Winger knew that with the expansion of the Amazon swarms across the continent, the now-sluggish ice would flow more easily, making the rivers into torrents, raising sea levels around the world.
“Heading change, now turning to a zero one five degrees,” Winger heard in his earpiece. The lifter pilot was an Italian jockey with a lilting accent, a UNIFORCE lifer. Beside Winger in the crew compartment was a BioShield engineer named Wolf.
The formation wheeled back to the east and headed inland, over an endless snowy plain that stretched to the horizon in every direction.
Wolf mouthed, “The East Antarctic Ice Sheet…”
Winger was curious at the striations visible on the ice surface, scores and scores of small waves frozen in motion, as if time had stopped.
Wolf knew what he was going to ask before he asked it. “Sastrugi,” he pronounced carefully. Hundreds and hundreds of small undulations in the ice sheet, the spaces between them filled with chiseled sandlike snow banks.
“Hard going across that kind of surface,” he said.
Wolf agreed. “That’s why we have lifters.”
Half an hour later, the lifters descended even lower, leveling out some two hundred feet above the ice cap. Strong circumpolar winds buffeted the small formation.
“Final approach,” Wolf observed. Both he and Winger kept their eyes glued out the porthole.
On the horizon, dead ahead, an opaque white fog writhed and glowed, flickering with light. The opaque fog covered the entire horizon, thinning out as it rose in altitude. Inside the fog, light speckled and flashed, as if a summer thunderstorm were building across the ice cap.
It was the Amazon swarm.
Johnny Winger’s earpiece crackled. It was the lead pilot, up front.
“Captain, this is as far as we can go. Have to set down on the ice here. Winds are too strong from here on in.”
As if to emphasize the point, a series of gusts slammed the lifter, skidding them sideways. The pilot drove them down through the wind shear and planted the lifter skids solidly on the ice, using the top jets to hold them in place.
“Guess we walk from here,” Winger decided. He got on the crewnet. “Detachment, fall out! Full hypersuits, suit boost at max. Try to stay together. I’ll get ANAD ready.”
The Quantum Corps troopers exited the lifter through the rear cargo doors. Immediately, it was apparent that staying together was going to be hard.
“Jesus…it’s a hurricane!” yelled Deeno D’Nunzio. She stepped onto the ice and the blast of air nearly knocked her over. Only quick response from the suit gyros kept her upright.
“Nah…just a gentle summer breeze!” said Reaves.
“Yeah,” added Gibbs. “A real walk in the park!”
All three of them were tilted forward at an impossible angle as their suits struggled to keep them upright.
With much grumbling and swearing, the air skids were removed and the Detachment’s gear offloaded and tied down.
“We gonna walk to war, Captain?” asked Taj. He was eyeing the distance from where the lifters had put down to the roiling fog bank ahead. Distances were hard to figure here. But the lifter pilot had ranged the swarm as he descended. The closest edge was several miles off.
Winger knew their hypersuits had limited boost. Fully clad, the boost could lift a trooper a few feet off the ground, maybe fifty feet in an emergency, and propel him forward at something like fifteen or twenty miles an hour. But in this gale—
“We walk,” Winger decided.
So the Detachment set off across the undulating waves of sastrugi, into blinding snow and sleet. As they neared the edge of the swarm, the winds picked up, buffeting them left and right, a near whiteout blizzard roaring across the ice cap.
“Hold up!” Winger decided. The troopers stopped, hunkering down in the lee of a frozen wave of snow. It was time to put ANAD to work.
“Okay, ANAD, you’re up next. Stand by for launch.”
***ANAD ready in all respects…my effectors are safed, bond breakers and enzymatic knives primed and ready…let me at ‘em!***
“ANAD…when you’re deployed, I’m ordering config two…the one we simmed back at Table Top. In that config, you’ll resemble an Amazon assembler. Once you’ve replicated, I’m sending you around the perimeter of the swarm. When you’re in position, we’ll slam ‘em with HERF and mag weapons from this side. That ought to keep them occupied for a few minutes. While that’s happening, you infiltrate the swarm from your position. If this all works like it’s supposed to, once you’re inside, you can change to config one—“
*** and that’s when I bust ‘em in the chops, right?***
Winger had the impression he was talking with a five-year old. “Basically, yes. But you don’t go until I say…got that?”
***ANAD copies***
While Reaves and D’Nunzio and the rest offloaded their weapons and set up the HERF guns, Winger launched ANAD.
A faint glow shimmered around the port in his left shoulder. There was a brief sting and his shoulder muscles grabbed like he’d been stung but the sting only lasted a moment. The glow subsided.
Another series of gusts blasted across the icecap, nearly scattering the Detachment to pieces.
***Whoa…baby…***
Just maintaining swarm integrity took every ounce of propulsor power ANAD had. Each time the assembler replicated a few trillion times, the gale-force winds scattered the swarm all over the place. ANAD did as his macro-scale buddies did and congregated in the lee of the sastrugi waves, trying to form up a combat-capable force. It was tough going.
“Maybe if he hugs the ground--” Gibby suggested. He had been watching acoustic images from ANAD as the assembler attempted to deploy. It was like being in a roller-coaster careening off its track.
“Yeah, Skipper…the wind doesn’t flow so smoothly close to the ice,” Taj offered. “Outside the laminar flow boundary and all that.”
Winger ordered ANAD to deploy as a thin sheet, a few nanometers thick, and slide forward across the ice.
***Skipper…this is better…much better…I can make my molecules conform to the boundary molecules of the ice, swinging from one lattice to another…it’s like climbing a ladder that never ends***
“Just do it,” Winger ordered. “And what’s your current heading?”
***I’m going zero two zero right now…sixty five microns per second…that’s about as fast as I can make it***
Unseen by all, the ANAD swarm oozed its way forward, sliding as a film a few molecules thick, along the surface of the ice. Hidden by the blowing snow and sleet, the ANAD swarm replicated as it eased forward.
An hour later, the swarm spanned half a square mile, a faint writhing patch of snow, somehow moving against the wind and sleet storm.
***I’m in position now, Skipper…latitude eighty degrees fifteen minutes south, longitude one five five degrees, forty five minutes east…winds are picking up…I’m burrowing into the ice lattice to hold position***
Winger acknowledged the report. “Understood, ANAD. Do whatever you have to but hold that position. We’re firing HERF in sixty seconds…first barrage.”
ANAD dug himself into the lattice of the surface ice and snow, hiding among the oxygen and hydrogen molecules, slowly but steadily squeezing his way forward, closer and closer to the storm. Hundred of microns above his position, a maelstrom of Amazon Vector bots churned with fury, tearing air molecules apart, creating the vacuum vortex that drove the surrounding air to hurricane fury.
For two solid hours, ANAD inched forward, hugging the surface of the ice, even penetrating into the upper layers of the lattice of molecules. It slowed down the approach but it also kept Amazon from detecting the assembler’s presence.
Half a mile inside the outer swarm boundary, ANAD signaled he was ready. Johnny Winger told the assembler to pulse his surroundings and return data on his position.
***It looks
like a crystalline lattice, Skipper…a few scattered molecules of silicon and olivine embedded…I’m maneuvering forward without too much difficulty…just a matter of surfing the hydrogen bonds…I get a pretty good slingshot effect every time I stretch one***
Winger and Gibby were both listening in.
“Great, ANAD…prepare to surface and engage the swarm. I make your position at twelve hundred and two meters inside the swarm boundary. Prime all effectors…surface on my mark—“
ANAD acknowledged and began easing his way up through the rigid hexagonal lattice of crystals.
***breaching the surface now…I am going to Config Two now***
“Acknowledged.”
Johnny Winger turned his viewer up to maximum resolution but all he could see ahead was a swirling, flickering fog. Somewhere inside the cyclone, a few thousand meters away, a swarm of ANAD assemblers had emerged from the ice cap and was now replicating furiously into assault configuration.
Their imagers swirled and throbbed for a few minutes as the swarms collided.
It was Gibby who spotted the enemy first. “Dead ahead, Skipper…see that line of dots ahead…ANAD’s detecting high thermals…lots of activity up ahead.”
“I see it,” Winger acknowledged. He checked ANAD’s config status. Bond disrupters ready, enzymatic knife ready, all effectors primed. For the time being, ANAD was maneuvering on auto and the rest of the Detachment were spectators. But at the right moment, Winger knew, Quantum Corps would spring the trap and slam Amazon from every direction.
“No sign of any response yet,” Gibby noted. As ANAD closed the distance, they could see the Amazon bots in frenetic motion…breaking down air molecules like a mad brickmason in reverse. Even as they watched, the enemy bots disassembled oxygens and nitrogens as fast as they could, snapping bonds and reassembling the pieces into new configs, their effectors moving with blurry and deadly efficiency as the swarm systematically broke down the atmosphere.
***ANAD holding on Config Two, Skipper…about seven thousand microns away…enemy has not changed course…or reacted***
“That’s our cue,” Winger said. He leaned back to look along the top line of the snowbank, squinting through the blizzard that was blasting along the crest of the ridge. “DPS…charge up the HERF!”
“Weapon is fully charged, Captain.” Sheila Reaves and Chandra Singh sighted the radio frequency weapon on the nearest arm of the swarm, now boiling across the ice cap two kilometers away.
A few more seconds. The swarm had created a cyclonic blizzard dancing across the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, a massive throbbing whiteout spinning like a gyroscope and expanding with every minute.
“Fire the HERF!” Winger yelled into the crewnet. “Blow the bastards to hell and back!”
A thunderclap of hot radio waves boomed across the ice cap, echoing and reverberating off snow banks and crevasses for kilometers around.
Before he could react, Winger heard a high freq squeal and then the staccato clatter of nanomechs shattered by the pressure pulse.
“Go, ANAD!” he shouted over the coupler circuit. “GO…GO…GO…!”
Two kilometers away, the tiny assembler zoomed forward to engage the nearest Amazon mechs, revving up to max propulsor.
*** Changing to Config One…NOW!...all effectors and weapons enabled…***
A soft voice…Moby M’bela’s voice...could be heard over the crewnet.
“Kick ass, little guy. Slam the bugs good this time!”
ANAD’s acoustic sounder sent back imagery but for many moments, the chaos of the battle made visuals useless. The imager was a grainy stretch of flashes and swirling color.
“HERF re-charging now,” Reaves announced. She and Taj had cycled the gun’s power supply.
“Standby,” Winger told them. He lifted his helmet over the top of the snowbank. Across the ice cap, the throbbing swarm had thinned out noticeably…the effect of the HERF gun, no doubt.
Won’t take long to re-build, he knew. “Mag weapons…open up…concentrate fire on config one coordinates!”
The two SDC’s—Mighty Mite Barnes and Sergeant Ray Spivey—let fly a volley of magnetized loops at the last reported position of the ANAD swarm. An ear-splitting shriek told them the mag bubbles had torn a gaping hole in the enemy swarm.
Finally, the imager view on Winger’s eyepiece settled down. Visible to the whole Detachment over the crewnet, a jittery scene of swarm combat materialized into view.
The picture careened sideways, jostling and shaking, as assemblers engaged in a running duel across the ice. Blurry, staticky pictures of the bristling icosahedral Amazon bots winked in and out of view, like battleships maneuvering in dense fog.
Over his coupler link, Johnny Winger caught fragments of ANAD’s ordeal.
***…get my pyridines unfolded fast enough…the bugger’s covered with propulsors…he can scoot just out of reach every time I…and those blasted carbenes…grabbers that long and sticky should be illegal…how can he bend like that…***
“Fire the HERF!” Winger decided. “And keep slamming ‘em, Mighty Mite…everything we got! ANAD’s in a battle and we’ve got to help him anyway we can!”
The rf gun boomed again, mixed with sporadic shrieks from the mag weapons and, for good measure, a few coilgun rounds as well. Alpha Detachment salvoed everything they had, trying to shock, stun, slam, and scatter the Amazon swarm as best they could…anything they could do give ANAD an edge.
Throughout the volley, the enemy force shrank a little and swelled back to size with uncanny resilience, as if it were a balloon being squeezed.
“He could try replicating more,” Gibby thought out loud. The IC2 was hunkered down in the lee of a snowbank, half-buried in blowing snow and sleet, looking like a beached whale. “Give him more mass…more effectors on the enemy.”
But Winger nixed that idea. “Tactically unsound…it diverts time and energy from the engagement…he’s got to win this battle at the point of contact.”
“What if you drove the master?”
Winger had already been considering that very idea. It had merit. “I could do the piloting while he concentrated on replication.”
“Take some of the load off his processor,” Gibby added.
Winger decided to do it. What atomgrabber could resist? Over the coupler link, he told ANAD what he was about to do.
***be my guest, Skipper….it’s a real scrum in here…ouch!...I just can’t get my bond breakers into position to…***
The imager view flashed with light as ANAD managed to shred covalent bonds on a nearby bot. Liberating thousands of electron volts, the Amazon bot shuddered and heeled over like a torpedoed ship, then moved off to lick its wounds and reconfig.
Johnny Winger toggled buttons on his wristpad to take control of the assembler. He had to keep brushing snow off to finish the sequence: automaneuver off, Fly-by-Stick enabled, config generator initialized to zero. He sent the commands but control handoff was sluggish…already, ANAD’s processor was bogging down.
I’ve got to get closer, he realized. Closer and in the line of sight.
“Acoustics are bogging down,” he told Gibby, huddled a few feet away. “And my coupler’s on the blink too. I’ve got to move in….”
“Closer to that swarm, Skipper?” There was a note of concern in Deeno D’Nunzio’s voice.
“It’s the only way.” Winger lit off his suit boost and let the thrusters hoist him up out of the snowfall. In seconds, he was powering forward, half stepping and sliding, half-floating through blowing snow and sleet.
He eased forward, a wraith in the whiteout conditions, rocked and buffeted by wind gusts until he found himself only a few dozen feet from the flickering maelstrom of the enemy swarm. He let off the suit boost and dropped into heavy snow, and was immediately covered up to his faceplate.
“ANAD…let go, will you? I’m taking over piloting and config—“ his fingers flew over his wristpad, now dim
and hard to see in the driving blizzard. “You replicate…max rate. I’ll do the rest—“
ANAD’s response was weak and sluggish.
***Skipper—I’m losing…it…I can’t keep up…the buggers …there’s too many of them--***
Johnny Winger firmly took command of the ANAD force. He let his hypersuit lower him into a defilade position behind a small scattering of icy boulders. Quickly he was half buried. But it didn’t matter, as long as he could read his wristpad.
He clicked into the coupler link. In his earpiece, he heard voices…the Detachment, re-deploying to support him now that he was further forward and exposed.
“Charging HERF again---“ Reaves was saying. She and Singh half-carried, half-dragged the weapon through the gale to another position, a bowl-shaped depression in the snow, closer to the Amazon swarm.
“Don’t fire ‘til I say,” Al Glance came back. Glance was CC2, nominally second in command to Winger. “Mag weapons, move left…let’s flank this arm of the swarm…slam ‘em from another bearing.”
Barnes and Spivey scrambled, half-boosted, half-stumbling on rubbly ice firn, to take up new positions, moving tangentially to the swelling perimeter of the swarm. Twice, errant gusts flew out of the vortex, knocking them down, driving them back. Eventually, they landed in the lee of another snow bank, working the mag guns up to take aim at the mouth of the beast.
Ahead of all of them, Johnny Winger’s eyepiece flickered, then winked out completely. Acoustics were gone…the swarm was now too dense to resolve structure.
From here on…it was the coupler link, or nothing.
He closed his eyes and concentrated on stilling his thoughts…dimly aware that his suit was being rocked and buffeted by gusts, his helmet pelted with sleet and mech debris.
Come on, ANAD…come on…where the hell are you? Come to me…come to Daddy…
Gradually, as if awakening from a deep sleep, the view seemed to clear, though his eyepiece was still completely dark. He found himself, as before, standing barefooted in a raging ocean surf, barely able to stay upright, slammed and broadsided by relentless thundering waves.
That’s when a ship appeared on the distant horizon, a low dark menacing hull silhouetted from beyond by a flickering thunderstorm…and he realized with a start that he’d seen the first enemy bot.