“I’m setting up your boost, Skipper…” Glance fingered the wristpad, stabbing at several buttons. “I’ll keep one arm on your arm just in case your gyros go.”
Winger tried to help but he seemed weak, unable to stand. He slumped in the suit…only Glance’s quick work kept the suit upright. The CC2 lit off Winger’s boost and, in a poof of snow and ice, the Captain’s suit was hovering a foot off the ground, wobbling as its occupant struggled to keep his balance inside.
Winger’s voice was strained, choked with emotion. “Glance…we can’t leave ANAD behind…we don’t leave anybody behind…no matter what.”
It was true and Al Glance knew it.
It was the bedrock code of the nanowarrior: you didn’t leave your buddies behind, for the enemy to pick over like some vulture.
Glance hesitated. “CQE’s…any way we can jam those quantum signals?”
Deeno D’Nunzio was first to reply. “No way, Sarge. We can hardly detect them as it is.”
“And nobody can predict what frequency they have,” added Ozzie Tsukota. “Quantum signals are like that…there’s really no such thing as a frequency anyway and they’re transmitted as all possible states permissible. Only when the signal is received do those probabilities collapse to an actual signal. You can’t predict it.”
Glance steadied Winger in his suit. The two of them floated like huge metal cocoons through the driving sleet and snow. He quickly slaved the Captain’s suit to his own…it was nearly impossible to keep physical contact under these conditions. With Glance’s hypersuit emitting a beacon, Winger’s suit thrust ahead on its own boost, following the signal…like a mama bear and her cub.
Scattered by the blizzard and the winds, the Detachment scrambled and floated across the choppy frozen waves of the sastrugi covering the icecap. The withdrawal was ragged and haphazard…Glance tried to maintain some semblance of formation but the swarm spun ever closer on their heels and all of them had to fight a running duel with the outer bands of bots converging on them.
Glance kept close to Winger has they slogged back toward the lifters. The Captain’s suit gyrated and wobbled as it was buffeted by the wind but followed like an obedient dog. The CC2 called up the UNIFORCE commander.
“Hadid…detach an element of your mechs and give us control. We can block their advance along this bearing…give us all more time to get the hell out of here.”
Hadid came back. “Negative, 1st Nano…we’re fully engaged right now…I can’t spare a single atom to give you. We’re in a standoff two miles east of you…got one hell of an arm of the enemy pounding us. If I detach now, they’ll blow right through us.”
Glance found BioShield in the same predicament.
Wolf’s voice was harried. “We’re falling back ourselves, 1st Nano…I’ve got nothing to give you! My force is being chewed to pieces!”
Glance suspected as much but it had been worth a try. Whatever it was, whatever powered the swarm, it was a beast growing in intensity with every passing moment.
“Roger that…fall back as planned. Rendezvous at the lifters. We’ve got to get the hell out of here…before the damn thing eats us alive.”
A few moments later, the dim outlines of the lifters materialized in the distance, squatting on the icecap like huge gray birds of prey.
“Come on, Skipper…” he gritted through his teeth. He twisted around to check out Winger’s face. In the amber glow of his helmet lamps, Johnny Winger wore an expression blank and impassive, glassy-eyed. Was he all right? Was he even conscious?
“Help me get the Skipper aboard,” he waved at the nearest suits, two troopers settling down onto the ice after shutting off their boost. “…he’s not responding.”
The suits turned out to be Gibby and Taj Singh.
Glance commanded Winger’s suit boost off and he thumped down hard onto the ice, losing his balance until Gibby shouldered him upright.
“Open the lifter bay doors,” Glance commanded. At the rear of the main cargo pod, doors clamshelled open, revealing the protective cocoon of warmth and strong flood lights inside.
Laboriously, they worked Winger, still inside his suit, up the ramp and into one of the ingress harnesses along the bulkhead.
Glance commanded the suit to depressurize and open. A hiss of air escaped as the neck ring and helmet quick-disconnected. Gibby lifted the helmet off.
Johnny Winger’s face was deathly pale and haggard. Gibby, Glance and the others crowded around.
“Skipper…you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Get him some water,” said Sheila Reaves. The DPS tech felt Winger’s forehead. It was cool to her touch. “No fever that I can see.”
“Check the suit,” Glance ordered. “It might have been penetrated. If he’s been swarmed—“
“There’s no evidence of that,” Gibby said. “I swept him as we came aboard.”
Winger’s hands were shaking as he accepted a cup of water from Reaves. He mumbled thanks.
“Skipper…” it was Moby M’bela, his necklace and trinkets clinking as he rubbed them for good luck. “…your containment port is open.”
The port to the shoulder-implanted capsule where ANAD resided hadn’t snapped shut.
Winger nodded grimly, sipping gratefully at the water. “I never got…ANAD never got recovered…had to get out of there—“
“My God…ANAD’s lost?” D’Nunzio sucked in a hard breath. “He’s still out there—“
Winger nodded. “Quantum interference…signals jammed…I couldn’t control him, couldn’t maneuver…nothing worked.” The Captain shook his head, winced at the flood lamps inside the lifter bay. He turned to M’bela. “Moby, there’s something wrong with the coupler link. When we were jammed and I couldn’t run ANAD or communicate, I started to feel…I don’t know, funny. Weird. I kept hallucinating, snatches of old thoughts and memories…it’s like I could feel ANAD. He was in trouble, losing function and I could feel it somehow…like I was losing function too.”
M’Bela clucked and rubbed his spirit talismans even harder. “Leakage effects. Doc Frost warned us that might happen.”
Glance was skeptical. “What do you mean ‘leakage effects?’”
“Just this—“ M’bela chose his words carefully. “--the quantum signals that ANAD sends aren’t always decoded in the Captain’s coupler with perfect accuracy. Stray signals can cause neural firing wave patterns to occur unrelated to the original signal…that’s the nature of quantum effects. It’s all about probabilities and how they collapse when the signal is received.”
Winger shook his head. “All I know is that I left a buddy back there…Quantum troopers don’t do that. It leaves a bad taste…I’ve got to go back and get ANAD—“ He started to rise but Sheila Reaves pushed him firmly back in his seat.
“It’s not going to happen, Captain…not today. Amazon’s a bitch of a swarm and nothing we’ve tried even slows it down. UNIFORCE has ordered everyone to pull back, to McMurdo. Including us.”
Winger seethed but he didn’t resist. He glared out a nearby porthole. The view was a swirling whiteout…blowing snow and sleet whipped into a fury by the vortex powered by the swarm. Wind gusts rocked the lifter, while the incessant wail of tortured air shrieked below the groaning creaking of the lifter fuselage.
Doc Frost said this could happen. Me and ANAD…Jesus, we’re like brothers now. Read each other’s minds, think each other’s thoughts. Like one…
Winger shook himself out of the daze. He looked up at all the worried faces peering back at him. “Okay troops…the show’s over. Let’s get this jalopy airborne and get back to MacTown.”
Moments later, the tiny fleet of lifters was winging its way back toward McMurdo City. As the billowing white pall of the swarm receded in the porthole and the black peaks of the Transantarctic range poked above the horizon, Winger stared out at the desolate scene, lost in thought.
&
nbsp; With ANAD lost, 1st Nano and UNIFORCE had no choice but to retreat. A new master assembler could be regenerated but that would take time. The dumb bots and micro-weapons that UNIFORCE had left—not to mention the patrol bots BioShield had brought in—were no match for the Amazon swarm.
A new way to fight the swarm would have to be devised and fast. More worrisome than that, Winger realized as the outer dome settlements of McMurdo City materialized through a light ice fog and the lifter began its descent, was the quantum signal jamming that had interfered with ANAD.
Winger would certain the investigation would lead back to Red Hammer. According to the UNIFORCE commander, the decoherence wakes had been traced back to a source in China, near the Himalayas, after a great deal of effort and interpolating.
No surprise there, Winger thought grimly. Red Hammer’s main base of operation was known to be in the area. Something would have to be done about the interference…or ANAD would be useless in combating the spread of the Amazon swarm.
A quick briefing was held in the UNIFORCE Ops command post. Suvorov was running the show. The Russian was harried and brusque.
“…that’s the best we can do…hold up the swarm for a few hours with a force of bots until the thing overwhelms us. Then, we fall back to a new position, re-group, inject a new force of bots and get chewed up all over again. The same process over and over again for the last week. At this rate—“ the Russian shrugged.
Stiles, the BioShield chief engineer, had already done the calculation. “…at this rate…McMurdo itself will be under assault in less than a week…less than a hundred hours if the swarm expands at a constant speed. So far, it hasn’t…but I can’t say we’re doing much to slow it down.”
Winger and Glance were attending the briefing for 1st Nano.
“Like flies tickling an elephant,” Glance observed. On displays surrounding the briefing theater, the whole of Antarctica was being consumed by spreading patches of red. Two isolated patches, representing separate swarms at Lake Vostok and Mount Erebus, strained toward each other across the map.
“It’s only a matter of time,” Stiles was saying, “before the two elements link up…then we’ll be facing a superswarm…this one capable of swallowing a whole continent.”
“And the atmosphere over the continent,” Winger added. “We’ve got to get back to Table Top…re-think our tactics. And regenerate another ANAD master.” The prospect of breaking in another assembler and re-establishing coupler links made him wince.
“And find some way to block that quantum interference,” Glance added. “We’ve become so dependent on quantum systems now that any disruption is a problem.”
“More than a problem,” Winger said, remembering the feelings of panic and helplessness. For a few moments, he had actually felt what ANAD himself must have felt. They had almost become one and the results had been near catastrophe.
Suvorov promised that UNIFORCE would deploy what ever microbot or conventional force was needed to engage the swarm.
“It’s all we can do,” the Russian explained, frustrated. “Paris doesn’t understand what it’s like down here. With BioShield’s mechs, it seems the best defense we have are our own dumb bots…replicate simple mass and throw it into the fight. Cannon fodder the size of molecules. At best, we may be able to slow Amazon down.”
Winger agreed. UNIFORCE nanobots were simple, non-programmable devices, with no real brains and minimal effectors. Easy to config, easy to replicate…they could be assembled into swarms at prodigious rates. Trouble was: the bots were easy prey for Amazon. The tactical plan was to overwhelm Amazon with mass but the enemy swarm was too quick to be stalled for long.
But until ANAD or something like it could engage and defeat the Amazon mechs in close combat, where it counted, there was little else UNIFORCE could do…here in the Antarctic or anywhere else Amazon was engaged.
UNIFORCE Command in Paris and the Security Affairs Commissioner were rapidly running out of options.
Winger and Glance left the Ops building and rode out to the skyway at McMurdo Field. Hyperjet Charioteer had been fueled up and the rest of the Detachment had loaded aboard with their gear.
Within the hour, the sleek black ship had lifted off, accelerating through the stratosphere on its ten-thousand mile suborbital hop to Table Top Mountain.
Johnny Winger holed up in the comm shack, glum and dispirited. Through the porthole, he could see miles below the ragged Pacific coastline of South America, lined with crumpled mountains of the Andes range. Though not visible from Charioteer’s near-space altitude, he knew that the ocean waves lapping the shorelines of Tierra del Fuego were rising steadily, as they were now all over the world. Amazon swarm activity was melting the south polar ice cap and seas were rising, by nearly an inch a day according to some measurements.
ANAD had failed. Yet he hadn’t…not really, Winger told himself. I’m the one who failed ANAD. The assembler had found a weakness inside the midline cavity of the Amazon bot, something that could be exploited. But Red Hammer’s interference had kept him from exploiting it.
And with the onslaught of the swarm, he hadn’t had time to properly recover the tiny assembler. That’s what the after-action report read anyway. The truth was rather more complicated.
Anyway you cut it, nanotroopers looked out for each other. When you wore the black and gold, you covered your buddy’s ass and you didn’t leave anyone behind. That was the code. They all knew it. They all lived by it. It didn’t matter if you were six feet tall or six nanometers tall.
And, deep down inside, Johnny Winger knew he had broken the code.
He got on the vidlink, anxious to talk, to explain, to do something and rang up Major Kraft at Table Top.
Kraft’s face was deeply furrowed in thought as the image came up. The Battalion commander had been reviewing the Detachment’s report. Glance had squirted it to Table Top off a satlink before they had lifted off from MacTown.
“Not very promising…this first engagement with a full swarm, Captain,” Kraft was saying.
“No, sir,” Winger agreed. “1st Nano got our ass kicked. The swarm bots are huge buggers, highly maneuverable. They replicate like crazy too…it’s unnatural how fast they can move. It’s like they’re revved up somehow. I thought I found a weak point…ANAD was probing…maybe some kind of service port or something but—“ Winger broke off the explanation. He could see the look on Kraft’s face. A small vein on the Major’s forehead was throbbing red. The volcano was about to blow.
Kraft’s lips tightened. “Your report says quantum interference was detected…you lost ANAD because of that?”
Winger was embarrassed. He wanted to kill the vidlink, shrivel up and die.
“Yes, sir…UNIFORCE got intermittent bearings on decoherence wakes, triangulated back to a source in southwest China…Tibet, they said. Ten to one, it’s Red Hammer.”
Kraft seemed skeptical. “I didn’t know quantum signals could even be effectively jammed. We went quantum several years ago, right after the Serengeti incident, for more secure command and control, not less.” Kraft could see Winger squirming. Part of a commander’s toolkit was knowing when to chew the ass off a nog who had screwed up…and when not to.
“What happened to ANAD?”
Winger related the details as honestly as he could, even though the same details were in the report.
“Our CQEs say these waves interfered with the basic functions of ANAD’s processor. Somehow, if I’m understanding this right, the jamming waves keep the processor and my coupler from being able to read quantum signals when they collapse…like scattering them so they can’t collapse or be read properly.” Winger struggled to find the right words. “ANAD started feeling sluggish at first. I was piloting at that point and after awhile, I had no control…effectors, propulsors, replication, anything. Then we couldn’t even talk to each other. My coupler link went on the fritz. And acoustics weren’t much b
etter.”
Kraft’s face was a picture of doubt. “I never liked all this hocus-pocus anyway. So you couldn’t control or talk to ANAD?”
“No, sir. I began to lose everything…just as the Amazon swarm began expanding again. It caught us off guard.”
Kraft nodded brusquely. A good commander never gets caught off guard. He scanned the report further, studying the embedded vidlinks. He could re-play 1st Nano’s desperate stand at the rock wall—coilguns and HERFs going off like firecrackers—then follow the Detachment’s withdrawal. “Captain, you violated basic tactical doctrine…you didn’t set up a defensive perimeter or recon the terrain enough to know your enemy. That’s why the swarm caught you off guard.”
“Yes, sir—“
Kraft took a deep breath. “I’ve got Doctor Frost on this link with me. Let me bring the good doctor in on this little discussion—“ The comm shack’s viewer went fuzzy for a few seconds, then split into two windows. Kraft’s dour face filled half the screen. The other half showed the face of Dr. Irwin Frost. Frost was in his lab at Northgate. Winger recognized the piping in the background. It was containment vessel piping…ANAD’s ancestral home.
“Hello, Johnny,” Frost’s face split into an avuncular smile. “I’ve been studying your report too…the Major rang me up awhile ago. Quite a battle you had down there, son.”
“Doc…” Winger shook his head, idly fingered the capsule port on his left shoulder…the now empty capsule. “…Doc, I’m having quite a problem, or was having a problem—“ he corrected, “coupling to ANAD. I felt…funny, weird…disconnected…lots of fragments, images that didn’t make any sense, some old memories…it’s really hard to describe—“
Kraft interjected. “Doctor…is this normal? Winger’s supposed to have a hard link to the assembler. Strictly a command and control link. He shouldn’t be having all this emotional, panty-waist crap in his head.”
Frost turned grim, tight-lipped. He nodded to the Major. “Quite right, Major. That is the intent of the design. However, remember this is still somewhat of an experimental setup. The nature of quantum links is such that, even now, we can’t always control or predict what final state a decoherence wave will collapse to. I’m sure we’re seeing that effect here. There’s leakage from Johnny’s coupler into the limbic circuits of his brain. It was an expected effect.”