***ANAD detecting small-scale quantum decoherence at the surface…quantum state fluctuations…Base, this device is another emitter…but smaller. The waves are higher frequency and more focused***
Winger remembered the small spheres Dana Tallant had shown him at Kurabantu. Is this the same thing? Best to approach cautiously. He switched eyepiece views to ANAD’s probe, studied the returns. A small-scale quantum emitter….
At first, he didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary with the ANAD swarm. The soundings returned good data and ANAD’s response to commands seemed normal. But visually, the assembler swarm began to take on a wholly new appearance.
***Base, receiving new config…is this a new template? ANAD must recalculate bond energy distribution…these effectors are not standard structures***
“ANAD, what the hell are you talking about?” He turned around and what he saw next made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.
The ANAD swarm had reconfigured itself into something like a demonio creature…but Winger knew he had never sent any new configs!
“ANAD…ANAD, what are you doing…reconfig swarm state Charlie. Is this some kind of joke?” He started to approach the swarm but thought better of it. “Stop fooling around here—“
***ANAD reporting configuration master override…this state has overwritten all other states…re-initialization is aborted…entity (Keeper) is connecting…establishing links…updating…***
What the--? Then Winger understood. It was the sphere…a quantum emitter, ANAD had reported.
Dana Tallant had seen ANAD change as well. She had the same thought as Winger.
“Maybe it’s some kind of master sphere, Wings.”
“Like the ones we saw at Kurabantu? Doc Frost examined the one I took back with us… his theory was that the sphere was a transmitter of some kind…maybe a link to another place and time. Maybe even some kind of archive or portable library. When I touched it, I got all kinds of weird images in my head. One thing’s for sure…we’ve got to get ANAD back to normal.”
Winger sent a command override to ANAD, attempting to bypass any external signals. At first, there seemed to be little effect. The swarm continued to form up into a semi-human shape—arms and legs, followed by a blank expressionless face on a slightly misshapen head. ANAD was taking the form of demonio, right in front of them.
But Winger knew a few tricks of his own, things he had learned from Doc Frost. He kept at it, sending and resending the override, digging into the guts of ANAD’s processor.
Eventually, his efforts began to pay off, when they saw the growing demonio creature begin to lose structure. First, an arm dissipated into twinkling glowing fog. Then half the head. For the next few moments, the para-human came together and dissipated several times, pulsing into and out of structure as its internal commands clashed.
“It’s the sphere,” Tallant insisted. “It has to be. That sphere must be part of the control system.”
“ANAD mentioned something called a Keeper. Didn’t Q2 tell us once that the founder and head of Red Hammer was someone called the Keeper of the Sphere?”
“I assumed that was some sort of mysterious person. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe the Keeper is a synthetic intelligence…like a super-ANAD. ANAD seems to be susceptible to it. Can you get control?”
“I’m trying—“ Winger kicked through some rubble to get closer to the loose cloud of bots that formed the half-human. “Maybe, if I can drive ANAD myself, we can do an insertion.”
“Insertion? Insertion where?”
Winger stopped right in front of the demonio, now slowly but inexorably falling apart as an identifiable structure. “The sphere, Dana. It’s the heart of Amazon’s control system. If I can get ANAD safely inside, I’m sure I can hack into the processor. With any luck, I can turn the whole thing off. Stop it right here.”
“Wings, you’re nuts…we’ve got to get out of here now. The generator’s gone…the mission’s accomplished.”
Winger ignored her. Instead, he switched eyepiece views to ANAD’s acoustic sounding and probed the surface of the sphere with sound waves. The return came back: solid-phase, of a type never seen before.
He drove the swarm forward, letting the sleet of loose molecules cascade past him, forward on half-propulsor. The replicants steadily closed the distance. Presently, he ordered the assemblers to a full stop, and let electromagnetic fingers probe the lattice dead ahead.
The structure was like an endless grid, basically octahedral in design, but the molecules were bound at impossible angles; the whole geometry of the thing shouldn’t work, but it did. What was holding it together?
Cautiously, he maneuvered ANAD forward, into the lattice. Approaching the outer electron shells, he could feel an attraction force. It strengthened quickly and Winger had to run propulsors up to three-quarters to maintain station.
Jesus, this is strong…it’s pulling me on, like a tide.
He inched forward, straining against the force, but it was no use. Even at maximum propulsor, the swarm was pulled firmly and inexorably into the lattice.
Don’t fight it, he told himself. Maybe it was a sixth sense or a premonition. He chopped propulsors. Instantly, he felt the swarm slingshot forward, right toward the lattice atoms…there seemed to be no way he could squeeze between them.
Yet somehow, incredibly and against every encounter he had ever had with molecular structures, the lattice parted, giving way and allowing the ANAD swarm to enter the solid phase of the sphere’s surface.
Soon enough, he was hurtling down a long, curving ‘tunnel’ formed by parted molecules of the sphere.
Now, I wish I had the master assembler with this swarm, he told himself. It’d be nice to get the little guy’s perspective on all this. But the sphere was emitting something that confused ANAD’s processor, making the master unreliable.
Best to drive this swarm myself. At least, he had the raw signal feed from all bands: acoustic, thermal, EM. The quantum coupler circuit seemed dead.
Or was it?
The first inkling Winger had of anything wrong came when the staticky fog of his coupler suddenly erupted in a chaotic jumble of images…fragments of his days at nog school, fleeting pictures of some planet seen from space, of a little boy playing in the surf before roaring ocean waves.
What was happening? Had the ANAD master somehow embedded himself in the swarm?
“ANAD…ANAD, I’m receiving something on my coupler? ANAD…is that you?”
***Entity (Keeper) is operating…Entity active in all registers…why have you come here?***
What the hell was going on? Who was Entity (Keeper)?
Almost as if his mind had been read, he got a response.
***Entity (Keeper) operates the portal…and maintains the Archive. WHY HAVE YOU COME HERE?***
Winger remembered the last Q2 briefing at Table Top, before the Detachment had set out on Operation Tectonic Strike. Q2 had intelligence indicating Red Hammer had been getting technical assistance from someone…it was unlikely the criminal cartel could have developed Amazon Vector or the original quantum coupler by themselves.
Q2 figured it was the Chinese who had been helping. But Winger had once discussed with Doc Frost another possibility: that Red Hammer was somehow receiving technical assistance from an extraterrestrial source…a distant intelligence, a non-human intelligence. “With quantum couplers,” Doc Frost had explained, “such signals would been damnably hard to detect. The possibility can’t be discounted.”
“What is the portal?” Winger asked, not sure if coupler was active.
***The sphere is a link and a portal***
Fair enough, Winger thought. But a portal to what?
“Where does this portal go to? What is being linked?”
Entity (Keeper) didn’t reply at first. Winger concentrated on driving the swarm forward, through the ‘tunnel’ of parted molecules. Most peculiar—
/> ***Access to the portal is controlled. Authorization is required…state authorization and present configuration for inspection***
At the same moment, the tunnel down which they had been maneuvering suddenly convulsed, shaking like a whip back and forth. Winger studied the soundings on his viewer, tweaking ANAD’s propulsor to stay in the middle of the channel. The shaking grew more violent, until the walls seemed to shatter, spalling off pieces in a shower that flooded the tunnel ahead.
Winger slowed ANAD to one-quarter and focused on the nearer pieces…they were all hourglass shaped…maneuvering as if under control but with no obvious effectors or means of propulsion.
Cautiously, he let a swarm of nearby hourglass structures flock around him. Even as he watched, the open ends of the hourglass bots—he had to call them bots since they moved and reacted with intelligence—snuggled over the ends of ANAD’s effectors. Every bot in the ANAD swarm was soon fully immobilized.
Too late, Winger realized what was happening. Whoa there, fellas, he told himself. He ran up ANAD’s propulsor to max and sent commands to fold and retract all effectors. No use. ANAD, along with several trillion replicants, was caught.
“What the--?” Winger forced himself to remain calm. What were these things? He racked his mind, thinking of every atomgrabber’s trick he’d ever tried. None of them worked. Quantum collapse…it was too soon to try anything that drastic. Bond disrupters…pyridine probes…carbene grabbers…none of them worked.
It’s like I’m caught in some kind of MOBnet, he thought. The hourglass bots were almost like antibodies, each one morphing to fit and disable specific ANAD effectors.
He checked system status and the blood drained from his face: ANAD’s board was lit up like a Christmas tree. Red lights flashed at him from every direction. System by system, ANAD was shutting down. The swarm was going dark.
We’ve got to get the hell out of here, he quickly decided. But how…he had no propulsors. He didn’t want to execute a quantum collapse…it would effectively destroy the master, not to mention leaving the Detachment defenseless.
Somehow, the hourglass bots were like defenders, or perhaps antibodies, seeking to eliminate an intruder. Yet they were unlike any other nanobotic device he had ever seen. Almost alive, eerie in their swift and sure movements, the bots had immobilized the ANAD swarm in mere seconds. Now, they seemed to be sucking the very life out of ANAD.
If it was an intelligence, maybe he could reason with it.
“Entity (Keeper)…what’s going on? Why have you immobilized the ANAD swarm? You must release us, immediately.”
***Entity (Keeper) detects not-self. Not-self must be eliminated***
For the briefest of seconds, his coupler crackled with a dizzy array of images. Too fast for his mind to resolve, he felt the coppery taste of fear in his mouth. Blood was roaring in his ears and his heart was pounding…it was like the cavern collapse, like the underwater avalanche at Kurabantu, like when he’d first learned of Mom’s death in the accident—all rolled into one. The cold steel of fear pierced his chest and his throat went dry—
His coupler had somehow touched Entity (Keeper) directly and the imagery stream had triggered his most terrifying, primal fears.
The connection had only lasted a second, maybe less, but the torrent of fear it unleashed made him nearly black out.
Entity (Keeper) had used the quantum coupler to directly activate stored imagery in his mind’s limbic system. Deeply buried fears and terrors erupted from the split-second connection and washed over him.
Pulse racing, Johnny Winger knew what he had to do.
Entity (Keeper)…whatever it was…it was bad news. Some kind of intelligence inside the Sphere had quantum capabilities far beyond anything the Corps had ever developed.
I’ve got to get ANAD out of here. The assembler swarm he was driving was being steadily weakened by contact with the Keeper.
Winger knew the only way he could extract the swarm was a quantum collapse. Slough off everything and reduce each assembler to its core processor dot. Stripped down to its barely existing essence, an assembler q-dot should be able to escape the hourglass bots that were even now disassembling his mechs.
It was risky as hell but there didn’t seem to be any other way. He had to get the ANAD master assembler away from the Keeper, re-group with all the Detachment survivors and try to make it back to the geoplane, back to Mole, before the Chinese arrived…or the whole complex crumbled into ruin.
Winger gritted his teeth as he tapped out commands on is wristpad. To save the master assembler, he had to amputate everything…get ANAD down to practically nothing…an indistinct dot of quantum probability states, little more than waves crashing on a shore…there and not there at the same time.
The maneuver was fraught with possibilities for screw-up. But it had always worked before.
He executed the collapse and simultaneously trillions of replicants threw off their effectors and atomic parts like spinning clouds of fluff. On his viewer, status lights winked out, one after another, until the board went dark.
Now it was all up to ANAD.
Johnny Winger shook his shoulder to spring open the containment port and began extricating himself from the pile of rubble into which he had fallen, relying on his suit gyros to keep him upright.
Come on, ANAD…come on home. Come to Papa…
“Fall back!” he ordered over the crewnet. The ANAD element he had detached to start boring a path out of the cavern had managed to create a short tunnel. The bots were still at it, through all the tremors and jolts, mindlessly chewing away at millions of tons of rock, their faint glow like a beacon in the dusty air. “Fall back on my position! We’re getting out of here!”
They couldn’t wait for the nanobots to do the job. The cavern, maybe the whole mountain, was unstable. Paryang could collapse at any moment and bury them alive.
“We’re going to have to blast our way out,” Winger decided.
One by one, the Detachment survivors boosted in and hovered or touched down nearby. Winger silently counted off the troops: Tallant and Klimuk, Calderon and Spivey, Barnes, D’Nunzio, Tsukota and Reaves. They’d lost three so far: Gibby, M’Bela and Singh. They’d be missed.
“Concentrate your fire on ANAD’s tunnel…everything you’ve got: mag, coilguns, whatever you have. We’re going to try to punch up to daylight from here.”
Klimuk, the Russian, looked skeptical. His trim black beard twitched. “How deep are we, Captain? Isn’t that dangerous, with all these seismic shocks?”
Winger shrugged. “It’s dangerous just to stay where we are. Here’s the plan: when I give the word, I want three of you—Reaves, Deeno and you, Victor, to concentrate your fire on that Sphere. I don’t know what that thing is...a portal or an archive or some kind of synthetic intelligence, maybe all three, but we need to destroy it. The rest of you use your weapons to blast us a tunnel up there where ANAD started boring a path.”
The nanotroopers positioned themselves to begin firing.
“I don’t know if the cavern walls will hold,” Winger admitted. “But we really don’t have much choice.”
He took a last look at the ovoid Sphere. The Keeper, whatever it was, was inside that Sphere. If nothing else, they had discovered the truth at the heart of one of Red Hammer’s deepest secrets. The Keeper, for years the presumed head of the cartel, was likely some kind of synthetic intelligence, a sort of super-operating system for the Sphere itself.
“Commence firing,” Winger gave the order.
Instantly, the Sphere was enveloped in flame, smoke and dust as Reaves, Deeno and Klimuk hosed the ovoid down with coil gun, mag and particle beam fire. For a brief second, Winger was sure the thing had been vaporized. But after the first bloom of debris had subsided, the Sphere remained, bathed in an unearthly pale blue light, seemingly unaffected.
“Keep firing!” Winger ordered. “The tunnel too—“
br /> Behind him, the rest of the Detachment opened up on the path already bored by ANAD. Rock and rubble rained down on them and the Detachment had to scatter to avoid being crushed. But the firing continued and a spider web of beams crisscrossed the cavern wall, pulsating at maximum frequency, trying to punch a hole through the rock walls.
I sure hope ANAD made it back home, Winger thought to himself. After a quantum collapse, there was no real way for ANAD’s master to communicate…the bot was little more than a quantum dot, a basic core barely ticking over. Winger had no idea if the tiny assembler—whatever was left of him—had made it back to containment.
He’d have to shut the capsule port and hope for the best. He thought about trying the coupler but figured it was useless. ANAD’s quantum dot core had barely enough logic to keep itself ‘alive’, let alone respond to signals.
And he wasn’t sure about interference from the Keeper.
After a minute of blasting, Winger ordered a cease fire to appraise the situation.
Dust and rubble settled about the cavern as he stared up at the rock overhead. Though the faint blue ball of light that was the partial ANAD swarm still flickered from the deep shadow of a crevice, there was no indication that all their firing had had much effect.
Dana Tallant said it before he could. “Wings, the only thing we did was add to the dust and debris.” Her hypersuit servos whirred as she kicked through knee deep rubble.
Winger took a deep breath. Time was running out. The Chinese would be at Paryang in no time. If 1st Nano were caught running operations inside Chinese territory….
“Fire again,” he decided. Maybe with ANAD boring a path, the rock overhang would be weakened enough to breach an opening to the surface. “Full bore…everything you’ve got…concentrate fire around ANAD’s boring—“
The volley of mag pulses and particle beams had just erupted when the cavern shook with a massive tremor…a series of lateral jerks and jolts like some angry child was shaking a play toy.
Great seams of rock and dust cascaded down on the nanotroopers in a roaring avalanche.
When the dust had finally settled and the shaking had subsided, Johnny Winger found himself sideways, pinned under a rubble pile. He commanded his suit to seek vertical and the thrusters popped a cloud of dust before his servos could extend. In a few seconds of squealing and whirring, he was standing waist deep in rock, rubble and dust—