Kurabantu seamount was rapidly engulfed in a thick billowing veil of dirt, rock and mud as violent tremors loosened thousands of tons of sediment. The pressure hull of the Red Hammer base, perched as it was on a narrow ledge, was breached by falling rock in dozens of places simultaneously and crumpled under the onslaught of mass. Torn from its anchorage, no longer protected by a nanobotic barrier, the structure was shoved downward and crushed into rubble by the landslide.
The Quantum Corps rescue force barely escaped. Through a widening seam outside the residence module, a supersonic wall of water crashed into the habitat, sweeping everything before it.
Winger, Barnes, Singh and the rest swam for their lives. Winger was swept up into the vortex and battered into walls repeatedly before he was able to regain some sense of balance. The skinsuit gave him some protection and respirocytes cycled oxygen to his blood, but the fierce pressure pulse slammed his ears and he was thrashed by violent currents in a hundred directions at once. The water cleared just long enough for him to catch a brief glimpse of the remains of the habitat, crumpled as if by a giant’s fist, sliding off into the abyss twenty thousand feet below. Then the heavy veil of thousands of tons of silt closed over him and he was simply spinning, floating, now falling, the cold ever penetrating as the vortex hammered him relentlessly.
How long he had been unconscious, Johnny Winger couldn’t say. He was cold, but not uncomfortably so…drifting freely. The water was thick and turbid, but he could still make out the faint outlines of Kurabantu or what was left of it.
Maybe he could raise someone.
Winger felt for his wristpad and opened up a channel.
“Any station…any station…this is 1st Nano rescue force on channel one…does anybody copy?”
Static and chirps and pops and crackles filled his headset. Then, suddenly, the clear and strong voice of Al Glance came through and Winger nearly wept with relief.
“Skipper…is that you? UNQCS Sea Ray responding to distress call on channel one…Skipper, if that’s you, transmit again so we can fix your position, over—“
Within an hour, the welcome outlines of the floater materialized into view. The twin-dish submersible hovered a few meters away, while her portside airlock swung open, beckoning him forward. Winger dolphin-kicked and flailed his way over and wearily hauled himself aboard.
The lockout chamber cycled and as the water drained, he could see faces peering at him through the porthole. Al Glance’s pug nose was centered in the view pane, surrounded by Deeno’s snarly grin and Taj Singh.
The heavy door was pulled open and strong hands helped Winger out into the ready room. Hands and faces crowded around, slapping him on the back.
“Give him some room to breathe,” barked Gibby, who helped the Captain pull off his mask, then began peeling off the skinsuit. In spite of the heated compartment and the press of bodies, Winger was shivering. Barnes threw him a robe.
Then he saw Dana Tallant.
Johnny Winger cracked a weak smile as he let others change him into drier clothing.
“Welcome aboard…” Tallant said. “I thought you’d never get here.” She grinned back at him, cradling a steaming mug of coffee with both hands.
Winger was still disoriented from his ordeal. “Me too…I kept hallucinating…wondering if all this was real.”
“All too real, Skipper,” said Barnes. She helped him pull on the robe and handed him a mug of his own.
“That whole complex went right over the ledge,” added Gibby, who was standing by the lockout door. “Straight to the seafloor…four miles straight down.”
“Everybody made it out okay?”
“All present and accounted for,” said Al Glance, who had been manning Sea Ray during the assault.
An alarm sounded over the intercom just as Glance was heading up to the command deck. He killed the blaring horn and saw contacts on the active sonar display. He called back to the lockout compartment.
“Skipper, we’re pinging something small and close aboard…several hundred yards astern.”
Winger climbed the ladders and appeared right behind Glance, sitting himself gingerly in the captain’s seat.
“Any signature? Can you make it out?”
“Well, sir…I’m not sure of this but since it’s such a faint return…just barely there…I’d almost be willing to say it was—“
They both looked at each other with the dawning realization of what Sea Ray had just detected.
“…it’s got to be ANAD.”
Glance maneuvered Sea Ray closer to the return, coming abreast of the target. A quick visual check through the forward portholes confirmed their suspicion: the faint glow of nanobotic activity right outside the window was unmistakable.
“Bring him aboard,” Winger ordered. “And carefully.”
Moby M’Bela was ready in the lockout with the mobile TinyTown unit when ANAD jetted inside. Once the autonomous assembler had arrived, the CEC1 reported that ANAD had brought something along.
“It’s a small, white sphere,” he radioed up. “Held in Mobnet by ANAD. I got it bagged and tagged for the time being. And ANAD is captured and in containment.”
“Whatever you do,” Winger warned, “don’t touch it. It’s some kind of control pack for the demonio creatures. I want Doc Frost to take a look at it.”
“Object is secured,” M’Bela said. “I’ll leave it in the lockout for now.”
Winger nodded to Glance, who had Sea Ray’s helm. “Okay, Al, we got what we came for…let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Gladly, Skipper. Now ten degrees up-bubble.” Glance steered the floater toward the surface. As they ascended, the water brightened slowly from deep black to a purple hue, then to a more diffuse green, finally turquoise and soon enough, the ocean was thick and teeming with life.
Sea Ray breached the surface with as roar of air and waves and floated uneasily on long, rolling swells while Winger contacted hyperjet Mercury, still orbiting overhead.
A welcome voice crackled through the speakers. “Mercury standing by for pickup,” said Lieutenant Matumba. “My drop doors are coming open and the recovery cradle is in position.”
Winger sighed a deep sigh of relief. After hours underwater, crawling like ants through claustrophobic tunnels, getting shot at from all directions and nearly crushed in a landslide, it was be pure heaven just to grab some chow and take a hot shower and hit the bunk.
“Matumba…this is Sea Ray on the surface. We are ready to execute recovery sequence. I’m lifting off now…we’ll be in position in about ten minutes. Set a course for Table Top Mountain.”
Matumba was a tall and statuesque Ibo woman, originally TDY’ed to Quantum Corps from UNIFORCE West Africa. “Roger that, Captain…course is laid in and we have clearance ‘over the top.’
“Very well,” Winger replied. He secured his seat harness as Glance revved Sea Ray’s engines. The floater lifted away from the surface of the Pacific in a spray of foam and water and banked hard to port to climb to recovery altitude. “Advise Table Top one more thing, Lieutenant. We have two survivors onboard from Bravo Detachment…Captain Tallant and Sergeant Collin. Two survivors and another mystery for Doc Frost to puzzle over.”
“Will advise,” Mutumba reported. “And Mercury has you in sight astern of us. Activating recovery program now.”
Less than an hour later, hyperjet Mercury was rocketing up into space on three good engines, cleared by UNISPACE Traffic Control ‘over the top.’ The long suborbital arc would take them to the very edge of space, nine thousand miles back to Table Top Mountain in less than two hours.
CHAPTER 9
Table Top Mountain, Idaho, USA
November 14, 2068
0700 hours
For most of the next day, as 1st Nano’s rescue force stood down and Dana Tallant and Jeff Collin were examined by medics, Johnny Winger worked with engineers to localize the source of the spo
radic quantum decoherence waves that they had detected at Kurabantu Island. The same effects had been seen at Via Verde and Lake Vostok; indeed, the interference in the Antarctic had caused trouble inside ANAD’s main processor and forced a difficult and time-consuming regeneration of the master assembler to be done.
“We’ve got to find out where these signals are coming from,” Kraft told Winger after the early morning debriefing at the Ops Center. “Red Hammer’s jamming is giving us tactical fits. If we can’t find and neutralize the source of the interference, we won’t be able to use ANAD’s full capacity. That makes it all the more difficult to combat Amazon Vector and restore the atmosphere to normal conditions.”
So Kraft ordered a new task force be put on the problem right away. By the end of the day, the best evidence pointed to a source in the mountainous borderlands between Tibet and Nepal.
Quantum Corps Intelligence, Q2 on the org charts, had requested a briefing with Kraft at 1630 hours, in the Sim Tank three levels underground in the Ops Center complex. Kraft was there, along with Winger and a pale but otherwise sound Dana Tallant, now cleared for duty. Vidlinked in from Paris was none other than CINCQUANT himself, General Linx.
The briefer was a Major Cabela, from First Intelligence Platoon, a short, stocky Corps lifer balding and florid of face. Cabela had activated SOFIE, the embedded AI that ran many systems at Table Top.
Cabela used a pointer to highlight a map projection of the Earth’s surface.
“We have consistently detected these decoherence waves at every site where Quantum Corps has conducted operations,” Cabela was saying. “That includes Via Verde, Lake Vostok and now Kurabantu Island. “We’ve also managed to pick up signal fragments at other locations around the planet…” he had SOFIE highlight the locations on the map “…everywhere we see this phenomena, we have elevated levels of atmospheric disturbance going on. Chemical changes in the atmosphere, some in the oceans, other environmental effects like rapid ozone destruction. We’ve done a little direction fixing and a few calculations, based on these signal fragments and the nature of the signals…as you know, decoherence waves are notoriously hard to detect, so all we’re getting is pieces—“
“Get on with it, Major,” Kraft growled. “I don’t need a physics degree today.”
Cabela’s face was shiny with sweat. “Yes, sir…as I was saying, sir…these signals seem to cross bearings at specific locations on and above the earth’s surface. We’ve correlated these coordinates to elevated chemical changes in the earth’s atmosphere. First Intel now believes that these coordinates indicate the centroids of Amazon Vector superswarms and colonies. And working backward from the geospatial coordinates of these centroids provides us a decent approximation of the original source of the waves….” He commanded SOFIE to run the simulation. The map of the Earth was suddenly lit up with a spidery web of lines, crisscrossing the continents and oceans. For a few moments, the lines moved and undulated across the map like snakes, before the sim evolved to their current positions. Cabela triumphantly placed his pointer dot on the master centroid of the decoherence waves.
“Here, gentlemen—“he circled the calculated target zone along the southern border of Tibet, “is the nexus of all the waves and wave fragments we’ve been able to detect. If First Intel is right and all these quantum signals and the decoherence wave spillover we occasionally pick up actually enable Red Hammer to control the swarms, then the source of the signals is in this region.”
The sim tank was silent for a moment. Then Linx spoke up, from Paris.
“Let me see if I’m getting this right, Major,” said CINCQUANT. “Your intel boys can only pick up pieces of these signals, is that right?”
Cabela licked his lips. “Yes, sir. When a quantum state generator sends out entanglement waves, there’s no known way to predict exactly what state the transmitted signal will be in. That’s the beauty and the curse of quantum communication. But the very process of entangling creates a kind of spillover…when the signals move from generator to receiver, they leave behind a sort of wake effect, which we call decoherence wakes. You could never re-construct the original signal from it…that would take more time than the Universe is old…but if you can detect even a whiff of one of these wakes, you know you’ve got a very faint bearing to a quantum state generator. First Intel has done that and the result is what you see here.”
Linx snorted. “It’s thin. Damn skimpy, if you ask me. Not that I’m surprised, mind you. We know some Red Hammer’s Ruling Council are real tight with the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army. There’s a certain believability to what you’ve come up with. It would make good strategic sense for Red Hammer to hide operations inside China, or Tibet in this case. They’d know there’s no way UNIFORCE can come after them.”
Kraft said, “If Cabela’s right and Tibet is where the main Red Hammer complex is, with what 1st Nano has encountered, there may be only one way for ANAD to successfully battle Amazon Vector and contain the swarms. That would be to shut down their links to the swarms at the source.”
Linx was rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “You mean an assault of some kind on that base, Major?”
“Yes, sir…we have some tactical plans on the shelf for doing that, but all of them would involve violating Chinese sovereignty and air space.”
Maybe not, Johnny Winger thought. But he kept his idea to himself for the moment.
Linx was troubled by the implications. “What you’re saying, Kraft, is strategically sound. The trouble is that it’s politically impossible. I’ll have to take this intelligence to UNSAC, see what is doable. Meanwhile, update your assault plans. Somehow, some way, we’ve got to sever the links from Red Hammer to the Amazon Vector swarms. Once the control links are gone, maybe ANAD can isolate and disable them.”
While Linx took the new intelligence to the U.N. Security Affairs Commissioner, Johnny Winger left the Sim Tank and made his way across the snowy quadrangle to the bunker-like containment center, at the south end of the mesa that was Table Top Mountain. He wanted to see how the regeneration of the new ANAD master assembler was coming along.
He found Doc Frost and Mary Duncan, along with a gathering of Quantum Corps technicians, huddled around a bank of consoles. The consoles surrounded the heavy hatch of the containment vault, which was itself draped with thick ganglia of pipes, tubes and cables.
“Johnny…so glad to see you again.” Frost embraced the atomgrabber firmly. Mary Duncan, Frost’s assistant, also came over to squeeze his shoulder. “We heard you were on a mission. I hope it went well…even if you did have to work with an earlier version of ANAD.”
Winger shrugged. “It was like racing in a World Cup race with an antique, Doc.” He flexed his fingers. “I had to get used to driving all over again.”
Mary Duncan grinned. “Something tells me you didn’t mind that at all, Johnny.”
Winger admitted it. “Once a ‘grabber, always a ‘grabber. How’s the patient doing?”
Frost returned to his console. On the monitors, the trellis that supported the nanoscale assembler as it was laboriously re-assembled and re-animated was covered with a dark mass of spherical shapes. It quivered slightly, the effect Winger knew, of slight perturbations in the medium and perhaps a little Brownian motion as well. The signature tetrahedral platform at the base of the mass told Johnny it was ANAD.
“We’re nearly done…just a few more tests, Johnny. Physically, the assembler master is finished…all the core functions are loaded. Effectors have been grafted or attached…I’ve been tweaking things a little, you know. Different angle here, different molecule there. I’m trying to stiffen his carbene grabbers, for one thing. Also, I’ve changed some of the cleavage lines…he’ll fold and unfold even faster now…just a matter of modifying a few proteins and adding a peptide chain in the right place…basic stuff.”
Winger liked the idea. “That should make him more usefully tactically. Engaging Am
azon Vector, with all its effectors and grapplers, you’ve got to be quick. Amazon has a midline cleft that’s unprotected, once you’re inside. But getting past all those effectors takes speed and maneuverability. I lost control of ANAD at Lake Vostok, Doc. Quantum interference from Red Hammer. If I’d been faster—“
“Don’t worry about that,” Frost went on. “I’ve hardened his main processor to protect against that kind of interference. Also I’ve done some re-configuring of the coupler. I think you’ll like it…not nearly as much leakage of signals once you link in.”
Winger smiled ruefully. “Glad to hear it. Sometimes, Doc, when I made the connection, I’d have strange feelings…I’d see images of my Dad in the hospital or my old pet microflyer Bailey or remember something about when I was a child…weird stuff. Even after I unlinked, the images would still come.”
Frost was sympathetic, fiddling with a few knobs on his console. “Stray signals from your de-coupler. It didn’t always capture all the quantum state signals sent by ANAD. Loose signals were fed through the buffer and the buffer didn’t always know what to do with them. It just unloaded them into whatever synaptic circuit was handy…sometimes you experienced that as a memory fragment or a twitch in your little toe or a tic in your left eye…very random.”
“Not to mention annoying, especially in combat situations.” He indicated the containment bank. “Can I link in yet…talk to the little guy? I’ve been really missing him. He’s like a little brother now.”
“Why not?” Frost decided. “Go ahead.”
Winger cocked his head and linked in the way Frost and Mary Duncan had taught him, back at Northgate.
The first impression he had was one of floating. Floating like the last time he and his sister Joanna and brother Brad and Mom and Dad had gone to the beach. California, hadn’t it been? Huntington Beach, maybe he was ten, maybe twelve. It was warm, salty and he was floating…lazily drifting on a raft, staring up at the azure sky with the white clouds, seeing shapes like rockets and faces, polygons and swords and multi-lobed icosahedral things and--
--that’s when he realized he wasn’t really at Huntington Beach at all—