Johnny Winger and the Great Rift Zone

  ***At fifty five percent now, Hub…ANAD is releasing now…launching from base…***

  Aboard Gopher’s command deck, Mendez toggled the quantum coupler circuit to show the view from ANAD’s nanometer scale. Troopers had long referred to this switch as “going over the waterfall.”

  At first, nothing made any sense. It was disorienting in the extreme, like going over the top of a roller coaster ride and your head was spinning out of control. Like standing on the beach in a driving sleet storm, with triangles and polygons and tetrahedrals and nightmarish tangled shapes blasting by your head. Gradually, your mind somehow made sense of the scene and the image settled down and stabilized. In a few seconds, you had gone from the macro world of things and substances and 3-dimensional shapes to the nanometer world of atoms and molecules and Brownian motion. Mendez shook his head, focused and fiddled with the gain on the imager, trying to make some kind of sense of all the photons ANAD was sending back.

  To Mendez’s eye, maneuvering through layers of black shale rock was like flying over a field of broken gravel at an altitude of one foot. Calcium, sodium and magnesium molecules flitted by like trees in a hurricane. ANAD navigated as best he could through the jungle, forcing his way through narrow crevices and corners, squeezing through tight defiles and shifting back and forth to make some kind of headway.

  “EM spike dead ahead, Skipper,” called out the SS1, Sergeant Rounds. “Big mass, lots of acoustics too.”

  Gradually, the imager settled down to a dark, staticky, grainy picture--of what? Mendez squinted, leaned forward. The view slowly materialized--a dense, regular lattice of throbbing, quivering spheres.

  "Crystalline structures," Sergeant Rono (GET1) reported. "Looks like calcium. Maybe carbons--

  Mendez was mesmerized by the perfect geometry. "Oxygens too, Sergeant." He pointed to long rows of tiny darkened blobs, marching off into the distance like a fence. "A cubical lattice, just like the micrographs. A crystalline solid--"

  "Limestone's mostly calcium anyway, with some oxygens and carbons mixed in. Interlocking crystals--it's beautiful."

  "And damned hard to navigate. Like a jungle…this stuff's so dense, ANAD's speed is way down. Enable the voice link--"

  Mendez strained to see anything and then…there it was. Shadows drifting in and among the structurally tight crystalline lattices of silicon and calcium and iron and half a dozen over things. “Slow to one quarter propulsor--“ he told ANAD.

  Over the next few moments, the enemy swarm came into view, gradually materializing among the loose atoms and clusters that choked the lattice. It was like playing hide and seek in a dense forest.

  The bots looked like a chorus line of squat cylinders, festooned with effectors and gizmos around their circumference.

  “Looks like some kind of shaggy cat,” muttered Rounds. “What the hell are all those things?”

  “I don’t know,” said Nguyen “but they’re all coming this way. HERF’s ready, Skipper.”

  “Let ‘em have it!” Mendez said. “ANAD…hold on. And cover your ears!”

  “Fire in the hole!” said Nguyen. He stabbed the FIRE button.

  The thunderclap of rf energy stabbed out into the rock and BOOMED! back in reverberation through Gopher’s hull. The net effect of blasting waves of radio freq energy was to shatter the enemy formation. It also loosened some of the rock layers through which Gopher was cruising.

  The ship’s hull shuddered, creaked and groaned. Méndez felt a lurch and there was a momentary sensation of sliding, then a sudden jarring stop.

  Rono, the geo tech, examined her instruments. “Side acceleration, Skipper. We’re slipping--“

  “Losing traction in the treads,” Robles reported. He backed off a moment, until Gopher’s tread bit again into the rock stratum.

  “Okay,” Mendez said, “belay any more HERF. We’re shattering the rock around us. ANAD, prepare to engage.”

  ***ANAD ready in all respects, Skipper. Let me at ‘em!***

  Rounds counted down the range. “Inside of fifty meters, Skipper. Big time EMs now, acoustics show massive swarm approaching, just off our starboard bow.”

  “Go, ANAD! Launch now!”

  Outside the ship’s hull, the bot master and its replicants jetted off.