on her wristpad. "I'm not linked to ANAD--"
"--I lost him," Winger admitted. "I was trying to snag a master…thought I had him but he slipped out…damndest thing I ever saw--"
Tallant finally gave up on her wristpad and concentrated on standing up.
Winger helped her get upright. "This is no good--" His own hypervest was minus a few servos and he was wobbly to boot but at least it offered some protection. "Dana, I can't hack fast enough to counter-attack. This stuff is unbelievable…somebody's really juiced up the rep rate. If it's an ANAD, they've really been tinkering under the hood."
"There's nothing left…we've got to get out of here…unless DPS can give us some breathing room."
Winger got on the crewnet. "CC1 to Detachment…fall back! Fall back at once! Fall back to the convoy--"
He slogged toward the door, through spongy mist a few paces and then made another call. "CC1 to DPS1. Mighty Mite, get your HERF guns spooled up. It might not work but we need all the help we can get!"
"Already on line, Lieutenant!" It was Barnes' strained voice, from somewhere in the hospital lobby. "I'm coming as fast as I can…we had to secure the convoy first—clear the villagers out."
"Mite, fire short bursts of RF! See if you can clear us a bubble or a zone around this hall! I'm not sure we can get back to the convoy otherwise! And make it quick…Lieutenant Tallant’s injured…infested! We’ve got to get her out of here.”
"CC1, we've now lost containment!" It was Deeno.
"Forget the pods!" Winger came back. "Form up around me if you can. DPS is going to try and stun these buggers with a big kick of RF, give us a chance to get the hell out of here!"
Seconds later, the drone of the HERF pulse gun blasted through the village clearing. A thick breeze of momentarily stunned nanomechs clattered against Winger's hypervest. When the second pulse shook the hut and nearly toppled it, and he felt the thermal of high-frequency RF wash over them, Winger willed himself into motion, half carrying, half-dragging Dana Tallant. The first seizure had died off and her body was limp.
"Fall back now! Outside, to the convoy…everybody--on the double…DPS, give 'em another shot! Lifters are too far away now…we’ll have to go by ground….”
Another drone-snap of radio energy and another wave of heat. Winger slogged through the mist, kicking and pummeling blindly, pulling his load with him.
At last, blinded and disoriented, he stumbled out of the hut, what was left of it, making the nearest crewtrac out by a line of smoking kapok trees, and practically crashed into the crew compartment. A flurry of hands helped him hoist Tallant inside, rolling her to the back, where she curled up like a baby. The rest of the Detachment fell in--after Deeno had momentarily dropped the MOBnet--a sorry, bedraggled lot…weary, frightened, half-eaten hypersuited nanowarriors, scrambling against heavy resistance, scrambling just to pitch headlong onto the floor of the crew bay in the carrier's rear. Already the whine of the turbine motors was drowning out everything else.
"One more pulse, DPS! Max power…leave it on and let it burn out! And get your tails in gear, folks! You'll only have a few seconds."
The two Defense and Protective Systems techs, Barnes and 'Buddha' Nguyen, cranked up the HERF gun they had erected outside Nalinka’s hut and let it pulse at maximum power. Rolling thunderclaps shook the entire structure and the team stumbled as they clawed their way to the carrier, but the pulse gun did the trick…momentarily flooding every cubic inch hut with high energy radio waves. It was shock therapy for a nanomech swarm in mindless exponential overdrive, replicating and disassembling matter at blinding speeds.
The hut vanished in a swirl of light and dust.
It was just enough shock therapy to stun the swarm into a stupor, just long enough to weaken the resistance to movement and give ANAD Detachment a fighting chance to evacuate what had now become a combat zone.
Behind them, they had no choice but to leave the rest of the village, now filled with groaning Tuareg herders and their families, now caught in the HNRIV storm. Winger gave them a moment's thought, but it couldn't be helped. They didn't have enough of ANAD left to isolate the area or immobilize the enemy swarm.
Maybe it'll just burn itself out, he hoped.
Struggling, whining, overheating and shuddering from the thunderclaps of collapsing HERF fields, the crew carriers rumbled off into the dark night sky, kissing the rock walls beyond the village at each sharp turn, as they spiraled down Banikaiyan Road into the bowels of Bamako, finally turning south and west and slowly but surely putting distance between themselves and the nanomech cloud. Johnny Winger eyed the carrier driver warily through the sighthole as he fought to keep control of the vehicle on the steep winding road. Only when the buffeting and the sonic pulses and the high keening wail of nanomech hell finally died off, did he finally begin to relax.
The very first thing he did was quick-disconnect the hypervest helmet, yank the hat off and gulp tons and tons of cold, dry, night-time desert air.
It was better than ice cream on a hot summer day.
One minute later, Nalinka died.
A somber tactical briefing was held on the tarmac at Bamako Airport, in the shadow of hyperjet Charioteer.
Johnny Winger was frustrated. He wiped sweat and flies from his face. McTierney was at the rear cargo ramp, keeping an eye on the post-mortem analysis going on inside.
"What the hell are we dealing with here, Doc? Is it evolution? Or deliberate design?"
McTierney was equally disturbed. "Exactly my question. Is it an accident of nature or intentional?"
"What I saw could be an isolated malfunction."
"Or it could be something more--"
Winger agreed. "One thing's for sure: HNRIV wouldn't let me alter anything inside Nalinka's limbic system. I couldn't grab a mech either. I was damn lucky to get what I did."
McTierney eyed the gathering airport workers with concern. The perimeter held by the remnants of Udinka's troops was getting smaller with every minute.
"Either way," the Scot said, "HNRIV's not what our lab thought it was. Something's happened to its program. The structure’s changed.”
Dana Tallant emerged from the interior and blinked in the pale ramp lights. Her face was ashen.
"What did you find?"
Tallant stripped off her gear and stowed it. "I'm still not sure. I looked over all of our vids and data. Nalinka died of neural trauma. Poor woman expired like an old motor run at too high a speed for too long. Neurotransmitter overstimulation of the central nervous system. An excess of dopamine, flooding her synapses. More like a tidal wave, actually. I'd say ANAD triggered some kind of protective routine in the HNRIV resident in her brain." She shook her head, bent to pack up her gear. "It wasn't pretty."
McTierney was intrigued. "Same progression as all the addicts we're seeing. Something's jazzing up the program, making it run overtime, pumping a river of dopamine through their limbic systems. Triggers an avalanche of signals…your body just can't handle it. Eventually, the seizures and convulsions cause a myocardial infarction, and kill you."
Deeno D'Nunzio and Mighty Mite emerged from the jet’s interior, their faces somber. They had Superfly vid footage of the village, what was left of it, now prepping Nalinka's body for burial. The troopers watched in stony, uncomfortable silence.
Johnny Winger was deep in thought. "We're not dealing with any ordinary nanomech here, guys. This bastard's got brains. I wasn’t able to grab anything but mech residue either. Ironpants Kraft will eat me alive if I don’t come back with a master bot.”
"Yeah," said D'Nunzio, "and he’ll slurp up the rest of us for dessert. What do we do now, Lieutenant?"
“I may have something here,” Gibbs piped up.
“What have you got, Gibby?”
Gibbs pointed to a small graph on his wristpad. “Just a hunch. During ANAD’s probe, I kept seeing this little baby but I ignored it for a while…this little sig
nal trace here. Some kind of comms…going out from Nalinka’s body, from her brain, right where ANAD engaged HNRIV…her tegmentum.”
Winger was instantly intrigued. “Comms. Did you get a trace?”
“A little…but it doesn’t make any sense.”
“Let me see….” Winger let Gibbs port the graph to his own wristpad. “Jeez, if I’m reading this right, the signal went right into space…am I interpreting the analytics correctly here?”
“I’d say so, Skipper. Something inside Nalinka’s brain—a master bot or something like that—called home for instructions.”
Winger sucked at his lower lip. “And it looks like home is some place in low Earth orbit. Maybe a satellite lab?”
Deeno was still nursing some bruises and lacerations from their narrow escape. “So what’s next, Lieutenant?”
Winger gave the order to finish loading up Charioteer. “First, we get all this squared away. Then I contact Major Kraft. I’ve got a feeling Old Ironpants may have another little trip in mind for us.”
“Drugstore in Orbit”
Aboard UNISPACE Assault Ship Archimede
Low Earth Orbit
October 9, 2048
Johnny Winger watched the Earth slide by two hundred and fifty kilometers below them. Deeno D’Nunzio and Mighty Mite Barnes crowded around the aft portholes of Archimede’s crew compartment as well, silently watching the brown tableland that was west Africa and the blue-green oval of the Med unfold.
“I never did