Winger used his sidestick controller to bank the floater to port.
“—coming around to heading two five five degrees,” said Al Glance. “There’s the gap in the canyon wall we saw on the map.”
“I’ll steer us right through the front door…” Winger was concentrating on a murky scene on his display, vaguely matching the dim outlines of a rugged underwater escarpment dead ahead. He pulsed his sidestick and the floater responded, rocking slightly, easing forward toward a V-shaped cleft in the mountain. Moments later, Sea Ray was abreast of the canyon entrance. All around them, the steep rutted flanks of massive rock walls rose up toward the surface two hundred feet above them.
“Manta One…prepare to launch.”
Barnes flooded the launch tube. “Tube is ready, Skipper.”
Winger silently counted down the seconds, then quickly reversed Sea Ray’s hydrojets.
“Launch now!”
A deep thrummm reverberated through the floater’s hull as a high-pressure slug of air discharged the first scout. Through Sea Ray’s forward windows, the beetle-like robot streamed off, trailing twin wakes as its propulsors revved up to speed.
“Manta One is away…I’m reading clean, green and mean across my board.” Barnes monitored a stream of telemetry showing status of the robot’s onboard systems.
“Very well,” Winger started backing Sea Ray out of the canyon. “Now we’ve got some eyes in this little corner of the ocean.”
Glance toggled the displays to show the launch points for Mantas Two and Three. The Red Hammer defector Nigel Skinner didn’t know the precise location of the underwater complex east of Kurabantu Island. Underwater topography charts had pinpointed several possibilities. Sea Ray’s scouts gave her the ability to reconnoiter a much larger area.
“Two more to go, Skipper.” Glance slaved the display to give heading information to the next launch point.
Kurabantu Island was itself the topmost plateau of a huge underwater seamount, the tallest of a ridge of mountains and submerged mesas that rose up out of the abyssal plains of the Marquesas basin and toward the surface tens of thousands of feet above. Only the upper fifty feet or so breached the ocean’s surface, forming the island with its central volcano of Tuontavik.
Beyond the perimeter of the seamount, the Marquesas basin was honeycombed with a labyrinth of underwater ridges and canyons, a tortured seascape alive with mudslides, avalanches and tremors. Winger intended to make good use of Sea Ray’s brood of scouts, while executing a complicated search pattern himself, seeking any sources of unusual ground motion, heat or chemical disturbances in the ocean.
With such an active quake zone surrounding them, the floater crew would have to keep their eyes open at all times. Sudden, catastrophic danger lurked everywhere.
Mantas Two and Three were launched in the same way. Sea Ray now had a small covey of robotic scouts cruising the underwater canyons around Kurabantu Island.
“What’s the latest intel we have?” Winger asked. “Any more hypersuit emissions detected?”
Al Glance had been monitoring comms with Table Top and the air search force. “Nothing more, Skipper. Navsats haven’t updated the last fix…the best coordinates were in a box about three miles square, centered ten miles north-northeast of the island. I’ve initialized our search pattern at one corner of the box.”
Winger nudged the sidestick forward, easing Sea Ray deeper, out of the sunlight zone. Bit by bit, the ocean darkened before their eyes. Beyond three hundred feet, they had entered the realm of eternal night—too deep for sunlight to penetrate.
“I’ll level off at four hundred for now. Set up a grid search pattern, but we’ll have to keep our eyes open. UNISEA reports said these underwater mountains could be treacherous…lots of blind alleys and narrow passes. Plenty of places to get stuck…or trapped in a slide.”
Glance programmed Sea Ray to follow the search pattern ordered and set the floater to auto-run. It soon became a roller-coaster ride, as the floater dived, twisted and turned to avoid the canyon walls that surrounded them. On the waterfall display of the ship’s active sonar, the canyon walls and mountain peaks made swirling patterns.
“Looks like a Van Gogh painting to me,” Glance muttered. “No way we’ll be able to follow a straight line down here.”
Corporal Chandra Singh was manning the sensor station aft of the command deck. Winger called back to the DPS tech.
“Taj—what have we got cooking with the other sensors?”
Singh did a quick scan of the board. “Nothing yet on thermal, Captain. Just background heat sources, mostly diffuse, probably magma channels in these mountains. Acoustic shows nothing unusual yet either. Lots of creaking and groaning…nothing man-made. I’m scanning visual, EM on all bands, even radiation flux. So far…it’s all background stuff.”
“I’m looking at quantum channels myself, Captain.” Deeno D’Nunzio was at one of the aft stations in the main cabin. “There’s just a chance we’ll be able to grab something out of the ether…maybe even a decoherence wake.”
“—or nanobotic activity,” added Moby M’bela. The CEC1 was manning the quantum coupler controls next to Deeno. “There’s a good chance we’ll be able to pick up the signature of a quantum processor by the leftover wakes it leaves behind. I’ve got this baby tuned extra-sensitive.”
Winger was tight-lipped. “So…we search—“ It was all they could do.
For several hours, Sea Ray cruised in and out of canyons, valleys, ravines and narrow gorges, skirting the outer perimeter of the Kurabantu seamount in an ever-tightening spiral. On Winger’s orders, Barnes broke out rations from a stores locker and the crew nibbled at their meals, keeping their eyes on instruments or staring numbly out the tiny portholes at the murk of the ocean that surrounded them. Even the murk wasn’t featureless, as flashes of light momentarily lit up the water, revealing gaping jaws and sinuous finned and crested creatures cruising alongside them. All of them seemed to have gaping jaws and long, needle-like teeth. Many trailed long, dangling antennae behind them. Most were black or gray though a few shone red and one that darted into view was a bright electric blue.
“Captain—“ it was M’bela, furiously squeezing some ornamental trinket around his neck. “—Captain…there’s something here—“
Winger had been in a light doze, and came instantly alert. “What is it, Moby?”
“I’m not sure, sir…molecular debris…some thermals, maybe—“
Barnes cut in from the weapons bay over the crew circuit. “I’m seeing it, too…it’s Manta Three. Particle flux, atom trash, lots of radicals, heat…it’s nanobotic activity, sir…I’m sure of it.”
“Where’s Manta Three now?”
Barnes quickly scanned her board. “Bearing one five five degrees, about four miles southwest of us.” She massaged the display to get a terrain map of the seafloor. “—just past Poseidon’s Massif…a little canyon she was reconning.”
Winger studied the same display on his panel. “Can you get closer…pinpoint the source?”
“Maneuvering now.” Barnes reported. She tweaked the sidestick controller, pulsing Manta Three’s hydrojets. Four miles away, the robotic scout banked left and slowed down, sniffing and sounding its way toward the target. “I’m queuing visual too…but the water’s cloudy…lots of sediment from landslides around here.”
“Use your flood lamps,” Winger told her.
Barnes steered the scout through a W-shaped formation called Devil’s Tooth and into the narrow gorge behind the towering Poseidon Massif. Manta Three slowed and began probing its surroundings in more detail, tasting and sniffing at the trail it had discovered.
“Water’s really churned up ahead…acoustics say there’s a minor landslide off to our left.” Glance was studying the passive sonar display, which speckled like a meteor shower with the reverberations from tons of falling debris.
“Unstable zone,” Winger mu
ttered. Hell of a place to put a base.
“Nanobotic activity’s going through the roof,” Barnes reported. “I’ve got spikes across the board…radicals everywhere, high heat signature. Going to visual now—“ She switched on Manta Three’s forward lights and commanded the autonomous craft to a dead stop.
At first, the visuals were grainy, staticky, shot through with streaks of light in a dense gray murk, like firecrackers going off in a heavy fog. Sediment and mud and debris rained down from above, swirling and shaking as tons of dirt and rock slid hundreds of feet down the flanks of Poseidon Massif, shaken loose in one of the dozens of daily seafloor tremors that afflicted the area.
Just visible behind the veil of sediment was an indistinct glow, as if the scene was being backlit from beyond the canyon walls by some vast lamp. The glow pulsated in a slow but steady rhythm and, as Barnes propelled Manta Three closer, seams in the glow could be faintly seen…like cracks or shadows in an otherwise seamless curtain of light.
“It’s a defensive barrier,” Al Glance said quietly. “Covering one entire wall of that canyon. A nanobotic shield…Jesus…the thing must be a half-mile wide.”
Winger agreed. He had put Sea Ray into a racetrack holding pattern some four miles east of the massif and canyon badlands. “The question is: what’s being shielded? Mighty Mite, can you get us any closer? I want to see what kind of bots we’re dealing with.”
“I’ll try, Skipper…but this place is rocking and rolling pretty good right now.” She nudged her stick, commanding Manta Three to ease forward at a few knots. Gradually, the visuals became clearer. “I’m probing acoustically now…and switching on my quark flux imager.”
Manta Three reached out and touched the nanobotic barrier with a tight stream of quarks, sending back details on fine structure. The imager view flipped over and over as greater and greater resolution filled the screen, drilling down further into the world of atoms and molecules. Soon, the grainy blurry outlines of a familiar icosahedral structure materialized into view.
Winger sucked in his breath. “An ANAD clone…just as I thought. Same effector layout, same platform design. A defensive barrier of basic ANAD mechs. I’m betting Red Hammer’s complex is somewhere behind that barrier.”
Glance studied the imager. “I doubt we can take Sea Ray safely into that canyon, Skipper.”
“Probably not,” Winger agreed. “But I’ve got an idea…Mighty Mite, give me a bearing to Manta Three.”
Barnes came back. “Steer left, three one five degrees, Skipper. Maintain depth at four two five feet.”
Winger maneuvered Sea Ray to the new heading. The floater cruised north by northwest for about ten minutes.
“Seamount margins ahead,” Glance announced. “Cliffs and rough terrain, it looks like.” He indicated the active sonar display on the control board. The display was lit up like a Christmas tree. “Want to let us in on the plan, Captain?”
Winger steered Sea Ray to a stop, less than fifty feet from the steep flanks of an underwater mountain. He pressed a button and bright searchlights shot out, painting the mountainside with light. A thick veil of sediment rained down the steep slope.
“The edge of Kurabantu seamount itself,” Winger announced. “This is our way in.”
Glance looked over at the Captain. “I don’t see any kind of entrance here. How far are we from Manta Three?”
Winger checked the display. “This ledge is about a quarter mile southeast of Manta’s position. If I’m right, the nano-barrier is just off to our right, on the other side of this escarpment.”
Winger’s idea suddenly dawned on Glance. “We’re going through the mountain?”
“Exactly.” Winger changed the display to show a topographic map of the seamount complex and its surrounding mountains and valleys, radiating outward like waves frozen in rock. “Look, there’s no way we can penetrate that barrier without setting off alarms all over the place.”
“Agreed.”
“The way I figure it…we use ANAD to breach a path through the mountain here and tunnel into the complex from the rear. We’ve got skinsuits, weapons…plus we’re all boosted with respirocytes. The enemy will never expect an assault from that direction, from inside the mountain.”
“Skipper—“ said Singh, “the barrier may not even be active from the mountain side of the complex.”
“Exactly.” Winger was already unbuckling his seat harness. “Let’s get moving. Bravo’s in trouble and we’ve got to get them out of there.”
The Detachment prepped themselves with dispatch and quick efficiency, despite the close quarters inside Sea Ray. Mag and HERF weapons were checked and charged, MOB canisters secured and the mobile TinyTown activated to ready ANAD for launch. Moby M’Bela cycled the containment pod systems to be sure the tiny assembler was prepared.
“Solution parameters in the green, pH normal, concentration gradients look good…I’m initializing the replication counter to zero—“
“Load tacticals one and two,” Winger told him. The pod imager showed a grid wavering in aqueous solution, with what looked like a bunch of grapes hanging off a trellis in the center. The Autonomous Nanoscale Assembler/Disassembler quivered slightly, its internal clock beating a silent rhythm. “This version of ANAD is pretty crude, Moby…older processor, no quantum coupler, no voice system…just barebones nano. I’ll have to drive him, once he’s launched and replicating.”
M’Bela detected the slight smirk in the Captain’s voice. What atomgrabber worth his electrons didn’t like driving nanobots through the atomic world?
“You never lose the knack, sir…it’s like I’ve always said…’a grabber’s gotta do atoms.’”
Sea Ray was quietly maneuvered into position, nuzzling up to a small knobby outcrop of the seamount. The floater’s nose nestled against the rock wall and a flexible tube was extended from the airlock. The tube pressed flush against the sheer face.
M’Bela had wheeled the TinyTown unit into the diver’s lockout chamber and completed last minute checks.
“ANAD reports ready in all respects, sir.”
Winger was still at the forward command deck. To Al Glance, he said, “Keep scanning, Al. All bands. I don’t want any unexpected guests trying to crash our party.” Winger unstrapped and slipped aft. An interface control unit had been mounted on a bulkhead near the lockout.
Winger looked around at his assembled troopers, gathered about the chamber: M’Bela at the TinyTown panel, Gibby initializing the interface so Winger could drive ANAD into the side of the mountain, Barnes, D’Nunzio and Singh. All eyes were on him.
“Dana Tallant’s out there, guys. So is Jeff Collin, maybe others too. We’re going after them. And we’re not going back to Table Top without them. Understood?”
“Perfectly, Captain…” said Singh.
“Launch ANAD,” Winger said at last. He turned to the IC unit Gibby had been prepping. “And let’s kick atomic ass!”
The tiny assembler exited the TinyTown cylinder with a faint whir of air. On his IC imager, Winger toggled up an acoustic display…letting the blurry scene settle down as the sounder slowly resolved finer and finer detail. Whirling, colliding shapes materialized on the screen…a blizzard of polygons and snake-like carbon chains, twin-lobed oxygens careening off L-shaped nitrogens, like some kind of mad volleyball game.
Johnny Winger blinked hard and focused. It always took a few moments, even for an ace atomgrabber, to mentally orient himself in the frenetic, dizzying recoil of the atomic world. It was like walking through a door into another dimension, in the middle of a blizzard, underwater.
The tactical plan was simple enough in principle, if damnably hard to execute. Once ANAD had been launched, the lockout chamber would be flooded. ANAD would make his way toward the face of the mountain, after replicating a suitable mass, disassembling molecules, tunneling right into the side of the mountain. Several hours later, as the swarm continued its
work, the Detachment would don their skinsuits and weapons and follow.
A narrow tunnel, just wide enough for a fully outfitted nanotrooper, would be burned into the flanks of the seamount. ANAD and its replicant swarm would steer toward the coordinates of the source of the defensive barrier.
“A hundred to one…our target’s there,” Glance had reasoned.
Once outside the Sea Ray, the nanotroopers would be assisted by their respirocyte-boosted lungs. ANAD would seal the tunnel after the last of the troopers had entered, helping to maintain pressure.
The tactic was risky, Winger knew, but it had the advantage of complete surprise. The defensive barrier was surely protecting something, something important.
1st Nano was determined to find out what.
Winger let the disorientation and dizziness slowly subside and found himself standing in a blizzard of sleeting molecules, bounced and buffeted like a surfer hunting for the next big one.
Let it come to you, ANAD had always told him. Relax and flow with the currents. You can feel your way through…just skate where the seams are.
“I’m piloting…” Winger announced. He let the van der Waals forces wash over him, the molecular quivers of Brownian motion and….there! He tweaked his propulsors and jetted forward, careening like a balloon in a gale but somehow finding a way to tack and maneuver ahead. “…I’m piloting…on Fly-by-Stick. Flood the lockout.”
Deeno D’Nunzio wet her lips and cycled the controls for the chamber. She knew Captain Winger was physically seated next to her, focused on the interface controls. But she also knew the Skipper was mentally engaged somewhere else, present in the nanoscale world that was invisible beyond the imager screen.
“Lockout flooding,” she announced. Beyond the heavy door, seawater poured into the chamber with a roar, quickly rising to the top. The whole process took less than two minutes.
The only noticeable effect that Winger could detect was an increase in the buffeting and jostling, making steering and propulsion that much harder. Soon after, a great cascade of twin-lobed water molecules crashed into him, sweeping the assembler off in a new direction. It was like shooting whitewater rapids on a raging, foaming river.
Winger struggled with the controls for a few minutes, fighting the sleet of molecules, but in time, his atomgrabber’s instincts took over. With practice and some finesse, he was soon able to surf and skate and slide through the onslaught like the polished stick man he was.