Cadet and applicant rankings were left to speculation for the next few days. More tests came and went. More physicals. Bizarre pokings and proddings and probings were made into every conceivable orifice, even into brains and places the cadets didn’t know they had and couldn’t name. Classes and briefings were held, on subjects ranging from Molecular Tactics to ANAD Ops to Quantum Engineering and Containment protocols, all of it designed to give instructors a feel for which cadets possessed the right stuff to be atomgrabbers and which did not.
As the days went on, Johnny Winger felt that he was somehow in a place he had always been destined for, without knowing it. Nathan Caden struggled, though no more than any other cadets. But some applicants had the knack for visualizing things nobody could see and manipulating and maneuvering things at the scale of atoms and molecules. It took a certain kind of wacky brain to do that. And Winger knew he would likely have plenty of company, what with Barnes and M’Bela and D’Nunzio and others doing almost as well as he.
Then came the announcement everybody had been expecting, dreading and waiting for. The details of the Big Test.
Major Kraft gathered all applicants in the recruits’ assembly hall and gave them the good news.
“Listen up boys and girls…I called this briefing— by the way, around the Corps, we don’t have meetings, we have briefings, so you hayseeds remember that. I called this briefing to give you a heads-up on how we end this recruiting cycle. There’s a big test coming. Tomorrow. Starts at 0700 hours. It’s called the Atomgrabbers’ Qualifying Test. It’s like a big game…a war game. You’ll all be given roles and assignments and rules of engagement. Then we turn the buggers loose. All you have to do is help our troopers fight ‘em off, contain ‘em and put them back in the bottle. If you fail, at any time, you wash out. You’re outta here. You work with your team mates, follow orders, do the job and put the critters back in containment, and I mean the right way, maybe we’ll consider your application. Questions?”
There was dead silence in the hall.
Kraft allowed himself the barest hint of a smile, peeking through his Black Forest of a moustache. “Very well. Pick up your mission and assignments disk on the way out. Units and team leaders will assemble in this room at 0600 hours tomorrow morning. Have a pleasant evening.”
Lieutenant ‘Wormy’ then bounded up onto the platform and bellowed out “Dismissed!” He sounded like a cow in heat.
Winger walked out with D’Nunzio and Oscar M’Bela, back to their quarters.
“What do you make of this qualifying test, Wings?” D’Nunzio asked. “I heard the same scuttlebutt as you. Separating the boys from the men…and the girls from the men?”
“Yeah, probably…I never heard anything about a wargame. I guess they want to see what we’ve learned, how we apply it, how we react under pressure.”
Oscar M’Bela pulled alongside the two, fondling some laibon healer trinkets in his hand. The cadets had taken to calling Oscar M’Bela ‘Witchy.’ That was because he was Congolese by birth, Hutu by tribe and really spiritual in his outlook. M’Bela found spirits in everything and Winger had long since gotten over the spectacle of Witchy talking to ANAD units in containment as if they were tribal brothers, even rubbing amulets, colored stones, and cowry shells. He had all kinds of rituals and beliefs, explaining there wasn’t much difference between the spirits of the forests and autonomous nanorobots. “You can’t see either one but you can sure make enemies of one if you don’t treat them with respect.” Nobody could argue with that.
The three of them spied Nathan Caden nearby. He wasn’t heading their way, in the direction of the barracks known as Galland Hall, the recruit barracks. Instead, he was cutting a path across the front of Barracks Row, heading for the domed Containment building, situated behind sturdy barriers to the south. Or maybe he was heading for the Infirmary…it was nearby too.
“What’s the matter, Caden? Lost your way?” D’Nunzio cackled. “You pee on the lawn over there, the bugs’ll have a feast on that little wang of yours.”
Nearby cadets chuckled at that but Caden paid them no attention.
“Just making a little delivery before turning in. Have a cold one for me, you creeps.”
He pressed on toward the shimmering barrier of the security field around the Containment center, a linked nanomesh of bots that kept out flies, mosquitos and nosy cadets with equal aplomb.
In his pocket, the disc that Wei Ming had given him felt like it weighed a ton.
“Table Top Mountain”
Table Top Mountain, Idaho
June 28, 2048
7:45 a.m.
The day of the AQT finally came and it was a bitch. Johnny Winger continued to do well in all the tests of dexterity and skill at nanospace orientation and nanobot maneuvering tests. M’bela and D’Nunzio and Mighty Mite Barnes did well enough.
They spent time wargaming scenarios and trudging up and down windswept mountain passes out in the Hunt Valley range, fending off attacks and assaults and all kind of wicked tricks the instructors pulled out of their feverish minds, all the while hurriedly looking up procedures and rules and tactical moves in their eyepads, portable handbooks they were supposed to rely on for proper responses to enemy actions. They all knew, and they all reminded each other, that they’d be graded on that as much as cleverness and results.
Major Kraft didn’t want any freelancing in the AQT.
“Okay, troopers, here’s the situation.” Kraft diagrammed the wargame on a board. “A large city is threatened by an enemy force, basically held hostage to their demands. Quantum Corps gets the call and an ANAD Detachment is formed. If the enemy’s demands aren’t met, the enemy will execute a Big Bang and destroy the city and all the inhabitants. ANAD Detachment is tasked with penetrating the city, conducting recon on enemy dispositions and preventing the Big Bang from playing out.”
“What about rules of engagement, Major?” asked Johnny Winger.
“I’m getting to that. In this wargame, which is called ‘Nanowarrior,’ ANAD Detachment will test the new trooper-embedded ANAD system. That means launch, deployment, engagement and recovery tactics. This scenario is designed to test how well that works, what you’ve all learned the last two weeks. As far as rules of engagement go, close-quarters combat is permitted, including all swarm tactics of evasion, deception, swarming attack and so forth. But no bodily penetration is allowed.”
“Too bad,” said Deeno D’Nunzio. “I was looking forward to grabbing somebody’s gizzard and shaking it down.”
“To help the simulation, we’ve had ANAD swarms at work out at the Hunt Valley range for the last several days, assembling fake buildings and other urban infrastructure. By now, it ought to look pretty real.” With a few taps on his wrist keypad, Kraft sent the scenario details and rules of engagement to every nog’s’s crewnet. “There…now you’ve got the facts. Questions?”
“Just one, Major.” It was Witchy M’Bela. “Isn’t Mr. Caden supposed to be here? We’re short a trooper.”
Kraft look annoyed but figured the question had merit. “Good question, Mr. M’Bela. Now you know why we run wargames. Mr. Caden won’t be joining us today. He reported sick at the Infirmary overnight. So now you’re short a trooper. Life’s like that. Work out the requisite tactics and complete the mission.”
For years, Table Top Mountain had been portrayed as looking like the palm of a hand. If that were so, then the ridges of mountains radiating out from Table Top were the fingers. Following the same analogy, Hunt Valley was a narrow plateau surrounded by steep cliffs roughly between the thumb and index finger of the hand that was Table Top.
The Valley was home to the outdoor wargame and test range, where nanoscale assemblers could be let loose in the wild, under some semblance of control. Indeed, one of the advantages of having a valley as the test range was the ability to throw a simple containment shield over the grounds, in the form of electron guns and even crude but
effective nanobotic barriers, able to blunt the effects of all but the worst types of accidents.
Johnny Winger led his training detachment of twelve troopers from the belly of the liftjet and hiked up a short cliff to a ledge overlooking the sim city below, affectionately known as “Valleyville.”
“DPS…” he called over to a cadet named Sheila Reaves. “We’d better do a little recon here so we know what we’re dealing with. Get Superfly up and sniffing around…perimeter of five hundred yards radius.”
“I’m on it.” Reaves and the DPS2, Cadet Chandra Singh, unloaded two of the micro air vehicles and fired them off. Moments later, the twin entomopters were airborne at altitude, cruising on picowatt power cells, their articulating wings spinning at thousands of rpm. They careened across the valley and the rooftops of Valleyville while Winger directed the rest of the deployment.
“Full hypersuits?” Cadet Al Glance didn’t relish the prospect of getting in to the heavy, boosted exo-skeletons they’d all trained with, but they did offer the best protection if things went downhill.
Winger thought. “We probably should, given the threat. But I’d like to know more about what the enemy’s up to.” Winger was like that…going on hunches, ignoring the book when the situation seemed ripe. It drove Kraft and the others crazy but more often than not, Winger’s hunches had been right. The hairs on the back of his neck were his warning system. At the moment, they were behaving. “Get the suits powered up but leave ‘em off…for now.”
“You smell something fishy, Wings?” asked Mighty Mite Barnes. Barnes was unstowing the HERF gun mounts, getting the radio-freq weapons ready to go.
“Maybe…” Winger said, scanning the terrain around Valleyville with his binocs. A faint shimmer pulsated and flickered around the nearer buildings of the fake city. “Get those HERF guns spooled up right away…and site them along axes parallel to the main streets. Oh, and Mite, put one up there, sited away from the ‘Ville.”
“Away from the city?” Barnes asked. “Are you--?”
“Yeah…I’m not forgetting who the OpFor is today….if I know Dana Tallant, she’ll have 2nd Nano all bug-eyed and ready to slam us from behind before we know what’s what. That’d be just like her.” Winger had jousted with Cadet Dana Tallant repeatedly in classes and exercises during the last week.
“What about ANAD?” asked Glance. “Think we ought to wake him up, get him going?”
Winger held up a hand, for silence. The hairs on the back of his neck had begun to prickle. “Al, you and Gibby come with me…we’re going to check out something down there. I think that shield’s just for show and the enemy wants us to come that way. The rest of you stay put…and keep your eyes open. You get any kind of tickle or whiff from Superfly, blast away with HERF. That’ll buy you some time.”
“But, Wings—“ Reaves was uneasy with the maneuver. “--if we get fragged with ‘bots here, we’ve got no defense beyond HERF and some coil-gun rounds. You’ve got the, er, the ANAD master….with you.”
“I’ll only be gone a few minutes and we’ll be in contact. With ANAD right here—“ he patted the containment capsule on his web belt, “we can deploy and engage faster now. You’ll be covered, no matter what.”
Reaves looked doubtful. It was against all doctrine to split up the detachment like this. Normally, ANAD would be contained in a TinyTown pod with the detachment as it deployed, not off following some wild hunch.
“If you say so.”
Winger took a small detail and left the ledge, creeping down a rutted gully until they were flatfooted on level ground just beyond the city buildings. The shimmer of a nanobotic shield flickered like summer fireflies a scant fifty feet away….supposedly the OpFor’s barrier to any probing from this sector.
You had to think like the enemy, know your enemy and what they liked to do. In this case, the enemy was Dana Tallant’s 2nd Nanospace Training Battalion. Winger smiled as they positioned themselves to do a little more reconnoitering around the edges of the shield.
He knew Dana Tallant like a kid sister.
Valleyville was essentially a shell of a town, literally. Over the last few days, Major Kraft had seen to it that swarms of nanoscale assemblers had put together a small group of buildings and streets, enough to resemble a small town. Only the exteriors had been assembled, like a Hollywood backlot. Inside their shells, the buildings were empty space.
“Wings, we going to breach this thing…or just check the perimeter?” It was Gibby, working the interface unit.
But Winger didn’t reply. Instead, he held up a hand and the detail halted, right outside the keening whine of the nanomech barrier. Something had tickled the hairs on the back of his neck. He spoke into his helmet mike.
“DPS, you got anything from Superfly yet?”
Sheila Reaves’ voice crackled back. “Funny you asked, Wings…right when you called up, ‘Fly gave me a tickle of something…I don’t know what it is…maybe nothing—“
Winger froze. With hand signals, he ordered the small detail to about-face and head back up to the ledge.
Gibby was curious. “What is it?”
Winger was already halfway up a gully, hauling himself as fast as he could. “Just a hunch…come on, troops—“
And that’s when all hell broke loose.
The scream of Sheila Reaves was the first thing everybody heard over the crewnet.
“AAAAARRRRGGGGHHHHH!.....Get the HERF gun!!!—“
Though he was still fifty feet below the level of the ledge, Johnny Winger could feel the swelling thermal bloom of a Big Bang attack long before he could see it. Overhead, sparks and crackles of phosphorescent blue and green stitched across the tops of the hills, as a swarm of nanobots descended on the detail, replicating madly, mindlessly, replicating in exponential overdrive, swelling and rolling and smothering like a slow-motion fireball of an explosion.
The sheer suffocating weight of the ‘bots as they divided and expanded made the air tingly and alive with pinpricks of flame.
“Come ON!” Winger yelled. Gibby and M’Bela and the rest of the detail scrambled after the Winger as he hauled and kicked and hoisted himself across ravines and clefts, climbing furiously toward the epicenter of the attack.
At the top of the ridge, Sheila Reaves managed to get the HERF gun turned around and boresighted into the teeth of the nanomech gale, cycling the action, as she motioned the others to get down.
“Cover yourselves…I’m gonna fry these suckers!”
The rest of the detachment took cover immediately and Reaves gritted her teeth, wincing and gasping for air as the ‘bots smothered her from every direction. Jeez, this feels worse than the Tank…it’s supposed to be an exercise, isn’t it? With her last ounce of strength, she lit off the radio-freq cannon and dove headlong to the dirt. She buried her face and screamed at the top of her lungs to equalize pressure in her head, trying to ignore the stings and bites of the ‘bots on her back.
The thunderclap deafened the hillside as a pulse of rf hurtled through the air. Winger waited a second for the wave of heat to wash over him, then he heard it: the clattering of nanomechs, momentarily stunned, falling to the ground like dead leaves in a stiff wind.
“Let’s GO!” he yelled, as he bolted up the hill. He cycled the comm circuit to the ANAD master now ticking over inside the containment pod. ANAD, get yourself ready…we’re going into action ‘soon as I get to the top…prep for deploy, safe all effectors, spool up propulsors, and orient yourself for launch…
Deep inside the containment capsule on his web belt, the Autonomous Nanoscale Assembler/Disassembler was readying itself for combat.