Nanotroopers Episode 3: Deeno and Mighty Mite
to time to listen, occasionally sounding the debris for telltale pulses.
It was damned frustrating but Winger tried not to show it. He'd tried several tactics to find out what HNRIV was doing to the Nalinka's limbic system, but this swarm was smart and aggressive, seemingly always one step ahead of ANAD. When Winger tried to outmaneuver, the enemy swarm countered. Every maneuver seemed to be anticipated; it was quickly evident that HNRIV (at least this variant) was programmed to defend itself and wouldn't give up control of its host without a fight. And to make matters worse, he'd been unable to grab an enemy mech for analysis.
"Nothing, Doc," he said. "It's like he's just disappeared."
"Perhaps ANAD has dispatched the enemy completely."
Winger figured that to be unlikely. "Anything else on the vascular grid?"
It was Sergeant Gibbs who saw the pressure spike from Nalinka's eye, a fraction of a second before the swarm ballooned into the room.
"Ah…Lieutenant, something seems to be--"
"LOOK OUT--!!" Deeno's scream filled the examining room.
No one was quite sure when the first effects of the HNRIV attack were felt. The debriefs later seemed to converge on the two CQE's, working hard to tweak ANAD's templates for the next phase of the engagement. Deeno D'Nunzio had been working with Gibbs on new configs for ANAD.
Both engineers noticed it right away; a shrill keening high-freq tone, almost beyond human hearing, yet irritating in a vaguely unsettling way. Both wore hypervests, partial rigs that provided some protection, and their sensors registered the attack right away. The enkasa’s panicked scream from the corner of the room as the nanomechs bored in to his head and arms would linger in everybody's memory for a long time. The other CQE, Sergeant D'Nunzio, reported a different effect--just as panicky--when she found she couldn't squirm away along the floor as fast as she wanted to…by then, the HNRIV swarm was thick enough to form a barely visible fog, almost a blanket, muffling the hut with exponentially thickening mist. It was something you could barely see but every sensor and caution alarm was going off in hypervests all over the place and you sure as hell could feel the resistance to movement.
"Mass assault swarm!" somebody yelled over the crewnet. It was Tallant's voice. The CC2 was already on one knee, swatting madly at the whizzing, spinning cloud of assembler mechs that had engulfed her.
"Bond breakers!" yelled Mighty Mite Barnes. She had been wrestling a containment pod into the hut when her arm servos quit. The pod slipped and slid out under its own weight, pinning her against the wall. "---aaarrrggghhh!!"
"They've gone airborne!" Johnny Winger recognized the scenario, too late. They'd wargamed it enough times at Table Top. "Fall back…fall back! Go to TACREP 1!"
Tactical Response One was already loaded in the IC's. Winger pressed a few buttons on his wrist keypad and pushed through the thick spongy mist, struggling hard to make it to the hall outside, and help McTierney, who was already enveloped in bots, writhing on the dirt floor.
They didn't have long to act. TACREP called for the unit to do an emergency opposed-force setup of the ANAD system. Retrieve the master, get containment going, re-establish comm links, and counter-program like hell to beat back the assault before it consumed everything.
The worst thing was that McTierney and Udinka and everybody outside the hut didn't even have hypervests to protect them.
Winger knew full well they had only a few minutes at best. In wargames, ANAD had demonstrated bond-breaking, molecule-disassembling speeds up to a hundred thousand nanometers per second, about a tenth of a meter every second, blown away as just so much atomic debris. HNRIV was undoubtedly just as fast, if not faster. If they didn't get countermeasures going quick, ANAD Detachment would cease to exist, not to mention Nalinka and all their evidence.
"Re-config IC!" Winger yelled. He worked with several others to free Deeno and together they managed to extricate the CQE1. It was like swimming in oily water, trying to exert any effort against the mechs.
"Re-configging--done now!" Gibbs called out. "She's ready to go."
Winger hunkered down on the floor, covering himself as best he could, to punch out commands on his keypad. Beneath his knees, the floor itself writhed and hummed like a thing alive. He could feel the high-freq vibration through his field boot. It wouldn't be long before he'd have to ditch the IC and retreat the hell out of there.
But he'd be damned if he was going to leave ANAD or their hard-won evidence behind now.
Winger flailed at the swarm with one hand while he punched buttons: Comm link to SELECT…Program to FBS--Fly-by-Stick. Launch would be opposed insertion. Active defense…ISR Mode. That stood for Intelligence-Surveillance-Reconnaissance.
At last, he was done.
"ANAD master in the tube!" called out Deeno. "Primed to go, Lieutenant!"
"Launch all groups!" Winger shouted. "Airborne counternano--and get these civilians out of here!"
Dana Tallant and Winger coordinated the insertion, while Barnes hustled McTierney and Udinka and the enkasa away from the examining room. They'd be secure enough for the time being with the convoy outside. For good measure, Barnes erected a small MOBnet around the hut, gesturing at the terrified Territorial troops to stay where they were.
Back inside, ANAD was ready. With a whoosh of compressed air, the TinyTown pod injected the recovered stream of ANADs into the midst of the enemy swarm.
"Full imager?" Gibbs yelled back.
"Do it!" Winger commanded. "But run active defense first--it's programmed. We've got to give these critters something else to chew on--besides us!"
"Got an image, Lieutenant!" Tallant struggled to see her eyepiece through the dust churned up by the furious enemy swarm. "I'm porting it to the net now…EMs are shaky…interference from the enemy, looks like."
Eyepieces were useless. The thermal bloom and dust exploded into a ball of fire, as ANAD swelled rapidly in an enveloping cloud, engaging the HNRIV swarm in a set piece battle of ionizing electrons and atom groups. The white-hot heat expanded like a small nova, almost pulsating as the front lines churned back and forth; ANAD's exponential armies rallying to the assault, tangling with uncounted trillions of enemy mechs.
The air grew thick and black with molecular debris.
"Need to grab one of these critters," Winger muttered to himself.
He used the twin control sticks on the IC panel to zero in on a detached group of HNRIV mechs, scooting away from the main axis of attack, swirling near a corner of the hut, near a guttering firepit. What the hell were they up to? Were they under remote control too? Was there some controller miles away joysticking the swarm through the assault? There was no way to tell.
Winger dove his ANADs at the HNRIV group and executed a perfect entrapment maneuver, neatly bracketing the swarm in a classic octahedral lattice. The HNRIV mechs pressed outward, buzzing angrily, trying to break out of the lattice, probing for weak spots, but Winger had quickly reinforced his scout group with extra ANADs.
"Gotcha!" he exulted. Now they'd have something to take back to the Detachment bivouac at Bamako Airport.
But his triumph was short-lived. Even as he commanded the ANAD lattice to propel itself back toward containment, shepherding the trapped HNRIV mechs, fending off steady probes of the bond breakers, one of the enemy devices separated itself from the main body. In the imager view, Winger stared in horror as the nanomech suddenly shed all its outer atom group armament in a puff of molecular debris and executed a daring fold/collapse, imploding in on itself in a flurry of segment cleavage and destruction. Whirling on picowatt propulsors like a mad dervish, a blurry core of atoms exploded out of the sleet of fragments and rocketed through the lattice like a bullet. In a fraction of a second, it was through the lattice and gone, off the field of view.
Johnny Winger could only shake his head at the maneuver. They'd wargamed tactical escapes from all kinds of capture maneuvers but nothing like this. It didn't even seem
possible.
Ten to one that was the master replicant, he told himself. Programmed to evade capture anyway it could, or commit atomic 'suicide' if it couldn’t. He couldn't help but wonder if he wasn't jousting with an unseen human IC somewhere nearby.
The skirmish continued for another five minutes, but Winger could tell the ANADs were steadily losing the battle. Group by group, the ANADs were steadily and surely overwhelmed by sheer numbers. He began to notice increasing resistance to movement again, a clear indication the HNRIV mechs had re-established themselves inside the examining room. Soon the high-freq whine became audible again.
"Dana, Deeno, I can't hold them back!"
Dana Tallant, five meters away and nearer the door, had already lost all servos in her hypervest. She lay on her side, virtually helpless, still fingering her own wristpad, pecking out counter-attacks against the stiffening HNRIV resistance.
"I've lost servo power myself! Help me up--"
Johnny Winger clawed his way around the bed, where Nalinka lay pale and still, enveloped in a gray swirling mass, and went to his buddy's side. He wrestled her up to a kneeling position.
"--Jesus, it's like water polo…trying to move an arm's almost impossible--"
Winger could see the situation was getting hopeless. "Just mindless replication. They're going to smother us, if they don't eat us first--"
Tallant was tapping keys without effect