Page 4 of Nanotroopers Episode 8: Doc Frost

  Chapter 4

  “Quantum Superposition”

  UN Quantum Corps Base

  Table Top Mountain, Idaho, USA

  November 30, 2068

  0750 hours

  When word came back to Table Top that contact with Bravo Detachment had been lost, Major Jurgen Kraft was white hot with anger. The vein on his forehead—the most reliable indicator of Ironpants’ state of mind—was red and throbbing. Johnny Winger fully expected a full-scale outburst at any second; he had already hunkered down in his seat awaiting a hail of verbal blows.

  Kraft boiled and sizzled, just barely in control. Winger thought he might fling the small commandpad right at him.

  “Winger, I didn’t send you to Kurabantu because I needed you here with ANAD. We’re losing this fight with Red Hammer. We need new tactics. That’s why I kept you here at the Mountain.”

  “Yes, sir…I’m in the lab every—“

  Kraft didn’t want to hear it. “Lieutenant Tallant is a fine young officer. Bravo Detachment was well led, well-equipped. What the hell happened out there? Was it ANAD? Are we dealing with a corrupt master bot? Winger, anything from the Lab on this?”

  Winger decided he’s better get an answer out fast, before the Kraft volcano blew its top again.

  “No, sir…Doc Frost…or what we thought was Doc Frost…did a good regeneration.”

  “Is it possible this Doc Frost angel…obviously a Red Hammer saboteur…did something to ANAD, something we can’t detect? Bollixed up the processor, inserted some kind of malware?”

  Winger didn’t think so. “If he did, we haven’t been able to find anything yet. I deal with ANAD very closely, every day. There are some differences with this new version, but nothing that would compromise its capabilities. ANAD’s combat-ready, Major. I’m sure of that.”

  Kraft sat back. He’d always viewed Winger as something of a work in progress…talented, yes, capable, certainly, but in need of a little polishing. Not quite a hunk of stone, but not quite a Renaissance masterpiece either. “I’m glad you’re so certain, Winger. Because I’m sending you and Alpha Detachment out there. I just got out of a briefing with Lofton and his Q2 weenies. They still think Frost and Duncan are on Kurabantu, or nearby. Everything we got from that defector Skinner points to that. Red Hammer’s using that island as a major control and operations center for something…something big and even Q2 doesn’t know what it is. There are theories…everybody and his mother has a theory. But precious few facts.”

  “What about Bravo Detachment, sir?”

  Now Kraft slammed his chair back down on the floor and leaned forward on the desk. His Black Forest moustache was straight as a ruler, with little curls at the end that Winger imagined as miniature fists, ready to counterpunch any poor slob who disagreed.

  “Damn it, read your Nanowarrior’s Code, Winger…atomgrabbers don’t leave their buddies behind. UNISPACE grabbed a faint locator signal off a satlink this morning…one of ours. What they got was scratchy, intermittent, but Q2 thinks it might be Tallant’s locator. There were other snatches of signals mixed in. You’re taking Alpha Detachment back to Kurabantu and you’re going to find Bravo Detachment, Winger…whatever may be left of them. Frost and Duncan have to be there too…all the evidence points that way.”

  “Yes, sir…sir, can I pick my own men and women?”

  Kraft scowled. “Winger, you can pick my grandmother Else if you want. Send me your request by 1200 hours…and your TOE request as well. I’m not waiting on UNIFORCE for this one…somebody’s still alive out there and I want you to find them and get them the hell out of there. Formal orders will be on your crewnet in an hour. Get our people out of that hellhole. Find Frost and Duncan and get them out too…if they’re not already working for Red Hammer. And find out what Red Hammer’s up to. You’ve been working on new tactics, Winger. Use them.”

  Winger stood up and saluted. “Sir, one more thing—“

  Kraft flung a return salute, like he was a fastballer on the pitcher’s mound. “What is it, Lieutenant?”

  “What are my orders if we find Doc Frost and Dr. Duncan have been turned…that they’re working for Red Hammer?”

  Now Kraft’s face hardened into stone. “Terminate…extreme prejudice. That’ll be in your orders too. Dismissed!”

  Winger hustled out of the Ops Center and practically ran up to the Mission Prep bunker. It was a cold and clear late November day and light snow had dusted the slopes of the Buffalo Range to the north of Table Top. A strong wind was gusting across the mesa.

  Winger knew he had about a million things he needed to do to get a Detachment ready for departure. Kraft’s orders chimed in on his wristpad as he scanned himself inside the bunker. Hyperjet Mercury would be departing Table Top at 1800 hours on the button.

  He had less than six hours to pull the mission together and that included final checks on ANAD and loading the little guy into his shoulder capsule.

  Kurabantu Island, the Marquesas

  South Pacific

  December 1, 2068

  0700 hours

  “Launch coordinates coming up, sir.”

  Johnny Winger was in the rear bay of the hyperjet Mercury, checking out the cockpit controls of the Quantum Corps floater Sea Ray. Part aircraft, part submersible, the ship had been detailed to the rescue task force for use in searching for the lost members of Bravo Detachment.

  “Acknowledged.” Winger tested Sea Ray’s propulsor and steering controls, making sure she would be seaworthy when the time came. His CC2, Al Glance, sat beside Winger. “She looks easy enough to operate from here…flight controls, diving controls, navigation and sensors. How about your side?”

  “All copacetic, sir.” Glance was synchronizing Sea Ray’s nav computer with Mercury’s. “I say we drop and go for a swim.”

  Indeed, that was the mission plan. Launch coordinates were a fixed point in mid-air, about ten kilometers northeast of the coral atoll of Kurabantu Island. Once Mercury was stable in hover, her rear bay doors would open and Sea Ray would be dropped a thousand meters to the ocean surface. Once she was trimmed for cruise, the ship would descend beneath the waves and begin search operations.

  Winger climbed out of Sea Ray’s cockpit and went aft to check stores and supplies. The briefing earlier that morning in the Ready Room at Table Top had been short and to the point: further interrogation and statements, corroborated by memory scan, of the Red Hammer defector Skinner had established that there was probably a new complex in the vicinity, previously undetected by UNIFORCE…a semi-automated compound in an underwater canyon about ten kilometers east of the island.

  According to Skinner, this base was a principal design and development center for the Project….an effort for which Skinner’s memory traces seemed incoherent, even confusing. Whatever the Project was, it was big, it was important to Red Hammer and it had even sucked Doc Frost into its vortex.

  According to Quantum Corps Intelligence, Skinner thought it likely that the captured members of Bravo Detachment had also been taken there.

  Winger stepped through the airlock, out of Sea Ray, and came forward to the crew station, where the rest of the unit was busy checking out their gear.

  Deeno D’Nunzio was passing out small thumb-sized capsules to the rest. “Got your respirocyte dose here, Skipper.” She handed the capsule to Winger. “Everybody else has done theirs.”

  Winger knew the respirocyte treatment was a necessary step in prepping for submerged missions. The capsule contained a complete replicated cycle of nanobotic artificial red blood cells. Once ingested, the ‘cytes would augment a trooper’s respiratory system, by delivering over two hundred times more oxygen to lung tissues than normal. Spherical diamondoid pressure vessels less than a micron in size, the’ cytes would enable Quantum Corps troopers to survive underwater with no further assistance, wearing only skinsuits, comm gear and utility and weapons belts.

  Winger w
as just glad to be rid of the tin can hypersuits.

  He opened the capsule port and inhaled, letting the pressurized stream of respirocytes flood into his throat. There was a brief tingle and he felt his face flush red and turn warm for a few seconds…the result of an extra charge of oxygen from the ‘cytes as they went to work.

  “Nobody light a match,” joked Gibby, as he slipped into his skinsuit. “This place’ll go up like a torch.”

  Sheila Reaves cycled her mag gun and holstered the weapon on her belt. “I feel so light-headed.” She feigned a breathtaking swoon, staggering around the crew station.

  Deeno snorted. “Sure she’s so light-headed…’cause there’s nothing upstairs.”

  “Yeah,” said Ozzie Tsukota, nearby. “Nature abhors a vacuum—“

  “Can it,” Winger ordered. “Gear up and let’s get aboard and get everything stowed away. Launch in five minutes.”

  Sea Ray was outwardly an ungainly-looking craft, a far cry from anything sleek or hydrodynamic. The crew compartment was a squat biconic dish, like two dinner plates pressed together.

  The interior was divided into three smaller compartments, a forward space for command and control, an engineering space with a diver’s lockout and a weapons and stores space. The dish of Sea Ray’s main cabin sprouted two legs, actually nacelles housing the hydrojet plants and propulsors. A small bubble of an observation platform sat on top of the dish.

  “Ready to launch, Lieutenant.” Al Glance’s fingers flew over the control board, readying Sea Ray’s navigation, diving and propulsion systems.

  “Very well.” Johnny Winger felt a slight burning in his lungs—the result of the boosted oxygen charge created by the respirocytes. For a few moments, he felt warm and flushed. Inside his body, the ‘cytes were steadily taking over the function of his red blood cells.

  “Mercury, Sea Ray is powered up and ready to drop.”

  The hyperjet pilot, Lieutenant Matumba, radioed back. “Okay, Lieutenant…we’re maneuvering into position now. Synch your nav system and we’ll squirt you the coordinates—“

  Glance pressed a few buttons. Sea Ray’s nav system was now fully updated.

  Matumba was all business, her voice steady, even laconic. “Bay doors coming open—“

  Mercury’s rear cargo bay doors clamshelled open. The hyperjet was now in full hover, a thousand meters above the choppy, turquoise waters of the south Pacific. It proved to be a beautiful, cloudless day.

  “Launch deck is clear—“

  “Sea Ray powered up…our props are turning—“

  “Extending launch table—“

  The floater rested on a cradle which now canted upward at the rear to a shallow angle and slid aft on rails toward the clamshell doors. At the same time, an electromagnetic catapult beneath the cradle primed itself to discharge Sea Ray into the air.

  “On my mark…ten seconds.”

  Winger and Glance nodded faintly to each other. Behind them, strapped into couches were half the Detachment, the troopers who would man the floater and conduct the search and rescue mission from underwater. The other half would stay aboard Mercury, conducting their part of the mission from the air.

  “…five seconds—“

  Winger took a deep breath and found his heart racing and blood rushing as the ‘cytes in his bloodstream ramped up O2 for increased demand. He cinched his five-point harness tighter, took one last scan of the controls and fixed his gaze on the swells of the ocean breaking and foaming a thousand meters below them.

  “Two…one…launch commit…and—“

  Matumba’s words were lost in the roar of the catapult as the power banks discharged and Sea Ray’s cradle jerked forward. Like a huge slingshot, the cradle accelerated down the tilted ramp, pulling the floater along with it.

  Sea Ray rocketed out the rear doors of hyperjet Mercury and arrowed straight down for the ocean, aiming to enter the sea at an angle calibrated to minimize shock, to the ship and her crew.

  The foaming waves came rushing up to meet the windscreen. There was a loud shudder—bang! as the floater slammed bow first into the water and quickly submerged. Vibration damped quickly beneath the waves. Shafts of diffuse sunlight streamed down from above.

  Sea Ray angled downward at a steep angle as the hydrojets kicked in.

  “Bring her around to two zero two degrees,” Winger commanded. “I’m leveling off at a thirty meters. Let’s sound and scan a few minutes, get our bearings.”

  “Copy that,” Glance said. He massaged the helm controls and Sea Ray banked to her new heading.

  “Skipper—“ it was Mighty Mite Barnes, strapped into one of the aft seats. “—I’ll start getting the mantas ready to deploy.”

  “Very well, get ‘em spun up and synched to Sea Ray. We get any kind of decent pings, I want them out the door and sniffing.”

  The mantas were mobile autonomous non-tethered assault and surveillance bots, inevitably robotic ‘crabs’ to all who ever saw them. Sea Ray carried a complement of three, to extend her eyes and ears beyond normal sonar range.

  Barnes unstrapped and slipped into the weapons and stores bay to begin prepping the robot scouts.

  The mantas were stored on cradles outside of individual launch tubes. Each scout resembled a large beetle, its carapace studded with sensors, probes and manipulators. Hydrojet thrusters provided mobility, while the manta’s face mounted cameras and more sensors.

  Barnes set to work. She synched each manta to Sea Ray’s computer. Then she primed the hydrojets, set the onboard processor to Full Auto and toggled a few more switches. One by one, the robot scouts came alive and crawled on articulating legs into their launch tubes.

  “Mantas prepped and ready for launch,” she announced up to the main cabin.

  “Very well,” Winger said. “Standby…let’s get Sea Ray into position—“

  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 a hundred meters 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 meters above. Only the upper fifty meters 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 kilometers square, centered ten kilometers 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 a hundred meters, they had entered the realm of eternal night—too deep for sunlight to penetrate.

  “I’ll level off at a 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, Lieutenant. 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, Lieutenant.” 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.

  “Lieutenant—“ it was M’bela, furiously squeezing some ornamental trinket around his neck. “—Lieutenant…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 kilometers 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 kilometers 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 muttered. 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 meters 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-klick wide.”

  Winger agreed. He had put Sea Ray into a racetrack holding pattern some four kilometers 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 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 one two five meters.”

  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, Lieutenant?”

  Winger steered Sea Ray to a stop, less than fifty meters 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 klick 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, Doc Frost too, 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. It was the best I could do on short notice. I’ll have to drive him, once he’s launched and replicating.”

  M’Bela detected the slight smirk in the Lieutenant’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 Doc Frost, maybe others too. We’re going after them. And we’re not going back to Table Top without them. Understood?”

  “Perfectly, Lieutenant…” 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 Lieutenant 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.

  “I’ve got it now….” He announced. He settled back to let the onrushing river of molecules crash by, bobbing and careening like a balloon in a hailstorm. “I’m sounding ahead now…showing denser structures ahead at forty thousand microns. Crystalline lattice structures—“

  Al Glance concurred. “That would be the seamount wall, Skipper.”

  Winger studied the acoustic returns. The display showed a grid of pyroxene and olivine and quartz molecules, taut dodecahedral structures linked on all sides like a dense forest of tangled limbs.

  “Intermolecular distances are small,” he answered. “Maybe a few hundred nanometers at most. This one’s gonna be a tight squeeze.”

  Under Winger’s control, ANAD streamed closer and closer to the lattice.

  “I’m starting my replication cycle,” Winger said. He toggled the controls, squirting the commands off to the tiny assembler. Less than twenty meters away through Sea Ray’s hull, ANAD received its new orders and began grabbing atoms to build copies of itself. “Better to do this now…while I have some room to maneuver.”

  Mere centimeters from the rough, rocky surface of the seamount, the black water began glowing with an ethereal phosphorescence. Through a nearby porthole, Taj Singh witnessed the unearthly glow.

  “ANAD’s at work…I can see it right out the window.”

  In less than ten minutes, the rep counter had ticked over to the commanded value. ANAD had built himself a family of several quadrillions of daughter molecules.

  Now it was time to go to work.

  Gibby had been up on the command deck, studying the results of the assembler’s acoustic probes.

  “This is garden variety igneous stuff, Skipper,” he radioed back. “Nothing unusual that I see. Just gazillions of quartz and feldspar molecules all lined up in formation. My guess is you break the thing at the tetrahedral joint…between the silicons and the oxygens. Bond strength would be weakest there.”

  “Agreed.” Winger programmed the sequence, telling ANAD just where to begin working his way into the lattice. Quartz made up much of the first few centimeters of the Kurabantu seamount…a crystalline grid of corkscrewing tetrahedrons composed of a silicon molecule and a pair of oxygens. ANAD would have the fastest results if he went to work on the tetrahedral joints.

  Winger sent the commands. Acting in unison, the Autonomous Nanoscale Assembler/Disassembler swarm jetted forward and penetrated the lattice, all its effectors fully extended. Engaging the first arrays of the lattice, the swarm began quickly ripping into the molecular formation, severing bonds and burrowing ever deeper into the rock.

  In minutes, the glow along the sheer face of Kurabantu’s submerged flanks brightened to a searing white hot incandescence. Nanometer by nanometer, uncountable swarms of assemblers burned their way into the side of the mountain.

  It was Singh and Deeno at the porthole who first spotted the faint outlines of ANAD’s ‘tunnel.’

  “There’s our way in, just like the doctor ordered,” Deeno said.

  Ten meters from the porthole, a shadowy opening in the rock face slowly materialized from the flickering light and silted water. Barely a meter wide, the fissure was easily overlooked in all the folds and crags of the mountain; only the pulsating glow of atomic disassembly made it visible. From deep inside the fissure, a faint amber glow throbbed like a warning beacon.

  Johnny Winger studied parameters on his IC panel. “My reps are all good…all effectors deployed and in the green. ANAD proceeding on one-quarter propulsor. Carbene grabbers are really going crazy…I’m pulling silicons like some kind of madman.”

  “How long before we can enter the tunnel, Skipper?” asked M’bela. He had sized up the dimensions by estimating from the porthole and wasn’t sure he really wanted an answer.

  Winger did some quick calculations. “At his current rate, ANAD’ll have a tunnel deep enough for all of us to fit in about twenty minutes, give or take. Get prepped now…skinsuits checked, belts and masks on, emergency breathers set to max.” Winger checked his watch. “We cycle the lockout and start deploying in half an hour.”

  The time went by quickly enough. Singh, D’Nunzio, Gibby, all but Al Glance donned their skinsuits and checked their gear. The CC2 would remain behind to operate Sea Ray. By twos, they back-checked each other’s preparations…connections, fasteners and quick-disconnects, weapons charged, any mistake now could be fatal. Winger ordered Barnes and Singh into the lockout first. As Defense and Protective Systems Tech 2, Singh was particularly well armed, carrying a small coilgun assault rifle as well as a HERF pistol for close-quarters combat. Barnes herself was packing a particle-beam weapon.

  “Once you get inside the tunnel,” Winger was telling them, as he switched his gaze from ANAD acoustics to the two nanotroopers, “use your suit boost. Set it to minimum and watch your heads. You should be able to get enough traction off the walls to go forward.” Winger took one last look out the porthole. “With any luck, we’ll surprise the hell out of them by coming in the back door. I just hope nobody has claustrophobia.”

  From the command deck, Al Glance did a quick sonar sweep of the area and pronounced everything clear. The lockout chamber was closed and flooded. Inside Mighty Mite Barnes and Taj Singh stared straight ahead, not daring to look at each other. Three minutes later, the chamber was fully flooded.

  “We’re moving out,” Singh announced. It was a strange, unnerving feeling wearing only the form-fitting skinsuit and mask, with its emergency breather pack, knowing the only way your lungs were getting oxygen was from the billions of respirocytes circulating in your bloodstream. Singh eased out and the shock of the cold stunned him momentarily. The ocean was painfully frigid at this depth, cold, dark and oppressively close, as he shoved the chamber hatch out of the way, grunting with the effort.

  Singh kicked ahead, floating through the hatch and in seconds, was steering himself carefully into the dim outlines of ANAD’s tunnel.

  His shoulders and belt just cleared the entrance, scraping along the edges, as he went in. Singh wore boosted flipper/assault boot combos on his feet. As soon as he was fully inside the tunnel, he lit off the boost and peered straight ahead, deeper into the tunnel, toward the still flickering swarm a dozen meters ahead. The tunnel walls were slick, glassy and still warm from ANAD’s work.

  Singh felt a coppery taste of panic in the back of his mouth, as the walls seemed to press in on him but he fought it off, focusing instead on feeling every square millimeter of belts and gear…anything to keep his mind from falling prey to the fear of the tunnel collapsing.

  Maybe it was the glow from ANAD up ahead but he was sure the walls were moving, as if he was being swallowed by some huge snake.

  Don’t even think about it, he told himself. Instead, he began reciting verses from the Bhagavad-Gita. Just a few meters ahead of his face, the ANAD swarm burned deeper into the mountain.

  One by one, the rest of the assault detail followed: Barnes, D’Nunzio, Gibby. Johnny Winger was the last to exit the lockout chamber.

  Inside the tunnel, his vision blocked by Gibby’s feet only centimeters from his face, Winger took deep breaths of respirocyte-boosted air and synchronized his suit boost to the speed of ANAD’s tunneling. He closed his eyes—there wasn’t much to see anyway.

  The whole approach would take several hours before the troopers were in position to breach the inner structure of the compound and begin the assault.

  Four hours later, the ANAD swarm had disassembled
its way through a long curving tunnel from a point a quarter kilometer south of the compound’s underwater location. The breach path followed a sinuous route through layers of shale and quartz and feldspar, growing warmer and more oppressive as the swarm neared its target.

  Taj Singh was in the lead and patched in along with Winger to the acoustic feed from ANAD.

  “ANAD sounding ahead, Lieutenant,” the DPS tech reported. “Rock density dropping off…possible aspect change…looks like a different structure dead ahead…less than fifty thousand microns.”

  Winger had noticed the change too. “Could be the outer wall of the compound.” He studied the acoustic display. “My read is reinforced concrete with embedded steel and carbon fibers. Molecular signature seems to match—“

  “Thank God,” breathed Barnes, a few meters ahead of Winger. “If I have to spend another minute in this coffin—“

  “Cut the chatter,” Winger ordered. “Get your weapons ready.” He monitored ANAD’s tunneling closely, noting when the lead assembler reached the wall surface. Before letting the swarm penetrate, he signaled ANAD to come to a stop. The swarm hovered just centimeters ahead of Taj Singh’s face and the amber glow subsided as molecular disassembly halted.

  Now only the helmet lamps of the troopers provided any illumination inside the tunnel, casting stark shadows on the still warm walls, fused with glassy residue from ANAD’s passage.

  Johnny Winger primed his own coilgun and ordered the others to arm all weapons.

  “When this thing blows, all hell will break loose.”

  “Lieutenant—“ it was Gibby. The CC2’s suit boost stirred dust and rock chips right into Winger’s face. “…any sign of a barrier ahead…any nano we might have to deal with?”

  Winger checked the status of all ANAD systems on his mask eyepiece. Everything was clean and green. “Nothing but concrete and steel dead ahead…the pressure hull seems clean. I’m not getting any signatures.”

  “We got ‘em by the cojones,” exulted Deeno. “Complete surprise.”

  “Remember,” Winger told them, “Dana Tallant and the rest of Bravo may be in there, Doc Frost too…keep your fire to a minimum and stay on your vectors. Anybody gets trigger happy now and we may put friendly fire on the wrong targets. Understood?”

  There was a chorus of replies.

  Winger sent commands for the ANAD swarm to resume the breaching operation. The amber glow returned and, if anything, seemed to brighten. Soon the tunnel was bathed in an intense white light and the walls grew too hot to touch.

  The concrete and carbon matrix that made up the compound’s outer hull was a dense atomic lattice. Winger kept a close eye on ANAD’s progress, noting the swarm seemed to slow as the assemblers chewed into the denser structure.

  Just a few more minutes…

  A ping sounded in Winger’s earpiece. At the same time, warning flags lit up his eyepiece…ANAD was nearing a void in the structure…the inner wall surface. Winger signaled the assembler swarm to slow to one-tenth propulsor power, just barely creeping forward a few dozen nanometers at a time.

  “Detail…standby. Taj, you’re the point man. Once the breach is through, you go in and give us ten suppressing bursts with the HERF. That’ll stun anything alive long enough for Barnes to come through. We’ll continue that sequence…each trooper through gets suppressing fire for ten shots. It won’t take long so get your asses in there fast!”

  “Got it, Skipper—“ said Deeno. She gripped the handle of her coilgun carbine even tighter. It would feel great just to get out of this hellhole of a tunnel and blast somebody.

  Singh made the call everyone had been waiting for.

  “Heads up…ANAD’s through…ANAD’s through—I see lights ahead.” He tweaked up his suit boost, waited impatiently for the glow to subside and kicked forward, crashing through the melted wall into a dimly lit stores room, stacked with crates and shelving.

  He lit off the HERF gun and hot searing radio frequency waves reverberated through the congested space. Crates and shelves rattled and went flying.

  “I’m in!” he yelled over the crewnet. “Get ANAD in here quick…get a barrier set up!”

  Singh scrambled away from the hole he’d just fallen through, moving in a coordinated pattern around the darkened room. Behind him, another body crashed through the opening and thudded onto the floor.

  Corporal “Mighty Mite’ Barnes leaped up and lit off her own HERF round. The thunderclap deafened both of them.

  So much for covert entry, Singh thought sourly. Still, the rf rounds gave the assault team a protected bubble of space and time.

  One after another, the rest of the team burst into the stores room. Lieutenant Winger was the last to drop onto the steel matted floor. At the same moment, a shaft of light stabbed the darkness at the far end. A door swung open and a shimmering fog poured into the room…mechs!

  “Swarm assault!” somebody shouted. Singh rolled onto the floor and came up with his coilgun firing, pumping magnetic loop after loop into the heart of the beast. The fog thinned in a few places under the assault, but continued enveloping the room.

  Someone behind Singh lit off another HERF round, blasting everything and everyone with a thunderclap. The enemy swarm scattered from the rf shock…just long enough for Winger to get off re-config commands to ANAD.

  “---go to tactical two…pyridines and enzymatic knives extended…bond disrupter primed…GO ANAD…gogogogogo….”

  He sent the commands and scrambled forward between HERF bursts, coming up behind Singh and Barnes. The door opened wider and through the residue of the shimmering fog, they saw faces. Human, vaguely Asian faces.

  Red Hammer troops! Muzzles swung into the room and the crackle of particle beams sounded. They were under fire in a confined space surrounded by a swelling swarm of enemy mechs. Bolt after bolt of particle beams lanced out, stitching a line of death across the wall.

  Barnes returned fire with a volley of coilgun rounds while D’Nunzio opened up with her own beam carbine. The air sizzled and popped with rounds as the two swarms collided overhead.

  Winger buried himself behind some crates, getting off an occasional volley of coilgun rounds himself. Tactically, the situation was serious, but not yet desperate. The swarms now engaging in a flickering aurora of combat overhead would tell the story. For the moment, the assault team was pinned down with only two avenues of escape: back through the tunnel or ahead through the door.

  Winger gritted his teeth and switched eyepiece views to nanoscale. He closed his eyes to limit the disorientation, took a few deep breaths, noting the continuing crackle of particle beams and the hot thump of HERF rounds, then opened his eyes into ANAD’s world once again.

  The grappling was both immediate and suffocating and Winger felt the enemy mech’s force close on him like a vise. It was a type of effector he’d never seen before, spiky and faceted like a soccer ball, studded with carbons.

  What kind of bastard are you? he asked. He tweaked ANAD’s propulsors and sent the swarm jetting forward to engage the Red Hammer mechs.

  With the Lieutenant now handling ANAD, Deeno D’Nunzio knew he would need cover. In the middle of a furious volley of beam fire, she crabwalked over to the crates and, with Barnes and Singh on her flanks, set up a perimeter to shield the Skipper.

  Hope to God ANAD can handle ‘em, she thought. If the Lieutenant couldn’t fend off the enemy swarm and clear a path out of the stores room, the assault team would be pinned down and chewed to pieces. She didn’t relish the prospect of having to retreat back through the tunnel. And they’d all heard what Red Hammer did to its enemies.

  Now fully engaged in nano combat, Johnny Winger massaged his wristpad controls like a pianist.

  “Carbenes to full deploy…I am in Auto Maneuver…enzymatic knife primed…bond disrupter primed…electron lens cooking….”

  He drove ANAD head-on into the melee, grappling with the nearest gang
of mechs.

  ANAD speared one with his bond disrupter, twisting off a pair of oxygens dangling from the mech’s backbone. There was a bright flash as the bond let go, liberating its stored energy. The mech recoiled and turned to swing a phosphate group around for shielding. It wasn’t quite fast enough.

  Gotcha…you little prick! Winger exulted. His atomgrabber’s instinct said look left…look left! Out of the corner of his image, he spotted the effectors slashing into view, just in time, and twisted ANAD out of the way.

  The mech’s grabbers were strong and sure but not as fast as Winger’s reflexes. A wicked ‘knife’ of hydrogen radicals sliced through ANAD’s perimeter defenses, pinching off several effectors. But Winger had seen it coming.

  He quickly deployed ANAD’s hydrogen abstractor and caught the enemy mech’s knife with one of his own. The molecules collided and torqued in a great train wreck of debris. Winger severed ANAD’s damaged effector and while the enemy mech was still trapped, he tore its grappling arms off with the abstractor. The recoil sent the mech spinning off into space, colliding with other mechs, trailing molecule debris as it drifted away.

  That’ll teach ‘em, Winger muttered. He turned ANAD to engage more mechs.

  Bit by bit, ANAD and its replicants beat back the enemy swarm. As the flickering fog retreated, the Red Hammer troops seemed to lose heart, realizing their primary defenses were weakening. One by one, they slipped out of the room, firing behind them to cover their withdrawal.

  “We got ‘em on the run!” Barnes exulted. She lay down a furious burst of beamfire sweeping the room back and forth.

  Winger set ANAD to work finishing off the enemy swarm and pulled himself out of the nanoscale view. Overhead, in an otherwise darkened compartment, the fog of assembler combat flickered like heat lightning on a hot summer night.

  “Secure the doors!” Winger scrambled forward, ducking below the high keening wail of the mechs and headed for the doors. Barnes cut in right behind him.

  They inched the door open and peered out into a dimly lit corridor. Emergency lightning cast stark shadows on a metal grate floor. Voices and shouts echoed back at them from around a nearby corner.

  Winger gathered his troops around him at the door.

  “Okay…here’s the plan: we put ANAD out first…detach an element and let him recon the corridor. He’ll send back visual, infrared, any EM threats. Once we know what we’re facing, we move out.”

  “Same tactics, Skipper?” asked Singh. The Indian DPS tech shouldered his HERF gun and slammed a new charge cartridge into the slot.

  “Five rounds of HERF, both directions,” Winger described his plan, “then we move out, in pairs. I’m using ANAD to locate infrared sources and analyze them on the go. He’s programmed to alert me if any target matches the profile of a nanotrooper.”

  “We need to find the control center,” D’Nunzio said. “If we can take down the control center to this hellhole, we should be able to access everything: files, controls, systems, everything.”

  “Agreed,” said Winger. “If ANAD returns any data on targets with strong EM emissions, that may be our baby. Remember, we have two objectives: find any Bravo Detachment held here plus Doc Frost and Dr. Duncan and get them out…and shutting down this place once and for all.”

  Gibby had noticed the flickering swarm overhead was gradually dimming, throwing the stores room into darkness.

  “Looks like ANAD has pretty well finished off the bastards, Skipper.”

  Winger fingered his wristpad, sending new commands to the assembler horde. Unseen overhead, the swarm finished off the remnants of the Red Hammer mechs and began reconfiguring for its next mission. Moments later, ANAD had detached a small element of assemblers and formed an invisible EM lens, a nanoscale ‘antenna’ to triangulate electronic emissions. If the compound’s control center emitted anything detectable, ANAD would find it.

  “Let’s move out—“ Winger ordered.

  Singh swung the door open and pumped out five rounds from his HERF gun…first left, then to the right.

  The corridor went dark and shook with the reverberating thunderclap.

  “GO!” Winger yelled.

  Singh punched out into the corridor, with Barnes right behind him. They ducked and veered left, hitting the floor in a roll, while the ANAD swarm swelled out into the hall and tuned itself to probe for electronic emissions.

  Two by two, the rest of the assault team poured out into the corridor, periodically deafened by the searing hot pulses from the rf weapons.

  Winger ducked out with the last group and linked in with ANAD as he scrambled forward. He followed right behind Gibby as they made their way along the corridor, trying to keep his balance while he plunged into the nanoscale world. His eyepiece view of the corridor dissolved into a driving sleet storm of every imaginable shape and color…the world of careening atoms and molecules.

  Then he stumbled and bumped into Gibby’s backside.

  “Here…Skipper…let me help you along.” It was Gibby’s voice. Winger felt the CC2’s arms haul him upright again. “Just hang on to me.”

  Already, ANAD’s electromagnetic ‘antenna’ was focusing on a strong source, bearing two five five degrees. The photon bucket that the assemblers had formed now channeled what it had detected back to Winger, who saw the effects as strobing pulses of light, like distant lightning on the horizon…the stronger the flash, the stronger the detected signal. Winger blinked in amazement at the light show and quickly homed in on the source.

  “That way,” he pointed, clinging to Gibby’s belt. “Strong emissions that way.”

  Gibby hoisted up his coilgun carbine and scrambled off down the corridor, with Winger clinging to his belt.

  Just to be safe, Winger changed ANAD’s config again, leaving a small element to direct photons. The rest of the force configured for assault, priming all effectors, flowing over and ahead of the rescue force as they crept toward the control center.

  Two left turns later, they came to a heavy shielded compartment hatch, at one end of a side hall.

  Winger scanned ANAD’s take, just to be sure. “This has to be it…photon cascade everywhere, a regular gusher of EM.”

  Gibby checked everyone’s position. Barnes and D’Nunzio were to the left, Singh and he to the right.

  “HERF is charging…” he muttered.

  “Lock and load,” said Barnes. She cradled her coilgun, ready to let fly when the door was breached.

  Winger set ANAD to work on the heavy door, rapidly disassembling its massive lock system. An intense orange glow engulfed them, as the assembler horde tore into the hatch.

  At least there’s no nanoshield or barrier here, he thought. At least, not yet. When the door was breached, though ANAD would have to be ready.

  “Standby---“ Winger said. The orange glow flickered and pulsated, then began dying away. Checking his eyepiece, Winger saw ANAD’s status lights all drop into the green. “Okay…we’re ready here…no detectable nano signatures around the door, beyond ANAD.”

  “MOB canisters ready, Skipper,” said Mighty Mite Barnes. She lifted a small cylinder from her utility belt and slammed it into the dispenser.

  “When we finally breach…” Winger was outlining the tactical plan, “…lay down three HERF rounds for stun effect. Then MOB anything that moves…I’ll slave ANAD to MOB control for the first few minutes. That’ll leave us free for other threats. Anyone takes fire, you’re authorized to return fire…coilguns, beamers and kinetic rounds if you have to.” Winger’s eyes met the others. “We’ve got to be smart about what we shoot at.”

  “What about our rear?” Singh asked. “It’s odd we haven’t run into any more resistance than we have.”

  “Yeah,” said Deeno D’Nunzio. “Where’d all those Red Hammer troops go anyway?”

  “Unknown,” Winger admitted. The very same thought had occurred to him. “Just to be safe, I’ve detached an elem
ent of ANAD for perimeter defense.” Even as he spoke, the troopers could hear the faint buzz that indicated nanobotic activity nearby. “Okay…let’s do it.”

  On a count of three, Gibby kicked in the heavy door. The hatch swung open and clanged against a bulkhead.

  D’Nunzio burst in first and immediately lit off the HERF gun, followed by Barnes. Hot, rolling waves of sound energy deafened the room.

  The control deck was roughly semi-circular, concentric rows of consoles arranged in a broad U around a curving wall of monitors.

  At the precise moment the door was forced and HERF rounds pumped inside, the sparse control room shift consisted of a handful of technicians and a squad of troops…the same troops who had fired on them from the stores room door. As D’Nunzio lit off her HERF gun, she dropped to the deck and came up ready to fire. The beam weapons of the Red Hammer defenders returned fire in unison, but the rf pulse killed their aim. The first rounds went wild overhead, stitching a seam of death across the ceiling. Hot metal and duramide shards rained down on them.

  “I got ‘em!” yelled Barnes, from somewhere off to the right. The SDC2 let fly a burst from her coilgun carbine. The spray of mag energy rounds lanced out and one loop caught a Red Hammer defender flush in the face. His head came apart in an explosive puff of flesh, blood and bone, peppering the nearby consoles and a trio of technicians cowering nearby.

  Beam fire streaked back and forth across the control deck for a few moments. Deeno lit off another HERF round, to cover Gibby and Winger as they rushed into the room. Momentarily stunned, a pair of Red Hammer troops caught a volley of flechettes in their chests; Gibby had flung off a flock of microbots into the air and the ‘bots had discharged their full loads at the targets. The enemy defenders crumpled in a thick spray of blood as their torsos were shredded by the hypersonic needles.

  After the first fusillade had died off, Barnes discharged her MOB canister. A faint mist issued into the air and in seconds, the three nearest crouching technicians were immobilized, struggling and clawing at the barrier bots as the net tightened and inexorably forced them to the floor.

  “Secure the room!” Winger yelled. He went to the MOB’ed trio to see that they were well pinioned. Singh slid over too, shouldering his coilgun.

  “Make sure they’re nice and comfy, Taj.”

  “Roger that, Skipper.” Singh laid down another layer of Mobility Obstruction Barrier bots just to be sure.

  Winger was about to begin puzzling out the control systems in front of him when an alert sounded in his mask earphone. It was ANAD. He linked in to the acoustic feed from the master assembler…and instantly, his blood ran cold.

  A large swarm was gathering in the corridor, moving rapidly on their position.

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” he muttered. Over the crewnet, he sounded the alarm. “Mass swarm…enemy bots right behind us. Make sure this room’s secure…” he was furiously tapping out commands on his wristpad as he peeled off orders. “…Barnes—get that door shut now. That’ll buy us a few minutes. Gibby…get the weapons away from those troops. We may need them. And Taj, make sure the civilians are out of the way…I’m reconfigging ANAD now.”

  The Quantum Corps troopers buzzed about the room, carrying out the Lieutenant’s orders. The monitor screens in front flickered with scenes from around the complex, inside and out, including a slow-motion view of another landslide along the flanks of Kurabantu seamount.

  But no one had time to look.

  Winger reconfigged ANAD to confront the approaching enemy swarm: pyridines to assault state one, bond disrupters primed, radicals and carbene grabbers extended and locked…he toggled the rep switch, telling ANAD to replicate like mad, build mass in a hurry for the coming onslaught.

  Moments later, they knew the Red Hammer mechs were upon them. A piercing shriek tore through the air as the mechs chewed into the massive door. The heat of atomic disassembly grew intense enough to blur the inner surface of the door, like hot pavement on a summer day.

  “I’m sending ANAD forward…engaging now,” Winger said. Propulsors up to ninety percent. He sent the commands…and waited nervously.

  All about the control room, every eye was on the door.

  The collision was like a distant explosion at night…you could see the light but the sound was muted. The shriek increased to a fierce whine, and a glowing ball of light emerged from the top of the door, which now resembled a melting heap of metal.

  “Slam ‘em, ANAD!” came Deeno’s voice over the whine. “Slam ‘em to hell and back!”

  Johnny Winger linked in and tried to make sense of the chaos that erupted in his mask eyepiece. He was a lone voyager in a driving blizzard, buffeted by gale force winds and fierce gusts of stinging sleet…molecules of air and metal torn and whipped by the fury of nanomech hell. He focused on what the ANAD master was doing.

  The onslaught stunned him.

  “Jesus…” he muttered, more to himself, as the first outlines of the enemy mechs came into view. “They look like battleships….I’ve never seen so many effectors.” He recognized the same cleft in the middle of the enemy mech structure that he’d seen before. “I know what to do with that—“

  He steered ANAD right for the cleft, dodging its effectors, as he closed in.

  Winger rolled ANAD right, then left, keeping just out of reach of the snapping grabbers and reconnoitered the beast’s outer membrane, looking for a way in, anything he could use, a weakness of some kind.

  Halfway aft, almost invisible among the rows of effectors, he saw the small cleft in the membrane, the cavity where groups of phosphate molecules made a wedge-shaped bond.

  Instinctively, Johnny Winger steered ANAD toward the cleft. As he approached, he unsheathed his bond breakers and flexed the devices up and down.

  With any luck—

  ANAD sped forward and slashed hard at the phosphate arms with his bond breakers.

  Just a little push here, a snap there…

  Johnny Winger commanded ANAD’s bond breakers into action. He seized one end of a polypeptide chain and tugged hard. It stretched, resisted, then with a crackling flash, it broke. A puff of atoms went spinning off in every direction.

  That’s more like it.

  Winger now drove the assembler deeper into the cleft, unfolding every effector ANAD had: hydrogen abstractors, carbon manipulators, electron lens, enzymatic knife. It was like chewing into the side of a mountain.

  Soon, the air was swimming with debris from shattered bots.

  “You got ‘em!” Gibby exulted. “You got ‘em on the run!”

  The intense blue-white globe of light began to cool and shrink. Most of the control room door and some of the bulkhead had been hit, burned away like so much paper mache. Moments later, Winger began to pull ANAD back from the front lines, leaving a small force of replicants to mop up the remaining mechs.

  That’s when Barnes saw something on one of the monitors.

  “Skipper…” she rushed over to the console. Several screens flickered with displays, different views of the same location. “Skipper…we got something—“

  Winger, D’Nunzio and the rest came over.

  It was a small room, apparently in the living quarters section of the complex. There were bunk beds arrayed around a central aisle. But at the end of the aisle, a pair of formless humps writhed on the ground.

  “Skipper…that’s some kind of MOB net, sure as I’m standing here.”

  Winger peered at the display, studied the console and located the quarters. “A few halls away, on the other side of these utilities ducts. It’s got to be Dana and the rest of Bravo. Maybe Doc Frost, too.”

  “What are we waiting for?” Gibby asked.

  The assault team gathered their gear and set off. Winger ordered ANAD to replicate a small force to secure the control room and make sure their captives were still held immobile in MOB. Once that was done he configged the master assembler for perimete
r defense. As the nanotroopers headed off to find the living quarters, ANAD would accompany them outside of containment, hovering overhead as a defensive screen against any more Red Hammer bots.

  After one wrong turn, Winger and his assault team found the residential section. It was a warren of small compartments, buried deep inside the mountain. The outer hatch was locked but Deeno made quick work of the mechanism with her particle beam carbine. The smoking slag heap of what was left of the door was easily kicked in.

  “Dana? Lieutenant Dana Tallant!” Winger burst in right behind Barnes and Singh. “Lieutenant Dana Tallant, U.N. Quantum Corps…front and center!”

  A series of low groans came drifting up from the rear of the compartment.

  Barnes was the first to arrive. “It’s them!” Without thinking, she tugged at the MOB net and the mechs resisted with an insistent buzz, stinging her hands like angry bees in response. She winced and pulled her hand back. “No way I’m going to release ‘em that way.”

  Winger steered the ANAD swarm that had been accompanying them down to the restraint mesh. He bent down, realizing the net was a much tighter weave than anything Quantum Corps used.

  “Dana…Dana Tallant…is that you? Are you hurt…any injuries? Can you breathe?”

  The hump moved sluggishly and words were said, but they came out an indistinct murmur, more a series of moaning grunts than anything else.

  “The net’s so tight…it must be compressing her face too,” Gibby said in disgust. “Damn buggers are squeezing the life out of her.”

  Winger was already reconfigging ANAD. “Not for long—“ He sent the commands to the assembler swarm. “Okay—everybody…stand back. Soon as there’s an opening big enough, we’re going to haul her out of there. Taj…check that other one.” He indicated another hump a few feet away. Singh bent down to probe it for signs of life.

  Winger maneuvered ANAD to the restraint net. A faint wavering in the air around the mesh showed the assembler swarm was at work, disassembling the mechs that formed the net. All of a sudden, the hump came alive, hearing the buzz of nanobotic activity and began writhing furiously.

  “Hold still… hold still, will you? It’s ANAD working on the mesh…I’ve got control of him…don’t thrash around so—“

  “I hope ANAD can bust her out of there, Skipper,” said Barnes, peering down. “She panicking—“

  Winger felt helpless. If it was Dana Tallant inside that mesh, she had become spooked by the sound of ANAD. “Damn mesh bots have probably been driving her crazy.”

  Then a narrow seam in the net became visible. A nose stuck out, then a mouth, sucking in air frantically, followed by a faint smile, then the eyes. The seam grew larger, as ANAD continued working. Soon, a full face stuck out.

  It was Dana Tallant.

  Johnny Winger almost cried with relief. He grabbed her face and patted it like a baby’s, wanting so much to plant a big wet kiss on her parched lips. But she wasn’t free yet.

  “Come on…come on…”

  It took another five minutes before the seam was large enough. Winger and Gibby grabbed her arms and carefully hoisted her up to her feet. Dana Tallant blinked and nearly collapsed to the floor, but smiled and coughed, heaving in great gulps of air. It was better than ice cream on a hot summer day.

  “What the hell took you so long, Wings?”

  Winger cuffed her on the head. “I knew how stubborn you are. We didn’t want to show up too soon.”

  Tallant was given a canteen of water and shuffled a few meters away around the dormitory, flexing her arms and legs. A few meters away, Taj Singh was probing the other MOB’ed victim. The hump groaned and shifted around on the floor.

  “Hey…this one’s alive too.”

  Tallant came over. “Jeff Collin, my CC2. We’re the only survivors, as far as I know. We got ambushed.”

  Winger sent ANAD commands to ‘unzip’ the nanobotic barrier. A buzzing sound accompanied the shimmering halo of air around the prostrate form. Moments later, a seam was open and Winger was tearing at the gap with Barnes, their bare hands fighting off tenacious remnant bots.

  Collin was nearly unconscious and had to be hauled out by hand and stretched out on the deck.

  Barnes was already readying an injection. “This’ll help…’cytes can boost his blood oxygen. The rest of the cocktail kickstarts his metabolism.” She slammed the injector into Collin’s neck. Moments later, his eyes fluttered open.

  “None of the others made it?” Winger asked.

  Tallant shook her head, wincing at some pain in her shoulders. “Like I said, it was an ambush. ANAD couldn’t hold ‘em off. Red Hammer bots had mutated out of some kind of tropical rainstorm, just like we simmed…remember the war games at Hunt Valley? Buggers were just too fast.”

  Winger understood. “Yeah, we ran into the same thing… I had to drive ANAD myself…we had some kind of quantum jamming that scrambled his processor…damn near fried it. He’s being regenerated now. All we got are older versions here…ANAD without the upgrades.”

  “Can we fight Red Hammer at all, Wings?”

  Winger described the midline cavity he had seen on the bot. “There is a way, Dana. But you gotta drive the thing right into that cavity…it looks like there’s no room but there is. Inside…they’re exposed as hell…all kinds of sensitive areas. You can finish off a bot real quick from inside that cavity…if you can get in. I just—“ he was interrupted by a grinding shudder that shook the entire complex. A series of dull thuds followed…then the floor tilted at a precipitous angle and there was an unmistakable sensation of movement…the entire complex was moving.

  “What the—“

  Singh scrambled to his feet. “The whole place is moving—“

  “Landslide!” Barnes said. “The mountainside’s giving way!”

  Winger then figured out what had happened. “Those outer barrier bots kept the compound from being swept off of the seamount. They anchored the place to the mountain.”

  “And when we started the assault,” Gibby finished the thought, “the bots re-deployed inside to defend. The compound was left exposed—“

  “…just when another tremor hit. See if you can raise Sea Ray on the coupler. We’ve got to exfiltrate…and fast.”

  “What about Doc Frost? Any sign of the Doc?”

  Winger queried ANAD. The bot had found no other emissions not already accounted for, emissions indicating unknown live humans in the compound. “He and Duncan must be elsewhere…we’ve got to get out of here now.”

  A shriek of tortured metal sounded through the walls, followed by more heavy thuds, then a hammering vibration. More rending metal…then a more ominous sound.

  “That’s the pressure hull,” Gibby decided. “Feel your ears hurting? It’s been breached and bulkheads are collapsing.”

  They all heard the panicked shouts and the tread of dozens of feet on the deck outside the living quarters.

  “Skipper…we don’t have any extra skinsuits!” Singh reminded them. The assault plan had called for Sea Ray to remove any survivors.

  Winger was thinking fast. “Make sure these two are boosted. Do it now!” While Sheila Barnes finished injecting ‘cytes into Tallant and Collin, Winger bent to his wristpad, the nucleus of an idea forming in the back of his mind.

  If ANAD could hold pressure inside that assault tunnel, he just might be able to form a protective bubble big enough and tight enough to shield the rescue team and the survivors from full seawater pressure at this depth.

  Winger hacked together a basic config off the top of his head and commanded ANAD to replicate at max rate. Then he ordered everyone to bunch together as tightly as they could.

  “Before we go,” Tallant said, “there’s something you should see.”

  “We don’t have time, Dana…this place could collapse at any time…we’re sliding down the side of the seamount now…you can feel it!”

&
nbsp; “This will only take a minute…come on!” She led Winger out of the dormitory, through a series of narrow corridors, down several flights of stairs to a vault-like space deeper under the mountain. Before they left, Winger told Gibby to contact Al Glance and get Sea Ray moving.

  “We’re going to need her,” Winger said. “This place is going to go at any second.”

  “What about Lieutenant Tallant and Sergeant Collin?” Gibby asked. “We can’t take them back through the tunnel.”

  Winger was already pressing buttons on his wristpad. “I’m configging ANAD to form a pressure enclosure. We’ll form a nanobarrier around the both of them and drag ‘em back to Sea Ray that way, if we have to.”

  “Aye, aye, Skipper.” Gibby set to work helping Sgt. Collin get ready to evacuate.

  Tallant had taken Winger to the innermost chambers of the Kurabantu compound, two levels below the living quarters.

  “This will blow your socks off, I guarantee it.” At the vault door, Tallant withdrew a small piece of film that looked like a patch of human skin. It was mounted on the end of a stick.

  “I managed to concoct this before Jeff and I were completely MOB’ed,” she explained. “I hacked into one of their smaller swarms…got into the master processor no sweat, and had the thing run off a simulated biometric. Like a fingerprint.” She grinned at Winger. “Bet you never did that before.”

  Winger snorted. “Can’t say that I have.”

  Tallant used the nanoderm patch to fool the vault lock. In seconds, the massive hatch was swinging open. Just as Tallant was about to lead Winger inside, the entire compound shuddered again, lurched and tilted. Heavy thuds clanged on the outside of the pressure hull.

  “Boulders…feels like we’re sliding again…the structure’s breaking up—we’ve got to—“

  “Just take a look inside, Wings…you won’t believe your eyes.” She pulled him deeper inside the vault.

  The interior was warm, dark, and humid. He let his eyes adjust to the low light level for a few seconds. There was water inside—a pool or a small pond, he could hear waves lapping. Something splashed nearby.

  When his vision cleared, he realized he was standing on the banks of a semi-tropical grotto laid out before them.

  The whole compartment was nothing but a nursery, an incubator for the same creatures he and Barnes has encountered in the cave at Engebbe. Featureless shapes shifted languidly in the water, despite the shuddering of the compound, partially formed half-men, some headless, some without arms or legs.

  “Just like before,” he whispered. Even as he watched, holding onto the vault door, the habitat lurched once again. “Same as Engebbe—Dana, what the hell do these things do? What are they for?”

  Tallant let a particularly violent shudder subside, then she knelt to the floor and groped in the dim light with her hands. “Hell if I know…there…here’s what I wanted to show you…” She held up a small metal bowl to the light.

  Inside the bowl were a handful of small spherical objects, featureless white in the poor light of the nursery, smooth as eggs yet hard, polished and made of some material Winger had never seen before.

  Experimentally, he touched one. At the moment his finger tip made contact, a hot flash of pain lanced through his body and, for a few moments, he staggered, semi-conscious and wobbly. A reel of memory fragments careened through his head, like some mad projector at hyperspeed.

  “Whoa…” Tallant grabbed him by the shoulders before he could pitch headlong to the deck. Winger felt dizzy, his face flushed red. “What was that?”

  “It happened to me too,” she admitted. “First time I touched one of these babies, I nearly passed out. It’s like somebody trying to rip your brain out of your skull through your nose.”

  Winger braced himself against more shudders and lurching. “So what the hell are they?” He nudged the spheres with the toe of his boot but didn’t touch any more.

  Tallant watched a nearby creature slide off the side of the pool into dark, oily water. It seemed to have no arms…only a partially formed head and stumps for legs, like an abandoned store front dummy. The creature thrashed momentarily, then slid below the surface, leaving only a few bubbles.

  “I’m not sure what they are…but I’ve seen the technicians take the same balls and insert them into the backs of their necks. There’s some kind of skin flap or something back there…I only saw it from a distance. The fully formed ones all get the same treatment. A technician opens up that skin flap and somehow attaches one of these balls inside. Maybe it’s some kind of control system or a biocomputer…something like that, maybe?”

  Winger was thinking fast. “We should take one back but I don’t know how—“ then an idea came to him. “ANAD can do it. We already use him to form MOB nets. Since we can’t touch the thing, I can have ANAD replicate a small force and detach it to secure one of these spheres. Doc Frost has got to see this!”

  Even as Winger was tapping out commands on his wristpad, the Red Hammer base shook with a fury that threw them both off balance and nearly pitched Tallant into a nearby pool. Water splashed on both them…along with a few hands and feet. Tallant quickly slithered away in disgust. Winger quickly grabbed her and together they groped their way back to the vault entrance.

  “Pressure hull is fully breached, Lieutenant,” came a voice over the crewnet. It was Gibby, back up at the living quarters. “We’ve got to move—“

  “On our way!” Winger replied. With Tallant ahead of him, he finished commanding an ANAD element to seek out the coordinates of the nursery. “I just hope ANAD can get an element here before the place collapses completely. Come on!”

  They scurried down a corridor, passing several panicked Red Hammer technicians going in the opposite direction, while emergency lighting flashed, and warning sirens blared, until at last they had made it back to the dormitory.

  In the center of the room, a glowing blue-white orb had already been formed…a nanobotic barrier just formed by ANAD. It floated like some weightless egg, a flickering fog of twinkling lights, radiantly shimmering in the dim red emergency lighting. Jeff Collin was already cocooned inside, peering out through the faint veil like a ghost’s face.

  “In you go, Lieutenant,” Gibby helped Dana Tallant through a faint orifice in the side. Once over the threshold and secured, Tallant and Collin stared back at them as the orifice swirled shut. Now the two survivors were snugly embraced by a nanobotic pressure enclosure, a sort of MOB-net in reverse.

  “Come on, Skipper,” said Barnes, securing her mask and stowing her coilgun. “This place is ready to blow.”

  Winger could only hope that ANAD had been able to secure one of the strange spheres. All around them, the shriek of rending metal grew unbearable. The air itself burned with heat as millions of tons of seawater pressed in on the compound, buckling walls and frames. The roar of the wave overwhelmed everything in its path and in the ensuing maelstrom, Johnny Winger knew what a molecule truly felt like, bounced and battered and blasted in every direction at once by forces he could only imagine.

  Kurabantu seamount was rapidly engulfed in a thick billowing veil of dirt, rock and mud as violent tremors loosened thousands of tons of sediment. The pressure hull of the Red Hammer base, perched as it was on a narrow ledge, was breached by falling rock in dozens of places simultaneously and crumpled under the onslaught of mass. Torn from its anchorage, no longer protected by a nanobotic barrier, the structure was shoved downward and crushed into rubble by the landslide.

  The Quantum Corps rescue force barely escaped. Through a widening seam outside the residence module, a supersonic wall of water crashed into the habitat, sweeping everything before it.

  Winger, Barnes, Singh and the rest swam for their lives. Winger was swept up into the vortex and battered into walls repeatedly before he was able to regain some sense of balance. The skinsuit gave him some protection and respirocytes cycled oxygen to his blood, but
the fierce pressure pulse slammed his ears and he was thrashed by violent currents in a hundred directions at once. The water cleared just long enough for him to catch a brief glimpse of the remains of the habitat, crumpled as if by a giant’s fist, sliding off into the abyss five thousand meters below. Then the heavy veil of thousands of tons of silt closed over him and he was simply spinning, floating, now falling, the cold ever penetrating as the vortex hammered him relentlessly.

  How long he had been unconscious, Johnny Winger couldn’t say. He was cold, but not uncomfortably so…drifting freely. The water was thick and turbid, but he could still make out the faint outlines of Kurabantu or what was left of it.

  Maybe he could raise someone.

  Winger felt for his wristpad and opened up a channel.

  “Any station…any station…this is 1st Nano rescue force on channel one…does anybody copy?”

  Static and chirps and pops and crackles filled his headset. Then, suddenly, the clear and strong voice of Al Glance came through and Winger nearly wept with relief.

  “Skipper…is that you? UNQCS Sea Ray responding to distress call on channel one…Skipper, if that’s you, transmit again so we can fix your position, over—“

  Within an hour, the welcome outlines of the floater materialized into view. The twin-dish submersible hovered a few meters away, while her portside airlock swung open, beckoning him forward. Winger dolphin-kicked and flailed his way over and wearily hauled himself aboard.

  The lockout chamber cycled and as the water drained, he could see faces peering at him through the porthole. Al Glance’s pug nose was centered in the view pane, surrounded by Deeno’s snarly grin and Taj Singh.

  The heavy door was pulled open and strong hands helped Winger out into the ready room. Hands and faces crowded around, slapping him on the back.

  “Give him some room to breathe,” barked Gibby, who helped the Lieutenant pull off his mask, then began peeling off the skinsuit. In spite of the heated compartment and the press of bodies, Winger was shivering. Barnes threw him a robe.

  Then he saw Dana Tallant.

  Johnny Winger cracked a weak smile as he let others change him into drier clothing.

  “Welcome aboard…” Tallant said. “I thought you’d never get here.” She grinned back at him, cradling a steaming mug of coffee with both hands.

  Winger was still disoriented from his ordeal. “Me too…I kept hallucinating…wondering if all this was real.”

  “All too real, Skipper,” said Barnes. She helped him pull on the robe and handed him a mug of his own.

  “That whole complex went right over the ledge,” added Gibby, who was standing by the lockout door. “Straight to the seafloor…four kilometers straight down.”

  “Everybody made it out okay?”

  “All present and accounted for,” said Al Glance, who had been manning Sea Ray during the assault.

  An alarm sounded over the intercom just as Glance was heading up to the command deck. He killed the blaring horn and saw contacts on the active sonar display. He called back to the lockout compartment.

  “Skipper, we’re pinging something small and close aboard…several hundred meters astern.”

  Winger climbed the ladders and appeared right behind Glance, sitting himself gingerly in the captain’s seat.

  “Any signature? Can you make it out?”

  “Well, sir…I’m not sure of this but since it’s such a faint return…just barely there…I’d almost be willing to say it was—“

  They both looked at each other with the dawning realization of what Sea Ray had just detected.

  “…it’s got to be ANAD.”

  Glance maneuvered Sea Ray closer to the return, coming abreast of the target. A quick visual check through the forward portholes confirmed their suspicion: the faint glow of nanobotic activity right outside the window was unmistakable.

  “Bring him aboard,” Winger ordered. “And carefully.”

  Moby M’Bela was ready in the lockout with the mobile TinyTown unit when ANAD jetted inside. Once the autonomous assembler had arrived, the CEC1 reported that ANAD had brought something along.

  “It’s a small, white sphere,” he radioed up. “Held in MOBnet by ANAD. I got it bagged and tagged for the time being. And ANAD is captured and in containment.”

  “Whatever you do,” Winger warned, “don’t touch it. It’s some kind of control pack for the weird creatures we saw inside. I want Doc Frost to take a look at it. Any signs of life out there?”

  “Just detected a small vessel, submersible probably, headed south by southwest. Maybe some kind of escape pod. I can’t tell if it came from the compound.”

  “Get a bearing. Maybe we can follow it.”

  Glance was one step ahead. “I’ve already slaved Manta Three to the target bearing. Intercept in about twenty minutes. Manta should be able to follow, as long as her power cell holds out.”

  “Good thinking, Al. I’ll let Table Top and UNISEA know what we’re tracking.”

  “Object is secured,” M’Bela said. “I’ll leave it in the lockout for now.”

  Winger nodded to Glance, who had Sea Ray’s helm. “Okay, Al, we got what we came for…let’s get the hell out of here. And keep me advised on Manta Three. Doc Frost may be onboard that sub.”

  “Gladly, Skipper. Now ten degrees up-bubble.” Glance steered the floater toward the surface. As they ascended, the water brightened slowly from deep black to a purple hue, then to a more diffuse green, finally turquoise and soon enough, the ocean was thick and teeming with life.

  Sea Ray breached the surface with as roar of air and waves and floated uneasily on long, rolling swells while Winger contacted hyperjet Mercury, still orbiting overhead.

  A welcome voice crackled through the speakers. “Mercury standing by for pickup,” said Lieutenant Matumba. “My drop doors are coming open and the recovery cradle is in position.”

  Winger sighed a deep sigh of relief. After hours underwater, crawling like ants through claustrophobic tunnels, getting shot at from all directions and nearly crushed in a landslide, it was pure heaven just to grab some chow and take a hot shower and hit the bunk.

  “Matumba…this is Sea Ray on the surface. We are ready to execute recovery sequence. I’m lifting off now…we’ll be in position in about ten minutes. Set a course for Table Top Mountain.”

  Matumba was a tall and statuesque Ibo woman, originally TDY’ed to Quantum Corps from UNIFORCE West Africa. “Roger that, Lieutenant…course is laid in and we have clearance ‘over the top.’

  “Very well,” Winger replied. He secured his seat harness as Glance revved Sea Ray’s engines. The floater lifted away from the surface of the Pacific in a spray of foam and water and banked hard to port to climb to recovery altitude. “Advise Table Top one more thing, Lieutenant. We have two survivors onboard from Bravo Detachment…Lieutenant Tallant and Sergeant Collin. Two survivors and another mystery as to where Doc Frost is. One of our mantas is tracking a small submersible now.”

  “Will advise,” Mutumba reported. “And Mercury has you in sight astern of us. Activating recovery program now.”

  Less than an hour later, hyperjet Mercury was rocketing up into space on three good engines, cleared by UNISPACE Traffic Control ‘over the top.’ The long suborbital arc would take them to the very edge of space, nine thousand kilometers back to Table Top Mountain in less than two hours.

  As he nodded off to sleep in his web seat, Johnny Winger watched the deep blue of the Pacific, dotted with white puffs of clouds, roll by underneath. He had no idea that in the days ahead, he and his fellow nanotroopers would be off on yet another adventure, trying to locate and rescue Doc Frost and Mary Duncan, this time in the jungles of South America, battling Red Hammer and the Demonios of Via Verde.

  Moments later, Winger had drifted off to a deep, dreamless sleep.

  END

  About the Author

  Philip Bosshardt is a nativ
e of Atlanta, Georgia. He works for a large company that makes products everyone uses…just check out the drinks aisle at your grocery store. He’s been happily married for 25 years. He’s also a Georgia Tech graduate in Industrial Engineering. He loves water sports in any form and swims 3-4 miles a week in anything resembling water. He and his wife have no children. They do, however, have one terribly spoiled Keeshond dog named Kelsey.

  To get a peek at Philip Bosshardt’s upcoming work, recent reviews, excerpts and general updates on the writing life, visit his blog The Word Shed at: https://thewdshed.blogspot.com.

  Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net
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