***ANAD is fully prepared to support the mission…all effectors are primed and ready…propulsors are at full charge…processor core initialized and set at zero state…just let me at ‘em***
As Barnes boarded the geoplane, the assembler swarm filtered and flowed right behind her, like a faithful pet following its master.
Barnes spent a few minutes checking the new Gopher’s outfitting and gear from bow to stern, then she consulted with Glance and the rest of the crew on mission details and comm protocols. After a last minute briefing on geological formations along the traverse route, Barnes received a message off the satlink from Mesa de Oro base. It was General Kincade. The General’s face appeared haggard and tired on the screen.
“UNSAC just squirted me the final orders, Sergeant,” Kincade was saying. “I’m sending them along…don’t go without a hard copy onboard. UNSAC has approved Himalaya Strike in full, all details and constraints as we discussed before. I’ve already talked with Major Leeds at Cyber Command to coordinate with their end of the mission. Major Winger…the Winger angel, that is, will be loaded aboard one of their packet sweepers within the hour. He’ll be cruising through the Net and hopefully be able to penetrate Paryang from that axis. Have you got your course set?”
“Plotted and laid in,” Barnes reported. She sat in the mission commander’s seat alongside Glance, who was still checking systems off a checklist. “We’re descending to five hundred meters a few kilometers north of the Pura River to get below the hardest basaltic layers…and to slip around a transverse fault the geos say is there. We head out north by northeast for about fifty kilometers, cross below the Nepalese border and rise to three hundred meters below the Namse Pass, where the shales are little better for boring. Fewer inclusions to deal with.”
Kincade was following his own copy of the assault course on a screen at his desk at the Mesa. “Exactly…Then from there, you cross the Tibetan border at three hundred meters depth, roughly paralleling the Gangdise Shan range—should be some tougher boring there, from what the geos tell me…lots of igneous stuff, quartzite and so forth. You’ll have to slow down. And there are subduction zones all along that range. The base of the mountains is being driven northward by the Indian tectonic plate, so there are tremors and shifting all the time. Watch yourself.”
“Don’t worry about that, General.” Barnes patted the main console. “Murchison says this Gopher should take real good care of us. From the Gangdise Shan, it should be a fairly straight shot into the Paryang Valley.”
“Watch your densitometer closely, Sergeant,” Kincade warned. “Follow the course profile as precisely as possible. UNIFORCE mapped these strata pretty well the last few weeks. With all that plate subduction going on west of Paryang, you could set off some seismic activity without meaning to. We don’t want to give Red Hammer—or the Chinese—any warning at all.”
“Understood, sir.”
Kincade looked up. His eyes narrowed on the screen. “Get in and get out, Barnes. Get up there and turn that base into rubble. Then get the hell out of there. With any luck, that’ll sever all the control links between Config Zero, the cartel and that alien race. Once they’re cut off from control and from each other, UNIFORCE thinks they can be engaged and defeated individually.”
“We’ll be nearly a week getting into position, General. But we’ve got ELF and the quantum coupler circuits to stay in touch with the surface. I’ll check in once every twenty-four hours, give you an update.”
“Good luck, Sergeant,” Kincade nodded. “And good hunting. Smash the bastards for good.”
Barnes signed off just as Glance poked his head up between the command deck consoles.
“Status report, Sergeant. The lifter loadmasters say we’ve got everything on board.” He handed over a thoughtpad with all the items checked off.
Barnes scrolled the pages. “Weapons…” she muttered, mouthing the gear the packbots had loaded aboard the geoplanes: HERF guns, mag weapons, coilgun bots and twenty-two thousand kinetic rounds. “That should be enough to blow up a small city. Hypersuit support gear…Mission support—“ She let the thoughtpad detail the location, status and quantity of every piece of gear they had aboard. Containment systems for borer and tactical ANAD, ANAD interface control boxes, SuperFly recon bots (two squads), Camou-fog generators (four canisters), MOBnet canisters (eight).
“Looks like it’s a wrap, Al. Everything squared away outside?”
The Borer Operator (BOP) nodded. “Crews are itching to get the hell out of here. Apparently, there’s a lot of townspeople and monastery folk gathering at the south end of the valley. That Indian officer—“
“Captain Vanilu, I believe.”
“Yes, sir…Captain Vanilu is having quite a time holding the perimeter.”
“Just as long as nobody sees what happens to Gopher and Mole. We don’t want any spies reporting two geoplanes disappearing inside the ruby mine. Get Reaves and Singh out there, to give Vanilu some backbone.”
“On my way, Sergeant.” Glance disappeared belowdecks.
Half an hour later, the lifters were ready for departure. Hoyt Gibbs was skippering Mole. At Gibbs’ suggestion, Barnes had agreed to coordinate the first movements of the geoplanes with the takeoff of the lifters. Both pilots had agreed to apply maximum power at takeoff, to stir up plenty of dust around the landing zone. Camouflaged by such a gale, Barnes then planned to push the geoplanes forward into the ruby mine. Once out of view, their borers would be activated and the vehicles would begin burrowing into the underside of the mountain, beginning their long descent below ground.
Nicole Simonet, Gopher’s Driver/Systems Operator (DSO) heard the go signal over her headset. All five lifters were churning up a small hurricane outside. All the crew could hear the staccato ping of pebbles and rocks against Gopher’s hull.
“Let’s go,” Barnes ordered. “That’s our cue to get out of here.”
“Engaging tread drive now,” Simonet reported. With a jerk, Gopher surged forward.
Aboard Sweeper One
November 29, 2049
1150 hours
Johnny Winger wasn’t sure where he was, only that he was dizzy and disoriented. He had a vague memory of riding the Mighty Cobra roller coaster at Daytona Beach as a child. It made him sick. He threw up when they stopped. Threw up all over himself and his Mom and Dad.
How embarrassing.
But this wasn’t quite like that, not exactly. It was more like riding the surf at Daytona. He often did that all day long, until he was sunburned to a deep red and his chest was chafed from the float and his eyes and ears stung with salt water.
Now he was…what, exactly? A collection of atoms. A swarm of molecules. An angel, deconstructed, now he remembered. And James Tsu had put him in a packet sweeper and sent him off flying around the Net just like that awful roller coaster years ago, with a virus named INDRA.
Now he was a whole new person, with no body and only the barest inkling of how to get around in this new world of deconstructed swarms.
He was an angel, cruising the WorldNet in a packet ship called Sweeper One, conducting an assault mission for Operation Himalaya Strike. It was all too much, overwhelming really, despite what Doc II had said. He wasn’t sure which part of the experience was the strangest: being an angel or riding packets inside the Net.
One moment, he was thrilled at what he could do now. Things he never imagined anybody could ever do. The next moment, he despaired, thinking he had died and this was some version of Heaven.
But he was still conscious. He was still Johnny Winger, in some form or another. And he still had a mission.
Focus on the mission. Focus. Focus….
So he was traveling around the Net at near-light speed, through cables, wirelessly into and out of routers, hubs, switches, servers and nodes too numerous to count. Somehow, Tsu and Anson Leeds could communicate with him. Messages came and went. He looked aro
und and realized he was still in some kind of containment vessel. It was cramped. He didn’t see any controls. But the messages came and he heard them and he responded.
Tsu was saying something even now--”…some kind of rogue packets in your vicinity…I’m diverting you to that node…can you see anything, Major? Can you describe what you see?...”
Winger tried looking around. Now, he realized that the containment vessel that was Sweeper One had some sort of translucent, at times even transparent skin. When he squinted, when he focused, he could see outside. It made him even dizzier. But he gritted his teeth…or what he thought were his teeth, for the memory of how to do that was still there, and tried to describe what he was seeing.
It’s like riding a train, he decided. That was the best analogy. A train of fuzzy cotton balls. In fact, he realized there were trains of cotton balls everywhere, paralleling Sweeper One, and some at crazy angles too.
This is insane, he told himself.
Some of the cotton balls came alongside and began to stick. Soon, a great quilt had built up along the outside. That’s when he realized someone was talking. It was James Tsu.
“Major…Major Winger…can you hear me? Major…come in.”
Winger looked around. There were no buttons to push. No controls of any type that he could see. How you respond?
He just started forming words in his mind. “I hear you, James. I don’t know how, but I hear you.”
That did the trick. Somehow the cotton balls carried signals to and from the packet cruiser.
“Good. I’m sending you a link…it’s some news files from Solnet…you should view them.”
“Yeah? How do I do that? There aren’t any controls inside this thing.”
For awhile, Tsu said nothing. Nobody had any ideas how to make comms work when you were inside the signal wave. “You’ll just have to figure it out, Major. I’ll keep sending the link.”
Thanks. He watched the streams of cotton balls. The ones that clung to the outside of Sweeper One had to be Tsu’s link. But how to activate it?
Then he hit on an idea. Winger found he had all kinds of effectors. No longer limited to two arms and hands, he could manipulate atoms and molecules in a variety of ways. He was puzzled by this for awhile, but soon enough, found a way to cycle open a port on the side of the sweeper and crank some of the clinging cotton balls inside. Immediately, he saw and heard snatches of some kind of news vid…”—orting that some rogue software…stretches of the Net…shutting down critical systems…”
As he cranked in more and more cotton balls, the compartment became crowded but the imagery and sound became clearer. Winger was stunned at what he saw.
All over the Net, the news was the same. Rogue software, viruses, Trojans, worms, berserkers, zero-day exploits nobody had ever heard of…the Net seemed to be slammed with them. Everything was affected: water treatment and supply systems, fuel and gas transport, communications, finance-bank-credit transactions, air traffic control, even killsats in orbit, which had fired uncommanded bursts on unsuspecting ground targets. Cyber Corps was swamped, unable to keep up with all the infiltrations.
James Tsu had appended his own file to the link. Winger watched as Tsu’s disembodied head materialized inside Sweeper One, like a ghostly wraith from a bad nightmare.
“The reason Solnet and WorldNet can’t keep up is that there’s a steady infiltration of bots from Config Zero, or so UNIFORCE keeps telling us. Until that’s shut off, the Net will be overwhelmed. Look, Major, we’ve got a bigger problem here. Contact me with this link—“ Tsu’s head looked down. At that very moment, a small cylinder appeared in the sidewall of the sweeper. Instinctively, Winger reached out an effector and contacted the cylinder. Instantly, James Tsu’s head appeared right next to him, so suddenly, it startled him. Tsu nodded.
“I see you managed to work the link. Welcome to the Net. How does it feel…being a disembodied swarm riding a signal wave at near-light speed?”
Winger shrugged, at least he tried to. He didn’t have any shoulders. But some kind of embedded memory said he had shrugged. “It’s hard to put into words. I feel like I’m riding a roller coaster in a sleet storm of cotton balls. Is this what it’s like to be part of a signal?”
Tsu smiled. “I don’t know. You’re the one on the scene. You tell me. Look, there’s a serious problem at the Kings Gorge Dam in Colorado. Something’s infected the controls for the Discharge Control System…the threat center’s getting steady feedback of valve and pump malfunctions. It’s serious. If the Bugs take command of the discharge controls, they could open all the sluice gates, flood hundreds of kilometers of valley downstream. Millions could be affected…in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico. I’m diverting you there…it should only take a few seconds. Leeds wants you to scope it out, send back a report. Don’t try anything yet. You’re configured for offensive actions at Paryang. Just report. Still got that cylinder?”
Winger spotted the cylinder with the locking cap. He knew it contained the INDRA virus. “Don’t worry…I can’t even control my own effectors yet. How do you drive this thing anyway? I don’t see anything to control it.”
Tsu’s face was already fading. “You don’t. It’s just a containment device. Leave the driving to us.” Then his face and head were gone. Winger was alone.
And Sweeper One careened left, diving headlong into a maelstrom of cotton balls.
He knew he had arrived somewhere…Node 2133493, KG Discharge Control Primary Gate Circuit A…when the cotton balls began to thin out. Sweeper One shuddered and rattled a little bit and he found himself rocking back and forth, like a train clacking along some tracks. Suddenly, Sweeper One jerked right, onto a new course and the last of the cotton balls parted.
He caught a quick view of some kind of enclosure flitting by. The sweeper darted into a tunnel, then emerged again and he saw more clearly, as the ship orbited something like a small lagoon, that the enclosure was like a fence encompassing the small lagoon. Inside the fence, bobbing on the lagoon surface, more cotton balls, but these balls looked dirty, torn, misshapen and bedraggled. One end of the fence was open and a multi-lobed nanobotic device seemed to be herding more and more balls inside, sorting, stopping, checking each one as it approached.
Right away, Winger understood that the nanobot doing the herding didn’t belong there. James Tsu had talked of enemy bots. He realized he was looking at one, in fact, there were several, forming a gauntlet along the approaches to the fence opening. The bots were shepherding more and more cotton balls inside. It was like some kind of round-up.
And inside the enclosure, the balls were undergoing some kind of metamorphosis. They came into the enclosure looking like all the other balls. But once inside, they changed color and shape and began looking decidedly beaten down.
Johnny Winger hunted around the sweeper cabin for the comm link. The cylinder was still there, still turning slowly in its socket. He reached out with an effector and felt a connection. Tsu’s head returned, turning slowly in the air.
“Good. You’ve got the hang of it. See anything?”
Winger reported what he was seeing.
Tsu frowned. “That’s bad, Major. That’s what we were afraid of. Those bots you see are the enemy. Don’t do anything. Don’t try anything yet. I think what you’re seeing is the discharge control system software being changed. The bots are trying to take command of the pumps and valves. We’re working on a fix right now.”
“Something needs to be done now,” Winger told him. “I can’t just stand by and let them take control of the dam.”
“You’re not configured for action there, Major…don’t do anything stupid.”
But even as James Tsu’s head was streaming warnings and cautions, Johnny Winger wasn’t listening. Instead, he was learning fast how to use his effectors and propulsors. Maybe this is how I learned to walk, he surmised. Step here, put a foot
there, shift and stride, fall down and bang my head on the coffee table. Scream bloody murder and get up and try again.
Bit by bit, little by little, he was able to get some of the basics down: okay…that’s extend, that’s retract, that’s manipulate, now rotate. Got the effectors. Now propulsors…how the hell do you turn these damn things on?
He decided to do a little exploring inside his cocoon, see just what this packet cruiser was like.
Winger found that he could just squeeze into another compartment. This one had some kind of airlock. Maybe a way out of the packet cruiser. He worked his effectors and by trial and error, found a way to open the airlock. He collapsed himself down and squeezed through. Then, cycling the outer hatch, he shoved himself outside.
Steaks of cotton balls raced by, multiple streams going in all directions. Jeez, it’s like standing next to a freeway. He reconnoitered the outside of his little ship for a moment, finding it a squat cylinder with hemispherical end caps at each end. Some kind of jets puttered front and aft and the aft jets were surrounded by flagellar propulsors as well. Sweeper One was well equipped for maneuvering in this strange new medium.
He dodged several streams of cotton balls and soon spied what looked like a mountain range in the distance, behind and above the small lagoon, where sorting and selecting was still going on. Atop the crest of the mountain, he saw what looked like the crenellated stone walls of a great citadel, perched on the very top. But it wasn’t the citadel that caught his attention. It was the swarm of bots attacking the citadel that he noticed…hundreds, maybe thousands of them, breaching the walls, clambering all over the parapets and towers of the great fortress.
He tried the link back to Cyber Corps, and found he could talk to Tsu, even outside Sweeper One.
He described the scene.
Tsu’s voice was concerned. He could tell in the strain of his voice. “That citadel you’re describing is Cyber Fence, Major. It’s something we built. The Kings Gorge discharge controls are inside. We installed that to keep the Bugs out. What you’re describing is a full-scale assault on the Fence. The Bugs are trying to get inside, and take over the dam operating controls.”
“I’ve got to do something, James. I can’t just stand here and watch.”
“Major, you don’t have the configurations to make an attack. Don’t even think about it. You’re configged to insert the INDRA virus at Paryang only. Just get in as close as you can and describe what you see….Major…Major, do you copy?”
But Winger had already gotten underway, figuring out how to operate his own propulsors as he jetted toward the steep escarpment of the mountain.
It’s like learning how to swim and walk at the same time, he told himself. I don’t know what half of these gadgets do…but , here goes….
He closed the distance to the slopes in a few minutes, and straight away found himself in a scrap with a small squadron of Bugs. They were nanobotic devices, of that he was sure. So am I, he snorted. I wonder what I look like to them.
Before he could react, he was already in the grasp of two bots, whose effectors lanced out and pinioned him against the flanks of the mountain before he could maneuver away.
Oh, yeah…let’s see what this thing does…he found all he had to do was think of a config and the right effector was enabled and powered up. Slammed sideways, he reacted with a few snaps from his own grabbers and managed to pinch off a few molecules of the attacking bots, atoms went spinning off in a puff of fragments as he scooted out from under them.
Take that, you snotty little worms.
Now Winger whirled and slashed with the same grabbers, a feint immediately parried by the bots, which butted him amidships and sent him spinning back down the slope. He managed to right himself and jetted back up into the melee.
It was like combat underwater in the swimming pool, like when he had tussled with his brother Brad as a kid, pulling hair, kicking, slapping, all in slow motion. The trouble was the slightest touch could set him spinning. Clearly there were forces here at this level he had never heard of. He’d have to be more careful.
Winger waded into another knot of Bugs and went to pinching and grabbing and slashing. He found he could use his propulsors to make kamikaze swooping attacks on a tangent to the mob, diving in for a slash, then pulling out just in time. That tactic worked pretty well.
Then, just by chance, he found how to operate his bond disrupters.
Using the same kamikaze dives, he found he could scatter knots of Bugs with liberal use of the disrupters. Each dive produced the same result: a big zap! and then atom fragments and pieces of effectors cartwheeling off in all directions.
This was starting to be fun.
Tsu’s voice muttered in the background but he paid little attention. “Major…you don’t have the right configs to attack…be sure to keep a safe distance…recon and intelligence, that’s all we need….”
Winger slashed and burned his way up the slope, encountering thicker and thicker knots of Bugs. It’s just me against millions. He knew there was a way to replicate additional copies of his own structure, but where was that control? Maybe that’s what James was talking about. Did he even have the right config to replicate?
But before he could consider the implications of that, he spied a different sort of Bug, higher up the slope, bigger, with more effectors, standing off from the others, directing breaching operations. Already, some of the Bugs had penetrated partway into the citadel walls. Others were clambering toward the parapets at the top, while disrupter fire from towers rained down on them. It could have been an illustration from a textbook on medieval history.
But it was all very real.
The larger Bug seemed to be in charge. Winger worked his way against the flow of bots, grabbing, pinching, slashing, where he had to, until he found himself at the same level as the large Bug.
It had multiple heads, globular and pyramidal, with a forest of effectors around its equator and it was spitting out copies of itself like some kind of whirling assembly plant…casings, effectors, grapples and propulsors…a queen bee of a bot growing drones and workers left and right.
Johnny Winger had never been one to turn down a challenge. His brother Brad often dared him to try things and he learned at an early age not to back down. He could outrun and outfight half the boys he had grown up with. Part of surviving in a family of boys was standing up to them, talking trash with them, roughing and wrestling with them. That’s how you got respect. Above all else, Johnny Winger wanted respect.
So he was moving toward the master bot before he even realized what he was doing, Tsu’s voice muttering and warning him in the background…you don’t have the configs to do this…your propulsors aren’t up to spec…you’re going to get hurt….
He waded right in, slashing and burning, and caught the master bot by complete surprise.
The first thing he noticed, after he collected himself from the recoil, was how fast the bastard was. In the blink of eye, the bot flung him away and zapped him with its disrupters for good measure. It went back to slamming atoms, trying to replicate as fast as it could.
Okay, mister, if that’s the way you want it.
Winger backed off and played with his effectors for a few moments, trying to figure out what did what. Okay, that’s like a hand. That one’s like a knife. That zaps things. That one over there twists things. When he felt he had a little better mastery of the gizmos, he charged right back in.
Winger remembered grappling and wrestling with his brother Brad as a child. It was all about leverage. The best position was on top but there wasn’t any gravity here, just weird forces that had names he couldn’t pronounce…van der Waals and things like that.
By instinct, he closed on the master bot and went for the mid-section, an area that seemed to have fewer effectors. Using a clutch and grab combo, he managed to grapple something and hung on as the bot thrashed about. Disrupter fire zapped
the air and he returned fire. Moments later, they had company as the bot master’s friends came zooming up. Winger felt himself pulled and punched in a hundred different directions. He zapped and pinched and twisted and slammed but it wasn’t doing any good.
He lost a couple of effectors—that should have hurt but then you could just grow more when you had the right config. Then he lost his hold and went spinning off in the distance.
Now the bot master was surrounded by a protective squad of daughter bots, replicants, Tsu had called them.
How did he do that? He wondered. I should have the same ability. But Tsu had warned him against attacking. He didn’t have the right configs.
Above them, the Bugs were busily assaulting the walls of the fortress. Winger could see it was only a matter of time before they got in, inside the Kings Gorge Dam Discharge Control System. If they got in, havoc would follow and millions would be affected. Lives could be lost.
Winger knew now he couldn’t do this himself. Wrestling his brother, he knew that sometimes you won and sometimes you lost. But Tsu and Leeds needed to get reinforcements here as fast as possible.
“I’m pulling out,” he announced, to no one in particular. He was startled when Tsu’s voice erupted in his ears.
“About time…we’ve got more Sweepers on the way. Just stand down, Major. Get back to your Sweeper. You’ve got a bigger mission ahead of you.”
Winger figured discretion was in order. “Better make it fast. That fortress is about to be overrun by Bugs…there must be a gazillion of them.”
“Probably two gazillion,” Tsu came back. “Sweepers Two and Three on the way. They should be on site in a few moments. Can you stay there and give us some battle damage assessment?”
“Roger that,” Winger said. He jetted on his own propulsors back toward Sweeper One. It was like trying to cross a ten-lane freeway; streams of cotton balls zipped by in a blur. He dodged and ducked and juked until he had made it across the signal flow and drifted up to Sweeper One’s airlock. He cycled the lock and was inside the lockout chamber moments later.
Winger wriggled through from the lockout bay into containment. When he was secure, he was about to inform Tsu to get the little ship going when he noticed a few stray cotton balls packed into one corner of the bay.
What the hell? He kicked at the balls and they quivered a little but didn’t move off.
Must have slid past me when I cycled the lock. He knew the balls were nothing more than packets of data and the thought came to him that they might be of some intelligence value. After a few more desultory kicks, he left them alone. They clumped and quivered in the lower level of the containment bay and didn’t otherwise respond. He soon forgot about them.
“Prepare for launch,” James Tsu told him. “I’m sending you on to Paryang. It should take about ten seconds…you’ve got several nodes to traverse and a few filters and buffers at the end. Maybe a little bumpy. How’d you like life as an angel?”
Johnny Winger was busy securing himself in containment, making sure all his parts were well fastened down to the scaffolding that served as an acceleration mount.
“It was wicked. Everything I am, or was, now in this little bot…it’s still hard to believe. And I still haven’t mastered the replication business.”
“Don’t sweat it…it’ll come. You’ve still got a lot of learning to do. Plus we’ve got more configs to add for the big show. We’re trying to coordinate with the geoplane assault too. Ready to fly?”
“More than ready.”
“Okay…here goes….”