“What did you say?” Tallant asked. She was unstrapping herself.
“It was ANAD…I’m leaving him outside containment…for the time being.”
“Is that a good idea?”
“Probably not. But there are some sound tactical reasons to keep the swarm nearby…just in case.”
Gopher squatted like a black metal armadillo in the lee of a snow bank, huddled against the steep flanks of a rugged mountain known to the locals as Zapog. It was dark and windy, snow swirling about the surfaced geoplane in gusts and squalls, as Winger threw open the hatch and leaped to the ground. Right behind him, Barnes, Reaves, Gibby and Tallant dropped to the snow and set up a quick defensive perimeter, quickly boresighting and registering HERF and mag weapons on nearby peaks barely visible in the blizzard.
Winger took a hack off the navsats and pinpointed their position, which he ported to the crewnet. The entire crew soon saw the coordinates on their helmet eyepieces.
“Okay, ANAD…I’m sending a new config. When it’s loaded, you’ll be optimized for solid-phase disassembly. You already have the coordinates of the fracture zone…where the ground is most sensitive to boring?”
***Affirmative, Control…from my position, the fracture zone centroid is three hours and twelve minutes away***
“Very well, ANAD…prepare to launch…all effectors primed and ready?”
***Effectors are enabled…let me at ‘em***
“ANAD…launch now!”
As Winger and the others huddled in the lee of Gopher’s hull, the translucent and iridescent shimmering blue globe settled into a nearby snow drift. In moments, it had disappeared beneath the snow, leaving only a backlit glow, like fireflies frozen in time, steadily dissipating. In time, it was gone.
“What now, Skipper?” asked Mighty Mite Barnes. She was sighted in on her HERF gun, covering her assigned sector of the perimeter.
“We wait. Any contacts? Any evidence we’ve been detected?”
Dana Tallant checked with Gopher’s systems. “Nothing. No EM, only background thermals, not even any quantum wake. Acoustics indicates the wind direction may be shifting…more to the southwest. Weathersats say there’s a front headed for the valley.”
“No nano threats?”
“Negative. The board is clean.”
Winger said, “Then we may have achieved what we wanted….complete tactical surprise.”
“Aren’t we kind of exposed up here?” asked Gibby.
“It’s a risk we’ll have to take. We’ve got about three hours before ANAD is in position. Reaves…let’s get SuperFly up and nosing about. Even in this weather, I’d like to keep a close eye on what’s happening.”
“Roger that, Skipper.” The DPS1 went over to the geoplane’s tail pod and withdrew three small suitcase-sized containers. She opened the first container and fiddled with the contraption inside. Seconds later, like a dormant bird, it sat up and began articulating its wings and rotors. Warmed up and synched with its base station, the entomopter whirred and lifted off, heading off into the snowy night sky. Reaves did this three times, powering up and launching each device skyward.
“SuperFly away, Skipper,” she reported. “As soon as they link up, we’ll be getting data back.”
The Tectonic Strike mission was three-fold: (1) to disable the quantum coupler links between the base and the Amazon Vector superswarms, (2) render the base inoperable for future Red Hammer operations and (3) locate the source of Red Hammer’s archive, the master Sphere that some intel specialists at Q2 believed had to exist, an archive likely in contact with all the proto-human demonio creatures that Winger and 1st Nano had encountered at Via Verde and Kurabantu.
The plan was that, in the chaos of the artificial tremors ANAD would generate, 1st Nano would be able to get inside the compound and achieve these objectives with a minimum of defense and resistance from Red Hammer. Just to make sure, after the tremors began, the ANAD master would rendezvous with Gopher at coordinates just outside the base perimeter to form a protective screen around the nanotroopers against the likely Red Hammer defensive nanobots they would encounter.
For nearly three hours, Gopher sat alone and motionless in a fog-shrouded, snowy valley three miles from the central Red Hammer base. Aboard the surfaced geoplane, Johnny Winger waited tensely for the big show to begin.
Finally, word came from the swarm of tiny assemblers.
***ANAD reporting swarm now in position at the following coordinates…*** the master rattled off a stream of numbers. Winger watched as Tallant plotted the position of the swarm on the stratigraphic map displayed on the main console.
“Very well, ANAD,” Winger reported back over the coupler circuit. He knew that nearly a mile of solid rock separated them from the swarm. “Stand by….” To Tallant, “what’s the verdict?”
The CC2 looked up. “Right on the button. He’s situated between these two faults, with a major fracture zone we plotted right below him. Red Hammer doesn’t know it but they’re sitting on a geological time bomb.”
Winger smiled. “Then it’s time to light the fuse.” He ordered the Detachment to return from their defensive positions and climb back aboard Gopher. “ANAD…commence the operation.”
***ANAD understands…commencing solid-phase destructive disassembly…hold on to your hats, folks***
Moments later, a vast, deeply felt rumbling could be heard and felt up and down Paryang valley. A great crashing roar occurred as landslides and avalanches pummeled the ground from the high slopes around the parked geoplane.
For protection, Winger decided it was best to submerge Gopher about fifty feet below ground.
The geoplane’s treads were engaged and her nose angled slightly down as the borer plowed through the snow and bit into the hard, frozen ground. In moments, they were below the surface, crawling forward toward the rendezvous coordinates.
The tremors had started, a continuous wave of tectonic plate motion and upheaval, shattering everything within miles of the Paryang valley and its ancient monastery.
Soon, the battle at Red Hammer’s central base would be joined.
CHAPTER 12
Paryang Valley, Tibet, China
December 4, 2068
2235 hours
The shaking and shuddering was the worst Winger and Tallant had ever experienced aboard a geoplane. When the tremors came, the first shocks were deceivingly light. Gopher began a series of gentle, rolling motions, shuddering like a slow-motion dog shaking off water after a dip in the ocean. But they both knew that wouldn’t last.
The first wave hit seconds later and Gopher rang like a bell from the impact, as hammering waves pounded them, a giant fist smashing and driving them down, deeper.
“We’re going deeper!” Tallant yelled, eyeing the densitometer. “We’re sliding…down and to the right!”
“I see it!” Winger had seen the same thing. The profiler showed what had happened, even as ANAD continued loosening more rock, even as the huge tectonic plates and faults shifted and heaved.
The geoplane had parked less than fifty feet below the valley floor, to avoid damage from mudslides and avalanches cascading down the mountainsides all around them.
Now, as the ground buckled and indescribably powerful forces rammed rock into rock, crumpling miles of Tibetan plateau like so much tissue paper, Winger knew they could never hope to ride out the tremors in their current position.
“I’m taking us back topside!” he announced. He pulled back on the yoke and Gopher’s treads angled upward, driving them through the shifting maelstrom toward the surface. There, at least, the geoplane and her assault team could avoid being smashed completely.
Like riding a roller coaster or a raft in the middle of a hurricane, the geoplane made her way arduously upward, boring through hard granitic and basaltic layers, until after what seemed like an eternity, Tallant saw the densitometer reading fall off sharply.
??
?We’re breaching, Wings…kill the treads!”
Gopher lurched forward and her treads spun in the air, grabbing for traction. The hull of the geoplane burrowed out of its hole and wallowed in snowdrifts and falling dirt and mud for a few seconds, before settling to a stop. Loose rock and rubble pelted the top of the hull in a steady clatter.
Winger and Tallant looked at each other. Winger wiped sweat from his eyes.
“That was close.”
“Amen to that…ANAD must have found one hell of a fault zone.”
Even as she spoke, the tremors seemed to be subsiding. Gopher rolled and bucked for a few more moments, but the amplitude of the shocks was definitely falling off.
“That’s our cue,” Winger said. He got on the crewnet. “The quakes are just about over. Prepare to exit, full combat load.”
One deck behind them, 1st Nano’s assault force erupted in a flurry of activity.
“All right, boys and girls…get your gear together and let’s get those pretty little asses moving!” Sergeant Hoyt Gibbs growled as he clanked down his hypersuit helmet.
All around him, hypersuited nanotroopers flexed their boosted arms and legs, and the whir of suit boosters going off stirred a small tornado of dust in the compartment.
One by one, the troopers wriggled into the access tube and boosted their way aft toward the lockout chamber, each one holding his weapon in front as the lift pushed them along.
From outside, geoplane Gopher looked like a fat metallic walrus half burrowed in a snow bank. Rock and snow continued to cascade down the mountainsides as the lockout doors unsealed and swung open.
Then, one after another, the nanotroopers of the United Nations Quantum Corps fell out into the deep snow and lit off their suit boost to right themselves. With a speed and deftness born of countless hours of training, the DPS techs Reaves and Singh along with SDCs Barnes and Spivey formed themselves up into a four-point perimeter defense, sighting in their coilguns on nearby approach paths. While that was occurring, CQEs D’Nunzio and Tsukota extracted their HERF guns and registered them along the assault vector that would lead the team to the Paryang monastery, now dimly visible in the swirling snow dead ahead.
The Red Hammer command post was a shadowy jumble of stone parapets and squat towers, a faint orange-yellow glow emanating from the windows facing them.
Tallant lasered the range. “I make the distance at about two miles, from here.”
Winger flicked out his tongue to the eyepiece control stud inside his helmet and changed views on his viewer. “Gibby, got anything yet?”
Sergeant Gibbs was IC2 for the Detachment but ANAD was already deployed in autonomous mode, so he had little to do for the moment. He scanned on all bands for nanobotic activity.
“Maybe something, Skipper…I’m picking up fairly high thermals just beyond that rise up ahead, kind of along that mountain wall to starboard. Some EMs, traces of bond breaking. Could be a defensive screen?”
“Better get ANAD back then,” Winger decided. He linked in with the autonomous assembler over the coupler. “ANAD, cease solid-phase disassembly operations. Return to base…home on my signature. I’m sending a new config…Assault Two…we may have company.”
***ANAD responding…I am embedded in dense matrix at the moment, Base…having to disperse to transit this layer…I will detach daughter swarms for faster transit…you can config manually when it arrives…estimating your coordinates in one hour seventeen minutes***
“ANAD, we may not have that much time…go to max propulsor, fastest possible transit.”
He told Tallant the bad news. “ANAD’s en route and he’s sending a daughter swarm ahead but the rock is extremely dense and it’s tedious and time-consuming.”
Tallant nodded. “Not to mention risky…he could lose half his effectors moving that fast through such dense rock. I’m seeing the same thing Gibby is seeing. Here…take a look—“
Winger studied the imagery on his viewer. The computer screened out the mountains and the snow and falling rubble, showing only bands of thermal emissions and electrical activity that usually accompanied nanobotic activity.
“That’s got to be nano…can we ID the signature?”
Gibby’s voice came back…the IC2 had pushed out ahead to a nearby outcrop, climbing up on the promontory to get a better view of the threat. “Could be Amazon, Skipper, but it reads like Indra…similar patterns of bond breaking, some pretty high-freq molecular assembly going on up there.”
“Possible config change,” Tallant said. “They may have already detected us. And it seems to be expanding. Not quite Big Bang but fast enough.”
“It’s our reception committee,” Winger was sure. “They’re not quite sure what we are or how we could appear so suddenly from nowhere, so they’re sent out the scouts to recon. HERF guns, you ready?”
Deeno and Ozzie replied in the affirmative at the same time.
“Sighted in and enabled, Skipper.”
“Itching to pull the trigger and fry some bugs…just say the word.”
Winger warned the Detachment what was coming. “HERF rounds coming up. Make yourselves small.”
Like robotic polar bears, the hypersuited troopers quickly dug in and covered themselves with snow.
“Fire the HERF!” Winger commanded. He knew a few rounds of hot rf thundering across the valley would undoubtedly give their position away but it would also buy some time for the ANAD swarm to return and configure for the assault.
A rolling thunderclap reverberated up and down the valley as the radio-frequency weapons discharged. Huge seams of snow and mud came loose and fell in sheets down the mountainsides. Ahead of them, the translucent fog of a nanobot swarm flickered and popped, stunned by the discharge. The swarm began to thin out even as it rolled toward them.
“Another round!” Winger commanded. “Full bore…let ‘em have it!”
“Charging now…charging…charging—“ D’Nunzio came back. “Fire in the hole!”
A second thunderclap boomed out and the roar of an avalanche sounded overhead. The clatter of stunned nanobots falling to the ground was lost in the deafening roar of the slide as tons of snow and rock, a huge wave racing down the mountainside, slammed into the ground and the upper parapets of the monastery.
From her position half-buried in a snow bank behind Gopher, Sheila Reaves muttered to no one in particular: “Wow…a few more pulses like that and there won’t be a target to assault.”
***ANAD nearing your position, Base…changing config to Assault Two***
Johnny Winger acknowledged the report. To Dana Tallant, he said, “ANAD’s approaching…I’m sending him ahead, to engage what’s left of that swarm.”
“The rest of us better get in position,” she replied. Over the crewnet, Tallant snapped off new orders. “Reaves and Singh…you move left, cover that flank and move out. Hold your position when you reach those boulders.”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” came the replies. Almost as one, the two DPS techs boosted out of their burrow hole and scooted off toward a stand of boulders at the base of the mountain, to the left of the monastery.
Johnny Winger knew that executing a frontal assault on a prepared defensive position was tactical suicide but he was counting on two elements to work in their favor: the continuing shocks and tremors spasmodically jolting the valley and the smothering effect of an ANAD swarm coming at them right out of a HERF barrage.
With a one-two punch like that, he had reasoned to Major Kraft back at Table Top, we’ll have the upper hand. We can breach their defenses and be inside the base before they know what’s hit them.
At least, that’s how they had wargamed the assault in all the sims.
For the next few moments, there was little apparent activity. The blizzard continued to blow. Only the occasional tremor shook the valley floor, loosening more seams of snow and rock.
“ANAD approaching the enemy swarms,” Gibby announced. “I make the di
stance at under ten feet to the boundary, based on EMs.”
Winger acknowledged. “Any sign our HERF barrage did some good?”
“EMs are off a lot…I’d say swarm density has dropped by half. Looks like we shattered the formation but thermals are rising fast.”
“They’re reconstituting,” Tallant decided. “Come on, ANAD…come on—“
***ANAD maneuvering to engage now…I am in Assault Two…all bond breakers primed, effectors in position…enzymatic lens enabled…we’re going in hot and fast, Base***
Winger smiled. ANAD had picked up too much jargon lately. He linked in to witness the engagement at close range, letting the dizziness subside, before he tried to orient himself. Doc Frost was right, he told himself. The link-up’s getting smoother.
He was in a pounding ocean surf, buffeted by hurricane force winds and squally rain, pelting him from all sides. Johnny Winger knew better than to panic…just ride with the waves, ANAD had always told him. Wait for the crest, then turn and scoot through the trough…that was how you surfed molecules through the maelstrom of Brownian motion.
***Detecting high thermals dead ahead, Base…I’m putting my pyridine probes and abstractors out front, just in case I need to pick off a radical or two…grabbers set to close on contact***
Then he saw the first enemy bots…murky shapes barely visible, flickering and popping as their effectors grabbed atoms and broke bonds, assembling structure as the swarm reconstituted itself.
ANAD closed steadily on the target and the massive flanks of a nearby Amazon bot materialized, its sides festooned with grabbers and effectors like a nanoscale Greek trireme shipping oars.
Got to watch out for those, he muttered but ANAD already knew that. As programmed, the assembler zeroed in on the concealed cleft behind an undulating clutch of phosphate chains, the amidships weak point of Amazon bots that Winger had found by accident at Lake Vostok.
All across a broad front, uncountable trillions of ANAD assemblers duplicated the maneuver.
The swarms collided and engaged with a ferocity born of desperation. Winger grew dizzy as his linked view careened at crazy angles, vivid flashes lighting up the battleground as ANAD tore off effectors left and right, liberating millions of electrons in a blinding cascade of lightning bolts.
It was like a violent summer thunderstorm on the beach, on the Fourth of July in the middle of the Great London Blitz.