators stalking prey, HNRIV and ANAD drifted silently across Nalinka's cranial sea, scant microns from each other, hidden yet ever alert, waiting for that one chance to close and dismember the enemy forever.
Johnny Winger had somehow managed to massage the imager enough to fine tune its resolution. A few adjustments made, he coaxed a grainy image of the cranial plasma and axon fibers crisscrossing the terrain. Then he took hold of the IC panel and started hunting again.
The hunt went on for several minutes. Taking a fix from the vascular grid, Winger navigated Nalinka's Islet of Duchin and cruised in expanding circles through jungles of thick axons, stopping from time