“Just dumb bots,” Winger surmised, studying the structure of the nearest ones. “Basic polyhedral core. A few effectors. So what’s the deal…why are they linked like this?”
Reaves’ voice came over the crewnet. “Skipper, Fly can’t hold any longer. The big swarm’s almost at the grotto…permission to engage HERF?”
“Give me one more minute, Sheila,” Winger told her. “Calderon, Taj, lay down some coilgun rounds…throw the sniffers at them…whatever you can…we’re right in the middle of a mystery here—“
Reaves snorted but said nothing. What the hell are they doing back there…reading detective novels? She motioned Calderon up to the entrance. The CEC2 crouched next to her and they surveyed the tactical situation.
“Chris…can you bring those sniffers down to block this entrance?”
“I can but it won’t even slow ‘em down that much. And we’ll lose our ability to know what’s happening to the atmosphere.”
Reaves was in charge of Detachment defense. “Do it. We need every second we can get.”
Calderon signaled the mote-sized bots to form up around the grotto entrance. He shook his head. “What a waste of good bots—“
“Look, pal, if we don’t hold off that big swarm out there, we’ll be the ones who are wasted. Stop bitching and give me some screening. Taj…get your ass up here too…and bring that coilgun—“
Back inside, Johnny Winger had made a decision. “I’m going in, Gibby…see what’s inside that core—“
“Captain…the time…we’ve got to start pulling out—“
“Hold on—“
Winger powered up the ANAD swarm and steered them into direct contact with the outer shell of mechs.
The battle didn’t last long. Even without its master assembler, ANAD was more than a match.
A few zaps from ANAD’s bond disrupters and the lattice unlinked like a zipper, the bots unlatching and folding back to make a path for the assemblers.
“It may be a trap, Skipper…watch out—“
I’m watching…I’m watching already.” Winger cruised in and poked a pyridine probe right into the clumped core molecules of the nearest mech. The sticky hydrogens tore a gash through blurry clouds of electrons. Bonds snapped and sizzled as Winger drove ANAD in deeper, feeling its way along.
Then, without warning, there was a blinding flash. White light filled the imager screen, blinding Winger and Gibby at the same time. Some energy source had discharged, liberating millions of volts and when the imager cleared, ANAD found itself pulled deeper into the lattice, surrounded on all sides in every direction by an unending plain of linked bots, like a boat stranded in a field of grain that stretched to infinity.
“What the hell—“
“Look—“ Gibby’s voice caught.
The imager had gone crazy. Lines of static flickered and scrolled across the viewer. Winger checked his wristpad. Still a signal, though it was weak and intermittent. Still getting an image.
But the image didn’t make any sense.
Was it an actual image, Winger wondered? Or was it like a glutamate trace in a human brain, a ghostly image of something else?
The grain field became a little sharper. The plants undulated just like wheat or corn in a faint breeze but closer inspection showed they weren’t plants at all…merely linked nanobotic mechanisms, of every size and shape, uncountable in number, sweeping to a distant featureless horizon. The plants weren’t alone either. Drifting like clouds over an Iowa countryside were vast coils and shapes, themselves more linked masses of bots. The world had turned upside down…everything was bots and mechs, no matter which way they turned.
“What is this place?” Gibby breathed quietly.
Winger shook his head. “I was going to say it ain’t Kansas…but hang it, maybe it is. But look…everything, everywhere…it’s all bots—“
“Are we still in that lattice?”
Winger checked the sounding. “ANAD signals don’t make any sense. I’m reading distances that can’t be…almost off the scale…millions, billions of microns. Gibby, it’s like what we’re seeing isn’t atoms at all…like we’ve gone macro.”
“Not atoms…” Gibby’s voice stuttered. “Then…where the hell is ANAD? Is this an image?”
“Or a trace? Maybe it’s just some kind of gibberish or static inside the creature’s ‘brain.’”
“If it’s a memory trace…it’s not like any world I’ve ever seen. Maybe these buggers have nightmares…and we’re in one.”
Winger was about to reply, but Reaves’ strained voice crackled over the crewnet.
“Captain…we’re out of time up here….permission to engage the HERF NOW, sir—“
Winger knew they had to fall back…or the whole Detachment might be trapped inside the grotto.
“Light ‘em up, DPS! Fry the bastards! ANAD’s pulling out now—“
In the last seconds before the thunderclap of heat rolled over them, ANAD squirmed free of the lattice, but not before tearing a huge gash in the mesh of linked bots, pulling away just as more bonds snapped and the crackle-flash! zapped the swarm once more. Static and sizzling fog swelled up, filling their eyepieces. A split second before the HERF gun scattered the colonies again into loose atoms, Winger saw something in his eyepiece that would stay with him for a very long time.
The lattice into which ANAD had been embedded pulled away, as if the tiny assembler had been launched into the air over the countryside. Up and up he flew, soaring higher and ever higher, until the pale blue faded into black, and the stars shone as hard bright unblinking lights.
As if ANAD had somehow been lofted into space, Winger remembered seeing the lattice retreat below him, fading into an indistinct seamless web, then curving and folding back on itself, forming first a horizon, then greater curvature, then a ball, then an entire world.
When the hot wave thundered through the grotto and the demonio were shredded into fluff once more, the final image Johnny Winger remembered was just that: an entire world of lattice, an entire world of linked nanobotic mechanisms folded back on itself like the covering of a ball…a planet of ANADs or something very much like them, floating in space, throbbing like a thing alive.
That’s when the second HERF discharge came and the roof of the grotto came crashing down on them.
Extricating the Skipper and Gibby took about half an hour. Reaves, Singh, D’Nunzio, the whole Detachment pitched in, digging and pawing through the rock and rubble in their hypersuits, while the Amazon swarm tore at them like a furious wind, a wind with teeth.
“Okay—“ came Moby’s straining voice….”now pull—“
Rubble, dirt and rock rolled down Johnny Winger’s faceplate. The first thing he saw was Sergeant Oscar M’Bela, his CEC1, peering into the helmet.
“Come on, Skipper…got…to…get…you…out of here--.“ He pulled and hoisted and pulled harder. Winger squirmed free of a load of limestone shards, finally working one arm free. Then he managed to snag a button on his wrist, activating his suit’s leg boost. Servos whined and moments later, his armored torso and legs were tilting upright, shedding debris in every direction like a wet dog.
“I got about one more charge!” Reaves yelled over the circuit. “If somebody could get the lifter overhead—“
Master Sergeant Al Glance was scrambling up toward the grotto entrance. Glance was second in command, Detachment CC2.
“I’ve got the codes. Give ‘em another blast and I’ll contact the ship.”
While Winger, M’Bela, D’Nunzio and the rest pulled back from the lower chamber, and headed up, Reaves primed the HERF gun once again.
“Charging…charging…charging…I think this is the last of it…Geronimo…!!”
The radio frequency weapon discharged its bolt of energy across the Yemanha River. The thunderclap stirred the river into a boiling frenzy, while hordes of bats screeched off in vast hordes, blackening the skies.
A fine mist fell from above, but it wasn’t rain…it was the debris of uncounted Amazon bots shattered by the pulse, raining out of the sky.
“HERF’s dead!” Reaves announced. “We got about two minutes…tops!”
“Here they come,” said Calderon. From the dim recesses of the inner grotto, splashing and scrambling through pools, slipping on the limestone floor, came the rest of the Detachment, a haggard, shaken crew.
Al Glance poked his head out of the grotto and stood on the lip, signaling the liftjet down from its orbit over the area. By command, the lifter had been circling the village of Via Verde at ten thousand feet, in close formation with the hyperjet Mercury, both cruising in a racetrack pattern on autopilot. Moments later, the black spidery rotors of the lifter came into view through the higher tree tops, its articulating wings and rotors whop-whop-whopping as it descended over the river, and came to a hover two hundred feet over a shallow sandbar.
Johnny Winger had recovered his bearings enough to make it up to the entrance on his own.
“Thanks, Moby…now let’s get the hell out of here.”
Gibbs followed behind. “Any word from ANAD, Skipper? I released the last of the swarm just before HERF went off.” It was standard doctrine when abandoning an ANAD swarm to command the bots to commit atomic seppuku, sloughing off all effectors and structures and zapping core bonds so that nothing was left.
“Not a peep,” Winger told him. “There’s not much left anyway…just a few atoms held together and the quantum kernel of his core. There’s probably not even enough core to communicate. I can’t raise him.”
Winger didn’t want to think about it. He’d let the assembler down plain and simple…let a fellow trooper down and that wasn’t kosher. He hadn’t done his recon properly, hadn’t made the right command decisions, hadn’t gone by the book when every hair on the back of his neck was standing up, screaming warnings. Instead, he gone with gut instinct, atomgrabber’s instinct and he’d been wrong, dreadfully wrong. He’d thrown the tiny assembler into something he couldn’t handle. ANAD couldn’t keep up with the Amazon bots. Whoever or whatever had created Amazon, the enemy mechs were faster and stronger. That much was certain.
Only a quantum collapse had saved ANAD. But it was like cutting off a trooper’s arms and legs to save his head.
“Lifter’s on station, Captain,” Glance reported.
The Detachment assembled at the front of the grotto, slipping and sliding down to the tiny beach by the river. They were a fatigued, beaten, hollow-eyed shell of a combat unit, hypersuited still but exhausted and dejected. They’d lost much of their gear but thankfully no casualties had been taken, save for ANAD himself.
And they had about sixty seconds to exfiltrate before the Amazon swarm reconstituted itself and came at them again.
“Bring her down,” Winger told Glance, who was piloting the lifter from his own wristpad. He eyed the growing ball of shimmering, sparkling fog that even now was swelling overhead, the enemy bots replicating in exponential overdrive. In less than a minute, the bots would blanket and smother the whole area. And the Detachment had nothing to counter the swarm with.
Glance sent the commands. Instantly, the big spidery vehicle lowered itself to less than twenty feet over the riverbank, translating laterally to position its belly doors.
Combat exfiltration wasn’t something the Detachment practiced very often but when you needed it, the suit boost had to work or else.
One by one, with Winger and Reaves hurrying everybody up, the troopers of Alpha Detachment stepped onto the tiny beach and lit off their boosters. Each hypersuit mounted two thrusters, one on each leg, which when fired, could lift a trooper fifty feet into the air in one big lift. They’d wargamed escape maneuvers using suit boost but the problem was the landing…you had to manage your position in the air to come down in line with the thrust. You could break your neck if you didn’t, or worse. It was a one-time shot, to be used only in times of dire necessity.
Johnny Winger figured they were about to be annihilated by the Amazon swarm and that was reason enough.
Each trooper lifted off into the air, scattering sand and water in all directions. Fifty feet overhead, the lifter dropped grab rings from its belly. Timed just right, with a little practice, a Quantum Corps trooper could shoot himself right up to the grab ring and be hauled aboard the lifter in about ten seconds.
“GO…GO…GO…!” Winger patted each trooper in turn on his shoulder, lighting them off in salvo like missiles being launched. One after another, they boosted—D’Nunzio, Singh, Reaves, Calderon, Spivey, Gibby and the rest.
Finally, as the Amazon swarm rolled toward them like a miniature storm front, crackling and flickering with menace, only Glance and Winger were left.
“Go, Al…get your butt up there—“
Glance met Winger’s eyes. “We did all we could, Skipper. We just got outswarmed, that’s all.”
Winger blinked at him. Nobody outswarms me and ANAD, but he didn’t say that. “Thanks…now…off you go—“
Glance lit off and boosted into the air. Second later, he was swinging by his arms from the grab ring, riding up into the belly of the lifter.
Winger looked up. Faces rimmed the belly bay opening, hands reaching out, imploring him to light off. Voices came down faint but unmistakable over the whooshing of the rotors.
“Come on…come on, Skipper…get going…”
Winger acknowledged them, then took one last look at the swelling cloud of Amazon bots, now engorging the nearest tree limbs that overhung the beach. The limbs disappeared in a shrill, whirring blur, consumed in a furious buzz of molecular deconstruction. All around him, the air was thickening to a gelatinous mist and the shriek of the mechs had become unbearable, tearing at his eardrums even through the helmet.
And it was coming his way.
You win this time, buggers…but it won’t be the last time we meet.
He took a deep breath, dimly aware that it was only the hypersuit that allowed him to breathe at all in this toxic cesspool of a swamp, and lit off his suit boost.
The thrusters slammed him upward and he extended his arms like he’d been trained. In no time, his fingers closed around the grab ring and the lifter was hoisting him up into its belly, a mother reclaiming her lost brood. His suit gyros gave out at that same moment, and he toppled over inside the bay, nearly plummeting back out into the river, just as the lifter banked off into the humid late morning sky, kissing the upper tree branches as it spiraled up and away from the river.
Winger hung on tightly as the craft put some distance between itself and the nanomech cloud below. The lifter shuddered under full military power, fighting remnant clouds of mechs boiling up from below, as it bucked and careened and shot skyward. A hurricane of dust and sand and water mist and swarming mechs tore by, all blown to the wind, as the lifter spun and wobbled until its autopilot could right her.
Sheila Reaves had grabbed Winger’s suit leg when the lifter took off and now she released it, sinking back against the bulkhead. She wiped sweat and grit from her eyes and squinted up, seeing a familiar face. It was Deeno D’Nunzio, looking for all the world like she’d just won a slam-boxing match…her hair was plastered to her face and she was flushed red.
The two women glared at each other for a moment and burst into laughter.
Too bad about Superfly, Reaves thought, as she sat up and wiped streaks of grime from her face. He’d always been a kickass bot, her personal toy and one damned good scout for Detachment missions. They’d miss this model for sure. But Table Top could fabricate another one in no time.
One hundred, two hundred, five hundred feet. Reaves barely breathed until they’d put miles behind them and the only thing she could hear was the thrummm of the liftjets and the cold wind whistling through the cabin holes. She shook her head, startled at the sight. Mechs had burrowed into the lifter…the holes, she hadn’t seen them before. It ha
d been that close.
Ten feet away, Johnny Winger was feeling much the same. He sank back, sweaty and exhausted, and killed the crewnet. His eyepiece went dark and he shoved it away from his face. But only when the buffeting and the sonic pulses and the high keening wail of nanomech hell had finally died off, did he finally begin to relax.
The very first thing he did was quick-disconnect the hypersuit helmet, yank the hat off and gulp down tons and tons of cold, humid high-altitude air.
It wasn’t toxic at all…in fact, it was better than ice cream on a hot summer day.
Then he crawled through all the groaning bodies to the front of the compartment, to see about the rendezvous with Mercury.
Above the belly on the flight deck, Al Glance massaged the controls like a master pianist, still in his hypersuit but minus the helmet. He saw Winger poke his head up from below and grinned back, trimming the lifter for the short cruise up to ten thousand feet, where hyperjet Mercury and their ride home were waiting like an expectant mother.
They made rendezvous an hour later. Al Glance deftly parked the lifter in Mercury’s docking cradle and let the mothership hoist them aboard. Climbing out into the docking bay, Johnny Winger couldn’t wait to head forward to the suiting room and climb out of ‘this tin can’ , as most of them called the hypersuits.
“Set a course for Table Top,” he told Glance, who would be up on the command deck running the ship for the first watch. “And get word to Battalion that we’ll need a new ANAD master.” Winger absent-mindedly massaged his left shoulder, as if he could somehow feel the bot inside, ticking over, barely alive. “I’ll find out what ANAD’s status is and get it to you as soon as I clean up.”
“Roger that, Skipper.” Glance bounded off to the command deck, to take Mercury out of her orbit and set the ship up for boost to Table Top. The whole five-thousand mile trip would take about two hours, give or take, as they skimmed off the top of the atmosphere and skipped northward like a stone on a lake.
Moments later, Winger was on the comm to Table Top. The vidlink connected and Major Kraft’s harried face peered up at the tone.