Linx’s mouth dropped open. “ANAD? You mean—“
Del Compo nodded. “A very advanced colony of apparently designed and programmable mechanisms, small as a virus, but with extraordinary capability—here, I’ll show you what I mean.” The doctor directed someone off screen with a flurry of Spanish. “I’ve got imagery…this is a Quark Flux image of one of the devices here.”
The image flickered and a separate, somewhat grainy image of a polyhedral structure filled the view. The structure was festooned with grapplers, hooks, extended chains of polypeptides, bristling with molecular tools.
“I’ll be damned,” Linx muttered. “What on God’s green earth are these doodads?” He squinted at the image, measuring a fuzzy protuberance on the 3-d image using his fingers as a caliper.
“Off hand, I’d say something like a fullerene hook,” Camois said. “Perhaps the same as your ANAD, only it seems to have a lot more complicated set of radicals at every end. How does it stay like that?”
“We don’t know,” del Compo admitted. “I had the same question. Bond energies should make this structure fly apart, but it doesn’t.”
“We’re looking at some very advanced nanoscale engineering here,” Linx said.
“The Sea People?” thought Camois. “Do they have technology like this?”
“Possibly, but this…this is so far beyond what we’ve ever seen of their culture so far,” said Satsuyama. “It’s hard to believe the Sea People would or even could, do this. My interactions with them have convinced me that they’re reasonably peaceful people… in fact, they want us to leave them alone.”
“General, these bots are organized and held together somehow in a colony that vaguely resembles something humanoid. These demonio, as we call them, are nothing more than a collection of autonomous nanoscale assemblers, ANADs, if you will. And here’s what’s really strange: all the internal structures you see in the internal scan are perfectly designed, if I can use that word, to adapt this creature to living inside these zones of altered atmosphere.”
Del Compo’s words hung in the air for a few moments, until the full import of what he had said sunk in.
“Is this a new species?” Camois asked. “Some branch off the human evolutionary line? Or some kind of experiment by the Sea People?”
“Or are we being invaded…maybe colonized ourselves?” Kerensky said.
Del Compo shook his head. “Unknown at this time. It’s my belief, however, that these atmospheric alterations, whatever their source, and the existence of the demonio, are related.”
“Did one cause the other?” Linx asked.
“We don’t know, General. That’ll require more investigation.”
Deputy Camois had heard enough. “This tells me we’ve got a crisis on our hands and it’s growing fast. If what happened at Via Verde spawned or was somehow created by these…Sea People creatures…then what the hell is happening at all the other sites BioShield has detected? This could explain why BioShield is detecting heightened nanobotic activity. Maybe we’re detecting these colonies.”
“I’ll get tasking from the DG and SG, before the night is over,” Linx promised. The investigation mission will be assigned to Quantum Corps and our ANAD units.”
The meeting went on for awhile longer, but no one seemed to notice that the Chinese delegate, Cao Zhilin’s avatar, had assumed a static, almost frozen position in the corner. Unknown to the others, Cao had placed her avatar in a default mode and left the conference. Physically located at the UNISEA suite of offices in New York, she shutdown the live link to Paris and switched to another link that was open…a chat link to the Foreign Ministry in Beijing.
Carefully, Cao spoke a warning to what she knew were likely dozens of interested parties online, monitoring her chat link for updates on the UNIFORCE conference.
Cao wrote cryptically, in Chinese kaishu script:
Proceed quickly with investigation…UNIFORCE expedition is coming….
Chapter 12
Reed Banks
The South China Sea
September 10, 2115
1100 hours
A combined effort to investigate the structure being assembled by the Coethi on the seabed floor of the South China Sea had to be hurriedly organized, since the UNIFORCE expedition would soon flood the area with ships, submarines, drones and divers, all armed to the teeth and ready to engage anything that looked vaguely threatening.
To keep unwanted visitors away as long as possible, Admiral Hu Zhejiang arranged for the PLA Navy to cordon off a hundred-square kilometer region of the seas surrounding the Reed Banks. Night and day, Yang-class destroyers, cruisers and Song-class submarines patrolled the area, dodging the waterspouts and increasing ferocity of storms, to keep the Ponkti and Chinese engineers and scientists from any outside interference.
PLA nanoscale combat units also joined the effort, dispersing across a wide swath of the ocean from Hainan Island to the Palawan Basin, to ferret out any attempts at covert surveillance or penetration from UNIFORCE ANAD units at molecular scales.
For Dr. Chu of the Beijing Academy and Dr. Li of the Guangzhou Institute, the main focus of their efforts would concentrate on the strange, vaguely menacing time manipulator, the Shijian caoxong qi, as the Chinese translated from the Ponkti tongue, at the center of all the disturbances. From all sensor data they could analyze, the Coethi bots, or m’jeete to the Ponkti, seemed to be assembling the thing according to some pre-programmed plan. Torrential thunderstorms and hordes of waterspouts and vortexes had been sweeping the sea for days now and Dr. Chu was grateful to finally be submerged, aboard the Academy’s research submersible Kunming, safe, stable and away from all the violence topside.
A volunteer detail of scientists from the Academy had agreed to come to Reed Banks and test the device and its properties by sending first unmanned, then later manned ships into the main vortex. The ships were called shiguang jiqi and were based on designs the Ponkti themselves had provided, from their Farpool transit ships.
Kunming closed on the vortex fields surrounding the structure carefully.
The small submersible was operated by the Guangzhou Institute. Dr. Chu and Dr. Li were aboard, along with the pilot, an oval-faced kid named Yang from Xiamen, not far from the Institute and the remote arm operator Xi Linping, an expert not only with the arms but also with operating Kunming’s squad of autonomous drones, carried piggyback in racks along the top of her hull.
Her forward sample basket had been rigged to carry the most important cargo of all: a small containment vessel from the Academy in Beijing. Inside the vessel were xiao zhanshi, the ‘tiny warriors’ of a nanoscale swarm of robots, with a master replicator and starter swarm of daughter elements. Chu was the acknowledged expert on nanobots in China and she hoped and prayed that the tiny warriors would be able to engage the Coethi swarm that surrounded the time manipulator and penetrate them well enough to allow the sub to approach the device. The plan was to approach the time manipulator and insert a small test capsule into its main vortex and see what happened next.
If events matched theory, the test capsule would disappear completely from view and be gone. It would then be up to Chu and the Academy physicists to prove that the capsule had been snatched away into some kind of wormhole, some kind of gateway to other times and places, as the Ponkti insisted it would.
Kunming was not alone in her approach to the device. Loptoheen, Lektereenah, Yakto and a small gathering of Ponkti and Skortish kelke roamed alongside the sub and stayed in communication with her crew through a modified signaler, modified with echopod translating devices so that the Ponkti and the Chinese could converse and signal each other, although the signaler was a low-frequency device, capable only of simple strings of words.
Now the signaler chirped with an incoming message. Li picked up the pod and used its control studs to turn up the volume, so all could hear over the rush of the turbulent waters around them. Kunming was cruising slowly at five knots, at a depth of two hundred me
ters along a sandy spine of the shoals above as she homed on the time manipulator.
“Shkreeah…m’jeete ahead…” came a squeaky, clicky voice over the circuit. To Li, it sounded like the larger Ponkti male, the one who went by the name translated as Loptoheen. “…mee’tor’kel water…very rough…opuh’te…many opuh’te…”
Li consulted some notes on a slate, notes he had been making about the language of the Sea People. He looked up in triumph with a smirk. “Opuh’te…that means whirlpools…or vortexes…I think.”
“Congratulations, Dr. Li,” Chu said sourly. “We can already see and feel them.”
“I’m slowing us down,” said Yang. “Ask your friends how far away we should stop.”
Xi studied the sonar board. “Get as close as you can…my tiny warriors have some fierce cross-currents to navigate to get to the perimeter of that swarm.”
Li put the question to Loptoheen through the signaler. The answer came back a few moments later.
“…one beat…half-beat…stop and hold position—”
Li did some calculating. “Their distance measurement is based on sound waves. A beat is one wavelength of their reference pinging sound…I make it about fifty meters, maybe less.”
“Too far,” complained Xi. “It’ll take a whole day for my little guys to approach their target. They’re just nanobots…they’ve got a jillion atoms and molecules to cut through.”
Li told Yang to set the stop distance at twenty meters. Outside Kunming, Loptoheen was startled to see the Tailless craft continue its approach past the point he had recommended.
“Stupid Tailless…they don’t know what they’re doing with these m’jeete.”
“Neither do we,” noted Lektereenah.
Finally, Kunming came to a complete stop, her side thrusters whirling madly to maintain position in the tricky currents.
Ahead of them, the sea was a blur of waves and silt and foam, as a ring of vortexes danced and throbbed around the circumference of the conical structure that was the time manipulator.
Loptoheen had listened carefully to the echopods Tulcheah had stolen from the Omtorish back in Keenomsh’pont, records stolen when she had tranquillized eekoti Chase into a stupor after a night of violent coupling. Chase had recorded how the Umans at Kinlok Island on Seome had described their own wavemaker, their own time manipulator, the very machine that generated the Farpool itself. It was Lektereenah, and her chief scientist Yakto, who had theorized that the m’jeete device worked in a similar way.
If the Tailless were brash and courageous enough to want to test that notion, Loptoheen thought, so much the better. “They can do the testing for us, save us the effort,” Lektereenah decided.
So a joint program of testing and analyzing had been worked out with the Chinese.
At the very center of the vortex field, the Coethi bot swarm was assembling something that looked like two dinner plates pressed together. Resting on the seabed in a shallow depression, the time manipulator spanned nearly a hundred meters in overall diameter. Atop the ‘dinner plates’ were concentric rings of blisters around the circumference of the structure. From each blister, a corkscrew of bubbles and swirling water issued. According to the echopods the Ponkti had provided, each column was a small vortex, a sort of partial wormhole.
Chu decided to test that notion. She ordered Yang to all-stop. “We’ll let one of our drones make the first approach.” While Xi Linping readied the drone for launch, Chu and Li studied the forest of vortexes all churning some fifty meters ahead of them, a turbulent, foaming zone that rocked Kunming in its wake.
“There are dozens of them,” Li noted. “It appears that the bots are building a symmetrical array of those blisters all around the circumference.”
Chu checked her own control station, showing status of the ‘tiny warriors’ now contained in the front compartment of the sub. “Perhaps when they’re done, the vortexes will somehow merge, creating a more intense vortex. That would seem reasonable.”
Li nodded. “What seems reasonable to us may be different for them. They appear to be bots but, if the Ponkti are right, they came from another place and time. We don’t know what they’re up to. We should proceed with caution.”
“We know what effects they’re having…all the storms topside, the bubbles of toxic air…thousands of people are affected. We have to stop this here and now…we have orders from Beijing, from the State Council. Now is not the time to be cautious.”
“True but I’m afraid the military people are pushing too hard. They see what these bots are capable of and they want the same capability. And they think the Ponkti can help give it to us…I’m telling you it’s a recipe for disaster.”
Xi called out, “Xiao zhanshi ready in all respects, Dr. Chu. All I need is your order to launch. It would be helpful if we could move in a little closer.”
“Let’s see what happens with drone first. Release the drone, Xi.”
Xi complied and Kunming rocked slightly as the manta-shaped ship lifted away from their top hull. Her motors whirred, sending back a corkscrew of bubbles and she soon sped off and was soon lost to view.
“I’ve got video,” Xi announced. “Sonar too. Closing on the first bank of vortexes--.”
The crew watched as the image careened and vibrated. Xi managed the drone course and speed with small joysticks. “Picking up currents, really strong currents, attempting to compensate—”
The image stabilized for a few moments, then the shudder picked up again. This time, it was clear the drone was trapped in the current and was being pulled inexorably into the vortex. The image spun crazily and was soon washed out in an explosion of foam and bubbles.
“I’ve lost control--!” Xi said. “I can’t pull her out—”
The last seconds of video seemed like they were caught in a dizzying, crashing maelstrom of foam and froth. The image careened in a spinning tornado of water and Xi finally gave up, raising his hands from the joysticks with an ‘I got nothing’ gesture.
The image was a blur…then…the signal was gone.
“Give me the final data,” Chu said. Xi reported what the drone had experienced, the last fatal seconds of her speed, spin rate, centrifugal force, structural strains. He blinked. “That can’t be…it says the drone was stretched to nearly half a kilometer in dimension…not possible. She would have broken apart….and the speed—look at the velocity figures--”
Chu and Li studied the readouts on Xi’s panel. “Two hundred thousand meters per second…your instruments are in error, Xi. Run a diagnostic…see if something corrupted the signal.”
Li snapped a finger. “It might make sense if what the Ponkti say is true. A true wormhole in space. If the drone entered a true wormhole, we might get readings like this.”
Chu made a decision. “We must drive the Coethi bots away so we can get closer, run more tests. Those are our orders. Xi, prepare to launch the first lot. Yang, can we get any closer?”
The pilot shook his head. “I can’t safely maneuver around those smaller whirlpools. If we get too close, the same thing could happen to us.”
“Okay, Yang, stop here.” Kunming came again to a full stop, hovering nearly sixty meters from the outer edge of the time manipulator. Through the forward portholes, they could see what looked like clouds of silt and sediment drifting across the slopes of the ‘dinner plates.’
Li checked their instruments. “Now reading high thermals dead ahead, off-scale high. Acoustics and electromagnetic interference rising rapidly…all the signatures of nanobotic activity. Whatever they are, they’re slamming atoms like crazy.”
“I just hope our Xiao zhanshi can deal with them. We’ve worked on these bugs of ours for ten years, tweaking configuration controls, effector designs, propulsors.”
“A true test of the Academy’s design,” agreed Li. He’d spent the better part of the last decade with the bugs, designing, testing, re-designing, wondering. “Okay, Xi, prepare to launch the bugs from here. After launch, we’d
better back off. Nobody knows what will happen when our tiny warriors engage the Coethi.”
Chu said, “We should inform our Sea People friends. Let them know we’re about to engage.”
“I’ll send the signal,” Li offered. He manipulated the signaler, got the ON tone and spoke slowly and carefully into the device, hoping his words would be understood.
Outside Kunming, Loptoheen and Lektereenah had taken up position behind a rocky hillock nearby. They heard the signaler and puzzled out what the Tailless were about to do.
“They’re planning to release their own m’jeete,” Loptoheen said. “They don’t know what will happen. They warn us to take cover.”
Lektereenah could hardly be still. “Think of it, Loptoheen…if the Tailless succeed in driving off the m’jeete, we could have our own Farpool device…just for us. Ponkti could come and go to any place or any time, thousands of mah into the past or the future. This has to be kept from Mokleeoh and the Omtorish. We could even change history, manipulate events so that the Ponkti rule the seas. All of Seome becomes Ponkti waters.”
Loptoheen knew Lektereenah never missed a chance to dream outlandish fantasies. “Begging the Metah’s pardon, but remember that Seome is no more. Our world is gone…we’re here because we had to come here,”
“Stupid tu’kelke” said Lektereenah. “Don’t you see? If we can use this Farpool like the old one, we could go back to Seome in an earlier time. Re-arrange events to suit us.”
“Yes, and we would still have to deal with the Tailless and the same enemy we see here…the m’jeete. The Coethi.”
“Look!” cried Yakto. “There they go--!”
They watched as Kunming’s forward compartment bay discharged the leading elements of the xiao zhanshi. The ‘tiny warriors’ were nothing but a diffuse cloud of nanoscale robotic devices, like a small puff of silt, all configured to grapple with the Coethi bots and disassemble them.
The Ponkti watched in fascination as the cloud drifted on picowatt propulsors, through the vortex fields, homing on the cloud of Coethi bots still busily assembling structures atop the manipulator. The approach would take many minutes.
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