--and peering up at snowflakes drifting down from a frigid night sky.
Somehow, they had made it! They had breached an opening to the surface.
“Detachment, sound off...let’s get topside and figure out where we are.”
One by one, the surviving nanotroopers came on line: Klimuk, Tallant, Reaves, Barnes…all had survived the last violent tremor.
And ANAD? Winger hurriedly scanned around the opening, for any sign of the assembler swarm. He saw nothing, no flickering lights, no blurry masses, no unusual formations of any kind. No doubt, the swarm he had let loose to start boring had been scattered in the last collapse. That loss was manageable…the swarm had been only drones driven by a config Winger had hacked together. But the master assembler, after the quantum collapse—had ANAD made it back into containment?
There was no way to tell. Communicating with a quantum core was impossible…it took specialized equipment of a type that only Table Top had. Winger swallowed hard and absent-mindedly patted his left shoulder.
You didn’t leave a trooper behind—that was the first rule of operations that every nog learned in Basic. You never left a buddy behind.
“Let’s boost out of here,” Tallant reminded him. “Before the place collapses on us.”
Winger agreed, reluctantly. He lit off his own suit and felt the reassuring force of the thrusters lifting him over the rock pile, lifting him above the rock walls, up, over and out of the collapsed cavern.
Topside, it was snowing hard and the Bailidzong hills were ghostly humps, lost in the snow. The hypersuited troopers dropped to the ground, coming out of boost, and flailed awkwardly in the deep drifts.
“Captain—“ it was Mighty Mite Barnes, less than thirty meters away. The SDC2 had somehow boosted higher than the others and come down on her side. She looked like a polar bear waking up, as her suit servos righted her. “Captain…geoplane probe signal…I got a snatch of it coming out of the cavern—“
“Get a fix…pin it down and let’s get moving on that heading,” Winger ordered.
“Behind us—“ Barnes decided. She turned around. “On the other side of—“
Winger saw what had stopped Mighty Mite in mid-sentence. It was the Paryang monastery, or what was left of it. Where once, the monastery had been a proud, if slightly decrepit stone fortress surrounded by towers and parapets, now there was only ruin left. Paryang monastery had been reduced to little more than a pile of broken stone softened by rising snow drifts, with smoldering fires still flickering orange and red, inside the collapsed ruins.
And, on the other side, a few hundred meters beyond the massive stone steps and gargoyled columns of its frontal approach, flashed twin red lights, a homing beacon that Mole had lit up to guide them back to the geoplane.
“There it is!” Deeno yelled over the crewnet. “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful in my whole life.”
“Home sweet home,” breathed Chris Calderon.
“Let’s go!” Winger commanded. “Detachment, move out…assemble at the geoplane!”
As one, the nanotroopers lifted away from the snow drifts and made their way over the ruins of the monastery to the open field beyond. Mole beckoned them with her twin nav beacons gleaming fire red in an otherwise bleak, whited-out winter night.
Deeno was the first to set down. She hugged the aft nacelle of Mole’s tread track like a long lost friend. “I love you…I love you—“
“Quit humping the treads and get inside, why don’t you?” snorted Barnes. “Jeez—“
Winger counted them off as they clambered aboard, entering the geoplane through the aft lockout chamber. Soon, he and Tallant were the only ones left outside.
“Can’t say I’m sorry to leave this place,” Tallant muttered. She took off her hypersuit helmet and took a deep breath. The cold Himalayan air was thick with acrid smoke and dust, mixed with snow…the orange flicker of smoldering fires buried deep in the monastery rubble cast a garish glow on the drifts piling up around the ruins.
Winger was pensive as he stared back at the ruins. “I just hope ANAD was able to make it back.”
“There’s no way to tell, I mean…after a quantum collapse?”
Winger shook his head. “Takes special equipment just to detect an assembler core that’s done that…let alone regenerate one. I didn’t feel anything over the coupler circuit either.”
Tallant was sympathetic. “He wanted so bad to be a nog, like the rest of us. Maybe the little guy made it back—“
The ground started trembling again. High on the mountain side, another avalanche was forming, a wall of snow and ice cascading down with a growing roar.
“Let’s get out of here,” Winger said. He and Tallant boarded Mole and in moments, the geoplane was buttoned up and ready to roll.
The geoplane’s treads jerked into motion and the craft trundled forward, plowing through snow drifts as its borer core lit up, swelling into a pulsating ball of light. The borer mechs configured for action as Mole angled downward and bit into the hard crust underlying the deep snow.
With a hiss of steam and the whir of treads grinding against rock, the squat cylindrical craft disappeared below ground. Seconds later, the entire forward end of the valley was buried in thousands of tons of snow as the avalanche crashed into the monastery grounds.
By then, Mole was a hundred feet below ground, boring rapidly downward, hunting for the approach tunnel she had bored out a day before.
“Densitometer dropping off,” Tallant reported from the command deck. “Still hard shale but sounding indicates linear voids ahead, less than a kilometer from the looks of it.”
“Must be our path,” Winger figured. “Unless it’s a new fault or fracture zone. Steering left to heading one five one degrees. We’ll check it out.”
Straightaway, Mole navigated to her approach path, a sinuous curving tunnel some five hundred feet below the plains of Tibet. If they could follow the existing tunnel back to their departure point at the ruby mine, the trip would go a lot faster.
“Skipper…” it was Barnes, up on the command deck to handle comms and troubleshoot some glitches with the quantum circuit. “…we got a signal. It’s still patchy but I think I can dial it in. It’s a signal from Singapore.”
“Send a response,” Winger ordered. He was gripping Mole’s control yoke tightly, manually steering them through their own tunnel. “Tell Singapore that Operation Tectonic Strike has achieved all mission objectives. We’re coming home. We’ll need extraction in—“ he did some figuring “—in about ten hours, if we don’t have to do too much boring.”
“I’m sending it,” Barnes told them, as she typed out the response for the quantum coupler to encode. “I just don’t know if we’re being heard—this gadget’s pretty finicky. Quantum systems…jeez, what a pain!”
Mole traversed her original path for the next ten hours, but some of the tunnel had collapsed on the Nepal side of the Namse pass. The ANAD borer was engaged and the geoplane’s progress was slowed to only a few kilometers per hour.
“We’d better surface,” Winger decided. “Give me a navigation hack—“ He pulled back on the control yoke and Mole eased upward, chewing through hundreds of feet of hard crust.
Barnes triangulated from the intermittent quantum signals Singapore base was sending out. “Maintain heading of two two five degrees. We should breach inside the border, inside Nepal. A few klicks from Simiko.”
Mole headed upward meter by meter, chewing her way through crust and shale. When the treads lost traction, Winger knew they had breached. The geoplane squirmed out of its burrow hole and squatted like a huge slug in bright morning sunshine.
A few hundred meters away, a young Nepalese goat herd named Muktat gazed down on the gleaming cylinder that had just surfaced with fear and wonder. Perched on the side of a craggy slope, his herd bleated and whined, unsure of what was happening. Muktat was certain that the Most Honorable and Enlig
htened One had sent him a vision…a beast from the depths of the earth. Perhaps this creature had been angry…the valleys around Simiko and Namse had been shaking a lot the last few days.
Inside the geoplane, Winger secured Mole from boring. “Raise the UNIFORCE commander,” he ordered. “We’re going to need lifter assistance to get out of here. And get Singapore base on the line. I’ll need a patch to Table Top.”
The Detachment debarked from the geoplane and set up a defensive perimeter around Mole. They had surfaced in a snowy valley of steep, desolate hills, black hills streaked with fingers of snow and ice. Thin streams of smoke from a nearby village issued skyward a few kilometers south.
Ozzie Tsukota scanned the valley with long-range glasses, noting the goat herds on the slopes, the crumbling stone ruins below them, and the dusty dirt road that snaked across the valley floor. The road bisected the valley, intersecting a cluster of crude stone huts and a sprinkling of tents nearby. A growing crowd of onlookers seemed to be making their way up the road, gesturing at the geoplane and her crew.
“Looks like we’ve got company, Skipper. Some kind of welcoming committee.”
Winger acknowledged. Before he could make a tactical decision though, Sheila Reaves’ voice crackled over the crewnet.
“Contacts overhead, Captain…bearing one five zero degrees, coming in low.”
Winger turned to see, squinting south in the bright morning sun. Can’t be the Chinese…wrong vector. “What’s the range?”
Reaves hesitated. “Best range is six klicks, closing at one two zero knots…aerial contact, Skipper…multiple returns approaching at low altitude. Could be UNIFORCE.”
The familiar whine of lifter jets could soon be heard echoing around the little valley. A formation of spidery craft materialized out of the sun glare and circled the geoplane like prey sizing up a new victim. But these were friendlies.
Winger squinted up and saw the familiar blue shield of UNIFORCE on the nearest lifter, as it wheeled about, hovered, and settled gingerly to the ground like a big fat moth.
“Secure the perimeter,” Winger ordered. His nanotroopers gladly stowed their weapons and made their way to the grounded lifter, while others landed nearby.
For the first time in days, Johnny Winger began to relax.
Tectonic Strike was over. The central Red Hammer base at Paryang monastery was a pile of ruins. Small aftershocks continued to rock the Paryang valley as the earth began settling down from the ANAD-induced quakes and tremors. So numerous were the continuing shocks that even the Chinese had been unable to enter the valley.
Johnny Winger knew that Red Hammer’s base had finally been destroyed. Much of the cartel’s control infrastructure was in ruins. Scores, maybe hundreds of Red Hammer troops and operatives had been killed.
The real question was: had the quantum state generator and the master Sphere really been destroyed or at least put out of action? Could a rejuvenated ANAD deal with the Amazon superswarms, without interference from the generator? Could the earth’s atmosphere be saved from destruction?
Only time would tell.
Johnny Winger had a million other questions he wanted to ask but when he saw the UNIFORCE squadron commander approaching, he stowed them and saluted the blue-helmeted major as smartly as he could.
Major Ayub Mehmet Khan was Pakistani by birth, a tall, swarthy, mustachioed Waziri tribesman with burnished coppery skin and fierce brown eyes. He snapped off a regulation-perfect return salute, then his face split into a mischievous grin.
“Welcome to Nepal, Captain…welcome back. The rest of my battalion will be arriving momentarily. Do you require anything…water, food, supplies or anything at all?”
They shook hands.
“Just a good comm link to Table Top base, Major. That and a ride out of here. All of us just want to go home.”
The Detachment lifted away from Simiko an hour later, after ensuring that Major Khan’s troops would secure and transport Mole back to Puranpur, the ruby mine where the operation had begun. As soon as the squadron of lifters had cleared the valley, Winger and Tallant vidlinked in to the Corpsnet at Table Top.
Major Kraft came on line, split screened with General Wolfus Linx from Paris. CINCQUANT himself wanted to hear the briefing directly from the 1st Nano team.
“You will complete a full debrief at Table Top, Captain,” Linx was saying, “and then you will appear at UNIFORCE headquarters here in Paris at 0800 hours on Thursday, January 1. UNSAC himself is addressing the troops…and there will be some medals handed out.”
Winger groaned inwardly, seeing Tallant react the same way out of the corner of his eye, but nodded gravely at the screen. “Understood, sir. 1st Nano can report mission accomplished. Operation Tectonic Strike achieved all assigned objectives.”
Major Kraft seemed satisfied. “Very well, Captain. Give us an update on the status of ANAD.”
Winger swallowed hard. He explained what had happened. “Sir, I’m not sure if ANAD…or rather his quantum core was contained at all. We don’t have the equipment to detect what’s left of an assembler after a quantum collapse. That will have to be done at Table Top.”
Kraft’s face had hardened. He’d never been a big fan of the Symbiosis Project, but once CINCQUANT had dropped the project in his lap, he was determined to see it succeed. “And ANAD’s performance during the mission…it was up to spec?”
“In all respects, Major.” Winger decided not to tell them how reluctant the tiny assembler had been to go back into containment or how his core functions had been scrambled by proximity to the quantum generator. That would all come out in the debrief. “ANAD was a fully capable component of this unit, able to contribute essential skills at critical times.”
Jeez, Wings, Tallant thought, though she said nothing. You sound like a recruiting vid.
Kraft seemed to sense that he was being conned but he didn’t intend to dig any deeper with CINCQUANT on the line. “Very well, Winger. I guess we’ll see all the details at the debrief. I’ve got a hyperjet standing by at Singapore. After you and your team complete their physicals, be on that jet and get some shuteye. That’s an order.”
“I do have a question, sir…if I may?”
“Proceed.”
“Has there been any effect on the superswarms since we put Paryang out of commission? Any evidence that BioShield or our own bots can deal with Amazon better?”
“I’ll take that one, Major,” CINCQUANT decided. Linx absent-mindedly massaged his moustache as he composed his answer. “First indications we’re getting, from BioShield and Dr. Camois at UNIFORCE, are encouraging. There are still sizeable swaths of bots, formed up into swarms breaking down Earth’s atmosphere over South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The strongest concentration is still over the South Pacific—all southern hemisphere threats. The swarms were always strongest there. North of the equator, we’re having more success. The swarms hadn’t linked up into supercells and ANAD and the other bots we’re using have been able to keep them in check. In the south though—“ Linx shook his head, “—it’s going to take time. Slowly, we’re breaking down the swarms and reversing the changes…but there are still going to be more casualties. In some places, like the Indian Ocean basin, returning the atmosphere to normal conditions will take months, maybe longer. Just clearing the skies of residual Amazon could take months. But make no mistake, Captain…what you and your team have done is given us some time. Without links to their control network, Amazon can be defeated, piecemeal to be sure, but I’m confident we’re gaining on them. Right now, UNIFORCE and BioShield are focusing on getting rid of the swarms. But we’ve got UN relief agencies attached to all units and they’re moving into affected areas as soon as we can clear the skies…moving in with respirators, medicines, filters and other gear. Still, casualties will mount into the millions before the situation is stabilized.”
“It’s been a global catastrophe,” Kraft agreed. ?
??I’ll fill you in when you touch down here.”
Winger was sobered by the report. There was so much to discuss but the details would have to wait. “The Detachment needs to stand down for a day or so, Major. We’re exhausted, injured and our gear is mostly shot or gone. Permission to go off-line and regenerate.”
Kraft could see the fatigue lines on Winger’s face, even over the vidlink. “Permission granted. General Linx, we’ll conference you in on our unit debrief, say at 0800 hours on December 31.”
Linx was brusque, already thinking ahead to the coming months of arduous cleanup and containment operations. “Very well, Major. I expect to ask a lot of questions…what worked, what didn’t, what we can do better. I also expect some answers. CINCQUANT…out.” The window displaying Linx winked out, replaced by a stylized Quantum Corps logo.
“Get some rest, Winger. You and your team have done a helluva job. CINCQUANT’s pleased…he just doesn’t show it. The politicians in Paris are too…they all want to have their pictures taken with you.”
“Great,” Winger lied. Tallant just shook her head. “I don’t know what’s harder…fighting off swarms of Amazon or fighting off swarms of politicians. They’ll both eat you alive.”
“True enough,” Kraft admitted, “but just remember who pays the bills. Table Top—out.” Kraft’s face dissolved and the vid went black.
Winger sat back and sighed, closing his eyes. “I just want something to drink and a hot shower and a warm bed.” He peered out the lifter porthole. Singapore lay dead ahead—already they were descending toward the Quantum Corps base—a hazy dot in the distance before purplish late afternoon thunderclouds. “I don’t care if they have to carry me off in a litter…I’m not lifting a finger until we get to Table Top.”
Tallant grinned. “Not even to help a fellow nog?”
Winger shrugged, patting his left shoulder, where the containment capsule had been implanted months before. “I’m betting the little guy’s in here, in spite of everything we’ve been through. This nog’s a hard nut to crack…he just needs a little TLC, like the rest of us.”