“Got it, Skipper!” Gibby made sure the target coordinates went back to all replicants. En masse, the ANAD swarm converged on the same cavity in every nearby enemy bot, duplicating Winger’s discovery. “Should we kill the HERF…give ANAD some room?”
“Negative…keep hitting ‘em!” Winger ordered. “Each pulse stuns the swarm a little more, keeps ‘em from organizing. It gives ANAD a chance to catch up replicating.”
Sergeant Gibbs lay half buried in snow several meters away but inside his hypersuit, his fingers were flying. “All units…keep firing on the swarm! Fire for effect! It’s working—“
Now scores of microns deep into the cavity, Johnny Winger suddenly had an idea.
If he altered ANAD’s config just a little, he could grow a few more hydrogen abstractors around his forward shell and fill in with an extra grabber of two. That kind of config would make burrowing into the bot’s cavity even easier, cleaving phosphates like warm butter…maybe killing the thing even faster.
He mocked up the config, squinting as a bright flash erupted…must be more bonds snapping… and sent it to the processor but for some reason, ANAD now seemed sluggish, even a bit clumsy. Instead of the nearly instant response he was used to, ANAD seemed to take forever to begin grabbing atoms. On top of that, he noticed his effector control wasn’t so smooth, or accurate. Twice, he bounced off bonds he should have easily severed. That flash, he wondered--
Winger slowed down to half propulsor, puzzled, and tried to re-gain control of the situation.
“ANAD…what gives? Effectors are balky…I’m losing precision control here—“
***…I don’t know…feel sluggish, Skipper…***
There was some kind of staticky fritz in the coupler circuit, too. Johnny Winger blinked and concentrated on re-clicking in and out of contact. Interference of some kind, no doubt. But what could interfere with a quantum coupler?
“ANAD, you’re breaking up…I’m resetting the link—“ Doc Frost had once taught him how to click in and out of contact by shaking his head just so.
Sometimes, the quantum de-coupler doesn’t disentangle signals properly, Frost had explained. You get gibberish in the back of your head and have to reset.
He tried it again.
***…feeling kind of sick, actually…I can’t really describe it. Anxious…like there’s too much going on here…registers full…hard to handle all the traffic…***
Winger’s eyepiece suddenly lit up with red…warning flags all over the place:
Channels 6 through 9… effector fine control off line
Main memory overflow
State generator off line
Config buffer overflow
Johnny Winger swore.
What the hell?
Winger tried changing configs, changing back to baseline but it was no good. The assembler’s effectors vibrated and twisted erratically. He couldn’t even safe them into a fold. Couldn’t replicate…couldn’t execute anything now—
Something had corrupted ANAD’s processor. Something had changed ANAD’s config.
Best to stop here and back out of the Red Hammer bot while he still could. He commanded all-stop, but the propulsors wouldn’t respond. Instead, ANAD careened out of control, heading into a layer of oxygen molecules like a train wreck. Like a fly in a spider web, he seemed trapped, flailing helplessly, unable to go forward or backward.
***…so weak, Skip…what’s happening?...I’m losing structure…losing--***
Even Johnny Winger could now feel a tingling dizziness in his head. Was it the coupler? Was it some kind of weird virus, let loose by Red Hammer and now chewing up his processor? Q2 had intel about some kind of weird configuration pulser, something that could change configs remotely, from a great distance.
As intense feeling of despair, even regret, washed over him.
Old memories came bubbling up…Jamison Winger in the hospital, in a bioshield, stricken with Serengeti…and there was nothing he could do! It was hopeless, inoperable…you’ll kill him if you do an insert.
No. No. No.
It had to be something in the coupler link. Winger shook himself out of the funk. Resolutely, he clicked off the link.
Warning flags popped up on his eyepiece: quantum decoupler off line, buffer off
line, pattern amplifier off line.
We’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way. Just like they taught us back at nog school.
Winger cycled the controls on his wristpad, wondering just what sort of command he did have: config status, replication counter, launch and capture, sensors, effector control, one after another, he tried them all. Each time, the same warning flags came back.
No comms…
Off line…
System fault….
Bit by bit, he was losing ANAD.
“Skipper—“ It was Barnes, on the crewnet. “Skipper, the UNIFORCE commander wants to talk with you.”
Winger was still puzzling out why ANAD had suddenly gone bonkers. “Can it wait?”
“No, sir…he says it’s urgent.”
“It always is. Very well, put him through.”
It was the brigade commander who had flown with them from McMurdo. Most of the Security Corps troops were deployed east of their position…fighting the swarm with whatever dumb bots they could scrounge up.
The voice was scratchy, heavily accented over the crewnet.
“Lieutenant…it’s Hadid. I’m in contact with McMurdo right now…I thought you would want to know—“
Winger winced, realizing he was going to have to reverse ANAD back out of the cavity now or he’d lose the assembler.
“Know what, Hadid?”
“Colonel Suvorov just advised me not five minutes ago. UNIFORCE satellites have detected weak decoherence wakes coalescing on your position. Weak but definitely something there.”
Winger sat upright in his hypersuit, banging his helmet on the stony brow of a huge boulder. He fingered snow from his visor, straining to see anything in the blizzard.
“Decoherence wakes…you mean, like quantum decoherence wakes?”
“Affirmative, Captain. UNIFORCE is trying to pinpoint the source location now. But the wake effects are real…and all the field lines converge on your position…just at the perimeter of the storm.”
Decoherence wakes detectable by UNIFORCE satellite could only mean one thing: someone was attempting to communicate or interfere with something else locally by quantum coupler. Or maybe it was the config pulser Quantum Corps Intelligence thought existed.
Deco wakes were echoes of a sort—the remnant effect of entanglement signals sent by quantum state generators. And to be detectable at satellite distances…the entanglement signals would have had to come from great distances themselves.
Was that the source of ANAD’s problem?
Winger knew he had lost effective control of the ANAD master. Worse, he felt sick himself…anxious, a little pissed and sad at the whole matter. What was happening?
Sometimes, the coupler link bleeds a little, Doc Frost had once told him. Sometimes ANAD’s state generator triggers unexpected patterns in the receiver. It’s a form of leakage.
He felt unaccountably sad, seeing Jamison Winger like that. By late October of ’48, he had re-made the barn into some sort of lab workshop. Now he spent most of the day and half the night in there…drilling, pounding, tinkering…he’d ordered one of those early fabs from a catalog (BE THE FIRST ON YOUR BLOCK TO FAB A NEW PATIO FOR YOUR HOUSE!) and spent hours taking it apart, putting it back together, fiercely engaged in the project, just to get his mind off Ellen and the car accident. Johnny often watched him from the barn windows. He half expected his Dad to tinker long enough with the fab to make it somehow spit out a weird rendition of his Mom…like she could be brought back now, from the pile of blackened, scorched wreckage at the bottom of Pueblo Canyon.
Winger shook his head. That wasn’t real. Something in ANAD’s
signal was setting off these memories. Something was inside ANAD’s core…eating away at the little assembler.
A sharp jolt brought Winger back to the moment. With a start, he realized something was happening…the Red Hammer bot was flexing, the duct into which he had driven ANAD was collapsing, shrinking.
ANAD had to get out fast.
“Gibby…I’m reversing! Something’s happened to ANAD…the link’s down…all my controls are sluggish. Effectors, sounding, replication…everything’s off line.”
“Get the hell out of there, Skipper!” Gibby was physically less than five meters away but his voice seemed a million kilometers distant. “UNIFORCE says the decoherence wake is strengthening. Quantum interference everywhere…it’s even affecting the crewnet.”
Sheila Reaves agreed, her voice choppy, staticky. “We’re being flooded with entanglement signals, Lieutenant…massive jamming…local scattering of Bioshield…nothing’s working right.”
“It’s got to be Red Hammer,” Winger decided. “The device that Q2 said couldn’t possibly exist—“ He could not risk losing this ANAD master. Regeneration was too painful…and time consuming.
Grimly, he set to work.
He punched out commands on his wristpad: fold effectors, safe all non-core systems, turn to new heading and rev propulsors to max. Power up acoustic sounding. Take a navigation hack and report.
Each command was sent but ANAD’s response was gibberish. Images of Doc Frost smiling down at him morphed into Jamison Winger’s face, contorted with Serengeti infection, morphed into the comforting winking of Bailey’s big red eye, as the microflyer floated serenely at the end of his bed, morphed into—
Damn it!
Angrily, Johnny Winger clicked again out of the quantum link. He couldn’t seem to turn the damn thing off now. The connection to ANAD was now fully severed…he hoped. He gritted his teeth, pressed buttons for acoustic command only and dialed in a new heading for the assembler to follow.
His eyepiece imager wasn’t much help. Colorful swirls and eddies were all he could make out, a pointillist landscape of violence and salmon-hued whorls. It might as well have been Jupiter.
Sheila Reaves’ strained voice crackled over the crewnet. “The swarm’s expanding…and HERF’s gone. We can’t hold ‘em…fall back! Fall back!”
Hoyt Gibbs waited for Winger to take command of the re-deployment, but the CC1 was preoccupied trying to navigate ANAD out of the crevice in the side of the Red Hammer bot.
Gibbs boosted himself high enough to check the surroundings. Across the snow-blasted icescape, the Red Hammer swarm had swollen in size, a monstrous cyclone of wind and sleet and furious mech activity, beating toward their position with relentless fury. It was clear the Detachment would soon be overwhelmed and fully enveloped. Steadied by his suit thrusters and gyros, Gibbs realized they had to get away now…something was wrong with ANAD. BioShield…UNIFORCE…nothing seemed able to block the swarm.
“Fall back to the lifters!” he yelled over the crewnet. He radioed their status to Hadid and Wolf, the BioShield engineer. “We’re being overrun…have to pull back and re-group…can you cover us…can you block or divert the swarm?”
Hadid’s scratchy voice crackled back. “Negative…we’re in a real scrum ourselves…my bots and weapons are no match...we’ve got to retreat ourselves!”
Gibbs watched the rest of the Detachment light off their suit boost and backpedal through the driving sleet to a low depression a quarter kilometer back. He counted them off one by one: Hiroshi and Singh, Barnes and Reaves, McReady (struggling with a balky gyro…Barnes stopped to help him get upright), Gibby and Spivey. Only the Skipper didn’t respond.
Gibbs steered himself toward Johnny Winger’s prostrate form. His hypersuit was motionless.
“Lieutenant…” he rapped on the side of the helmet. “Skipper…we’ve got to fall back—“
Winger’s suit shifted slightly. His weak voice hissed back over the crewnet.
“Gibby…I’ve lost it…I’ve lost ANAD…he won’t respond—“
Gibbs eyed the oncoming maelstrom swirling mere meters from the rock outcrop. Lightning flickered inside salmon-hued clouds, great ripples of flickering light as the Red Hammer bots tore into the air, into the snow, into the icecap, mindlessly disassembling everything.
The CC2 couldn’t wait any longer. He maneuvered his own suit into a kneeling position, ran his own servos to max power and, with motors whining and groaning, used every ounce of force the thing could give him. Using a nearby boulder as leverage, Gibbs levered Winger’s suit to an upright position. He peered in through the faceplate…saw a face at once pale and anxious in the orange glow of its interior lamps.
“Skipper…are you hurt? Can you move…can you maneuver on your own?”
Winger’s glum face nodded. “ANAD’s gone…I couldn’t link in…I tried acoustic…I tried everything I could think of.”
“I’m setting up your boost, Skipper…” Gibbs fingered the wristpad, stabbing at several buttons. “I’ll keep one arm on your arm just in case your gyros go.”
Winger tried to help but he seemed weak, unable to stand. He slumped in the suit…only Gibbs’ quick work kept the suit upright. The CC2 lit off Winger’s boost and, in a poof of snow and ice, the Lieutenant’s suit was hovering a meter off the ground, wobbling as its occupant struggled to keep his balance inside.
Winger’s voice was strained, choked with emotion. “Gibby…we can’t leave ANAD behind…we don’t leave anybody behind…no matter what.”
It was true and Hoyt Gibbs knew it.
It was the bedrock code of the nanowarrior: you didn’t leave your buddies behind, for the enemy to pick over like some vulture.
Gibbs hesitated. “CQE’s…any way we can jam those quantum signals?”
Ray Spivey was first to reply. “No way, Sarge. We can hardly detect them as it is.”
“And nobody can predict what frequency they have,” added Lucy Hiroshi. “Quantum signals are like that…there’s really no such thing as a frequency anyway and they’re transmitted as all possible states permissible. Only when the signal is received do those probabilities collapse to an actual signal. You can’t predict it.”
Gibbs steadied Winger in his suit. The two of them floated like huge metal cocoons through the driving sleet and snow. He quickly slaved the Lieutenant’s suit to his own…it was nearly impossible to keep physical contact under these conditions. With Gibbs’ hypersuit emitting a beacon, Winger’s suit thrust ahead on its own boost, following the signal…like a mama bear and her cub.
Scattered by the blizzard and the winds, the Detachment scrambled and floated across the choppy frozen waves of the sastrugi covering the icecap. The withdrawal was ragged and haphazard…Gibbs tried to maintain some semblance of formation but the swarm spun ever closer on their heels and all of them had to fight a running duel with the outer bands of bots converging on them.
Gibbs kept close to Winger has they slogged back toward the lifters. The Lieutenant’s suit gyrated and wobbled as it was buffeted by the wind but followed like an obedient dog. The CC2 called up the UNIFORCE commander.
“Hadid…detach an element of your mechs and give us control. We can block their advance along this bearing…give us all more time to get the hell out of here.”
Hadid came back. “Negative, 1st Nano…we’re fully engaged right now…I can’t spare a single atom to give you. We’re in a standoff two kilometers east of you…got one hell of an arm of the enemy pounding us. If I detach now, they’ll blow right through us.”
Gibbs found BioShield in the same predicament.
Wolf’s voice was harried. “We’re falling back ourselves, 1st Nano…I’ve got nothing to give you! My force is being chewed to pieces!”
Gibbs suspected as much but it had been worth a try. Whatever it was, whatever powered the swarm, it was a beast growing in intensity with every passing moment.
“Roger that…fall back as planned. Rendezvous at the lifters. We’ve got to get the hell out of here…before the damn thing eats us alive.”
A few moments later, the dim outlines of the lifters materialized in the distance, squatting on the icecap like huge gray birds of prey.
“Come on, Skipper…” Gibbs gritted through his teeth. He twisted around to check out Winger’s face. In the amber glow of his helmet lamps, Johnny Winger wore an expression blank and impassive, glassy-eyed. Was he all right? Was he even conscious?
“Help me get the Skipper aboard,” he waved at the nearest suits, two troopers settling down onto the ice after shutting off their boost. “…he’s not responding.”
The suits turned out to be Spivey and Taj Singh.
Gibbs commanded Winger’s suit boost off and he thumped down hard onto the ice, losing his balance until Gibby shouldered him upright.
“Open the lifter bay doors,” Gibbs commanded. At the rear of the main cargo pod, doors clamshelled open, revealing the protective cocoon of warmth and strong flood lights inside.
Laboriously, they worked Winger, still inside his suit, up the ramp and into one of the ingress harnesses along the bulkhead.
Gibbs commanded the suit to depressurize and open. A hiss of air escaped as the neck ring and helmet quick-disconnected. Gibby lifted the helmet off.
Johnny Winger’s face was deathly pale and haggard. Gibby, Spivey and the others crowded around.
“Skipper…you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Get him some water,” said Sheila Reaves. The DPS tech felt Winger’s forehead. It was cool to her touch. “No fever that I can see.”
“Check the suit,” Gibbs ordered. “It might have been penetrated. If he’s been swarmed—“
“There’s no evidence of that,” Spivey said. “I swept him as we came aboard.”
Winger’s hands were shaking as he accepted a cup of water from Reaves. He mumbled thanks.
“Skipper…” it was Taj Singh, his necklace and trinkets clinking as he rubbed them for good luck. “…your containment port is open.”
The port to the shoulder-implanted capsule where ANAD resided hadn’t snapped shut.
Winger nodded grimly, sipping gratefully at the water. “I never got…ANAD never got recovered…had to get out of there—“
“My God…ANAD’s lost?” Mighty Mite Barnes sucked in a hard breath. “He’s still out there—“