a defensive response."
"Wings--" the voice was Barnes', from the rear van, on the tactical circuit. "--we may have already triggered something--I'm porting it to your eyepiece on the crewnet--" She was already tuning the Superfly seeker to a new band. Static fuzzed the eyepiece and Winger momentarily shutdown the link. "--I'm reading acoustic disturbance…ground level or a few meters overhead, under ten decibels, but something's definitely there."
"EM, Mite? Thermal?"
"Just tickling Superfly's seeker. First it's there…then it isn't--"
Winger had a bad feeling. His neck hairs were standing up. And he had just ordered ANAD to return through Banikaiyan Mountain.
"Hub to ANAD! Hub to ANAD…belay that last order! Get the hell out of that building, anyway you can. Get going right now!"
Gibby was uneasy, studying the IC. "What is it, Skipper?"
"Just a gut feeling…somehow…I don't know how--we've been discovered. Somebody--or some thing's tipped Red Hammer off--"
The IC1 was monitoring ANAD on his panel. "--ANAD's away, sir…just regrouped and exited the outer shell of the structure…airborne and en route bearing zero eight five. ETA…" he did some quick calculating…"--nine minutes."
"Max rep," Winger ordered. "I've got a bad feeling--" He moved over to Gibby's station.
"Wings--" It was Barnes again. Her voice was thick. "--whatever they are--here they come!"
It was too late to get into their hypersuits. And there wasn't enough room. "DPS, bring Superfly in tighter. Make a screen…head 'em off. ANAD's still eight minutes away, replicating like crazy. Maybe we can hold 'em off long enough--" He looked around the van. "Everybody get down and cover yourself with something NOW! We may get a breach--"
Winger worked with Gibby, massaging controls, tapping keys, managing ANAD's approach, making the assembler swarm ready to confront the enemy nano.
Somehow ANAD been detected.
"Come on…come on…come on!--"Winger breathed, willing the swarm to close the distance. It was a race now: Red Hammer mechs swooping down off the mountain, flowing around the convoy of vans still parked on the side of the road and the ANAD swarm streaking from the compound as fast as their picowatt propulsors could move them.
"--getting confirmation now!" Gibby yelled. "ANAD's blowing up--template T-1--coming in hot and hard…less than fifty meters. Must've picked up a tailwind." Twenty meters over their heads, drifting in like dust on a faint mountain breeze, ANAD was multiplying, bagging atoms and making replicas, accelerating mass at an exponential rate.
Gibby was already crouching down in his seat. "This one's gonna be close--"
Winger was already helping Deeno and Delforza and his 2nd Nano guys and Nguyen grab some protection, a seat cover, a cushion, cargo webbing--anything. "Make yourselves small, guys. Small as you can."
From below a console, Deeno's black eyes narrowed. "Just let me at 'em…let me kick some nano ass, sir--"
"Later---DPS, what's up?"
D’Nunzio was already tracking the swarm filling in around the convoy. "Enemy nano, sir! I was tracking with Superfly, engaging, but they got him. Shredded the whole force--just like that. I'm reading about a hundred meters north, toward that cliff we saw driving up, below the fort, bearing two-five-oh degrees, tight formation, closing at about a meter per second. Can't tell what config yet--"
Winger did another quick mental calculation…at a meter per second, they had about six minutes to intercept with ANAD. And hunker down for the assault.
"DPS," he called out over the circuit. "Are we probing? I need some idea of what we're dealing with here."
Mighty Mite Barnes no longer had aerial imagery from Superfly. The microflyer swarm had already been shredded by the oncoming enemy force. Instead, she used the steerable sideband pulser, sweeping electromagnetic fingers around the convoy. The pulser swept through the cloud of Red Hammer nanomechs and returned a rough structural outlines of the devices.
"Coming in now. I'll patch it through to the IC…." She touched a few icons on her wristpad and the data was squirted over to the lead van.
Winger studied the signal. The pulse had come back with a rough image of the enemy force disposition, as well as a few details. Could be HNRIV…maybe even a clone…but they didn’t have configs to defend against an unknown like HNRIV…he fed the details to the config and started tapping out commands to fill in some gaps in ANAD's structure, modifying his own config on the fly. Inside of a minute, he'd hacked out a design for ANAD that might do. It would have to do. Once the enemy closed on their position, ANAD wouldn't get a second chance.
"Change config," he told Gibby. "Do it now!"
Gibbs sent the command. Twenty meters over their heads, trillions of ANAD replicants received the same instructions: alter configuration to this design…grab atoms…cleave this group…fold here…build lattice there…the air churned with furious activity.
Winger knew it was time to ring the bell. "Disperse the swarm. Prepare to engage," he said quietly.
Less than fifty meters away, directly over a sandstone cliff on the front slopes of Banikaiyan Mountain, the hillside was suddenly bathed in an unearthly pale blue light as vast but unseen armies clashed. The gotterdammerung pulsed like a flickering aurora as the swarms collided head-on.
The entire battle lasted four minutes.
From the beginning, Winger and Gibby saw that ANAD had been weakened somehow. Perhaps it was the trip through the solid rock of the mountain. Perhaps it was the config Winger had hurriedly hacked out. Perhaps it was something else.
Gibbs was the first to report enemy mechs inside their defensive perimeter.
A small segment of the Red Hammer force had detached and surrounded the lead van, almost as if the mechs were under remote human control. Gibbs and Winger both felt the air crackle like a million stinging needles had fallen on them.
"Here they come!" Gibbs yelled.
"Fold up!" Winger ordered to everyone in the van. "Make yourself as small as possible!"
It was a self-defense tactic they had tried with ANAD before but it seldom worked. Somehow, Red Hammer had found them, caught them unprepared, trying to recover the recon swarm. Winger squeezed as tightly into the space below the IC panel as he could. It had been his decision to recover ANAD back through the mountain. Maintain operational security--that was the rationale. Now it looked like a terrifically bad decision.
Red Hammer had been waiting in the folds and crags of the mountaintop all the time. He could easily lose the whole unit if ANAD couldn't fight them off.
Old Ironpants won’t like me losing his ANAD master in the middle of the desert.
One of Delforza’s men, Corporal Laval’s voice, did the trick. He screamed in agony as enemy mechs filtered inside the van and fell on his position, forward at the mobile TinyTown bay.
"arrrggghhh!…HELP--HELP ME!!…THEY'RE BURNING--!" Laval couldn't take it any longer; he clawed at his face and arms, then burst out of the van, and tore off down the road toward the bridge, arms flailing at invisible tormentors. He didn't even make it to the other side. In the mist and the shadows, they heard him stumble…the splash came ten seconds later. He'd dived from the bridge headfirst, ten meters, into the swirling waters of the Niger River tributary.
Winger had had enough. This was his fault. He was damned if he'd let the Detachment be chewed up on his watch….
"DPS! Mighty Mite…get your HERF guns set up! Full power…all azimuth…blanket this whole area!"
"Inside the vans, Wings?" She was already hustling to get the radio-frequency weapon ready. "We don't have protective gear…HERF'll fry every living thing to ashes…inside these vans--"
"Do it!" Winger knew full well the weapon could permanently damage their hearing, even collapse a man's central nervous system at full power. But he had no choice. HERF would shatter the Red Hammer formation too. They needed some kind of shielding and fast.
Once HERF was up, they could re-capture ANAD and get the hell out of Dodge.
Seconds later, Barnes had the HERF gun powered up. "Weapon is enabled, sir!"
"Fire!" Winger yelled. Already, he was feeling tongues of invisible fire, lapping at his neck and head. "Fire all around! Full bore! Let 'em have it!"
The entire van shook like a giant hand had slapped it, vibrating as the first pulse shot out, squeezing the air with a thunderclap of heat. A searing wave washed through the interior, as the bubble of radio waves expanded outward, frying and pulverizing everything in its path.
The first pulse was quickly followed by several more, each discharge hammering the convoy of vans with an invisible fist of energy. Johnny Winger screamed at the top of his lungs, trying to equalize pressure inside his head. His eyes and lungs burned. His skin crawled with fire, then tingled and crackled….
At best, he figured the HERF gun had bought them a few minutes.
"Detachment--!" he croaked out. "Secure the convoy! Get ANAD back into containment…Let's get the hell out of here!"
Even as Gibby was steering the ANAD force back toward the van, Nguyen was prepping TinyTown for capture. He initialized the cylinder, moved the vacuum tube into position by the rear door, while Gibby readied the master assembler for its harrowing trip off the mountain. Winger had already sent commands for all the remaining replicants to stay engaged with the Red Hammer force, sacrificing themselves so the humans could get away. Once the battle was