“Two separate swarms?” Winger asked.
“That’s correct. We’re engaging them in both places—probably you saw some of that when you came in—Erebus is practically invisible from the density of the swarm there—and we’re trying to keep them contained, keep them from linking up.”
“Already,” Suvorov explained, “the swarms are affecting the weather and conditions on the continent and the surrounding seas. You noticed the winds outside when you landed?”
Winger had felt the wind rocking his hypersuit, its gyros struggling to keep him upright in the gale. “It was a bit breezy when we left the hyperjet.”
Stiles smiled grimly. “The swarms have been replicating and moving so aggressively, especially around the Lake Vostok, that they’ve generated vortices in the atmosphere. That plus chemical changes in the atmosphere have started up high winds all across the ice cap, winds that are feeding into the south circum-polar jet stream now. The winds are affecting general atmospheric circulation everywhere below sixty-five degrees south latitude.”
Suvorov confirmed what Stiles was saying. “Da, we’ve seen wind damage in Melbourne, Christchurch, New Zealand and parts of the Argentine pampas, even on isolated islands in the south Pacific. Sustained winds over a hundred forty kilometers an hour in places. It’s a disaster.”
Stiles went on. “Plus, swarm activity had generated significant quantities of local heat, accelerating melting at strategic points in the ice cap. You saw the bergs off McMurdo Sound?”
“Coming in, I saw them…yes,” Winger admitted. He watched one screen, an aerial display of the roiling clouds surrounding Mount Erebus.
The BioShield chief shook his head. “Ice cap melting is reaching critical levels. At the rate the swarms are generating heat, we’ll see melting fast enough to raise sea levels a meter a week…and so far, we haven’t even been able to slow it down. Every coastal city on Earth is at risk…hundreds of millions of people.
“And then there are the atmosphere changes themselves…spiking carbon dioxide—that doesn’t help ice cap melting either, spikes in hydrogen and nitrogen, oxygen levels dropping…it’s almost like evolution in reverse…like the Earth is relapsing to some primitive state, the way things were before life got started.”
Johnny Winger watched the virtual diorama of Antarctica. Flashes and pops of light went off like light bulbs. Frontal boundaries of swarms engaging, he knew. Real time data fed the diorama, causing it to shift and refresh every few seconds, a living, breathing simulacrum of a continent in agony. The entire display throbbed and writhed like a thing alive.
“What’s BioShield done so far?” he asked.
Stiles shrugged. “We’ve tried everything. Our swarms are ANAD clones…I’m sure you know that. We’ve engaged multiple times but we’re overrun each time. It’s numbers, Lieutenant. The buggers can replicate faster than us, grapple from further away, and they’ve got stuff I’ve never seen…weird bond disrupters, for instance. And swarms just pop up out of nowhere…it’s like Red Hammer can transmit them and operate them remotely in just a few seconds.”
“Don’t forget the propulsors,” Suvorov mentioned. “Each mech is covered over its entire surface with propulsors I’ve never seen before. The bastards can run circles around our mechs.”
Winger’s eyes met Hoyt Gibbs’. “We’ve got to work on tactics, gentlemen. I’ve just spent the last few days working with ANAD, trying to tweak him. We’ve simmed against known Red Hammer capabilities but that’s a long way from engaging in combat. How about UNIFORCE, Colonel Suvorov? What’s worked and what hasn’t?”
The Russian used the diorama to illustrate. “Our best results have been here at Mount Erebus. Yesterday, we engaged that swarm from a different bearing, from out of the Ross Sea at a very low angle. Mag cannon on lifters, coilgun bots, everything we had. BioShield engaged with mechs from the opposite bearing as a diversion.” The Russian shook his head slowly.
“What happened?”
Stiles answered. “They blunted BioShield’s mechs with no problem. It was like running into a wall. The swarms engaged and then we were swallowed whole, like we had no defenses at all. And we were the diversion—“
“The buggers can be shattered by mag impulses, just like any swarm,” Suvorov went on. “Slam them with a few pulses and they lose their formation, cohesion…the swarm seems to fall apart.”
“But they recover so damn fast it’s unbelievable,” Stiles added. “One minute, the swarm seems shattered and half an hour later, it’s back up to strength and pushing outward again. There doesn’t seem to be anything we can do.”
“Current status?”
Suvorov indicated the diorama. “We engage around the clock…both swarms. BioShield replicates as fast as they can and engages…just trying to keep some pressure on them and interfere with them. We pulse them with sonic and magnetic weapons day and night…” the Russian shrugged in frustration, “it barely slows them down.”
Hoyt Gibbs asked, “You said you had better results with this swarm…the one at Mount Erebus. What’s different about the other one?”
Stiles gave that some thought. “The Vostok swarm has different characteristics. It’s bigger, for one…the thing averages over twenty square kilometers in extent at times. We’ve captured and analyzed pieces of some of the mechs…they’re configured differently, different effectors, somehow optimized for grabbing and altering oxygen molecules. This swarm has created a region near the South Pole that’s like conditions on Mars or Venus. It was centered at the South geomagnetic pole initially, but now it seems to be moving this way.”
“We think the swarms are trying to link up…form a superswarm over the continent. The same behavior has been seen in other targeted areas…the Congo River basin, for example. Multiple swarms forming, then coalescing into larger swarms.”
“And everywhere they operate,” Suvorov said, “the same effects: hurricane winds, atmospheric alterations, extremes of temperature. Whoever’s programmed them must have a death wish…for all of us.”
“It’s like they’re trying to alter the whole planet,” Glance said.
“Maybe they are,” Winger said. He remembered the imagery ANAD had detected inside the demonio’s brain at Via Verde months before…a world of nanobotic devices, a planet of mechs. “Quantum Corp intelligence is convinced that Red Hammer is behind this operation. But they also feel the cartel’s getting help.”
“Help? From where? From who?”
“Unknown at this time.” Winger turned to Gibbs. “Sergeant, we’d best get the Detachment deployed. I’d like to go after the Lake Vostok swarm first. You haven’t had as much success there.”
Suvorov concurred. “I’ll arrange a tactical briefing for 1600 hours. Just tell us what you want us to do to support you.”
“I will,” Winger said, as he headed out of the Ops center, “as soon as I figure it out myself.”
Alpha Detachment loaded all its gear on airskids and lifters, for the short hop east toward Lake Vostok. Suvorov dedicated a four-ship unit of lifters for air support and top cover, to keep anybody else from interfering while Quantum Corps engaged the Red Hammer swarm.
Winger huddled with the Detachment in the cavernous Ready Room.
“All your gear ready?”
A chorus of nods and affirmatives circled the group.
“Hey, Lieutenant,” Sheila Reaves called out. She was buttoning up the HERF gun enclosure, turning the skid over to a packbot to load aboard. “UNIFORCE has big guns like these too, don’t they?”
“Different freqs, different caliber…but basically the same, yes. Mag impulse stuff for short range.”
Reaves smirked. “Me and Taj here—“ she indicated Chandra Singh, the other DPS tech, “we been thinking. Kind of tinkering with the HERF. What if we messed around with the fluxtrons and sort of souped up the impulse carrier? Taj has figured out a way to put more power into the pulse,
cover more frequencies. It might be more effective.”
Winger was crawling back into his hypersuit. It was like climbing into a small vehicle. Inside, he popped his head above the neck ring. “That true, Taj? You can put more punch into the primary?”
Singh’s white turban seemed incongruous bobbing above the shoulders of a hypersuit, but he nodded. “Yes, Lieutenant. We tried it out on the test range at Table Top. It worked pretty well.”
“Pretty well,” snorted Reaves. “Skipper, after Taj modified our HERF, we fired a few pulses and damned near fried the top off Buffalo Ridge. Started a rockslide, we did.”
Winger liked the idea. “We’re going to need every advantage we can get. Battalion engineering sign off on this little mod of yours?”
Taj looked sheepish. “No, sir…not exactly. We didn’t really tell anybody what we had done.”
Winger nodded. “I figured as much. But it works?”
“Oh, yes, sir…it works…works real well.”
“There are some, er… control issues, Lieutenant,” Reaves admitted.
“Really. Well, put the module in and make it work,” Winger ordered. “We’ll try it out at Vostok. Just be sure we don’t lose the HERF altogether. I got a feeling we’re going to need the whole arsenal against these buggers.”
Winger finished suiting up. Outside the Ops building, the lifters were waiting. He locked his helmet in place, fired up suit boost and got a ping in the back of his head from ANAD.
He clicked open the coupler circuit. “What’s up, ANAD?”
***Skipper…I’m pulsing that you’re pretty worried about this one***
Winger let his suit take him out of the Ready Room and aboard the nearest lifter, hovering off the dock at one end of the Ops center. He climbed aboard, stood aside while the rest of Alpha Detachment ingressed and quickly checked off their equipment…everything tied down, powered down and safed.
“Yeah, ANAD, I guess you could say that. Red Hammer’s nasty—hell, you know about that. I’m not sure what’s going to happen.”
***You know I have the latest upgrades and mods from Doctor Frost. What could go wrong…the enemy’s just a herd of mechs, same as me…it’s just a matter of executing the mission***
If only that were true. “ANAD, I know perfectly well what Doc Frost did to you. I also know you’re a re-gen…you’re not the same master assembler I had before. You’re supposed to have the same programs and configs but still—“ He didn’t want to voice his real concern: that somehow, the relationship he’d developed with the last master had been lost in regenerating.
But ANAD seemed able to read his mind anyway.
The convoy of lifters left McMurdo City for Vostok Station, or what was left of it, a half-hour trip. The plan was to fly in low, from the south, crossing the vast Wilkes basin and the East Antarctic ice cap, a sea of ice frozen in white that stretched for nearly a thousand kilometers. Forward elements of UNIFORCE and BioShield were still in contact with the swarm at Vostok, latitude 78 degrees south, and had been for several weeks now. But theirs was a hopeless task, it seemed.
Suvorov had explained it: “The best we’ve been able to do is slow it down. The zone of disturbance grows by several square kilometers every day. We’ve been able to keep the two swarms from linking up, so far. But it’s only a matter of time.”
The formation of lifters took off and turned southeast, crossing the perimeter of the Ross Ice Shelf and paralleling the Transantarctic Range for half an hour, before turning back east toward the desolate polar cap.
Johnny Winger watched the terrain slide by a few thousand meters below them. Even from such a low altitude, it was apparent that the Transantarctic range was merely a vast rocky dike, holding back the ceaseless flow of the ice cap toward the sea. With the swarm so active, temperatures and winds had risen and the glacial tongues that had carved the valleys over millennia had sped up.
It was a Dutchman’s nightmare: against the south side of the range, pressed a sea of white ice, submerging the range nearly to its full height. Directly on the other side lay the Ross Sea itself, three thousand meters lower and at every dip in the range, the ice was pouring down to the sea, ripping away rock like water tearing open breaks in a levee, until some of the gaps in the range were huge floods of ice, rivers ten and twenty and thirty kilometers wide.
Winger knew that with the expansion of the Red Hammer swarms across the continent, the now-sluggish ice would flow more easily, making the rivers into torrents, raising sea levels around the world.
“Heading change, now turning to a zero one five degrees,” Winger heard in his earpiece. The lifter pilot was an Italian jockey with a lilting accent, a UNIFORCE lifer. Beside Winger in the crew compartment was a BioShield engineer named Wolf.
The formation wheeled back to the east and headed inland, over an endless snowy plain that stretched to the horizon in every direction.
Wolf mouthed, “The East Antarctic Ice Sheet…”
Winger was curious at the striations visible on the ice surface, scores and scores of small waves frozen in motion, as if time had stopped.
Wolf knew what he was going to ask before he asked it. “Sastrugi,” he pronounced carefully. Hundreds and hundreds of small undulations in the ice sheet, the spaces between them filled with chiseled sandlike snow banks.
“Hard going across that kind of surface,” he said.
Wolf agreed. “That’s why we have lifters.”
Half an hour later, the lifters descended even lower, leveling out some two hundred meters above the ice cap. Strong circumpolar winds buffeted the small formation.
“Final approach,” Wolf observed. Both he and Winger kept their eyes glued out the porthole.
On the horizon, dead ahead, an opaque white fog writhed and glowed, flickering with light. The opaque fog covered the entire horizon, thinning out as it rose in altitude. Inside the fog, light speckled and flashed, as if a summer thunderstorm were building across the ice cap.
It was the Red Hammer swarm.
Johnny Winger’s earpiece crackled. It was the lead pilot, up front.
“Lieutenant, this is as far as we can go. Have to set down on the ice here. Winds are too strong from here on in.”
As if to emphasize the point, a series of gusts slammed the lifter, skidding them sideways. The pilot drove them down through the wind shear and planted the lifter skids solidly on the ice, using the top jets to hold them in place.
“Guess we walk from here,” Winger decided. He got on the crewnet. “Detachment, fall out! Full hypersuits, suit boost at max. Try to stay together. I’ll get ANAD ready.”
The Quantum Corps troopers exited the lifter through the rear cargo doors. Immediately, it was apparent that staying together was going to be hard.
“Jesus…it’s a hurricane!” yelled Mighty Mite Barnes. She stepped onto the ice and the blast of air nearly knocked her over. Only quick response from the suit gyros kept her upright.
“Nah…just a gentle summer breeze!” said Reaves.
“Yeah,” added Gibbs. “A real walk in the park!”
All three of them were tilted forward at an impossible angle as their suits struggled to keep them upright.
With much grumbling and swearing, the air skids were removed and the Detachment’s gear offloaded and tied down.
“We gonna walk to war, Lieutenant?” asked Taj. He was eyeing the distance from where the lifters had put down to the roiling fog bank ahead. Distances were hard to figure here. But the lifter pilot had ranged the swarm as he descended. The closest edge was several kilometers off.
Winger knew their hypersuits had limited boost. Fully clad, the boost could lift a trooper a few meters off the ground, maybe fifty meters in an emergency, and propel him forward at something like fifteen or twenty kilometers an hour. But in this gale—
“We walk,” Winger decided.
So the Detachment set off across the u
ndulating waves of sastrugi, into blinding snow and sleet. As they neared the edge of the swarm, the winds picked up, buffeting them left and right, a near whiteout blizzard roaring across the ice cap.
“Hold up!” Winger decided. The troopers stopped, hunkering down in the lee of a frozen wave of snow. It was time to put ANAD to work.
“Okay, ANAD, you’re up next. Stand by for launch.”
***ANAD ready in all respects…my effectors are safed, bond breakers and enzymatic knives primed and ready…let me at ‘em!***
“ANAD…when you’re deployed, I’m ordering config two…the one we simmed back at Table Top. In that config, you’ll resemble a Red Hammer assembler. Once you’ve replicated, I’m sending you around the perimeter of the swarm. When you’re in position, we’ll slam ‘em with HERF and mag weapons from this side. That ought to keep them occupied for a few minutes. While that’s happening, you infiltrate the swarm from your position. If this all works like it’s supposed to, once you’re inside, you can change to config one—“
*** and that’s when I bust ‘em in the chops, right?***
Winger had the impression he was talking with a five-year old. “Basically, yes. But you don’t go until I say…got that?”
***ANAD copies***
While Reaves and Barnes and the rest offloaded their weapons and set up the HERF guns, Winger launched ANAD.
A faint glow shimmered around the port in his left shoulder. There was a brief sting and his shoulder muscles grabbed like he’d been stung but the sting only lasted a moment. The glow subsided.
Another series of gusts blasted across the icecap, nearly scattering the Detachment to pieces.
***Whoa…baby…***
Just maintaining swarm integrity took every ounce of propulsor power ANAD had. Each time the assembler replicated a few trillion times, the gale-force winds scattered the swarm all over the place. ANAD did as his macro-scale buddies did and congregated in the lee of the sastrugi waves, trying to form up a combat-capable force. It was tough going.
“Maybe if he hugs the ground--” Gibby suggested. He had been watching acoustic images from ANAD as the assembler attempted to deploy. It was like being in a roller-coaster careening off its track.