The onslaught stunned him.
“Jesus…” he muttered, more to himself, as the first outlines of the enemy mechs came into view. “They look like battleships….I’ve never seen so many effectors.” He recognized the same cleft in the middle of the enemy mech structure that he’d seen at Lake Vostok. “I know what to do with that—“
He steered ANAD right for the cleft, dodging its effectors, as he closed in.
Winger rolled ANAD right, then left, keeping just out of reach of the snapping grabbers and reconnoitered the beast’s outer membrane, looking for a way in, anything he could use, a weakness of some kind.
Halfway aft, almost invisible among the rows of effectors, he saw the small cleft in the membrane, the cavity where groups of phosphate molecules made a wedge-shaped bond.
Instinctively, Johnny Winger steered ANAD toward the cleft. As he approached, he unsheathed his bond breakers and flexed the devices up and down.
With any luck—
ANAD sped forward and slashed hard at the phosphate arms with his bond breakers.
Just a little push here, a snap there…
Johnny Winger commanded ANAD’s bond breakers into action. He seized one end of a polypeptide chain and tugged hard. It stretched, resisted, then with a crackling flash, it broke. A puff of atoms went spinning off in every direction.
That’s more like it.
Winger now drove the assembler deeper into the cleft, unfolding every effector ANAD had: hydrogen abstractors, carbon manipulators, electron lens, enzymatic knife. It was like chewing into the side of a mountain.
Soon, the air was swimming with debris from shattered bots.
“You got ‘em!” Gibby exulted. “You got ‘em on the run!”
The intense blue-white globe of light began to cool and shrink. Most of the control room door and some of the bulkhead had been hit, burned away like so much paper mache. Moments later, Winger began to pull ANAD back from the front lines, leaving a small force of replicants to mop up the remaining mechs.
That’s when Barnes saw something on one of the monitors.
“Skipper…” she rushed over to the console. Several screens flickered with displays, different views of the same location. “Skipper…we got something—“
Winger, D’Nunzio and the rest came over.
It was a small room, apparently in the living quarters section of the complex. There were bunk beds arrayed around a central aisle. But at the end of the aisle, a pair of formless humps writhed on the ground.
“Skipper…that’s some kind of MOB net, sure as I’m standing here.”
Winger peered at the display, studied the console and located the quarters. “A few halls away, on the other side of these utilities ducts. It’s got to be Dana and the rest of Bravo.”
“What are we waiting for?” Gibby asked.
The assault team gathered their gear and set off. Winger ordered ANAD to replicate a small force to secure the control room and make sure their captives were still held immobile in MOB. Once that was done he configged the master assembler for perimeter defense. As the nanotroopers headed off to find the living quarters, ANAD would accompany them outside of containment, hovering overhead as a defensive screen against any more Amazon bots.
After one wrong turn, Winger and his assault team found the residential section. It was a warren of small compartments, buried deep inside the mountain. The outer hatch was locked but Deeno made quick work of the mechanism with her particle beam carbine. The smoking slag heap of what was left of the door was easily kicked in.
“Dana? Captain Dana Tallant!” Winger burst in right behind Barnes and Singh. “Captain Dana Tallant, U.N. Quantum Corps…front and center!”
A series of low groans came drifting up from the rear of the compartment.
Barnes was the first to arrive. “It’s them!” Without thinking, she tugged at the MOB net and the mechs resisted with an insistent buzz, stinging her hands like angry bees in response. She winced and pulled her hand back. “No way I’m going to release ‘em that way.”
Winger steered the ANAD swarm that had been accompanying them down to the restraint mesh. He bent down, realizing the net was a much tighter weave than anything Quantum Corps used.
“Dana…Dana Tallant…is that you? Are you hurt…any injuries? Can you breathe?”
The hump moved sluggishly and words were said, but they came out an indistinct murmur, more a series of moaning grunts than anything else.
“The net’s so tight…it must be compressing her face too,” Gibby said in disgust. “Damn buggers are squeezing the life out of her.”
Winger was already reconfigging ANAD. “Not for long—“ He sent the commands to the assembler swarm. “Okay—everybody…stand back. Soon as there’s an opening big enough, we’re going to haul her out of there. Taj…check that other one.” He indicated another hump a few feet away. Singh bent down to probe it for signs of life.
Winger maneuvered ANAD to the restraint net. A faint wavering in the air around the mesh showed the assembler swarm was at work, disassembling the mechs that formed the net. All of a sudden, the hump came alive, hearing the buzz of nanobotic activity and began writhing furiously.
“Hold still… hold still, will you? It’s ANAD working on the mesh…I’ve got control of him…don’t thrash around so—“
“I hope ANAD can bust her out of there, Skipper,” said Barnes, peering down. “She panicking—“
Winger felt helpless. If it was Dana Tallant inside that mesh, she had become spooked by the sound of ANAD. “Damn mesh bots have probably been driving her crazy.”
Then a narrow seam in the net became visible. A nose stuck out, then a mouth, sucking in air frantically, followed by a faint smile, then the eyes. The seam grew larger, as ANAD continued working. Soon, a full face stuck out.
It was Dana Tallant.
Johnny Winger almost cried with relief. He grabbed her face and patted it like a baby’s, wanting so much to plant a big wet kiss on her parched lips. But she wasn’t free yet.
“Come on…come on…”
It took another five minutes before the seam was large enough. Winger and Gibby grabbed her arms and carefully hoisted her up to her feet. Dana Tallant blinked and nearly collapsed to the floor, but smiled and coughed, heaving in great gulps of air. It was better than ice cream on a hot summer day.
“What the hell took you so long, Wings?”
Winger cuffed her on the head. “I knew how stubborn you are. We didn’t want to show up too soon.”
Tallant was given a canteen of water and shuffled a few feet away around the dormitory, flexing her arms and legs. A few feet away, Taj Singh was probing the other MOB’ed victim. The hump groaned and shifted around on the floor.
“Hey…this one’s alive too.”
Tallant came over. “Jeff Collin, my CC2. We’re the only survivors, as far as I know. We got ambushed.”
Winger sent ANAD commands to ‘unzip’ the nanobotic barrier. A buzzing sound accompanied the shimmering halo of air around the prostrate form. Moments later, a seam was open and Winger was tearing at the gap with Barnes, their bare hands fighting off tenacious remnant bots.
Collin was nearly unconscious and had to be hauled out by hand and stretched out on the deck.
Barnes was already readying an injection. “This’ll help…’cytes can boost his blood oxygen. The rest of the cocktail kickstarts his metabolism.” She slammed the injector into Collin’s neck. Moments later, his eyes fluttered open.
“None of the others made it?” Winger asked.
Tallant shook her head, wincing at some pain in her shoulders. “Like I said, it was an ambush. ANAD couldn’t hold ‘em off. Amazon bots had mutated out of some kind of tropical rainstorm, just like we simmed…remember the war games at Hunt Valley? Buggers were just too fast.”
Winger understood. “Yeah, we ran into the same thing down in the Antarctic.
I had to drive ANAD myself…we had some kind of quantum jamming that scrambled his processor…damn near fried it. He’s being regenerated now. All we got are older versions here…ANAD without the upgrades.”
“Can we fight Amazon at all, Wings?”
Winger described the midline cavity he had seen on the bots…and what he had managed to do at Lake Vostok before the jamming.
“There is a way, Dana. But you gotta drive the thing right into that cavity…it looks like there’s no room but there is. Inside…Amazon’s exposed as hell…all kinds of sensitive areas. You can finish off a bot real quick from inside that cavity…if you can get in. I just—“ he was interrupted by a grinding shudder that shook the entire complex. A series of dull thuds followed…then the floor tilted at a precipitous angle and there was an unmistakable sensation of movement…the entire complex was moving.
“What the—“
Singh scrambled to his feet. “The whole place is moving—“
“Landslide!” Barnes said. “The mountainside’s giving way!”
Winger then figured out what had happened. “Those outer barrier bots kept the compound from being swept off of the seamount. They anchored the place to the mountain.”
“And when we started the assault,” Gibby finished the thought, “the bots re-deployed inside to defend. The compound was left exposed—“
“…just when another tremor hit. See if you can raise Sea Ray on the coupler. We’ve got to exfiltrate…and fast.”
A shriek of tortured metal sounded through the walls, followed by more heavy thuds, then a hammering vibration. More rending metal…then a more ominous sound.
“That’s the pressure hull,” Gibby decided. “Feel your ears hurting? It’s been breached and bulkheads are collapsing.”
They all heard the panicked shouts and the tread of dozens of feet on the deck outside the living quarters.
“Skipper…we don’t have any extra skinsuits!” Singh reminded them. The assault plan had called for Sea Ray to remove any survivors.
Winger was thinking fast. “Make sure these two are boosted. Do it now!” While Sheila Barnes finished injecting ‘cytes into Tallant and Collin, Winger bent to his wristpad, the nucleus of an idea forming in the back of his mind.
If ANAD could hold pressure inside that assault tunnel, he just might be able to form a protective bubble big enough and tight enough to shield the rescue team and the survivors from full seawater pressure at this depth.
Winger hacked together a basic config off the top of his head and commanded ANAD to replicate at max rate. Then he ordered everyone to bunch together as tightly as they could.
“Before we go,” Tallant said, “there’s something you should see.”
“We don’t have time, Dana…this place could collapse at any time…we’re sliding down the side of the seamount now…you can feel it!”
“This will only take a minute…come on!” She led Winger out of the dormitory, through a series of narrow corridors, down several flights of stairs to a vault-like space deeper under the mountain. Before they left, Winger told Gibby to contact Al Glance and get Sea Ray moving.
“We’re going to need her,” Winger said. “This place is going to go at any second.”
“What about Captain Tallant and Sergeant Collin?” Gibby asked. “We can’t take them back through the tunnel.”
Winger was already pressing buttons on his wristpad. “I’m configging ANAD to form a pressure enclosure. We’ll form a nanobarrier around the both of them and drag ‘em back to Sea Ray that way, if we have to.”
“Aye, aye, Skipper.” Gibby set to work helping Sgt. Collin get ready to evacuate.
Tallant had taken Winger to the innermost chambers of the Kurabantu compound, two levels below the living quarters.
“This will blow your socks off, I guarantee it.” At the vault door, Tallant withdrew a small piece of film that looked like a patch of human skin. It was mounted on the end of a stick.
“I managed to concoct this before Jeff and I were completely MOB’ed,” she explained. “I hacked into one of their smaller swarms…got into the master processor no sweat, and had the thing run off a simulated biometric. Like a fingerprint.” She grinned at Winger. “Bet you never did that before.”
Winger snorted. “Can’t say that I have.”
Tallant used the nanoderm patch to fool the vault lock. In seconds, the massive hatch was swinging open. Just as Tallant was about to lead Winger inside, the entire compound shuddered again, lurched and tilted. Heavy thuds clanged on the outside of the pressure hull.
“Boulders…feels like we’re sliding again…the structure’s breaking up—we’ve got to—“
“Just take a look inside, Wings…you won’t believe your eyes.” She pulled him deeper inside the vault.
The interior was warm, dark, and humid. He let his eyes adjust to the low light level for a few seconds. There was water inside—a pool or a small pond, he could hear waves lapping. Something splashed nearby.
When his vision cleared, he realized he was standing on the banks of a semi-tropical grotto laid out before them, resembling very closely the Yemanha River grotto he’d seen a few weeks before at Via Verde.
The whole compartment was nothing but a nursery, an incubator for the demonio creatures that were somehow a part of the Amazon Vector threat. Featureless shapes shifted languidly in the water, despite the shuddering of the compound, partially formed half-men, some headless, some without arms or legs.
“Just like before,” he whispered. Even as he watched, holding onto the vault door, the habitat lurched once again. “Same as Via Verde—Dana, what the hell do these things do?” What are they for?”
Tallant let a particularly violent shudder subside, then she knelt to the floor and groped in the dim light with her hands. “Hell if I know…there…here’s what I wanted to show you…” She held up a small metal bowl to the light.
Inside the bowl were a handful of small spherical objects, featureless white in the poor light of the nursery, smooth as eggs yet hard, polished and made of some material Winger had never seen before.
Experimentally, he touched one. At the moment his finger tip made contact, a hot flash of pain lanced through his body and, for a few moments, he staggered, semi-conscious and wobbly. A reel of memory fragments careened through his head, like some mad projector at hyperspeed.
“Whoa…” Tallant grabbed him by the shoulders before he could pitch headlong to the deck. Winger felt dizzy, his face flushed red. “What was that?”
“It happened to me too,” she admitted. “First time I touched one of these babies, I nearly passed out. It’s like somebody trying to rip your brain out of your skull through your nose.”
Winger braced himself against more shudders and lurching. “So what the hell are they?” He nudged the spheres with the toe of his boot but didn’t touch any more.
Tallant watched a nearby creature slide off the side of the pool into dark, oily water. It seemed to have no arms…only a partially formed head and stumps for legs, like an abandoned store front dummy. The creature thrashed momentarily, then slid below the surface, leaving only a few bubbles.
“I’m not sure what they are…but I’ve seen the technicians take the same balls and insert them into the backs of their necks. There’s some kind of skin flap or something back there…I only saw it from a distance. The fully formed ones all get the same treatment. A technician opens up that skin flap and somehow attaches one of these balls inside. Maybe it’s some kind of control system or a biocomputer…something like that, maybe?”
Winger was thinking fast. He knew Doc Frost had found the demonio they had captured at Via Verde was little more than a swarm of nanobotic devices, holding structure loosely in a para-human form. “We should take one back but I don’t know how—“ then an idea came to him. “ANAD can do it. We already use him to form MOB nets. Since we can’t touch the thing, I can have A
NAD replicate a small force and detach it to secure one of these spheres. Doc Frost has got to see this!”
Even as Winger was tapping out commands on his wristpad, the Red Hammer base shook with a fury that threw them both off balance and nearly pitched Tallant into a nearby pool. Water splashed on both them…along with a few hands and feet. Tallant quickly slithered away in disgust. Winger quickly grabbed her and together they groped their way back to the vault entrance.
“Pressure hull is fully breached, Captain,” came a voice over the crewnet. It was Gibby, back up at the living quarters. “We’ve got to move—“
“On our way!” Winger replied. With Tallant ahead of him, he finished commanding an ANAD element to seek out the coordinates of the demonio nursery. “I just hope ANAD can get an element here before the place collapses completely. Come on!”
They scurried down a corridor, passing several panicked Red Hammer technicians going in the opposite direction, while emergency lighting flashed, and warning sirens blared, until at last they had made it back to the dormitory.
In the center of the room, a glowing blue-white orb had already been formed…a nanobotic barrier just formed by ANAD. It floated like some weightless egg, a flickering fog of twinkling lights, radiantly shimmering in the dim red emergency lighting. Jeff Collin was already cocooned inside, peering out through the faint veil like a ghost’s face.
“In you go, Captain,” Gibby helped Dana Tallant through a faint orifice in the side. Once over the threshold and secured, Tallant and Collin stared back at them as the orifice swirled shut. Now the two survivors were snugly embraced by a nanobotic pressure enclosure, a sort of MOB-net in reverse.
“Come on, Skipper,” said Barnes, securing her mask and stowing her coilgun. “This place is ready to blow.”
Winger could only hope that ANAD had been able to secure one of the demonio spheres. All around them, the shriek of rending metal grew unbearable. The air itself burned with heat as millions of tons of seawater pressed in on the compound, buckling walls and frames. The roar of the wave overwhelmed everything in its path and in the ensuing maelstrom, Johnny Winger knew what a molecule truly felt like, bounced and battered and blasted in every direction at once by forces he could only imagine.