The escape tunnel from Mole to Badger took ANAD about two hours. It was less than a meter wide, barely wide enough for a well-fed nanotrooper to squeeze through. There was a good bit of grumbling and griping about living like gophers and moles, but the technique had been well-practiced and simmed over the last few days. One by one, weapons and supplies in tow, the entire crew and troop complement of Badger burrowed through the tunnel and came aboard Mole through her D Deck lockout.
It was going to be a tight squeeze for the rest of the trip.
Winger told the DSO to get the ship going. “We’re behind schedule. Can we make three kilometers an hour?”
“I’ll try, sir.” Rice cranked up the treads and Erromango commanded more replications out of the borer ANAD swarm. The blue-white half-globe at Mole’s bow soon grew white hot as she chewed her way through layer after layer of Cretaceous and Jurassic granites, Mesozoic sedimentary rock and Paleozoic quartzite.
Galland shuddered, watching the stratigraphic plot on Mole’s command deck, sipping a warm mug of coffee. “At least most of the tremors have subsided.”
They were now deep inside the Eurasian tectonic plate, still two hundred meters below the seabed. The Pearl River and Hong Kong were dead ahead, five hours away at the geoplane’s best cruise speed.
Five hours later, Winger had fallen into a dreamless daze when a voice roused him from the commander’s seat. It was Kruizenga.
“We’re directly under the Pearl River estuary, Skipper. Two hundred meters under the floor of the channel. Should I start the ascent?”
After a last minute briefing on geological formations along the traverse route, Winger had received a message off the satlink from Table Top base several hours before. It came to Mole on her ELF receiver. It was Major Kraft. The Major’s face had appeared haggard and tired on the screen.
“General Kincade just squirted me your final orders, Lieutenant,” Kraft was saying. “I’m sending them along…don’t go without a hard copy onboard. UNSAC has approved Tectonic Sword in full, all details and constraints as we discussed before. Have you got your course set?”
“Plotted and laid in,” Winger reported. He sat in the mission commander’s seat alongside Galland, who was busy checking systems off a checklist. “We’re descending to a thousand meters a few kilometers south of the Pearl River entrance to get below the hardest basaltic layers…and to slip around a transverse fault the geos say is there. We head out north by northwest for about twenty kilometers, cross below Hong Kong Island and rise to five hundred meters below the Kowloon Peninsula, where the shales are little better for boring. Fewer inclusions to deal with.”
Kraft was following his own copy of the assault course on a screen at his desk at Table Top. “Exactly…Then from there, you cross the bay at two hundred meters depth, roughly paralleling the southern coastline of the New Territories—should be some tougher boring there, from what the geos tell me…lots of igneous stuff, quartzite and so forth. You’ll have to slow down. And there are subduction zones all along that range. The base of the mountains is being driven northward by rotation of the Eurasian tectonic plate, so there are tremors and shifting all the time. Watch yourself.”
“Don’t worry about that, Major.” Winger patted the main console. “Murchison says this Mole should take real good care of us. From the Stonecutters Island escarpment, it should be a fairly straight shot up into Lions Rock.”
“Watch your densitometer closely, Lieutenant,” Kraft warned. “Follow the course profile as precisely as possible. UNIFORCE mapped these strata pretty well the last few weeks. With all that plate subduction going on east of the estuary, you could set off some seismic activity without meaning to. We don’t want to give Red Hammer—of the Chinese—any warning at all.”
“Understood, sir.”
Kraft looked up. His eyes narrowed on the screen. “Get in and get out, Winger. Get up there and turn that base into rubble. You’ve got the target list with the priorities checked off: destroy the pulser emitters and controls, destroy the scope works, any other control centers, the Keeper portal if you can get to it, then get the hell out of there. With any luck, that’ll sever all the control links to the killsats. Once they’re cut off from control and from each other, UNISPACE thinks they can be engaged and control regained individually. Once you exfiltrate, UNISEA will have a sub waiting to escort Mole at the coordinates we agreed on.” Rendezvous point is thirteen degrees north by one nineteen degrees west.”
“We’ll be nearly a day getting into position, Major. But we’ve got ELF and the quantum coupler circuits to stay in touch with the surface. I’ll check in once every four hours, give you an update.”
“Good luck, Lieutenant,” Kraft nodded. “And good hunting. Smash the bastards for good.”
“Sir, the escarpment is dead ahead. Should we start our ascent?” Kruizenga asked again. He indicated the profile on Mole’s acoustic sounder. “Solid rock dead ahead and above us.”
“Borer on line?” Winger asked.
“Up and swarming. All parameters normal. ANAD reports ready in all respects.”
Winger took a deep breath. The geoplane and her assault team were about to commit to the underground phase of the assault. He glanced over at Galland, her face still streaked from burrowing through the scape tunnel ANAD had carved; both of them exchanged knowing looks. They both understood the risks they were about to take.
“Let’s do it,” Winger ordered.
One compartment behind them, Corporal Lucy Hiroshi was nervously stroking a handful of amulets and talismans, clinking them in a staccato rhythm. The CQE1 mumbled incantations in her native Kyushu dialect, imploring the spirits of earth to watch over the small assault force.
Sheila Reaves was annoyed. “Lucy, you’re going to wear the finish right off those trinkets. Give it a rest, how about it? You’re driving us all nuts with all that witch doctor stuff.”
Hiroshi never opened her eyes, only muttering, “The spirits of earth are unhappy. Many rumblings…Fujiyama sends fire…I try to calm them.”
“Yeah? Well those spirits aren’t the only ones unhappy. Stuff those beads before I stuff them down your throat.”
Taj Singh was right behind them, scrolling a copy of the Bhagavad Gita on his wristpad monitor. “Lucy’s right…it can’t hurt to placate the spirits. We’re in their world now…Vishnu is angry…I sense it too. There are forces about us that we don’t understand.”
Reaves was about to reply but all talk ceased aboard Mole’s C deck, as the high wail of nanobotic activity came through the hull. At the same moment, the geoplane slowed noticeably and a pronounced shudder rolled through the hull.
“That’s it, then,” said Mighty Mite Barnes. She forced herself to remain calm, eyeing the hull frames warily. “We’re headed up.” The whole of C deck suddenly fell quiet.
An unmistakable creaking could be heard as the borer bit into the hard rock and Mole angled up toward the surface.
The assault plan called for Mole to surface near the base of the mountain that was Lions Rock, in fact, near the entrance to the Lions Rock Country Park. The first hour of boring took the geoplane into hard basaltic rock layers, to an intermediate depth of a hundred meters below the surface. Seismic charts had indicated a broad layer of the black volcanic rock underlay most of the Pearl River area and gave the geoplane a solid structure to tunnel through for nearly ten kilometers north.
Somewhere below Hong Kong Island, a few kilometers northwest of Junk Bay, the geos had determined that the basaltic layer thinned out, abutting inclusions of quartzite and shale, with magma channels embedded in the rock.
It was this transition zone, a subduction zone according to the geos, that posed the greatest risk to transit by the geoplane. The entire region was crisscrossed with fragile lava tubes and fracture faults in the rock, evidence (said the analysis) of billions of years of strain brought on by the collision of the Philippine and
Eurasian tectonic plates.
It was there that Mole would have to slow down and sound carefully ahead, taking extreme care not to let the borer loosen too much rock.
Even the slightest weakening could lead to a complete rupture and a cascade of rock plates shifting.
Johnny Winger had no wish to tempt Fate again.
“Borer on line at nearly one hundred percent,” Erromango reported. “We’re chewing through this rock like it was butter…a blistering three kilometers an hour.”
Winger acknowledged the report. “Tread system status?”
Rice, the DSO, checked the drive. “Tread drive engaged and operating fine, sir…no anomalies.”
“Clear sailing from here,” Winger said. He eyed the densitometer on the main panel. It read slightly more than a hundred meters below the surface. According to the profiler, Mole was traversing layers of extremely hard igneous rock, richly veined with inclusions of iron and magnesium. The layers formed a dense mass of some of the hardest rock on earth, in a zone of tremendous pressure caused by the northward movement of the Philippine plate against the Asian plate, a zone of grinding force and constant shifting and slipping.
It was also a zone of near constant seismic activity.
Mole plowed ahead for several hours, making steady progress along the first leg of their course. Four hours after the geoplane had entered the estuary, Anatoly Balderis announced a new navigation hack off the quantum coupler signal coming from Singapore base.
“We’re across New Territories now,” he reported. “Or rather underneath it. Inside target zone for final ascent…and on course.”
Winger yawned and stretched. He motioned to Galland, perusing on her wristpad a makeshift map of the Lions Rock complex from Quantum Corps Intelligence. “Take over, will you? I’m heading aft to see what’s in the Stores lockers. When’s our first turn?”
“At Tolo Harbor…two hours and twenty minutes away, if we stay on course at this speed. Profiler says we’ve got hard basalt all the way.”
“Good for tunneling,” Winger said as he ducked down through the access tube. “You want anything from the fridge?”
“Negative. Just get back up here as soon as you can, Wings. I like having extra eyes on the densitometer and the profiler. We may yet have to slam on the brakes before we get to the target… maybe alter course.”
“Maybe I’ve got more faith in ANAD than you. If there are any voids or faults out there, the borer bots are programmed to stop boring immediately. We’ve got fail-safe cutoffs this time.”
“Maybe,” said Galland, “but ANAD’s been just ornery enough lately to make me feel a little uneasy.”
Winger disappeared down the access tube. He decided to check out the rest of the detail, sacked out in varying stages of sleep and undress on C deck.
“Welcome to the nursery, Lieutenant.” Mighty Mite Barnes had a drop cloth out on the deck; she was oiling and cleaning a disassembled coilgun carbine while behind her, Sheila Reaves grunted through several hundred crunches. “Want to play with us?”
Winger surveyed the berthing deck. Half of Tectonic Sword’s assault force was here: Gibbs, McReady, Barnes, Hiroshi and Reaves. The Japanese CQE was potting a miniature bonsai plant below her bunk, lovingly tending its leaves and branches. The assault troops from the abandoned Badger had sacked out one deck further aft.
“Maybe later, kids. Your gear all checked out?”
Hiroshi sat in a semi-circle of wooden talismans and figurines, casting spells and hexes, when she was finished with her plants. “Fujiyama is not happy, Lieutenant. Spirits are troubled…see how the light falls on his face…see the shadows? Omens…very bad omens….”
“Hey, that’s why they issue us coilguns, Loos,” said Barnes. She held up the just-oiled barrel of the coilgun, its magnetic head gleaming. “This is what we do to bad omens.”
“Atomize the bastards…that’s all I got to say,” snarled Reaves, toweling off after her three hundredth rep. Sweat rolled down her cheeks. “Hey, LT…how long we gotta live in this bug coffin? Gives me the creeps. What are we, ants or something?”
Winger smiled. At least, his troopers were in good spirits. “Just Quantum Corps troopers on a mission, Sheila. Get as much shuteye as you can. In about—“ he checked the chronometer on his wristpad—“ an hour and thirty minutes, Mole will surface. That’s when the real fun begins.”
“Do you think we can really surprise ‘em?” asked McReady, the red-haired CEC tech. He had his hypersuit helmet off, trying to re-position the padding inside for a better fit.
Winger shrugged. “Intel says Red Hammer won’t be defending an approach from underground. Me…I’m not so sure. Q2 thinks they don’t know we’ve optimized ANAD for boring. But I’d be willing to bet they’ve got a few surprises in store for us. But they don’t have ANAD and they don’t know when or where we’re—“
Winger stopped in mid-sentence. A perceptible shudder had shaken the normally smooth thrummm of the geoplane’s treads. Before he could continue, the rolling shudders grew to a sudden jerk, as Mole ground to a halt. The treads went silent, but only for a few seconds.
“Oh, shit—“
“We’re moving…feel it? We’re sliding, left…left and downward—“
Just then, Mole’s hull was slammed hard as if they had hit something and the screech of tortured metal sounded from somewhere aft. The geoplane shook violently, knocking Winger to his knees.
“Cover yourselves…it’s a fault!” He crawled on hand and knees, back into the access tube, and scrambled forward to the command deck, as the pitching and shaking grew more violent, as if the geoplane were caught in an underground landslide. Hard bangs slammed the hull as the tremor amplitude increased. Mole was taking a hell of a beating and Winger hauled himself up the tube as fast as the pitching deck would allow. He burst onto B deck and was immediately thrown against the bulkhead.
“Secure the borer!” he yelled out.
“Already done!” Galland came back. “Treads are off line too—“
They both held on for a few seconds as Mole shimmied and shook like a wet dog. Then, as suddenly as it had started, the violent tremor stopped. The compartment was silent, the air thick with dust, as the geoplane hull creaked and groaned under renewed stress.
“Just your average strike-slip fault movement,” muttered Kruizenga, holding his breath and scanning his profiler.
“Damage report!” Winger got on the 1MC. “All decks, report!”
Bit by bit, the reports came back to B deck: no significant damage, a few cuts, bruises and lacerations but no casualties.
Galland checked her instruments. “No flags or anomalies. No cautions or warnings. Looks like Mole’s good to go.”
“Where are we now, Kurt?”
The geotech consulted his profiler and stratigraphic maps. “One hundred and six meters below the surface, Lieutenant. Directly below Lions Rock.”
“Injun Country,” said Galland softly.
“Start the ascent,” Winger ordered. On the 1MC, he made the announcement. “All hands to battle stations.”
Operation Tectonic Sword was about to enter its final approach phase.
The ascent came off without a glitch. Mole tunneled upward on a course of zero seven five degrees, through hard igneous rock layers, at an average speed of one kilometer per hour.
The stratigraphic and topo maps all indicated the same underground terrain for Mole’s borer to chew through: amorphous basaltic lava smashed northward and compressed over hundreds of millions of years along the margins of the great Philippine and Eurasian plates. Extremely hard and dense, composed of a geochemical stew of magnesium and calcium oxides, the rock layers made perfect tunneling material, save for the fault and fracture zones, which were unstable enough to try and avoid.
Gabrielle Galland took a navigation hack off the quantum signal grid broadcast by Singapore base and announced her findings.
“Sounding structures directly above us, Wings. Twenty meters and some change.”
“Show me,” he said.
Galland pointed to the profiler. It showed a simulated elevation view of the rock layers surrounding the geoplane, overlaid on a live, high-resolution sat image of the terrain seen from space. Mole’s position was indicated with a flashing star.
“We’re here—“she pointed with her finger. “That’s the bottom cavern of the complex, dead center of all the entanglement waves that Q2 triangulated. Red Hammer Incorporated. I make the distance at about twenty meters.”
Winger nodded. “Stop the ascent. Rock layers?”
Galland checked the stratigraphy maps. “Pyroxene and feldspar, mostly. Same stuff ANAD’s been boring though for the last six hours. There is a small fracture in one plate…looks harmless enough.”
“Give it a wide berth,” Winger ordered. “I don’t want any tremors now...at least, not until we’re in place and ready.”
Julie Rice, the DSO, complied and steered the geoplane level to the surface. B deck inclined ever so slightly, while Winger made the announcement to the crew over the 1MC.
“This is Winger…listen up…we’re directly below our surface objective. We’re going to full battle stations on my command…button up your tin cans and load up your weapons. We’ll be at the jump-off point in thirty minutes.” He sounded the alarm klaxon, which echoed through Mole’s hull…three sharp blasts on the horn.
Soon, bodies were stirring and scurrying through all seven decks.
“Come on!” yelled Mighty Mite Barnes. “Get your fat asses in gear! We’ve got atomic butt to kick!”
“Small is all!” someone yelled from inside the access tube.
“I can’t wait to get the hell out of this big friggin’ metal condom!” shouted Gibby, as he snapped down his hypersuit helmet.
“Yeah, Sarge…we’ll squirt you out like you know what—hey! Gimme another MOB canister…I’m going in with everything I can hang on this tin can.”
The next phase of the mission would be the riskiest. Once the geoplane had reached the jump-off point, near the surface, Winger would command the borer to cease operation. From this point, ANAD would be re-configged and commanded to exit the hull and form a protective barrier around Mole, in an attempt to shield the assault team from what would come next.