Winger nodded. “Quantum interference…signals jammed…I couldn’t control him, couldn’t maneuver…nothing worked.” The Lieutenant shook his head, winced at the flood lamps inside the lifter bay. He turned to Singh. “Taj, there’s something wrong with the coupler link. When we were jammed and I couldn’t run ANAD or communicate, I started to feel…I don’t know, funny. Weird. I kept hallucinating, snatches of old thoughts and memories…it’s like I could feel ANAD. He was in trouble, losing function and I could feel it somehow…like I was losing function too.”
Singh clucked and rubbed his spirit talismans even harder. “Leakage effects. Doc Frost warned us that might happen.”
Gibbs was skeptical. “What do you mean ‘leakage effects?’”
“Just this—“ Singh chose his words carefully. “--the quantum signals that ANAD sends aren’t always decoded in the Lieutenant’s coupler with perfect accuracy. Stray signals can cause neural firing wave patterns to occur unrelated to the original signal…that’s the nature of quantum effects. It’s all about probabilities and how they collapse when the signal is received.”
Winger shook his head. “All I know is that I left a buddy back there…Quantum troopers don’t do that. It leaves a bad taste…I’ve got to go back and get ANAD—“ He started to rise but Sheila Reaves pushed him firmly back in his seat.
“It’s not going to happen, Lieutenant…not today. Red Hammer’s got a bitch of a swarm out there and nothing we’ve tried even slows it down. UNIFORCE has ordered everyone to pull back, to McMurdo. Including us.”
Winger seethed but he didn’t resist. He glared out a nearby porthole. The view was a swirling whiteout…blowing snow and sleet whipped into a fury by the vortex powered by the swarm. Wind gusts rocked the lifter, while the incessant wail of tortured air shrieked below the groaning creaking of the lifter fuselage.
Doc Frost had once said this could happen. Me and ANAD…Jesus, we’re like brothers now. Read each other’s minds, think each other’s thoughts. Like one…
Winger shook himself out of the daze. He looked up at all the worried faces peering back at him. “Okay troops…the show’s over. Let’s get this jalopy airborne and get back to MacTown.”
Moments later, the tiny fleet of lifters was winging its way back toward McMurdo City. As the billowing white pall of the swarm receded in the porthole and the black peaks of the Transantarctic range poked above the horizon, Winger stared out at the desolate scene, lost in thought.
With ANAD lost, 1st Nano and UNIFORCE had no choice but to retreat. A new master assembler could be regenerated but that would take time. The dumb bots and micro-weapons that UNIFORCE had left—not to mention the patrol bots BioShield had brought in—were no match for the Red Hammer swarm.
Even worse, he realized, the cartel might now have a way to generate and affect swarms at a great distance, if the ‘pulser’ device Q2 had surmised was real.
A new way to fight the swarm and the pulser would have to be devised and fast. More worrisome than that, Winger realized as the outer dome settlements of McMurdo City materialized through a light ice fog and the lifter began its descent, was the quantum signal jamming that had interfered with ANAD.
Winger was certain the investigation would lead back to Red Hammer. According to the UNIFORCE commander, the decoherence wakes had been traced back to a source in China, near the Himalayas, after a great deal of effort and interpolating.
No surprise there, Winger thought grimly. Red Hammer’s main base of operation was known to be in the area. The Paryang Monastery…it was not a big secret. Something would have to be done about the interference…or ANAD would be useless in combating the spread of the Red Hammer swarms. The ice would continue to melt and sea levels would rise and the air would grow more toxic and millions could die.
A quick briefing was held in the UNIFORCE Ops command post. Suvorov was running the show. The Russian was harried and brusque.
“…that’s the best we can do…hold up the swarm for a few hours with a force of bots until the thing overwhelms us. Then, we fall back to a new position, re-group, inject a new force of bots and get chewed up all over again. The same process over and over again for the last week. At this rate—“ the Russian shrugged.
Stiles, the BioShield chief engineer, had already done the calculation. “…at this rate…McMurdo itself will be under assault in less than a week…less than a hundred hours if the swarm expands at a constant speed. So far, it hasn’t…but I can’t say we’re doing much to slow it down.”
Winger and Gibbs were attending the briefing for 1st Nano.
“Like flies tickling an elephant,” Gibbs observed. On displays surrounding the briefing theater, the whole of Antarctica was being consumed by spreading patches of red. Two isolated patches, representing separate swarms at Lake Vostok and Mount Erebus, strained toward each other across the map.
“It’s only a matter of time,” Stiles was saying, “before the two elements link up…then we’ll be facing a superswarm…this one capable of swallowing a whole continent.”
“And the atmosphere over the continent,” Winger added. “We’ve got to get back to Table Top…re-think our tactics. And regenerate another ANAD master.” The prospect of breaking in another assembler and re-establishing coupler links made him wince. He also wanted to spend some time with Doc II. He had about a million questions.
“And find some way to block that pulser interference,” Gibbs added. “We’ve become so dependent on quantum systems now that any disruption is a problem.”
“More than a problem,” Winger said, remembering the feelings of panic and helplessness. For a few moments, he had actually felt what ANAD himself must have felt. They had almost become one and the results had been a near catastrophe.
Suvorov promised that UNIFORCE would deploy whatever microbot or conventional force was needed to engage the swarm.
“It’s all we can do,” the Russian explained, frustrated. “Paris doesn’t understand what it’s like down here. With BioShield’s mechs, it seems the best defense we have are our own dumb bots…replicate simple mass and throw it into the fight. Cannon fodder the size of molecules. At best, we may be able to slow them down.”
Winger agreed. UNIFORCE nanobots were simple, non-programmable devices, with no real brains and minimal effectors. Easy to config, easy to replicate…they could be assembled into swarms at prodigious rates. Trouble was: the bots were easy prey for Red Hammer. The tactical plan was to overwhelm the enemy formations with mass but the enemy swarm was too quick to be stalled for long.
But until ANAD or something like it could engage and defeat the Red Hammer mechs in close combat, where it counted, there was little else UNIFORCE could do…here in the Antarctic or Greenland or anywhere else Red Hammer was engaged.
UNIFORCE Command in Paris and the Security Affairs Commissioner were rapidly running out of options.
Winger and Gibbs left the Ops building and rode out to the skyway at McMurdo Field. Hyperjet Charioteer had been fueled up and the rest of the Detachment had loaded aboard with their gear.
Within the hour, the sleek black ship had lifted off, accelerating through the stratosphere on its twelve-thousand kilometer suborbital hop to Table Top Mountain.
Johnny Winger holed up in the comm shack, glum and dispirited. Through the porthole, he could see kilometers below the ragged Pacific coastline of South America, lined with crumpled mountains of the Andes range. Though not visible from Charioteer’s near-space altitude, he knew that the ocean waves lapping the shorelines of Tierra del Fuego were rising steadily, as they were now all over the world. Red Hammer swarm activity was melting the south polar ice cap and seas were rising, by nearly a centimeter a day according to some measurements. Bubbles of modified atmosphere were expanding northward from Antarctica and threatening the entire southern hemisphere. The cartel was using its own bastardized ANAD designs, married to some kind of new pulser device, to
bump up the CO2 and methane levels of the atmosphere, compounding what humans had already been doing for centuries. The fear was that the same thing would soon be happening at the North Pole and Greenland. Already, the cartel had issued ransom notes to cities and states being affected.
ANAD had failed. Yet he hadn’t…not really, Winger told himself. I’m the one who failed ANAD. The assembler had found a weakness inside the midline cavity of the Red Hammer bot, something that could be exploited. But Red Hammer’s interference had kept him from exploiting it.
And with the onslaught of the swarm, he hadn’t had time to properly recover the tiny assembler. That’s what the after-action report read anyway. The truth was rather more complicated.
Anyway you cut it, nanotroopers looked out for each other. When you wore the black and gold, you covered your buddy’s ass and you didn’t leave anyone behind. That was the code. They all knew it. They all lived by it. It didn’t matter if you were three meters tall or six nanometers tall.
And, deep down inside, Johnny Winger knew he had broken the code.
He got on the vidlink, anxious to talk, to explain, to do something and rang up Major Kraft at Table Top.
Kraft’s face was deeply furrowed in thought as the image came up. The Battalion commander had been reviewing the Detachment’s report. Gibbs had squirted it to Table Top off a satlink before they had lifted off from MacTown.
“Not very promising…this first engagement, Lieutenant,” Kraft was saying.
“No, sir,” Winger agreed. “1st Nano got its ass kicked. The swarm bots are huge buggers, highly maneuverable. They replicate like crazy too…it’s unnatural how fast they can move. It’s like they’re revved up somehow. I thought I found a weak point…ANAD was probing…maybe some kind of service port or something but—“ Winger broke off the explanation. He could see the look on Kraft’s face. A small vein on the Major’s forehead was throbbing red. The volcano was about to blow.
Kraft’s lips tightened. “Your report says quantum interference was detected…you lost ANAD because of that?”
Winger was embarrassed. He wanted to kill the vidlink, shrivel up and die.
“Yes, sir…UNIFORCE got intermittent bearings on decoherence wakes, triangulated back to a source in southwest China…Tibet, they said. Ten to one, it’s Paryang.”
Kraft seemed skeptical. “I didn’t know quantum signals could even be effectively jammed. We went quantum several years ago for more secure command and control, not less.” Kraft could see Winger squirming. Part of a commander’s toolkit was knowing when to chew the ass off a nog who had screwed up…and when not to.
“What happened to ANAD?”
Winger related the details as honestly as he could, even though the same details were in the report.
“Our CQEs say these waves interfered with the basic functions of ANAD’s processor. Somehow, if I’m understanding this right, the jamming waves keep the processor and my coupler from being able to read quantum signals when they collapse…like scattering them so they can’t collapse or be read properly.” Winger struggled to find the right words. “ANAD started feeling sluggish at first. I was piloting at that point and after awhile, I had no control…effectors, propulsors, replication, anything. Then we couldn’t even talk to each other. My coupler link went on the fritz. And acoustics weren’t much better.”
Kraft’s face was a picture of doubt. “I never liked all this hocus-pocus anyway. So you couldn’t control or talk to ANAD?”
“No, sir. I began to lose everything…just as the enemy swarm began expanding again. It caught us off guard.”
Kraft nodded brusquely. A good commander never got caught off guard. He scanned the report further, studying the embedded vidlinks. He could re-play 1st Nano’s desperate stand at the rock wall—coilguns and HERFs going off like firecrackers—then follow the Detachment’s withdrawal. “Lieutenant you violated basic tactical doctrine…you didn’t set up a defensive perimeter or recon the terrain enough to know your enemy. That’s why the swarm caught you off guard.”
“Yes, sir—“
Kraft took a deep breath. “I’ve got your Doc II on this link with me. Let me bring the good doctor in on this little discussion—“ The comm shack’s viewer went fuzzy for a few seconds, then split into two windows. Kraft’s dour face filled half the screen. The other half showed a flickering fog that resembled the face of Dr. Irwin Frost. Doc II was in the containment center. Winger recognized the piping in the background. It was containment vessel piping…ANAD’s ancestral home.
“Hello, Johnny,” Doc’s face split into an avuncular smile. “I’ve been studying your report too…the Major launched me awhile ago. Quite a battle you had down there.”
“Doc…” Winger shook his head, idly fingered the capsule port on his left shoulder…the now empty capsule. “…Doc, I’m having quite a problem, or was having a problem—“ he corrected, “coupling to ANAD. I felt…funny, weird…disconnected…lots of fragments, images that didn’t make any sense, some old memories…it’s really hard to describe—“
Kraft interjected. “Doctor…is this normal? Winger’s supposed to have a hard link to the assembler. Strictly a command and control link. He shouldn’t be having all this emotional, panty-waist crap in his head.”
Doc’s face turned grim, tight-lipped, the fog roiling a bit as it gathered more atoms. He nodded to the Major. “Quite right, Major. That is the intent of the design. However, remember this is still somewhat of an experimental setup. The nature of quantum links is such that, even now, we can’t always control or predict what final state a decoherence wave will collapse to. I’m sure we’re seeing that effect here. There’s leakage from Johnny’s coupler into the limbic circuits of his brain. It was an expected effect.”
“In English, if you don’t mind, Doctor.” Kraft was growing impatient. “I’ve got a war to fight here and I don’t have time for theories.”
“Simply put,” Doc tried to explain, “some of the decoherence waves sent out by ANAD are collapsing to a different state than planned and Johnny’s coupler doesn’t know how to interpret them. It’s overloaded. The enemy’s quantum jamming doesn’t help either…we’ll have to analyze the effects of this new pulser device. So Johnny’s coupler just dumps the raw decoherence waves out. They wind up collapsing to a final state inside his limbic system tissue—where emotional states are formed. There they trigger unpredictable and unrelated feelings, thoughts and memories. It’s a known side effect of using quantum systems for communications. We gain some things and lose some things.”
“That may be so,” Kraft growled, “but one of your ‘side effects’ is that I’ve lost another ANAD master and damn near my whole Detachment. Plus my tactical commander’s less than a hundred percent and that just won’t work. The Project isn’t supposed to produce this result. Something’s got to be done and soon.”
Winger was just as frustrated. “Major, ANAD was pretty effective against Red Hammer bots until quantum jamming interfered with his core functions.” He described the cavity into which ANAD had probed. “The bugger’s effectors couldn’t reach into the cavity and only a weak phosphate group screened off the area. I’m guessing it was a port of some kind, probably for service or access. Once we were inside, ANAD made quick work of the membrane molecules…if it hadn’t been for the pulser, I’m sure ANAD could have dismantled the thing from the inside. But something was fouling up ANAD’s config big time.”
Kraft just shook his head, peering down at something on his desk. “The source of that interference has got to be eliminated,” he said. “Whatever it takes…ANAD’s our best shot now, maybe our only shot to stop Red Hammer before it’s too late.”
Doc had an idea. “Major, I may be able to devise some countermeasures against the pulser interference. It’s a little trick we’ve been working on here at the Lab…a sort of ‘anti-phase’ entanglement wave. Experimentally, we’v
e had decent results in the few trials we’ve made. But it will take time to perfect.”
Kraft rubbed his eyes wearily. Reports, staff briefings, decisions…long hours had been taking a toll on the battalion commander the last few days. “Time, Doctor, is one quantity that is unfortunately in short supply around here. Get working on it…and send the details to me. I’ve got a vidlink with UNSAC himself this afternoon, 1500 hours my time. Every option is on the table and I need as many as I can get…I’m running a bit low. The first thing I’m requesting is UNIFORCE approval to do something about that base in Tibet. If that’s where the interference is coming from, we’ve got to take it out, neutralize it.”
Through a porthole, Winger watched the hard bright sun set in a molten pool of gold and crimson over the western horizon of the Pacific. In seconds, Charioteer was completely in darkness, arcing over the Amazon River basin itself. Jagged veins of lightning cascaded across the tropical skies eighty kilometers below them, creating a strobe effect on the cloud tops. Somewhere down there was the tiny river village of Via Verde or what was left of it.
“Major, do you think UNIFORCE can do anything?”
Kraft’s face darkened. “Unknown, Winger. It’s politically touchy, with the Chinese. There are elements of the People’s Liberation Army who protect Red Hammer…it’s widely known. But UNIFORCE has to act now…there’s already talk out of Paris of ordering mandatory evacuations across the Southern Hemisphere…Sydney and Melbourne, Singapore and Buenos Aires. The sea level’s rising faster than anyone ever expected. If UNIFORCE doesn’t or can’t act now to stop the swarms, they’ll be swept aside and politics be damned. Without UNIFORCE, it’ll be every nation and tribe for itself. Anarchy won’t begin to describe it.”
Doc II questioned Winger more closely about the effects of the coupler problem and the interference. As he did so, he created a small diagnostic, which he squirted to Kraft over a separate channel. Even as the Major detailed the steps UNIFORCE was taking to battle Red Hammer swarms around the world, he scanned the cryptic notes of the diagnostic from Doc II: