***ANAD Config One exiting the ship now*** came ANAD’s voice over the commlink.

  “Very well,” Reaves checked ship’s status one last time. “ANAD, maneuver to these coordinates--“ she sent the last reported bearing from Sensors, “--and hold that position. Form up a frontal shield…assume Config Six Six.” Reaves had pulled that one from the ship’s archive…it would configure the ANAD nanobotic formation into a barrier that should in theory deflect much of the sonic lens waves when they came. It wasn’t exactly protocol but Major Kraft had authorized her to use any trick in the book to beat the sonic lens. “I want this test to be as realistic as possible,” the Major had said.

  When ANAD was in position, Reaves sent a message to Ferret. She knew Lieutenant Winger would be pressing the button to fire the weapon.

  Come and get me if you can, she sent.

  Winger had to smile when he saw the words scroll up on his display. “Lieutenant, ANAD swarm is in Config One, per test protocol, and in position. Weapon is enabled.”

  Gerhart licked his lips. Subterranean ops were definitely not for the faint-hearted. “Okay, first pulse…fire!”

  Winger stabbed the button.

  A thunderous echo reverberated through Ferret’s hull as megawatts of acoustic energy erupted from her sonic lens dish. The waves penetrated the hard rock layers around the geoplane and traveled like longitudinal compression P waves at nearly four thousand meters per second.

  Moments later, the waves struck the fracture zone and shattered the ANAD swarm just like a HERF pulse, ripping effectors and grabbers from bots, shattering casings, crushing replicants into so much atom fluff.

  For a brief moment, Sheila Reaves studied the returns from ANAD at her panel aboard Otter. The sonic lens pulse was having the desired effect. No Red Hammer swarm will be able hide now, she told herself.

  “Send the second pulse,” Gerhart ordered.

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

  The thunderclap of acoustic energy stabbed out into the rock and BOOMED! back in reverberation through Ferret’s hull. The net effect of blasting waves of sound energy was to fully shatter the ANAD formation. It also loosened some of the rock layers through which Ferret was cruising.

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

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

  “Losing traction in the treads,” Walz reported. She backed off a moment, until Ferret’s tread bit again into the rock stratum.

  “Okay,” Gerhart said, “belay any more sonic lens. We’re shattering the rock around us. Winger, anything from Otter?”

  At that very moment, the other geoplane was in a world of hurt.

  Before her skipper, Lieutenant Kimmel, could respond to Winger’s call, Otter shuddered violently and began a slow clockwise roll, with a sickening screech coming from somewhere forward. Chaos and panic filled the space.

  Otter’s geo tech was barely clinging to her console. “---P wave coming, high magnitude transverse waves, lots of ‘em, coming this way—“

  The crew of Otter didn’t know it at the time but the sonic lens pulses had not only shattered the ANAD formation, it had also somehow managed to lubricate the rock strata surrounding the geoplane. A punishing series of tremors radiated outward through the region, oblique convergent plate boundaries letting go as the rock underlying the Brooks Mountains gave way in a spreading fracture zone, propagating outward like a sheet of glass cracking.

  The sonic pulse had insinuated itself into multiple fault zones and disassembled enough rock to release the massive strain which had built up over the centuries. Massive seams of slate and feldspar, hundreds of kilometers long, suddenly wrenched forward with crushing force, sending shock waves and seismic energy halfway around the Earth, as crustal plates rebounded and jostled each other.

  Geoplane Otter was caught like a bug in a vise. Kimmel shouted over the din of the crushing force now slamming them downward.

  “Get on the horn to Ferret, tell ‘em to cease fire…stop firing NOW!…we’re caught in some kind of—“

  But he never finished the sentence. Seconds later, the plates shifted again, twisting and crumpling Otter even further downward, wrenching off her nose and borer lens and crushing the ship into a twisted pile of wreckage.

  A thousand meters away, even Ferret was getting slammed by the reverberation effects of the sonic pulses.

  “Message from Otter,” Winger announced. “She’s reporting that—“ But he never finished the sentence.

  Winger’s last words were cut off as Ferret shuddered violently. For a brief moment, there was an unmistakable sensation of sliding, sliding sideways and downward. Almost at the same moment, something hit Ferret’’s nose with a sickening crunch and the geoplane shuddered again and ground violently to a halt. The cabin tilted to port and stayed tilted.

  Ferret’s cabin was deathly still for a few moments, then the creaking and groaning of the hull under tremendous pressure started.

  “What happened?” Gerhart asked, wincing as the tortured sounds of the hull being compressed grew louder.

  Corporal Thielen, the borer operator, scanned his instruments nervously. “Borer is offline. I’m getting no responses from ANAD in the forward module…pressure drop in containment…we may have a breach.”

  “Great,” Gerhart muttered. “Just friggin’ great. And it looks like we’ve got a breach in the pressure hull too.”

  “I see it…cabin air pressure fluctuating…we’d better activate emergency flasks, just in case.” Winger toggled a few switches and immediately, high pressure air began flooding all compartments. “Lieutenant, I’m getting no signal now from Otter…just a tone. Something’s happened over there.”

  The sonic lens pulses had worked just as designed. ANAD had been shattered into loose atoms. But the forty megawatts of acoustic energy projected into the surrounding rock layers had done more, much more. Thousands of tons of rock had been fractured. Thousands of tons of permafrost had been melted.

  Now both Ferret and Otter were trapped five hundred meters below ground.

  By the book, rescue tactics called for an ANAD-bored tunnel to be drilled down to the stricken geoplanes. Within minutes of the tremors, as both geoplanes lay trapped, automatic emergency locator beacons were activated, each sending sonic pulses upward at special frequencies. The signals were quickly detected and Drew Wilkins began recovery ops immediately.

  Using ANAD to bore an escape tunnel was by its nature a time-consuming process. Once each geoplane’s location had been pinpointed, containment vessels for the recovery swarms were maneuvered into position over the bore site. Configurations were loaded and both master bots thoroughly checked.

  “Time is critical,” Wilkins told the recovery crew. “We’ve got hard shale down there, with quartz inclusions and probably some unmapped faults and seams. Geo, you’ve got the ships’ signals?”

  The project geologist was Theresa Mueller, a blond Austrian post-doc with black-framed dataspecs that perfectly punctuated her parka-lined face. “Got ‘em, Drew. Loud and clear. Ferret and Otter are putting our sonics at full power, so at least their transmitters aren’t damaged. I’ll send the coordinates for both to ANAD.” She pecked at a few keys on her wristpad, frowned a moment, then finished with a quick fist pump. “Done.”

  As the rescue squad finished offloading their gear from the lifters, Wilkins looked around, spying a pair of staghorn elk studying them from a small ledge halfway up the side of the nearest hill.

  Fellas, he muttered to himself, you’re about to see something you’ve never seen before. I just hope to God this cockamamie stunt works.

  “Make sure the hole’s wide enough to let hypersuited troopers through,” he told the rescuers. “Use the d
imensions Mueller gave us. I’ve loaded a new config, optimized for disassembly of basaltic molecular lattice. I don’t have to remind you that time is of the essence.”

  Hovering like a backlit ground fog, the ANAD swarm flickered and pulsated with eerie radiance as it maneuvered to enter the ground. Already replicating quickly, the fog was swelling as it gained enough mass to attack the hard black volcanic rock that lay beneath the snow.