Chapter 4
“The Torino Scale”
U.N. Quantum Corps Base
Table Top Mountain, Idaho, USA
May 18, 2049
2150 hours (U.T.)
Major Jurgen Kraft had just chopped the vidlink to Paris after finishing up a briefing with General Linx, when the first sirens pierced the late afternoon air.
Alarms and warning klaxons blared out across the mesa and Table Top Mountain was quickly in an uproar.
Lieutenant Gabrielle Galland had run the briefing with Kraft. The commanding officer of 2nd Nano nearly gagged on her day-old coffee. “It’s a Big Bang, Major! There’s been a breach somewhere on the base!”
Through a nearby window, they could see that the entire complex was in chaos. Troopers were scattering in every direction, ducking and weaving and dodging each other. Loudspeakers blared out across the quadrangle.
“ALL HANDS…THIS IS A CODE ONE ALERT, CODE ONE ALERT!...all hands, man your stations. Repeat…CODE ONE ALERT!!”
Kraft punched up the base securenet on his vid. Lights and warning icons lit up the screen, concentrated on the area around the Containment building.
“It’s Containment…something’s busting out.” He stabbed a few buttons, got Security Branch on the screen. The harried face in the window was Captain Lucas, duty officer at the watch desk.
“Kraft…it’s bad…real bad, sir…over at Containment…massive breach…I’ve got every squad on the way—“
“Get your HERF guns spooled up, Captain. Everything you’ve got. I’ll contact Paris…get them to release a killsat to me. We may need it.”
“Copy that, sir.” Lucas’ face disappeared from the screen window.
“Major…it’s visible from here—“ Galland’s voice was thick. She gestured out the window, to the south end of the mesa.
From the third floor of Ops, they could both see a dirty gray, sparkling mist issuing from the Containment building. It was some kind of ANAD swarm now replicating out of control, boiling across the lifter pads of South Field, a dingy fog swelling and expanding into every corner of the base complex. Kraft’s stomach tightened at the sight. Table Top hadn’t seen a full-bore Bang in months. What had happened?
Even as he and Galland watched, fleeing troopers were caught in the swarm and went down, quickly engulfed and consumed like the raging wildfires that sometimes swept through the Buffalo range of southern Idaho.
“If we don’t get it under control quick,” Galland was saying, “the swarm will spill out of the base and head off into the hills. The entire state could be at risk, parts of Canada too.”
Already, the thing had swollen to dimensions that MOBnet couldn’t handle.
Kraft fumbled with nearby binoculars and studied the low domes of the Containment building. Troopers were running across the grounds in all directions.
“Damn thing’s already escaped the building,” he muttered.
It was the very same nightmare scenario they had simmed at the wargaming range countless times. An effective defense had never really been demonstrated. This time, it was no wargame. Now it was all very real…and heading right for them.
“Better head for the bunker, Major,” Galland advised. The ‘bunker’ was a crude name for the underground command center, six stories below the ground floor of Ops. “This part of Ops isn’t shielded from live swarms.” She started for the door but stopped. Kraft had decided differently.
“No, Lieutenant…we’re going to need every defense we can devise. MOBnet and any other shielding we can find. Counter-swarms, if they can be launched and programmed fast enough. Maybe atmospheric manipulation. Magpulse weapons.”
Kraft ticked off the possibilities. “What the hell set off ANAD this time…we test containment systems regularly. A breach like this shouldn’t be possible…but the damn bugs keep getting out.”
“Unknown, sir…but we’d better get to protection soon…we’ve got nothing up here.”
“Agreed.” Kraft dialed up Lucas at Security Branch again. “Captain, detail a squad and meet me at Containment. I want to see this swarm for myself. Something’s different…I can feel it.”
Lucas’ face took on a pained look. “Major, sir, I’d advise against it…we’re in a real battle here, sir—“
“Damn it, Lucas, don’t argue with me! Send me one man with a MOB canister! Hell, I’ll grab a mag gun myself, if I have to. But I’m going down to Containment. Kraft, out!”
The Major hurried out, with Gabrielle Galland hustling to keep up.
It took seven minutes for Kraft and Galland to weave their way through on-rushing troopers to the front entrance of Containment. Even as they arrived, the first HERF batteries had just been wheeled into position, setting up on a grassy sward between the south BOQ and Containment.
Lucas came rushing up a moment later, with two troopers behind, both armed with mag carbines.
“Major, sir—“he managed to heave out—“we’ve got details at both ends of the mesa…ready to go in less than a minute!”
Kraft took stock of the tactical situation. In the center of the mesa that was Table Top Mountain, the ANAD swarm continued swelling, rolling like a carnivorous mist across the grounds, filling the grassy swards between the Barracks, boiling westward toward the liftpads and the lifters parked in revetments, seeping, crawling and flowing over all obstacles toward the Ops center and Drexler Field, the parade grounds.
The details had to hurry. If the swarm spilled off the top of the mesa and ran down the mountainside into Buffalo Valley and the ravines radiating outward from Table Top, the whole of southern Idaho would be threatened. Already, the Governor and the National Guard had been alerted to prepare to evacuate nearby towns.
Lucas got a call over his commpac, the voice crackling with intensity. He acknowledged, then reported to Kraft: “All HERF units ready, powered up and humming, sir.”
Kraft knew they couldn’t wait any longer. Already he was dreading what he might find inside the Containment building, the epicenter of the Big Bang. Ordinarily, there were plenty of techs and troopers inside—
“Blast ‘em, Captain! Blast the sonsabitches to kingdom come!”
Lucas needed no further encouragement. “Fire!” he yelled into the commpac. “Fire all around, all units! Full bore! Let ‘em have it!”
A series of sirens warbled across Table Top, warning everyone to take cover.
The whole mesa seemed to vibrate as the first pulse shot out, squeezing the air with a thunderclap of heat. A searing wave passed by the Containment center, as the bubbles of radio waves expanded outward, pulverizing everything in their path.
The first pulse was quickly followed by several more, each discharge hammering the ground with an invisible fist of energy. Kraft, Lucas, and Galland screamed at the top of their lungs, trying to equalize pressure inside their heads. Their eyes and lungs burned. Their skins crawled with fire, then tingled and crackled….
“INSIDE!” yelled Lucas, shoving Kraft and Galland through the heavy outer doors to the building. Inside, the air itself seemed alive, thick with bots. The three of them waved their arms wildly over their heads, beating at the swarm. As they plunged deeper into Containment, down corridors and through more doors, the air was thick with mechs, falling in stunned sheets clattering to the floor from the HERF fire.
“Come on!” Lucas yelled, dragging Galland by the arm. Kraft stumbled, thrashing after them, falling to his hands, then scrambling forward blindly, groping and plunging after the Security Branch chief into the thickening mist.
In time, they reached Cell 3 and Lucas was sure they were nearing the center of the swarm. Mech debris tinkled onto the floor, tickling, brushing, crawling at their skin but they ignored the stinging and came at last to what was left of Cell 3’s outer hatch, now a seething slag-heap of atomic debris. Inside the cell, the air burned with blue-white fire, nanomech hell.
“Look…who’s that?”
Galland was the first to notice the bodies, or what was left of bodies, crumpled on the floor beside the massive gray hulk of a containment tank. Through the sparkling mist of replicating bots, it was hard to tell who they had been.
“Burn a hole!” Kraft ordered. He hoisted up his own mag carbine and counted to three, then hosed down the cell in concerted fire with Lucas, momentarily clearing a bubble for them.
Galland dived in and went to the bodies, turning the nearest one over on its back.
It was Doc Frost, his face partially degraded from swarm action, but still recognizably Frost. Galland shrank back.
“My God…it’s the Doc—“
Kraft bent down and quickly ascertained that the inventor of the original ANAD was gone. “Pull him out of here---keep firing—“ he ordered the two troopers. “Give me a space to extract these casualties.”
Two other bodies lay sprawled near the containment tank. Lucas went to them, still batting at loose bots that had survived the HERF blast. He read off their nameplates: “Royce…Philcox. Must be containment techs. What a way to go—“
Kraft took charge. “Keep those bots away and help me get these guys out of here.” A makeshift litter was fashioned from a nearby rack of scrubs and, one by one, the three casualties pulled from the inferno of Big Bang, out of the Containment building and into an ambulance that Kraft had called up from the base infirmary.
Kraft watched somberly as Doc Frost was lifted into the medevan. “It’s a dark day for Quantum Corps. Frost invented ANAD several years ago.”
Galland agreed, eyeing the scattered knots of mechs coalescing into swarms again. “Amen to that, Major. But we can’t stay here long…HERF batteries are going to sweep this area again, in less than a minute.”
The medevan departed for the infirmary on the other side of the mesa. Kraft huddled with Lucas and Galland to decide what to do next.
“We can’t keep HERFing the base,” Kraft told them. “I need containment techs, ideas, theories…you atomgrabbers ought to be able to get small and figure out what’s bollixed up ANAD.”
Galland agreed. “The only sure way to stop a Big Bang is to neutralize the master assembler. But we have to find it first. We have to get to it.”
“I want all department chiefs in the command bunker in half an hour. Every company commander too. We’ll thrash out a strategy and smother this swarm explosion one way or another. If I have to, I’ll evacuate everybody off the mesa and use one of UNIFORCE’s killsats to hose the place down with particle beams. One way or the other, we’ve got to contain this menace now. We can’t let the bugs win…it’ll be the end of all of us.”
Galland eyed the growing swarm now gathering around the front of the building, reconstituting itself even as they watched, pressing in on them. Another round of HERF would fry the bastards but how long could they keep that up?
“Maybe that’s the plan, Major. The bugs want to take over. We’re just food for them.”
Kraft had already struck out for the Ops building, lighting off his own mag carbine to clear a path through the swarm. “Then our strategy is real simple, Lieutenant: give the bastards the worst case of indigestion they ever had.”
Johnny Winger had independently come to almost the same conclusion. At almost the same moment the Big Bang had started at Table Top, the ANAD borer swarms chewing up Hicks-Newman had gone berserk too.
The quantum wave pulse which would only later be isolated and backtracked to an origin somewhere on or below the surface of the Moon, just outside the Chinese Tian Jia base, had passed by and through the asteroid and triggered mass, uncontrolled replication by every ANAD swarm at all three dig sites.
Winger had dropped back to the surface and was at Site Alpha, Odin’s Fissure, at the sunward pole of Hicks, when his helmet head-up display lit up like a Christmas tree. At the same moment, the crewnet crackled to life.
“What the--?” that was Chris Calderon, adjusting the beam grid around the dig to check ANAD’s orientation.
“Skipper—“ Taj Singh had seen the same alarms on his own viewer. “Skipper…it looks like—“
“I see it, Taj…get the hell away from that hole!”
Winger, Singh and Calderon hopped away from the dig site just as the first boiling mist of nanobotic overdrive came swelling up out of the pit.
“Get back!” Winger yelled. “Check configs…something’s bollixed up the master assembler!”
“I’m scanning…I’m scanning now!”
The crewnet suddenly came alive with cries and shouts.
The first was Al Glance, three kilometers down-sun at the Asgard chasm, Site Charlie. “Lieutenant—something’s gone haywire with our ANAD. It’s in some kind of hyper rep—“
“It’s a Big Bang, Al,” Winger told him over the net. He backed away further and further from the Alpha dig, nearly stumbling backwards over a rock outcrop. “I’m going through config checks now…somehow ANAD’s shifted to max rep and I can’t change it back!”
Did Wei Ming’s malware do this, Glance wondered? What have I done? More importantly, did anyone see me?
“Still not responding, sir,” came Singh’s harried voice. “I’ve tried every trick I know.”
Nicole Simonet’s voice cut in. She was six kilometers away, at Bravo Site. “Skipper, this is CQE2…I’m reading massive decoherence waves in the area. Something just pulsed through here a moment ago, something big.”
“A quantum signal…from where? We knocked out that generator at Copernicus.”
“We thought we did, Lieutenant,” said Sheila Reaves, from Site Alpha. She eyed the swelling ANAD swarm now lifting itself free of the dig near Odin’s Fissure. It looked like a blue-white flickering fog, spilling over the edge of the fissure, creeping with ghostly fingers along the rubbly ground, tendrils of mist and dust that grew wider with every passing minute, as the bots grabbed atoms from the asteroid surface and replicated in overdrive.
Winger went nano on his own viewer and tried to see what was happening to ANAD at the bot’s scale. The disorientation and dizziness subsided quickly enough and he soon found himself in a gale of frantic atomic activity.
Mech debris clattered and fell against his hypersuit but he ignored it and tapped out commands furiously on his wristpad, trying to link up with ANAD.
“Come on, buddy, come on…come on…where the hell are you--?”
In desperation, he cycled the voicelink again and again. “Base to ANAD…Base to ANAD…is anybody there, anybody in charge out there…where the hell are you, buddy?”
Just then, a staticky hiss formed into a recognizable word.
“—emory register—“
“ANAD, is that you?”
The whisper grew marginally louder. His own breathing, his own racing heartbeat, nearly drowned out the words.