Place: Unknown
Date: Unknown
Time: Unknown
Johnny Winger quickly learned that their proto-human captors intended to sacrifice the troopers to their god Ngai. They had been roughly prodded into the village, a crude gathering of thatched huts and lean-to’s, surrounding a large central fire pit, where a fire smoked and guttered. One by one, to Winger’s surprise, the troopers were taken from the vine enclosure and forced into a small sack-like covering, which strangely hummed and sparkled as it was lowered over them.
“Major, they’ve got a MOBnet…it’s a-- !” Barnes said. Her words were throttled and her head was quickly stuffed inside the mesh and the thing auto-cinched up tight. Barnes squirmed and writhed, but it was no use and she fell in a shapeless heap to the dirt, where she was rudely scooped up by two hominids with long poles and carried like a butchered meat carcass off to one of the huts.
One after another, Hiroshi, Singh and Winger suffered the same fate, finding themselves lined up against one side of the hut like totems, spoils of war.
Being enmeshed in a Mobility Obstruction Barrier was like being stuffed into a pillow case, only in this case, the pillow case was composed of trillions of nanobots that could react to everything you did. The more you struggled, the tighter the mesh. Soon breathing itself would become difficult.
Winger felt the side of his net wiggling and realized he had been propped up against someone else. It was Taj Singh.
“Skipper—“ came a muffled voice, “how is it these freaks have MOBnets? This looks like something out of the Pleistocene era.”
“I don’t know,” Winger told him. “This is some kind of place and time that can’t exist…or shouldn’t exist. It’s that Sphere. Somehow, we ‘ve got to get out of here and find another Sphere…or we’ll never get back.”
“Atomgrabbers in hell…that’s what we are,” Singh decided. He winced as his shoulder continued to throb and ache from the spear impact. At least, the bleeding had stopped. The few remaining repair ‘cytes in his bloodstream had done the work.
Ten minutes later, the MOBnets were hoisted up again like grocery bags and carted out of the village.
A convoy of hominids chanting and brandishing torches paraded out of the village bearing four MOBnets on long poles, headed right back toward the huge volcano, which was even now belching fumes, hissing and bubbling, its summit wreathed in a red halo of clouds, barely visible through hot, boiling clouds of steam.
The parade was headed right into the middle of a cauldron of crimson hot lava which was surging through the field toward them.
The hominids skirted the worst of the lava pools and made a wide circle around the base of the mountain, hacking and scything their way through dense groves of leafy plants, which to Winger had seemed like corn stalks on steroids. Through the mesh of the MOBnet, he could hear some of the guttural talk of the creatures. One word stood out, almost like a chant: Kipwezi…Kipwezi…Kipwezi….
The sound chilled him to the bone. Kipwezi—if he was hearing the chant right---was the name of the volcanic mountain overlooking the dig site at Engebbe, Kenya.
Had the Sphere brought them to some ancient time at the same place? And the volcano certainly wasn’t dormant. He could smell the sulfurous steam in the air and feel the ground rumbling and trembling beneath them.
On the far side of Kipwezi from the village, the convoy of hominids began their ascent up the side of the mountain. Here, the lava flows hadn’t started yet, though fumaroles occasionally burst from the ground in great steaming geysers. Up and up they slogged and crawled, still bearing four MOBnet sacks like grocery bags dangling from poles.
They finally found the cave on the steepest slopes of the northwest flanks of Kipwezi, nearly four thousand meters above the surrounding plain. The creatures were clearly exhausted by the climb; the effort had taken nearly half a day from the trailhead at the base of the mountain. They were cold even in the superheated scalding air of the volcano slopes, dirty, sore and tired, although the respirocytes in their bloodstream kept them both from the worst effects of pulmonary edema and other forms of altitude sickness.
The cave complex, when they located it, was well hidden in the folds and crevices of the upper slopes of the volcano, above a cloud deck and slick with patchy ice and snow drifts. The wind screamed and gusted at well over eighty knots at this altitude and the detail had to hunker down in the lee of a rocky barren to keep from being shredded with ice shards and rock chips scoured off the mountainside.
Carefully, one after the other, the slipped through the meter-wide crack in the side of the mountain and stood in the twilit dust confronting a nanobotic barrier shimmering before them, stretching from floor to ceiling.
Mighty Mite Barnes writhed and squirmed inside her MOB cocoon, hearing the familiar sound of nanobots in action.
Maybe a barrier of some kind. Where the hell are we? She had tried several times on their trip to signal or talk through the barrier but only earned a kick and a sharp, painful poke from her captors for her effort. Barnes remained silent, but alert to any sound or smell she could identify.
The hominid chief withdrew a small palm-shaped object and thumbed control studs on its side. Instantly, the barrier swarm fluoresced and flashed like a strobe. A shrill keening buzz echoed around the cave and the barrier went dark as the bots dispersed.
They were in.
The creatures moved deeper into the cave with their prisoners, following a drifting mist of bots that wavered in and out of view. They descended several levels, crossed a rock bridge across a deep chasm and maneuvered through more tunnels. Lighting was created by the mist, a pulsing, flickering light that cast deep shadows on the gnarled veins of rock lining the cave. The floor was slick, patches of ice everywhere. Soon enough, they came to a narrow opening, barely waist high. More light flickered from inside. The entire complex of caves shook and trembled with the movement of tons of magma below.
The mist of bots which had floated with them swirled like dust in a storm and gathered around the opening like a frame, coruscating and flashing as if lit from within. Bonds were broken and atoms slung together…in moments, the mist formed itself into a small ramp, extending over a sluggish pool of water. At least, the substance resembled water, even as tendrils of steam hovered over the surface like a fog.
Cautiously, first the chief, then the others edged out onto the newly formed ramp and walked ahead.
When it appeared, the master swarm materialized out of the rock ceiling of the cave. At first, the swarm resembled nothing more than trembling shadows, a pale flickering ghost seemingly contoured with the cave ceiling and walls. As it descended from above, the swarm gathered itself into a roughly spherical shape, still pulsing, still throbbing, backlit from within by the fires of atomic bonds being broken, new structures being slammed together, new bots being formed.
The swarm hung in the misty air like a swollen cloud, ready to dump torrential rain on a tropical forest. But they were a long way from any rain forests. The swarm unfurled itself and hung in the air like a great storm front, a trembling fist, flashing purple and orange and magenta all at the same time.
That’s when Barnes heard a voice that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.
>>Why are you here? Rule 225635 is violated. Single-swarm entities may not enter the Sanctuary at this time>>
“Jesus H. Christ!” she muttered to herself. It was Configuration Zero, Config Zero…she’d know that synthetic voice anywhere. It was Symborg’s voice as well. The voice sounded out of synch, like multiple tracks laid imperfectly over each other.
This is just too weird, she thought.
The hominid chief responded in some kind of rough, guttural dialect, words she didn’t understand.
“Katanga…mwale…nortenga…novidi…novidi…”
The MOBnets were carried past the great Config Zero swarm to a side cavern and secured with stout vine to makeshift davits
in the wall. All four sacks squirmed and thrashed at their imprisonment, but little could be done. The bots only meshed more tightly when they felt resistance from inside.
For a long time, Johnny Winger heard and smelled nothing. It seemed as if they had been taken to the side cavern and left there.
He found that by kicking and pushing hard enough, he could move his cocoon close to another one, leaning against it in physical contact. It turned out to contain Mighty Mite Barnes.
“Mite…Mite, is that you? Can you hear me?”
Her voice was muffled but understandable. “Yeah, Skipper…it’s me. Can you hear my voice?”
Together they reviewed the hard facts of their situation. Taj Singh was on the opposite side. By judicious kicking and pulling and shoving, he managed to make contact enough to join the conversation as well.
Barnes had an idea. “Major, do you still have Doc II? Or your ANAD embed?”
Winger replied, “I lost ANAD fighting off those creeps from Red Hammer. But Doc II’s still in my shoulder capsule.”
Barnes admitted the same. “Our ANADs were used to make a barrier around the camp we set up at that swamp. And my mag pistol’s been confiscated…somebody’ll have to pay for that. Skipper, couldn’t Doc II eat his way out of your MOBnet…and ours too?”
“In theory,” Winger told her, “if I had the right config and my wristpad works. One of the gorillas tried to take it from me but I stuffed it in my pants and he gave up.”
Barnes warmed to her idea. Winger, and Kraft before, had always said nanotroopers were supposed to show initiative and resourcefulness. “Skipper, what if you could hack out a config for Doc II? You could get us out of these grocery bags pretty easily and we could be on our way.”
“If we could find our way back out of these caves.”
Now Singh spoke up, his voice muffled and distant coming through the mesh. “Major, suppose we cut our way out of these bags in a way that doesn’t alarm anybody. “
“Yeah,” said Barnes, “then tunnel out of here right through the mountain. Those gorillas would never expect that.”
Winger thought the idea had merit. “I’m not sure these are gorillas, or that they’re really all that primitive. Somebody’s given them some pretty modern play toys. Plus Doc II’s not really optimized for solid-phase disassembly. Tunneling right out of the cave through the mountain could take days.”
“So what have we got to lose, Major? It’s something—“
Winger had no answer for that. “Mite, as always, you make sense, in your cock-eyed sort of way. I’ll see if I can startup my wristpad and contact Doc II.”
For the next hour, Winger worked the commlink with Doc II, still in his shoulder capsule, and hacked out a config for tunneling through the cave walls. It was clear that Doc II was somewhat reluctant.