“Lobotomized, Chen. I can’t hold at all. I’m showing propulsor failure, major bond breaks, shielding’s gone…main structure being disassembled…we’ve got to withdraw now—“
“Withdraw?” said Tallant. “Where the hell to?” She was hunkered down against a ledge, squinting through her eyepiece at the shimmering combat all around her. The Detachment was pinned down good, unable to move forward against this swarm and unable to fall back to the cave entrance.
She put her hypersuit in motion, letting its motorized boot treads propel her along the ground like an inchworm, still hoping and praying that she wouldn’t get swarmed. But before she could link up with Collin and Chen, another agonized voice cried out.
It was Tony Samoya.
Tallant couldn’t stand to watch. The DPS1 had wedged himself into a cleft in the wall, semi-standing, cycling the last few rounds into his mag gun when the first fingers of the swarm enveloped him. Hypersuit armor was a tough laminate, supposedly impervious to nanomech action—at least all known nanomechs—but it might as well have been butter, for all the good it did.
“AAAARRRGGGHHH….HELP MEEEEE…..OHHHH…!!!”
A pale blue mist boiled over Sammy’s head and his face was soon lost in the fires of nanomech hell, as the suit was breached. Seconds later, the suit and whatever was left inside collapsed in a heap to the ground.
Now, it was just her, Collin and Chen.
“Captain---look out!”
Tallant had seen movement beyond the veil of the swarm, on the other side of the cavern, below their level, and coming up the ramp in a hurry. The muzzles of laser carbines flashed through the haze. Beam fire erupted across the ground.
Collin and Tallant ducked as the first volley narrowly missed them, carving out a seam in a boulder behind them. Rock and debris exploded, flying everywhere.
“We got nasties all over the place!” Collin yelled.
“And no more ammo…ANAD’s the only hope…Chen…how about it…can you replicate a screen and give us cover to move out?”
“No can do, Skipper,” Chen muttered. “It’ll weaken ANAD too much.” He was kneeling now, at the top of the ramp, ducking fire himself, as he steered one swarm into the heart of the melee. He handed off the rear swarm, blocking them from the rain ‘bots to Collin, so he could concentrate on the enemy at hand.
“Whatever you are,” he muttered to himself, “you act a helluva lot like ANAD…only souped up about a million times.” He worked the config controls, at the same time pulsing in and out of contact range with the main enemy, slashing and weaving, scrunching up atoms and twisting bonds to zap the bastards with their own electron charge.
Keep coming, you atomic assholes…keep on coming…right into my hands—eat my carbene effectors, you jerks—
Chen was in the midst of trying to outflank the swarm that had them pinned down, when a stray burst from the Red Hammer techs caught him flush in the chest. The shot spun him around and killed the suit servos, knocking him off his feet. The impact with the ground smashed his wristpad, chopping the link with ANAD. In seconds, the enemy swarm surged forward, now overwhelming the three remaining Detachment members.
Tallant saw what had happened. Frantically, even as the high keening whine of mechs eating at the outer layers of her suit filled her ears, she wrestled with her own wristpad, trying to link up with ANAD.
But it was no use.
Collin’s suit was already nearly breached. Whatever these mechs were—and Chen hadn’t been able to get structure on them—ANAD couldn’t handle them. Too fast, too well armed, too nimble…she couldn’t tell and even as she pecked away at the keypad, jiggling the joystick for some response, she knew it was hopeless.
Shadows loomed over them, giants dimly outlined in the shimmering mist of the swarm. She’d heard the high-freq buzz, knew the mechs were dining on her suit, but so far, it hadn’t breached. She wondered why.
Then she realized why.
The giant shadows were the Red Hammer troops who had moved forward and were now close enough to reach out and touch. They’d held the swarm back.
She saw muzzles flash in the light. All of them were trained on her. Slowly, she lifted her hands and put them behind her helmet. Six feet away, Jeff Collin was roughly rolled over onto his back like a wounded beetle and found himself staring down the muzzle of a laser carbine.
They were surrounded. Chen was fried, burned in a lucky beamshot. The rest were---atoms and little else.
They were all gone…the whole Detachment…Rialto, Mwate, Samoya, Richter, now Chen. ANAD was contained by the enemy swarm, probably being disassembled even as they were roughly hoisted to their feet. A phosphorescent gel descended over them…a MOB barrier, she realized, quickly immobilizing them in restraints, except for their legs.
They’d seized control of the suits too, somehow hacked into the controllers. With no command from her, Tallant’s suit limped forward seemingly on its own, its arms stiffly pinioned to her side, its legs and servos now under enemy control. It wasn’t a hypersuit anymore. Just a cage.
Jeff Collin and Dana Tallant couldn’t see the faces of their captors. It was just as well. The two of them were marched in unison, down the steeply curving stone ramp, deeper into the ground, below into the fiery belly of the Tuontavik volcano.
That’s when she wondered if Chen and the rest had been the lucky ones.
CHAPTER 5
Via Verde, Republic of Valencia
South America
November 1, 2068
Early morning….
Johnny Winger didn’t know what had happened at Kurabantu Island. All he knew was how thick and impenetrable the jungle was below the lifter skids and how forbidding the terrain seemed from several thousand feet. Clumps of misty clouds drifted lazily over the quilted green carpet as far as the eye could see. Even finding the Yemanha River was hard; the building clouds offering only occasional glimpses of the muddy brown ribbon.
“Village coordinates coming up, Captain,” said the lifter pilot, Lieutenant Graves. “Dead ahead…around that bend in the river, looks like—“
“I don’t see a thing…not even a clearing.”
“Me neither, Skipper. I’m hunting now for a place to set you guys down.”
Their mission was simple enough to state, if damnably hard to pull off: reconnoiter the village of Via Verde and its surroundings. Ascertain who or what was causing the atmospheric perturbations BioShield had detected. Was there some kind of illegal nanobotic reservoir in the area, modifying the air locally? And find out where the strange, predatory demonio creatures came from. Dr. Del Compo had theorized there was some kind of nursery in the vicinity of the abandoned Xotetli village. What connection did the creatures have with the changes in the atmosphere?
Sergeant Chris Calderon was CEC1 for the Detachment, in charge of containerization and environmental control. With the ANAD master embedded in a capsule in Johnny Winger’s shoulder, the CEC’s didn’t have a lot to do. Winger had put Calderon to work monitoring the atmosphere as they approached the LZ.
“CEC, what’s the air like outside?”
Calderon was a humorless, by-the-book type, and a bit of a tinkerer. He read tech manuals for entertainment.
“Reading 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. Soon as we set down, I’ll release the sniffers.”
If we can find a place, Winger thought. “Very well. Graves, it’s up to you. How about that small beach over there?” The atomgrabber pointed to a narrow peninsula jutting out into a bend in the river.
Graves cleared his throat. “I’ll try it, Skipper.”
The lifter whirred sideways, scuttling through the air like a drunken bat, tilted and eased down to a soft thump on the bank of wet s
and. Graves let her settle gingerly, unsure of their footing on the soil. But the lifter stabilized and he cut the rotors.
“Detachment, fall out!” Winger buttoned up his own hypersuit—it went without saying the suits were universally detested, but in Indian country, it was best to have the protection. With each trooper plugged into the crewnet, the whole Detachment could move and make tactical decisions almost as a single organism.
Alpha Detachment assembled on higher ground above the LZ, while the packbots offloaded their gear and set it up: the MOB canisters, the HERF guns and mounts, coilguns, camou-fog generators and SuperFly pods.
Winger got on the crewnet. “Okay, let’s get ‘Fly up and circling. I want some eyes overhead.”
“Underway, Skipper.” DPS1 Sergeant Sheila Reaves was the Detachment’s comic cutup, with her red hair burred down to the nubs and a flair for the unpredictable. Disarmingly clumsy with a snorky kind of laugh, she was also the Corps’ reigning coilgun master marksman and could put a magazine of rounds on target faster than you could blink your eyes. Reaves unbundled the case of tiny fly-sized entomopters and spun them into the air, activating their motors. Moments later, a horde of ‘flies’ buzzed overhead, competing with the native Drosophila swarming around the LZ.
Winger had already programmed their ground route and called up the path. The ghostly lines flickered on a dozen eyepieces simultaneously.
“We head north by northwest, according to the sat images and what Dr. Del Compo said. Along the riverbank. Those caves and the grotto are that way. Calderon--?”
The CEC1 had just released a swarm of sniffers, tiny dust-mote sized sensors spreading out to check the air. “Definitely deteriorating, Captain. Sniffo reports CO2 levels rising rapidly…now reading over five thousand parts per million. O2 partial down and dropping. Pressure’s fluctuating too, mostly down…we’re in a little bubble of Mars, almost.”
“That’s a good sign,” Winger decided. He whirred his suit servos into action, setting mobility on auto. The motors moved his legs with no effort on his part, gyros keeping him upright and stable in the slippery footing along the riverbank. “Means we’re heading in the right direction. Okay…move out.”
As one, the hypersuited troopers slogged forward along the edge of the jungle, surrounded by hordes of flies, as they headed west by northwest. The going was hard, owing to the treacherous footing, though the undergrowth was minimal, mostly hard ropy vine and cypress ‘knees’ half buried in wet sand. Out on the river, a formation of tapirs made a “V” in the water as they padded upstream, their black snouts just visible above the wake.
“Captain…look at this!” It was Corporal Chandra Singh, the DPS2, running point guard for this leg of the trek.
Winger cut his suit back to manual and thumped up to the high ground where Singh stood by the weathered trunk of an araucaria tree. It mushroom canopy rained sharp needles on them in a slight breeze.
Singh had found some sort of sign or totem: two tapir jawbones, still filled with teeth, slung from a low branch of the tree, crossed in the shape of an X.
“What is it?” asked Reaves. Her own suit motors hummed trying to keep her level in the soft earth. “Some kind of warning?”
“Maybe,” said Winger. “We’ve seen plenty of evidence of the Xotetli around here. Look over there—“ his pattern recognizer had found more evidence of habitation and bracketed the image in his eyepiece.
A cone-shaped cage fashioned from sticks had been gouged into the ground just inside the tree line. Alongside it lay a perfectly round, soot-blackened clay pot.
“The universal language of the jungle,” surmised Master Sergeant Al Glance, the CC2 and Winger’s second-in-command. “It means ‘stay out’. ‘ Come no closer’. We must be real near the Xotetli village.”
“Or what’s left of it,” Reaves said uneasily.
“Something sure came this way,” Singh added. “And it wiped out the whole tribe.”
The hairs on the back of Johnny Winger’s neck bristled. It was a sign he had long ago learned to pay attention to. He clicked open a separate channel to ANAD.
“We’d better get you launched and formed up, pal. I don’t like the looks of this. We’re exposed as hell and the atmosphere’s going south in a hurry.”
***ANAD ready in all respects…let me take a look, Boss…anything naughty out there, I’ll sniff it out...***
Winger got back on the crewnet. “Let’s halt here. I’m launching ANAD, putting up a swarm screen for defense. Gibby, you take control when he pops.”
Sergeant Hoyt Gibbs was the IC2. He replied, “Standing by to take control, Skipper—“
The Detachment halted.
Winger pressed a small control stud on his wrist keypad. The whole sequence was automatic, taking less than twenty-two seconds now, since they’d practiced the maneuver so many times.
The containment capsule port in his left shoulder cycled open, and in unison, a separate tube and port on the hypersuit shell did likewise. Now an open path was clear.
Inside the capsule, ANAD reported his progress over the link to Winger.
***…safing now…effectors folded…bond weapons enabled and primed…propulsors spinning up…processor in tactical one…***
“Load max rep program,” Winger commanded over the link. Only he and ANAD could hear them talking. The quantum coupler link bypassed the crewnet completely. “I want a full defensive screen airborne, all azimuth.”
***…loading max rep program…done…ANAD ready for launch…configuring ejector…counting down…three…two…one…and AWAY!!!!...***
As the Detachment looked on, a small puff of mist escaped from the left shoulder of Johnny Winger’s hypersuit, quickly dispersing in the breeze. Instantly, the port squeezed shut. The suit was fully buttoned up again.
Overhead, the mist quickly swelled into a shimmering pulse of light, as trillions of daughter assemblers were born from loose atoms.
“ANAD signaling--,” Gibby reported. He watched readouts on his eyepiece…pH, pressure, temperature, the rep counter ticking over in a blur as exponential numbers showed the growth of the swarm. “—I’ve got data now…good data…numbers coming up and everything’s in the green…swarm now at one quarter and accelerating—“
“Move out,” Winger commanded. “ANAD can follow along.” His suit had the coordinates and he put the thing back on automobility, so he could think as they trundled deeper into the jungle.
Sooner or later, he thought, we’re going to run right into whatever is changing the atmosphere around here.
It turned out to be sooner.
Gibby’s voice startled him out of his thoughts.
“ANAD reports temperature rising ahead, Captain. Picking up loose radicals, atomic debris…something’s happening and it’s chewing up the air.”
They had cleared the bend in the Yemanha River and were now tracking almost due west, bearing two six five degrees, along the riverbank. Limestone cliffs had formed inland, squeezing the beach down to a narrow footpath of wet sand and soft loamy black mud, making footing treacherous, even for their suit treads. The water was strangely slow and sluggish, as if it had somehow thickened. Small humps of rock and mats of grass made gurgling hydraulics all across the river.
“I see it,” Winger reported. The feed from ANAD, as well as from the sniffers and Superfly tiled the image viewer on his eyepiece. He flicked out a tongue at the control stud, letting ANAD’s take expand to cover the view. Gibby was right: acoustic sounding showed hydrogen radicals had thickened along with loose chains of oxygen atoms. The air was choked with them. Oxygen was highly reactive…any atomgrabber knew that. It hated being a single atom and clumped together into pairs like lint to a wool sweater. Something was stripping oxygens apart and keeping them that way. Something with a lot of energy.
“Gibby, command ANAD into tactical two…full defenses. I’m taking a closer look—“
“Got it,” Gibby reported. He sent the command and, as one, the ANAD swarm armed its full weapons suite: enzymatic knife, bond disrupters, the works.
Winger linked in to see what the tiny assembler was dealing with. A dizzying image came up on his eyepiece--
--Long, whippy chains were hurtling at him…a sleet of shapes of every size and description. Cones, polygons, tetrahedrals, pieces of lattice, a junkyard of molecules streamed at him and he soon found he had to squeeze down to minimum radius just to keep from being sliced in half—
“ANAD…what the hell is all this crap?”
***sorry, Boss…had to stow my effectors…it’s a blizzard down here…something’s really churning up ahead…stripping off atoms and pieces and junk like crazy…I’m up to max propulsor but I’m barely moving…may have to go quantum if this keeps up***
“Can you move in closer…see what’s causing it?”
***I’m trying…but it’s a battle…I’ll have to fold in a few more effectors…get real small…whatever it is, it’s kicking up a storm…and it’s huge too***
Winger let his hypersuit carry him forward, along with the rest of Alpha Detachment, while he monitored ANAD’s progress.
***Sounding major pressure pulse ahead…I’m slowing to half power… temperature spikes…big temperature spikes…whew! The debris is picking up…it’s really tough--***
Winger could feel the battering the tiny assembler was taking. It was like wading into the ocean surf in the middle of a hurricane. The coupler link was working a little too well…Johnny could feel the impacts of errant atoms and radicals, molecular junk hurtling at him, pounding and slamming into him.
I’ve got to turn this down a bit…I can’t even see or think straight. Maybe Doc Frost could tweak the quantum coupler, drop the gain a bit, so he wouldn’t be fully exposed to what ANAD was feeling. Maybe humans weren’t made to sense things at atomic scale.
“I’m not seeing a thing,” Winger muttered. He switched back and forth from ANAD’s view to an exterior scan of the jungle around them. It was disorienting, to say the least.