“Yeah, Skipper…the wind doesn’t flow so smoothly close to the ice,” Taj offered. “Outside the laminar flow boundary and all that.”
Winger ordered ANAD to deploy as a thin sheet, a few nanometers thick, and slide forward across the ice.
***Skipper…this is better…much better…I can make my molecules conform to the boundary molecules of the ice, swinging from one lattice to another…it’s like climbing a ladder that never ends***
“Just do it,” Winger ordered. “And what’s your current heading?”
***I’m going zero two zero right now…sixty five microns per second…that’s about as fast as I can make it***
Unseen by all, the ANAD swarm oozed its way forward, sliding as a film a few molecules thick, along the surface of the ice. Hidden by the blowing snow and sleet, the ANAD swarm replicated as it eased forward.
An hour later, the swarm spanned half a square kilometer, a faint writhing patch of snow, somehow moving against the wind and sleet storm.
***I’m in position now, Skipper…latitude eighty degrees fifteen minutes south, longitude one five five degrees, forty five minutes east…winds are picking up…I’m burrowing into the ice lattice to hold position***
Winger acknowledged the report. “Understood, ANAD. Do whatever you have to but hold that position. We’re firing HERF in sixty seconds…first barrage.”
ANAD dug himself into the lattice of the surface ice and snow, hiding among the oxygen and hydrogen molecules, slowly but steadily squeezing his way forward, closer and closer to the storm. Hundreds of microns above his position, a maelstrom of Red Hammer bots churned with fury, tearing air molecules apart, creating the vacuum vortex that drove the surrounding air to hurricane fury.
For two solid hours, ANAD inched forward, hugging the surface of the ice, even penetrating into the upper layers of the lattice of molecules. It slowed down the approach but it also kept Red Hammer from detecting the assembler’s presence.
Half a kilometer inside the outer swarm boundary, ANAD signaled he was ready. Johnny Winger told the assembler to pulse his surroundings and return data on his position.
***It looks like a crystalline lattice, Skipper…a few scattered molecules of silicon and olivine embedded…I’m maneuvering forward without too much difficulty…just a matter of surfing the hydrogen bonds…I get a pretty good slingshot effect every time I stretch one***
Winger and Gibby were both listening in.
“Great, ANAD…prepare to surface and engage the swarm. I make your position at twelve hundred and two meters inside the swarm boundary. Prime all effectors…surface on my mark—“
ANAD acknowledged and began easing his way up through the rigid hexagonal lattice of crystals.
***Breaching the surface now…I am going to Config Two now***
“Acknowledged.”
Johnny Winger turned his viewer up to maximum resolution but all he could see ahead was a swirling, flickering fog. Somewhere inside the cyclone, a few thousand meters away, a swarm of ANAD assemblers had emerged from the ice cap and was now replicating furiously into assault configuration.
Their imagers swirled and throbbed for a few minutes as the swarms collided.
It was Gibby who spotted the enemy first. “Dead ahead, Skipper…see that line of dots ahead…ANAD’s detecting high thermals…lots of activity up ahead.”
“I see it,” Winger acknowledged. He checked ANAD’s config status. Bond disrupters ready, enzymatic knife ready, all effectors primed. For the time being, ANAD was maneuvering on auto and the rest of the Detachment were spectators. But at the right moment, Winger knew, Quantum Corps would spring the trap and slam Red Hammer from every direction.
“No sign of any response yet,” Gibby noted. As ANAD closed the distance, they could see the enemy in frenetic motion…breaking down air molecules like a mad brickmason in reverse. Even as they watched, the enemy bots disassembled oxygens and nitrogens as fast as they could, snapping bonds and reassembling the pieces into new configs, their effectors moving with blurry and deadly efficiency as the swarm systematically broke down the atmosphere.
***ANAD holding on Config Two, Skipper…about seven thousand microns away…enemy has not changed course…or reacted***
“That’s our cue,” Winger said. He leaned back to look along the top line of the snowbank, squinting through the blizzard that was blasting along the crest of the ridge. “DPS…charge up the HERF!”
“Weapon is fully charged, Lieutenant.” Sheila Reaves and Chandra Singh sighted the radio frequency weapon on the nearest arm of the swarm, now boiling across the ice cap two kilometers away.
A few more seconds. The swarm had created a cyclonic blizzard dancing across the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, a massive throbbing whiteout spinning like a gyroscope and expanding with every minute.
“Fire the HERF!” Winger yelled into the crewnet. “Blow the bastards to hell and back!”
A thunderclap of hot radio waves boomed across the ice cap, echoing and reverberating off snow banks and crevasses for kilometers around.
Before he could react, Winger heard a high freq squeal and then the staccato clatter of nanomechs shattered by the pressure pulse.
“Go, ANAD!” he shouted over the coupler circuit. “GO…GO…GO…!”
Two kilometers away, the tiny assembler zoomed forward to engage the nearest Red Hammer mechs, revving up to max propulsor.
*** Changing to Config One…NOW!...all effectors and weapons enabled…***
A soft voice…Taj Singh’s voice...could be heard over the crewnet.
“Kick ass, little guy. Slam the bugs good this time!”
ANAD’s acoustic sounder sent back imagery but for many moments, the chaos of the battle made visuals useless. The imager was a grainy stretch of flashes and swirling color.
“HERF re-charging now,” Reaves announced. She and Taj had cycled the gun’s power supply.
“Standby,” Winger told them. He lifted his helmet over the top of the snowbank. Across the ice cap, the throbbing swarm had thinned out noticeably…the effect of the HERF gun, no doubt.
Won’t take long to re-build, he knew. “Mag weapons…open up…concentrate fire on config one coordinates!”
The two SDC’s—Mighty Mite Barnes and Sergeant Ray Spivey—let fly a volley of magnetized loops at the last reported position of the ANAD swarm. An ear-splitting shriek told them the mag bubbles had torn a gaping hole in the enemy swarm.
Finally, the imager view on Winger’s eyepiece settled down. Visible to the whole Detachment over the crewnet, a jittery scene of swarm combat materialized into view.
The picture careened sideways, jostling and shaking, as assemblers engaged in a running duel across the ice. Blurry, staticky pictures of the bristling icosahedral Red Hammer bots winked in and out of view, like battleships maneuvering in dense fog.
Over his coupler link, Johnny Winger caught fragments of ANAD’s ordeal.
***…get my pyridines unfolded fast enough…the bugger’s covered with propulsors…he can scoot just out of reach every time I…and those blasted carbenes…grabbers that long and sticky should be illegal…how can he bend like that…***
“Fire the HERF!” Winger decided. “And keep slamming ‘em, Mighty Mite…everything we got! ANAD’s in a battle and we’ve got to help him anyway we can!”
The rf gun boomed again, mixed with sporadic shrieks from the mag weapons and, for good measure, a few coilgun rounds as well. Alpha Detachment salvoed everything they had, trying to shock, stun, slam, and scatter the Red Hammer swarm as best they could…anything they could do give ANAD an edge.
Throughout the volley, the enemy force shrank a little and swelled back to size with uncanny resilience, as if it were a balloon being squeezed.
“He could try replicating more,” Gibby thought out loud. The IC2 was hunkered down in the lee of a snowbank, half-buried in blowing snow and sleet, looking like a beached whale. “Give him more mass??
?more effectors on the enemy.”
But Winger nixed that idea. “Tactically unsound…it diverts time and energy from the engagement…he’s got to win this battle at the point of contact.”
“What if you drove the master?”
Winger had already been considering that very idea. It had merit. “I could do the piloting while he concentrated on replication.”
“Take some of the load off his processor,” Gibby added.
Winger decided to do it. What atomgrabber could resist? Over the coupler link, he told ANAD what he was about to do.
***Be my guest, Skipper….it’s a real scrum in here…ouch!...I just can’t get my bond breakers into position to…***
The imager view flashed with light as ANAD managed to shred covalent bonds on a nearby bot. Liberating thousands of electron volts, the Red Hammer bot shuddered and heeled over like a torpedoed ship, then moved off to lick its wounds and reconfig.
Johnny Winger toggled buttons on his wristpad to take control of the assembler. He had to keep brushing snow off to finish the sequence: automaneuver off, Fly-by-Stick enabled, config generator initialized to zero. He sent the commands but control handoff was sluggish…already, ANAD’s processor was bogging down.
I’ve got to get closer, he realized. Closer and in the line of sight.
“Acoustics are bogging down,” he told Gibby, huddled a few meters away. “And my coupler’s on the blink too. I’ve got to move in….”
“Closer to that swarm, Skipper?” There was a note of concern in Mighty Mite Barnes’ voice.
“It’s the only way.” Winger lit off his suit boost and let the thrusters hoist him up out of the snowfall. In seconds, he was powering forward, half stepping and sliding, half-floating through blowing snow and sleet.
He eased forward, a wraith in the whiteout conditions, rocked and buffeted by wind gusts until he found himself only a few dozen meters from the flickering maelstrom of the enemy swarm. He let off the suit boost and dropped into heavy snow, and was immediately covered up to his faceplate.
“ANAD…let go, will you? I’m taking over piloting and configs—“ his fingers flew over his wristpad, now dim and hard to see in the driving blizzard. “You replicate…max rate. I’ll do the rest—“
ANAD’s response was weak and sluggish.
***Skipper—I’m losing…it…I can’t keep up…the buggers …there’s too many of them--***
Johnny Winger firmly took command of the ANAD force. He let his hypersuit lower him into a defilade position behind a small scattering of icy boulders. Quickly he was half buried. But it didn’t matter, as long as he could read his wristpad.
He clicked into the coupler link. In his earpiece, he heard voices…the Detachment, re-deploying to support him now that he was further forward and exposed.
“Charging HERF again---“ Reaves was saying. She and Singh half-carried, half-dragged the weapon through the gale to another position, a bowl-shaped depression in the snow, closer to the enemy.
“Don’t fire ‘til I say,” Gibbs came back. Glance was doing double duty as CC2, nominally second in command to Winger. “Mag weapons, move left…let’s flank this arm of the swarm…slam ‘em from another bearing.”
Barnes and Spivey scrambled, half-boosted, half-stumbling on rubbly ice firn, to take up new positions, moving tangentially to the swelling perimeter of the swarm. Twice, errant gusts flew out of the vortex, knocking them down, driving them back. Eventually, they landed in the lee of another snow bank, working the mag guns up to take aim at the mouth of the beast.
Ahead of all of them, Johnny Winger’s eyepiece flickered, then winked out completely. Acoustics were gone…the swarm was now too dense to resolve structure.
From here on…it was the coupler link, or nothing.
He closed his eyes and concentrated on stilling his thoughts…dimly aware that his suit was being rocked and buffeted by gusts, his helmet pelted with sleet and mech debris.
Come on, ANAD…come on…where the hell are you? Come to me…come to Daddy…
Gradually, as if awakening from a deep sleep, the view seemed to clear, though his eyepiece was still completely dark. He found himself, as before, standing barefooted in a raging ocean surf, barely able to stay upright, slammed and broadsided by relentless thundering waves.
That’s when a ship appeared on the distant horizon, a low dark menacing hull silhouetted from beyond by a flickering thunderstorm…and he realized with a start that he’d seen the first enemy bot.
He tweaked propulsors and surged forward. It was like paddling a canoe upstream against a tsunami.
The Red Hammer bot was a vast battleship on the horizon, festooned with whirling, undulating projections.
By experiment and determination, he found that he could make a little forward progress by tacking at angles to the onrushing stream, which he knew wasn’t waves of water at all but a steady driving squall of molecules of every conceivable size and shape. Like some kind of ferocious dodge ball game, he careened and bounced from one impact to another.
There’s got to be a better way than this, he gritted. He tried retracting effectors halfway. That seemed to help.
***Just feel your way along, Skipper…let the waves talk to you…you can skate from one bump to the next…give yourself enough forward speed and you’ll eventually find the weak points. Slide and glide…that’s how it’s done. Remember this: the best path isn’t always the obvious path***
Gradually, he grew more accustomed to the bruising, battering course he had to follow. Jesus…the slightest movement is like a marathon. He always had a lot more respect for the assembler’s world when he had to move through it.
Sounding ahead, fighting torrents of van der Waals forces, he closed steadily on the enemy bot, now growing in size with each slide and glide….
Just a little closer…one more surge and a kick this way—
And then, without warning, he was swept forward into a churning whirlpool and felt himself firmly grappled by effectors that had flashed out of nowhere.
Nanoscale combat was all about leverage and balance and reach distance. You could practice boxing and tai kwon do and any number of martial arts disciplines all day long, but if you didn’t intuitively understand bond energies and van der Waals forces and Brownian motion and how to snap off a benzene ring so it wouldn’t come back to bite you in the ass, you didn’t really know nanocombat.
Johnny Winger had long been considered the top code and stick man in the whole battalion, with a natural talent for atomgrabbing and an uncanny sense of how to corral molecules and navigate the infinitesimal. He’d aced the SODs tests in nog school and won every major competition there was to be won in the Corps-wide games that were held every spring at Table Top Mountain.
So when the Red Hammer bot snared him and began reeling him in like some kind of stubborn flounder, he naturally reacted like any ace atomgrabber would have.
He went on the attack.
Pressing keys on his wristpad furiously, Winger spun left, then right, and managed to snap free of the trap.
“ANAD, keep replicating…max rate! Give me more mechs as fast as you can!”
Beyond the thrashing melee of the fight, uncounted trillions of ANAD assemblers received their orders: cleave and divide, multiply and engage.
Like an army of slaves, the growing horde of assemblers mimicked Winger’s actions and sped forth to do battle.
Got to get out of range of those grabbers, he realized.
The Red Hammer bot was a writhing mass of carbenes and hydrogen probes, undulating and grasping, snagging anything and everything that came near. Behind the mottled membrane of its outer walls, had to be some kind of quantum processor, able to coordinate its defenses and maneuver the bugger so smartly. It was startling how nimble the bot was for its size. Row upon row of slashing effectors, like oarsmen on a Roman slave ship, some maneuvering, some fighting…the thing was like a huge hand with a mil
lion fingers, all separately controlled.
Maybe not so huge after all, he thought. Still, its long axis was easily several thousand nanometers long, a Leviathan of the molecular world.
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 a small cleft in the membrane, a cavity where groups of phosphate molecules made a wedge-shaped bond.
The cavity was relatively free of effectors, seemingly out of reach of any nearby grabbers. He hadn’t noticed the cleft in any encounters with Red Hammer before, certainly not at Mali or Lions Rock or Engebbe. Maybe this was a different kind of bot. The phosphate bonds flexed as the bot maneuvered, forming a small opening, almost like a mouth.
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, electrons lens, enzymatic knife. It was like chewing into the side of a mountain.
The Red Hammer bot lurched and shuddered but Winger had found a soft spot and bore in tenaciously…severing bonds, slashing through membrane lipids, just beyond the reach of the damn thing’s pesky effectors. Buried deep in the guts of the beast, ANAD cruised forward like a windmill out of control, hacking and cracking as he went.
Behind the assembler, a steady stream of ANAD replicants poured into the cavity, systematically expanding the zone of destruction.
“I’m in!” Winger exulted. “Found a soft spot, Gibby…about halfway aft, between the front and rear lobes. There’s some kind of cavity—looks like a mouth—where its effectors can’t reach and a phosphate group is there protecting it.”