“Maybe Red Hammer’s found a way to mask them…” suggested Singh. “Although that’s not supposed to be possible.”
“We’re going on,” Winger decided. He’d made his mind up. “Last known bearing…you still have that, Taj?”
“Locked in, Skipper.”
“ANAD…continue boring along that vector…maybe we can help. Use our hands…pulverize some of this rock with coilguns and mag pulses. One way or another, we’ve got to get to that convergence…it’s the only lead we have. Somehow, some way…quantum signals are going out from this complex to the Amazon swarms. We’ve got to find that source.”
Progress was arduous and slow for the next several hours. Ray Spivey and Victor Klimuk worked out a way for Barnes to free wheel in her suit, even though its servos and thrusters were shot, while the ANAD patch bots were knitting her ankle bone back together. It was awkward and tedious but somehow, they made progress any way.
Johnny Winger and the rest of the Detachment worked by hand to help ANAD clear a path. Exhausted, cut, bleeding and sore, after several hours, Winger called a halt to the operation.
“Okay, guys…take five. Rest a few minutes. I’ll link in with ANAD, see if there’s an easier way.”
He checked with the tiny assembler, deployed in a flickering blue ball of light at the head of the tunnel.
“ANAD, how much more of this stuff is there? Our coilguns are going to need re-charging soon.”
***ANAD is detecting different solid-phase structures ahead…of a type I have not detected before. Configuration seems to be unstable…one moment, I sound ahead and get a basic tetrahedral lattice of magnesium, calcium and oxygen. The next time I sound, I get something different. I’m also detecting bonds being broken…and some loose atomic debris--***
Even as he ‘heard’ ANAD’s description in the back of his mind, Winger’s neck hairs stood up. Broken bonds…atomic debris…two signatures of nanobotic activity.
“Sheila…” he called out to the nearby DPS tech, kneeling stiffly in her hypersuit while she sipped at a straw inside her helmet. “Sheila…check your thermals. ANAD may be detecting nano activity up ahead.”
Reaves toggled through her viewer screens until she found the sensor feed. “Holy cow, Skipper…how’d we miss that? I’m showing thermals practically off the scale…major nano…it’s all around us--!”
“The rock…look!” yelled D’Nunzio. She boosted herself upright and slammed her helmet hard into a low hanging ledge. “It’s moving…shifting….”
“Nanobots!” came another voice over the crewnet.
“What the--!”
The clearing in which they had stopped to rest now quickly dissolved with a high-frequency screech and a flash of light, like a trillion light bulbs going off all at once.
They were surrounded by a swarm of enemy bots! And the swarm was steadily contracting, squeezing the clearing down to nothing.
“ANAD…!” Winger toggled furiously on his suit wristpad. “Assault config one…I’m sending the details!” He squirted off a new configuration, even as the walls dissolved and the Red Hammer swarm thickened inside the tunnel.
***ANAD receiving…I am going to Assault One…carbene grabbers fully extended…let me at ‘em!***
“Detachment…get small!” Winger yelled over the crewnet. He didn’t have to remind them; D’Nunzio and Barnes and Reaves and Singh all scattered and let their hypersuits burrow themselves into the ground, but even as their servos whined, the troopers found the ground shifting beneath them.
“It’s moving--!” cried Barnes. She fell heavily onto her side and was soon engulfed in a small swarm of mechs, boring in on the laminate armor of the dead suit. She kicked and flailed, trying to fight off the bugs but it was no use.
“The whole place’s alive with bugs!” D’Nunzio yelled. She bulled her way through an onrushing swarm, trying to ignore the high-freq buzzsaw eating away at her, grasping for the HERF gun which had fallen over into a crevice.
“We’re right in the belly of the beast!” said Singh. “It’s like Vishnu…the whole mountain’s nothing but bots—“
Winger linked in to get a closer look at their tiny, swarming adversary. He shook off the initial dizziness and focused on the swirling swarm in front of him…a gale of tetrahedrals and polygons and cylinders sleeting by—
“ANAD…give me a visual…what’s the bastard look like?”
***Ahead and off to the left…bearing three five oh…looks like two pyramids stacked apex to apex…with a few carbon rings around the middle and peptide chains at either end…never seen such a complicated doodad***
Then he saw it. ANAD was right…the enemy nanobot was like a jeweled and faceted bead, glittering and flashing with severed bonds as it built structure, adding more pyramids even as he watched. Like a nanoscale anaconda, it undulated and whipped through space, wrapping itself around its prey, squeezing and shearing, snapping bonds…before he knew it, ANAD had surged forward to engage.
The two swarms collided and 1st Nano found itself in the very midst of the combat, surrounded by sparking veils of light and crackling tendrils of mist. Hunkered down in the lee of a rock outcropping, Deeno D’Nunzio figured this must be what it felt like to be digested in a stomach…the ground heaved and rattled and shook, as seemingly solid rock dissolved into thin air, pure nanobotic mesh melting away as the bots joined the fray.
***ANAD can’t replicate fast enough, Base…the enemy grows structure faster than I can…the beads keep adding pyramids until my boys are engulfed and enveloped…we’re tearing bonds left and right but the swarm keeps thickening…what the hell kind of algorithm is in this bastard?***
Winger had seen it too…and felt the thickening mist swelling all around them. He lifted his head, running his suit servos until they stained to the breaking point. Even simple movement was getting harder…the enemy swarm was growing denser, steadily contracting and squeezing the space. They wouldn’t be able to take much more of this.
Singh was right. The whole complex, maybe the whole mountain was nothing but nanobotic swarms, configged to look and act like natural structures. If Red Hammer had reached this level of sophistication, what else could they do? He recalled the imagery he and Gibby had witnessed at Lake Vostok…an entire planet of nanobots, a world of ANADs.
Was this the same thing…a dreamlike image of something imaginary, a freak of neural firing brought on by contact with the enemy bots? Or a snapshot of another place, another time…a glimpse into a world best left undisturbed?
Then Johnny Winger had an idea.
If Taj was right and they really were in the belly of some kind of swarm-beast, then the best way to get out was to agitate the beast, so it would expel them, cough them up.
Tactically, it was suicide but it might just work. If ANAD could hold off the Red Hammer swarms long enough, a small element of assemblers detached for a special mission could do the trick.
Winger planned to get a Big Bang going, using an element of the larger ANAD swarm. With the main force engaging the enemy, the smaller force would do one thing and only one thing: replicate like crazy, divide and grow assemblers in mindless exponential overdrive.
If he was right, and the Detachment could avoid being crushed to death, the Big Bang would so irritate the enemy swarm that it would have to disengage and move off.
It had to work. They would have only one shot at this.
“ANAD, I want you to peel off a small force, say a quarter swarm. I’ve got a special mission for them.”
***ANAD receiving…what kind of mission have you got in mind?***
Winger explained the tactic. “Here’s the config…I’m sending it now. Prepare to execute on my command.”
The tunnel was collapsing even as he squirted the config to the master assembler. Winger saw Spivey and Barnes practically engulfed in bots, uncountable trillions of bots, throbbing and undulating as if the swarm were chewing them up inside a mou
th.
This had better work-- “Now, ANAD…execute NOW!”
For a few long seconds, nothing seemed to happen. The rolling, palpitating rhythm of the enemy swarm continued on, sparking and flashing where the main ANAD swarm was engaging, a sinuous seam of light that snapped like a whip from one side of the tunnel to the other.
Then, Winger became aware of a new and growing glow from behind his head. At first, he couldn’t be sure; he caught furtive glimpses of the glow as it brightened steadily and expanded, while pumping out mag pulses in every direction, trying to stun the enemy swarm away from him, carve out some kind of perimeter.
The glow soon brightened and spread out like a small aurora, throbbing and pulsating as ANAD replicated like a mad brickmason, grabbing atoms and building structure with white-hot fury.
“It’s working--!” Reaves cried. She kicked at the cloud of bots swarming her and lit off a HERF charge, the thunderclap deafening everyone as it reverberated off the tunnel walls. “I can feel it…the swarm’s slackening off—“
“Belay that HERF!” Winger ordered. “Give ANAD a chance to draw them off!”
Ten feet away, Singh and Tsukota were finally able to pull Mighty Mite Barnes free of the swarm that had engulfed her. The tunnel began dissolving around her, as she worked herself free and into Singh’s arms with a jolt. They both collapsed to the ground with heavy grunts.
“Get off me, you big Hindu ape…” The two of them pulled themselves apart and let their suit servos bring them upright again.
“Skipper—“ Reaves was crouching behind an outcrop of rock that was slowly but steadily dissolving into its constituent nanobots…a swarm mesh flying apart before their eyes. “Skipper…it’s working. ANAD’s giving the bastards indigestion.”
“Stay small!” Winger ordered. “Hunker down where you are and don’t make yourselves targets. Let the bugs fight it out.”
A strong tremor then shook the tunnel and the walls themselves seemed to fly apart. Overhead, the small nova of a Big Bang in action was swelling out of control. All around them, the enemy bots de-structured and swarmed to fight off the spreading menace of ANAD.
In the end, what was rock and what was nanobotic mesh was never very clear. As the battle proceeded, the entire tunnel system collapsed, dissolved and, amid the tremors and rhythmic palpitations of a great beast in spasmodic agony, the tunnel seemed to vanish like fog scattered by a strong wind.
With no more footing left, Johnny Winger and the rest of the 1st Nano Detachment plunged downward in a terrifying free fall, falling and flailing, deeper and deeper into the belly of the mountain.
Johnny Winger was never sure how long or how far they had fallen, tumbled, plunged and plummeted. It seemed like hours, but that made no sense. He had a mental image of being the day’s next meal, sliding down the throat of some enormous beast.
Then, with a dawning realization that his fall had finally stopped, he crouched, stunned and low, while rubble and rock rained down all around them. His feet seemed to be on solid ground despite the incessant downpour of rock pelting his helmet and back. He squinted through the gale of dust and rubble and saw some kind of light, intermittent and faint, but definitely there. Instinctively, he crawled as well as his hypersuit would let him toward the light, bobbing up and down crazily.
It turned out to be a helmet lamp, in fact several lamps huddled together. Barnes, Reaves, and Singh. At least, they had survived the fall.
A scratchy voice crackled in his earphones. It was Barnes. “Where the hell are we, Skipper? What is this place?”
Winger squinted through the light dust still falling like gray snow and the faint outlines of the subterranean chamber slowly materialized into view.
The cavern was a massive space, hewn right out of the sheer rock interior of Bailidzong mountain, lit by light poles up and down the height of the chamber, fully a hundred meters ground to ceiling. Just visible in the deep shadows beyond the lights, the cavern walls were blurred, rubbed out to indistinct texture like a mirror fogged over.
Nano mesh, Winger realized. Undoubtedly, the cavern was thick with bots, some of the securing the walls. Deep gouges in the walls were evidence that the tremors ANAD had generated had done damage and recently.
As his eyes adjusted to the lighting, Winger realized that the largest structure in the cavern was a multi-level platform occupying most of the central atrium of the chamber, supported by thin cable and wire above and slender tapering columns below.
The platform was a three-level flat plane onto which banks of equipment had been mounted. Small shacks and cubicles were scattered among the consoles. Dominating the largest raft was an open sphere of lattice work and girders, rotating slowly like a giant ball bearing. A small knot of men had gathered at consoles surrounding the sphere.
Even as Johnny Winger watched, the lattice-work sphere seemed to fade in and out of view, becoming over several moments a spinning blur, then returning to sharper focus, as if it were a thing to be tuned, like a video image.
The hairs on the back of Winger’s neck stood up.
“Quantum effects, Skipper,” It was Taj Singh, right behind him, marveling at the sight. “Superposition of states. That sphere is probably generating quantum states on a huge scale…it shouldn’t even be possible—“
Winger nodded. “What about your last fix, Taj? The decoherence waves—“
Singh stumbled slightly as another faint tremor shook the cavern. He checked his readings. “Bearing oh two seven, Skipper…that sphere is it…the convergence zone. All the deco waves intersect here.”
At that moment, beam fire erupted across the cavern. The 1st Nano troopers dove for cover. The rest of the Detachment had fallen nearby and were wedged in the fissures and crevices of the near walls. The troopers scrambled for cover. Reaves and Spivey immediately returned fire, hosing down the near side of the platform with coilgun fire.
For the next several minutes, they were pinned down and terribly exposed, with incoming rounds slashing at their position from ahead and both sides. Particle beams stitched seams of death in the rock and nanomesh above and behind them, loosening gouts of rock, which rained down on them. High-pitched squeals cut the air as the bots embedded in the walls were vaporized.
Winger motioned to Dana Tallant and Victor Klimuk, who were both tucked behind some boulders twenty meters away. Move right…flank them…I’ll keep ‘em occupied—
Tallant nodded. She and Klimuk waited until Winger and Singh lay down a withering barrage of mag pulses, then both lit off their suit boost and half-slid, half flew along the steep flanks of the cavern walls to a new position outflanking their enemy. They dug in at a deep crevice and opened fire, pumping coilgun rounds at the pocket of Red Hammer troops firing at them from beneath the platform.
The firefight lasted several minutes. Winger wondered what had happened to ANAD. He tried linking in.
At first, he felt like he was flying in a blizzard…shapes and images rushed at him from all directions, pummeling and washing over him. He caught glimpses of the shapes…it was a grid, a three-dimensional lattice of quivering spheres and cones and polygons and he was rushing through them like a high-speed film.
***ANAD is receiving…is that you, Base? ANAD is on max propulsor, transiting solid-phase…I am sounding your signal…distance is seventeen x 10 exp 20 nanometers…I should be there in a few minutes***
ANAD was still embedded in the cavern walls. When the tunnel had dissolved under their feet, ANAD had been engaged with the enemy bots.
“ANAD, you old dog…I thought we had lost you! We’re under fire here…I need you to give us another axis of attack…take some of the heat off us.”
***ANAD is engaging enemy swarms intermittently, Base. Having to fight my way toward your position. ANAD has also lost some effector capability…processor glitches…ANAD must reset and re-initialize effector controls…something is happening--***
Winger wo
ndered what glitches ANAD was referring to. He discussed the report with Tsukota, even as they returned fire, keeping the Red Hammer troops pinned down.
Tsukota got off a few more rounds of coilgun fire. The flechettes detonated off the far end of the platform, raining debris on top of the enemy.
“Could be quantum effects mucking up his CPU,” Tsukota said. “This close to such a powerful quantum state generator—“
“It’s got to be fixed…we need ANAD now!” Winger motioned for Tallant and Klimuk to open fire. Over the crewnet, he added, “Keep ‘em pinned down for me…Ozzie and I will try to work our way in closer to that platform.”
“Will do,” Tallant came back. A barrage of mag pulses and coilgun rounds flew out, enveloping the near end of the platform in smoke and falling debris.
“ANAD…stow all effectors…configure for fastest possible transit to my position. We need help down here—“
“Skipper—“ it was M’Bela, with Reaves and Calderon, somewhere above and behind Winger. “Skipper—look, beyond the platform!”
The smoke momentarily cleared and in that moment, Johnny Winger saw what had caught M’Bela’s eyes. The jagged rock walls surrounding the platform seemed to come alive, unwrapping themselves like peeling a tarpaulin off a scaffolding. Like a small army of great wings, the rocky ramparts of the walls shifted and heaved, tore themselves away from the cavern and oozed into shapes vaguely human, vaguely bipedal.
Demonio, Winger realized. The nanobots embedded in the cavern walls had re-configured themselves into a growing formation of the para-human forms he had first encountered at Via Verde.
It was time to slam them with HERF.
“Charge up the HERF!” Winger ordered. Thirty feet away, Reaves made the weapon ready, enabling all its tracking and firing circuits.
“Charging now, Captain…charging…charging…weapon is now enabled!”
“Fire the HERF!” Winger commanded. He dug in where he was, bracing himself against the coming shock waves.
The thunderclap of hot rf went off, booming and echoing off the cavern walls. Almost immediately, an avalanche of stunned and fried mechs pelted down like a summer thunderstorm.
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