***Base, I am detecting propulsor mounts on many effectors…that’s the secret…target has maneuvering propulsors on every effector…***
ANAD closed and the two bots grappled.
It was Lucy Hiroshi who first spotted movement in the jungle on the far side of the swamp. Still engaged in maintaining barrier configs with her own ANAD, the movement was quick and furtive, gone almost before it was there, and she just caught it out of the corner of her eye.
With a start, she realized it was their surveillance targets Jupiter and Juno…Kulagin and Volk.
“Hey…hey, look! It’s our targets!”
Barnes had seen it too. “Better tail ‘em, Lucy. Port your swarm to me and disengage. We need to maintain surveillance.”
Hiroshi needed no further encouragement. Major Winger had gone ‘small,’ engaged in trying to capture one of the local bots.
Skipper’s always harping on the need to take initiative, Hiroshi told herself. So I will. She transferred swarm control of her own ANAD to Barnes, slipped through the barrier nano and started jogging along the shore of the swamp, trying to keep Kulagin and Volk in sight. They had disappeared again beyond a low rise in the terrain and she found the pursuit tough going, kicking and hacking at thick vine around her feet, slurping and sliding through shallow pools of muddy water.
The jungle was thick with pandanus vine and heavy underbrush, all of it nothing but bots, she realized. Everywhere she planted her boots, clouds of bots poofed into the air. To an untrained eye, the poofs looked like dust, but Hiroshi knew better. Every tree, every stump, every vine…all of it bots and more bots.
Jeez, what the hell is this place?
She hung back to keep some distance between herself and the targets. Even from a quarter kilometer, with just brief snatches of Kulagin and Volk, she could make out what they were doing. Every few minutes, they would stop and grab samples of something, then move on again. A tree trunk, a mudpile, a bush, some vines.
They’re going to take all those samples back…but how do they get back?
How the hell do we get back?
Hacking and kicking her way through the brush, Hiroshi hadn’t initially noticed that her targets had doubled back and were now closing on her position. She heard some heavy thudding up ahead and turned to see what it was when a loud crack! lanced out and she felt a fist slam into her shoulder.
Kulagin had opened fire.
The mag loops had whacked her shoulder and chest and Lucy Hiroshi went down hard., faceplanting herself into a shallow bog. She rolled, feeling the sharp sting and the wet of blood oozing out. She’d been hit and hit bad.
Already the paralysis was setting in.
Kulagin fired again and leaves and branches shredded into a rain of debris right over her head.
So much for covert surveillance, she muttered. She winced rolling over, extracted her own mag pistol and returned fire, letting fly round after round of magnetic loops until her magazine was empty. She snapped it out, slammed another one in and listened, hearing only a slight rustle ahead.
Cautiously, her left arm and shoulder nearly useless, her digger’s jacket and tunic now dark red with blood, she strained up to one knee. Bodies flashed ahead and she figured it was her targets. She aimed as steadily as she could and fired again. Crap! Nothing. Too much cover between us.
Then they were gone. Lucy Hiroshi staggered to her feet. The whole left side of her body weighed a ton; already the mag loops had fried her nerves and she couldn’t feel anything over there. Worse, Jupiter and Juno were nowhere to be seen.
Hiroshi felt faint and dizzy and realized she’d better try to get back their erstwhile camp by the swamp…before I conk out completely.
It was a dizzying, circuitous, stumbling route she took and when she saw the faint flicker of the nano barrier ahead, she fell headlong into the swamp. The splash alerted the others and she felt strong hands pulling her free, then carrying her litter-style inside the barrier, which buzzed as it unzipped. They laid her down on a makeshift bed of leaves and brush, then eventually used their own ANADs to fashion some real bedding.
After that, Lucy Hiroshi saw nothing but black and passed out.
“She needs a med insert,” Mighty Mite Barnes said. Barnes sat back with her legs tucked under her, wet cloths sticky with blood in her hands. “That was probably a Level One burst, full-jacket mag primes, from the looks of that wound. The paralysis is spreading, Skipper. It’s only a matter of time before it gets into her head.”
Johnny Winger stooped down, felt Hiroshi’s forehead. It was hot. “She’s burning up now…infection spreading, I guess. Problem is, I don’t have anything special in configs…just the standard med templates. And I haven’t done an insert in ages.” He looked around at all the trees, now swaying gently as a wind fetched up, shedding bots like dust. The glow of that distant volcano made the tops of the trees seem on fire…all of it filtered by the barrier nano, which flickered and popped and flashed like a horde of summer fireflies.
“She can’t wait any longer,” Taj Singh said. “If we don’t insert and do some quick tissue repair, she won’t make it.” Singh checked something on his wristpad. “And I’m reading high thermals and EMs when I scan her. Those mag loops may have carried more than just magnetic energy when they hit her.”
Barnes squinted up at them. “Bots riding a magnetic beam…can that even be done?”
Winger nodded. “There was something on the boards in the squad room about intel to that effect…it was supposed to be hypothetical, according to Q2. Now, it looks like somebody’s put the theory into practice.” He made a decision. “Okay, we can’t discuss this any longer. Mite, you and Taj prep Lucy as well as you can. I’ll hack out a config that might work…and I’ll do the insert.”
While Barnes and Singh made Hiroshi as comfortable as possible, Winger retreated to a quiet spot next to a tree trunk…a real one, he was glad to find out, to work on his wristpad and modify existing ANAD config templates for a body insert mission.
Atomgrabbers had to be ready to fight anywhere, even inside a human body.
Half an hour later, they were ready. Hiroshi’s condition was steadily deteriorating and she was visibly in shock, her face and hands cold and pale.
"Set up there," Winger ordered. He helped Hiroshi lie down on a makeshift litter Barnes’ ANAD had fabbed out of loose feedstock. She was already sleepy, her eyes heavy from sedation. She was fully unconscious a few moments later, unaware of the other nanotroopers gathered around her.
The oddity of doing an ANAD insertion beside a steamy swamp in a tropical jungle located who knew where wasn’t lost on Winger.
It was a whole new way of fighting a war and Johnny Winger knew that half the time, they were inventing tactics as they went along.
"Okay, Major," Barnes patted down the incision she had just made in the side of Hiroshi’s skull. "She's prepped and ready."
Winger checked with Taj Singh, whose embedded ANAD would be the source of the medbots. “Your ANAD ready to fly?"
Singh came back, "Ready in all respects, Major."
"Vascular grid?"
"Tracking now. We'll be able to follow the master just fine. I'll replicate once we're through the blood-brain barrier."
"Watch for capillary flow," said Barnes. "When her capillaries narrow, your speed will increase. And viscosity will stay up."
"Like slogging through molasses. ANAD's inerted and stable…ready for insertion."
The insertion went smoothly enough. A slug of plasma forced the replicant master into Hiroshi’s capillary network at high pressure. Winger got an acoustic pulse seconds later and selected Fly-by-Stick to navigate the system. A few minutes' run on its propulsors brought the Autonomous Nanoscale Assembler/Disassembler to a dense fibrous mat of capillary tissues. The image soon appeared on Winger's wristpad panel.
"Ready for transit," he told Singh. "Cytometric probing now. I ca
n force these cell membranes open any time."
Taj used ANAD's acoustic coupler to sound the tissue dam ahead, probing for weak spots. "There, Major, right to starboard of those reticular lumps…that's a lipid duct, I'd bet a hundred bucks. Try there."
Winger steered ANAD into the vascular cleft of the membrane. He twisted his right hand controller, pulsing a carbene grabber to twist the cleft molecules just so, then released the membrane lipids and slingshot himself forward. Seconds later, ANAD was floating in a plasma bath, dark, viny shapes barely visible off in the distance. The plasma was a heavy viscous fluid. Winger tweaked up the propulsor to a higher power setting and took a navigation hack off the vascular grid.
"Ventral tegmentum, Major. Just past the mesoencephalic nucleus. Looks like we're in."
Winger navigated ANAD through the interstices of Hiroshi's brain for the better part of an hour. It wasn’t hard to find evidence of tissue damage caused by the mag loops. Darkened patches, torn and free, were easy to spot.
“She’s got some damage in her lower cerebellar spindles…looks like a hurricane blew through here, Taj. Tissue trauma in what my system’s identifying as the flocculus and posterior fissure…I’ll send ANAD in for a close-up.”
Singh could see what ANAD saw on the acoustic sounder image of Winger’s wristpad. “Hurricane’s probably a good analogy…can you repair it?”
“I can try…ANAD, I’m sending config C-48A…need a few more grabbers and pyridine probes.”