Johnny Winger and the Serengeti Factor

by Philip Bosshardt

CHAPTER 10

  “The architects of this wickedness will find no safe harbor in this world. We will chase our enemies to the furthest corners of this earth. It must be war without quarter, pursuit without rest, victory without qualification.”

  Rep. Tom Delay,

  U.S. House of Representatives

  September 11, 2001

  Katmandu, Nepal

  September 15, 2062

  5:30 p.m.

  UNISPACE tracking put the approximate location of the ground laser source that had fired on Archimede at somewhere just inside the borderlands of Nepal and the People's Republic of China. A joint mission had been proposed by UNISPACE, with support from Quantum Corps and the UN's ground force, known as UNICORPS, to Jiang Hao Bei, the Security Commissioner. The mission: locate and eliminate the source of the incident. You couldn't very well have UNISPACE patrol ships being fired on by every thug and malcontent with a laser, could you?

  There was just one small problem. Tracking and intelligence had put the predicted location of the laser inside Chinese territory.

  Signal intercepts, interrogation of Vivonex and other suspects taken into custody over the last few weeks and file intelligence from previous Quantum Corps missions had long pointed to the cloud-shrouded mountain valleys of the Gangdise Shan range north of the border with Nepal as a likely operating base for Red Hammer. Tracking had traced the laser bursts to this very area. The problem was that China had long forbade any UN operations in its territory or airspace. And Red Hammer was known, from reliable sources, to have a hell of a lot of claws inside China's People's Liberation Army.

  So UNSAC had approved a combined mission, with reservations, to eliminate the laser source. The fact that Red Hammer was involved was just butter on the bread. There was now irrefutable evidence the criminal cartel was up to its ears in the Serengeti/HNRIV epidemic too. UNSAC had seen a chance to take a shot at the heart of Red Hammer's power and maybe break the back of the epidemic at its source, all on the pretense of protecting spacecraft from unlawful attack.

  Quantum Corps was tasked with providing a reconswarm and nanodefense for the air/ground task force put together by UNICORPS. A command post had been set up in the ruins of a crumbling monastery on the outskirts of Katmandu, a short half-hour lifter trip to the Rabga Pass, Mount Everest and the rugged and forbidding terrain beyond.

  And Johnny Winger had finally prevailed on Major Kraft to lift his quarantine, just in time for the nanowarrior to join up with 1st Nano on its departure from Table Top Mountain.

  Gibby slapped the Lieutenant on the back. "Got any more buzzing in the back of your head, sir?"

  Winger waved at him. "A few flies and moths…nothing much. Let's get this gear loaded and get underway."

  They made the ten-thousand mile trip to Katmandu in less than three hours.

  Nepal was a rugged, cloud-shrouded land of steep ravines, snow-covered mountains and dingy, mud and stone towns, perched on narrow cliffs that wound through the misty valleys. Katmandu was the largest city.

  Thirty miles north of the city, the Tashkung monastery was an abandoned crumbling stone fortress snugged up against a steep hillside. Narrow paths and stairways had been hewn right out of the rock face of the mountain. Herds of llama poked through the ruins. Monks in saffron robes prowled the dusty corridors of the monastery, seeking enlightenment.

  The government had given UNIFORCE permission to occupy the place. It was only a few miles from the border with China and the peaks of the Tashkung Hills afforded a clear line of sight all the way north to the Tibetan plateau and the tortured folds of the Gangdise Shan.

  It was here, according to UNISPACE intelligence, that the source of the laser attack on Archimede would be found. And it was also here, in the estimates of the analysts, that Red Hammer maintained its primary base of operations.

  With just the right kind of probe across the border, it was thought, the criminal cartel could be provoked into revealing itself, giving up the location of the base. And if Red Hammer's base could be located, UNIFORCE would finally have a target to shoot at. With Pharmex under control, a key link to the superswarms of the Serengeti mechs had been brought down. Now the head of the monster had to be found and cut off.

  Johnny Winger and the Quantum Corps would be the bait.

  "Launch ANAD!" Winger commanded. The mobile TinyTown had been hoisted to the top of the Tashkung hills and secured. Below and to the north, a cottony sea of clouds stretched to the horizon, broken only by scatterings of mountain peaks, huge bergs of rock and snow dimpling the cloud layer. The shadows of Mount Everest and K-2 lay across the cloud tops like giants' hands, ready to crush all interlopers.

  "ANAD's away, Lieutenant," said Moby M'Bela. The powdery snow at the summit of Tashkung swirled in tornadoes of sleet and ice, as the winds roared across the mountaintop. "Tight formation…I'm keeping him low to the ground to stay out of the wind."

  "Can he navigate to the north in this gale?"

  Gibby was already on the IC panel, watching ANAD's status. "He can if he stays close enough to the terrain. It'll be a bumpy ride and we may lose a few daughters. I've laid out a course that tacks to the prevailing wind. He'll be at the border in about two hours, if all goes well."

  "Status?"

  "ANAD reports ready in all respects, sir."

  "Very well. When he's closer to the border, give me a visual. Replicate more daughters if you have to. I want a good look at what we're going into."

  "Understood." Gibby pulled up the template for ANAD's virtual lens. At the right time, he'd fire off the command and the assembler would detach a portion of its force to form up a photon "bucket", able to image the terrain and sky ahead and send the imagery back in visible wavelengths.

  ANAD traversed the mountaintops of the Tashkung in good order and announced its position with characteristic verve.

  "ANAD to Hub…closing on last waypoint…two hundred 'k' microns and closing…ready to go in…let me at 'em!"

  Gibby smiled and looked up at Winger. Both nanowarriors were already bundled in full hypersuit gear. A nanoshield had been erected over the encampment and snow was already rising along its nearly invisible sides, forming irregular mounds that seemed to hang in mid air along the perimeter.

  "ANAD's itching to get at 'em, Lieutenant. Can I give permission?"

  Winger studied the battle plan on his helmet eyepiece. UNIFORCE had a squadron of lifters on the way, hugging the ground in a nap-of-the-earth penetration into Chinese airspace. "I've got to wait for word from the UNIFORCE commander. Once his lifters are in position, give ANAD the go."

  "Hub to ANAD, hold position this side of the last waypoint…repeat, this side of the last waypoint."

  "ANAD to Hub…acknowledging--"

  "Let's have a visual check, Gibby. That'll give him something to do."

  Gibby sent the command and moments later, the first grainy images from ANAD's position jerked onto the imager screen. Twelve miles north of their position, a small portion of the ANAD force had formed itself into a virtual lens, sucking up photons of reflected light from the surrounding terrain.

  It was a forbidding view indeed…a sere and desolate scabland of steep chasms and frozen white mountains.

  Winger and Gibby studied the imagery for a few moments. Slight adjustments made the view clearer, as ANAD reconfigged the 'lens' to gather different parts of the spectrum.

  "Looks like some weather up north," Gibby noted. He pointed the darkening mass forming over the tops of distant peaks. "Must be a front…I don't recall anything from the met report, though--"

  Johnny Winger eyed the approaching weather 'front' with growing apprehension. The detachment had trained all its gear on the phenomenon several minutes ago, sounding the swollen storm clouds with acoustic, EM, infrared and radar. Sergeant Sheila Reaves confirmed Winger's worst fears.

  "That ain't no regulation storm front, Lieutenant."

  Winger scanned the DPS ima
gery. "Nanomech swarm, by the looks of it. They haven't even bothered to disguise it."

  "I sure hope ANAD's up to snuff, Lieutenant. If he isn't--"

  "--we’ll be dust. Sergeant, let's get moving."

  Reaves exited the nanoshield of the encampment and hunkered down against the driving, windblown sleet blasting across the top of the Tashkung. She checked the HERF guns for registration--they were all trained across the mountaintops, ready to fry anything foolish enough to stray into firing range. For good measure, she and Buddha Nguyen powered up a squadron of coilgun bots, torqueing their motors on with a quick wrist snap. Both Defense and Protective Systems techs launched a handful of the bots, watching as the tiny ornithopters buzzed away from the summit of the mountain, struggling in the teeth of the driving wind, but steadily gaining altitude. When fired, each bot could discharge a few million volts worth of energy a distance of half a mile, neatly complimenting the HERF guns against point targets.

  The two DPS techs scampered back inside the shield.

  For another two hours, the small squad at the summit of Tashkung watched with growing uneasiness as the Red Hammer 'weather front' boiled and swept southward. The rolling thunder of a massive nanomech swarm had rolled across the arid, windy steppe country of southern Tibet, systematically laying waste to small villages, nomadic ordu and fleeing battalions of yert (tent) horsemen and shepherds, an unstoppable, polymorphic, programmable horde of intelligent pseudo-virus assembler devices.

  Winger fidgeted inside the nanoshield, while snowdrifts piled higher and higher against the invisible walls.

  "Where the hell is UNIFORCE?" he asked. Red Hammer's going to engage us before the lifter teams are in position. Somehow, we've already been detected.

  Winger's plan was simple enough, in theory. Once commanded to engage the enemy, ANAD would replicate fast, trying to achieve a critical mass, to be able to deal with Red Hammer's numbers from a position of equal strength. When the rep phase was done, the ANAD force would be split into two and reconfigure. After a lot of tactical discussions, Johnny Winger and Dana Tallant had agreed on the camouflage: one ANAD formation would re-assemble itself to assume the molecular form of a dust cloud, a common enough occurrence in the high desert of Tibet. The second formation would reconfigure into something resembling a swarm of cyclorrhodophe subtens…better known as flies.

  Winger and Tallant had worked out the templates in a marathon session a few nights before. Now the test would come. Dust and flies--two of the most common elements of the arid steppe country.

  Would Red Hammer be fooled long enough for ANAD to infiltrate?

  The third phase was the attack. This had to be coordinated with the UNIFORCE penetration. If all went well, Serengeti would gently absorb a harmless cloud of dust and flies, only to find, when the final command was sent, that it had swallowed the Devil itself. Rapidly reconfigging into full assault state, ANAD would close with the Red Hammer mechs and shred the swarm to pieces.

  That, at least, was the plan.

  Johnny Winger got in touch with the UNIFORCE commander. His name was Major Ghali.

  "We've got enemy mechs closing fast on our position," Winger advised the Major, over the tac-net. "Somehow, they detected us…I don’t know how. We'll be engaging any moment now."

  Ghali's voice crackled back through his helmet earphones. "My force is in readiness, Lieutenant. Hold your position…and keep these mechs off my back. My lifters are airborne at this time. I'm launching strike forces now."

  Even before he secured himself for the coming onslaught, Winger heard Gibby shout over the keening wind.

  "Lieutenant…look!"

  The wintry horizon was suddenly bathed in an eerie lavender glow, as pillars of light stabbed down from the clouds. Thunder rolled across the mountains as the beam weapons ripped the air apart.

  "Killsats!" Winger squinted at the sight, momentarily taking his eyes off the ANAD imager. "They must have found a target…Ghali said they were firing now!"

  Both men watched mesmerized as shimmering columns of directed energy beams swept back and forth across the crests of the mountains, vaporizing anything in the path of the beams. Strobe flashes lit up the underside of the clouds with a pearly evanescence, stitching a weave of death across the valleys and hills.

  At the same time, red-orange bursts of explosions blossomed on the horizon. A rippling eruption of flame and smoke danced across the mountaintops, as UNIFORCE missiles homed in on their targets. Overhead, through breaks in the thick clouds, Winger caught glimpses of the lifters and their unmanned killbot drones swooping over the plateau beyond, wheeling about like vultures for another dive onto a target.

  UNIFORCE had unleashed the full fury of assault weapons, air and space, against Red Hammer.

  Now it was up to Quantum Corps to cover their asses.

  "Distance to swarm?" Winger asked.

  DPS1 Sheila Reaves was back inside the nanoshield, slaving HERF guns and coilgun bots to new coordinates. She tapped furiously at her wrist keypad, probing the oncoming swarm with electromagnetic fingers. "Two miles, Lieutenant. Closing fast…ten feet per second."

  Winger felt his neck hairs tingle. Combat did that to people, even when the enemy was a billion times smaller than a human being.

  "Platoon…button up your suits! We're going to get swarmed--"

  "--thirty seconds to first contact--"

  Now was the time. He felt it.

  "ANAD…engage now!"

  Gibby hands flew over the IC panel. "ANAD's away…reps look good. I've got a good signal…valid signal!" The IC hunched over his panel, eyes flicking from one display to the next, checking parameters. No mistakes now. "Dispersal proceeding--"

  "Command rep template, IC!" Winger didn't like the looks of the approaching storm; already, the harsh mountain sunlight had dimmed noticeably. "Send it!" He well knew that several miles behind and to their west, UNIFORCE had a staging base on the outskirts of Katmandu. If the enemy mechs broke through…or flanked them--

  Gibby complied and transmitted the Lieutenant's orders.

  ANAD signaled back: "ANAD to Hub…yiipppeee! ANAD at max propulsor…closing fast--"

  Winger ignored the outburst. ANAD was like a small child, just let out of his room to play. Only this playground was for keeps.

  "Detachment to defilade positions! Get your hypersuits buttoned up, guys!" Winger sealed his own enclosure, checked to make sure the others were doing likewise, and trotted on servo-powered legs to the trench and bunker system they had carved out of the ice and snow atop the Tashkung hill. He let the exoskeleton do the work; kneeling, then flattening him into the concealed furrow. All systems chimed off their status tones as he let the servos half-bury him in the snow.

  Just in case Serengeti broke through and the nanoshield didn't hold.

  Less than half a mile away, the snow and ice roiled in steaming clouds as Serengeti swept relentlessly toward them.

  Tense seconds ticked by. It was all timing, Winger had always warned them. All timing--now!

  "Rep cycle done!" the IC's voice was thick with tension.

  "Split the force!" Winger came back. "And send the camouflage templates. We don't have a lot of time!"

  A half mile away, even as more killsat beams stabbed down from the clouds, geysering up huge BOOMS! on the horizon, ripping the air with particle beam thunder, unseen by human eyes, ANAD and its brood of nearly a quadrillion replicants swirled into separate formations and dispersed even further, quickly assuming the 'dust and flies' configuration they had coded. As the darkening cloud bore down on the encampment, Winger thought back to the last encounter with the enemy mechs. The Vivonex lab had been no picnic and the Detachment had been lucky to get away with the casualties they had.

  Winger swallowed hard, tasted the coppery tang of fear in the back of his mouth, and counted down the seconds.

  "Activate! Activate templates NOW!"

  Winger squ
eezed his eyes shut as the wind howled overhead, buffeting his hypersuit. Snow and sleet flew in stinging sheets, building to a shrill whir, then a new tone sounded amidst the keening whine of the wind…a high-frequency chirrriiinnnggg like a high-speed drill that Winger had long ago learned to fear.

  Through the dim blur of swirling snow, Winger saw the shimmering bubble of the nanoshield collapse in an instant, shredded into atomic fluff by the onrushing mechs. It had been Gibby's idea to use the bubble as a decoy, and to bury themselves outside the shield, allowing themselves to be enveloped by the swarm.

  "It might just give us a few extra seconds," the IC had explained.

  Winger gritted his teeth, reminding himself to report Sergeant Gibbs for a special commendation if they ever got back to Table Top.

  His suit servos told the truth; Serengeti mechs were already hard at work attached to the suit's outer laminate armor, busily disassembling its latticework shell of atoms.

  Winger knew the assault would come to this. It was all part of the decoy operation--pull the swarm away from the UNIFORCE base and give Ghali and his men a chance to take out the Red Hammer targets. Sucker the enemy mechs in close and then--Somehow, they had to tough it out, wait and pray, wait for just the right moment…it's all about timing, it's all about timing…

  Now was the time.

  "IC1!" Winger forced out. He could feel the mechs whirring away at the shell, digging in, sharp razors whirling for his skin--"IC1…NOW! Attack config!…give it to 'em, right in the chops!"

  And he thought he heard through his headset, over the shrill blast of the wind and the snow and the high-freq whine of the assault, the chipper yelping of ANAD itself:

  "Yahoooo!"

  Johnny Winger decided to chance a move and help Gibby out. Even as he gouged a path through the shifting snow, he felt his suit servos go. Suddenly the hypersuit weighed its full quarter ton and Winger clawed blindly for traction, trying to drag himself along on muscle power alone. Pulling and clawing, he finally managed to reach the IC1's position. Gibby was himself half-buried in blowing snow.

  "Tactical report?"

  Gibbs whirred inside his own hypersuit; already, his own servos were grinding down. "Re-config's proceeding…I'm sounding now…looks like quite a battle."

  "Any indication the enemy's split up? Anybody heading for the UNIFORCE camp?"

  Gibby's helmet wobbled. "No, sir…seems like the whole force is concentrated here!"

  "Good!"

  Serengeti roared over them, pressing down with the weight of a tidal wave. Above, beside, and all around them, unseen armies clashed and fought, as ANAD re-formed from its camouflaged redoubt and tore into the Red Hammer mechs.

  On the IC panel, which Gibby had linked into their helmet eyepieces, soundings told the story. Second by second, the camp was being steadily consumed yet ANAD cleaved and slashed and wrecked enemy mechs in uncounted millions. Still the swarm rolled on as each master dueled with the other, throwing everything they had into the maelstrom.

  It was a classic war of attrition, slaughter and mayhem, a thousand Verduns played out on a battlefront scarcely a hundred yards wide. ANAD replicants cleaved Serengeti mechs atom from atom, exploding tight bonds, wreaking valence, wresting carbenes and radicals and ester groups from the enemy's grasp, all at blazing speed, hollowing out the enemy swarm from the inside out.

  Yet even as ANAD re-configured and closed for battle, Serengeti's speed blunted the worst effects.

  "It's like trying to squash a balloon, Lieutenant!" Gibbs was reading off mass density and pressure flux from the center of the battle swarm. "Mash it here and it pops back there! I can't seem to out-replicate…we're getting out-numbered and out-slugged everywhere--!"

  Winger switched to remote data feed and let Gibby's IC controls talk to his own helmet eyepiece. He swore, scanning the figures; icons representing the ever-shifting battle throbbed and flickered. Gibbs was right.

  Something was slowing ANAD down, mucking up the rep cycle, clogging the responsiveness of the assembler to commands.

  "Let me try--" Winger pressed close to the controller's remote drive and took direct command of ANAD from his own wristpad. That violated every tactic they had ever agreed on in wargames and sims; no one, not even Johnny Winger, could 'fly' ANAD through a combat action like this. It was all supposed to be coded and stored beforehand…the templates, the script of actions ANAD would follow. No human could react fast enough to deal with such a fast-changing tactical situation.

  Trouble was, it wasn't working.

  Thirty feet away, half buried in a snowdrift, DPS1 Sheila Reaves saw a flicker of something on her own helmet eyepiece.

  "Hello---?" she muttered to herself. When the Detachment had encamped a few hours before and she and Buddha Nguyen had left the nanoshield to set up the HERF guns, Reaves had taken it upon herself to launch a small flight of Superfly drones, recalibrated drones, overhead. The drones would be a last ditch tripwire, in case any Red Hammer mechs tried leaving the perimeter of the camp, in case enemy mechs leaked westward and south, toward the UNIFORCE base they were tasked to protect.

  Now, Superfly was talking to her, dribbling bits and pieces of a signal from something it had just detected.

  A Red Hammer element leaving the scene of the crime? A small squad of nanomechs sneaking through?

  Reaves blinked and stared again at the signal. "It's inside…close by--" And the signature was all wrong. It seemed like Serengeti…but then again it didn't. And it was intermittent…something was blocking the return. A concentration of ANAD, maybe? Snowdrifts piling up? An outcropping of rock?

  Curious, Reaves finagled her hands around to where she could reach her wristpad, careful to stay hunkered down, making herself small, as the mech war shrieked overhead. She tapped on her wristpad, measuring signal strength in several directions, letting the chip compute an intersect. There…the thing chirped in her headset. Now…she had a fix. She maneuvered her body around inside her heavy hypersuit, until she could get an eye on the coordinates---

  ---and was stunned…though maybe she shouldn't have been.

  The chip had fixed the source of the Superfly return at the exact coordinates occupied by Lieutenant Nathan Caden. Thirty two yards away, bearing two-zero-niner degrees. Lieutenant Caden was hunkered down, no heavy swarm anywhere near him at all, yet Superfly was reading something, getting some kind of return, shifted a little, muffled, but there nonetheless.

  Sheila Reaves squinted hard through her helmet, but the snow and the swarm made vision difficult.

  Somehow, she had to let Lieutenant Winger know about this.

  Winger knew he had to find a way to save the assault. His own hypersuit was starting to lose integrity...he could hear the high-freq vibrations as Serengeti mechs bore into the shell layers…something had to be done…and fast.

  What was it he'd always told them back at Table Top: it's all about the timing, Major. You've got to kind of feel your way through--

  "Easy for you to say, kiddo--" Winger forced out. Breathing fast, in shallow breaths, forcing his mind to ignore the whirring sawblade inches from his spine, he bore in on the imager in his eyepiece and seized control of the thing from Gibby, ripping the ANAD master free of a swarming, smothering, suffocating assault.

  "--get small, baby…get real small--"

  With a quick flick of the config driver on his wristpad, he pulled ANAD free of engagement and folded down carbene effectors left and right. Then he thumbed a new command through the pad's coupler: fold here, cleave at this group, invert plane and spin…do the hokey-pokey and you shake it all about…a full combat reduction fold. Everywhere at the same time, ANAD and its daughters collapsed like a crumpled napkin and spun their way out of entrapment, scooting off on max propulsor power.

  "ANAD to Hub…whew…thanks, Boss…whatever that was…it came just in time…ANAD's just glad to be out of that mess--"

  "Don't get too comfortable, litt
le guy--" Winger gritted out. "I've got an idea--"

  He tweaked the assembler, trimmed it for speed and flew out of the hurricane as fast as ANAD's propulsors would churn.

  "Got to re-group," he muttered to himself. "Got to fall back and re-config...if I can…countercode and hold another line…."

  "ANAD to Hub…we need to re-think this strategy…come at this a different way…enemy mechs are too fast, too fast--"

  "I'm working on it, buster…don't wet your pants, just hang on--"

  The crescendo deepened above him as Serengeti's numbers began to take effect. ANAD was right--Serengeti was too fast. Or was ANAD too slow?

  Already, Winger's hypersuit had seized; servos were gone and life support was dicey. They'd have to get the hell out and soon if the Detachment were to be saved. And get a warning off to Ghali and the UNIFORCE base.

  There just has to be a way--what's wrong with this program? Frustrated, Winger wanted to scream. Serengeti was the same technology…hell, it was practically an ANAD clone. How the hell could it outduel ANAD everytime--

  Red FAIL lights lit up his eyepiece, a Christmas tree of death, as replicants winked out, their processors completely disassembled by Serengeti. Winger swore under his breath, tapping out commands on the wristpad.

  They were losing the battle and he knew it. Every second's delay brought more FAIL icons to his eyepiece. Worse, ANAD knew it too. His plaintive voice grew more and more panicked.

  "ANAD to Hub…can't hold structure! I'm reconfiguring…emergency truncation…shutting down peripheral systems!"

  "Johnny Winger--" he muttered to himself. "it isn't working---this is not going to work--" He fumbled with the command stream--trying another--trying to drown out ANAD's desperate cries--countermanding the replicant's efforts to save itself--add effectors here…a fullerene hook there…swivel this group…cleave and stick an ester here. Winger's fingers flew over the keypad. Try anything…try everything--

  "ANAD losing signal strength…losing fine…motor…control--losing…attitude--losing…orientation…propulsors…losing…sensory--molec-u-l-a-r--a-n-a-l-y-s-I-s--"

  ANAD was weakening right before his eyes.

  Adrift overhead in a tornado of nanomechs, ANAD hunkered down and fought off wave after wave of attacks. Winger's commands came through but ANAD's processor buffered the string and diverted everything to self-defense. In the very center of the onslaught, ANAD had two choices: fight to live or accept commands, divert defenses and die while executing the CC1's commands.

  ANAD chose to live.

  It took only a few more seconds for Winger to realize the situation was hopeless. The book said tactical retreat was in order. But Winger didn't go by the book. He wasn't ready to give up on ANAD just yet…not while they still had HERF guns and coilgun bots and an ounce of grit left in them. He staggered to his feet, under the full weight of the hypersuit, and spied Dana Tallant doing the same, a distant twenty feet away, dim but faintly visible through the snow and the swarm. No servo-assist; muscles and willpower got the Lieutenant upright. He had to make sure at least the rest of the Detachment could still get away. He wasn't putting them through another Lion's Rock again.

  The high-freq whine had changed tone. Must be through the laminates, he thought. Another six mil of hardcoat shell and it's my skin…

  "Fall back! Fall back now!" Winger fought off the cloud of mechs now thick enough to blot out the fierce Himalayan sun, clawed frantically at his helmet faceplate. "Detachment…listen up! Cease fire and withdraw! Fall back to the lifter…leave your gear--"

  Tallant's voice was weak and out of breath. "What about you, Lieutenant? We can't just--"

  "Get going!" Winger forced out. "I'll be right behind you…I've got to set up a perimeter…something to contain these buggers…then get to the HERF guns--"

  "ANAD weakening…inner--l-a-t-t-i-c-e--a-t-o-m----"

  Through the luminescent speckling of exponentiating mechs in front of his face, Winger caught glimpses of their encampment, now a chewed-up wasteland of wrecked equipment. The Serengeti horde had expanded across the phase line the Detachment had set up at the crest of the Tashkung hills and billowed out to better than five miles in diameter.

  We can't stop it! Winger realized. He tripped over a mound in the snow, got up and with a start, realized it was a carcass. Marc Seurat…the CEC2, or what was left of him. Seurat had replaced Joe McReady. "Barnes, Reaves, Caden, everybody…fall back now!"

  Reaves' thick voice came through his headset. "Uh, Lieutenant…there's something you should see here…something strange--"

  Winger staggered through blowing snow to Reaves' position. The DPS showed him the strange soundings from Superfly.

  "It's kind of there, then, it isn't there," she explained. "Superfly's sounding some kind of nano around here. Small swarm…almost a point source."

  Winger saw the returns on her wristpad display. "Location, Sergeant?"

  She indicated Lieutenant Caden, now slogging his way downslope toward the lifter. Caden was helping M'Bela lug the TinyTown unit through the snowdrifts. M'Bela was waving at his invisible assailants, trying to bat them away. Caden seemed unaffected.

  "Superfly's sounding some kind of intermittent nano, sir. It's real screwy. First, you see it. Then you don't. And it's not this crap buzzing around us, either."

  Winger and Reaves bent over, squinting through the murk at her wristpad. What the hell was going on? Did Caden have some kind of experimental, non-reg device on him? Was he running a test or something? The Lieutenant from California had a reputation for free-lancing, even on maneuvers and sims. It had happened before.

  Winger was instantly suspicious. When they got back to the lifter, if they got back--

  "I'll speak with the Lieutenant," Winger decided. "Get your ass in gear…and make sure HERF's ready to blow."

  "Cocked and loaded, sir."

  Winger followed her downslope, slipping and sliding across icy patches, hurrying as fast as his deadweight hypersuit would let him.

  "Very well, DPS…when we get everybody back inside the lifter, I'll give the word."

  For the beleaguered warriors of 1st Nano, that moment never came. The swarm fell upon the camp with a ferocity never experienced before. One moment, the nanotroopers had been slogging and slashing their way down the hill toward the ledge where the black arthropod shape of the lifter was dimly visible in the haze. The next moment, Serengeti seemed to swarm ever tighter, thickening the freezing air with a spongy mist, making hard to move, even to breathe.

  "ARRRGGGHHH!" someone called out over the crewnet. "--my eyes….my face--!!"

  Johnny Winger could see they'd never make the lifter. "Forget the gear!" he shouted over the circuit. All around him, hypersuited soldiers had fallen or stumbled, dotting the blowing snowscape with carcasses. One man seemed unaffected, dragging a pallet of gear on, seemingly impervious to the assault. Winger gritted his teeth, wincing…imagining the first nicks of the mechs coming through the shell of his suit. "Form up around me if you can! Come ON, you assholes! DPS…give 'em a kick of HERF…fry the buggers NOW!"

  Seconds later, the drone-snap of the HERF pulse gun blasted across the crest of the Tashkung. A thick breeze of momentarily stunned nanomechs clattered against Winger's hypersuit. When the second pulse shook the ground and he felt the thermal of high-frequency RF wash over them, Winger willed his aching muscles to go.

  "Now, troops…NOW! Gogogogogogo…!"

  But the only place he went was straight down.

  A deafening roar rolled across the escarpment as the HERF pulse loosened thousands of tons of snow and ice. Picking up speed, an entire face of the Tashkung came free in torrential sheets of ice and the very ground slipped out from under his feet. Winger felt his stomach slam into his mouth as the avalanche split a seam of snow and ice nearly a quarter mile long.

  The western shank of Tashkung fell free and plummeted downward, a t
hickening, roaring cascade that swept everything before it.

  The last thing Johnny Winger saw was a tiny crevice…a black oval in the whiteness of the world. It was a cave, yawning up at him as the force of the spill hammered him down the mountainside.

  With every ounce of strength he had left, he twisted and lunged for the opening, snagging something--he wasn't sure what, perhaps a rock shelf--and pirouetted head over heels, slamming himself upside down and back first against the face of Tashkung. The maneuver was crazy, it defied the laws of physics and common sense. And it worked.

  He plunged headfirst into the gaping mouth of the cave and landed hard, breathless, and still reeling, with the roar of the icewave just inches from his face. The cave vibrated with the force of avalanche and Winger heaved in great gulps of air, then slumped face first, still in his hypersuit, his helmet faceplate fogged over completely, spiraling down--down--down, into unconsciousness.

  He came to and heard an eerie whistling howl ringing in his head. Groggy, stiff and sore, he de-helmeted and sucked in cold air, then remembered what had happened. The whistle was the buffeting of wind gusts across the mouth of the cave. Somehow, incredibly, he had fallen into a narrow fissure protected by overhang. The ledge above the entrance had held throughout the avalanche. Outside, night had come to the Himalayas, and a frigid blast of air greeted him as he stuck his head out.

  No mechs. No swarm. No mindless horde of Serengeti assemblers eating away at him.

  At least, we got rid of them, he told himself.

  But he spoke too soon.

  A faint buzz emanated from his helmet headset. With a start, he realized it might be Tallant, or Reaves or someone else. Where were they all? Had any survived?

  He poked his head back into the helmet, squinted and strained to hear the faint voice whispering.

  "ANAD to Hub…ANAD to Hub…is anybody there? ANAD to Hub…broadcasting on tactical channel two…broadcasting in the clear…ANAD to--"

  A more joyous sound, he'd never heard.

  "ANAD, you old scumbag…where the hell are you?"

  The timbre of the assembler's synthetic voice changed slightly, as if it were truly pleased to hear a response.

  "ANAD to Hub…is that you, Lieutenant?"

  "Damn straight, it's me. CC1 in the flesh--" he groaned as he rolled over. Might be something broken back there--he felt a stabbing pain in his legs. "ANAD, what's your position--?"

  There was a short pause. Then, even as Winger winced, feeling along the suit juncture at his waist ring, wondering what might be broken and what could be salvaged, he heard a distant whine--a high-freq whine--and froze.

  Were they coming back? Another Serengeti swarm--coming back to finish him off?

  The whine grew louder and right over his head, dust began to fall from the roof of the fissure. The whine pitched even higher and, before he knew it, a small hole had opened up in the rock. The whine subsided slightly and a shimmering haze exited the hole, before dispersing into the air.

  "ANAD to Hub…reporting for duty, sir--"

  In spite of a fiery stab of pain in his hip, Johnny Winger laughed out loud.

  ANAD and his brood--what was left of them after being chewed up in battle--had gone small--sloughed off everything but his outer shell--and transited into the mountain itself. Winger learned the little assembler had laboriously penetrated the innards of Tashkung, occasionally rising toward the surface every so often--probing for friendlies, listening and sounding for Serengeti, then diving back down and slipping through the rock plates a little further.

  "Awfully lonesome down there, Lieutenant--this place is different from the last one…crystalline planes are easier to navigate. Not as many loose radicals and electrons, knocking me around--"

  "Glad to hear it--" Winger eased his helmet off again, but kept it close enough to hear ANAD's synthetic voice. "Where is everybody? What happened to the swarm?"

  ANAD had a few answers.

  "Enemy swarm has retreated and re-grouped…near the border. After the shock wave…it was stunned. Had to re-assemble. New swarm forming three point five miles northeast of this position…bearing zero seven five degrees…forming at ground level. Swarm being re-constituted…ANAD has not engaged new swarm…ANAD--"

  Something in its voice--what was it? a quaver of fear, maybe?--caught Winger's attention.

  "Hub to ANAD…what is it? You were saying--"

  He felt a warm tickle on the back of his neck, almost as if the assembler swarm were a dog licking him, seeking human contact, tasting him--

  "ANAD not fully functional, Hub…format conflicts…version faults…cannot execute all commands…I--ANAD…not whole--"

  Not whole. Then, Winger remembered. The interface controls had seemed sluggish. The whole cycle of replication seemed out of whack.

  Suddenly, it came to him. Winger sat up straight, yelping as his bruised ribs and hip complained. "It's your program, ANAD. It has to be. Version faults. Format conflicts."

  He thought for a moment. "ANAD, report program status. List parameters. All configs and registers." He cycled his wristpad display, and watched as ANAD returned a complete listing of his CPU status, dumping the contents of the quantum computer.

  Winger's forehead wrinkled and he clucked at the scrolling data. "This is crap. What is this?" Nothing made any sense. His suspicions piqued, he dug a little deeper, then with a dawning realization, he understand what had happened.

  Somebody had dumped the current control system and substituted an older version. ANAD was running on some kind of jalopy software. And Winger was pretty sure he knew who was behind it.

  "ANAD," he said, "we've got to get you whole and functional again. We've got a mission and the enemy's still out there. And you've got to help me find the rest of the Detachment too."

  "ANAD…not whole…version faults--"

  "Yeah, yeah, I know that. I can fix that." It had never been done before, even in sims. Doc Frost had theorized about it. But no one really believed it could be done.

  Johnny Winger was about to try. The only way he'd be able to get a functioning ANAD, with all the effectors and capabilities the assembler had been designed for, was to dump the brains of the device and drive ANAD himself. One to one. No software. No buffers. No control system. Just Lieutenant Johnny Winger in direct control of the assembler's systems, navigating like a hot rod driver through the quantum world of atoms and radicals and fuzzy electron clouds.

  Doc Frost would probably faint if he knew about this.

  He decided to spell the news out straight. ANAD was supposed to have the cognitive capacity of a small child. Think of him as a five-year old, Doc Frost always said. Just about ready for his first day at school--

  Okay, Winger thought. School is about to be in session. For both of us. He dragged himself to the front of the cave, peered out. Black humps of distant mountains loomed on the horizon. Slowly, carefully, he laid out his plan to ANAD, over the voice circuit.

  There was a momentary pause. He imagined ANAD mulling the idea over inside his nanometric brain. Then:

  "ANAD to Hub…are you sure you really want to do this?"

  Winger took a deep breath. "ANAD, trust me…this'll work. And I don't have time to explain it or argue about it."

  ANAD made no more complaints but Winger knew the little assembler couldn't be pleased. The control software enabled human beings--astronomically larger entities than nanoscale devices--to pilot the assemblers through the subatomic world without smashing everything to pieces. Driving an ANAD without the command buffer would be like doing brain surgery with kitchen utensils.

  But Johnny Winger could think of no other way to fight ANAD against the Red Hammer mechs.

  He went to work on his wristpad, changing programs, setting up the keypad and control bud to operate the assembler directly, porting ANAD's soundings directly to his helmet eyepiece. Then he commanded ANAD to dump its program.
<
br />   "ANAD to Hub…I think…this isn't such a great idea…could we talk about this, Hub--?"

  "Later," Winger muttered. He confirmed the action through his wrist keypad and it was done. Though the cave was in near darkness, a faint iridescent shimmer hovered near the roof, the remnants of ANAD and its remaining replicants. There was no discernible change in appearance after the assembler's buffer had been dumped.

  "Well--" he flexed his fingers, lightly tapped the control bud on his wristpad, "--here goes." Now was the time to test his work.

  The first rule of atomgrabbing was to relax. Winger sniffed at that…the rulemakers never imagined a nanowarrior would be stuck in a freezing cave in the Himalayas in a damaged hypersuit, trying this kind of stunt. He fixed his helmet squarely, let the imager view come to his eyepiece. When his eyes had adjusted, he saw that he was floating in a sleetstorm of polygons and spheres and elongated elastic bands…sparks and arcs zapped the edges of the view--electrons let loose from bondage with their parent atoms.

  "Feels jumpier than I remember--" he muttered. He touched, then nudged the control bud on his wristpad.

  "ANAD to Hub…hey, watch it--!"

  The imager view careened crazily and he started a dizzying spin. "Sorry about that." It took several minutes to get the thing stabilized. "Jesus, the slightest touch and I'm out of trim." It had been months since his last turn in the simulator, getting the feel for forces and motions at such infinitesimal scale. Everywhere he turned, van der Waals forces slapped him like ocean waves. Radicals and ion clusters came drifting by--little lightning bolts that discharged if they got too close, adding to the spin.

  "I'll try to dock with something." That was the true test of an atomgrabber. Could he use the assembler's effectors to snag something or park ANAD on the front porch of a molecule, without shattering the thing to pieces, or getting bounced off? "Hey--that looks like a candidate--maybe a--"

  "Calcite molecule--" ANAD reported. "Spalled off the walls of this cave. Watch out for the oxygens…valence is near maxed out. The wrong touch and--"

  "Yeah, yeah, I get the picture," Winger answered. Nothing like a back seat driver the size of an atom. "What say we scope this bugger out for a parking place?"

  "I don't know…this isn't such a--remember, those are covalent bonds---"

  But Winger ignored him. "Oh--!" Winger drove ANAD forward, then grunted sheepishly. The calcite's carbonate 'fingers' flicked ANAD away. He'd approached on a poor vector and got bounced off by stiff bond forces. "Sorry, pal--I'll just--" He grimaced, trying to regain control, clumsily manipulating the tiny control bud on his wrist. "That's weird--molecule just up and spun me around…what gives? Usually, you can just barrel on in and squat between electrons."

  "Ummm…ANAD to Hub…I meant to remind you about that. Remember AUTO-BOND? Before the software, you could do that…fly right in close and probe for a soft spot."

  "Yeah, I remember that."

  "Well now, Hub, you don't have AUTO-BOND anymore. No way to figure resistance and equilibrium on the fly. You gotta do the math yourself."

  Winger shook his head. This would take some getting used to. Math had never been his strong point.

  Bit by bit, over the next hour, Johnny Winger gained some sense of what it would take to 'fly' ANAD manually. He was surprised how much he'd forgotten. Auto-controls had taken a lot of the feel away from the average atomgrabber. You had to be on your toes to keep up with the Brownian motion, the ionic crackles and sticky radicals and turbulence in this world. He wasn't fully comfortable with the feel of the control bud; it was touchy and sensitive and his fingers missed the finer control of the interface panel. But it would have to do.

  He tried probing the medium with ANAD's sensors, tasting pH, concentration gradient, pressure. For kicks, he toggled the rep 'pickle', one cycle, just to see what a basic replication was like. In the blink of an eye, the image jostled slightly.

  And that's when he heard Dana Tallant's husky voice crackle over his headset.

  "CC1, this is CC2, calling on any channel…come back--"

  Winger practically choked when he heard a live human voice. "Lieutenant Tallant, you old witch! Where the hell are you?"

  "CC1--receiving you loud and clear. I'm down here--at the base of the mountain. Where are you?"

  It took nearly an hour for what was left of 1st Nano to re-group. In a narrow, ice and snow-clogged ravine at the foot of Tashkung, near the shattered wreckage of the lifter, Johnny Winger counted off his troops. Tallant was there, looking scratched and beat up but alive. Gibby, Moby, Mighty Mite and Reaves. Seurat had been killed, shredded by Serengeti at the summit, then buried in the avalanche that followed. Ozzie Tsukota was there and Buddha Nguyen, looking pale and drawn. And Lieutenant Caden.

  I'll have a word with you later, pal.

  "We thought you were buried," Tallant told him. They picked through the carcass of the liftjet, pulling out pieces and scraps of gear they could still use.

  Winger explained what had happened. Then he told her about ANAD.

  "I'm sure that's the answer, Dana. Somehow, his control system's corrupted. Buggy version or old copy--it doesn't matter. I dumped it. Now I can fly ANAD myself, with no buffer. Just me and the atoms--the old-fashioned way."

  Gibby was skeptical. A dark bruise covered half his face and he winced as nanoderm patches were applied. "Good way to crash an assembler, if you ask me, Lieutenant. Humans are too big, too clumsy. It's like flying a jetscooter in a china shop. Everything winds up smashed to bits."

  "We've been following some interesting feeds on our eyepieces," Tallant told him. "Looks like a small element of Superfly got separated. Wound up too far over the border…I guess it got behind the Serengeti swarm and somehow survived."

  "What kind of feed?"

  "Visual, mostly. Some infrared, EM too. Take a look--" She stabbed a few buttons on her wristpad and the imagery materialized in front of Winger's eyes.

  It took a few moments for his eyes to discern anything, but gradually man-made structures became visible among the shadowy humps of the mountains. By the map, they were well inside China, near a tiny hamlet called Gyirong. The town was a small patch of low stone buildings cradled in a steep ravine of severe mountains. Just outside the town, Superfly found the laser site.

  As Reaves manipulated the imagery, the destruction of the UNIFORCE attack became apparent. Several beam projectors had been toppled off their mounts, crashing off to one side of a control building. Fuel storage spheres lined one side of the installation; their domes burst open like cracked eggs. At one end of the half-mile square installation, a small power plant lay in smoking ruins. Debris and wreckage lay strewn about the snowdrifts. There was no outward sign of human life.

  "Red Hammer's laserworks," Reaves narrated, as Superfly cruised overhead, panning back and forth.

  "Any sign of activity?"

  "None human--" Reaves admitted. She showed Winger the Superfly control pad. "But he's picking up something--signature looks like an unusual concentration of nanomech debris. Could be remnants of the laser but I doubt it. There's enough atomic fluff here to make me think a Serengeti swarm--or something like it--is still in the area. Lieutenant--" Reaves's eyes met his--"I have a hunch this may be the mother lode."

  Winger was thinking the same thing. "Red Hammer's main base…" he completed her thought. "If that's true--if there's even a chance that's true, we've got a hell of an opportunity. Where's UNIFORCE now?"

  "Sorry to report, Lieutenant--" it was Buddha Nguyen, "UNIFORCE was attacked by the swarm. Ghali and several commanders are dead. They have pulled back, all the way back to Katmandu…to the airfield. To regroup."

  Nathan Caden added, "There in no position to counterattack."

  "Which is exactly what we should do," Winger said. "Now, while we've got them reeling. We've poked a stick in the hornet's nest, troops. But all that does is make them mad. Now
, we have to knock down the nest and stomp it into the ground."

  "I'm with you, sir," Reaves said. "But how?"

  Winger's eyes narrowed. He stared back up the towering snowmount flanks of Tashkung. Dawn was just breaking in the eastern valleys and the mountain summit seemed to glow with orange radiance. "We have to go in. Fight them, swarm to swarm. Flush 'em out and take 'em on in their own backyard."

  "Inside China?" Caden asked. "We don't have a mandate for that."

  "No," said Winger. "But maybe we can get one." The tactical need was there. If they could assault Red Hammer at its own base, they could disrupt the cartel's operations for a long time, possibly even break the last control link between the cartel and the Serengeti superswarms. It seemed worth a little diplomatic scuffle with the Chinese.

  Winger got on the vidlink back to Table Top. "This we gotta call in."

  After a few minutes, Major Jurgen Kraft's harried face materialized on Winger's wristpad screen.

  "What the hell happened there?" Kraft stormed. "UNISPACE put the laser out of commission. You were supposed to coordinate with Ghali and the UNIFORCE team. I just heard Ghali's dead and the blue hats are licking their wounds."

  "My fault, sir," Winger said. "Red Hammer launched a swarm and we couldn't contain them. They flanked us, got behind us and assaulted Ghali's men. It was a rout." Winger swallowed hard, remembering how close it had been for 1st Nano. "We took some casualties too, sir. But we've re-grouped."

  "Send me the brief."

  "Major, our DPS is in contact with remnant Superfly that somehow strayed into Chinese territory. It's scouting the laser site now."

  Kraft held up a hand. "I know, I know. We've got satellite imagery of the whole place. Killsats made a big smoking hole in the ground. That's why I can't understand what happened to UNIFORCE. After the sats fried the installation, there should have been time to mount the assault."

  "Major, the swarm was on us too fast…like they were expecting us, and knew our position almost exactly." He stopped short of voicing his real suspicion, about Lieutenant Caden. Not on a vidlink circuit. That he'd have to encrypt. "And Superfly's still detecting nano at the site, sir, at least signature of assembler swarms--localized hot spots, atomic debris, evidence of activity, sir. I think he may have located Red Hammer's main base."

  Kraft was skeptical. "At the laser site…that's ridiculous. Why would Red Hammer locate a key base in plain site like that?"

  "The installation's in plain site, but there are mountains and gorges and canyons and ravines all around the town, Major. It's just a hunch, but--well, sir, if we could send ANAD in, configged as a reconswarm, even underground, we might get lucky. I'm convinced Red Hammer's thick in this area…there's something big nearby. Otherwise, why protect it with a laser?"

  Kraft conceded the point, but had a warning. "You are not to cross the border with anything bigger than an atom. Is that understood, Lieutenant? China's already touchy about border incursions, nano or otherwise. I'll talk to UNSAC…see if I can get permission for small operation. The Chinese don't like anybody snooping around their borders. And they've got clout with the UN…a lot of clout. Clear?"

  Winger nodded glumly. "Yes, sir."

  "Get 1st Nano shipshape again, Lieutenant. I've already ordered reinforcements sent up from Singapore Base. You may have to exfiltrate and come back home for now. You have permission to plan and sim a small reconswarm but that's all. Not a single atom across that border unless I give the word. Understood?"

  "Yes, sir."

  Kraft signed off. Winger stared at his wrist for a long moment, wondering. It was foolish to disobey direct orders. That's how you got court-martialed. Or worse. Still, by sheer chance, Superfly had strayed across the border and nobody had too much heartburn about that. At least, not yet.

  He could config ANAD for an underground approach, like they'd done to Vivonex in Switzerland. But he knew ANAD struggled traveling through dense matter like rock and the recon would take a long time to unfold because of that.

  He headed off to help the others salvage what they could from the lifter wreckage, still mulling over the possibilities.

  An hour later, the bad news came in. Kraft paged Winger and gave it to him straight. Permission for an operation against Red Hammer inside Chinese territory was denied, by order of the UN Commissioner of Security Affairs. Winger could tell Kraft didn't like it either.

  "It's politics, Lieutenant. My hands are tied. The Chinese know what happened last night and they're furious. They raised a hell of a stink with UNSAC and UNIFORCE. 'No interference in local affairs,' or something like that. UNSAC just put out the word to everybody."

  Winger was disappointed, but not surprised. "The Chinese are covering for Red Hammer. The cartel's got sticky fingers in high places."

  "So it would seem. But like any good soldier, we obey orders and do as we're told. We'll have to get at Red Hammer another way."

  Winger strolled away from the lifter wreckage, out of hearing distance of the others. The entire unit was busily sifting and sorting gear from the smashed liftjet, shuffling through knee-deep snowdrifts like polar explorers. Overhead, the morning sun was hard and bright. And the Singapore contingent was due overhead any minute.

  "Major, are we making any progress fighting those airborne swarms?"

  Kraft shrugged. "We can track them for awhile. But they disperse and re-form quickly. It's like trying to fight the weather. One by one, we've isolated control links…Vivonex, the Pharmex lab…there may be others. And WHO's making progress designing and testing a treatment for those already infected. We'll be tasked with that, I'm sure…it's going to be a nanobotic antidote. But so far, Dr. Keino and Dr. Macalvey haven't been able to show the antidote works very well. Efficacy is the term they use. Serengeti's a nasty bugger…worse than HNRIV. It actually fights off every intruder…and so far, the doctors haven't had any more success inside the human body than we have. It's frustrating. And the number of infected or addicted grows everyday. The plague's spreading…it's already crossed into the Americas."

  Winger thought about his suspicions of Caden, decided not to mention them on the vidlink. He needed more evidence. Suspicions alone wouldn't be enough to pull a line officer from front-line duty…not someone of Caden's rank. He'd have to have more than that.

  Kraft signed off and Winger informed the Detachment they'd be going back to Table Top, after a brief detour at Singapore.

  "We've got to find another way to attack Red Hammer," he told them. "We can't get China's permission to recon or assault what may be their main base." He didn't bother hiding his disgust with the order.

  The Detachment went back to work. Moments later, the camouflaged waverider shape of a Quantum Corps lifter appeared alongside Tashkung mountain, descending on her jets toward a tiny clearing on the ledge. Winger watched as the pilots negotiated the downdrafts and crosswinds, nestling the ungainly bird in a deft series of maneuvers, right on the edge of the precipice.

  He went looking for Sheila Reaves and found the DPS tech at the rear of the wrecked lifter, pawing through scorched and smashed gear, sorting what was salvageable from what was to be destroyed.

  "Reaves, have you got any Superfly in the immediate vicinity?"

  The DPS sergeant pointed to a display waterfalling along the top of her wristpad. "Got a few birds up top, Lieutenant." She pointed skyward, toward what looked like a circling formation of mountain hawks, soaring on thermals a thousand feet above them. "Just to be safe."

  "Good. You getting anything…anything…around this site, that is?"

  He inclined his head in the direction of Lieutenant Caden.

  Reaves immediately understood and shook her head. "No, sir. The returns I saw before have vanished. No nanobarrier. No halo. Nothing. The Detachment is clean and green, so far as 'Fly can detect."

  "Curious," Winger muttered. "Very curious." He trotted off
. "Thanks, Reaves."

  Winger found Caden, helping load the new lifter with gear from the wreckage.

  He pulled the Lieutenant aside.

  "What's going on, pal?" he asked. "Are you part of this detachment or not?"

  Caden scowled back at him. "What the hell are you talking about, Lieutenant?"

  Winger explained what Reaves had detected. "You know regulations, same as me. If you've got some kind of personal shield or halo on you, you better ditch it now. I won't have anyone endangering the mission or any of my Detachment."

  Caden finished passing a few items to the lifter crewman and stopped. He glared back at Winger.

  "You got a lot of nerve, Winger. I'm right here on the front lines, same as you. When we get swarmed, I take the same chances. The Major detailed me to this Detachment and I've got a job to do. I plan to do it to the best of my ability."

  "Question is: what exactly is your job? Ever since we started this mission, ever since we started fighting HNRIV and Serengeti, you've acted like something special. You got some kind of secret orders I don't know about?"

  "As a matter of fact, I have the same orders as you. And if I did have special orders, you're the last person I'd report to, Winger. Atomgrabbers may think they run this Corps, but that's a crock. Everybody's got a specialty--everybody contributes."

  "Yeah…so what's your specialty: giving me a headache?"

  Caden knew that Winger still had remnant mechs in the back of his head, even if the Boy-Wonder Lieutenant had no idea. He'd have to play this straight.

  "What's eating you anyway, Winger? Mad at yourself for letting UNIFORCE get swarmed?"

  Winger swallowed hard. That was too close. He growled, "I'm just mad we can't seem to stop this bugger. Everytime ANAD gets in close--" he shrugged, unable to explain his frustration.

  Caden smirked. "This is a young man's game, you know. Maybe you've lost a bit of your touch--"

  "Not likely. Maybe you bollixed up the program somehow." Winger glared back at him. Caden tried to return the stare, then chose to turn away and help steady a heavy crate that had almost slipped out of the cargo hold.

  "Johnny Winger…you're jealous and you know it. You've made a few mistakes and some of that golden tarnish has rubbed off. And it's eating you alive."

  "Yeah, right. Caden…I'm a better atomgrabber than you now and I'll always be a better atomgrabber than you and we both know it." He put a finger in the Lieutenant's snarling face. "Major Kraft assigned me command of this Detachment. If I find you're messing with my nano, you will have one hell of a bad day. Is that clear, mister?"

  Caden didn't trouble to look back but went about his business of helping load the lifter.

  Winger stalked off.

  The replacement lifter took off, after the wrecked craft had been stripped of everything valuable. According to regs, anything as big as a lifter couldn't be left behind in one piece, so close to the enemy's position. Winger ordered a quick ANAD launch, then replicated the assembler to fashion a small horde of choppers. Once the master was back inside TinyTown, Winger programmed the chopper swarm to make quick work of the lifter wreckage.

  As the new lifter rose from the ice ledge in a cloud of steam and snow, the wreckage was rapidly consumed in a fury of nanomech disassembly. Inside of an hour, the whole crash site would be a melted slagheap of atomic debris. The choppers were programmed to commit seppuku when they were done, effectively disassembling themselves into fluff.

  The lifter turned south, heading for Singapore Base. From there, a hyperjet would take the Detachment back to Table Top Mountain.

  En route, Johnny Winger vidlinked to Major Kraft over an encrypted line. Kraft had Security Branch chief Major Lofton with him.

  Winger confided his suspicions about Caden, including the evidence Sheila Reaves had dug up. He laid out his case point by point: the sluggish performance of ANAD, the way Caden seemed to avoid being swarmed in attacks, Reaves' detecting a personal halo centered on the Lieutenant…he unburdened himself of every frustration and blamed Caden for them.

  Kraft was skeptical, more irritated than concerned. Lofton was cautious.

  The Security Branch chief decided the evidence was worth a closer look. "Red Hammer's tried penetrating us before. This could be another attempt."

  Kraft wasn't buying it. "Unlikely, Major. What could compromising a platoon leader do for them?"

  Lofton shrugged. "Hard to say. If the platoon's operational, maybe interfere with a mission. The smart play would be to dig a little deeper, see what turns up. I want to set up TinyEye, surveil the subject for awhile. Say, a week or so."

  Kraft didn't appreciate Security interfering with operational stuff but there wasn't much he could do. Lofton could go over his head to the Corps commander himself, if he wanted to. He had little choice but to agree.

  "Do what he says," he told Winger. "And keep it quiet."

  Winger listened carefully as Major Lofton laid out the parameters of the TinyEye operation. A nanomech surveillance swarm would be set up, able to unobtrusively observe a suspect at all wavelengths. Built on ANAD principles, TinyEye could also fashion a virtual 'lens' and send photons back to be recorded. Whatever the subject did or said, would be well documented. For any kind of surveillance, the Corps commander himself had to approve. Criminal or security investigations could not be allowed to compromise military operations.

  Lofton was thoughtful, rubbing his trim black goatee. "If Caden's got a halo, TinyEye'll find it. Get started right away, Lieutenant. And notify me on a secure link when the Eye's in place."

  "Yes, sir,' Winger acknowledged. He logged off and left the comm shack to head back to the crew berths, more worried than ever.

  Red Hammer and Serengeti Factor made a formidable enough enemy as it was. Now, 1st Nano might have to fight another enemy as well…an enemy inside the Detachment.