***Launching now, Base…I am in launch mode…configuring C-2…going to high rate replication…disrupters enabled***
The faint mist had just begun to issue from his shoulder when a band of creatures they hadn’t seen appeared just below them. Spears flew. One struck Singh in the shoulder. The Bengali trooper cried out, grabbing his arm in a spurt of blood and sank to the ground. Hiroshi was with him in an instant, ripping off a sleeve of Singh’s outer camou to twist into some kind of tourniquet. She tied off the wound above Singh’s elbow and cinched it up tight.
ANAD swelled rapidly into a thickening mist but the formation was invisible in the smoke of hot lava bubbling in the crags and recesses above them. Doc II never launched.
The small band quickly surrounded the troopers and brandished spears at each.
Winger told Barnes to put her pistol away. “Let’s don’t make this any worse,” he told them. “Maybe we can talk our way out of this.”
As one, the nanotroopers held up their hands. The creatures were less than two meters in height, clad in animal skin loincloths and vests of fur and feathers. They swooped down on the troopers and gathered them together, looping strong vines around the four of them, to make a more easily managed group.
One hominid, for that’s what Singh called them, gestured downslope, even as more spears and stones rained down on them from above. The other hominids returned fire and charged up the hill, slipping and sliding on loose rock and fell on their assaulters in hand-to-hand combat. A furious struggle ensued even as the troopers were escorted roughly down the hill to the original band below them.
The band growled and grunted and gestured at them as they approached, while their comrades finally succeeded in driving off the band up slope. The warriors who had charged then came whooping and hollering down the side of the mountain, waving their remaining spears and shields in triumph. The entire band then encircled the Quantum Dawn team and glared angrily at them, poking and prodding with spears and long poles.
“Where are we?” Barnes whispered out of the side of her mouth, eyes glued to the tip of a spear that waved right in front of her face. “When are we?”
“Yeah,” said Lucy Hiroshi. “What happened? This surely isn’t Kokul-Gol.”
“Something must have gone wrong,” Winger decided. “We didn’t work the Sphere right…maybe we didn’t touch the surface right, or we were out of synch or something.”
“Skipper,” winced Singh, still massaging his wounded shoulder. “Do something…what happened to ANAD?”
Winger realized the formation had followed them down slope but was still dozens of meters away, only dimly visible in the steam and smoke clouds. “Up there—ANAD, can you hear me…ANAD, acknowledge on comm one immediately—“
But before he could check for a response, he got the tip of a spear right in his mouth. Winger gagged and coughed.
One of the hominids, the largest male, perhaps a chief with a necklace of shell beads jangling, came right up to Winger face to face. He grunted something, growled something else, then Winger was pushed and shoved roughly by another creature.
“Hey--!” Guess it’s no talking, he said to himself.
As one, the nanotroopers of Quantum Dawn, were herded further downslope onto level ground.
They were prodded and kicked along, prisoners now of this strange band of semi-humans in a land and a time they didn’t understand, nudged along toward the homeland of the creatures, deeper into a dense field of waist-high leafy plants and bushes. Thrashing their way through the brush, they could see and smell a single column of smoke ahead, perhaps a village or campground. Behind them, the volcano where they had landed rumbled and shook with steady tremors. Seething, hissing rivers of lava could be seen pouring down the far flanks of the hill. Geysers of blood-red steam curled skyward, lighting up the low-handing clouds, making fantastic, grotesque faces and forms in the sky.
Where were Kulagin and Volk? Had the cartel agents come to the same time? Why had he Sphere sent them here to this place? What had gone wrong?
Johnny Winger squirmed a bit as the hominids tightened the vine noose around the group. He had lost ANAD, left him on the side of the volcano. But he still had Doc II, still embedded in his shoulder capsule.
That could come in handy. But for now, the nanotroopers were prisoners of this warrior band of semi-humans. And even now, one of them was walking alongside the vine noose, tugging curiously at Winger’s wristpad…his only way to launch and control Doc. He couldn’t let them have the wristpad.
Chapter 3
“Blood Sacrifice”