Johnny Winger and the Serengeti Factor

by Philip Bosshardt

CHAPTER 11

  “I count him braver who overcomes his (own) desires than him who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is over self.”

  Aristotle

  Table Top Mountain, Idaho, USA

  September 18, 2062

  9:30 p.m.

  For most Quantum Corps troopers, liberty time at Table Top Mountain was a frantic escape into the snow-capped foothills of the Buffalo Mountains, hiking, fishing, camping and generally drinking and carousing around. For Nathan Caden, however, liberty time was altogether different. Tense, anxious and furtive, Caden seldom partied with the rest of 1st Nano. More often than not, he spent his liberty hours elsewhere. Lately, that meant clandestine meetings with Red Hammer couriers in Haleyville.

  By the time, the lifter had reached Table Top, Winger and Reaves had gotten permission to release TinyEye. The nanoscale surveillance device, in a swarm barely as large as a period on a page, had been released and programmed to follow Nathan Caden, wherever he went. It had taken up position in a dark corner of his bunk space in A Barracks. It would keep tabs on the Lieutenant no matter what he did or where he went. TinyEye was programmed to sound an alarm to Quantum Corps Security if Caden attempted anything out of the ordinary, such as going anywhere near ANAD's containment system.

  And Caden, despite his position in the Battalion, would never know the mech swarm was even there, hiding in the corner of his quarters, seeming for all the world like dust motes in the air. Dust motes with eyes.

  Unknown to the Lieutenant, Sheila Reaves had not requested liberty. Instead, she had parked herself in the Security Branch command center, with permission from Major Lofton, the Security Chief.

  "I've been keeping my eye on the Lieutenant for awhile," she explained. "The Detachment and the Lieutenant don't always get along too well."

  Lofton was skeptical. "I don't usually let enlisted personnel inside the command center, Sergeant. Especially not with active surveillance underway. It tends to lower morale with the officers. But for some reason, CINCQUANT was most insistent. What the hell are you, Reaves…some kind of undercover agent?"

  Reaves snorted. "Just a Defense and Protective Systems tech, Major. And I got a good nose for bad news. Ask anybody in 1st Nano."

  Lofton showed her the TinyEye feed. A set of monitors flashed data from the device's sensors: EM, acoustic, video and audio, and a dozen other channels.

  "If we get close enough, Sergeant, we can even scan gross EEG output. Can't quite read the Lieutenant's thoughts, yet. But it may not be long."

  Reaves accepted a cup of steaming coffee and situated herself in front of the video feed, streaming back from the virtual 'lens' that TinyEye had formed.

  "So where's the Lieutenant at the moment?"

  Lofton introduced Reaves to Staff Sergeant Mark Finn, the duty tech. Finn highlighted a schematic of the Table Top complex on one screen.

  "Lieutenant Caden drove off base at 2115 hours, just a few minutes ago. He logged through East Gate in his personal car and headed east on Highway 7."

  Reaves studied the plot, and then watched the grainy image of Caden's shoulders as he negotiated his car along the twisting mountain highway.

  "Haleyville?" she wondered out loud.

  Finn shrugged. "Hard to say, Sergeant Reaves." Finn was the picture of protocol and formality. His trim black moustache was a perfect rectangle over his lips. "I've taken steps to detach part of TinyEye and embed it in the fibers of Lieutenant Caden's jacket. That required CINCQUANT approval." He looked over at Reaves. "I don't know what the Lieutenant's done but whatever it is, it's got high-level suspicion."

  Reaves was noncommittal. "You don't say--"

  They both watched the video feed for a few minutes.

  Caden drove along a nearly deserted Highway 7 for thirty minutes, eventually pulling into the small town of Haleyville. The main street was a half-mile stretch of bars and clubs and honky-tonks, a common destination for Quantum Corps troopers, but Caden passed by all of them and turned into the parking lot of the Custer Inn.

  He got out of the car and made his way inside the rambling pine and stucco motel. He stood in the lobby for a few minutes, scanning the light crowd, then made his way into a dimly lit bar at the far end of a large semi-circular atrium that resembled a hunting lodge, with trophy animal heads and Winchester rifles mounted on the walls.

  Caden ambled through the bar, obviously looking for someone. Ten miles away, Sergeant Finn manipulated controls on his interface panel to redeploy TinyEye to capture more photons inside the darkened bar. He overlaid the image with a thermal picture, outlining Caden in a ghostly green radiance.

  "Stay with him, Sergeant," Reaves muttered.

  "I'm on it…TinyEye can adjust pretty quickly."

  Then, the image suddenly jittered slightly. Caden had found who he was looking for.

  Finn adjusted TinyEye to pull back and reveal the face of Caden's acquaintance. He had a vaguely Indian appearance, with tousled dark black hair and a few errant locks draped over a high forehead. His eyes were slits. A prominent scar creased his right cheek, forming an exclamation point along the jawbone.

  Finn adjusted TinyEye again, reconfigging for better audio.

  "--name is Windsinger. You take a great chance coming here like this. What is it you want?"

  "There's a problem…I wanted to--" Caden's reply was interrupted. Windsinger had raised a calloused hand.

  "Not here. Come--" With no further words, Caden followed the Indian outside, leaving the hotel completely. Finn made hurried adjustments, augmenting TinyEye's autocomp to accommodate the changing light levels.

  The two men walked hurriedly across the graveled lot to a pickup truck, parked by a thorny acacia tree. A couple embraced in kisses muttered as they approached and scuttled off into the darkness of the nearby woods.

  Finn swore. "Damn…TinyEye's come loose. I've lost embedding…something happened--"

  Reaves let her eyes follow the board. It was similar to ANAD, but she was no IC, like Gibby or Lieutenant Winger. "What's happened?"

  Finn pointed to a proximity display. "Part of the swarm was detached to stay embedded in Caden's jacket or shirt. But it's been sloughed off somehow…I'm not in contact anymore. Something pushed me off-" his fingers flew over the keyboard.

  Reaves watched the video feed, keeping Finn in the corner of her eyes. The tech was struggling trying to get TinyEye re-grouped, re-embedded. Even as she watched, though, Caden and his contact Windsinger had climbed into the truck. Reaves watched with alarm, as both men climbed into the bed of the truck. An unknown driver was already in the cab.

  The truck started up just as Finn was maneuvering the TinyEye swarm to close again with its target.

  "Hurry up," Reaves told him. The swarm was still too far away--and the truck was already skidding across the gravel lot, pulling out onto Highway 7. "You're going to lose him--"

  "I know, dammit!" Finn's hands flew back and forth across the keyboard. "There was a pulse, something, and the next thing I knew, TinyEye was detached."

  Reaves' eyes narrowed. "I don't think it was an accident, Sergeant." She watched the video feed with a sinking feeling, as the truck sped off into the distance, the grain of the image dissolving into pixilated murk, until the truck was gone. "That Indian guy did something…we were detected."

  Finn looked over at Reaves. "I'd better call Major Lofton."

  The truck sped off through the late summer twilight along a lonely stretch of Highway 7, twisting and turning across the Buffalo Ridge, toward the turnoff to Hunt Valley and the test range. A sign flashed by, depicting the tunnel known as the Notch - TEN MILES - along Hunt Valley Road, but the truck didn't take that turn.

  Instead, they continued along Highway 7, deeper into the mountains. Massive, snow-capped flanks abutted the road, as they skidded slightly, switching back and forth through a series of steep descending turns.

  Nathan Caden wondered j
ust where they were going.

  Windsinger seemed to read his thoughts. "What you have done," the Indian said, above the wind noise, "is very dangerous. You violated every precaution coming here. You are not following procedure."

  Caden pulled his jacket tighter against the breeze. The truck was accelerating downhill now, topping eighty miles an hour.

  "I had no choice!" Caden said, raising his voice over the wind. "It was necessary!"

  Windsinger pulled back his jacket sleeve and pressed a stud on a wristpad. In seconds, the wind noise died off and the night sky shimmered with iridescent speckles. A camou-shield had been erected around the back of the truck. From any distance greater than ten feet, the shield would resemble the truck bed itself, as uncounted trillions of mechs massaged photons to hide them from view. The mechs finished the shield in several minutes.

  "You were under surveillance," Windsinger said. "My own mechs detected it…you carried nano on you."

  "Impossible," Caden said. "I swept myself several times before I left Table Top."

  Windsinger was unimpressed. His weathered face was a map of lines and creases. "You were bugged." He turned slightly in Caden's direction, inclining his massive head. "All of us have a halo. A personal shield that goes wherever we go. Makes sure we do what we're supposed to do. When you came into the hotel, my halo told me you weren't clean. That's why we ride in the back of this truck."

  Caden indicated the shield around the truck bed. "Your halo, too?"

  Windsinger shrugged. "I think and my halo acts. Like the great spirit of the mountains, always watching over me. My shadow, my armor…even my soul." Windsinger smiled faintly. "The price of membership in Red Hammer. Why did you send for me…against all warnings to avoid personal contact?"

  Caden's throat was dry. He told Windsinger about the failed attempts to keep Pharmex operating. "There was little I could do. I'm only a lieutenant in Quantum Corps. I can't work miracles."

  "You are not being paid for miracles…only results. And after that, when the Corps came to the mountains of Tibet…when your armies assaulted our sacred grounds in the Gyirong valley…what of that?"

  Caden was quick to reply. "What do you expect? Your lasers fired on a UNISPACE ship in orbit. We were almost killed. You cut the ground right out from under me."

  "You could have stopped the assault."

  "No I couldn't! Like I said, I can't work miracles. You've got to give me a chance to help you. Stop blowing up things behind my back."

  "You have failed at everything," Windsinger said matter-of-factly.

  Caden's heart was beating faster. "I'm telling you--like I've told the others--I can work for you inside Quantum Corps. I can mess with ANAD…steer them in the wrong direction. I can get you secret information…that's what I'm best at." He suddenly realized the camou-shield was as much prison cell as protection. The humps of mountains streamed by in a sparkling blur, as the mechs stayed attached to the truck, maintaining the shield. "Work with me…that's all I'm asking. Hell, I know what happened at Tashkung. But Red Hammer jumped the gun. When you do that, it undercuts everything I've done. This will only work if you give me time…and space to do what I can."

  "We don't have much time," Windsinger said.

  "Why do you say that?"

  Windsinger sighed. His face seemed to change. The lines and creases were molding themselves like molten clay, into what? Caden watched from the corner of his eye. Was it natural…a facial twitch? Or something else? Red Hammer couriers loved nanoderm…every last one of them had a thousand faces, a thousand looks. All of them were shot through with nano…walking, talking, breathing symbionts with precise, programmable control of everything at the level of atoms and molecules. It was eerie…and unnerving.

  Even as he watched, the Indian’s face morphed into something—a face vaguely familiar—the pitched eyebrows, the moustache—it wasn’t…but it was…it was Gaidar. Mustafa Gaidar—

  Caden felt a chill run down his spine.

  "You must act now." Windsinger/Gaidar told him. His face slowly returned to a leathery Arapahoe countenance. Which was real? It was impossible to say. Somehow, Caden was relieved to see the Indian again. "The Project is at a critical stage."

  Caden was by now completely unnerved. He stared openly at the courier. "This Project…other handlers mentioned it. What exactly is this Project?"

  Windsinger stared through the coruscating flux of the camou-shield at something unseen, something thousands of miles away, his eyes steel-hard. "We're trying to regain control of the supercolonies now. With Pharmex down, they've become uncontrollable. Once they're released into the atmosphere, they disperse and regroup constantly. It's a survival tactic, I suppose…something we didn't anticipate. We're trying to reach them, bypass the Pharmex link. But it will take a few more days." Windsinger turned to face Caden. His face was in motion again. "You must disable Quantum Corps, permanently."

  "Disable Quantum Corps? How the hell am I supposed to do that? I'm one man--"

  Windsinger was insistent. "Destroy their ability to interfere. You agreed to do this. Do we not have an understanding? You’ve promised me a lot, Caden and I’ve paid you well enough based on those promises…now I expect results. You have the means. You have agents in place, no?"

  Caden told Windsinger that one of 1st Nano's key people, Lieutenant Johnny Winger, had remnant Serengeti resident in his brain, a sort of 'Trojan Horse'. "So far, it's undetected."

  Windsinger removed a bracelet from his other wrist and pressed it into Caden's hands. "With this bracelet, you have short-range control of Serengeti mechs."

  Caden fingered the bracelet delicately. It was a heavy band of gold and silver, with inlaid stones. Each stone was a control stud. "How does it work?"

  Windsinger tapped the center stud. "This one…press this one when you are near your target. Serengeti will do the rest. I promise that your victim will be begging for death in less than an hour. Direct link to the target's limbic system; he will whimper like a wounded wolf."

  The truck had somehow made a great circle and was now speeding back along Highway 7, back toward the distant glow of Haleyville.

  "Use this tool," Windsinger warned him. "You must disrupt Quantum Corps operations for at least three more days. That will give us time to regain control. Re-build links to the Serengeti swarms." The truck slowed, pulling off the road just short of the gravel lot in front of the Custer Inn. "Do whatever you have to. But don't fail."

  Caden didn't even notice when the camou-shield was deactivated. He climbed out of the truck bed and the truck sped off.

  Three more days. Do whatever you have to….

  Windsinger's meaning was unmistakable. Or had it been Mustafa Gaidar?

  There was only way he could think of to completely scramble Table Top Mountain for that long. It would mean the end of his career inside the Corps too.

  Caden suddenly felt thirsty and trudged along the darkened road, through the gravel and into the bar at the Custer Hotel.

  He decided he needed a little liquid fortification before he went back to Table Top base.

  Table Top Mountain

  September 19, 2062

  5:20 a.m.

  Sergeant Mark Finn's attention was caught by a flashing light on his control board. He looked up from a puzzle he had been working. It was TinyEye, sending back a signal.

  Finn dialed up Sheila Reaves, who had bunked out in temporary quarters in the basement of the Security center.

  "Reaves, get up here on the double. Our ship just came in."

  Reaves' sleepy voice crackled over the line. "What ship?"

  Finn was already maneuvering the TinyEye swarm to re-engage. "Target re-acquired. East Gate--"

  The tenor of her voice changed abruptly. "I'll be right up."

  When TinyEye had lost contact, Finn had recalled the swarm to Table Top and parked the mechs in a ti
ght orbit, hovering twelve feet over the East Gate entrance to the base. It seemed the logical place to search for Caden; a quick check with Major Kraft revealed that the Lieutenant had permitted liberty time of only twelve hours.

  "He'll be back," Finn was certain. "And he'll probably come in through East Gate." East Gate was the only road-navigable gate entrance up onto the mesa that formed Table Top Mountain base.

  Caden drove his turbo onto the base complex and turned north along Quad Street to the barracks and bivouac area. He had quarters in A Barracks, second level. Finn signaled TinyEye to form up and follow in airborne mode. By the time the Lieutenant had stepped off the scooter and swiped through the locked doors to A Barracks, TinyEye had closed to contact distance.

  Finn pressed a few keys and deftly steered the swarm into direct contact with the target, quickly embedding the nanomechs among the fiber and dust molecules of the Lieutenant's khaki summer weight duty shirt.

  "Contact," Reaves marveled at the tech's skill with the swarm. "Now we've got him covered."

  They both sat back, nursing steaming cups of coffee and fruit bars, to wait and watch.

  Nathan Caden threw himself into his bunk, left the lights off and tried to close his eyes and think. After a minute of enforced stillness, he got up and stood by the parted curtains of his quarters, gazing out across the lighted quadrangle of the Ops Center. A few guards patrolled the walkways. A few techs were straggling in, reporting for day shift inside the Tank. If he stood to one side of the window, Caden could see the low floodlit dome of the Containment Facility, a few hundred meters south from the barracks compound. More security. In the distance, perched on an outcrop of the mesa that overhung Buffalo Valley, was the parade ground and Drexler Field. He checked his watch, noted the time and date. In less than two weeks, the next round of nogs--Corps cadets--would be tossing their tasseled caps into the air, finishing Basic training and feeling like prisoners let out on furlough.

  Caden snorted, remembering his own sweaty days of Basic. Atomgrabbing 101 and all the quantum physics you could ever want. Not to mention Phys Ed and the obstacle course every afternoon. Thirty-mile hikes through the snow and sleet of the Buffalo Mountains. Survival training. Escape and evasion tactics. Molecular fencing and the Sim Tank, where malevolent instructors fitted you out with gizmos that repelled and attracted just like real-life atoms. You bounced around like a tennis ball for several hours, usually knocking yourself senseless in the process. He shook his head. Maybe it had been a big mistake after all.

  Nathan Caden stood at the window, fidgeting with the frayed ends of the curtain draw. He knew he had to act. He knew he had to do something.

  Disable Quantum Corps for three more days.

  There was only one possibility and Caden recoiled from it because he knew his days in the Corps would be over if he pulled it. But he didn't really have a choice. He was in tight with Red Hammer, too tight by now, and if he politely declined, he'd be terminated faster than he could say quantum.

  The only sure way to bollix up Table Top Mountain for three days, maybe longer, was to get inside the Containment building and release ANAD. Config the bugger for max replication and let the swarm loose on Table Top Mountain.

  The Big Bang scenario they'd simmed so many times…this time, played out in real life.

  With any luck, he might not even survive the onslaught.

  He waited until just before 0700 hours, right at shift change for the Containment techs and the guard force, and slipped out of the Barracks. He walked briskly through a light morning breeze, noting the pale orange of the sun already rolling around the horizon like a beach ball, and made the facility in five minutes. He flashed his badge and 1st Nano ID, expecting to gain admittance easily enough but the guard noted something on his display and asked the Lieutenant to wait one, while he reset the bioscanner.

  "Only take a minute, sir…probably a glitch in the system. Your ID's been flagged for some reason…."

  That's when Caden jammed a PKR coilgun into the guard's ribs and fired. He'd already set the weapon to 20K--enough to fry bacon at a hundred meters--and the guard flew backward like a ragdoll, landing hard on the cement walkway outside the security shack. Caden quickly pocketed the weapon, cycled the bioscanner and dragged the guard back in by his feet. He propped the poor fellow up so the retinal sensor would see his dilated eyes and popped the SCAN button. This time, the access controller read the guard's already-permitted retinal pattern.

  Behind them, the main access door hissed open. Caden dropped the guard to the floor and hustled inside.

  "He's inside Containment," said Finn, studying the TinyEye images. "Looks like he's heading for the ANAD vault."

  Sheila Reaves had a bad feeling. "He just killed that guard…and I can't raise anybody else at the security station."

  Finn was already patching through to the alert desk. "I'm calling in a Code One…we better get some troops over there."

  Reaves got dizzy watching the image, as Caden careened through various locks and hatches, heading directly for the ANAD vault, a secure, Level 4 compartment in the very center of the Containment building. The image was grainy, jerky, as TinyEye struggled to stay engaged with the target, and to catch enough stray photons to form an image.

  "Sergeant, isn't there something you can do to stop him?"

  Finn shook his head, massaging the keyboard. "TinyEye doesn't have the configs." He suddenly had an idea. "But maybe I can slow him up a little."

  Reaves was already heading out the door. She had had suspicions about Mr. Caden for a long time. And she had a nagging fear that she knew what he was up to.

  Caden cycled the final hatch door, using his own retinal scan as ID. Inside Containment, he no longer cared if the logs showed unauthorized entry or not.

  In a few minutes, none of that will matter, he told himself. In a few minutes, the whole base will be swarming with ANAD, out of control and replicating at maximum rates.

  Inside the Level 4 compartment, he burst through the final door and saw the containment unit, a squat gray cylinder about the size of a coffin, parked in the middle of the chamber on an isolation pad, tethered by thick ganglia of wires, cables, hoses and flexpiping.

  He checked his watch, noting only a minute had passed since he had fried the guard outside.

  The cavalry will be arriving any minute now, he muttered to himself. He figured he had about three minutes to do the job. Grimly, he set to work.

  Even as he deftly navigated the cylinder's systems, he felt fiery pinpricks all over his neck and back. Mosquitoes? Couldn't be. He slapped and patted at the welts that were forming on his skin. What the hell was that? Felt like a bee sting. But there couldn't be any such thing inside Level 4 containment.

  Ouch, dammit!

  He slapped at his neck again, as another fiery bite made his skin crawl.

  One by one, he addressed the cylinder's systems, preparing ANAD for combat launch at max rep. He toggled through each stage of the prep and deploy sequence: nutrient flow, power, monitoring--always one step ahead of the unit's self-protection circuitry until, finally, the cylinder was ready, ANAD was powered up and primed for launch, ticking over inside the chamber like a bomb ready to explode.

  He scrolled through the config templates, resetting each Security delay, until he came at last to the Big Bang, the max rate replication command. Still, stinging and slapping at bites and welts--what the hell is that?--he authenticated each stage with his own ID, and drilled down to the final command.

  Then, he knew what it was. More bites and stings, getting worse. Caden backed away from the cylinder controls for a moment, and ripped off his jacket and shirt, tossing them into the corner. Windsinger had been right. Somehow, some way, he'd been tagged. Security mechs were probably crawling all over him. Now that he was inside Containment, somebody was working the swarm to stop him, trying their best to distract him from what he had to do.


  It won't work, guys. Not this time.

  He sent the final command, and at the same time, released the last valve isolating ANAD inside the cylinder. There was an audible whoosh! as a slug of high-pressure air and fluid sprayed into the compartment. In seconds, a visible cloud had darkened the ceiling, as ANAD exploded in max rate replication, grabbing atoms furiously to build and replicate structure. Like its namesake, the Big Bang was an explosion of nanomech division, a runaway freight train able to consume everything in its path.

  Caden ducked, still slapping and clawing at the pinpricks of the Security mechs eating his skin, and scuttled back out of the compartment. He ran headlong through the locks and hatches and exited the Containment building--right into the waiting arms of the Security detail Sheila Reaves had alerted.

  "Lieutenant Nathan Caden," came a voice from the detail, "--you're under arrest. Please step away from the door and keep your hands where I can see 'em, sir. I'm just going to--"

  Caden wasn't dumb but spinning away from the detail to charge at Sheila Reaves wasn't the brightest thing he had ever done.

  He lunged at Reaves. She fired back, Finn too, discharging the MOBnet ejector just as the Lieutenant came into range. It stopped Caden cold, the linked mesh of nanomechs forcing the man steadily to the ground. He squirmed a bit, but gave up, knowing it was useless.

  Major Lofton was there too and he bent down to give Caden a good once-over. The CC2 was bound up nice and snug; the more he struggled, the more the mechs squeezed back. A simple command would have snapped the mechs tighter still, like a miniature clampdown.

  Suffocate the slimebag, Reaves thought. She could have done it with a clear conscience too. But then a million questions would have gone unanswered.

  "Look out!" a voice cried out.

  Reaves looked up just in time to see the gray cloud of exponentially replicating ANAD mechs boiling out of the Containment building like a tornado. The Security detail, with its prisoner firmly in tow, scattered in all directions.

  Alarms and sirens blared out across the mesa and Table Top Mountain was quickly in an uproar. Caden was immobilized and dragged off to a bunker in the basement of the Ops Center.

  Reaves fled too, but diverted left along the grassy quadrangle, toward the hangars and the ordnance and mission prep complex. She caught up with Johnny Winger and Buddha Nguyen along the way.

  "It's a Big Bang, Lieutenant!" she heaved out. They ducked and weaved and dodged others as troops streamed in every direction. Loudspeakers thundered across the quadrangle.

  "All hands…this is a Code One alert, CODE ONE ALERT…all hands, man your stations. Repeat…CODE ONE ALERT!!"

  Winger and Nguyen hustled after Reaves.

  "We need CEC out here!" Winger yelled. "Mobile containment--"

  "--and magpulse weapons!--" added Nguyen.

  They raced into the mission prep hall and gathered every tech they could find.

  From inside the bunker, Winger watched the ANAD swarm, replicating out of control, boiling across the lifter pads of North Field, a gray fog swelling and expanding into every corner of the base complex. His stomach turned at the sight. Even as he watched, fleeing troopers were caught in the swarm and went down, engulfed and consumed like the raging wildfires that sometimes swept through the Buffalo range of southern Idaho.

  If we don't contain it soon, the swarm will spill out of the base and head off into the hills. The entire state could be at risk, parts of Canada too, he realized.

  Already the thing had swelled to dimensions that MOBnet couldn't handle.

  It was the very same nightmare scenario they'd simmed at the wargaming range countless times. An effective defense had never really been demonstrated. Now, it was all too real…and heading right for them.

  Winger knew they'd need every defense they could devise. MOBnet and any other shielding they could find. Counter-nanoswarms, if they could be launched and programmed fast enough. Atmospheric manipulation. Magpulse weapons.

  Ideas flew around the mission bunker thick as dust.

  "Somehow, I've got to get to the master," Winger said. "If I can get a signal through that swarm, I can counter-program…maybe stop the replication."

  "Too dangerous," Reaves said. "Swarm's too thick, too active. You'd never get close enough."

  "He might," Nguyen was thinking out loud, "if we stun the swarm a few times."

  "You mean with HERF?"

  Nguyen was scribbling a sketch on a pad he had dredged up. "Sure…like this. Get your guns along the perimeter of the base…here, here and here--" he X'ed off proposed locations on his crude sketch. "Do it quick and pump a few billions watts of RF across the mesa. Crossfire. That should slow down the rep, and maybe, just maybe give the Lieutenant time to get a signal through."

  "You've got to locate the master first. It should be somewhere near the center of the swarm, but it's in motion." Reaves shook her head. "How the hell do you find him?"

  Winger was thinking fast. "I've got an idea. I had to dump ANAD's control software back in the Himalayas. Caden had bollixed up his brains with an older, buggy version. I dumped ANAD's control and piloted the master myself."

  "CEC's been re-generating the main core since we got back to Table Top," Reaves agreed. "But it wasn't finished, last I heard. Moby told me yesterday it would take another three days at least to regain and test all higher functions."

  "That means ANAD's on autopilot right now, stuck in overdrive, with no higher functions or safeties to override the rep command," Winger told them. "This replication's like a mindless spasm. And what do we do with spasms?"

  "Shock therapy?" Reaves wondered.

  "That's where your HERF guns come in. Blast the swarm with RF, just long enough for me to find the master and dump the control system again. If I can do that, before replication starts up, I can take control of ANAD and drive him back to containment. Soon as I sever the control links to the swarm, your magpulse guns can clean up the mess. At the same time, I can pilot ANAD out of the swarm and back to re-capture."

  Reaves and Nguyen looked at each other, then at Winger and the other troopers assembled in the bunker.

  'What are we waiting for?" Reaves asked.

  "Let's go!"

  It took seven minutes for Reaves to radio her plans to Security and to the base commander. Fortunately, the HERF guns were stowed in Mission Prep; the troopers who'd taken cover there helped break out the gear. Volunteer details were formed up and five HERF units were trundled by hand to opposite ends of Table Top's broad mesa. In the center of the mesa, the ANAD swarm continued swelling, rolling like a carnivorous mist across the grounds, filling the grassy swards between the Barracks, boiling westward toward the liftpads and lifters parked in revetments, seeping and crawling and flowing over all obstacles toward the Ops Center and Drexler Field.

  The details had to hurry. If the swarm spilled off the top of the mesa and ran down the mountainside into Buffalo Valley and the ravines radiating outward from Table Top, the whole of southern Idaho would be at risk. Already, the Governor and the National Guard had been alerted to prepare to evacuate nearby towns.

  In less than ten minutes, Reaves and the HERF guns were ready, powered up and humming.

  Winger was in contact with General Kincade, Quantum Corps' commander at Table Top.

  "All units ready, sir. I'm inside Mission Prep, with a portable IC unit strapped on."

  Kincade's face was grim on the vidlink. The General was with his staff, bottled up in the Emergency Action Center seventy feet below Main Ops.

  "Blast 'em, Lieutenant! Blast the sonsofbitches to kingdom come!"

  Winger needed no further encouragement. He checked with Reaves one last time.

  "Weapons are enabled, sir!"

  "Fire!" Winger yelled. "Fire all around, all units! Full bore! Let 'em have it!"

  A series of sirens warbled across Table Top, warning everyone to take cover.

/>   The whole mesa seemed to vibrate as the first pulse shot out, squeezing the air with a thunderclap of heat. A searing wave passed through the Mission Prep hall as the bubbles of radio waves expanded outward, pulverizing everything in their path.

  The first pulse was quickly followed by several more, each discharge hammering the ground with an invisible fist of energy. Johnny Winger screamed at the top of his lungs, trying to equalize pressure inside his head. His eyes and lungs burned. His skin crawled with fire, then tingled and crackled….

  NOW! NOW was the moment….

  He raced out of the hall and ran a swerving, zigzagging course across the open ground between the barracks and the Ops Center. The air seemed alive, thick with mechs, and he waved his arms wildly over his head, beating through the swarm. All about him, droplets of something fell from the sky. He stumbled and nearly fell, then scrambled to his feet, plunging into the thickening mist, until alongside the road from the BOQ to East Gate, he felt he was near the center of the swarm. Mech debris clattered and fell from the sky, tickling, brushing, crawling at his skin, but he ignored it and tapped out commands on his wristpad furiously, trying to link up with ANAD.

  "Come on, buddy, come on…come on…where the hell are you--"

  Already, the effects of the HERF pulse were beginning to wear off. His skin crawled with living fingers, tickling, pinching, as the swarm began to recover from the blast, replicating new mechs to replace those the RF waves had shattered.

  Come on…come on…in desperation, he opened voicelink.

  "Hub to ANAD…Hub to ANAD….is anybody there, anybody in charge out there…where the hell are you, buddy?--"

  Just then, a staticky hiss in his ears formed a recognizable word.

  "---emory register--"

  "ANAD…is that you?"

  The whisper grew marginally louder. Sirens nearly drowned out the words. "ANAD…ANAD to Hub…..it's…this is….controls are…I'm weakened….can't activate--"

  "ANAD…is that you…ANAD…this is Hub…listen to me…ANAD, can you hear me?"

  The whisper was weak, but there. Winger waved blindly, trying to get the sirens shut off, trying to stop the next HERF pulse. "ANAD…listen to me…command override…Excalibur alpha x-ray…command override…Excalibur alpha x-ray--" He hoped the old reset command would work. He'd just told ANAD to shutdown all comm links and effector controls…he hoped.

  The swarm was reconstituting again, he could feel fiery pinpricks on his back and neck. Got to hurry now!

  "ANAD…execute omega one…full shutdown…all links, all effectors, all sensors and probes…ANAD, I'm coming to you…I've taking over--"

  He toggled a sequence of buttons on his wristpad, snapped his eyepiece into place and, to his surprise, ANAD had responded, giving him full control of his core processor and all functions.

  The nanomech voice link was weakening. "ANAD…responds….comm one and comm two down…effec--disabled…main core idling…ANAD to Hub…please…hlp me--"

  The eyepiece image was like driving a hundred miles an hour through an Idaho sleetstorm. Polygons and spheres and snakes and cubes streamed past at high speed. For a moment, Johnny Winger was disoriented.

  Where the hell am I?

  Then he tickled the tiny joystick on his wrist and powered up ANAD's propulsors.

  Just have to dead reckon my way back to the barn today, he mumbled to himself. At least, comm links are down. That'll shut off the replication.

  But he hadn't counted on Reaves firing off the HERF guns again. The swarm had partially reconstituted again, and the pulse, when it came, was like being caught in a tidal wave.

  The link to ANAD stayed active and Johnny Winger felt himself scattered and tumbled and jostled and swept along in a great river, surging through, vast forces tearing at his limbs, punching him in the chest, ripping his head open. His own body's natural instincts forced him into a curled, face down position, as the thunderclap rolled across the base. But even as he was still and face buried in wet grass, the dizzying, caroming ride continued.

  He was linked in with ANAD and seeing what the mech sensed as the RF wave expanded through the air above Table Top. For a few moments, he blacked out, then staggered back to semi-consciousness and stabilized himself with judicious pulses on his propulsors.

  "ANAD," he muttered to himself, "let's go home." Momentarily, he backed out of the ANAD link and radioed back to the Mission Hall, telling Reaves to shut down the HERF guns. "I'm driving ANAD right now…and neither of us wants to go through that again!"

  Gradually, the swirling, driving sleet of oxygen and hydrogen atoms slackened off and he felt he was making headway on half-propulsor power. Molecules of dust and debris thickened the air, making navigation dicey, but Winger quickly recovered his atomgrabber's instincts and piloted ANAD through reefs and shoals and rapids of whirling, churning atoms and molecules, feeling his way through the sleet, fighting stiff currents as he hacked his way back toward the Containment building.

  It was doubly disorienting, when he physically stood up, peering outside his eyepiece, stumbling through the remnants of the gray mist, tripping over half-eaten corpses in the grass, then looking back through the eyepiece at the cyclone of atoms ANAD was battling through. Two different worlds in the same view: macro and nano, humans and atoms, and the rules were different in both.

  Johnny Winger wobbled and stumbled his way back to the Containment building like a drunken sailor, with troopers and technicians giving him a wide berth everywhere along the zigzag track.

  He made it to the complex in half an hour, with Security and other troopers holding open doors and clearing a path all the way into the Level 4 Containment compartment.

  "ANAD….we're here. You're home," Winger muttered. He stepped delicately over wires and cables and hoses and carefully piloted the nanomech toward the vacuum tube being held out by Moby M'Bela.

  "Only a few feet more, Lieutenant," Moby told him.

  Winger switched his vision back and forth, eyeing the position of the vacuum tube with his eyes, then peering into the eyepiece to maneuver ANAD through a maelstrom of oxygens and nitrogens swirling in every direction. He'd safed and stowed most of the mech's effectors, so ANAD was rudely bounced and jostled with every pulse of its propulsors.

  "Hey…watch it," came the plaintive voice through Winger's earphones. "I'm not made of rubber, you know--"

  "Sorry." Winger squinted at the eyepiece view, trying to match up what he was seeing with the macro view his eyes gave him. In time, a yawning chasm gaped before him, a canyon dark and turbulent with whirlpools of molecules spinning at the mouth. With a start, Winger realized it was the head of the vacuum tube. He safed ANAD for transit and let the suction of the whirlpools pull him in. The view in his eyepiece spun crazily and he rapidly became dizzy and disoriented.

  "Looks like you're just about home, little guy," Winger said.

  "ANAD signing off….down the hole!!" came the reply.

  Winger disconnected himself from ANAD control and let Moby M'Bela do the rest.

  The pressure pulse almost snapped the tube right out of his hands. In an instant, the Autonomous Nanoscale Assembler/Disassembler had transited the tube and plunged into the soothing homewaters of the Containment cylinder.

  M'Bela grabbed the end of the vacuum tube out of the air and stabbed a button, sealing the tank. "Got him, Lieutenant! Safing now…pressure coming up, temps okay, pH in the green. ANAD's sealed and safe."

  Winger was already powering down his wristpad IC controls. "Whew…I'm glad that's done. What about the rest of the base?"

  Major Lofton was there as well, along with Dana Tallant and Gibby. Lofton was patched in to Reaves, who was still stationed at the northeast wall, manning one of the HERF guns.

  "Next pulse in ten seconds, gentlemen. Get yourselves ready."

  By the time it came, Winger and the others had rolled the Containment cylinder against one bulkhead of the co
mpartment and draped heavy tarps over it, trying to protect ANAD as much as possible from the RF wave.

  The thunderclap came, rattling everything inside, breaking a few pipette racks on the wall, and knocking gear off a cart. The heat wave followed, searing the air like a hot desert wind. Winger and the others had dropped to the floor and made themselves small, covering their heads against falling debris.

  Over the next ten minutes, the HERF guns fired three more times, shattering the mesa with RF waves, frying the rest of the ANAD swarm into loose atoms. Lofton took a message on his talker, and breathed an audible sigh of relief.

  "All call," he reported. "All stations reporting in. Swarm density has dropped to a tenth and falling. It's safe to move outside now. Security details are securing all gates and checking the perimeter. Damage control parties are reporting in. General Kincade's coming topside."

  Johnny Winger cautiously got to his feet. He looked at Dana Tallant. Her face was red and peeling.

  "You look like a broiled fish, Lieutenant."

  Tallant grinned. "I probably smell like one too. You look you could use a stiff one at the O Club."

  "Later," he muttered, though it was tempting. "We'd better make sure ANAD's okay. And get started on cleaning up this place."

  Moby was feeling the scaly skin around his eyes. "That was too close, Lieutenant--" he stopped, hearing the distant crackle of more magpulses, smaller pulses, clearing the air across Table Top Mountain.

  Outside the Containment building, mech debris littered the grounds, along with pieces of siding and broken glass, roof shingles and twisted, charred pipe and wire. The entire base looked like a great cyclone had swept through, which in effect, had happened. The cyclone of the HERF guns had collapsed the last of the ANAD swarm and swept the debris over the side of the mountain.

  For the time being, the threat had been neutralized and the swarm contained. A Big Bang runaway replication had been avoided and the town of Haleyville and the surrounding Idaho countryside had been spared the worst of the onslaught.

  But it had been close. Too close.

  Thankfully, casualties were light. Four fatalities had been suffered, both in the first minutes of the assault, all of the troopers caught out in the open, near the north lifter pads. The shredded remnants of their corpses had already been removed and taken to the Infirmary for identification.

  Johnny Winger brushed himself off and left Containment, heading back to Mission prep with Tallant and M'Bela.

  "What's going to happen to Lieutenant Caden?" M'Bela asked. The three of them picked their way through piles of debris being collected by sweepbots along the walkway. The bots scuttled back and forth across the grassy sward between the Ops Center and the barracks, shoving piles of metal and glass and brick into bigger piles for removal.

  "I don't know," Winger replied. "Major Lofton said he had been taken to the stockade for now. General Kincade's already scheduled a hearing for 1100 hours. Rumor has it CINCQUANT himself is coming in."

  "Whatever happens," Tallant said, "he deserves it."

  Before they could make their way to Mission prep, Winger got a call on his talker. It was Major Kraft. The Major's face was grim and hollow; it had been a long night for everybody.

  "Report to the Ops Center at once, Lieutenant. There's a pre-hearing investigation going on right now. General Kincade wants all the facts laid out before the charges against Lieutenant Caden are made. Security Branch needs a statement from you."

  "On my way, Major." Winger peeled off and headed briskly across the quadrangle now humming with sweepbots and troopers collecting scrap and debris. A light curtain had been set up around a small patch of grass near the entrance. More bots crisscrossed that patch in systematic sweeps--forensic bots looking for evidence.

  Johnny Winger wondered what would happen to Nathan Caden now.