“Again…three more pulses, Reaves!”
The DPS tech complied, releasing HERF charges one right after another.
The effect on the growing wave of demonio was immediate and dramatic. As if they had been scythed by blades, the first wave of the para-human bot colonies exploded, shattering into individual assembler mechs, spattering the platform and nearby rock. Behind them, an angry swarm of bots re-collected itself and surged forward, swarming up toward their position.
“ANAD…where the hell are you?” Winger said. To Reaves: “Another round…keep firing so we can hold ‘em off!”
***ANAD closing on your position, Base…estimating five minutes to breach…do you have a config for me?***
Winger stabbed a few buttons on his wristpad, commanding his hypersuit to burrow him into the rock, cutting out a shallow foxhole with his suit thrusters, while he held on to a nearby boulder. Once defiladed, he hunkered down, letting the HERF blasts shake, rattle, and roll the subterranean chamber. A minute later, Reaves reported bad news:
“HERF’s dead, Captain… I’m all out of charge.”
Winger lifted his head to survey the damage below.
A light mist of falling and suspended nanobots shattered and decoupled by the HERF barrage hung thickly in the air amid the smoke of gunfire. Tremors continued to jolt the cavern, sending steady streams of rubble and dust down from above. The cubicles and shacks mounted on the platform had been smashed and their occupants, Red Hammer technicians, had fled to the periphery of the cavern. Sporadic beam fire erupted in volleys from pockets of enemy resistance below the platform and along the far walls.
We’ve got to smash that generator, Winger thought. If Taj Singh was right and the generator was the locus of all the decoherence waves, it must be the key piece of the Amazon swarm control system. They had to knock it out.
“Dana, you and Klimuk get ready to lay down suppressing fire…when I give the word, let ‘em have it! Keep those bastards away from the platform.”
Tallant’s voice crackled back over the crewnet. “What about you, Wings?”
“Taj and me and M’Bela are going down there…we’ve got to take that platform and put that generator out of commission.”
“Blast the thing from here…we’ve got enough kinetic rounds to reduce the whole cavern to atoms.”
“Blast what…the damn thing keeps dissolving—“
Even as they debated tactics, the latticework sphere seemed to vanish, becoming a faint translucent outline of itself, before fading completely, then moments later, re-appearing as if nothing had happened.
“Taj says it’s quantum effects. We could hit it with everything we’ve got and still not be sure we’ve hit it. How do you destroy something that may or may not be there? We’ve got to get down there…get closer…to take it out. Taj has an idea—“
Tallant understood. “We’ll cover you from here. I’ve got a clear line of fire to this side of the platform. Any of those buggers shows his head, he’s atom fluff.”
“What about the swarms, Skipper?” Reaves asked. She was positioned above and behind Winger, with Deeno and Tsukota, dug into a deep fissure overlooking the ledge where Winger and Singh had taken up position. “My HERF’s dead. We got nothing to fight off the bugs with.”
***ANAD now arriving your position, Base***
Winger scanned around the cavern. At first, he saw nothing, but over a few seconds, a faint shimmer in the walls behind them became visible. The shimmer grew, blurring out the sharp edges of the rock, until it spalled off the wall and erupted into a ball of light.
“ANAD, you’re a sight for sore eyes. Configure swarm state alpha…I’m linking in, too. We’ve got to hold off those Red Hammer bots and get down to that platform!”
***ANAD understands…now re-configuring…my effectors are at alpha position, bond disrupters primed, enzymatic knife enabled…Base…ANAD reporting memory overflow in primary registers…Base…something is not right…I have--***
Winger was in the process of linking in when he vaguely heard ANAD’s protest. Something not right…overflow in primary registers…access denied…vector state loading aborted…
For a few seconds, he was disoriented, but that was normal. Most often, Winger came through the link-up with images of being in or around the ocean, riding the surf, battling waves…whatever imagery his neural buffer fed into his hippocampal circuits, the only way his mind could make sense of what it was receiving through ANAD. But this time, it was different.
He was in water, but this time it was a languid tidal pool, rancid and fetid with organic growth. He was dimly aware of flashes of lightning overhead, vivid pops and thunderclaps and of the gentle sloshing of the water stirred by a fresh wind fetching up…a storm was coming.
I’ll just re-orient myself to watch the show, with a quick burst of propulsor, a snap of a pyridine effector, maybe snag something with a grabber…BUT HE HAD NO EFFECTORS…
What the hell—
He rolled and commanded effector movement, commanded retraction…extension, commanded propulsor, but nothing happened. He was helpless, no appendages at all…just a springy tetrahedral rolling around with the waves…it was like he was being born over, grown again from first molecules….
There…! He felt the gentle touch of a molecule and reflexively reached out…he still had a few electrons to snag things with….and grabbed it. It bobbed and squirmed like a rubber ball…an oxygen molecule…at least, he had something to work with—
The image faded and was soon replaced by a more normal sleet of polygons and octahedrals and pyramids, surging past, buffeting him like waves on a shore…
“ANAD, what’s going on…what was that?”
***ANAD does not know…for a few moments, all primary registers were dumped…ANAD was nothing but a core…a cluster of molecules floating in a nutrient bath…or a pool…***
“Like when you were created…assembled in Containment at Table Top?”
***ANAD is not sure, Base, but this seemed different…for a few seconds, Memory One and Two were filled with something else, superimposed, like a shadow column of data, overlaying the original data…my processor could briefly access more from the registers than they are supposed to hold…the data did not describe parameters of Containment…parameters were different…conditions were more primitive***
Winger was concerned but he didn’t have time to worry about it. They had a mission to perform.
“Probably quantum effects, ANAD, this close to the state generator. I got some weird coupling effects when I linked in too…let’s config swarm state alpha and go after ‘em!”
***Base, it will be a pleasure…now re-configuring--***
“Commence firing,” Winger ordered. “Fire at will…keep those bugs off me! I’m linked in with ANAD and we’re going in--!”
With Taj on his tail, providing cover, and Tallant and Klimuk and the rest laying down suppressing fire, Winger emerged from his crevice and scrambled down the rock walls toward the cavern floor and the platform. He toggled his viewer to show EMs and thermals and piped in ANAD’s acoustic feed, then let Taj slave his hypersuit to his own, so the two troopers could move as one. With Singh controlling, Winger could concentrate on the battle ANAD was fighting and his own suit would automatically follow Singh’s as they made their approach.
The cavern resounded with volleys of coilgun fire and the electric fzzzz of the kinetic rounds lacing the air with death. Gouts of rock erupted from the walls while smoke and flame filled the cavern. At the same time, D’Nunzio, Spivey and M’Bela sprayed the platform and surrounding ground with magpulses. The air ripped with shock waves from the magnetic loops peeling off in every direction.
Winger was linked in with ANAD, his view restricted to the world of surging molecules and sloshing Brownian motion. When the first volley was done, Singh lit off his suit boost and the suit thrusted upward, lifting him over the crags and folds of the cavern slopes, canted f
orward in assault stance, toward the platform. At the same time, Winger’s suit did the same.
The two troopers eased forward on half thrust, down the slope toward their objective. For good measure, Singh let fly a volley of mag pulses dead ahead, scattering a squad of half-formed demonio into loose clouds of debris.
“…got a clear path to the platform, Skipper,” Singh said. “Don’t know how long it’ll last—“
“Let’s go!” Winger came back. But his mind was on the approaching battle in nanospace…a full fleet of Amazon bots loomed ahead, their scores of effectors quivering like oars on a Greek trireme, a squadron of battleships a few hundred billionths of a meter in size.
As Singh led them both down the rugged slopes to the cavern floor, lighting off round after round of mag, Winger concentrated on the engagement confronting ANAD.
“I’m taking over,” Winger announced. “Give me direct mode…Fly-by-Stick. I want to try some new tricks.”
***Base, direct mode slows down response times…speed is essential with this enemy…ANAD can handle this engagement***
“Negative, ANAD…I’ve fought these bastards before…I know their tactics, their weak spots…and I can see one right now…engaging enemy bots—“
He was dimly aware of his own suit maneuvering under Taj’s control, as the two of them boosted forward, dodging Red Hammer return fire and peppering the cavern floor and near walls with magnetic rounds. Concussive shock waves rocked him sideways but the suit gyros stabilized him and he followed Taj through the melee automatically, switching from nanospace perspective to direct view and back as conditions dictated.
The nearest Amazon bot careened sideways and Winger saw its scores of propulsors spinning madly as it maneuvered to grapple. Now in Fly-by-Stick, he tweaked his own propulsors, actually ANAD’s, and lined himself up for the onslaught.
Somewhere in among those whirling peptide chains was the amidships cavity that was Amazon’s main weakness. Winger drove ANAD forward, just skirting the grasp of the enemy’s grabbers, probing and sounding for the tell-tale cleft of folded proteins…there it is!...and snapped open his own carbenes to slam the bot full force.
“Max propulsor!” he commanded and ANAD jetted forward, dodging the undulating hydrogen tips and peptide fingers that tried to snag him. He rammed ANAD forward and checked the position of his bond disrupter one last time.
Coiled and ready, primed to fire…
At the instant of impact, ANAD shuddered from the collision and all forward momentum ceased.
“Now, ANAD! Zap ‘em now!”
The disrupter discharged its energy and severed every atomic bond within a hundred nanometer radius, in one stupendous blinding flash. The staticky pop of so many bonds letting go unleashed a convulsive contraction in the bot’s membrane and it shook like a wet dog, spasming and shuddering as its innards came apart and flew off spinning in a puff of debris and loose atoms.
At the same moment, uncounted trillions of ANAD replicants duplicated the same maneuver. The air was soon thick with strings and knots of loose atoms, nanobot entrails floating in every direction.
“Gotcha…you slimy bastard…how about another one!?”
Winger tweaked ANAD’s propulsor to disengage and back off, then primed the disrupter once more. He slammed the throttle forward and ANAD sped in for another collision.
But the impact never came. Instead, still linked in via his coupler, Johnny Winger suddenly became disoriented and dizzy. He lost effector control and felt the propulsors spinning down. The impact, when it came, was only a glancing blow and the assembler skidded off the side of the bot, nearly ensnared by peptides grasping reflexively at the attacker.
Only a quick instinctive spin kept ANAD from being grabbed and held fast.
Shaking off the dizziness, Winger tried re-booting the coupler…the imagery wasn’t making any sense…one moment, he saw the Amazon bot clearly through ANAD’s acoustic sounder, then the bot fuzzed out and he was floating lazily in that same languid tidal pool, bumped gently by clumps and clusters of strange molecules—polycyclic hydrocarbons, weird sugars and dogleg clumps of anthracene, sticking and poking at him—
***ANAD reporting memory overflow in all registers…Vector (state:self) = Vector (state:self)…unknown algorithm…unnamed variables loaded…re-load aborted…what is happening…unable to extend effectors***
With a determined effort, Winger delinked and shook off the cobwebs.
What the hell was going on? “Taj…ANAD’s processor is being affected by that generator…I can’t engage the bots…something’s messing up his processor.”
They had almost reached the cavern floor. Through his viewer, the outlines of the control shack were visible in the smoke…the platform was only a few dozen meters away. Just then, shadows crossed his field of view and something heavy slammed into the side of his hypersuit, knocking him sideways. Only quick response from the gyros kept him upright. He turned and saw the three demonios that had jumped him.
Singh was first to fire, hosing down the para-human bot colonies with mag blasts. The creatures exploded in a rush of light, as the magnetic energy severed quadrillions of bonds and the atoms flew apart in all directions. The DPS tech pumped several more rounds into the flickering swarms, to keep them disrupted, keep them from re-forming.
“Come on--!” Singh yelled. He boosted upward, barely making the edge of the platform, scrambling with his hands and feet for purchase. Still slaved to Taj’s suit, Winger’s did the same, startling him with the thrust. He managed to grab the edge of the platform and lever himself up and onto the scaffolding.
More demonios charged at them from behind the smoldering control shack. At the same moment, beam fire lanced through the air, slicing through the decking with a deadly crackle.
The generator was now less than twenty meters away, a huge, gently rotating latticework sphere, flexing, dissolving and re-appearing as if it were breathing, as if it were a thing alive.
From her perch on the cavern slopes, Dana Tallant and Victor Klimuk knew they had to do something.
“They’re too close to get a shot off…we might kill the good guys,” Tallant said.
Klimuk had an idea. “We could try to draw those buggers off…get their attention.”
It was worth a try. “Follow me,” Tallant ordered. She lit off her suit boost, set it to max, and lifted away from the crevice where they had been crouching. Klimuk did the same and immediately, they drew fire. “Cover us, Sheila! We’re going to try and draw those demonio away from the platform!”
Forty meters away, Reaves and M’Bela peppered the cavern floor with coilgun rounds, while Tallant and Klimuk drifted down toward the platform, hugging the folds and fissures of the cavern walls. A fusillade of fire engulfed the platform in smoke and falling rubble, accentuated by continuing tremors and jolts from the unstable ground below them.
Boosted and trimmed, Tallant and Klimuk rose on their thrusters over the far end of the platform and, at Tallant’s command, fired wildly at the other side of the cavern, making as much racket as they could. The demonios charging Winger stopped, in mid-stride…their arms and legs flowing out of formation and lending a funhouse mirror distortion to their rough human forms as the bots reassembled and set off in a new direction. Now, the buggers had seen Tallant and Klimuk, assessing them as a greater threat. Their para-human forms twisted and stretched as the swarms changed heading.
For the moment, Winger and Singh were in the clear.
“Skipper!” yelled Singh. “The generator...we can make it--!”
“Go…Go…Go…Go!”
They were at the edge of the rotating sphere in a few seconds.
Winger killed his boost and his hypersuit set him down roughly on the platform, a bit unsteadily. Beamfire continued to lance the air, with the rip of magpulses in reply and coilgun rounds detonating everywhere. The platform wobbled with more tremors.
Even as they stood beside the q
uantum state generator, it faded nearly to nothing…a black dusty wavering shadow was all that remained…then as if a light had been turned on, the generator returned to solidity, filling in the space as if a child had somehow erased a sketch and drawn it over again. The edges of the latticework frame blurred and re-formed, while the rotating sphere winked on and off.
Being so close to such a sight gave Johnny Winger the chills. Taj Singh stared up at the structure in awe.
“It’s like a projection,” he muttered. Experimentally, he put his hand out toward the shadowy edge of a strut, but better sense stopped him and he drew it back.
Winger cycled his own coilgun and pumped round after round into the heart of the machine, with no discernible effect. The rounds went off but it was like trying to slice through fog.
“Nanobots?” he asked.
“Negative, Captain…” Singh let his suit sensors probe the machine…acoustic, thermal, EMs, all bands but nothing came back. The DPS tech clucked in annoyance. “It’s nothing…I’m getting no readings back at all, on any band. It’s not a swarm of bots. It’s like a hole…there’s nothing there.”
“But we can see it…it’s got to be a projection of some kind.”
Singh marveled at the possibilities. “We use to theorize about this back in nog school. Even after the quantum coupler was developed…we drew up sketches for large-scale quantum systems, much larger than a coupler. This is incredible….”
Winger finally gave up with the coilgun. Maybe ANAD could do something. “Why can’t I kill it?”
“Because it’s not really there, Captain.”
“Hell…I can see it. At least, I can see something. You see it, don’t you?”
“More precisely, Captain, the generator is in fact located in multiple places at the same time…what we’re seeing may be a projection of sorts. It may not be the central device at all. It’s characteristic of quantum systems that they can be in multiple states and locations simultaneously.”
“We’ve got to do something to disable or destroy it,” Winger said. “This thing is managing all the control links with the Amazon swarms.”
“Maybe not,” Singh admitted. “It may be just a node in a greater network. But I agree…we have to disrupt it.”