WHO. Either this is HNRIV stuff or my mother’s Chinese."
Captain Revel had heard and seen all he needed to. He listened impatiently to alternative explanations from several techs, but ignored them.
"Pharmex is hereby placed under UNISPACE custody." Revel motioned his platoon leader over. His name was Horkum. "Nobody else aboard this garbage dump?”
Horkum shook his head. “She’s clean as far as we can detect, Skipper.”
“Very well. Place all operating systems in a safe mode. Make sure containment and the Level Four lab are secured. Pick three of your men for a detail…I want a skeleton crew of techs only…they'll stay behind and make sure Pharmex stays shutdown." Revel marched off, back to the Archimede. "Mssrs. Holweg and Souvranamh are in custody and will be returning to Kourou with us."
Winger couldn’t believe their luck. He told Gibby to re-capture ANAD. "I'll get Mighty Mite and Deeno. Looks like our work here is done."
Winger went forward to the Level Four lab. Outside the chamber, a small compartment was crammed with consoles and keyboards. Two UNISPACE troopers were on duty inside. They nodded grimly at Winger.
"--just checking for residual nano, boys. Making sure ANAD didn't miss anything."
The lead trooper wore a mottled white on white battlesuit and a frown. "Captain says this place is off limits."
"No sweat, Sergeant. I'm just doing my job." The UNISPACE sergeant let Winger pass into the compartment. For good measure, the Lieutenant had carried a mobile IC panel. He knew Gibby and Barnes were safing ANAD even now, but the gear made him look official.
Inside the compartment, Winger read off controls and displays labeled Comm/Swarm Interface and Synaptic Cartography. Studying the layout of the place, he realized it was similar to what they had seen in Banikaiyan.
Here's where they control the swarms. HNRIV's brain---
"Lieutenant--" it was Barnes, her head stuck through the compartment hatch, between the two troopers. "Lieutenant--it's Major Kraft. He wants to speak with you…he's patched in through the ship."
Winger made his way back to Archimede and her main cabin. Her exec, Lieutenant Commander Sumida, was on duty.
"He's on Comm C," the UNISPACE pilot said. "--right here." He indicated a small nook behind the flight deck. Kraft's gruff face was lighting up a vidport. Winger made himself visible and filled in the Major on what they had found. Kraft seemed distracted.
"Major, I'd like to stay aboard with the UNISPACE detail, check out this place. We may be able to figure just how Red Hammer is controlling HNRIV."
"Negative," Kraft said. "Get back to Table Top, as soon as you land. CINCQUANT's got new intelligence on Red Hammer. And Q2 is setting up a little interrogation session for Souvranamh. With the control link to the swarms broken, I want to act fast to contain HNRIV. The lab’s got some new ideas."
Hey, just give me a chance, Winger thought but didn’t say. "Major, I--"
"That's an order, Lieutenant." Kraft's tone of voice brooked no dissent. "As soon as you hit Kourou, get your gear together and get back here…on the double."
"Yes, sir." Kraft's face vanished. Winger forced his fingers to unclench. Some days, there just was no pleasing the Major.
Archimede undocked from Pharmex in good order several hours later and moved off to de-orbit. The custody detail remained aboard--four 1st Space Raider Platoon troopers and the balance of the Pharmex techs who hadn't been arrested. Holweg and Souvranamh chafed in restraints in the main cabin, surrounded by rest of the UNISPACE force. Winger and the 1st Nano detail were secured in their seats in the rear of the cabin.
The big winged bird shuddered as her de-orbit engines fired, and Winger felt like he'd been kicked in the back by an elephant. They'd started the burn over Central Asia, heading for landfall on the northeast coast of South America, the Kourou spaceport.
Out the porthole beside his head, Winger spied the bright white bumps of the Himalayas, poking through late afternoon sunlight above streaks of wispy cirrus clouds, casting shadows for hundreds of kilometers. Further south, the setting sun made bright reflections off the green dappling of the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. As Winger turned back to the cabin, his eye caught a flash in the darkened furrows between the mountain ranges below. He turned back and saw it again--a red strobe flickered for an instant, and was gone. Then again--
A series of pulses followed.
Seconds later, Archimede shuddered again, and her de-orbit engines abruptly shut off. Winger froze in his seat, mesmerized by the red pulsing light illuminating the darkened valley below them. What the--
And then he knew what it was.
Archimede had been hit. A directed energy beam, arrowing up from a source deep in the Himalayas, had struck the ship. The shudders got worse, as Archimede's engines cut in and out. Suddenly, the ship began a slow roll to starboard.
Up front, the flight deck was in an uproar. Sumida and the ship commander, Lalande, fought the controls. Captain Revel squeezed forward, poking his face into the deck.
"What is it--what's happened?"
Lalande stabbed a button again, and swore. "No dice, no dice, dammit! She's out--Captain…something's hit us. Main engines offline…attitude control offline…verniers are out…we're drifting--"
"Are we still in orbit? What's our speed?"
"Mon Dieu, Captain…we're--I can't get this rotation stopped. We're drifting and we're helpless--"
Sumida's face was grim. "And we're dropping out of orbit fast!"
Revel's eyes widened as the ship's gyration brought the earth back into view. Now nearly in nightfall, Central Asia and China passed quickly below them, more than two hundred kilometers below them, and the pinpricks of city lights were just coming into view across the Yangtze River valley. Ahead lay the vast black basin of the Pacific Ocean.
Revel knew there was no way they would ever make Kourou and the South American coast.
Commander Lalande's eyes ricocheted from instrument to instrument, with a harried glance out the forward windscreen.
Speed down to Mach 16.4. Altitude was 74,666 meters. Rate of descent was four thousand meters per minute. And Archimede was rolling to her wingtips, perilously close to a flat spin with each cycle. Her aero controls were useless--not enough air--and her thrusters and verniers were damaged and out of commission. He took a sideways glance at Sumida. The pilot's face was as pale as his.
They were falling out of the sky at sixteen times the speed of sound, enveloped in a fireball of ionized plasma, out of control, with no effective way to stop, slow down, turn or flatten out…not until the ship had bitten deeper into the atmosphere. And by then, it might very well be too late.
Outside the windows, flashes and streaks of plasma streamed by the ship, an inferno of flame and hot pink throbbing pulsations, as Archimede ripped deeper and deeper into the atmosphere.
Beads of sweat had broken out on Lalande's face. "Any idea where we are?"
Sumida checked a profile display, tried updating it, even tapping it with his knuckles. "Not really. If we were following a normal path, we'd be about over the Marshall Islands about now. But--" he shrugged. "--your guess is as good as mine."
Lalande nodded grimly. "Hickam Field, Hawaii is probably our only shot to make a dry landing. If we don't disintegrate first. We'll have one shot at this…once we get below a thirty thousand meters, we should have aero control."
"Commander, we're going into a spin. And the rate is--"
"I know, I know. But we've got no choice."
Already centrifugal force was making it hard to stay in their seats. Both pilots cinched up their harnesses even tighter. "How long to the threshold?"
Lalande studied his instruments. "Airgate-One starts at one thirty thousand meters. With our rate of descent, about a minute and a half. We got power to the aerosurfaces?"
Sumida cycled a switch. "Everything's green there. Flaps, slats, elevons, ru
dders, stabilators…all look good."
The moment of decision came all too soon. Lalande had just finished explaining to the rest of the crew--and their unwilling passengers from Pharmex--what he was going to do. At just the right moment--designated Airgate-One in the book--Archimede's commander would pop every aero surface he had, pop them all to maximum deflection, in a last-ditch, desperate effort to stop their spin. If it worked--and it was an enormous if--the ship could be brought under some semblance of control. If they timed it right, they might be able to cruise--glide was more like it, since the ground laser had fried their engines and fuel tanks--far enough to avoid ditching in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Lalande was planning on Hickam Field, Hawaii. But the airfield was probably at the far end of their gliding range. Archimede was a so-so glider, since she normally returned to land under full propulsive power. But now, she had no engines. Gliding was their only chance.
"Here she goes!" Lalande shouted. He slammed his rudders and flaps out, with Sumida straining against the ever-increasing force of the spin to cycle the rest of the aero surfaces. Archimede groaned and creaked with the strain. Both men imagined they could hear the ripping of metal against the pounding of the airstream, tenuous though it was. The ship shuddered, dropped, shuddered again, then slipped. For a few moments, they fell freely, and the spin force ceased. Then a vicious slam banging sounded against the hull as something gave way, clattering and