He tweaked propulsors and surged forward. It was like paddling a canoe upstream against a tsunami.
The Amazon bot was a vast battleship on the horizon, festooned with whirling, undulating projections.
By experiment and determination, he found that he could make a little forward progress by tacking at angles to the onrushing stream, which he knew wasn’t waves of water at all but a steady driving squall of molecules of every conceivable size and shape. Like some kind of ferocious dodge ball game, he careened and bounced from one impact to another.
There’s got to be a better way than this, he gritted. He tried retracting effectors halfway. That seemed to help.
***just feel your way along, Skipper…let the waves talk to you…you can skate from one bump to the next…give yourself enough forward speed and you’ll eventually find the weak points. Slide and glide…that’s how it’s done. Remember this: the best path isn’t always the obvious path***
Gradually, he grew more accustomed to the bruising, battering course he had to follow. Jesus…the slightest movement is like a marathon. He always had a lot more respect for the assembler’s world when he had to move through it.
Sounding ahead, fighting torrents of van der Waals forces, he closed steadily on the Amazon bot, now growing in size with each slide and glide….
Just a little closer…one more surge and a kick this way—
And then, without warning, he was swept forward into a churning whirlpool and felt himself firmly grappled by effectors that had flashed out of nowhere.
Nanoscale combat was all about leverage and balance and reach distance. You could practice boxing and tai kwon do and any number of martial arts disciplines all day long, but if you didn’t intuitively understand bond energies and van der Waals forces and Brownian motion and how to snap off a benzene ring so it wouldn’t come back to bite you in the ass, you didn’t really know nanocombat.
Johnny Winger had long been considered the top code and stick man in the whole battalion, with a natural talent for atomgrabbing and an uncanny sense of how to corral molecules and navigate the infinitesimal. He’d aced the SODs tests in nog school and won every major competition there was to be won in the Corps-wide games that were held every spring at Table Top Mountain.
So when the Amazon bot snared him and began reeling him in like some kind of stubborn flounder, he naturally reacted like any ace atomgrabber would have.
He went on the attack.
Pressing keys on his wristpad furiously, Winger spun left, then right, and managed to snap free of the trap.
“ANAD, keep replicating…max rate! Give me more mechs as fast as you can!”
Beyond the thrashing melee of the fight, uncounted trillions of ANAD assemblers received their orders: cleave and divide, multiply and engage.
Like an army of slaves, the growing horde of assemblers mimicked Winger’s actions and sped forth to do battle.
Got to get out of range of those grabbers, he realized.
The Amazon bot was a writhing mass of carbenes and hydrogen probes, undulating and grasping, snagging anything and everything that came near. Behind the mottled membrane of its outer walls, had to be some kind of quantum processor, able to coordinate its defenses and maneuver the bugger so smartly. It was startling how nimble the bot was for its size. Row upon row of slashing effectors, like oarsmen on a Roman slave ship, some maneuvering, some fighting…the thing was like a huge hand with a million fingers, all separately controlled.
Maybe not so huge after all, he thought. Still, its long axis was easily several thousand nanometers long, a Leviathan of the molecular world.
Winger rolled ANAD right, then left, keeping just out of reach of the snapping grabbers and reconnoitered the beast’s outer membrane, looking for a way in, anything he could use, a weakness of some kind.
Halfway aft, almost invisible among the rows of effectors, he saw a small cleft in the membrane, a cavity where groups of phosphate molecules made a wedge-shaped bond.
The cavity was relatively free of effectors, seemingly out of reach of any nearby grabbers. He hadn’t noticed the cleft in any encounters with Amazon before, certainly not at Via Verde. Maybe this was a different kind of bot. The phosphate bonds flexed as the bot maneuvered, forming a small opening, almost like a mouth.
Instinctively, Johnny Winger steered ANAD toward the cleft. As he approached, he unsheathed his bond breakers and flexed the devices up and down.
With any luck—
ANAD sped forward and slashed hard at the phosphate arms with his bond breakers.
Just a little push here, a snap there…
Johnny Winger commanded ANAD’s bond breakers into action. He seized one end of a polypeptide chain and tugged hard. It stretched, resisted, then with a crackling flash, it broke. A puff of atoms went spinning off in every direction.
That’s more like it.
Winger now drove the assembler deeper into the cleft, unfolding every effector ANAD had: hydrogen abstractors, carbon manipulators, electrons lens, enzymatic knife. It was like chewing into the side of a mountain.
The Amazon bot lurched and shuddered but Winger had found a soft spot and bore in tenaciously…severing bonds, slashing through membrane lipids, just beyond the reach of the damn thing’s pesky effectors. Buried deep in the guts of the beast, ANAD cruised forward like a windmill out of control, hacking and cracking as he went.
Behind the assembler, a steady stream of ANAD replicants poured into the cavity, systematically expanding the zone of destruction.
“I’m in!” Winger exulted. “Found a soft spot, Gibby…about halfway aft, between the front and rear lobes. There’s some kind of cavity—looks like a mouth—where its effectors can’t reach and a phosphate group is there protecting it.”
“Got it, Skipper!” Gibby made sure the target coordinates went back to all replicants. En masse, the ANAD swarm converged on the same cavity in every nearby Amazon bot, duplicating Winger’s discovery. “Should we kill the HERF…give ANAD some room?”
“Negative…keep hitting ‘em!” Winger ordered. “Each pulse stuns the swarm a little more, keeps ‘em from organizing. It gives ANAD a chance to catch up replicating.”
Sergeant Glance lay half buried in snow several meters away but inside his hypersuit, his fingers were flying. “All units…keep firing on the swarm! Fire for effect! It’s working—“
Now scores of microns deep into the cavity, Johnny Winger suddenly had an idea.
If he altered ANAD’s config just a little, he could grow a few more hydrogen abstractors around his forward shell and fill in with an extra grabber of two. That kind of config would make burrowing into the Amazon bot’s cavity even easier, cleaving phosphates like warm butter…maybe killing the thing even faster.
He mocked up the config and sent it to the processor but for some reason, ANAD now seemed sluggish, even a bit clumsy. Instead of the nearly instant response he was used to, ANAD seemed to take forever to begin grabbing atoms. On top of that, he noticed his effector control wasn’t so smooth, or accurate. Twice, he bounced off bonds he should have easily severed.
Winger slowed down to half propulsor, puzzled, and tried to re-gain control of the situation.
“ANAD…what gives? Effectors are balky…I’m losing precision control here—“
***…I don’t know…feel sluggish, Skipper…***
There was some kind of staticky fritz in the coupler circuit, too. Johnny Winger blinked and concentrated on re-clicking in and out of contact. Interference of some kind, no doubt. But what could interfere with a quantum coupler?
“ANAD, you’re breaking up…I’m resetting the link—“ Doc Frost had taught him how to click in and out of contact by shaking his head just so.
Sometimes, the quantum de-coupler doesn’t disentangle signals properly, Frost had explained. You get gibberish in the back of your head and have to reset.
He tried it again.
***�
��feeling kind of sick, actually…I can’t really describe it. Anxious…like there’s too much going on here…registers full…hard to handle all the traffic…***
Winger’s eyepiece suddenly lit up with red…warning flags all over the place:
Channels 6 through 9 effector fine control off line
Main memory overflow
State generator off line
Johnny Winger swore.
What the hell?
Winger tried changing configs, changing back to baseline but it was no good. The assembler’s effectors vibrated and twisted erratically. He couldn’t even safe them into a fold. Couldn’t replicate…couldn’t execute anything now—
Something had corrupted ANAD’s processor.
Best to stop here and back out of the Amazon bot while he still could. He commanded all-stop, but the propulsors wouldn’t respond. Instead, ANAD careened out of control, heading into a layer of lipid cells lining the duct through which he had been cruising. Like a fly in a spider web, he seemed trapped, flailing helplessly, unable to go forward or backward.
***…so weak, Skip…what’s happening?...I’m losing structure…losing--***
Even Johnny Winger could now feel a tingling dizziness in his head. Was it the coupler? Was it some kind of weird virus, let loose by Amazon and now chewing up his processor?
As intense feeling of despair, even regret, washed over him.
Old memories came bubbling up…Jamison Winger in the hospital, in a bioshield, stricken with Serengeti…and there was nothing he could do! It was hopeless, inoperable…you’ll kill him if you do an insert.
No. No. No.
It had to be something in the coupler link. Winger shook himself out of the funk. Resolutely, he clicked off the link.
Warning flags popped up on his eyepiece: quantum decoupler off line, buffer off
line, pattern amplifier off line.
We’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way. Just like they taught back at nog school.
Winger cycled the controls on his wristpad, wondering just what sort of command he did have: config status, replication counter, launch and capture, sensors, effector control, one after another, he tried them all. Each time, the same warning flags came back.
No comms…
Off line…
System fault….
Bit by bit, he was losing ANAD.
“Skipper—“ It was Deeno, on the crewnet. “Skipper, the UNIFORCE commander wants to talk with you.”
Winger was still puzzling out why ANAD had suddenly gone bonkers. “Can it wait?”
“No, sir…he says it’s urgent.”
“It always is. Very well, put him through.”
It was the brigade commander who had flown with them from McMurdo. Most of the Security Corps troops were deployed east of their position…fighting the swarm with whatever dumb bots they could scrounge up.
The voice was scratchy, heavily accented over the crewnet.
“Captain…it’s Hadid. I’m in contact with McMurdo right now…I thought you would want to know—“
Winger winced, realizing he was going to have to reverse ANAD back out of the cavity now or he’d lose the assembler.
“Know what, Hadid?”
“Colonel Suvorov just advised me not five minutes ago. UNIFORCE satellites have detected weak decoherence wakes coalescing on your position. Weak but definitely something there.”
Winger sat upright in his hypersuit, banging his helmet on the stony brow of a huge boulder. He fingered snow from his visor, straining to see anything in the blizzard.
“Decoherence wakes…you mean, like quantum decoherence wakes?”
“Affirmative, Captain. UNIFORCE is trying to pinpoint the source location now. But the wake effects are real…and all the field lines converge on your position…just at the perimeter of the storm.”
Decoherence wakes detectable by UNIFORCE satellite could only mean one thing: someone was attempting to communicate or interfere with something else locally by quantum coupler.
Deco wakes were echoes of a sort—the remnant effect of entanglement signals sent by quantum state generators. And to be detectable at satellite distances…the entanglement signals would have had to come from great distances themselves.
Was that the source of ANAD’s problem?
Winger knew he had lost effective control of the ANAD master. Worse, he felt sick himself…anxious, a little pissed and sad at the whole matter. What was happening?
Sometimes, the coupler link bleeds a little, Doc Frost had once told him. Sometimes ANAD’s state generator triggers unexpected patterns in the receiver. It’s a form of leakage.
He felt unaccountably sad, seeing Jamison Winger like that. By late October of ’47, he had re-made the barn into some sort of lab workshop. Now he spent most of the day and half the night in there…drilling, pounding, tinkering…he’d ordered one of those early fabs from a catalog (BE THE FIRST ON YOUR BLOCK TO FAB A NEW PATIO FOR YOUR HOUSE!) and spent hours taking it apart, putting it back together, fiercely engaged in the project, just to get his mind off Ellen and the car accident. Johnny often watched him from the barn windows. He half expected his Dad to tinker long enough with the fab to make it somehow spit out a weird rendition of his Mom…like she could be brought back now, from the pile of blackened, scorched wreckage at the bottom of Pueblo Canyon.
Winger shook his head. That wasn’t real. Something in ANAD’s signal was setting off these memories. Something was inside ANAD’s core…eating away at the little assembler.
A sharp jolt brought Winger back to the moment. With a start, he realized something was happening…the Amazon bot was flexing, the duct into which he had driven ANAD was collapsing, shrinking.
ANAD had to get out fast.
“Gibby…I’m reversing! Something’s happened to ANAD…the link’s down…all my controls are sluggish. Effectors, sounding, replication…everything’s off line.”
“Get the hell out of there, Skipper!” Gibby was physically less than five meters away but his voice seemed a million miles distant. “UNIFORCE says the decoherence wake is strengthening. Quantum interference everywhere…it’s even affecting the crewnet.”
Deeno agreed, her voice choppy, staticky. “We’re being flooded with entanglement signals, Captain…massive jamming…local scattering of Bioshield…nothing’s working right.”
“It’s got to be Red Hammer,” Winger decided. He could not risk losing this ANAD master. Regeneration was too painful…and time consuming.
Grimly, he set to work.
He punched out commands on his wristpad: fold effectors, safe all non-core systems, turn to new heading and rev propulsors to max. Power up acoustic sounding. Take a navigation hack and report.
Each command was sent but ANAD’s response was gibberish. Images of Doc Frost smiling down at him morphed into Jamison Winger’s face, contorted with Serengeti infection, morphed into the comforting winking of Bailey’s big red eye, as the microflyer floated serenely at the end of his bed, morphed into—
Damn it!
Angrily, Johnny Winger clicked again out of the quantum link. He couldn’t seem to turn the damn thing off now. The connection to ANAD was now fully severed…he hoped. He gritted his teeth, pressed buttons for acoustic command only and dialed in a new heading for the assembler to follow.
His eyepiece imager wasn’t much help. Colorful swirls and eddies were all he could make out, a pointillist landscape of violence and salmon-hued whorls. It might as well have been Jupiter.
Sheila Reaves’ strained voice crackled over the crewnet. “The swarm’s expanding…and HERF’s gone. We can’t hold ‘em…fall back! Fall back!”
Al Glance waited for Winger to take command of the re-deployment, but the CC1 was preoccupied trying to navigate ANAD out of the crevice in the side of the Amazon bot.
Glance boosted himself high enough to check the surroundings. Across the snow-blasted icescape, the Am
azon swarm had swollen in size, a monstrous cyclone of wind and sleet and furious mech activity, beating toward their position with relentless fury. It was clear the Detachment would soon be overwhelmed and fully enveloped. Steadied by his suit thrusters and gyros, Glance realized they had to get away now…something was wrong with ANAD. BioShield…UNIFORCE…nothing seemed able to block the swarm.
“Fall back to the lifters!” he yelled over the crewnet. He radioed their status to Hadid and Wolf, the BioShield engineer. “We’re being overrun…have to pull back and re-group…can you cover us…can you block or divert the swarm?”
Hadid’s scratchy voice crackled back. “Negative…we’re in a real scrum ourselves…my bots and weapons are no match...we’ve got to retreat ourselves!”
Glance watched the rest of the Detachment light off their suit boost and backpedal through the driving sleet to a low depression a quarter mile back. He counted them off one by one: D’Nunzio and Singh, Barnes and Reaves, M’Bela (struggling with a balky gyro…Barnes stopped to help him get upright), Gibby and Klimuk. Only the Skipper didn’t respond.
Glance steered himself toward Johnny Winger’s prostrate form. His hypersuit was motionless.
“Captain…” he rapped on the side of the helmet. “Skipper…we’ve got to fall back—“
Winger’s suit shifted slightly. His weak voice hissed back over the crewnet.
“Glance…I’ve lost it…I’ve lost ANAD…he won’t respond—“
Glance eyed the oncoming maelstrom swirling mere yards from the rock outcrop. Lightning flickered inside salmon-hued clouds, great ripples of flickering light as the Amazon bots tore into the air, into the snow, into the icecap, mindlessly disassembling everything.
The CC2 couldn’t wait any longer. He maneuvered his own suit into a kneeling position, ran his own servos to max power and, with motors whining and groaning, used every ounce of force the thing could give him. Using a nearby boulder as leverage, Glance levered Winger’s suit to an upright position. He peered in through the faceplate…saw a face at once pale and anxious in the orange glow of its interior lamps.
“Skipper…are you hurt? Can you move…can you maneuver on your own?”
Winger’s glum face nodded. “ANAD’s gone…I couldn’t link in…I tried acoustic…I tried everything I could think of.”
Johnny Winger and the Amazon Vector Page 24