“With all due respects, sir,” Kraft was saying, “intel sources are like that. We need corroboration and we need to be careful.” Kraft’s face hardened, visible even over the vidlink. “We also need to deploy…now. Engage the enemy and get a little intel on our own.”
Chekwarthy nodded. “You’re right, of course. It’s just that…my God, we can’t even believe what a man has stored in his own memory. What can we believe?”
“What we can see and touch and smell ourselves, sir,” Winger said.
Chekwarthy held up his hands. “I know when I’m wrong, gentlemen. I surrender…because I know you’re right. We’ve got a mission from UNIFORCE.” He turned to Winger. “Get to it, son.”
Winger saluted. “Yes, sir…I’ll have my Detachment ready to deploy within the hour, sir---“ He left the briefing and dashed double-time over to Mission Prep, a secondary building adjoining Ops on one side and the Ordnance bunker on the other.
Dana Tallant was in the ready room, going over gear that had been laid out on tables, while her CC2 read from a list. She looked up when Winger suddenly appeared.
“Wings, what’s the word…are we on or off?”
Winger came in. “Chekwarthy’s cutting the orders now. We’re on…both of us. Two detachments.”
Tallant whistled. “Both of us….can the world handle two champion atomgrabbers at once?”
Winger smirked, ignoring the jab. “We both know who the champ is, Captain Tallant. Let me see your list—“ He took the equipment listpad and checked off the gear they would need…standard issue for each twelve-man ANAD Detachment in the field:
HERF Guns (2)
Magpulsers (12)
Coilgun ‘bots (4) with programmable kinetic rounds (24 each)
Squad server
Personal Data System (12)
Hypersuits (12)
Containment Pod (1)
Super-Fly units (6)
Camou-fog Generator (1)
MOB (Mobility Obstruction Barrier) Canisters (4)
ANAD Master Replicant (1)
IC (Interface Control System) (1)
“By the way—“ Tallant was reading over his shoulder, “—where the hell is the little guy anyway? I heard Doc Frost had him back in Containment, running tests. Those halo ‘bots give him a migraine or something?”
Winger had already beamed the list to a pickbot in Stores, who would draw and assemble the Detachment’s gear and lay it out for pickup on the tables. “Doc just wants to make sure he’s fully functional…duking it out with Skinner’s halo was a meatgrinder for him…even his core took a beating.”
Tallant smirked. “I’m jealous, Wings. You’ve always got your eyes on that little bugger…instead of me. What’s a girl gotta do to be noticed?”
The pickbot rolled up and Winger signed off for the first draw…two coilgun ‘bots, field-portable. Stores was adjacent to the Ready Room and Winger and Tallant had both called for pre-mission briefings at 2230 hours. Chekwarthy’s orders were expected at any moment and they could both hear the whine of hyperjet engines warming up out on the runway.
Winger shrugged. “Maybe replicate your complete structure like a hundred and twenty times a minute, for starters. Dana, you’re a bedsore on my ass…at least, ANAD doesn’t think he’s king of the hill all the time. He’s got a hell of lot better sense of where he belongs.”
Tallant snorted, squirted her list to the pickbot too. It scuttled off into the vast warren of Stores to start drawing gear. “Hey, listen up, wiseguy…just because you’ve got that fancy schmancy capsule in your shoulder doesn’t make you Emperor of the Universe. I happen to know the whole Battalion’s slated to get implants too…before you know it, we’ll all be walking containment pods—“ she slashed an imaginary broadsword across Winger’s face—Dana Tallant loved old dragon westerns—“fighting for truth, justice and the UNIFORCE way. So don’t be such a snot….Captain Winger…you may have an ANAD in your shoulder, but I’ve got the looks and the brains. Me…when I get my capsule, I’m putting in for a souped-up power cell, all the gizmos a kickass ‘bot like ANAD really needs.”
“Dream on, kid…I’ll be grabbing atoms while you’re still--” Winger remarked, but he was interrupted by a commotion at the Ready Room entrance. It was Deeno D’Nunzio and Ozzie Tsukota, Alpha Detachment’s quantum engineers. Tsukota was lugging a backpack, while Deeno trash-talked her way through a gathering of troopers. A few hours with the nanoderm patches had reduced her facial lacerations to dull bruises.
“Got your little buddy right here, Skipper,” she announced. Tsukota came up and a flurry of hands helped him doff the pack. It was a mobile containment cylinder. Inside was ANAD, the master now fully regenerated and checked out.
“Doc Frost says he good to go,” Tsukota announced. “He’s getting a little antsy, too…told us both he wanted to go home—“ the CQE2 pointed to Winger’s shoulder. “Your garage ready to park the car?”
Winger shrugged off his black T-shirt and exposed the metal lip of the capsule, looking like an open mouth behind his right shoulder. Doc Frost had taught him how to shake his shoulders just so, to set the capsule for ANAD’s entry. A quick toss of his shoulder made the capsule ready to receive the tiny assembler, setting its fluid medium properly in pH, temperature and concentration. “Open sesame, Ozzie…let him fly—“
Tsukota finagled with the port of the cylinder and pressed several keys on the small keyboard at the top, signaling ANAD to be ready. A row of lights flashed green.
“ANAD reports ready, Skipper—here goes.”
A quick turn of the topscrew and a tiny whoosh escaped the mouth of the cylinder. For a brief second, as the Ready Room troopers gathered around, the cylinder was surrounded by a shimmering pulse, like a tiny rainbow as the assembler transited into the air. The rainbow throbbed, then like a living, breathing thing, then arrowed toward Johnny Winger’s shoulder. ANAD swooped through air molecules at blazing speed on picowatt propulsors, leaving an ionization trail like dust motes catching sunlight.
Entry into the capsule stung like a bee for a moment, then it was over. There was an audible click as the capsule port snapped shut and the assembler was nestled securely in containment two inches below Winger’s clavicle bone. The shimmer in the air died off and the troopers stared at each other and just shook their heads.
“Ain’t never seen anything like it before, Captain…not like that,” said a muscular sergeant named Kurtz. “Does it hurt?”
“Not the least…just like a bee sting, but it’s over before you know it.” He patted his shoulder, absent-mindedly rubbing the hard lip of the capsule port. “Feels…I don’t know-- right, somehow. Like I was missing something and now I got it back. Like an arm or something.”
“Friggin weird’, if you ask me,” said Angelo, the Cuban interface controller. “Loco, that’s what I call it.”
Dana Tallant scowled at all the attention Winger was getting. “We’re all getting it, bozo. Didn’t you see the report…Corps’ springing for the whole Battalion to be equipped…by the end of next year.” She leveled an even gaze at Winger. “Not bad in a Ready Room like this…but what about combat, atomgrabber? You think you’ll have enough time to pull off that stunt when the enemy’s fragging your position and pickle rounds are whizzing by your head?”
Winger was waving his impromptu audience off. “I guess we’ll see about that, Dana. That’s why the capsule’s an experiment…can a nanotrooper be augmented and do his duty better?”
“Yeah, well I hope you like being a lab rat, Wings. Me, I got a mission to do—“
A chime in her earclip interrupted and Tallant bent her ear to listen in. Winger’s had gone off too. It was Chekwarthy’s voice, the orders they had been waiting for. The General’s voice was followed momentarily by a scroll of instructions and details on their retinal clips.
It was just like Winger had heard…two missions and two detachments, ANAD
Alpha and ANAD Bravo. Winger would command Alpha, Tallant would honcho Bravo Detachment.
“Jesus…” whispered Tallant as she read the scrolling details. “…Kura...Kurabantu, whatever, island…the Pacific…Marquesas chain…you are to make forced insertion and conduct surveillance of the island...you are to engage Red Hammer facilities and forces previously detected by satellite and determine nature of the operations…you are to disable and render inoperable any facilities or forces involved in atmospheric modifications and hold position until reinforced—“ Tallant whistled at the scope of the mission. “UNIFORCE doesn’t want much, do they?”
Winger read his own retinal scroll. Via Verde, Valencia…insertion by lifter at latitude…longitude…upper reaches of Yemanha River…make your way on foot to coordinates…engage any facilities or forces involved in…
“This one’s serious, Dana,” he decided.
Both detachments had similar missions: investigate the phenomena described by Dr. del Compo in the briefing and sensed by BioShield patrol nanobots in the atmosphere. Something--some device or process, probably man-made and probably started by Red Hammer—was changing the Earth’s atmosphere, breaking down oxygen and nitrogen, building different constituents and compounds. The air was becoming toxic, unbreathable. And it was spreading. People had died, and more might die if the changes weren’t stopped.
Whatever it was, UNIFORCE had tasked Quantum Corps to find out…and stop it.
Two hyperjets lifted off from Singapore base before 2300 hours that night, each bearing a full ANAD Detachment. Both headed east, making suborbital hops across the top of the atmosphere. Hyperjet Charioteer headed toward a small coral atoll in the Marquesas Islands. The second aircraft, hyperjet Mercury, headed further east, toward the Republic of Valencia.
Johnny Winger couldn’t sack out and spent most of the trip to South America staring out a tiny porthole in the aft compartment at thin wispy stratospheric clouds below them. Charioteer routinely climbed above a hundred miles altitude on her quick jumps around the globe…above ninety-nine percent of the atmosphere.
Winger wondered. What the hell was happening down there…what was happening to disturb the Earth’s atmosphere on such a scale?
Even ANAD himself was unnaturally quiet, as if the tiny assembler were deep in thought, or what passed for thought in the quantum processor core of an artificial sentience sixty nanometers tall.
Winger found the hairs on the back of his neck standing up. Del Compo was certain the source of the disturbance was an illegal nanobotic reservoir operating in violation of BioShield.
If Red Hammer was behind the disturbances, were the ‘bots like the ones that had infested Skinner? ANAD had fared none too well in that engagement. What kind of tricks did the criminal cartel have in store for them this time? Would the two of them be up to the mission?
Just keep me from screwing up, Winger prayed silently.
***Me too*** came a thin ‘voice’ from the back of his mind.
Winger smiled, now aware that ANAD was linked in and listening, but he said nothing in reply. What was there to say?
He returned to his bunk and tried to rest, but sleep just wouldn’t come. An uneasy premonition had settled over him like an unwanted memory. He just couldn’t shake it and it stayed with him the whole trip across the Pacific.
CHAPTER 4
Kurabantu Island, the Marquesas
South Pacific
October 30, 2068
Early morning…
From the air, Kurabantu Island looked like a mouth. Or a big claw, thought Dana Tallant, as Charioteer orbited the coral atoll at ten thousand feet. And about to bite our asses, if we’re not careful, she added. She hoisted herself up, letting the suit servos propel her upright as she shuffled through the compartment to the lifter bay. A gravelly voice sounded over the loudspeaker.
“ANAD Detachment lay aft to the lifter bay on the double. Insert point coming up—launch in five minutes—“
Captain Dana Tallant was a by-the-book commander, unlike Johnny Winger, who tended, or so she thought, to fly past the rules by the seat of his pants a bit too often. Doctrine said that when you made a forced entry into Indian country, you did it with full packs, hypersuits, weapons enabled and SuperFly watching your six…just to be sure. And that was precisely what Dana Tallant intended to do.
She swore under her breath however, every time they had to do more than walk two feet in the blasted hypersuits. It was like living inside a garbage can, with all the maneuverability of a bulldozer, though the suits were lifesavers in the event the unit got swarmed.
“Come on…come on, ya’ll move like old ladies —“ Tallant griped as Bravo Detachment boarded the lifter for the descent to the island.
Sergeant Jeffery Collin was her CC2, the backup command rating, and a helluva gorgeous muscle monkey in the gym. Collin’s suit motors whirred and vibrated as he throttled the leg actuators forward as far as they would go.
“I’m tryin’, Captain…I’m tryin’, but this tin can won’t move any faster.”
“Yeah, Skipper,” said Sergeant Samoya, their senior DPS tech. “—can’t we ‘chute these things down and go in like civilized people?”
Tallant nixed that. “You can when the enemy starts acting civilized. Okay, troops…saddle up and climb aboard. This train’s about to leave the station.”
The lifter was an articulating jet-rotor ship with enough legs to look like a flying spider. The Detachment strapped in and moments later, the launch table spun and slung the lifter out the back of Charioteer, which zoomed off to establish itself in a safe orbit ten thousand feet over the island.
The lifter scuttled through the air on its own jets, and arced like a hungry spider sensing food through choppy early morning thunderclouds, breaking out into blinding shafts of dawn sunlight over the lagoon that formed the center of the island’s claw.
“The Island of Dr. Moreau,” someone muttered behind Tallant. The commander of Bravo Detachment snorted. You may be more right than you think, she thought.
The lifter settled down on a small beach overlooking the lagoon. Tallant got on the crewnet and barked out orders.
“Bravo Detachment, fall out! This is a Level One insertion--opposed entry…DPS, get SuperFly up and sniffing around. Is ANAD enabled for launch?”
Sergeant Joey Mwate was CEC1 for the unit. He was a lanky Nigerian engineer, a newcomer to the Corps and fresh out of nog school. Since nobody in Bravo had the implant like Johnny Winger, the ANAD master was transported in a mobile containment cell, a small cylindrical TinyTown. Mwate wore the unit on a backpack frame.
“ANAD reports ready in all respects, Captain.”
“Very well…” Tallant stepped out of the rear hatch of the lifter and plunked her hypersuit boots into the wet sand. “Keep your eyes and ears open, folks. Who knows what we might run into down here.” Tactical doctrine called for proper protection any time an ANAD detachment went into unfriendly terrain.
The Detachment debarked and organized itself into formation. Tallant hand-signaled for the rest of their gear to be off-loaded. The lifter squatted down to accommodate the process. It looked for all the world like a fat mosquito, its articulating landing skids retracted to ground level for unloading.
Kurabantu Island lagoon shone turquoise and blue in the early morning sunlight, surrounded on three sides by dense jungle vine and wiry stands of pandanus and screw pine. Through the branches to the northwest, the misty peak of the central volcano—Tuontavik, it was called—poked above a ring of clouds. Most of the island was rocky valleys filled with choking undergrowth. Limestone cliffs ringed the northern flanks of the island. It was from those cliffs, so the debriefing said, that the Red Hammer agent Skinner had jumped.
Tallant studied the feed on her helmet eyepiece. Nothing from Superfly…yet. The sooner they got ANAD up and launched, the better.
“What about the atmosphere?”
Tallant asked. “Any disturbances…perturbations nearby?”
Corporal Eric Richter was SDC1, in charge of stealth and defensive countermeasures. He was a lean, hard-edged, red-haired kid, and he ran a small fleet of chem sniffers that had just gone airborne. “Minor fluctuations, Captain, that’s all for the moment. Oxygen levels down ten percent, actually dropping even as I speak. Nitrogen’s good, but CO2 is up over a thousand parts per million…that’s about three or four times normal. We need to stay in our suits.”
“Hell we’re in the middle of a jungle, Red,” said Tech Sergeant Claudia Rialto, their CQE1. “We ought to be drowning in carbon dioxide with all these plants and trees and vines.”
“I already adjusted for that…Sniffo says this is different.”
Tallant was supervising equipment setup and corralling everybody into formation. “Any bearing on a source?”
“Negative, Captain….pretty amorphous right now—it’s everywhere.”
“Fly’s picking up something, Captain,” It was Sergeant Samoya, their DPS1. “Just now…heat source…a local thermal bloom and it’s not the weather. Bearing two six oh degrees, almost due west. Through that patch of trees right there.” He pointed to an opening across the water.
“Airborne, DPS? Or ground source?”
“Hard to tell, Captain…’Fly’s heading over there now. My read is the thing’s probably airborne.”
Tallant felt the tingle of a cold sweat inside her hypersuit. “Okay, everybody button up. Joey…launch ANAD. Full rep…full effectors. Let’s get some teeth into the air.”
Even as Joey Mwate complied, a loud screech sounded across the lagoon. Tallant looked up in time to see a flight of collugoes gliding across the beach above them, webbed and menacing, gliding from tree to tree. There were soon dozens of them soaring overhead, their translucent bat wings nearly invisible in the sun.