Bit by bit, the snow bank melted and melt water ran in streams down the ravine’s gullies, revealing bare ground underneath. But the ground was no longer solid rock. Instead, it boiled and billowed like a mirage speckled with a billion tiny explosions going off all at once, as ANAD bots broke atomic bonds and burned their way into the molecular lattice of rock.
There was little the rescue squad could do now but wait. Wait and hope. Mighty Mite Barnes returned to a nearby lifter to monitor ANAD’s progress. Acoustic pulses came back to her on the coupler circuit, along with system status and overall borehole conditions. Barnes plotted the results on a vertical profile chart, to show ANAD’s current location.
Seven hours and sixteen minutes seemed to last an eternity.
It was Gabby Galland, curled up in a fetal position on the command deck floor, who first sensed a presence around her. She sat up, felt the increase in heat, shook herself into a groggy sort of consciousness and spotted the faint aura of a shimmering smoke billowing out from behind the main console.
She smelled it too. Something was burning. An electrical fire?
“Wings…Wings!—“ she yelled. Staggering to her knees, she peered under the console. “Wings...we got a fire! Get up here—“ She groped around in the failing light, breathing hard, sucking for air, feeling for a fire extinguisher. Any fire now could rapidly deplete their last remaining oxygen.
Johnny Winger stirred himself awake and saw Galland frantically rummaging about the cabin.
“What is it? What’s --?”
“There’s smoke…right there under the console! We must have an electrical fire!”
Before he could respond, a faint chime sounded in the back of Winger’s mind. It was ANAD…the tiny assembler had returned!
“ANAD!” Winger swung himself down from the seat, coughing in the stale, stagnant air. His head pounded and his ears rang from the CO2 buildup. “It’s ANAD!”
Galland sat down heavily as she realized Winger was right. Semi-conscious and exhausted, she had mistaken the faint blue mist for a fire.
***ANAD acknowledges…returning from the surface. I have brought a search and rescue squad. Trooper Barnes re-configged my processor to optimize my effectors. I have widened the original borehole to thirty centimeters diameter. Surface rescue is sending two hypersuits down the hole. My instructions are to assist you in any way possible***
Winger’s eyes widened. “You enlarged the hole? And hypersuits too? This is looking better all the time.”
***ANAD has config patterns for respirocyte bots. If you need additional oxygen boost, ANAD can replicate respirocytes***
Winger explained all that ANAD had told him. A huge wave of relief came over Galland’s face.
“Might be a good idea, Wings. At least until we get the tin cans on.”
Winger agreed. “ANAD, Mighty Mite gave you the config?”
There was a pause before the assembler responded.
***Trooper Barnes does not know ANAD loaded the respirocyte config. She said ANAD should focus all processor capacity on boring and supporting the hole…but ANAD loaded the config anyway. A trooper does not leave his buddies behind***
Winger mulled that bit of news over. Now, it seemed, the assembler was disregarding orders from its human handlers and initiating configurations on its own.
The less Major Kraft knows about this, the better.
“Okay, ANAD, give us some oxygen. When will the suits be here?”
“Maybe now,” Galland said. “Sounder says there’s something in motion right outside the hull…and it’s not the earth.”
“It’s probably them,” Winger decided. “How do we get the suits inside the cabin?”
***ANAD has opened a path through the borer module. The forward bulkhead and horn have been disassembled. Remove the main console and you will have access***
“Jesus,” Winger muttered. “ANAD has practically burned away the whole front of Gopher.”
ANAD detached a part of the swarm that had already replicated into respirocytes. He and Galland let the swarm enter orally, coughing as the dry fog filled their mouths.
“Ugh,” said Galland. “Tastes like dirt.”
“Or metal chips.” Winger added, though he was grateful for the oxygen boost. In a few minutes, his headaches subsided and his vision was no longer blurry. Deep inside his lungs and bloodstream, uncountable trillions of nanoscale respirocytes swapped oxygen molecules through his alveolar tissues, improving the molecule exchange a million-fold.
“Feels better,” he took a deep breath, looked over at Galland.
“Yeah, like I just swam the Pacific.”
“Let’s get to work.” He squeezed himself below the main console and started to unfasten its mounts. “Help me get this bugger off its mounts—“
Between the two of them, they managed to push the console away from the bulkhead enough to get at the frame behind.
Winger pushed and pulled at the skin, until he had worked the panel loose. Rock dust and rubble poured into the cabin with a crashing roar.
Blinking and coughing through the dust, the two troopers pawed their way through the rock and rubble until Winger lost his balance and fell forward through a weak spot into a void. He wound up crawling through the debris into a narrow vertical shaft, buzzing with the high-freq whine of nanobots and backlit by a pale unearthly glow. It was the bore hole, guided by ANAD right into Gopher’s forward compartment and shored up with a barrier screen of bots.
It was like being inside of a kaleidoscope.
Winger raised his head up to look around and hit his head on something hard. Feeling with his hands, he realized he was squatting under the treaded boot of a hypersuit.
“I think I found our suits,” he called back to Galland. “I just hit my head on one.”
An hour later, Winger and Galland were grunting and panting, trying to contort themselves into ANAD’s tunnel. With effort and a lot of shoving, Winger was able to force Galland, now encased in full hypersuit, up into the shaft.
“What kind of clearance do you have?”
Galland bit her lip. She was not going to succumb to claustrophobia now.
“Maybe a centimeter around my head. It’s a tight fit.”
“Can you see anything above you?”
“I can see a wall of rock screened off by bots. It’s like the wall is bubbling and heaving. But I can reach out and touch it with my helmet. Above me, it’s black as night. Can’t see a thing.”
“It’s probably going to be a bumpy ride. Close your eyes and think of something more pleasant—“
“Yeah…like what? Like you naked on the beach. Wings, about what happened—“
“Later, Gabs. Just light off your suit boost and get going. It’s a long way to the surface.”
Amen to that, she thought. Maybe a little prayer would help too. She took a deep breath, counted to three and pressed a button on her wristpad with her other hand.
Then she started to move upward, smacking the side of her helmet on the hard rock walls.
She continued her painstaking ascent for what seemed like hours, maybe days. She soon lost all track of time and space.
Only the labored sound of her own breathing—her helmet visor was getting pretty fogged up—and the bang and crunch of her hypersuit scraping along the tunnel walls gave her any sense of motion.
She tried reducing the suit boost to see if it had any effect on the scraping but it didn’t.
Guess I’m going to be a billiard ball when I get topside, she told herself. She wondered how long that would take. She would have given anything to know where she was, how close to the surface she was. Pitch black, in a narrow tube the size of a coffin, with no idea where she was or where she was going.
It was enough to drive a girl to drink.
How long she had passed out, she didn’t know. But her mouth was bone dry and there wasn’t any liquid in the chin tube; she must h
ave sucked it all dry. Her shoulders, neck and legs throbbed from the incessant banging and battering.
Maybe I’m not going anywhere, she thought. But that couldn’t be. How else to explain the steady thrummm at the soles of her feet—the liftjets pulsing on and off had made her feet go numb hours ago. They had never been designed for extended duty like this.
At least, ANAD’s tunnel seemed navigable, if a bit snug. She wondered where Wings was. Had he left right after her? Or was he still inside Gopher, trapped and suffocating, maybe dead?
She didn’t want to think about that at all.
Suddenly she felt like she was being accelerated forward. With a sudden surge, she was pushed upward, through loose soil…then light…blindingly bright light and before she realized what had happened, she was the surface, wallowing in snow and dirt like a beached whale.
Strong hands helped her upright and a blur of faces were just outside her helmet, but the visor was grimy and fogged and she couldn’t make out anything.
She was wobbly but all the hands and her own suit gyros kept her upright. She felt the helmet quick disconnect go, then a stream of cool mountain air leaked in around her neck dam and the helmet came off with a jerk.
The first face she saw was Major Jurgen Kraft, scowling in at her bruised, sweaty face.
“Well, well,” Kraft said, “aren’t you a sight? Lieutenant Galland, welcome back to the land of the living.”
With help from the rescue squad, her hypersuit was clamshelled open and Galland lifted carefully out. She was quickly placed into a life-support pod and taken to a nearby lifter.
Kraft pulled General Kincade aside. “We’ll give her a good look-over, General. She’s been through quite an ordeal.”
Kincade nodded. “And the geoplane? That’s the prototype down there. How long does this set us back? UNSAC has given us until August 10 to mount an operation against Red Hammer.”
“We’ve got to recover Gopher’s data recorders and find out what happened. I’ve already issued orders for Murchison and the engineers to triple-shift construction of the second geoplane. Mole will be ready to test by the end of the week. But after we recover the data recorders, there may be more changes.”
A commotion interrupted the two officers. Kraft went back to the borehole opening. There in the pile of loose snow and dirt, another hypersuit was emerging from the ground, a giant egg being hatched by the earth.
Johnny Winger was nearly unconscious when he was pulled from the hard shell and laid into a life pod. Mighty Mite Barnes and two Battalion medics scoped and examined him carefully.
“Dehydration…maybe a little hypercapnia,” Barnes pronounced. “A little oxygen boost and some fluids should do the trick.” She backed off while the pod was littered to the lifter.
Kincade came over and Kraft saw the frown of concern on the General’s face. “The medics say he’ll be okay. The kid’s dehydrated and a little short of breath…the techs are checking out his hypersuit now.”
“I want a debriefing on the geoplane test at 0600 hours tomorrow morning, Kraft. I want to know what happened and why. I’ve got to give UNSAC an update later in the day.”
“You’ll have it, sir.”
Kincade was thoughtful. “We’d better review the op plan for Tectonic Sword one more time…go over all the details. And bring Murchison and your tactical group. I want to know if an underground assault is still a viable option, in light of what’s happened.”
Kincade left to board the second lifter, while Kraft joined Barnes at Johnny Winger’s life pod. The transparent doors of the pod were already shut. Inside, already hooked up to a forest of tubes, the atomgrabber was grimy and bruised on his face, his cheeks swollen and pale.
What kind of hell did you and Galland go through, Lieutenant? the Major wondered. The life pod was hoisted aboard the lifter and secured. Kraft climbed aboard as well.
No one seemed to notice the faint dimly illuminated wisp of fog that seeped in with the rest of the rescue squad and nestled out of sight between some storage racks.
The two lifters took off together, in a tornado of snow and dirt, and turned southwest, heading back across Hunt Valley toward Table Top Mountain.
“It’s obvious the geoplane design needs more work,” Kraft was saying to the assembled briefing. “And equally obvious that coordinated subterranean operations with ANAD needs more practice.”
The briefing room at the underground Ops Center was packed. Kraft had the floor and SOFIE was running visuals. General Kincade was there, too, scowling and rubbing his moustache, along with Winger and Galland and the rest of the Battalion. Doc II drifted in the back like a faint veil of dust motes.
“We can’t afford to practice much more, Major,” Winger said. Red Hammer’s on the loose again. Just got the latest results from BioShield.”
Kraft recognized the commander from BioShield, granted temporary clearance to be at the classified meeting. His name was Major Meier.
Meier was grim. “The bubbles of modified air are expanding again, as swarms begin to link up. There’s a growing supercolony aggregating across the entire Southern Hemisphere, from South Africa, through the Indonesian archipelago, to the coast of Chile. Johannesburg and Djakarta have reported tens of thousands dead, probably millions are fleeing north, by boat, on foot, any way they can. Whole swaths of the southern Indian and Pacific Oceans—“ Meier ticked off the list and SOFIE highlighted the affected areas in red on a 3-D globe—“the Seychelles Islands, the Andamans, the Gilberts, the list goes on and on, showing areas now essentially uninhabitable. BioShield is reporting mass casualties on Borneo and Fiji, thousands of corpses offshore, floating like rafts in the ocean swells. With the changes in the atmosphere effected by Red Hammer, deaths from increased ultraviolet radiation, exposure, asphyxiation, hypercapnia and other related causes are soaring.”
“This may be the final push,” said Galland. “The last offensive.”
Kincade had heard enough. “Don’t forget the flooding, caused by icecap melting. Sat video has shown almost every berg off the Antarctic coast calving at two and three times the normal rate. Coastal cities will be underwater in several weeks…we’re talking New York, Miami, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Mumbai.” Kincade abruptly stood up. “We can’t wait any longer. Murchison--?”
The project engineer replied, “Here, General—“
“What is the status on Mole, the second geoplane?”
Murchison consulted a wristpad he had clipped to his belt, scrolling down through the outstanding items. “Tread system and controllers have been installed this morning. The borer went on-line yesterday; we’ve tested it with a small denatured swarm but a full-up test isn’t scheduled for another three days. Power plant, controls, environmental systems are all operational and tested.”
Kincade prowled the briefing room like a caged animal. “UNSAC wants to know when Tectonic Sword can get underway. We’re behind—several weeks behind—and every hour’s delay—“he indicated SOFIE’s globe—“well, I don’t have to remind you of the cost. BioShield is engaging the enemy swarms at dozens of places around the Southern Hemisphere but it’s just a holding action. BioShield doesn’t have the nano we have. Unless we can put Red Hammer’s base out of action, this will continue to expand. In time, it may affect the Northern Hemisphere, then the whole planet. Casualty figures then become…who can say?”
“An extinction-level event,” said Meier, for him. “Given enough time. Another mass extinction. Earth has seen it a number of times.”
Murchison shook his head. “We’ve been selected for extinction. Evolution rolled the dice and the human race has come up snake eyes.”
“Not quite yet,” Kincade said. “The Red Hammer base must be put out of action. What’s the status on Gopher?”
“Gopher is not recoverable, General,” Murchison admitted. “She’s too deep and too badly damaged. We’re building a second Gopher, but the fram
e’s just been laid down. We’re weeks from having a testable vehicle.”
“Listen to what I’m saying, gentlemen,” Kincade growled. “We don’t have weeks. At best, we have only days. If we allow these swarms to continue to coalesce, by the end of the year, the entire planet will be enveloped. We won’t be able to engage and defeat Red Hammer with anything we have, with any conceivable ANAD technology, if that happens. We’ve got to stop it now!”
“What are you suggesting, General?” Kraft asked.
Kincade consulted a calendar. “August 10 is only two weeks away. When this briefing is over, I’m sending UNSAC a reply to his question. Tectonic Sword will commence operations on August 10. That means you will engage Red Hammer at their base on the Hong Kong-Shenzhen border with whatever you have in hand at the time. Geoplane transports, weapons, tactics, personnel, and training, ANAD swarms…Kraft, you and your people have two weeks to pull it all together. And as I indicated earlier to both Majors here, UNSAC has approved a new force to help out…a Boundary Patrol force, equipped with geoplanes as fast as they can be turned out, new crews, new tactics…all this has to be worked out…in the next two weeks. It’s the only way we can get around and avoid being incinerated by those killsats the cartel has seized.”
The small vein on the Major’s forehead was red and swollen, a sure sign Kraft was about to blow. He glared at Murchison, Winger, Galland and Barnes. Then, grimly, he acknowledged the General’s order.
“First Nano will be ready and in position, General. All we need is your H-hour signal to go.”
“I’ll get that to you as soon as UNSAC issues final approval and the operational orders are cut. There are still a few little diplomatic niceties to observe with the Chinese at the UN before that happens.”
“General, what about the underlying geology of the target area? The Pearl River delta and southeast China are similar to this area, from what the geos tell me. Basaltic rock crisscrossed with fault lines, not all of them mapped very well. There’s a good chance an underground assault may cause more slippage, more seismic shifting. Worst case…we could lose the assault team before the assault begins….or wind up leveling Hong Kong.”