Nanotroopers Episode 19: Mount Kipwezi

  ***Single-configuration entity detected…module DISASSEMBLE invoked…mono-config are errors and must be detected…module 668 CORRECTION MATRIX initiated…bond disrupters priming…updating syntax algorithm for response…***

  “…You are in the Beginning. The Time of the Seeding. You are a configuration unknown to me…transmit configuration status that I may locate your files…”

  Erika realized at that moment that Symborg wasn’t talking with her or replying, but talking at her, executing a pre-programmed response to unfamiliar phenomena.

  She began to move off, putting some distance between her and the creature—thing—swarm—whatever it was. As she headed into what had once been thick brush and was now a small-scale dust devil, she found herself quickly lost in the murk and unable to see in any direction. A high keening hum trilled in the air and grew louder. Bots or bees or mosquitoes, maybe all three, were flying at her, slapping her face, picking and poking and she flailed and swatted and thrashed about.

  What the hell is this place? Some kind of alternate Earth?

  She ran stumbling blindly through the mist and smelled swamp water again. She’d been safe from the bot swarms in the water, so she plunged headlong into the swamp and ducked under again. She stayed under as long as she could and only came up to catch a quick breath and duck back under. Each time she came up, the air was dark with bots, swarms of bots, trillions of bots, the air was almost solid with the things.

  Then she ducked back under.

  The cycle continued for quite a while and Erika lost track of time but she had a chance to think and consider her predicament more rationally.

  I went through some kind of entanglement episode from that sphere at Kokul-Gol. Now I’m somewhere and sometime else. If I’m right, maybe I’m actually still in both places and I’ll stay entangled until I’m somehow observed here. But I don’t see anything or anyone who could observe me.

  Erika rose again for another breath and lingered just long enough to scan her surroundings. The entire swamp shoreline and jungle beyond had changed again. Now all she saw was a level plain dotted with clumps of tall grass and wiry bushes.

  Maybe this is still Kokul-Gol. But there doesn’t seem to be anything living around here. No birds screeching, no flies, that sort of thing. Maybe this is Kokul-Gol before the Maya, maybe even before life itself. Except maybe for that moss I saw growing on those rocks. Pre-biotic, maybe the Hadean era. Three to four billion years before our time.

  The swamp water stirred with sudden tremors and the ground rumbled. Curious and cautious, Erika surfaced and now saw there were tall mountains in the distance. The summit of the nearest one glowed orange-red in the cathedral gloom of the forest, which was in the process of re-forming, as if it had never gone away.

  “Looks like we might have a blow soon,” Erika said to herself. “I don’t like the looks of that.”

  At that moment, she spied a fog bank roiling across the top of the swamp. Tendrils of steam drifted in patches.

  Morphing steadily, the fog bank took on a more menacing look. As she looked more closely, she could see small flashes and pops of light within the fog, as if it were thick with fireflies.

  “Those aren’t fireflies, girl.”

  The hairs on the back of her neck stood up. She debated staying in the swamp but a sixth sense told her to get out and she scrambled toward the opposite shore, figuring to

  backtrack the way she had come but the swarm filled in behind her and she soon found herself trapped on a narrow spit of dry land, surrounded by cypress knees and piles of moss-covered rocks.

  Though the swarm had nearly enveloped her, at least it hadn’t closed any further.

  “My God!” Erika Volk watched several patches of swarm begin dropping down closer to the ground. As she watched, the light flickering inside changed pattern, becoming more intense, pulsing faster, almost like a strobe and the fingers of the swarm swept right across the moss covering on top of the rocks, pausing momentarily at each moss patch.

  “Fantastic,” she breathed. “It’s writing genetic code, right into the cells of that moss. Injecting something directly into the cells. Maybe this is how life got started…at least in this place and time.”

  Erika Volk knew that somehow, some way, she had to get back to her own time and let her handlers at Red Hammer know about this place. Surely, if she could grab a few bots and bring them back, the cartel’s scientists could reverse-engineer them and they would have an edge on Quantum Corps.

  But how to get back?

  She didn’t have long to think about that, for now the swarm was reconstituting and beginning to move in her direction.

  Movement out of the corner of her eye caught her attention. A foaming hydraulic had started on the far side of the swamp. With the swarm moving toward her, she knew she couldn’t stay on the small landing and eased back into the water. She stroked gently toward the hydraulic, keeping a wary eye on anything moving—there were swarms everywhere and the volcano in the distance was now cherry-red and spewing flames and molten lava down its sides. It was only a matter of time before the lava reached the swamp and already she imagined she could feel the water getting warmer.

  The hydraulic turned out to be a small whirlpool. She stopped a dozen meters away, wary of the pull, and studied the thing, treading water as she watched it whirl and bubble and foam.

  What’s causing that? she wondered.

  Cautiously, she eased forward but before she could stop, she was caught in an undertow and was pulled steadily into the heart of the vortex.

  Trapped, she screamed and flailed, trying to pull herself out of the strong current but it was useless. In and around she went, until her foot slammed into something on the swamp bed.

  “Ouch!” She struggled hard, splashing and thrashing and floundering, until at last, dead with fatigue and her arms burning, she gave up and succumbed. “What’s the use--?”

  That’s when her foot hit something hard again and this time, she knew in an instant what it was…

  There came a blinding flash of light and a roaring rush of deceleration….

  Then nothing.

  As Erika Volk’s last conscious thoughts drained away, she remembered feeling like this before… but when she finished racing at breakneck speed down the long curving corridor now filled with polygons and cubes and pyramids and things she could never describe, and she came at last to a hard bump and things slowed down and finally stopped spinning….

  She knew he wasn’t in the swamp anymore.

  She let the world stop spinning—that took a while—and tried to focus bleary, dizzy eyes on what was before her.

  It was the burial chamber at Kokul-Gol. The Snake King’s skeleton lay before her, undisturbed, as if she had only been gone for a moment. She staggered up to a sitting position and realized she was right back where she had started. There was the Snake King. There were the jade beads and necklaces draped over the stone bier. There were the jaguar and parrot figurines she seen before…and the bas-relief of Holmul war scenes and the sacrifices and the green jade masks.

  What had happened? Had she imagined the whole trip? Passed out and dreamed some kind of feverish nightmare?

  Or had she been caught in the sphere’s entanglement web and been transported to another time and place?

  More importantly, was there something Red Hammer could use here?

  Erika Volk got up unsteadily, dusted herself off and squeezed her way up and out of the burial chamber. For all she could see, no time had passed.

  The sphere she had touched was still there below the head of the Snake King, below the end of the stone bier. It was featureless and motionless, yet the air around the sphere shimmered with heat waves and the thing seemed to hum with barely contained energies.

  Red Hammer had to know about this, she decided. This sphere, like the others, was somehow able to transport people back and forth between today—now—the present
—and some kind of early or even alternate Earth. The question was how could the cartel make use of that? What could she obtain from such trips that would make her shine before the Ruling Council?

  She left the temple and carefully made her way back, through faint early morning mists, to the dig camp. It was just before sunup and a few cooks and diggers were stirring about the encampment. She smelled the sharp tang of eggs cooking from a distant fire and made her way in that direction.

  An hour later, she caught up with Dr. Richter, still in his own tent, carefully examining an engraved stone relic under a powerful fluxscope he had set up on a rickety table.

  Richter motioned Erika inside the tent flap and went back to his study. “Marvelous piece, Erika…look at that detail. The Museum will pay handsomely for something like this. We bring back enough pieces like this and we can finance several expeditions. I want to—“

  Erika interrupted him. “Dr. Richter, there’s been a family emergency. I have to get back to Munich…right away…I’m sorry.” She put on as serious a face as she could.

  Richter looked up. “What is it, Erika? What’s happened?”

  She made up a tale of her mother hurting herself in a horse-riding accident—in fact, her parents had died years before—embellishing the story with just enough detail and concern to bring out fatherly clucks and murmurs from the doctor.

  “Of course, Erika, of course, we understand. Do you need any help…anything I can do? I can send a few porters over to help with your bags, your gear.”

  “That would be great, Dr. Richter…really, I’m sorry, but I just have to be with her. Mama is—“ she shrugged, tried to look anguished.

  Richter shooed her out of his tent and called for some porters to accompany her.

  Three hours later, Erika Volk was inside the main terminal at Benito Juarez Airport in Mexico City, studying the departure boards. Her flight was not back to Europe, to Munich as she had told Dr. Heinz Richter. Instead, she would be boarding a hyperjet to Kolkata, India…a two hour hop across the top of the atmosphere. She clutched her carry-on, checked her ID and travel documents on her wristpad and headed toward the security lines that led to the gate area.

  The flight across the Atlantic and the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean passed by in a blur. Erika slept part of the trip, then stared out the porthole at clouds and waves a hundred kilometers below. She drifted in and out of wakefulness and filled her more lucid moments with snatches of the words she would use to describe to Red Hammer’s Ruling Council what she had found at Kokul-Gol.

  They would have to listen, she decided. True there were two other Spheres that she knew of, but this one was a gateway to a time and place that seemed like early Earth. Not only that, but the place was swarming with all kinds of bots, bots that could be grabbed and reverse-engineered and put to use in this time, to give the cartel a decisive advantage against UNIFORCE and Quantum Corps. And she, Erika Volk, would bring this wonder right before the Ruling Council.

  They would have to recognize what a find they had in Erika Volk. After that, she figured she could write her own ticket, all the way to the top.

  The hyperjet burst out of the cloud bank on its descent to Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Airport at Kolkata and Erika Volk stared out the porthole at the hazy Ganges delta below. Columns of smoke from thousands of cooking fires added to the thick haze. Rice paddies interspersed with the crude huts of the traditional Bengali mawzas stretched to the horizon, like an infinite chessboard.

  Seen from the air, the great Indian metropolis was not particularly impressive. A sea of dun-colored low rise buildings was punctuated by TV towers and the occasional high-rise building, split by the muddy ribbon of the river. Several patches of green—city parks and the Maidan race track-- gave some color to an otherwise dreary urban landscape.

  From the airport, Erika Volk knew the drill. An unmarked lifter had landed not long after the hyperjet had touched down and taxied to the end of a ramp seldom used by commercial flights. The lifter had come for her. Somewhere over the western Indian Ocean, Erika had activated the CONTACT feature of her halo and carefully, cryptically, described why she was coming to Kolkata.

  I need to go to Paryang. I’ve made an important discovery.

  She took a small van driven by a driverbot to the lifter, a black articulating craft that resembled an armored spider, with multiple legs, wings and rotors. She scanned inside the lifter and moments later, the autopilot lifted the vehicle into the air and turned about, heading north.

  Erika was the only passenger.

  An hour later, the lifter was approaching the foothills of the Himalayas. Flying nap-of-the earth and winding through snow-capped valley after valley, Erika watched the forbidding terrain rushing by outside her porthole. A sere wasteland that was Tibet’s high desert rolled by beneath them. The crumpled white peaks of the Himalayas lay off to their right…the roof of the world, some called the area. Soon enough, they crossed the Chinese frontier, with no challenge by any air defenses and settled down to an altitude of less than five hundred meters, speeding across the high desert of Tibet, heading for Paryang Valley hundreds of kilometers north.

  Small villages and tent compounds flashed by below them, the villages always framed by curling columns of smoke from hundreds of cooking fires. Herds of yak and wild horses roamed the countryside and the lower slopes of the Gangdise Shan Mountains. Through it all, Erika tried out different words and phrases in her mind. She would have one shot to make a pitch to the Ruling Council and she didn’t want to blow it.

  What she had found at Kokul-Gol was surely worthy of the cartel’s time and effort to exploit.

  Paryang Valley came up quickly and the lifter circled the valley to gauge the tricky winds before setting down on a rubbly plateau half a kilometer down slope from the huge castle-like main complex.

  The monastery was huge, multi-level compound, all columns and turrets and gables, resembling in the late afternoon sunlight more a bird about to take off than a building. Lion’s heads and gargoyles of fantastic beasts guarded the porticoed entrance of the main hall. There was a pebbled path lined with Buddha sculptures of every imaginable shape, size and color leading up the hall…jade Buddhas, ceramic Buddhas, stone and rock Buddhas, a few black coral Buddhas, even paper lanterns done up to resemble Buddhas glowing with Enlightenment near the stairs below the portico.

  Wooden doors guarded the monastery entrance, which gave onto a vast, multi-storied hall, its perimeter lined with stone statuary and pediments. Above them, at the top of a broad curving staircase, a gray stone Buddha beamed down with an enigmatic smile, while the hall was surrounded by vats and pots and urns in dizzying variety, every size and shape imaginable. Some of the urns steamed and smoked with pungent incense, or scented candles, lending a smoky, acrid taste to the air.

  Erika Volk was expected and when she came to the guard station, she scanned in quickly enough and was escorted by a saffron-robed staff aide to a small lift in the room behind the great hall. The aide was a frail, balding older man with a beatific smile that seemed pasted on. He pressed a combination of buttons and the lift opened. Ushered in with a wave of a hand, Erika boarded the lift and the aide reached in to press another button.

  That’s when she saw the sparkle of lights drifting off the aide’s hand.

  An angel, she realized…and not a very good one. This one couldn’t maintain structure on even such a simple thing as an arm.

  The Ruling Council quarters were buried ten stories below the monastery main floor, deep inside the mountain on top of which it sat.

  Her halo guided her unerringly through a labyrinth of corridors, up and down stairs to a small anteroom outside and above the quarters. There she met Dmitri Kulagin, her sponsor.

  Kulagin was Russian mafia, one of the last to buy into the Council. He was tall for a Russian, possessed of a glorious black moustache and feral predator eyes. His face was pocked with a childhood d
isease, it was said, though Erika figured it was more disguise than disease, as melanomorph bots could easily alter anyone’s appearance and disguises were common throughout the cartel. Maybe it was just an image the Russian was trying project…seasoned warrior, Cossack partisan, something like that.

  Kulagin bowed slightly, lifting Erika’s hand to his furry lips.

  “You had a comfortable trip, Dr. Volk? No problems?”

  Of course, Kulagin would have scanned her halo output about the whole trip so he could have easily known everything, even her most intimate thoughts from the time she had left Mexico City to now.

  “Comfortable enough. I’ve made a major discovery at the Kokul-Gol dig in Mexico. The Council needs to know about this.”

  Kulagin’s eyes narrowed. “Ah, yes…Kokul-Gol. The Mayans and their fantastic beasts. Another Sphere, I gather?”

  “Indeed,” Erika said, “and this one is different, more powerful, possibly more useful to us if we can figure out how to exploit it.”

  With that, Kulagin sized her up as a hunter would study his prey, and mumbled, “Come…we’ll meet with the others.”

  They descended carpeted stairs to a lower level and came to a small room, just outside the Council chambers. Rattan curtains were drawn around the perimeter of the room. A round oak table dominated the center; the table supported a concave hood arching out from its center, arching out over the table to form a circular shroud.

  "Sit," Kulagin commanded. Erika sat.

  Kulagin sat beside her. A recessed keypad slid out. Buttons were pushed. The black concavity brightened with streaks and squiggles of light, then its myriad pinpricks of light dissolved into an image, grainy at first, then clearer.

  It was a three-D textured image of a stone wall, marbled with quartz and calcite. Animated icons and cartoonish creatures fluttered across the field of view. They were avatars. Symbolic representations of real people, jacked in to the tele-immersion image. It was the most vivid holo she'd ever seen.

  One of the avatars turned face-on into the view and swept into the foreground, alighting on the rubbly ground of the image. It was an avatar of a Buddhist monk, draped in saffron robes and tao beads.

  Kulagin spoke first. "Your Eminence, a visitor has come. She offers a new business venture…a new Keeper sphere has been discovered.”

  The monk-avatar's cherubic face changed expression, adapting a pixilated frown of vexation.

  "Name this visitor. I will assign an identity."

  "She is called Dr. Erika Volk, Eminence."

  The monk-avatar gestured with its hand, a fluttery symbolic sequence of hand motions. The image of the stone wall flickered, then vanished, to be replaced by an image of a darkened cave, a dark vault of roughhewn walls, icy stalactites, with the blue flame of a fire casting animated shadows in a central fire pit.

  The monk-avatar materialized out of a tongue of the flame and sat cross-legged beside the fire. He spread his hands for warmth, then spoke into the flame.

  "I am the Portal-Keeper. I have assigned an identity to this visitor. During this session, the visitor will be displayed to all as a hawk, predator of the high desert. She is to be called Hawk."

  "As you wish, Eminence."

  The Portal-Keeper, still in monk-avatar robes, stared into the flame, continuing to warm his hands. His robe had turned blood red in the firelight.

  "You propose a new venture, Hawk. Why?"

  Erika explained her proposition briefly, outlining how an expedition through the portal of the newly discovered Sphere would give Red Hammer access to all kinds of new nanobotic designs. “It was some kind of early Earth, Eminence. Millions, maybe billions of years ago. In the past, trips through the Sphere portals have been short jaunts. Trips to some kind of archives, I’ve heard. My trip through this portal took me to a place and a time that strongly resembles a primitive Earth, at a time when Life was just beginning. Maybe even an alternate Earth. Everything there was a swarm: the trees, the underbrush, the mountains, even the swamp. A whole world of nothing but swarms of bots…Eminence, it’s an inexhaustible resource for us. We can mine it at our leisure, if we can harness this new Sphere. So, yes, I’m proposing an expedition back to the same place. Grab some bots and come back to our time and place. Study them. Reverse-engineer them. There is no possibility that Quantum Corps can have anything like these bots. This technology gives us an insurmountable edge.”

  The Portal-Keeper’s image froze, seemingly paused, in thought. But the voice went on. "An apt description from a hawk. Prey and predator…the yin and yang of our world. He who is not predator must be prey." The avatar levitated itself into the air, then hovered over the fire just beyond the flames' reach. The avatar rotated so that its face was now fully in view. The Portal-Keeper's eyes closed. "It is written that, when the mouse trusts the hawk, the end of the world is near. Hong Chui is a living creature, Hawk…born of pure minds, unencumbered with bodies or earthly concerns. We must survive. The Eight-fold Way lights our path. Persistence and patience are our bedrock. Deceit is our soil. Master of the First Level?"

  "Yes, Eminence?" Kulagin replied. Even as the Portal-Keeper drifted across the view, another avatar blossomed out of a fissure in the rock wall. A pair of luminous blue eyes floated into the foreground, peeking around the point of a stalactite.

  "Ah, General Zhang is here. Zhang….you've been listening?"

  The Zhang avatar blinked, blood red corneal veins striating the eyes. "An odd proposition, Eminence. Why does Hawk want to mount this expedition anyway? Who's to say Hawk won't help herself to our other Spheres…or sell the bots she obtains to Quantum Corps or another bidder?"

  "Or sabotage the whole works?" A third avatar had materialized in the background--a horse/centaur-like beast galloping up from the background shadows.

  Kulagin nodded at the newest participant. "Good evening, Souvranamh." To Erika, he turned and added, "Neuro traficante. Bangkok's biggest, before he joined the Hammer. Souvranamh is third level."

  The Portal-Keeper acknowledged the virtual presence of the others. "A question for Hawk, then. A question of trust. And motives."

  Erika Volk had not known what to expect when she was allowed to come before the Ruling Council…a board room, white-haired old men in dark suits, slide shows and 3-d presentations, perhaps. She preferred direct visual; avatars could never capture the nuances of face…lines tightening at the mouth, eyes focused or evasive. But there was little she could do. Red Hammer preferred symbolic. She would have to speak carefully here, use words precisely.

  "Motives are slippery. Only interests never change, Eminence. I am new to Red Hammer. I’m not that important. I came to our organization because—“why exactly had she come to the cartel?

  Only a year and a half had passed since Erika had been sponsored into Red Hammer membership and allowed herself to be halo’ed. She’d signed on with Red Hammer, Americas division, only in the fall of ’47, sponsored by none other than Kulagin himself, the ex-Russian mafioso of the Ruling Council. She’d been put to work on something known only as the Project; with talents in archeology, environmental engineering, nanoswarm control algorithms and meteorological engineering, Erika figured she’d be a worthy addition to the effort.

  Assigned duties at Mexico City station, Erika had plunged into the details of her work: generating and maintaining nanobotic master assemblers, improving their capabilities, initiating and maintaining swarm dispersion for atmosphere modification. She had no other life anyway. She was a rootless German. Born outside Munich (ca. 2020). Something of a child prodigy in school. Honors and letters from Tubingen in Chemistry and Environmental Sciences.

  She had lived in Mexico for most of her adult life. Both parents had died in a lifter crash in 2040. For the last ten years, she had lived in a Mexico City apartamento, worked for the Interior Ministry in freshwater remediation, met engineering and nanobotic pollution abatement.

&n
bsp; She’d joined BioShield in 2047 after the Serengeti plague, worked on swarm communications and controls, and had been released in ’48 on suspicion of embezzlement and misuse of agency resources (even now, Erika could hear her own voice rising in anger at the hearing: “this charge of unauthorized tampering with core ANAD BioShield algorithms without approval is patently ridiculous…nothing but a witch hunt—“)

  But she was out on the street, nonetheless, and she thirsted for a way to embarrass BioShield and get back at the pinheads who had thrown her out on some kind of technicality. That was when Erika learned through the Mexican underground of something called Hong Chui.

  Her highest level contact inside Red Hammer had always been Kulagin’s deputy Kawati Chandrigarh, a musician turned gene designer whom Erika had taken an instant liking to. One day, curious and frustrated by the lack of detail about her job, Erika had asked Chandrigarh about the Project.

  Chandrigarh had thick, bushy eyebrows that framed a cat’s face with ludicrous animation. He explained the Project was an effort to discredit UNIFORCE and the Quantum Corps by making BioShield ineffective, so UNIFORCE would have to use Red Hammer designs under license.

  That was when Erika Volk knew for sure she wanted in.

  “---I came to Hong Chui to get justice.” She figured that was as close to the truth as she would admit to herself. “I study ancient ruins and peoples, try to figure out how they lived, how they thought and fought and loved and died…what kind of people were they? That’s what archeologists do. This new Sphere opens up another entirely new world for me to study. And when I realized that this world, whatever or wherever it was, was nothing but swarms and bots, I saw an opportunity, for me, for the organization, for all of us. My idea is to understand how this Sphere works, use it for science and use it also for the opportunity it gives us to gain a decisive edge over Quantum Corps and all their blasted atomgrabbers. We’ve used all the Spheres for the same purpose…defeat the atomgrabbers once and for all. This Sphere may just allow us to do that…to obliterate Quantum Corps for good and gain a global market unhindered by anybody else for our scope, fabs, anything we can sell.”

  Her face darkened. "I seek advantage, that’s all…and perhaps even a little revenge. It was Quantum Corps that took my old life away two years ago. I am fifty generations descended from Charlemagne. To lead a great kreuzzug on a great quest…that is my destiny. Red Hammer can help. Only the Quantum Corps stands in my path. So--" Erika gestured at the avatars in front of her, "--our interests are parallel. They converge…on a common enemy. By helping you, I help myself. There can be no stronger bond of mutual interest than that."

  She could see from the responses of the avatars that her words carried some weight. She’d chosen them wisely.

  "Hawk speaks wisely," Zhang's eyeball said.

  "Indeed," said Souvranamh's man-horse, "the Portal-Keeper has assigned this identity with wisdom, has he not? Who is more patient and persistent than the predator of the high desert? Who is swifter of flight?"

  "Or keener of eye?" added Zhang.

  The Portal-Keeper drifted, sitting cross-legged, away from the fire. Several minutes passed in silence. The monk avatar positioned itself in a craggy recess at the top of the cave.

  "Then it is settled. Hawk, listen to me: the proposition is acceptable to the Ruling Council. I have consulted with the Old Ones. We will undertake this expedition. The archives of the Old Ones are filled with knowledge useful for this venture. I will see that it is provided. Hawk, you may walk in the garden of the Red Hammer. And…if your stratagem is successful…if this proposal increases our market share and the enemy is damaged, measures will be taken to make you a full partner. Be advised: to sit with the Masters of the Four Levels will be an arduous task. But our judgment is clear: Erika Volk, known as Hawk, must be given the chance. Trust must be given. Master of the First Level?"

  "Yes, Eminence?" Kulagin replied.

  "Render to Hawk all necessary assistance."

  "It will be done."

  The Portal-Keeper began to waver, pixelating at the edges of the avatar. "The Vispassana will be our guide, insightful meditation and trust our companion on this path. The Old Ones look down upon all of you with satisfaction. Soon enough, they will return. Go now…and end the scourge of this Quantum Corps."

  The monk-avatar winked out. Then, one by one, the others pixilated down to points, signed off and vanished.

  Kulagin sat back with a thoughtful frown. A luminous glow gradually suffused the hood, ending the session.

  "We have our orders," the Russian said. "Come."

  The rest of the day was spent with Kulagin and cartel functionaries laying out the details of the expedition. Kulagin would accompany Erika. To foil UNIFORCE spybots and recognizers, he would be injected with biomorphing bots…his face and appearance would be altered substantially. A full team would be assembled to assist them: an engineer, a mechanic, a quantum systems specialist, a containment expert. There would be six in all, counting Volk and Kulagin. The team would travel to Mexico via commercial carriers, by separate routes, at random and staggered times and converge on the Kokul-Gol site under a variety of guises, so as not to trip any alarms.

  The six of them would pass through the portal created by the Sphere—Erika had insisted that she understood the device well enough to use it reliably, though that was a bit of a boast—and appear in this primitive Earth she had described, with the goal of securing some sample bots from that time period, bringing them back to the present and reverse-engineering them into weaponized nanobotic devices that could engage and defeat Quantum Corps and UNIFORCE.

  They departed for Mexico City two days later.

  Assembling the team at Kokul-Gol took another week. Each day, the dig team would recruit, interview and hire new diggers, new porters, new cooks and custodial staff, research assistants. A constant flow of new arrivals kept the population at the dig site in perpetual motion. Hong Chui—Red Hammer—would use this staff turnover to mask the gathering of its operatives.

  Dmitri Kulagin was the last to come. He landed at Benito Juarez Airport in Mexico City, took a domestic lifter to Merida and came to Kokul-Gol by jeep taxi. At Intake in a small trailer outside the dig site fence, Kulagin presented his credentials. He would be a research assistant to Dr. Volk, specializing in Mayan and Toltec religious images and works…a post-doc on loan from Cambridge University, here in the Yucatan to gain field experience.

  Kulagin put on his broadest smile for the interviewer: an American woman in her mid-fifties, with a short gray bun of hair and deeply weathered and tanned face.

  “The Lab is my home but once in a while the directors think we post-docs should get out and see the world, no?”

  The interviewer looked up at him and smiled humorlessly. “Sure.” She squirted an Approved signal to his credentials pad and waved him inside the compound, directing him toward the Commissary tent where he could get supplies, bedding, toiletries and other things needed for field work. Kulagin breathed easier and swore under his breath as he passed through the final security scans and looked about for the big tent.

  Unknown to the Russian, however, the air inside and outside of Kokul-Gol was well populated with spybots, owing to its proximity to the Quantum Corps base at Mesa de Oro. Kulagin knew of this, of course, but the Ruling Council figured the slight chance of recognition was worth the risk and the biomorphing bots that had altered his face, voice and gait surely would fool even the most sophisticated recognizers. There had never been any evidence that full biomorphing, reserved exclusively for Ruling Council members, had ever been detected or sniffed out by any spybot anywhere.

  What Kulagin didn’t know, however, was that twenty-five hundred kilometers northwest of the dig, deep in an underground alert center below the Bioshield Ops building in Los Angeles, something had triggered the duty tech’s watch board and sent a Level 1 alarm right to the Mesa de Oro base commander, in fact,
directly to General Kincade’s wristpad.

  It was First Sergeant Marty Rivers at BioShield LA Center who first noticed the blinking light on his board.

  Curious and somewhat started by the alarm—there hadn’t been a real alert in Central America in weeks—Rivers sat up straight and his hands started flying over the keys, toggling the detectors to focus on the source of the disturbance, running routines to characterize the threat, sending alertgrams to a dozen different sections and also activating the Quantum Corps warning system.

  Ten thousand meters over the western Gulf of Mexico, a small swarm of BioShield nanobots received instructions from LA Center and maneuvered into a tighter formation, probing earthward with pulses of sound and EM, trying to get a fix on the locus of the source. The returns fingered a unique point source, very small, and fixed its real-time location and heading. Moments later, Sergeant Rivers had the same data.

  Immediately, he opened a vidlink to Mesa de Oro.

  Kincade had been in the senior staff head taking care of business when his wristpad chirped. Swearing silently, the general cleaned himself up and headed down five levels to the alert center.

  Sergeant Roy Levins was the tech on duty. He had just received the alert from Bioshield LA.

  “It’s LA, sir, some kind of point source of nano activity, near here. In fact, just a few kilometers. Kokul-Gol, sir. Recognizers didn’t get a proper authorized response back, so the alert piped up.”

  “Show me,” Kincade growled.

  The two of them studied the map of the Yucatan Peninsula, showing splotches of nano here and there, all tagged with IFF codes, properly authorized. One dot didn’t have a tag.

  Levins enlarged the view. “Inside the dig site, sir and this is what’s odd: the recognizer’s been trying to get an IFF response back, but no dice. When that happens, it polls its library for signatures on record. Closest match was this one—“ Levins ported a file to the display.

  The file opened to reveal the face and background of one Dmitri Kulagin.

  Kincade hmmpphhed. “Kulagin, Dmitri I.…Russian mafia, wasn’t he? I read somewhere he was lost in a plane crash, then he turned up later in Hong Kong…and may be in tight with Red Hammer now.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This is your closest match to the signature Bioshield’s detecting?”

  “It is, sir. This is what MAX came up with.”

  Kincade rubbed his jaw uneasily. “Facial recognizers show nothing. Maybe, if Kulagin’s Red Hammer, he has a halo…a really powerful one. That might be what Bioshield is detecting. A halo is just a bunch of bots anyway…but for LA to pick up a halo, it must be slamming atoms like crazy. But that begs a greater question. “

  “Sir?”

  “Why does a Red Hammer Ruling Council member, with a halo sizzling like the Sun, turn up in biomorphed disguise at a place like Kokul-Gol? There has to be a reason. I guess we’d better let Paris know about this one.”

  Chapter 2

  “Quantum Dawn”