Johnny Winger and the Serengeti Factor

by Philip Bosshardt

CHAPTER 14

  “Don’t waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour’s duties will be the best preparation for the hours and ages that follow…”

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Engebbe Dig Site, Tanzania

  September 24, 2062

  11:20 a.m.

  Two things were uppermost in Johnny Winger’s mind as the Serengeti big bang erupted out of the excavation pit.

  First, he had civilians in the area and he had to get them away, as fast as possible. Doc Frost, Professor Valdemore and his archeologists were all targets that had to be protected. It was Quantum Corps policy to take extra measures to protect noncombatants.

  Winger grabbed Doc Frost, and ordered Ozzie Tsukota to hustle him to the lifter.

  “I’ll round up the eggheads,” he added, then he sprinted off after Valdemore. With help from the Tanzanian troops, he was able to corral the scientists and herd them toward the lifter, which was spinning up and pulling away even as they boarded.

  “Get the hell out of here!” Winger yelled. Tsukota slammed the hatch shut and the lifter pilot wheeled about and accelerated at full military power, climbing rapidly away from the onrushing dust devil of the mechs.

  The second matter was force protection. Winger circled his hands over his head, eyeing the whirlwind spilling over the top edges of the pit.

  “To the fort!” he yelled. “To that old fort!” Across the dig was a series of stepped back ledges and at the very top, the ruins of El Mareb, the old Arab traders’ fort clinging precariously to its sandstone ledge. Somehow, they had to gather the rest of the force into a protected area, get ANAD launched and put up a defensive screen, all before the Serengeti tidal wave boiled over them and reduced the place to atoms.

  “Come ON!” Sergeant Glance pulled stragglers out of their tents as he and Deeno scurried about Camp Matterhorn. A line was quickly formed, snaking its way along the trader’s trail alongside the streambed of the Engebbe River. Gale force winds had picked up and dust beat at them from all directions. As they climbed the steps to the ledge where the fort was perched, Al Glance looked behind, down into the pit.

  The mech eruption looked like an expanding bubble of dust, thickening the sky with a spreading crown as it emerged from the excavation. Like a swelling dust devil, the big bang of runaway replication was steadily blotting out the sun, darkening the camp like twilight rainclouds. Only there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

  Even as they scrambled up the rubbly steps into the shadows of El Mareb, the rolling thunder of a massive nanomech swarm spilled over the edges of the pit and swept down across the arid, windy river valley, systematically laying waste to every hut and tent, to trucks and piles of equipment, to small villages miles upstream toward Bismarck Falls, nomadic Masai tribesmen and fleeing battalions of Hunter’s gazelle and wildebeest, stampeding the vast herds southward away from the darkening menace erupting out of Engebbe….an unstoppable, polymorphic, programmable horde of intelligent, pseudo-virus like assemblers.

  Al Glance reached Winger’s position, beneath the overhang of a crumbling balcony fronting the fort, and dived into the gathered throng. Winger was helping Moby situate the ANAD cylinder for maximum protection, while Reaves and Nguyen scrambled in opposite directions, along the narrow defile of the ledge, armed with personnel coilguns and a small magpulser.

  “Give me as much time as you can!” Winger told his Defensive techs. Nguyen gritted his teeth as he clambered up the sheer face of a sandstone cliff, swaying in the gathering wind. Finding a fissure where he could take hold, he positioned his pulser tube and triggered the weapon at the nearest arms of the whirling mech cloud. The thunderclap shot an expanding wave of RF skyward, loosing a stream of rock, which the DPS clung desperately to, to keep from pitching forward off the ledge. The RF burst did the trick for a moment, blunting the expansion of Serengeti around them. The cloud collapsed a bit, shrunk back and Nguyen covered himself as trillions of fried mechs clattered down all around him.

  “That’s it! That’s the way!” Reaves yelled to him. She had scrambled off in the opposite direction, and was on one knee at the very end of the ledge, spraying coilgun rounds in every direction. It was useless, and only a delaying tactic—everyone knew that—but Winger and Glance and Moby needed every second they could get.

  Out at the end of the overhang, between rubble piles and a broken minaret dome, the troops were massaging the containment pack controls, readying ANAD for launch.

  “Pressure coming up—“Glance gritted, squinting against the stinging dust whipped up by the big bang. The full fury of the gale was blunted by repeated RF bursts from Nguyen’s pulser.

  “ANAD fully primed…fully enabled,” Moby announced.

  The count was quick: launcher attached…vacuum enabled…ANAD inerted and configured…3…2…1….

  “Launch the sucker!” Winger ordered. “Launch ANAD—I’m sending max rep right now!”

  An audible whoosh signaled the escape of the autonomous assembler as it snapped out of the launch tube and went airborne at full propulsor power. In seconds, a shimmering radiant ball had formed overhead, over the end of the excavation, some fifteen feet in the air.

  “Max rep!” Winger ordered. He moved along the edge of their perch, stumbling on loose rubble, to give Glance a hand with the interface controls.

  ANAD immediately flashed back confirmation. Expanding like an opening fist, ANAD began multiplying, bagging atoms and making replicas, accelerating mass at an exponential rate.

  “DPS techs…give me a reading…what’s up--?”

  Reaves’s voice crackled over the crewnet radio. “Serengeti main pulse still over the pit…one hundred meters, bearing two one six degrees, expanding rapidly.”

  Nguyen came back too. “Pulser works for awhile, Lieutenant! I can slam ‘em, stun ‘em, and sort of steer ‘em away from my position. But the envelope’s growing and they just flow in another direction.”

  Winger grimaced. “Like a balloon.”

  “Yeah,” said Glance, bent to the interface controls. “A balloon with teeth.”

  Winger walked up and down the front of the ruins. “Everybody move back…group together…that’s it—“ he saw an archeologist holding hands with an interpreter “—everybody hold hands…draw together and get down on the ground, face down, minimum radius. I’m trying to put up a screen. It’ll help ANAD to keep the size of the group small.”

  He could feel the mechs’ approach, feel his skin crawl. Go, ANAD, baby. GO! Make a bubble— If we only had a HERF gun--where the hell was Tallant and the ground convoy anyway? The heavier weapons were still miles away.

  It seemed like ANAD was taking a long time. If he couldn’t engage the Serengeti swarm now, before the devices closed on their position, all the firepower in the world wouldn’t be able to save them.

  The first clash came as a bright spark of light. Less than fifty yards away, directly over the A Level boundary markers of the pit, the entire southwest face of El Mareb was suddenly bathed in an unearthly pale blue glow as vast but unseen armies clashed. The gotterdammerung pulsed like a flickering aurora as the swarms collided head-on.

  The crowd gasped and shrank back. Winger and Glance both felt the air crackle like a million stinging needles had fallen on them.

  “Here they come!” Glance yelled.

  “Everybody stay together!” Winger yelled over the keening whine. “Fold up! Make yourself as small as possible!”

  The furious battle ebbed and flowed in the air right in front of the ledge, while all around them, outside the ANAD bubble, the swarm seethed and boiled over the top and out onto the dusty plains beyond. The blocking screen of assemblers ANAD had erected held, barely, for the moment, as the swarms throbbed and smashed into each other.

  Winger lay prone, at the very edge of the rubble, wishing to hell the ground convoy could show up.


  “Where the hell’s Bravo? See if you can raise ‘em!” he ordered. Glance turned over the interface controls and started broadcasting in the clear.

  We won’t be able to hold out long, Winger could tell. Eventually, Serengeti would overwhelm ANAD by sheer mass, drawing on some well of power, deep and buried in the excavation pit. All Detachment Alpha had, besides innocent scientists and civilians, was the basic ANAD swarm, plus containment and IC and a few coilguns. Nguyen had a small-bore magpulser, but he was using up charge fast and he’d be empty and exposed out at the end of the ledge in no time.

  If Dana doesn’t get here fast, we’ve got two choices, he told himself.

  Try to re-program ANAD on the fly…maybe pilot the master directly as it dueled with the swelling storm of mechs. Or call the lifter back to Engebbe and make a run for it.

  Either one was dicey.

  “We can’t leave Engebbe,” he decided out loud.

  “Sir?” Glance had overheard a few of his mumbles.

  “I was just thinking out loud,” Winger said. “We can’t leave now. Serengeti’s loose and the buggers will just continue terrorizing the world if we don’t stop them, here. Now.”

  “How are we going to do that, Lieutenant? This swarm’s got smarts…Red Hammer or somebody’s running the show, controlling the effects.”

  “I don’t know yet. But…somehow…this place is where Serengeti gets its power. Maybe it’s feeding off mutations in that ancient viral genome, buried somewhere in the pit. I don’t know. Somehow, Engebbe Valley’s the source of power for the buggers. We’ve got to destroy the source. We’ve got to contain Serengeti here.”

  He didn’t have to add that whatever happened, it could well mean the end of the archeological dig and its priceless treasures from the past.

  They both heard Nguyen’s scream…a piercing shriek above the mech whine, echoing off the ramparts of El Mareb. Winger and Glance leaped up and started edging their way out along the ledge, toward Buddha’s position. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

  “aaarrrggghhh!...HELP—HELP ME!!...THEY’RE BURNING--!” Nguyen’s pulser had run out and the quiet, serene, normally unflappable DPS tech couldn’t take it any longer. With no more protection, he was trapped by the swarm, exposed to the full fury of nanomech hell. He clawed at his face and arms, then tore off his gear and leaped into the air, his body disintegrating even as it cartwheeled end for end and plummeted down into the whirling gale of the pit. His body never made it to the ground.

  Bit by bit, Serengeti was wearing them down. Nguyen was the first to go. Reaves just barely made it inside the bubble from her position at the other end, the southeastern promontory. Luis Villa—everyone called him Ham—wasn’t so lucky.

  Villa had left the bubble to help Reaves. He pulled and dragged her along the rocky path, then shoved her through a temporary breach in the bubble. But the enemy was fast too and Villa was infested before he could make it back inside himself. His left leg was swarmed and the mechs penetrated into his body before he could pulled into the safety of the bubble. For a moment, even as Villa thrashed and screamed in pain, ANAD replicants and Serengeti mechs surged and pressed against each other at the point of the breach. Like tongues of hot air shimmering back and forth, the battle raged for the better part of three minutes, until at last ANAD made good the breach and crushed the intruding assemblers into atomic fluff. The shimmering died down and a circle formed around the still-agonized nanotrooper.

  “Get him deeper into the fort, back against that wall,” Winger ordered. Three men carried and dragged the writhing soldier to a spot deeper inside the ruins. Winger watched Villa, struggling with the infestation. He knew he’d soon have to detach an element of ANAD, enter Villa’s body and ferret out the mechs before they fried his brain. At least, he knew about the serotonin cascade now, the mechanism Serengeti used. I know what it’s like, big guy. I’ve been there. But there were more pressing matters at the moment.

  “The swarm’s picking us off,” Glance muttered, when Winger came back to the interface controls. “One by one.”

  “And everytime they do, we lose a bit of the bubble.” Serengeti was pressing in on the group huddled in the ruins of the fort, steadily, relentlessly, implacably. It was just a matter of time before ANAD caved. They had to do something to distract the swarm, to take the pressure off.

  “Still nothing from Bravo?” he asked.

  Al Glance was still manning the comm. “Nothing, Lieutenant. Swarm’s jamming us, I think. Something’s put a lid on all EM coming in and out of the valley.”

  “Great.” Then Johnny Winger had an idea. It was radical and risky as hell, but it might work.

  “Can we get a signal to the lifter?”

  The CC2 shrugged. “We can try. Swarm density’s lightest at the top. I’ll patch us through.” He fiddled with the comm set and after a few moments, the staticky crackle of the lifter pilot came through. Winger told him to put Doc Frost on.

  “Frost, here—“

  “Doc—“ Winger started pacing around the piles of rubble, rattling off ideas the way he always did…on his feet. “—we’re going to lose this battle if we don’t do something and do it quick. Is there any reason why I can’t let Serengeti inside the bubble? Let ‘em infest us and fight ‘em that way? Collapse the bubble and make the swarm disperse enough to penetrate us. Once we’re all infested, Serengeti—or whoever’s driving it—has no choice but to back off…so as not to kill the subjects. It seems to me the swarm’s designed and programmed to infest, not to kill. If we don’t do something to stop this big bang, we’re all be suffocated and crushed.”

  Frost’s voice was firm. “Johnny, it’s too risky…you can’t segment ANAD that way and expect to control all the elements…not when you’re also infected. You’ve just cleared your own body of mechs…why chance it? It’s not a good idea.”

  Winger disagreed. “It may be the only chance we have, Doc. We don’t have a lot of options down here. Serengeti’s still replicating, expanding out from Engebbe. At this rate, by the end of the day, the swarm may be in Dar es Salaam or Nairobi. I’m sure I can do it…I beat them before. I had Serengeti inside my head and I still slammed ‘em. I know what kind of tricks to use, what to look for, what its weaknesses are—“

  Frost’s voice was thick. “Johnny, it’s a hell of a risk. You were only fighting one swarm inside your own head.”

  “It’s still only one swarm…only bigger. I’ve seen how it responds, what kind of tactics it uses.”

  Ozzie Tsukota’s voice crackled over the circuit. “Lieutenant, something’s just come up…I’m getting pulses again, ‘ripples’ like those decoherence waves Superfly saw. There must be a signal in the area.”

  Winger looked at Al Glance. “Red Hammer’s controlling this swarm…I’m sure of it. Can you resolve it, Ozzie? Can you jam it?”

  Tsukota was slow in replying. “I’m not sure, Lieutenant. All I’m getting from ‘Fly is a tickle, once in awhile. I can try tuning it…maybe boost the gain, tweaking ‘Fly to look for certain effects—“

  “Do it. And let me know if you think you can interfere with the signal…that could be the key to everything. Doc, if I’m right about this, maybe we can occupy this swarm, tie it down here, long enough to for Detachment Bravo to get here. Dana’s got the big guns—HERF, magpulse cannon, the works. If I can keep ‘em occupied long enough, and we can hold here at Engebbe, we can smash the swarm for good, right at the source. Ozzie, you work on jamming that signal, too…that’ll help.”

  Reluctantly, Doc Frost gave his okay. “I’ll try to monitor operations from up here. Be careful, Johnny. Don’t get in so deep you can’t get out. Serengeti’s wicked. It’s got programming based on an ancient virus…a virus that wiped out an entire branch of our evolutionary tree.”

  “I plan to give the bastards a run for their money. Oh, and Ozzie?”

  “Yes, sir?”

&
nbsp; “You’re in charge up there. If the mechs manage to overwhelm us before Bravo can get here, tell that lifter pilot to scram. Get the hell out of here.”

  A pause, then, “Understood, sir. I’m sending a patch to Superfly now. Maybe I can grab a little more of that signal.”

  Winger turned back to Al Glance. “Sergeant, let the others know what’s about to happen. Give it to ‘em straight. There’s no reason to panic…it’s like falling off a boat into deep water. Just relax…float…let what’s going to happen—happen. Tell ‘em not to fight the mechs…let them penetrate. It’ll go easier.”

  Glance was pale. “You sure this’ll work, Lieutenant? I don’t mind telling you I’m a bit anxious…it’s not natural, letting mechs invade you like this. Your body wants to fight—“

  Winger squeezed his shoulder. “I’ve been there before, remember? It’ll work.” He sent Glance away, with more confidence than he felt himself. It’s got to work.

  Instructions were passed around and the group huddled together in the back of the ruins, partially protected by crumbling columns and sagging pillars. Lanterns from the excavations inside El Mareb cast long shadows across the sandstone and rubble floor, identifying shallow pits marked with laser grids and boundary tape. Beyond the fort entrance, the ANAD bubble continued to shimmer and glow, as the assemblers slugged it out with the mech swarm, probing, pushing, squeezing but, so far at least, not quite breaching the screen.

  That was about to end in a hurry, Winger thought.

  Even Valdemore and the scientists had lost much of their arrogance. The Frenchman was just as frightened as the rest, nervously gesturing to his colleagues as he listened to Sergeant Glance’s explanations.

  When Glance was done, he and Deeno D’Nunzio came back over.

  “I think they’re ready,” Glance said, eyeing the crowd. Archeologists and technicians mixed with nervous Tanzanian soldiers and Quantum Corps troopers.

  “Where do you want us stationed?” D’Nunzio asked.

  Winger thought about that. “Crowd control’s important. Space yourselves among the people…you can help keep ‘em quiet and calm. This whole stunt will work more smoothly if everybody stays still.”

  Glance knelt down at the interface control pack to begin initializing ANAD for dispersal. “ANAD reports ready, sir.”

  Winger took a deep breath. “On my mark, collapse the bubble and set ANAD for a quick config change. Queue it up for auto-transmit too, in case I mess up and can’t get the command off.”

  Glance pressed a few keys. “Done.”

  Winger nodded. “Now—“ he said, quietly. He sat down, wedging his back against a fallen pillar, making himself comfortable. This should only take a few seconds—

  The pale blue iridescence of the ANAD bubble died off. At the same time, the keening whine of mech combat increased to a shriek, then tore off into inaudible frequencies, still felt, but no longer heard. Johnny Winger closed his eyes, felt the hot, dusty wind wash over his face, the stinging sleet of dust and rock surging into the open front of the fort as Serengeti breached the shield and swept over them. A whirlwind vortex spun crazily at the entrance, then like a thing alive, the gaping maw of wind and mechstorm rolled in and hammered the walls and floor with a fist of accelerating mass.

  From somewhere behind them, a woman screamed.

  Winger gritted his teeth, felt the electric needles stinging, burning his skin, kept his eyes screwed shut and tried to think of other places, other times. The trip down into that old cave at El Dorado kept coming back, that and endless days of playful romping with Bailey in the fields and ravines around the North Bar Pass Ranch.

  That’s when the convulsions came.

  His arms were jerking like a puppet before he even realized it. He’d seen that before. Serotonin cascade…Serengeti was already inside him, feeling its way along, tickling his limbic system, pumping dopamine and half a dozen boosters through every neural circuit across his brain. Serengeti’s nasty little calling card…just a warning, really. Don’t try to get away, human. Somebody else’s in charge now.

  He willed himself to lie still, letting the mechs jerk his strings like a puppet, activating each circuit in turn, pumping juice through each pathway one after the other: the ventral tegmentum, the reticular activating system, nucleus accumbens, like a newborn flexing its fingers, getting ready to stand up and boogie. A detached eyeball, floating above his body like a bad dream would have seen him dancing like an old rag doll, being shaken by a petulant child, frustrated, impatient, wringing and squeezing and thumping and banging a toy that just wouldn’t work right, throwing a tantrum with his body.

  Somewhere, deep inside, the essence of Johnny Winger smiled.

  I’ve got you now, suckers. Stuffed myself with ANAD replicants before you came knocking.

  Then, the Johnny Winger essence sobered up a bit, realizing that twenty-seven other human beings were close by, each one going through the same shakedown cruise.

  He was real glad he’d loaded up with ANAD early enough to block the serotonin cascade. Now it was just a matter of getting down to business—putting the thrashing spasms that Serengeti liked to provoke into one cabinet drawer of his thoughts and concentrating on maneuvering ANAD into battle.

  This was going to be like riding Linda Lamont’s prize Arabian stallion Misty while doing config algorithms in the back of his head at the same time.

  “ANAD…ANAD…this…is…Hub…do you read me?”

  His voice sounded like it was strained through a mile of cotton. He tried that again, but it was just as bad.

  “ANAD to Hub…reading you five by five. I’m already inside…transiting mesostriatal cortex now…full propulsor power…this place is like a stormy night at sea…detecting discharge overloads ahead—“

  Winger grunted. “That would be my limbic system, I believe. ANAD, change config…go to Config Three-A, and prime bond disrupters. Prepare to engage before transiting median forebrain bundle.” He’d worked out the infiltration route with Al Glance a few hours before, a way to enter a human brain unnoticed by the mechs and creep up on them from another axis, an unexpected route of advance. Dendrite fiber was dense here and the route of assault risky. The median bundle was composed of nerves that connected a number of critical regions: the septum, the amygdala and the olfactory tubercle. It was like a trunk line running from all the structures of his reward circuits to the rest of the brain. Grand Central Station for pleasure and pain.

  Again and again, as ANAD closed on the enemy, Johnny Winger fought off spasms and convulsions and tremors and jitters and waves of nausea, interspersed with drowsiness and nameless inchoate fears that numbed his senses. He knew, somewhere in the back closet of his mind where the essence of Johnny Winger had been safely tucked away, that others nearby were going through their own nightmares. That thought alone gave him strength.

  He wasn’t alone in the battle. ANAD was there with him, with detached elements of the assembler force in everyone else, stalking Serengeti along the same route through the median forebrain. Every maneuver he had ANAD make, every probe and config change, was instantly replicated, duplicated twenty-seven times over, in everyone who’d been assaulted by the mechs.

  And ten thousand feet overhead, watching the billowing brown dust cloud that defined the expanding nebula of nanomech hell, Doc Frost was monitoring the situation as best he could, anxious, sick with dread, but powerless to do anything directly to help. In the back of the lifter cabin, Ozzie Tsukota was frantically tuning and adjusting the remnants of the Superfly horde, trying hard to pin down the decoherence wake, to stab the signal like a skittish fish and hang on to it long enough to flood the frequency, if quantum states could be said to have such, with noise and trash, somehow to block the signals that Red Hammer was feeding into the maelstrom.

  He knew they had to do something to help out. If only Detachment Bravo would get here.

  Johnny Winger bent to th
e task, managing ANAD as best he could. He had already taken the interface control pack from Glance and propped it on his lap, leaning back against the pillars for support, hanging on by his fingernails when he had to. Micron by micron, ANAD crept forward, still lost in the electrical noise Serengeti was making as it fired circuit after circuit, extending its control throughout his midbrain. Soon enough, the autonomous assembler and its brood would surge forth across the dendrite forests in an epic battle against its mortal enemy.

  And all around the ruins of El Mareb, Quantum Corps troops and archeologists and Tanzanian infantrymen and porters and a dozen others thrashed and trembled like dying fish on the beach, as the furious battle was joined.

  The first engagement caught Serengeti completely by surprise.

  “Pour it on!” Winger said. His head spun and the room whirled around and he saw his arms jerking and shaking with uncontrollable tremors, but he ignored that and talked to ANAD. “Slam ‘em, ANAD! Hammer the bastards to hell and back.”

  The autonomous assembler came back, “ANAD engaging now…I have many mechs, many, many…dead ahead… looks like a whole division, jacking along that axon…I’m going in—“

  The assemblers closed the gap and waded into the very midst of the surprised mechs, discharging bond disrupters left and right, snagging valence shells, ripping electrons and ester groups and slashing through the horde like a knife fight in a dark alley. ANAD swelled forward and deployed into a flanking swarm, enzymatic knives deployed forward, revving propulsors to get around the formation and cut it off from the mother herd. In seconds, ANAD had done just that.

  Now the real slaughter would begin.

  He’d beefed up ANAD’s core functions since the last melee. Now, the tiny device and its army of replicants bulged with effectors, yet segmenting the propulsor along different axes gave him better maneuverability and he danced around the Serengeti mechs—probing, slashing, stinging, withdrawing, then probing again—like an angry bee. ANAD quickly smothered Serengeti and ripped through the line of mechs, tearing them apart into loose clumps of molecules. Soon the entire sector was choked with debris.

  Flanked on all sides, above and below, ANAD advanced again, hunting more mechs, sounding ahead for the telltale electrical spikes of overloaded nerve fiber. It wasn’t long before he cruised right into another battle, this one anterior by a few microns, deeper into the tegmental tissue.

  The battle raged back and forth, in twenty-seven separate battlefields, for many moments. Fast and furious, ANAD and Serengeti dueled, each one probing, feinting, laying ambushes in the thickets of dendrite fiber, swarming to sudden attacks, dismembering each other by the millions.

  And one by one, infected victims began to succumb to the infestation.

  The first was Sergeant Nico Simonet, the Detachment’s replacement CEC2. Simonet had stashed himself near the front of the fort, draped himself over several archeologists to protect them from the worst of the assault. Johnny Winger talked to ANAD.

  “I’m losing him,” he told the assembler. “I can feel it. We’re outnumbered, outgunned. Everywhere I turn, mechs are there.”

  ANAD agreed. “ANAD to Hub…I’m not sure what’s going on. I’ve replicated the same config. Using the same tactics everywhere. It’s just that this site’s different. The subject’s cortical layout, the fiber density, action potentials, molecular pathways…it’s all laid out differently. I’m probing in the dark, sounding when I have to…I’m just not sure what’s out there—“

  Winger gritted his teeth. His own nerves were jangling, burning with fire. He’d been trying to ignore the pain…stuffing the feelings in another back closet of his mind. Trouble was, he was running out of back closets.

  “Extend replication, ANAD. Let’s add some mass. Rep 10 exp 6 more times. And spread out, disperse. Use another axis of approach. Remember what we discussed?”

  “The prefrontal cortex? Hub, that will take a long time. Enemy mechs will be too strong in the tegmentum by then. I’ve got to swarm directly through the tegmentum...it’s the only way. Otherwise—“

  Winger knew he was right. “Okay, do it, ANAD.”

  But it was hopeless. Winger knew in a few minutes that Nico Simonet was lost, fully in the grip of the Serengeti infection. His body thrashed and convulsed, his back arching at impossible angles. An agonized groan escaped his mouth. Then he was still, breathing shallowly, his face and lips deathly pale blue.

  “—myocardial upset, Hub…losing rhythm, losing oxygen flow…synchro failure…all systems impact—“

  And he knew perfectly well that ANAD could spare no replicants to motor down along the carotid artery to Simonet’s heart for a cold restart. Time was too critical. There were too many others.

  “He’s lost, Hub…I can’t do anything else—“

  Winger swallowed hard, a reflex that somehow got through all the commotion clogging up his nerves. “I know…I know. Full shutdown. Safe all units. Inert and pull out, ANAD. We’ve got a lot more battles to fight here.”

  It was a matter of numbers, he figured. Twenty-six separate battlefields, ANAD replicants engaging Serengeti mechs in each one, and Johnny Winger found after awhile he just couldn’t manage all of them at the same time. It was frustrating, aggravating—he could grab mechs with ANAD and throttle them into atom puff, but he couldn’t catch all of them. There were just too many. As soon as he shut off one line of attack, ANAD would whirl about, motor forward, sound and probe, and re-engage. Each engagement was individually a success. In direct combat, he’d learned how to jab forward directly for Serengeti’s core, how to hold off his carbene grabbers and knife the bastard with a bond disrupter, like ramming ships and setting off a bomb. It worked everytime, on a broad scale throughout every battlefield around.

  But always, Serengeti withdrew in just enough numbers to sustain itself, and soon regenerated units almost as fast as ANAD could dismember them.

  For a time, Johnny Winger gave thought to the one extreme maneuver he’d hoped to avoid: the quantum collapse. It was a last resort, something like a sword to fall back on should the need arise. It would undoubtedly kill him but the quantum collapse would also trap and destroy all the Serengeti mechs inside his body. The entire fort full of soldiers and scientists would become a mass grave of mech casualties.

  But Serengeti’s expansion would be halted right where it started.

  He called up to the lifter, wanting to discuss things with Doc Frost and Tsukota.

  Frost’s voice came back strained and thick. “Lieutenant Tallant reports she’s about an hour away, Johnny. She’s says the convoy’s got Kipwezi in sight. Try to hold on a while longer.”

  Winger was dubious, but he tried not to let it show. “The war’s a stalemate right now, Doc. We’ve lost a few—Sergeant Simonet just died a few minutes ago—but overall, we’re holding up. But I can feel it inside me…ANAD’s weakening. We don’t have the numbers. We can’t replicate fast enough. We’re winning a lot of battles. But we may be losing the war.”

  Frost tried to keep his spirits up. “Johnny, you’re the best code and stick man in the whole Corps. You’re a natural at this…there’s nothing Serengeti., or any human pilot, can do that you can’t beat. I’ve seen you do it. At Lion’s Rock, at Balkistan a few years ago…there has to be a way to blunt this attack.”

  Winger had already made up his mind to do the quantum collapse, unless there was a change in their fortunes, and soon. “Hey, Ozzie…what about that decoherence signal you were tracking…any luck?”

  Tsukota’s voice was loud and clear. “Still tracking, sir. It’s a hopper, keeps jumping from one entanglement state to another. I’m trying to pin it down, but we don’t have the gear to do it. If I can figure out the scheme they’re using, I can gin up an algorithm to jam it.”

  “And we call ourselves the Quantum Corps,” Winger snorted. “Keep at it.”

  He shutdown the link and tri
ed to stand up, wobbly, to survey the battlefield.

  Outside the fort, the air was still thick with dust, though the shimmer of nanomech combat had faded. No wonder, he told himself. The battlefield’s inside now.

  The troops and the scientists were scattered among the ruins like a casualty ward in a hospital, which in a clinical sense, they were. There was Simonet, now cold and still, arms still half-draped across the neck and chest of a young woman. Winger realized she had been the interpreter for Valdemore. A local Masai tribeswoman, wrapped in beaded necklaces and a colorful red and blue print kanga robe. He didn’t know her name, which was just as well. She was writhing as if possessed, her yellow headband half ripped off on nearby rubble, her hands clutching at her face blindly, yet her eyes were tightly shut, as if facing the full fury of some nightmare demon.

  Winger knew how she felt. “Hang in there, girl. We’re fighting ‘em. Just hold on a bit longer—“

  Ten feet away, he stopped at the sight of Buddha Nguyen. The DPS2 was as still as the nearest boulder. His arms were raised as if to ward off a blow, but they hung in the air in a frozen gesture of self-defense. His face was impassive, neutral, his lips a thin blue line. Johnny Winger shook off the burning, jangling feeling in the back of his head, the iron clamps squeezing his head, and bent down to Nguyen, fearing the worst.

  The Defense tech was dead. Rigor mortis had already set in. Winger felt carefully around his face, his eyes, mindful of the likely presence of Serengeti mechs still inside his body. Any orifice was suspect. He had to get on with the fight. But he didn’t leave Nguyen until he’d closed his eyes for good and brushed back a lock of cool, sweaty hair.

  So long, my inscrutable friend. Yours was the bravest soul of all.

  It was time to stop fooling around. He knew what he was doing. Walking among the living, writhing dead was just delaying the inevitable. And he’d always prided himself on knowing what was right and doing it.

  The quantum collapse was the only way to stop Serengeti in its tracks, right here at Engebbe.

  It was time to get on with it.

  It was a tactic they had talked about over beers at Table Top’s O Club, but never wargamed. SOFIE was programmed to prevent such things. Too dangerous. Winger remembered lab discussions, with CINCQUANT attending, at Northgate University, at the Autonomous Systems Lab, over whether such a thing was even possible. The general consensus was that it might be possible, but that you’d have to be pretty desperate to ever try it.

  Doc Frost didn’t even want to talk about it.

  In theory, the idea was simple enough. If ANAD and its millions of replicants could maneuver close enough to Serengeti, even better grapple the mechs with its effectors, then initiate a quantum collapse, the mech infection could be blown to kingdom come. The quantum collapse was an implosion of the assembler’s core processor, a catastrophic release of every quantum state at the same time, maximum decoherence, a simultaneous phase change of entangled states of existence, leading to probabilistic overload. ANAD, and anything within a few million Planck lengths radius of the assembler, simply winked out of existence, crushed into a void of nonbeing.

  It was, as Doc Frost surmised, as if the Universe grew annoyed with humans tinkering around with reality and simply erased the problem once and for all.

  The trouble came, as Johnny Winger, knew from the collateral damage such a collapse could cause. Buried deep in the midbrains of twenty-six people inside the ruins of the old fort, a quantum collapse could easily cause decoherence and other effects that were unpredictable, even fatal for the victims. No one knew what would happen when ANAD imploded in a cascade of collapsing probability waves, inside the brains of the victims.

  Johnny Winger didn’t even want to think about it. But the prospects for survival were grim.

  It was time. Winger found a bare patch of ground amid the rubble piles and sat down.

  “Hub to ANAD… accessing core functions…command override…Alpha…Zero…Zero…provide state vector status—“

  There was a bit of a delay as ANAD disengaged from maneuvering around the Serengeti horde he had been stalking.

  “ANAD to Hub…acknowledging command override…standby for state vector update.”

  Moments later, ANAD’s full configuration data was dumped into the bitstream and uplinked to Winger’s IC pack; he’d taken the unit from Glance and perched it on his lap as he sat down. Every bond and every atom, every picojoule of van der Waals force, every degree of symmetry and every qubit position in his core processor was polled and fired off. Johnny Winger watched numbly as reams of data scrolled down the screen. What he was about to do was tantamount to murder—

  “ANAD, enable quantum buffer gates.”

  This time, the concern in the assembler’s synthetic voice was plainly evident. “Hub, are you sure you want to do this? Buffer gates are fully primed. Core activity is at one point five petabytes and climbing…engaging the enemy is taking all my capacity. Enabling buffer gates—“

  Winger tried to ignore the voice, reminding himself that it was an artifact, a luxury of programming in the quantum computer at the heart of the assembler’s core.

  “Arm buffer gates.”

  Later, in his dreams, he would replay this moment and imagine quite vividly a sort of expletive uplinked through the comm channel. He was never sure whether ANAD had really said anything. His own mind was stressed, still grappling with remnant Serengeti ticking over inside his limbic system.

  Finally, “Hub, ANAD…arming buffer gates not recommended. Core overload imminent. Arming buffer gates may result in interference…macroscale leakage…with the environment….arming buffer gates may result in decoherence effects…collapse of the core—“

  Reluctantly, Winger tapped two keys on his IC pack, effectively muting the assembler’s voice.

  “I know that ANAD…don’t you think I know that?” He sent the command string manually, arming the quantum buffer gates. He studied config, then ANAD’s position. Winger took control of the joystick, and drove the assembler closer to the nearest Serengeti mech, parked like a miniature dump truck at an axon branch point, still mindlessly trying to hijack serotonin molecules, even though most of its effectors had been sheared off.

  Now, with a final keystroke, the buffer gates would be open and ANAD’s quantum core would be exposed to full effects of its macro-scale environment. What happened after that was usually called ‘decoherence’ in the dry argot of physics. An instantaneous collapse of all the infinite probability states of existence, imploding and decohering all at once. Shock waves would radiate out through the cytoplasm inside the brains of the victims as the autonomous assembler and everything around it balled up into a singularity of nonexistence, rending the very fabric of spacetime itself.

  Suicide or hari-kiri, whatever you wanted to call it, the quantum collapse was the surest way Johnny Winger knew to make certain Serengeti was mortally wounded in the ruins of Engebbe. It would mean the end of ANAD, and very probably the end of his own life as well.

  But before he could key the buffer gates open, Doc Frost’s voice crackled over his headset.

  “Johnny…Johnny Winger…don’t do this…I’m getting the indications up here. ANAD’s showing that you’ve enabled the quantum buffer gates…you’ve overridden safeties…Johnny, there’s no need to blow ANAD…or yourself…just yet—“

  Winger said nothing at first. His finger hovered over the key, poised to stab it.

  Frost was pleading. “Your comrades are just a few miles away, Johnny. Wait a few minutes…don’t do anything irreversible. Think what you’re doing. If you open the buffer, ANAD’ll be gone. You yourself…all your detachment…may die when decoherence comes. It’s never been tried—it’s too risky—“

  Winger’s finger relaxed. “It’s the only way, Doc. Dana Tallant can mop up the rest of the swarm when she gets here. But I’m the one who decided to put all these people throug
h this. I’m responsible. If I can get ANAD into the right position, quantum collapse can get rid of Serengeti once and for all.”

  “And destroy ANAD in the process, too? That’s what will happen. Johnny, you’re a military officer. Use your training, use your judgment. No one’s asking you to do this. You’ve got reinforcements less than ten minutes away.”

  Johnny Winger watched the horrible scene around him…a casualty ward that surely duplicated similar scenes in a thousand hospitals and clinics and alleyways and bedrooms around the world, as Serengeti swarms drifted down from the skies and infected millions more everyday.

  “I can’t watch them suffer any longer, Doc. It’s horrible…its agonizing—“ even as he spoke, spasms convulsed half a dozen victims across the room. Cries and groans filled the air. Serengeti and ANAD dueled on battlefields too small to be seen, but the stench of death was just as strong. The ancient ruins of El Mareb were filled with thrashing limbs and trembling hands and grimacing faces. A shaking hand clutched at Winger’s ankle—it was one of the Tanzanians, his face a deathmask of agony, teeth bared full, his tongue a bloody, swollen chunk of red meat—and Winger eased his feet away from the soldier’s last desperate lunge. The Tanzanian arched to a crawling position, like a cat ready to pounce, then collapse in a whimpering ball around a crumbling pillar. “—I’m sorry, Doc…but I’ve brought this on…and I’ve got to end it.”

  “Johnny, listen—“ but Frost’s transmission was cut out by a stronger voice on the same channel.

  “Detachment Alpha…we are tango your position…we have you in sight…we’re just crossing the river bluffs to the southeast.” It was Lieutenant Dana Tallant. “Detachment Bravo moving on your position…can you advise enemy disposition and action in the area?”

  Johnny Winger’s mouth wouldn’t work. Detachment Bravo! Dana! He flung down the IC pack and staggered to the mouth of the fort, peered out through swirling dust, to the southeastern cliffs, squinting for something, anything.

  Even through the haze, he could see the rooster tail of dust churned up by the ground convoy. Bravo was just across the canyon, paralleling the stream bed of the Engebbe River, hunting for a way down through the crags and folds of the cliffs to the dig site.

  He waved and flailed his arms wildly, wincing as Serengeti pinched off more neural circuits, trying to regain his balance as ANAD battled the mechs. His vision dimmed and he retreated back to the innards of the fort.

  “Dana? Detachment Bravo, where the hell have you been?”

  Tallant’s voice was exasperated. “Through hell and back, thank you very much. Where are you?”

  Winger gave her the details—how they had been jumped by the mechs, some kind of local swarm being run by remote control, how they’d retreated to El Mareb, how their perimeter had been squeezed steadily, and how he’d authorized the shield to be dropped and the scientists and the Tanzanians and the Quantum Corps troops to be deliberately infected.

  And how that tactic had come close to backfiring.

  “Dana, you’re a sight for sore eyes. Get your HERF guns primed and set up.”

  “Where do you want ‘em? Looks like the whole valley is swarmed, upstream and downstream for as far as I can see.”

  It’s spreading, he realized. Expanding out of the camp. They didn’t have a minute to lose.

  “Dana, deploy one of your HERF mounts so it can blast RF up and down the valley. You’d better put the other one on the side of the cliff…so we can catch ‘em in a crossfire.”

  “What about all your people? Shouldn’t we get them some help too…you can’t fight these buggers all by yourself.”

  “No,” Winger was forced to admit, “No, I can’t. I’m able to handle my own swarm without too much difficulty, but the others—let’s just say we’ve taken casualties. We’re holding on here, but just by our fingers. I need you to take some pressure off me…everytime ANAD gets the upper hand inside this fort, Serengeti re-infiltrates and reinforces. It’s numbers, Dana…we just don’t have the mass to hold ‘em off.”

  By now, he could see the convoy easing its way down a rocky incline onto the hardpan of the Engebbe River streambed. There were ten vehicles in all. Even from the perch of the fort halfway up the cliffside, he could see Dana Tallant waving at him from the lead truck.

  “Johnny, we’ve got our own ANAD here. It’s the slimmed-down strain. The dumb bots. Shouldn’t we deploy to put pressure on Serengeti, maybe draw some of the mechs off from your position?”

  Winger liked the idea. “I could use the help, that’s for sure.”

  Tallant needed no further encouragement. “Standby…” her voice came back. “I’ll get these buggers deployed and engaging mechs in no time.”

  The convoy stopped downstream, just outside the expanding bubble of the Serengeti swarm. Troops dismounted and Johnny Winger watched as they unloaded a containment cylinder. Moments later, the entire convoy was enveloped in a faint blurry film—the exponentially replicating mass of an ANAD swarm, this one a bubble of ‘dumb bots’, fully as capable as the original but minus the computational smarts. Not fully autonomous, the troops of 1st Nano had taken to nicknaming the assemblers ‘NAD. Inevitably, the acronym had been corrupted into ‘Naddy.”

  Under direct pilotage from the convoy, the swarm of Naddy bots swelled up and pressed forward against the outer reaches of the Serengeti horde. All along the length of the riverbed, flashes and bursts of light crackled in the dust, as mech dueled with assembler, engaging and probing and maneuvering and feinting and counterpunching. For many minutes, the zone of engagement surged up and down the river, like a whirling dust devil whipped by unseen winds.

  At length, Serengeti began thinning out, dissipating inside the confines of El Mareb, as the swarm redeployed down to the riverbed to fight off the new intruder. Winger noticed the effect right away; his mind seemed clearer, and his arm and leg muscles easier to control. Straight way, most of the twitching and trembling had stopped. Looking around, he saw Tanzanians and archeologists and nanotroops sitting up, some attempting to stand. There were groans and racking coughs all around. Serengeti was pulling out, leaving the fort to defend itself against Naddy.

  “It’s working,” Winger said. He scooped up the IC pack from the rubble pile where he’d left it and pulsed for ANAD.

  He re-initiated the voice synthesizer. “Where the hell are you now, little guy?”

  A moment later, ANAD’s voice came back, weak and strained. “Quantum buffer gates armed, Hub. My core’s ready to blow—do you really want to do this?”

  Winger quickly disarmed the buffer. “I guess not, ANAD. I thought we were done for. But the cavalry’s arrived. Serengeti seems to be flowing away from our position.”

  ANAD responded, “ANAD concurs…now sounding ahead…I’m still anterior to the fissure of Sylvius…still detecting remnant mechs ahead. Just a lot fewer of them…don’t worry, Hub…I can deal with these mechs on my own.”

  He knew he had come within a whisker of blowing the assembler’s quantum buffer gates wide open, setting in motion an irreversible chain of quantum collapse. A chain of events that would likely have destroyed ANAD, Serengeti and all their host victims. He shuddered at the thought now.

  Tallant’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “How’s it looking up there now, Wingman? We’re fully engaged with Serengeti down here.”

  Winger described the incredible scene. “It’s like everybody’s just been freed from captivity. People are smiling, rubbing their necks and eyes. People are up and moving around. I’ve configged ANAD to mop up the rest of Serengeti in this sector. When he’s done, we’ll join forces and smash these bastards but good.”

  When she was reasonably sure the tide of the battle inside Johnny Winger and the others had turned, Dana Tallant set to work using Naddy to systematically surround the Serengeti mechs and contain the ever-expanding swarm. From a distance, the Engebbe River valley appeared env
eloped in dueling dust storms, as the nanoscale armies clashed up and down the length of the river. An iridescent fog sparkling with pinpricks of lights boiled over the cliffs paralleling the river. Where the mech density was greatest, and the combat most fierce, knots and fists and streamers of fog thickened and thinned as if alive, setting off long chains of electrical discharges, like miniature lightning strokes, as Naddy’s bond disrupters went to work and mechs were ripped apart.

  While Naddy flanked and pressed in on the mechs, Tallant decided to detach a small element of the dumb bots and replicate a swarm large enough to handle another job, a job that had to be done. When the detached force had been formed up and was under control, she told the IC’s to steer it toward the dig site itself.

  “There are bones and fossils down there,” she said. “That’s the true source of Serengeti’s power. We’ve got to destroy them.”

  “Destroy them…destroy everything?” asked a young Interface Controller named Dobbs. “You mean the gear, the markers—“

  “I mean every damn molecule, soldier!” Tallant yelled. “The dig, the excavation, the tools, the bones, the fossils, every last molecule. Disassembled and blown the hell out of here.”

  “Yes, ma’am!” Dobbs replied.

  “If I’m right, this’ll draw even more mechs out into the open.” She looked up along the edges of the cliff, eyeing the emplacement of the HERF guns. “And once we’ve got ‘em exposed, we fry ‘em.”

  A furious airborne battle ensued but Detachment Bravo had finally brought enough weapons to turn the battle. The HERF guns were brought up and sighted in. Then, a sanitized perimeter was created, by steering Naddy around the perimeter of the main battle. With ANAD now free to join the fight, Serengeti was forced to defend itself and its redoubt from every direction. Inside the perimeter, ANAD and the enemy mechs dueled with relentless fury. Outside the cordon, Dobbs had piloted Naddy into the excavation itself, nibbling at the edges of the battle, systematically disassembling anything larger than a grain of sand, laying waste to years of fossil hunting, to priceless treasures of an ancient past.

  Tallant strained listening for a report from the HERF crews over the keening whine of the mech battle and the steady zzzzzippp-crack of the bond disrupters ripping the air. At last, it came.

  “Weapon in place, Lieutenant. Unit One sighted in and registered all-azimuth. Ready for power-up.”

  Tallant acknowledged. “Unit Two…what’s the story?”

  Seconds later, “Unit Two…just about done, Lieutenant. We’re priming now—“

  “Very well…you are authorized to power up the weapons. Lieutenant Winger--?”

  Winger was steering a sizeable formation of ANAD replicants out of the fort, swarming down the face of the cliff toward the excavation. “Winger here. 1st Nano is ready. I’m maneuvering to cut off the lower end of the valley. Don’t want any mechs heading for Kipwezi or the villages.”

  “Understood. Keep yourself away from open air, Wingman. We’re about to crash this party once and for all.”

  There was no point in waiting any longer. Tactical necessity demanded speed. Tallant gave the word, knowing full well they were probably destroying the ANAD master as well as Serengeti. But it couldn’t be helped.

  Serengeti had to be defeated, here, at any cost.

  “HERF guns and magpulsers, fire at will!”

  The thunderclap, when it came, struck the ground and the walls like a hammer, momentarily collapsing the atmosphere around them. Lungs screaming, Johnny Winger and his troops rose up and hustled out of El Mareb, crouching, stumbling, scrambling down the dusty steps to the riverbed, through the rubble and dust, pulling themselves along as the radio frequency weapon slammed tera-hertz RF waves into the air.

  Again and again, HERF discharged. Each time, the entire valley shook with the fist of energy. Somehow, as Winger led the throng to freedom, the tactic seemed to be working. He led the Detachment, followed by the Tanzanians and the scientists across the river, fording the cool stream at ankle depth, finally converging on Tallant’s position downstream where a switchback in the river course led off to a rutted road to the nearby village of Longido. Atop the low hill overlooking the river, a crowd of villagers, local Masai in colorful robes and headdresses, had gathered.

  He found Tallant and the rest of Detachment Bravo holed up in the defiladed ruins of a stone wall, actually a remnant of the excavation that the river had unearthed weeks before. Winger grinned crazily when he saw Dana Tallant. They hugged tightly, then aware of the stares around them, stepped apart and saluted.

  “You’re looking mighty handsome today, Lieutenant,” Winger was soaked with sweat and grime from the scramble down from the fort. “We got pinned down by those angry bees…damn near ate us up.”

  “Get small and cover yourself!” Tallant warned them. “Another round’s coming up—“ At her hand signal, the escapees hit the ground and buried their faces in the mud.

  The HERF guns fired again and again and the very air was fried with RF, shattering the ANAD and Naddy and Serengeti formations into nanodust. A deafening series of thunderclaps rolled through the Engebbe valley, flattening everything, igniting small fires in the brush on the hillsides. The villagers of Longido launched into action to contain the flames.

  But the battle was over. Serengeti and ANAD had been crushed out of existence, stripped down to their nucleus fragments. Even the master assemblers had been annihilated, their cores squeezed into atom puffs and, more importantly, the source of Serengeti’s power—the ancient genomes of the fossilized remains at the Engebbe dig site-- were destroyed too.

  Johnny Winger dragged himself to a standing position. He was exhausted nearly into unconsciousness. But somehow, he had survived. They had withstood the onslaught of the mechs and managed to get away, at least most of them.

  Winger helped the others stand and brush themselves off. The entire group was a frazzled, bedraggled lot. Many, maybe even most of them, would need nanobot med therapy to recover full functions in their brains, throughout their bodies. Most were wobbly and faint; some couldn’t even stand.

  Three had died: One was Valdemore’s graduate assistant, a young Frenchwoman named Selene. She had succumbed early on to the mech invasion and thrashed herself to death in a choking, vomiting fit.

  Two Detachment soldiers had been lost as well: CEC2 Sergeant Nico Simonet and DPS2 Corporal An Nguyen. Simonet had filled in for Marc Seurat, himself a replacement for Joe McReady. All were casualties of the campaign.

  Johnny Winger swallowed hard as he walked among the survivors, helping the weakest to stand, shaking off the infestation for the first time, tending to all the bruises and cuts and lacerations.

  And he couldn’t forget about ANAD too. The assembler had been lost when the HERF guns went off. It was crazy, he realized, but he couldn’t help thinking about the device. It was just a machine, a few dozen nanometers in breadth, but somehow, unaccountably, he’d sensed the beginnings of a sort of friendship with the little guy.

  All of them were heroes, each in his own way. The very first nanowarrior heroes.

  They had sacrificed everything to save the world from the scourge of Serengeti Factor.

  Time alone would tell if destroying Engebbe would finally help bring the pandemic under control.

  EPILOGUE

  U.N. Quantum Corps Briefing Room

  U.N. Quantum Corps Base, Table Top Mountain, Idaho, USA

  September 28, 2062

  Morning

  This briefing theater has more brass than a sportsman’s yacht, Johnny Winger thought. Major Kraft was there, along with Lieutenant Tallant, all from 1st Nano. CINCQUANT, General Linx, was also on hand, having lifted in from Paris an hour before. Stuart Macalvey was vidlinked in from WCDC in Atlanta. Doc Frost was on hand.

  Frost had imagery of a nanobotic device up on the display, pointing out features of the design.

  “Of course
, we’re all glad UNSAC’s seen fit to lower the threat level last night,” CINCQUANT was saying. “But that doesn’t mean we’re free of this menace. The airborne swarms are still up there. Doctor Frost—you’re ANAD’s creator. This new design you’ve got—you’re sure it’ll work? Nobody’s ever authorized a release of nanodevices this large before.”

  Frost fiddled with the resolution of the display, bringing the gain up to maximum. He tweaked the sensitivity controls of the quantum flux imager, remotely tuning the instrument located two thousand miles away at the Autonomous Systems Lab at Northgate University. The image on the screen sharpened slightly. In focus at the center of the screen was a regular grid. At the exact center of the grid, a faint tetrahedral structure seemed to beat to an inner rhythm.

  “General, we’ve got every reason to believe the seeker ANAD you’re looking at will do the job. I’ve already worked out with Dr. Macalvey the exact protocols of the release…the coordinates, the volumes to be released, dispersal patterns, and so forth. With Serengeti still plaguing a lot of the world’s cities, we’ll have to be diligent in monitoring its effectiveness. But in all tests so far, seeker nanobots have been nearly one hundred percent effective in countering Serengeti.”

  Linx frowned, looked at Kraft and Winger. “The damn thing looks just like ANAD.”

  “It is ANAD,” Frost admitted. “Actually a close cousin, if you like. These seeker ANADs are variants of the basic design for autonomous assemblers. The physical resemblance is there, but it’s loaded with different programming. The seekers have programming to specifically engage and disassemble Serengeti.”

  Kraft spoke up. “General, the doc has incorporated a lot of details that came from our experiences with Serengeti, in the field. We encountered variants of the bot in Hong Kong and east Africa, multiple encounters, actually. “

  Frost added, “The program enables the seeker ANADs to locate Serengeti by certain molecular signatures. Then it engages, blocks the known effects of the mechs on neural serotonin systems—that’s the serotonin cascade I mentioned earlier—breaks any detectable comm link, such as this quantum channel back to Red Hammer we detected, and begins disassembly of the surviving mechs.”

  “You can replicate in enough quantity to attack this menace everywhere, all over the globe?”

  Frost nodded toward the pixellated face of Stuart Macalvey on an adjoining monitor. “We’re coordinating the treatment campaign with Dr. Macalvey there, and with WHO in Switzerland.”

  Macalvey cut in, his red beard a luxuriant bush supporting his chin and mouth. “Clinics are being set up in every major city, on every continent. Now that we understand the mechanism by which Serengeti works, we can counter it more effectively. Treatment has two phases, General: dealing with existing victims, and hunting down the airborne superswarms.”

  “By studying the nucleotide sequences of those ancient viral genomes in the Engebbe fossils,” Frost explained, “we were able to develop and load the right program and structure for the seeker ANADs. Thanks to all the help from Macalvey and also from Dr Keino at WHO.”

  Linx was a short, heavy-set man with piercing blue eyes and a shiny bald head. “UNSAC has already informed me that the Security Council will authorize your release this morning. We should get the word when the Paris contingent arrives for the ceremony.” He inclined his head toward Kraft, Winger and Tallant. “The sooner we get these jokers deployed and engaging Serengeti superswarms, the better. Major, your people have done excellent work.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Kraft tried to relax a bit. It wasn’t everyday the Commander in Chief of the Quantum Corps visited Table Top. “And we are working on backtracking those comm links,” he told CINCQUANT, “trying to locate Red Hammer’s operating base. We still believe it’s in the mountains, somewhere near the Nepal-Tibetan border.”

  Linx understood and was thoughtful. “Releasing these seekers makes a lot of people nervous, gentlemen. It’s the first time we’ve authorized such massive nanoswarms to be let loose in the environment—outside of HNRIV and Serengeti, that is. Major, it’s going to be Quantum Corps’ responsibility to control and monitor operations, in the atmosphere and in the clinics. UNSAC has worked up a set of stringent nanosafety controls. The public has to be assured this will work, and not make the problem worse.” Linx’ face darkened. “No one wants another Vivonex to happen.”

  At Kraft’s prompting, Winger and Tallant briefed the general on the details of the Delta Helix mission to Engebbe. The after-action review involved displays run by SOFIE, running down what happened, what worked and what went wrong.

  Linx was sobered by the casualties. “You lost some good people, Major. Are you certain the genome source at that dig site is rendered safe?”

  “Yes, sir,” Winger acknowledged, for Kraft, “to our knowledge, the entire site is fully destroyed and disassembled into atom puff. We left a detail at the site to monitor activities, assist in cleanup and recovery and to kind of mollify the archeologists. They’re pretty upset, losing all those fossils and artifacts.”

  CINCQUANT snorted. “No sense of perspective for any of them. It’s only a matter of time before we get a handle on this pandemic. After all the casualties—“ he shook his head.

  Macalvey concurred from his lab in Atlanta. “General, final figures aren’t known yet. Actual mortality data suggest casualties in the low millions.”

  “Only one thing worries me,” Major Kraft said. “We have a handle on Serengeti and its source. We’ve shutdown the control links between Vivonex and Red Hammer and the superswarms, or we think we have. But the brains behind Serengeti are still around…probably at that Red Hammer base, wherever it is. Sometime soon, we’re going to have to go back into those mountains and find them. Put them out of action permanently.”

  Linx agreed. The general stood, and the rest of the theater came to attention, as he headed for the door. “We’d better get out to the lifter pads. UNSAC and the Secretary-General will be arriving soon.” He regarded Kraft thoughtfully. “That very thought has been keeping me awake at night for the past few weeks. As long as Red Hammer’s intact and active, the main enemy hasn’t been defeated at all. The real adversary is still out there.”

  Kraft followed the general as he left the Ops Center and headed across the quadrangle for the north lifter pad. Tallant and Winger glanced at each other, then fell in behind the flag officer too.

  An award ceremony had been arranged for 1st Nano at Drexler Field, across the mesa from the lifter pads. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, the Honorable Ahmed Ben Salah and the Security Affairs Commissioner (UNSAC) Jiang Hao Bei had arrived with a stern, no-nonsense UNIFORCE escort, along with the U.S. President, Dr. LaTonya Kendrick.

  The troops of the battalion were dressed out in full parade uniform, sky blue piping on spotless dress grays, arrayed in perfect ranks along the manicured lawn of the grounds. Johnny Winger squirmed in his tight jacket, earning a hiss from Dana Tallant, who was right behind him.

  “Quit wiggling, Wings…you’re making the whole platoon nervous.”

  “I can’t help it,” Winger mouthed back. “This damn jacket’s too tight…I can’t breathe.”

  “ORDER IN THE RANKS!” Kraft barked out loud. “PRESENT….H’ARMS!”

  The battalion snapped to full attention and stood at arms while Ben Salah and Dr Kendrick reviewed the formation. A brassy trumpet fanfare filled the parade grounds from the Corps Honor Guard Band. The Secretary-General was a tall, regal man, stern of eye with a prominent aquiline nose. President Dr. Kendrick moved in perfect unison right alongside him, an athletic black woman whose lithe stride belied her fifty years of age and experience.

  The formal ceremony seemed to Johnny Winger to last forever. The battalion itself received a unit citation from the Secretary-General. Major Kraft proudly marched forward to receive the U.N. Special Order of Gaia, 1st Rank, signifying, as the inscription on the pennan
t read, “extraordinary valor and courage defending the peoples of Earth.”

  Semper fi, Winger muttered to himself. Get on with the show. I’m dying out here.

  Individual citations were next. Winger and Tallant were singled out for Purple Hearts. They marched forward in unison, saluted smartly, and received the medals from President Dr. Kendrick, then about-faced and regained their positions in the ranks.

  The final ceremony came from the U.N. Security Affairs Commissioner, Jiang Hao Bei. Jiang called Johnny Winger out by name again, and after the lieutenant had marched up, touched the nanowarrior with a jeweled scepter on each shoulder.

  “For uncompromising integrity and unflinching selfless duty in the service of his fellow soldiers—“ Jiang announced. UNSAC removed a small medallion from a leather box and pinned the stallion and crown of the UNIFORCE Blue Legion of Victory on Winger’s chest. Johnny saluted, then shook hands with the Commissioner.

  “Bravo!—“ someone called out. “Hurrah!” The words were repeated several times, then swelled into a chorus of cheers. The ranks broke into applause and Johnny Winger gave a sly smile as he regained his position.

  Another trumpet fanfare followed, then a parade of endless speeches. To occupy his mind, Winger kept a loose count of the number of times the word valor was used. He lost track at one hundred and four.

  It was finally over at 1100 hours. Major Kraft, with permission from CINCQUANT, passed an order to his troops to stand at ease and officially mingle with the high and mighty.

  Two hours later, after the award ceremony and the Secretary-General’s reception at the Ops Center, the 1st Nanospace Battalion was formally stood down and released. Major Kraft granted liberty. Most of the nanowarriors headed for the O Club, or off base to gaudier amusements.

  Winger and Tallant decamped with Doc Frost to the Containment Facility.

  “There’s something I want to show you,” Doc Frost told them.

  Inside the containment barrier, they came to the TinyTown cylinder in the Level 4 compartment. It was quiet, powered down for the moment. ANAD was gone, destroyed in the HERF blasts at Engebbe and the room was quiet and dark, save for a glowing cone of light coming from the quantum flux imager in one corner.

  Frost motioned the two of them over. Inside the flux tube, a small capsule was fastened to the grid. The imager hummed with power, its injectors pointed at the center of the capsule.

  “What’s going on, Doc?” Dana Tallant asked. “Why’s the imager powered up?”

  Frost indicated the screen. “Take a look for yourself.”

  They did. Contained within the capsule was a nanoscale processor core, its blurry cloud of electrons twitching with barely suppressed energy. The fuzzy image was superimposed on a fine latticework grid, pinned like a buzzing moth to a screen door. Even as they watched, the core shifted through a dizzying variety of states, probability wave collapse at its most basic level as the core decohered into one visible state after another.

  “It’s looks like some kind of quantum core,” Winger muttered, looking up from the ‘scope with a frown. “I don’t understand…what is it?”

  Frost smiled mysteriously. “I was able to contain it from the cabin door of the lifter cockpit at Engebbe. Took awhile to get a hold of it, get under control and be sure I had it contained.”

  “But what is it?”

  “The quantum core for Serengeti…or at least a goodly portion of it.”

  Winger and Tallant were both startled at the admission. “And you were able to snag this at Engebbe? How the hell—“

  Frost held up a hand. “Don’t ask. I’m using it now…trying to seed a new ANAD with it.”

  Winger’s eyes narrowed. “Isn’t that a bit dangerous?”

  “Not if you know what you’re doing.”

  Winger didn’t understand. “We lost ANAD at Engebbe. Master, core and all. Right?”

  “Sadly…correct,” Frost admitted. “But I still have the basic code for his kernel. It’s in the capsule…actually, that capsule is a miniaturized containment device. I’m—I guess you could say—blending the two.”

  Tallant bent to the imager screen again. “Hard to see anything at this resolution. How do you know what it can do?”

  “I don’t. I’ll have to test it. But if I’m right, Serengeti’s a clone of the original ANAD design. I’m betting the two will be kissing cousins…compatible with each other, at the basic level of their cores, anyway. I’m starting the seeding process now, back at Northgate.”

  “And you’re going to blend Serengeti’s core into his?”

  Frost nodded. “If I can find out what makes him tick, I will. I don’t want to inadvertently inject something into ANAD we can’t control.”

  Winger shrugged. “I don’t know, Doc. I had the feeling ANAD’s already his own person. I hate to admit it, but I miss the little guy. He was like a little brother to me, just learning how to walk and talk.”

  Frost beamed at the analogy. “I’m glad to hear you say that, Johnny. ANAD had a quantum processor core that was pretty advanced for nanodevices. Enough computational capacity to rival a small child. In a sense, he could have been a little brother.”

  “He had a personality,” Winger said. “And a temperament.”

  “With Serengeti’s core blended in, and an upgraded processor in his core, I think you’ll see ANAD growing up a lot faster. He’s going to be quite a dandy, once the seeding is done and I can start regenerating from the core out.”

  “We kind of started to think of him as a little nanotrooper, a burrhead just arrived from nog camp.”

  “And so you shall again,” Frost assured them. “With this generation, I’m planning on adding a few extra behavioral routines. He’ll have the computational capacity for them. And I’m throwing in a few new wrinkles too.”

  “Some new effectors, Doc?”

  “Oh, that and something else.” His eyes twinkled. “You don’t know this but every time ANAD crawled inside your head, he mapped out glutamate trails in your limbic system. I’ve got that recorded…don’t ask me how,” he held up a hand. “It’s better that you don’t know. But it means the new ANAD’ll have many of the same memories and traits as you.”

  Tallant chuckled, slapping Winger on the shoulder. “He really will be like a little brother, Wings. He’ll want to follow you everywhere, do everything you do. What more could you ask for?”

  Winger was both sobered and impressed. A sheepish grin materialized on his face. “Just don’t tell Major Kraft anything about this, will you, Doc?”

  The beer bash was still going strong at the Officers’ Club when Tallant and Winger finally arrived.

  They ordered a round of the bartender’s special of the day. The club was loud and boisterous, crammed wall to wall with 1st Nano and other atomgrabbers.

  “It’s like a frat party on Saturday night, after the big game,” Winger raised his voice to be heard over the din.

  Tallant checked out the crowd, then nodded, hoisting a mug. “We’ve been under fire most of the last month…something’s got to give. They’re just letting off steam.”

  Winger’s eyes locked with Tallant’s. “You’re a hell of a nanowarrior…you know that?”

  “I thought you’d never notice. I didn’t know what might happen when Major Kraft detailed me to Delta Helix. That was kind of your baby from the beginning.”

  Winger shrugged. “All you did was save our asses at Engebbe.”

  “You shouldn’t have split up the force at Dar es Salaam. Violates every tactical doctrine I’ve ever heard of. You got outflanked by the enemy and nearly atomized. You were a lucky son of a bitch.”

  Winger admitted the truth of that. “Anyway, thanks, Dana. You and I…we make a pretty good team, don’t we?”

  Tallant considered that. “Yeah…I suppose you could put it that way. Of course, some of us want a little more than that.”

 
The moment passed and they knocked down a few more beers, placing bets and making odds that they’d be facing Red Hammer again.

  “Those scumbags are holed up somewhere over the border in Tibet, sure as I’m sitting on this barstool,” Tallant was saying. She’d loosened her hair a bit and rolled up her sleeves.

  Winger was pensive, staring down at the scorching amber liquid the bartender had poured for them. It was a Kurganian brew, something called aalok kudrim—‘wicked fire,’ was the closet translation. Aptly named, he thought as he took another kick in the teeth from the potent brew.

  “We’ll meet again,” he agreed. “Somewhere, sometime. I’m not too keen on meeting them just yet though.”

  “I don’t know, Wings.” She edged her stool an inch closer to his. “If there is a next time, I think ANAD can beat ‘em. We’ve got Serengeti now; we’ve got their latest stuff.”

  “And we’ve got Nathan Caden out of our hair,” he admitted. “Nabbing him solved a lot of unsolved mysteries around here. How he got turned is going to take a lot of explaining.” Winger shrugged. “I guess I’m not as confident as you.”

  “Why? Too much horsepiss in that so-called drink of yours?”

  “Not really.” Winger looked at her. “No, something Doc Frost once said, a long time ago.”

  “And what pearl of wisdom did the good doctor utter this time?”

  Winger suddenly wasn’t thirsty anymore. “It’s like ANAD was the perfect warrior. Grown from a virus. Part organism, part mechanism. Don’t get me wrong, I think Doc Frost is the smartest man on the planet. I just wonder how smart it is to try blending Serengeti with ANAD. It’s like tampering with evolution, maybe tampering with the future. They both came from viruses. As a lifeform, viruses have lived on earth a hell of a lot longer than we have. They’ve adapted to everything Life has thrown at them. They’re relentless. And now what do we have? With ANAD, an intelligent, programmable virus. Add in a pinch of Serengeti and what does that give you?”

  “An even more intelligent, programmable virus?”

  “Exactly…I mean…is this really a good thing to do? Dana, at times, when ANAD was inside me, talking to me on the acoustic circuit, I was certain he was alive, conscious, even mischievous, just like a little boy.”

  “So you’re a Daddy now. You’ll soon have a new son to raise and teach the facts of life to.”

  “I’m not sure who’s teaching who. With quantum computing, and now genetic programming from Serengeti—which was itself based on an ancient virus—we’ve given Nature’s most efficient killer the smarts to outsmart us all.” He decided to finish off his own drink. “I just wonder how much longer we can stay ahead of them. Do we teach ANAD? Or does ANAD teach us?”

  Tallant shrugged. “Maybe a little of both.” Then, she put down her beer with a disgusted thunk on the counter. “Johnny Winger, don’t you go morose on me and ruin a perfectly good drinking binge. Does it really matter?”

  Winger shook his head. Already, he was thinking of what challenges might lay ahead for the Quantum Corps, not knowing that in a few months, he and Tallant would be facing down mortal enemies once more in Johnny Winger and the Amazon Vector.

  “Probably not. I just miss ANAD, that’s all. I hate that we had to HERF that valley. Maybe it was the only way. But he was a valiant warrior. Heck of an atomgrabber…maybe the best of us all.”

  Tallant finished off her own brew. “I’ll drink to that. With you and me in a rough and ready outfit like this, no enemy stands a chance…virus or human or halfway in between. Hey, maybe after Doc Frost finishes regenerating ANAD II, we should have some kind of formal induction ceremony. You know—bring the assembler into 1st Nano with rank and commission, the works. A full-fledged nanowarrior.”

  “Amen to that,” Winger agreed. “But let’s make that gallant group of warriors a trio instead of a duo.” He hoisted his mug. “To ANAD.”

  Tallant smiled, in spite of her disappointment, adding, “To ANAD…the newest nog in the outfit.”

  About the Author

  Philip Bosshardt is a native of Atlanta, Georgia. He works for a large company that makes products everyone uses…just check out the drinks aisle at your grocery store. He’s been happily married for over 20 years. He’s also a Georgia Tech graduate in Industrial Engineering. He loves water sports in any form and swims 3-4 miles a week in anything resembling water. He and his wife have no children. They do, however, have one terribly spoiled Keeshond dog named Kelsey.