***Not to worry, Boss, ANAD mechs can handle this stuff with ease…just relax and enjoy the view***
Winger snorted. The only view they had was of the inner pressure hull of the geoplane. Even as Winger watched, he imagined that he could see the compression of Gopher’s interior frame under the millions of tons pressing down on them.
“Sounding ahead…” Tallant reported. “Your depth is now four eight eight feet. Signal distortion coming back…it’s probably the shale zone.”
Winger shoved the control stick forward. “I’m going a little deeper…see if we can plow through some of that quartzite.”
Tallant was dubious. She studied the sounding profile. “Just don’t push Gopher too hard, okay? Let’s don’t press our luck on the first run. I’m showing discontinuities dead ahead…some kind of boundary layer, maybe.”
“Inclusion zone? Maybe it’s the quartzite.”
Tallant shook her head. “It looks more like a fault, maybe a transform fault. The geos said there were fracture zones north of Hunt Valley.”
Gopher angled slightly downward and slowed, as the borer swarm bit into denser rock.
“Cabin temp going up,” Tallant reported.
“Acknowledged. Those mechs are working overtime up front, making us a tunnel. I—“
Winger’s last words were cut off as Gopher shuddered violently. For a brief moment, there was an unmistakable sensation of sliding, sliding sideways and downward. Almost at the same moment, something hit Gopher’s nose with a sickening crunch and the geoplane shuddered again and ground violently to a halt. The cabin tilted to port and stayed tilted.
Gopher’s cabin was deathly still for a few moments, then the creaking and groaning of the hull under tremendous pressure started.
“What happened?” Winger asked, wincing as the tortured sounds of the hull being compressed grew louder.
Tallant scanned her instruments nervously. “Borer is offline. I’m getting no responses from ANAD in the forward module…pressure drop in containment…we may have a breach.”
“Great,” Winger muttered. “Just friggin’ great. And it looks like we’ve got a breach in the pressure hull too.”
“I see it…cabin air pressure fluctuating…we’d better activate emergency flasks, just in case.” Tallant toggled a few switches and immediately, high pressure air began flooding all compartments.
Winger was studying the acoustic sounder, replaying the last few moments before the—what had happened? An accident. “Dana, I’m not sure but I think we may have created our own earthquake.”
“What? That can’t be…can it?”
Winger went over the soundings again. “We were approaching some kind of discontinuity—see right here?” He pointed to the display. “Like a layer or inclusion zone. Remember when the geos told us there were some transform faults and fracture zones around Hunt Valley?”
Tallant said, “Vaguely.”
Winger was figuring out the scenario as he replayed in his mind what must have happened. “It was ANAD in the borer module. The swarm disassembled just enough shale and quartzite and other rock to loosen up the fault. It slipped, shifted around and we were caught in the slide.”
“So we did create our own earthquake.”
Winger took a deep breath. “So it would seem…now we’ve got to figure out a way of getting out of here. What do we have to work with?”
Tallant went over her instruments again. “Borer’s offline, like I said, and it looks like containment was breached in the accident. I’ve got no response from the borer swarm, no configs, no data of any kind. That swarm’s gone and it’s not responding to commands.”
Winger tried a few tricks of his own but with no success. “Well, I do have a master in my shoulder capsule. We could jerry-rig a swarm for the borer if we had to.”
“If the module’s not too damaged. On top of that, the tread system’s not responding…so we have no mobility. And the pressure hull….”
Winger saw the oxygen level had been dropping significantly in the last few minutes. “We’ve got to stop that leak…here, let me contact ANAD.” He linked in. “ANAD, this is Winger…do you read me?”
***ANAD copies…reading you loud and clear…what has happened?...ANAD’s coupler indicates some kind of swarm break…is the borer functioning?***
How the hell did he know that?
“ANAD, Gopher’s had an accident. The pressure hull has been breached. Configure for launch and max replication. I need a local swarm to find and plug the leaks.”
***ANAD configuring now…systems initializing…ANAD reporting ready in all respects…***
Winger unstrapped himself and went aft through the tunnel to the power plant. “Launch, ANAD. Launch now….” As the atomgrabber went off to check on their power systems, a shimmering light blue fog emerged from the capsule in his left shoulder. Winger felt a brief sting as the assembler exited containment but the launch sequence seemed smoother than before.
***ANAD replicating…can I get a heading to the target?***
“I’m doing that now,” Winger reported, as he scrambled through the galley and berthing deck and the engineering deck. “Dana, where’s the leak? Can you localize it?”
Still back at the command deck, Dana Tallant scanned her instruments. “I’m showing maximum pressure drop at frame ninety-six, starboard side…somewhere between E and F deck.”
Winger squirmed through the central access tube. He knew E deck was for Engineering, Shops and Utilities. Murchison had called it the ESU deck. Just aft was F deck, home to Gopher’s hybrid battery and fuel cell power plant.
“I feel it…there’s a whistle just off to my left—“ Winger paused, sniffing, letting his senses guide him. There. A utilities duct penetrating the bulkhead seemed to be the center of the leak. He saw a faint mist in the air swirling around the duct. “I found it….ANAD configure max propulsor. Home on my signal.” He pressed a button on his wristpad.
Several decks forward, the shimmering fog of the assembler swarm wheeled about and began transiting the access tube.
***ANAD is en route to your location…estimated time is twenty-two minutes***
Winger tried examining the source of the leak, where the inner pressure hull had been stove in. It was scalding hot with swirling steam and air and he couldn’t get any closer.
“Hurry, ANAD…this break is getting bigger by the minute.”
The ANAD swarm arrived at the site of the breach and promptly went to work. Configuring itself as a tightly interlinked mesh, ANAD sought out the pressure hull penetrations and quickly formed a nanoscale patch over the holes with its trillions of replicants. Gradually, the whistling subsided, then stopped altogether.
“I’m reading air pressure stabilizing in all compartments,” Tallant reported from the command deck. “The patch seems to be working.”
Johnny Winger breathed a sigh of relief, feeling the cool oxygen of the geoplane’s emergency flasks wash over his face. “ANAD, you’re a lifesaver.”
***ANAD reporting swarm element in place and holding. No more air molecules can get in or out. I am configured in repeating tetrahedral with radicals at my outer barrier. Oxygens hate that. And yes…I did save the ship, didn’t I? Isn’t that what you learn in nog school…don’t leave your buddies behind?***
Winger decided to return to the command deck. “You’re right about that, ANAD…but who told you that? You were never a nog.”
***I could have been, Captain. I’ve had a lot of the training already…Doctor Frost has programmed my processor with all relevant operational routines, including standard search and rescue algorithms. Isn’t that the same thing?***
Winger gave the question some thought, as he hauled himself forward up the narrow access tunnel.
“ANAD, you can’t be a nog. You didn’t have the same experiences as the rest of us…like twenty miles runs in the snow around Hunt Valley. Or the SODS tank
or all the hazing.”
Winger reached the command deck, while ANAD was silent for a few moments.
***So why is your experience any better than mine? You don’t know what it’s really like to snap a bond. Or park a carbon atom on the front porch of a benzene ring. Or surf van der Waals forces through a red blood cell***
Winger climbed into his commander’s seat. “Forget it, ANAD…we’ve got work to do. We’ve got to find a way out of here.”
“Did you say something? Tallant asked. Second Nano’s CC1 had been half buried inside an electrical cabinet, trying to troubleshoot Gopher’s tread drive.
“Just talking to ANAD…what’s our status up here?”
Tallant sat back and wiped sweat off her face. “Tread drive’s shot. Something overloaded the controller. I’m getting no response anywhere…either we’re jammed or there’s a hard mechanical failure. I think I’ve got it isolated to somewhere between E and F decks. I got power up to that frame and zilch aft of that point.” She shook her head. “Either way, the tread drive’s offline. We have no mobility. You get the leaks stopped?”
Winger checked Gopher’s instrument panels. “For the moment. ANAD replicated a patch of dumb bots. It seems to be holding.”
Tallant sighed. “Then it looks like we’re stuck here, Wings.”
Winger wasn’t one to accept defeat easily. “Maybe, maybe not. We don’t know what the problem is with the borer. I want to send ANAD out there to do a little recon, see if we can get the borer working again.”
“The master doesn’t have the same config as the borer bots. Have you got the right program?”
Winger was already pecking out commands on a nearby keypad. “I think I can gin up something from here…it’s really just a matter of optimizing his effector setup. I studied Doc Frost’s work close enough to get a feel for the geometry.”
Winger hacked out a configuration and fired it off to the ANAD master. Above and behind the main console, the faint blue fog pulsated and flickered like a mist in the air…the assembler seemed to prefer to exist in small-scale swarms whenever it was left outside containment…like it was a natural state. As ANAD received and processed the commands, the fog roiled and billowed with unseen currents, a ghostly radiance barely visible but for the tiny bursts of light popping on and off embedded within.
***ANAD processing commands now…I will replicate a small formation, config for solid-phase disassembly and exit the vehicle***
“We need information, ANAD,” Winger explained. Sometimes you could say better in English things you couldn’t express in configuration commands. ANAD’s natural language processor made that possible but it was a two-sided sword. “Do a recon of the entire borer module. I want config status, visuals, EM, acoustics, everything. I want to know what condition the module is in. Is it functional at all? What happened to the swarm inside? And could you replicate a replacement if needed?”
***ANAD understands…now on eighty percent propulsor…en route to borer containment port***
Tallant was apprehensive, as she watched the blue fog slowly pass over them and insinuate itself behind the main console. Forward of the command deck was Gopher’s containment vessel, swarm controls and loading ports. The borer itself was a horn-shaped dish outside the pressure hull, through which borer ANAD bots emerged into active formation for tunneling.
“Wings, what do we do if ANAD can’t fix the damage? What if he can’t operate the borer...maybe the fault damaged the horn.”
Winger stared at the last faint tendrils of the mist as it disappeared behind the console.
“We’ll figure that out when we have to, Dana. Let’s just fight one problem at a time.”
A few minutes later, Winger got ANAD’s report.
***The borer swarm is gone, Boss…nowhere to be seen. They must have slipped containment…the whole front end of the horn is crushed. Swarm control is gone too***
And we don’t have the configs loaded for major ship repairs, Winger reminded himself. He explained what ANAD had found to Tallant.
The CC1 shook her head. “Without a horn, the borer swarm can’t be focused, if we even had a swarm.”
“Maybe ANAD can disassemble enough material to unstuck us. If we could get the tread drive operating, we could reverse course and back our way out of this mess.”
Tallant was skeptical but agreed it was worth a try.
Winger contacted the ANAD master. “ANAD, I’m sending a new config. I want you to detach a small element and exit Gopher completely to see if you can remove enough rock to free our treads. We’ll troubleshoot the system from inside and try to restart the tread drive.”
***ANAD acknowledges…transiting the hull layers now…approaching solid-phase rock structures…I’ll try to bore my way out…can you give me a new heading?***
Winger checked the latest soundings. “Steer right one five one degrees. That should put you into the largest pressure hull breach. And, ANAD…be careful. We don’t want to make anything worse.”
***ANAD acknowledges…now initiating disassembly…I am in full solid-phase now…looks like feldspar…lots of potassium molecules around here…aluminums and silicates…a real jumble***
Unseen by either Winger or Tallant, ANAD replicated a small swarm and pushed out of the hull breach in a faint iridescent globe of blue flickering light. Sliding into the layered structures of feldspar sheet, the master assembler attacked silicon and aluminum bonds with a vengeance, severing the connections that held the rock layers together.
Now freed of its atomic constraints, the suddenly liberated feldspar molecules scattered and huge plates began to creep forward. Grinding past each other, the rock plates picked up speed as more and more atomic bonds were loosened and disassembled. For a time, further slippage was prevented by the forces of friction and intramolecular traction, but as ANAD swelled outward from the geoplane’s hull, a threshold was reached…and passed.
Gopher shuddered violently and pitched nose down and to the left, as thousands of tons of rock heaved and pushed toward the newly created void.
“Look out!” Tallant yelled, as she hung on to the edge of her cockpit seat, quickly tightening her shoulder harness. “We’re shifting—“
Winger tried to contact the assembler. “ANAD! ANAD, cease operations! ANAD, stop now—Gopher’s being crushed!”
The tortured shriek of rending metal pierced the air. Gopher shuddered and shook and both felt the geoplane in motion once again, sliding…sliding…ever sliding and picking up speed…downward.
Deeper below the surface.
“We’re going lower!” Tallant screamed.
Winger tried the treads, tried everything he could think of to resist the geoplane’s descent but it was hopeless. The void created by ANAD had loosened the fault again and massive plates were in motion, taking everything with them. The fractured seam in the earth’s crust split with a thunderous roar as the plates ground past each other. Gopher was caught in a subduction zone, forced downward at the very front of a plate boundary, rammed and slammed into denser rock below.
Then, as suddenly as it had started, the grinding, shuddering vibrations died off and Gopher was still, the air inside her battered hull thick and heavy with choking dust.
Winger and Tallant coughed in the swirl of hot dust. Both unstrapped themselves and crawled aft below buckled frames, scrambling through smoking debris and wreckage, toward light and cooler air in the stern of the geoplane. They managed to find a pocket of relatively dust-free air in a corner of D deck, the Stores and Supplies deck, among boxes and cans and other rations scattered during Gopher’s ride downward.
“Where the hell are we?” Winger gasped out. They should have boosted their bloodstreams with respirocytes before the test mission…he realized that now. But the whole project was in such a hurry-- “How deep did we slide?”
Tallant coughed up some dust and croaked out, “I don’t know…for sure…but the densit
ometer was pegging a thousand feet before we bailed out.”
“Jesus,” Winger sank back against a buckled frame and closed his eyes. “We’ve got to get ANAD back aboard…it’s our only chance.”
“Wings, we got bigger problems than that.” She eyed some readings on a nearby instrument panel. “Look at the air pressure…it’s dropping like a brick. There’s a major hull breach somewhere.”
Johnny Winger tried for several minutes to reach ANAD. Finally, a faint signal over the quantum coupler could be heard.
“ANAD…ANAD, is that you? ANAD, this is Control—“
***ANAD responding…where are you, Boss? You’re signal is very weak…I’m trying to boost gain now***
“Apparently, when you started boring around the treads, you disassembled enough rock to loosen the fault again. We’ve been pushed downward, down to nearly a thousand feet. Where are you?”
The signal took a few moments to come back and Winger wondered if ANAD’s coupler were damaged.
***Exact coordinates unknown…I am reading densitometry levels consistent with the original shale layer. ANAD is probably not deeper than four to five hundred feet. Continue sending and I will home on your signal***
Winger explained Gopher’s precarious situation. “If you’re that far away, ANAD, it’ll take hours to get here. We don’t have that much time.” Already there had been a noticeable rise in cabin temperature, as hot crustal rock dust seeped in through the geoplane’s crushed hull.
ANAD is on max propulsor, Control. Estimated time of arrival is two hours***
“Home on my signal, ANAD…I’ll try to keep this channel open.” And somehow, he thought to himself, I’ll have to config up any leftover mechs and see if I can patch those hull breaches.
Grimly, following Tallant’s instrument readings, he set to work. Using his wristpad, he hacked out a config that seemed like it would work. Any atomgrabber worth his electrons could have done that. Then he pulsed out commands on Gopher’s acoustic circuit, still working even though there were no borer swarms to receive them, commanding any loose bots into replication formation. Got to have some mass now, he muttered to himself. Mass enough to form a mesh of nanoscale bots over any holes in the hull.
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