***…Base, I can’t hold structure…it’s these blasted chlorines…got to reconfig…shutdown peripheral systems!...***
Gibby was watching the engagement on his own eyepiece, an acoustic image from ANAD itself. He didn’t like what he was seeing.
“He’s got to disengage, Skipper…emergency truncation. Everything not critical. We’ve got to get ANAD out of there before we lose him!”
Winger knew he was right. Hell, he could feel the snare tightening with each turn of the enemy bot, a great fist slowly closing. It was almost like a MOB net in miniature…an impossibly long chain of atoms wrapping up the assembler like a spool. Everywhere around them, the enemy bots were duplicating the same tactic.
“I know, I know…just keep trying, Jesus…internal bonds on main body structure weakening…I’ve lost all grappling capability…” he had to focus, dammit! The pressure was enormous, atoms stripped from atoms, bonds snapping with a crackle…Winger swore and clicked out of the quantum circuit, out of the ANAD view. He couldn’t take it, couldn’t take the intensity, the squeeze, the overwhelming smothering—
Dammit!
Angrily, Winger clicked back to acoustic view. As he watched, the bot systematically dismantled ANAD, molecule by molecule. The enemy was strong, more flexible than any structure that size had a right to be, with some kind of grappler that could extend impossibly far and sting like a tentacle. With ruthless efficiency, they whirred and chopped every device ANAD could generate, all the while, squeezing ever tighter. ANAD tried to counter, replicating probes, inserters, jaws, cilia, pumps, blowers—but it was no use.
Amazon…for that was what he started to call the thing…was too strong. Somehow, the master bot seemed to anticipate ANAD’s every move.
Winger was awed by Amazon’s combat capabilities. “Incredible,” he whispered. “The perfect warrior. Must have one hell of a processor.” And he kicked himself for not being there with ANAD…somehow Doc Frost had to dial down the quantum circuit, cut down the intensity of the feed. If they ever found Doc Frost again…
They had no choice but to disengage. The top atomgrabber in the Corps hated to admit he was beaten, but he had a responsibility, to ANAD, to the Detachment, to the mission. He had to pull ANAD out—any way he could—before it was too late.
“We’re losing signal strength, Lieutenant!” Gibbs yelled.
“I see it! Amazon’s got his fingers in the matrix now. Main processing functions in danger…I’m counterprogramming….” Winger pecked madly at the keyboard, dimly aware of a shrill keening whine outside his suit helmet.
With ANAD down, they were defenseless against the Amazon swarm.
“DPS1…get that HERF gun ready…ANAD’s got to pull back…when I give the word…slam ‘em! Fry the bastards!”
“On your mark, sir—“
ANAD couldn’t hold. The only hope looked to be a quantum collapse…but the timing had to be right. If ANAD collapsed and the HERF fired before ANAD’s core was safely contained, they’d lose everything: master assembler and all. Then they would really be in a hurt.
Gibby shook a fist at the image on his eyepiece, now a dark, swirling mass of shapes and forms. “Come on, damn it! Come on….”
But it was no use. ANAD was outgunned. Every move was countered by the enemy swarm. Amazon’s response was swift and sure. Winger, Gibbs and the others watched in their eyepieces in amazement and horror, as one by one, ANAD’s capabilities—fine motor control, attitude and orientation, propulsors, sensors, molecule analysis, replication—were rendered inert or completely lost.
ANAD was helpless.
“Got to get the hell out of Dodge,” Winger muttered, sick with anger at how little help he had been to the assembler. You didn’t abandon a buddy on the battlefield, no matter what…that had been drummed into every Quantum Corps trooper from the first day of nog school. No matter what it took…you got your buddies out. Even if they died in the effort.
Gibbs was checking status. “It’s bad, Lieutenant. No electron lens. No enzymatic knife. Hardly any effector control. ANAD’s crippled. We can’t let ‘em get to the core…can’t let the enemy rob the bank—“
Johnny Winger gritted his teeth. “Not just yet…” His fingers flew over the keypad. “Gotta get some data on this bastard…got to probe that bugger and get some structure…know what we’re dealing with…if I can just get stabilized—“
“Lieutenant—there’s nothing left to stabilize—“
Despite the risk, the mission demanded something more. Earth’s very atmosphere was under threat…who knew what could stop these bots, if anything could? They had to get data on what Amazon nanobots were like…and who was behind them. If it meant sacrificing ANAD—
Sorry little buddy, but the mission has to come first.
Grimly determined, he piloted what was left of the ANAD horde back for another wrestling match with the enemy
“Whatever this thing is,” he swore to himself, “it reacts like ANAD itself, only supercharged a thousand times.” Was it Doc Frost’s work…Frost now working for Red Hammer? No, he’d never believe that. He worked the config controller stick, while Gibby managed status, crossing his fingers that the ANAD master would hold together just a little longer.
And that the Detachment could fend off the Amazon swarm now descending on them beside the river.
While Sheila Reaves kept the HERF gun sighted in, and her fingers poised above the firing button, Winger ‘wriggled’ ANAD a bit more vigorously in its tentacle embrace. Managing to move a few nanometers, he siphoned off some of the grappler’s outer electrons until the charge had built up enough to send a zap down the length of the chain.
Like being stung by a bee, the grappler loosened just a bit, and Winger was ready, commanding another squirming fit by ANAD. Reams of bond energy data and config details burst onto the imager. The enemy bot’s grappler had given up vitals on structure and ANAD’s core snatched the info right out from under him, storing it, pulsing it back to its human controllers.
“Now, I gotcha, you little bastard—“
It was time to get the hell out of Indian country.
“Executing quantum collapse…NOW!” Come on baby, get small for me…get real small….”
Deep inside the crushing embrace of the grappler, the ANAD master collapsed what was left of his own structure in an explosive puff of atom fragments. Base, effectors, probes and grapplers, even the core shell surrounding its main processor, went hurtling off into the air in a big bang of spinning atom parts.
ANAD…at least, the barest whiff of what had once been ANAD…was finally free.
And the Amazon bot’s grappler was left holding…nothing…nothing but a ghostly afterthought…an entangled quantum shadow of its once squirming captive.
Instantly, ANAD disappeared. To all intents and purposes, ANAD had effectively vanished in a cloud of blurry quantum waves.
Less than two minutes later, making its way on quantum wave propulsors, ANAD was finally captured in the embedded containment capsule in Johnny Winger’s shoulder, its processor still dogging electron states to bring the nearly invisible device home.
That’s when Winger told Sheila Reaves to fire the HERF gun.
A series of hot thundering waves of RF washed over the Detachment, hunkered down in wet riverbank sand below a swarming horde of nanobots.
Winger squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for the pulse to pass. He felt the tinkle of dying bots clattering against his helmet.
“DPS…give ‘em more! Keep slamming ‘em!”
With the ANAD master now little more than a quantum dot, he could only pray the HERF gun would destroy enough enemy bots to give them some room.
More searing hot waves thunderclapped past the Detachment, shaking the earth and the river like a giant fist. The Yemanha’s oily waters stirred with restless waves.
When the third pulse was done, Winger commanded his suit servos to set him upright.
“Secure the HERF. Move out…Sergeant Calderon…anything from the sniffers?”
The rest of the Detachment struggled to unsure footing, while Calderon checked his airborne brood.
“Got a strong reading, Captain…dead ahead, bearing zero five zero. Those caves up ahead—“
Winger steered the Detachment toward a steep cliff of limestone, riddled with caves and grottoes. Del Compo had mentioned something about a grotto off the river.
He could only pray they’d damaged the Amazon bots enough to clear a path. With ANAD in containment, licking his wounds, collapsed down to practically nothing, Winger felt bare and defenseless. Still, there was a chance some of ANAD’s replicants had survived the HERF pulse.
“Gibby, check your interface…see if any of our guys made it through the HERF blast—“
Gibbs slogged through wet sand on automaneuver, just like the rest of the Detachment, wobbly but upright. He pecked out a few commands. “Good idea, Lieutenant…if enough made it—“
“I could pilot the survivors myself,” Winger finished the thought. “Maybe even rep a few trillion bots to help out.” If I could remember the commands, he thought.
The Detachment followed the bend of the river, angling forward toward the limestone cliffs. The bank narrowed to a tiny shelf of sand, barely one man wide. They went in single file, with Superfly watching carefully from overhead, circling like a horde of flies. Something screeched and fluttered in the trees overhead, ten thousand bat wings heard but not seen. Winger paid no attention.
Instead, he concentrated on contacting ANAD, now deep inside the containment capsule in his shoulder. He felt bad about the quantum collapse---it usually took a week to regenerate an ANAD master after such a drastic maneuver, but it was the only way.
“ANAD…are you there…can you hear me…?”
He tried several times, not expecting an answer but figuring it was worth a try. The assembler was now little more than a few atoms of processor core, held together with tenuous quantum waves. There weren’t enough atoms to send a reply…just enough to keep the processor barely ticking over until he could be extracted and regenerated.
Sorry, little buddy….I had to do it…I had to get you out of there…
He wondered what it felt like.
“Skipper…got something—“ It was Gibby. He’d been probing the air, trying to locate remnants of the ANAD swarm. “Looks like a few stragglers survived…maybe enough to regroup-“
“I’m on it,” Winger said, grateful for the interruption. He switched his eyepiece to acoustic sounding, signaled all surviving assemblers to form up overhead. Moments later, he sent a basic replication command. He’d have to monitor this one personally. The ANAD master normally controlled basic operations of the swarm, like a top sergeant, but ANAD was contained, barely alive.
Have to do this the old-fashioned way, Winger told himself. As the remaining assemblers grabbed atoms and rebuilt the swarm, he watched through the faceplate of his helmet. A faint shimmer through the tree limbs told him the replication was underway, though it was subdued and tediously slow-going without the master.
“Must be the entrance to that grotto,” came a voice over the circuit. It was Reaves, driving the Superfly horde ahead of them. Imagery speckled on everyone’s eyepiece, imagery of a dark recess in the limestone cliffs.
“Hold up,” Winger commanded. “Hold your position…let’s get a basic swarm up and ready to go in. I don’t like the looks of this. Calderon, what do your sniffers say?”
Calderon was watching the readouts. “CO2 up another fifteen per cent. O2 down ten…looks like nitrogen’s dropping…trace amounts of chlorine, methane, neon…all screwed up, Skipper. Air’s bad inside, not breathable at all. Basically, toxic stuff coming out of that grotto and overhead too, venting from the cliff. Whatever’s going on, this is the epicenter.”
Something splashed in the river, and Superfly caught a glimpse of glistening dark limbs breaching the water. The light was low but whatever it was, it was definitely alive. Reaves tweaked Fly’s sensors, got some infrared from the source, before it submerged.
“Some kind of croc…or a snake, maybe?” muttered Deeno D’Nunzio. The CQE1 was at the rear of the Detachment, running the packbots that carried their supplies.
“Hard to say,” Reaves muttered. “Readout says it’s not a point source…more diffuse.”
“Like a swarm,” Winger thought. Del Compo had run into that here too.
“Swarm’s ready, Captain,” Gibbs said. “You driving or me?”
“I’d better do it,” Winger decided. Gibby was a decent atomgrabber, but Winger was the top code and stick man in the whole battalion and knew he could handle the basics. “Give me control.”
Gibbs passed the swarm interface to the Lieutenant. Winger tapped out a few commands and watched as the shimmering ball flowed around the tree trunks and penetrated the grotto. “Reaves, detach an element of Fly and send them in right after the swarm. I want eyes and ears and I want to leave the ANADs for defense, if we need ‘em.”
“Detaching now—“ Reaves announced. On her command, a small portion of the Superfly horde peeled off and followed the ANAD swarm inside the grotto.
Acoustic imagery from the swarm filled Winger’s eyepiece. He switched to Superfly’s visual and infrared, then checked EM wavelengths, before switching back.
“Reading lots of thermal, Lieutenant,” Reaves noted right away. “Many sources, big sources, dead ahead—“
“I see it,” Winger said. “Get the HERF guns ready. Coilguns too…Detachment spread out and get down. There may be another swarm—“
Forms materialized in his eyepiece, human-like forms, dimly seen in the low light.
“What the hell are they--?” someone asked. The same imagery was on everyone’s eyepiece.
“Apes…maybe what’s left of the natives—“
Johnny Winger remembered something Dr. Del Compo had described in the briefing at Table Top.
“It’s vaguely humanoid,” del Compo narrated over the imagery. “It has radically modified lungs, and as you can see, extra appendages. We’ve scanned all of its internal structure as well, in some detail.” Ghostly images appeared, outlining the results of the scans. “There are the lungs, all four of them. Something that we’re calling a heart, or circulatory pump, and there are other organs we haven’t puzzled out yet. Interestingly, it has no brain or central cognitive-processing center that we can detect.”
“This may be what Del Compo was talking about,” Winger said.
The grotto seemed to be alive with them, dozens, maybe scores of the demonio, writhing and undulating like so many pieces and parts of bodies. Heads lay on the ground, waving in unseen currents like meadow grass. Arms and legs whipsawed along between the heads, like snakes. Torsos and parts of torsos vibrated like bees’ nests. Pools of water stirred with more creatures, and parts of creatures.
“Sir…are they…human…or what?”
Winger switched back to acoustic imagery, letting the ANAD swarm filter in deeper, closer.
“Human-like organisms. A colony of nanobots, that’s what Del Compo said. Only they’re not really human….more like bad copies of humans. Del Compo thought they were adapted for the atmospheric changes going on, extra lungs, low-pressure blood—that sort of thing.”
“What is this place?” asked Singh.
“It’s a nursery, from the looks of it,” said Gibbs.
Alpha Detachment had stumbled onto a colony of demonio in varying stages of formation.
“Look at them,” whistled D’Nunzio.
“Proto-humanoids,” said Mighty Mite Barnes. “Colonies of bots…being assembled by other bots. Is this what all those badass mechs have been protecting?”
“Angels….” someone whispered over the crewnet. “This is where they’re born. Maybe Symborg came from here.”
Many of them were only partially forme
d. Winger knew of one creature already in captivity…the one Del Compo had brought back. It was a cinch Quantum Corps could learn more. What were they? Why were they here?
“I’m going to try an insertion,” Winger decided.
“Excuse me, sir--?” asked Gibbs, incredulously. “Without an ANAD master?”
Winger had made up his mind. Sure, there was a risk. What was left of ANAD’s master was now inside containment in his shoulder capsule. It took a week and specialized care at Table Top to regenerate a master assembler after a quantum collapse. A few trillions of ANAD’s replicants were left in a barebones swarm; that’s all there were to run an insertion into unknown territory like the demonio. What kind of resistance would they put up? The creatures were little more than colonies of nanobotic mechanisms in the shape of something vaguely human-like.
There’s only one way to find out, Winger decided. As Major Kraft was fond of saying, when you’re in command…command.
“Prepare for opposed entry,” Winger ordered.
The first step was to corral one of the demonio creatures, immobilize and contain it long enough to insert a small swarm to investigate.
“Sir, I have an idea,” said Calderon.
“I’m listening.”
Calderon trundled forward, his suit servos trying to keep him level on the uneven ground. The grotto interior was marshy, spotted with small pools, its limestone walls dripping wet.
“Sir, suppose we blast this place with HERF a few times, enough to stun the bugs into a stupor. Then, the DPS here—“ he indicated Sheila Reaves and ‘Taj’ Singh “—fires off a few rounds of MOB. Maybe that’ll hold enough of ‘em together to do a little recon…see what makes ‘em tick.”
The idea had merit. “We won’t have long,” Winger told them. “Sheila, give me three blasts inside this grotto…then keep HERF trained outside. What does ‘Fly see outside right now?”
The Superfly horde had been positioned just outside the grotto entrance, orbiting over the riverbank.
“Bots are re-forming now,” Reaves reported. “Small swarms…isolated elements at the moment. I give us about four to five minutes.”
“Okay…keep ‘em dispersed with HERF, coilguns, whatever you can. Give me just five minutes of protection,” Winger said. “Then we’ve got to get the hell out of Dodge.”
“Will do, sir. HERF’s enabled now—“
Winger ordered the rest of the Detachment to take cover. As one, ten hypersuits lowered their occupants to the ground, assuming minimum profile.
“Fire the weapon!” Winger commanded.
“Weapon is charging…charging…charging…fire in the hole!”
Riding out a bolt from HERF was like sticking your head in an oven. Twice…three times, Reaves discharged the high energy radio frequency weapon into the grotto. Like a thunderclap, the sound exploded all around them, echoing off the walls, loosening seams of rock and flash-frying pools of water into steam columns.
As expected, the RF blasts scattered the demonio into loose swarms and knots of mechs, buzzing around like so many disoriented hornets. At the very moment Reaves wheeled the HERF gun back to cover the grotto entrance, Johnny Winger switched his eyepiece viewer back to nanoscale and signaled his own small swarm of bots to move forward, revving their propulsors to max, bearing down on a nearby horde of mechs.
“Okay, Taj…MOB’em!”
Taj Singh fired off several canisters of Mobility Obstruction Barrier. The clouds of dumb bots were probably no match for the mechs making up the creatures, but at least, it would keep them occupied while ANAD probed.
The switchover to acoustic always made Winger dizzy but he recovered soon enough. As always, piloting nanoscale bots through any medium, especially one that had just been HERF’ed, was like flying in a sleet storm.
He finagled with the scale on his viewer until he found one that was comfortable, then tickled the stick, pecking out a few commands. In unison, the swarm extended all effectors, primed bond breakers and enabled grapplers and enzymatic knives. He didn’t have time to try a replication…they had maybe five minutes, maybe less, before the Amazon bots re-formed outside the grotto in numbers sufficient to overwhelm Superfly.
When that happened, Alpha Detachment would have to fall back to the lifter…or be eaten alive.
Gibby was monitoring the command circuit as well. Qualified as an interface controller, the IC2 was an invaluable second set of eyes for swarm maneuvers and tactics.
“Reading fifteen thousand microns…nearest formation,” Gibby muttered. “Our guys enabled, sir?”
“Primed and ready,” Winger said, concentrating on the image, trying to make out anything he could recognize. Atomgrabbers spent a lot of time studying atomic configurations; the best of them could spot a peptide or a fullerene a long way off and knew instinctively how to counter it. When you fought wars and skirmishes at this scale, long-range sounding and recognition was crucial.
“—picking up some heat ahead,” Winger noticed from the swarm’s sounding. “-small thermals, point sources…pretty spread out.”
“I don’t recognize the signature,” Gibby said.
The assembler swarm was in all respects ANAD in design and capability. Same effectors, same construction and abilities. Only the nanoprocessor core was missing, the brains of the master assembler. Johnny Winger would have to provide the brains, trusting his instincts to react properly to moves and feints and maneuvers of the enemy.
“Me neither…but that’s not surprising…I’m slowing to half speed, spreading out a bit…maybe I can get better resolution—“
He sent the commands. As a single body, trillions of ANAD assemblers responded by cutting back propulsor rpms to half. Spreading them further apart gave him a better angle to sound ahead, a sharper image on the acoustic to discern what lay before them.
“—there!” Gibby’s voice was exultant. Although both Winger and Gibbs lay prone inside their hypersuits on the dank floor of the grotto, their eyes and minds were elsewhere, speeding along through a hail of loose atoms, homing on a distinct mass dead ahead, a mass emitting lots of heat and loose radicals….a sure sign of nanobotic activity.
“I think we got one—“ Winger switched momentarily from acoustic to macro and peered over the top of his eyepiece, out through his helmet. Sure enough, a form loosely resembling half a human was bobbing in a small pool of water about six meters away. Its head and shoulders were above the surface of the water, its still-forming arms and hands flailing away, splashing and thrashing about. Mesmerized, Johnny Winger had to tear his eyes away from the scene, back to the world of atoms.
The ANAD swarm was bearing down directly for the center of the creature’s still-forming head.
“Slowing to one-quarter speed,” Winger announced.
“Extend your carbenes, Skipper….see if you can grab one of those appendages—“
Dead ahead, a tight flock of devices whirred and vibrated like mad dervishes, grabbing atoms left and right, building structure and emitting furious heat.
“They’re replicating—“ Winger said.
“Like crazy, Skipper…look at those effectors…”
Indeed, as the swarm closed, the motions of the demonio mechs were almost a blur, so fast did they move. The small horde grabbed and positioned atoms like a frantic crew of brickmasons. In seconds, each bot had grabbed enough atoms to fashion a complete replica, which it topped off with a tetrahedral base, attached with crosslinked peptide chains and an undulating backbone of phosphates.
“Amazing…unbelievable…this is one souped-up bug,” Gibby breathed.
“The bastard’s optimized for replication…that’s all it’s doing…not much of a core, that I can see.”
“Just a mindless nanobotic baby-maker,” Gibby said.
“I’m going in….this we got to investigate—“
“Careful, Skipper….those carbenes look nasty to me…I wouldn’t get
too close…he could pick us apart in no time.”
On command, the ANAD swarm eased forward.
“Skipper…watch out! Soundings are going haywire…thermals all over the place—“
Before Winger could react, the ANAD swarm found itself enveloped in a cloud of churning babymakers, drawing closer and closer.
“Where’d the hell they all come from?”
“I don’t know, Skipper, but we better get out while we can.”
Winger spun up the swarm’s propulsors and ran head-on into a horde of babymakers.
“All stop!” Winger yelled. “Effectors out max…Jesus, those bonds are strong—“
Gibby could see ANAD was quickly becoming enmeshed in a web of effectors, like a fly in a spider’s web. Its own momentum had helped spring the trap.
“Trying backing out, Skipper!”
“I’m trying just to get loose…these are covalent bonds…I ought to be able to break ‘em, but—“
Trillions of ANAD assemblers squirmed and fought hard against the entrapment, but the babymakers were doubly bonded, their effectors sharing multiple electrons in strong, rigid loops.
Johnny Winger tried every combination of kick and feint he could think of, just trying to squirm free of the mesh of ever tightening mechs. No matter what he did—flipping carbene grabbers, firing his bond breakers, slashing enzymatic knives—nothing worked. The babymakers were too strong.
He couldn’t do a quantum collapse, again…the swarm would cease to exist. Unlike the master assembler, there wasn’t enough core to regenerate.
Winger gritted his teeth. “Maybe I can power my way out…”
He revved up the propulsors to max, flexing every effector at the same time. Slowly, grudgingly, the babymakers gave way, a little at a time, then more and more.
“Come on, ANAD…come on….come on—“
“Kick ass, Skipper….give ‘em hell!”
The last flex did the trick. Almost in unison, the ANAD assemblers sprung free and shot forward on max propulsors. Half their grabbers were ripped off and most had platform damage, but the bots were intact and the worst damage could be repaired quickly enough.
The ANAD swarm catapulted beyond the first screen of babymakers and soon enough, found themselves approaching another dark, formless mass dead ahead. The hailstorm of babymakers slipped steadily behind them.
“Thermals are high…but it’s a different signature, Skipper.”
Winger was puzzled for a few minutes, as he slowed and tried to regain some kind of control over the swarm. Then it came to him.
“Gibby…it’s a brain.”
“A what?”
“It makes sense…instead of each mech having a core like ANAD, they’re grouped together into a single mass…like our brains. Like one big mass of tissue and neurons, only these cells are individual nanobots.”
Gibby couldn’t believe it. “Del Compo was right then, wasn’t he? These creatures really are nothing more than colonies of bots.”
Winger knew he’d heard that before. ANAD had once said the very same thing to him.
“We’ve got to go in there—“
“Skipper—“
“Lieutenant—“ it was Reaves on the crewnet circuit. “—Amazon swarms approaching…I think this is it for ‘Fly…permission to engage with HERF?”
“Hold up, Sheila…we’re right in the middle of something here—“ If DPS let fly with another round of HERF, even aimed away from the grotto, the impulse could shred the demonio again…scatter its nanobotic parts and make it impossible to probe the thing’s ‘brain.’
“Lieutenant—“
“Give me three minutes, DPS,” Winger ordered. He needed the time to probe ahead, see what the dark mass was. “But keep HERF charged and ready. When I give the word, light the bastards up.”
Back at the grotto entrance, Reaves swore under her breath. Skipper’s right, they needed the data…she knew that, but that swarm was growing fast and Superfly wouldn’t be able to handle it much longer.
She peeked out across the river, warily eyeing the thickening mist that had descended over the waters. The surface stirred, freshened not by a breeze but by furious nanobotic activity, as the Amazon bots replicated into a swelling horde. In seconds, her view of the opposite bank had dimmed. All she could see now was a patch of sky through gaps in the swarm, through gaps in the dense canopy of tree cover. A dense flickering fog was rapidly descending on the grotto and Reaves didn’t like the looks of it.
She checked on Fly…the squadron of entomopters had already engaged the swarm along its perimeter and the results were predictable. A fourth of the unit had been shredded in less than a minute.
At this rate, Skipper won’t have even three minutes, she realized. She felt the warm, throbbing barrel of the HERF gun, wondering how much charge she had left. A few shots at best. After that—
Johnny Winger bored in on the dark mass ahead. Looks like a bunch of grapes, hanging on a trellis, he thought.
“Sounding ahead…” Winger muttered. ANAD pinged the mass for distance.
“I make it as three thousand microns,” Gibby read off the result. “You planning on engaging, Skipper? We may not have time. With the swarm outside, and HERF wearing off here—“
More and more of the demonio had re-assembled themselves into forms vaguely resembling humans. Heads and arms and pieces of torso scuttled around the pools and the limestone floor like disembodied wraiths. Another blast would give them more time, but it might also scatter the colonies into loose atoms as well.
“I want to engage the outer mechs in that mass, see if we can sniff out anything we could use…a weakness, something. These buggers are being formed for a reason. I want to know what it is.”
“Two thousand microns, Skipper,” Gibby read off the sounding.
“I am in tactical three…defensive grapplers extended. My bond breakers are active. Maybe we’ll get lucky…find us a glutamate trail.”
Gibby was skeptical but said nothing. Several years ago, Doc Frost had added a new capability to ANAD, the ability to shuttle around inside someone’s brain like a bunch of bees, sniffing out calcium sinks in every neuron, looking for concentrations of glutamate molecules. Everywhere there was a certain level of glutamate was a pathway, burned in, a crude trace of memory. Doc Frost had tweaked ANAD’s hydrogen probes to search out these traces, sending back data on whatever it found—calcium levels, sodium levels, activation times. With new algorithms in its processor, ANAD was able to re-construct a very crude version of what originally laid down the trace.
“Sort of like painting somebody’s portrait from their shadow,” Frost had explained. “Kind of an echo of a memory, if you like.”
It had always given Gibby the creeps.
But there was no reason to think the demonio were wired the same way.
Movement to contact took another minute. Outside the grotto, Sheila Reaves was increasingly nervous.
“ANAD sounding less than one hundred microns, Skipper.”
“I see it. I’m slowing to one quarter—grapplers primed…got my sticky radicals out…carbenes and pyridines too,” Winger piloted the small swarm on a tangent toward the first humps of the mass. Closing in, he saw that the formation of bots were tightly linked in a rigid lattice, each unit grappled with the next, in a vast undulating plain of nanobots. The plain rippled like the surface of a lake stirred by breezes.
As ANAD approached, the outer bots clicked defensive arms into view. The lattice quickly grew spiky bristles.
“Those are bond disrupters,” Gibby announced. “Pretty crude but—“
“They could zap me if I’m not careful—all stop—“ Winger brought the ANAD swarm alongside the lattice, hovering only a few microns away. The bots made no move to contact or repel, simply spread their disrupters outward to ward off any attempts at contact.
“Just dumb bots,” Winger surmised, studying the structure o
f the nearest ones. “Basic polyhedral core. A few effectors. So what’s the deal…why are they linked like this?”
Reaves’ voice came over the crewnet. “Skipper, Fly can’t hold any longer. The big swarm’s almost at the grotto…permission to engage HERF?”
“Give me one more minute, Sheila,” Winger told her. “Calderon, Taj, lay down some coilgun rounds…throw the sniffers at them…whatever you can…we’re right in the middle of a mystery here—“
Reaves snorted but said nothing. What the hell are they doing back there…reading detective novels? She motioned Calderon up to the entrance. The CEC2 crouched next to her and they surveyed the tactical situation.
“Chris…can you bring those sniffers down to block this entrance?”
“I can but it won’t even slow ‘em down that much. And we’ll lose our ability to know what’s happening to the atmosphere.”
Reaves was in charge of Detachment defense. “Do it. We need every second we can get.”
Calderon signaled the mote-sized bots to form up around the grotto entrance. He shook his head. “What a waste of good bots—“
“Look, pal, if we don’t hold off that big swarm out there, we’ll be the ones who are wasted. Stop bitching and give me some screening. Taj…get your ass up here too…and bring that coilgun—“
Back inside, Johnny Winger had made a decision. “I’m going in, Gibby…see what’s inside that core—“
“Lieutenant…the time…we’ve got to start pulling out—“
“Hold on—“
Winger powered up the ANAD swarm and steered them into direct contact with the outer shell of mechs.
The battle didn’t last long. Even without its master assembler, ANAD was more than a match.
A few zaps from ANAD’s bond disrupters and the lattice unlinked like a zipper, the bots unlatching and folding back to make a path for the assemblers.
“It may be a trap, Skipper…watch out—“
I’m watching…I’m watching already.” Winger cruised in and poked a pyridine probe right into the clumped core molecules of the nearest mech. The sticky hydrogens tore a gash through blurry clouds of electrons. Bonds snapped and sizzled as Winger drove ANAD in deeper, feeling its way along.
Then, without warning, there was a blinding flash. White light filled the imager screen, blinding Winger and Gibby at the same time. Some energy source had discharged, liberating millions of volts and when the imager cleared, ANAD found itself pulled deeper into the lattice, surrounded on all sides in every direction by an unending plain of linked bots, like a boat stranded in a field of grain that stretched to infinity.
“What the hell—“
“Look—“ Gibby’s voice caught.
The imager had gone crazy. Lines of static flickered and scrolled across the viewer. Winger checked his wristpad. Still a signal, though it was weak and intermittent. Still getting an image.
But the image didn’t make any sense.
Was it an actual image, Winger wondered? Or was it like a glutamate trace in a human brain, a ghostly image of something else?
The grain field became a little sharper. The plants undulated just like wheat or corn in a faint breeze but closer inspection showed they weren’t plants at all…merely linked nanobotic mechanisms, of every size and shape, uncountable in number, sweeping to a distant featureless horizon. The plants weren’t alone either. Drifting like clouds over an Iowa countryside were vast coils and shapes, themselves more linked masses of bots. The world had turned upside down…everything was bots and mechs, no matter which way they turned.
“What is this place?” Gibby breathed quietly.
Winger shook his head. “I was going to say it ain’t Kansas…but hang it, maybe it is. But look…everything, everywhere…it’s all bots—“
“Are we still in that lattice?”
Winger checked the sounding. “ANAD signals don’t make any sense. I’m reading distances that can’t be…almost off the scale…millions, billions of microns. Gibby, it’s like what we’re seeing isn’t atoms at all…like we’ve gone macro.”
“Not atoms…” Gibby’s voice stuttered. “Then…where the hell is ANAD? Is this an image?”
“Or a trace? Maybe it’s just some kind of gibberish or static inside the creature’s ‘brain.’”
“If it’s a memory trace…it’s not like any world I’ve ever seen. Maybe these buggers have nightmares…and we’re in one.”
Winger was about to reply, but Reaves’ strained voice crackled over the crewnet.
“Lieutenant…we’re out of time up here….permission to engage the HERF NOW, sir—“
Winger knew they had to fall back…or the whole Detachment might be trapped inside the grotto.
“Light ‘em up, DPS! Fry the bastards! ANAD’s pulling out now—“
In the last seconds before the thunderclap of heat rolled over them, ANAD squirmed free of the lattice, but not before tearing a huge gash in the mesh of linked bots, pulling away just as more bonds snapped and the crackle-flash! zapped the swarm once more. Static and sizzling fog swelled up, filling their eyepieces. A split second before the HERF gun scattered the colonies again into loose atoms, Winger saw something in his eyepiece that would stay with him for a very long time.
The lattice into which ANAD had been embedded pulled away, as if the tiny assembler had been launched into the air over the countryside. Up and up he flew, soaring higher and ever higher, until the pale blue faded into black, and the stars shone as hard bright unblinking lights.
As if ANAD had somehow been lofted into space, Winger remembered seeing the lattice retreat below him, fading into an indistinct seamless web, then curving and folding back on itself, forming first a horizon, then greater curvature, then a ball, then an entire world.
When the hot wave thundered through the grotto and the demonio were shredded into fluff once more, the final image Johnny Winger remembered was just that: an entire world of lattice, an entire world of linked nanobotic mechanisms folded back on itself like the covering of a ball…a planet of ANADs or something very much like them, floating in space, throbbing like a thing alive.
That’s when the second HERF discharge came and the roof of the grotto came crashing down on them.
Extricating the Skipper and Gibby took about half an hour. Reaves, Singh, D’Nunzio, the whole Detachment pitched in, digging and pawing through the rock and rubble in their hypersuits, while the Amazon swarm tore at them like a furious wind, a wind with teeth.
“Okay—“ came Moby’s straining voice….”now pull—“
Rubble, dirt and rock rolled down Johnny Winger’s faceplate. The first thing he saw was Sergeant Oscar M’Bela, his CEC1, peering into the helmet.
“Come on, Skipper…got…to…get…you…out of here--.“ He pulled and hoisted and pulled harder. Winger squirmed free of a load of limestone shards, finally working one arm free. Then he managed to snag a button on his wrist, activating his suit’s leg boost. Servos whined and moments later, his armored torso and legs were tilting upright, shedding debris in every direction like a wet dog.
“I got about one more charge!” Reaves yelled over the circuit. “If somebody could get the lifter overhead—“
Master Sergeant Al Glance was scrambling up toward the grotto entrance. Glance was second in command, Detachment CC2.
“I’ve got the codes. Give ‘em another blast and I’ll contact the ship.”
While Winger, M’Bela, D’Nunzio and the rest pulled back from the lower chamber, and headed up, Reaves primed the HERF gun once again.
“Charging…charging…charging…I think this is the last of it…Geronimo…!!”
The radio frequency weapon discharged its bolt of energy across the Yemanha River. The thunderclap stirred the river into a boiling frenzy, while hordes of bats screeched off in vast hordes, blackening the skies. A fine mist fell from above, but it wasn’t rain…it was the debris of unc
ounted Amazon bots shattered by the pulse, raining out of the sky.
“HERF’s dead!” Reaves announced. “We got about two minutes…tops!”
“Here they come,” said Calderon. From the dim recesses of the inner grotto, splashing and scrambling through pools, slipping on the limestone floor, came the rest of the Detachment, a haggard, shaken crew.
Al Glance poked his head out of the grotto and stood on the lip, signaling the liftjet down from its orbit over the area. By command, the lifter had been circling the village of Via Verde at two thousand meters, in close formation with the hyperjet Mercury, both cruising in a racetrack pattern on autopilot. Moments later, the black spidery rotors of the lifter came into view through the higher treetops, its articulating wings and rotors whop-whop-whopping as it descended over the river, and came to a hover fifty meters over a shallow sandbar.
Johnny Winger had recovered his bearings enough to make it up to the entrance on his own.
“Thanks, Moby…now let’s get the hell out of here.”
Gibbs followed behind. “Any word from ANAD, Skipper? I released the last of the swarm just before HERF went off.” It was standard doctrine when abandoning an ANAD swarm to command the bots to commit atomic seppuku, sloughing off all effectors and structures and zapping core bonds so that nothing was left.
“Not a peep,” Winger told him. “There’s not much left anyway…just a few atoms held together and the quantum kernel of his core. There’s probably not even enough core to communicate. I can’t raise him.”
Winger didn’t want to think about it. He’d let the assembler down plain and simple…let a fellow trooper down and that wasn’t kosher. He hadn’t done his recon properly, hadn’t made the right command decisions, hadn’t gone by the book when every hair on the back of his neck was standing up, screaming warnings. Instead, he gone with gut instinct, atomgrabber’s instinct and he’d been wrong, dreadfully wrong. He’d thrown the tiny assembler into something he couldn’t handle. ANAD couldn’t keep up with the Amazon bots. Whoever or whatever had created Amazon, the enemy mechs were faster and stronger. That much was certain.
Only a quantum collapse had saved ANAD. But it was like cutting off a trooper’s arms and legs to save his head.
“Lifter’s on station, Lieutenant,” Glance reported.
The Detachment assembled at the front of the grotto, slipping and sliding down to the tiny beach by the river. They were a fatigued, beaten, hollow-eyed shell of a combat unit, hypersuited still but exhausted and dejected. They’d lost much of their gear but thankfully no casualties had been taken, save for ANAD himself.
And they had about sixty seconds to exfiltrate before the Amazon swarm reconstituted itself and came at them again.
“Bring her down,” Winger told Glance, who was piloting the lifter from his own wristpad. He eyed the growing ball of shimmering, sparkling fog that even now was swelling overhead, the enemy bots replicating in exponential overdrive. In less than a minute, the bots would blanket and smother the whole area. And the Detachment had nothing to counter the swarm with.
Glance sent the commands. Instantly, the big spidery vehicle lowered itself to less than ten meters over the riverbank, translating laterally to position its belly doors.
Combat exfiltration wasn’t something the Detachment practiced very often but when you needed it, the suit boost had to work or else.
One by one, with Winger and Reaves hurrying everybody up, the troopers of Alpha Detachment stepped onto the tiny beach and lit off their boosters. Each hypersuit mounted two thrusters, one on each leg, which when fired, could lift a trooper fifty meters into the air in one big lift. They’d wargamed escape maneuvers using suit boost but the problem was the landing…you had to manage your position in the air to come down in line with the thrust. You could break your neck if you didn’t, or worse. It was a one-time shot, to be used only in times of dire necessity.
Johnny Winger figured they were about to be annihilated by the Amazon swarm and that was reason enough.
Each trooper lifted off into the air, scattering sand and water in all directions. Fifty meters overhead, the lifter dropped grab rings from its belly. Timed just right, with a little practice, a Quantum Corps trooper could shoot himself right up to the grab ring and be hauled aboard the lifter in about ten seconds.
“GO…GO…GO…!” Winger patted each trooper in turn on his shoulder, lighting them off in salvo like missiles being launched. One after another, they boosted—D’Nunzio, Singh, Reaves, Calderon, Spivey, Gibby and the rest.
Finally, as the Amazon swarm rolled toward them like a miniature storm front, crackling and flickering with menace, only Glance and Winger were left.
“Go, Al…get your butt up there—“
Glance met Winger’s eyes. “We did all we could, Skipper. We just got outswarmed, that’s all.”
Winger blinked at him. Nobody outswarms me and ANAD, but he didn’t say that. “Thanks…now…off you go—“
Glance lit off and boosted into the air. Seconds later, he was swinging by his arms from the grab ring, riding up into the belly of the lifter.
Winger looked up. Faces rimmed the belly bay opening, hands reaching out, imploring him to light off. Voices came down faint but unmistakable over the whooshing of the rotors.
“Come on…come on, Skipper…get going…”
Winger acknowledged them, then took one last look at the swelling cloud of Amazon bots, now engorging the nearest tree limbs that overhung the beach. The limbs disappeared in a shrill, whirring blur, consumed in a furious buzz of molecular deconstruction. All around him, the air was thickening to a gelatinous mist and the shriek of the mechs had become unbearable, tearing at his eardrums even through the helmet.
And it was coming his way.
You win this time, buggers…but it won’t be the last time we meet.
He took a deep breath, dimly aware that it was only the hypersuit that allowed him to breathe at all in this toxic cesspool of a swamp, and lit off his suit boost.
The thrusters slammed him upward and he extended his arms like he’d been trained. In no time, his fingers closed around the grab ring and the lifter was hoisting him up into its belly, a mother reclaiming her lost brood. His suit gyros gave out at that same moment, and he toppled over inside the bay, nearly plummeting back out into the river, just as the lifter banked off into the humid late morning sky, kissing the upper tree branches as it spiraled up and away from the river.
Winger hung on tightly as the craft put some distance between itself and the nanomech cloud below. The lifter shuddered under full military power, fighting remnant clouds of mechs boiling up from below, as it bucked and careened and shot skyward. A hurricane of dust and sand and water mist and swarming mechs tore by, all blown to the wind, as the lifter spun and wobbled until its autopilot could right her.
Sheila Reaves had grabbed Winger’s suit leg when the lifter took off and now she released it, sinking back against the bulkhead. She wiped sweat and grit from her eyes and squinted up, seeing a familiar face. It was Deeno D’Nunzio, looking for all the world like she’d just won a slam-boxing match…her hair was plastered to her face and she was flushed red.
The two women glared at each other for a moment and burst into laughter.
Too bad about Superfly, Reaves thought, as she sat up and wiped streaks of grime from her face. He’d always been a kickass bot, her personal toy and one damned good scout for Detachment missions. They’d miss this model for sure. But Table Top could fabricate another one in no time.
One hundred, two hundred, five hundred meters. Reaves barely breathed until they’d put kilometers behind them and the only thing she could hear was the thrummm of the liftjets and the cold wind whistling through the cabin holes. She shook her head, startled at the sight. Mechs had burrowed into the lifter…the holes, she hadn’t seen them before. It had been that close.
Three meters away, Johnny Wi
nger was feeling much the same. He sank back, sweaty and exhausted, and killed the crewnet. His eyepiece went dark and he shoved it away from his face. But only when the buffeting and the sonic pulses and the high keening wail of nanomech hell had finally died off, did he finally begin to relax.
The very first thing he did was quick-disconnect the hypersuit helmet, yank the hat off and gulp down tons and tons of cold, humid high-altitude air.
It wasn’t toxic at all…in fact, it was better than ice cream on a hot summer day.
Then he crawled through all the groaning bodies to the front of the compartment, to see about the rendezvous with Mercury.
Above the belly on the flight deck, Al Glance massaged the controls like a master pianist, still in his hypersuit but minus the helmet. He saw Winger poke his head up from below and grinned back, trimming the lifter for the short cruise up to three thousand meters, where hyperjet Mercury and their ride home were waiting like an expectant mother.
They made rendezvous an hour later. Al Glance deftly parked the lifter in Mercury’s docking cradle and let the mothership hoist them aboard. Climbing out into the docking bay, Johnny Winger couldn’t wait to head forward to the suiting room and climb out of ‘this tin can’ , as most of them called the hypersuits.
“Set a course for Table Top,” he told Glance, who would be up on the command deck running the ship for the first watch. “And get word to Battalion that we’ll need a new ANAD master.” Winger absent-mindedly massaged his left shoulder, as if he could somehow feel the bot inside, ticking over, barely alive. “I’ll find out what ANAD’s status is and get it to you as soon as I clean up.”
“Roger that, Skipper.” Glance bounded off to the command deck, to take Mercury out of her orbit and set the ship up for boost to Table Top. The whole five-thousand kilometer trip would take about two hours, give or take, as they skimmed off the top of the atmosphere and skipped northward like a stone on a lake.
Moments later, Winger was on the comm to Table Top. The vidlink connected and Major Kraft’s harried face peered up at the tone.
That’s when Winger learned that UNIFORCE had finally picked up faint beeper signals from Doc Frost…somewhere in the jungles of Myanmar.
“…last word we had from Frost’s beeper,” Kraft was saying, “they were in Hong Kong, maybe Lions Rock. We had scouts and sniffers combing the area now but there was no sign of the Doc…nothing at all—until now.“ Kraft’s frown deepened and he looked away from the vid. Losing a resource like Dr. Irwin Frost made him sick but he couldn’t let Winger see that.
Winger was exhausted, even after a shower and a change. He shook his head, describing the engagement with Amazon.
“It was the damnedest thing, Major. It was like ANAD was moving through molasses. He was always a step behind, couldn’t react fast enough and when he grappled, the bots just shrugged him off like a gnat. Never saw grapplers like that—I tried to get structure on ‘em and we got some…but it may not be enough.” He had squirted the data take from ANAD to Table Top at the beginning of the session.
“I’ll have our engineers take a look at it…maybe there’s something they can do under the hood, soup up ANAD for future action. We’ve got to get a hold of this menace now…UNIFORCE says BioShield can’t even slow ‘em down. These atmospheric perturbations are growing…and spreading. So far, no big population centers are affected yet, but it is just a matter of time, especially in central Africa. It’s worst of all in the Antarctic. The icepack’s melting like crazy and most of the world’s coastal cities will be flooded in weeks if we can’t stop it. You may be right…Via Verde could be Red Hammer’s central nursery for angels.”
Winger wasn’t sure whether he should tell Kraft about the strange probe into the core of one of the Amazon bots. What could he say, really?
“Get your ass back up here, Winger…” Kraft was saying, “We’ve got some tactics to work out. And then we’ve got to go after Doc Frost, if he’s still alive.”
“ETA is 1930 hours, your time, sir,” Winger told him. “And we’ll need to start regenerating another ANAD master. I lost this one.”
Kraft killed the vidlink and Winger went forward from the comm shack to the cockpit. Al Glance was there, on watch, but the ship was piloting herself. Beyond the forward windows, the curvature of the Earth was backlit by a setting sun, spreading a pool of molten gold and red all along the western horizon. Mercury was near the apogee of her suborbital arc, moments away from weightlessness, and her final plunge back into the atmosphere. In less than an hour, she’d be circling onto final approach and settling down on the north lift pad at Table Top Mountain.
“Bad news, Skipper? You look kinda pale. I can handle the ship, if you want to get some shuteye.”
“It’s okay, Al…just talked to the Major. UNIFORCE may have located Doc Frost…somewhere in Myanmar. Singapore’s not sure what happened.” Winger related all he had just heard from Kraft.
Glance uttered a low whistle. “Was he kidnapped by Red Hammer or what?”
“Apparently,” Winger said. “Sniffers are up now…all assets air and space are looking, but so far—“ He shrugged. “The Major’s putting together another mission.”
The fatigued face of Sergeant Gibbs appeared in the door behind them. “Sorry, Skipper…didn’t know you were here. I was…just sort of –“
Winger understood. “Restless.”
“Yes, sir… kind of...” A puzzled frown came over his face. “--just not sure what to make of…what we saw, sir. Inside the core of that bot…inside that creature—“
Winger shook his head. “Me neither, Gibby. I didn’t say anything to the Major. But it’ll come out in the debrief.”
“How do you explain it, sir? It was like a nightmare…maybe we were living through a kind of dream those buggers have, if they even have minds.”
“I don’t know what to say. It’s more like a feeling. Somehow, this Amazon bot swarm, and the demonio creatures are related. And they’re part of something much larger. I don’t know what yet. I’d bet my atomgrabber’s license that Red Hammer’s involved. But I doubt they’re up to this kind of technology alone. Somebody else is helping out.”
“Another cartel, maybe? One we don’t know about?”
Winger thought about the odd sensation he’d had, just before the grotto roof collapsed, plugged in with ANAD into the core of that bot, of seeing imagery of an entire world of nanobots, a planet of mechs.
“Maybe something even bigger, Gibby. But let’s save it for the debrief. Kraft wants us in his office at 0600 hours tomorrow. Better get some rest now, while we can.”
“Sure, Skipper.” Gibby disappeared aft.
Johnny Winger left the cockpit and lay aft to his own compartment. He settled wearily into the bunk but sleep wouldn’t come. He could feel Mercury maneuvering down through the denser layers of the atmosphere, visualizing her turns and descents toward Table Top. But he was restless and it wasn’t a vision of other worlds that kept him awake.
It was ANAD. And what had happened.
Johnny Winger tossed and turned in a cold sweat, frustrated that ANAD had been bested by the Amazon bots.
Little fellow…I let you down…and that stinks.
In a way, he’d let the whole damn Detachment down. Sure, they’d gotten a little data on the Amazon bots, but it wasn’t much. Would it be enough?
Hell, maybe it’s this friggin’ quantum link.
Ever since Doc Frost had linked him in with the assembler, he’d had periods of confusion, indecision, just plain fog…like he was somebody else, somewhere else. It was crazy, despite what the Doc said. And Johnny Winger wasn’t buying any of this signal leakage or combat symbiosis crap.
The fog--or whatever the hell it was--had nearly cost him and the Detachment their lives. ANAD too…and that was the crux of the matter, wasn’t it?
He had some apologizing to do but ANAD was mute, wha
t was left of his core having barely enough atoms to keep the processor going.
His own Dad—Jamison Winger—had been like that too, when Johnny’s Mom had died in the auto accident. The Year of Hell, that was. More than a year ago, but it seemed like yesterday. Cold and silent as a stone wall. Jamison Winger hadn’t said ten words the whole year. Then, the next year, they gave him the patch for depression and at least he was better.
When you had something you wanted to get off your chest and you just couldn’t, all you could do was swallow it and keep going.
Nanotroopers learned real well how to keep going. They learned that practically from day one in nog school. Maybe too well.
Sometimes nanotroopers kept going until they crashed head on into a stone wall.