***Increment counter for next carbon group***
The swarm of ANAD mechs closed with the OPFOR master bot swarm and flung themselves against the enemy.
Newly armed, ANAD seized a phosphor group on the nearest mech's effector and twisted atoms until the bonds broke. Liberating thousands of electron volts, the disrupter zapped the enemy mech and shattered its outer shell, ripping off probes left and right. The enemy shuddered and spun with the pulse, then re-engaged to fight off another bond snap. It was a maneuver Winger had practiced a dozen times in the sim tank at Table Top.
Throughout the monkey's tegmentum, trillions of ANAD replicants duplicated the same tactic.
"Take that!" Winger was exultant, twisting his sticks left and right. His fingers flew over the controls, managing config, pulling more molecules to add shielding, all the while fighting off thrusts and slashes from the enemy mechs.
The cytoplasm churned and frothed with furious combat.
Yet unseen by anyone, indeed completely unprogrammed by Lieutenant Burke and the trainers, a small force of OPFOR mechs had detached from the main formation. Detected but not noticed, the force exited the ventral tegmentum and beat its way at flank speed toward the optic nerve of the monkey’s brain, a bundle of fibers in its visual cortex near the front of its brain. Passing the Nodes of Ranvier, the force silently cruised outward along the fiber bundle, steadily closing on the inner membranes of the macaque's eyeball.
It was the quickest way for any mech to exit the brain.
Winger and D’Nunzio stared at the speckling blooms of light winking on and off…the imager captured the sound and fury of nanomech battle deep inside the monkey's immobilized skull and converted the acoustic waves to visual. It was like watching some mad kaleidoscope of swirling dots, washed with brilliant daubs of color.
"Like a thousand battles of Verdun," Winger said. He’d read about great battles for an essay in a History course, just last week. "All in a space the size of a walnut. Incredible--"
"Reading high heat signature," D’Nunzio reported. "Vascular grid's registering something like a hundred thousand picojoules, and rising."
Winger acknowledged the figure. "This fellow's out like a slab of stone and he's emitting like a supernova." He refreshed the imager with more data. "Quick count, Deeno…look at that, will you? ANAD's pulsing the plasma and the density's dropping."
D’Nunzio saw the data. "Fewer mechs, maybe? Or a tissue leak?"
"Hard to say at the moment. Maybe ANAD's holding its own. Sure wish we could get an image--"
"When the dust settles, Cadet Winger." Lieutenant Burke peered in, watching the same density readings Winger had pointed out. Sure enough, the numbers were falling. The original spike signaling the first thrashing moments of battle had now leveled off--all replications were done and the monkey's brain was thick with nanowarriors swarming to the melee--yet the density was steadily dropping.
Burke frowned. That wasn’t in the scenario. What the hell--
And still unnoticed, the small detached force of OPFOR mechs had reached its objective. Slowing to transit the narrowing tube of interstitial fluid, the force passed through the lachrymal duct at the corner of the monkey's eye and surfaced like a fleet of miniature subs through the corneal film to the outer surface of the eyeball. There they floated for a few seconds, until the replication order came.
A few dozen centimeters below the small fleet, uncounted trillions of OPFOR mechs had been cleaved and slashed into atoms before the enemy master had managed to stabilize the battlefront. Then, for several minutes afterward, ANAD and OPFOR stalked each other relentlessly, drifting on brief propulsor bursts, sounding the fluid swamp with acoustic jolts, then listening, always listening, in a deadly game of hide and seek. Both forces were exposed, both had suffered massive losses of replicants. Each sought refuge in the dendritic jungle of the monkey's ventral tegmentum. One misstep, one maneuver too far could be fatal. A billion billion times smaller than their submarine ancestors, who had prowled the oceans like predators stalking prey, OPFOR and ANAD drifted silently across a cranial sea, scant microns from each other, hidden yet ever alert, waiting for that one chance to close and dismember the enemy forever.
Johnny Winger had somehow managed to massage the imager enough to fine tune its resolution. A few adjustments made, he coaxed a grainy image of the cranial plasma and axon fibers crisscrossing the terrain. Then he started hunting again.
"Deeno, I've got the strangest feeling," he admitted. "Like I'm dueling with a very keen intelligence here—something not quite expected--"
Lieutenant Burke admitted the same thing, to himself. He wondered, maybe, just maybe, if the exercise ought to be stopped here but he was curious to see what this Winger fellow would do when faced with the unexpected…scuttlebutt around Table Top said Winger had some kind of preternatural feel for these things.
The hunt went on for several minutes. Taking a fix from the vascular grid, Winger navigated the monkey's Islet of Duchin and cruised in expanding circles through jungles of thick axons, stopping from time to time to listen, occasionally sounding the debris for telltale pulses.
It was damned frustrating but Winger tried not to show it. He'd tried several tactics to find out what OPFOR was doing to the limbic system, but this swarm was smarter and more aggressive than he expected, seemingly always one step ahead of ANAD. When Winger tried to outmaneuver, the enemy swarm countered. Every maneuver seemed to be anticipated; it was quickly evident that this bugger was programmed to defend itself and wouldn't give up control of its host without a fight. And to make matters worse, he'd been unable to grab an enemy mech for analysis. The exercise rules called for ANAD to capture the master bot and Winger intended to do just that.
"Nothing, Deeno," he said. "It's like he's just disappeared."
"Maybe ANAD already bagged his target."
Winger figured that to be unlikely. "Anything else on the vascular grid?"
It was Lieutenant Burke who saw the pressure spike from the monkey’s eye, a fraction of a second before the swarm ballooned into the room.
"Ah…Mr. Winger, something seems to be--"
"LOOK OUT--!!" Deeno's scream filled the examining room.
No one was quite sure when the first effects of the attack were felt. The debriefs later seemed to converge on the two cadets of Team Bravo, Mighty Mite Barnes and Hoyt Gibbs, both of them working hard to tweak their own ANAD's templates for the next phase of the engagement.
Both training officers Burke and Walz noticed it right away; a shrill keening high-freq tone, almost beyond human hearing, yet irritating in a vaguely unsettling way. Both wore hypervests, partial rigs that provided some protection, and their sensors registered the attack right away. Barnes’ panicked distress call from the corner of the room as the nanomechs bored into her rig and arms would linger in everybody's memory for a long time. Winger’s engineer, Deeno D'Nunzio, reported a different effect--just as panicky--when she found she couldn't squirm away along the floor as fast as she wanted to…by then, the OPFOR swarm was thick enough to form a barely visible fog, almost a blanket, muffling the training theater with exponentially thickening mist. It was something you could barely see but every sensor and caution alarm was going off all over the place and you sure as hell could feel the resistance to movement.
"Mass assault swarm!" somebody yelled over the crewnet. It was Dana Tallant's voice. She was already on one knee, swatting madly at the whizzing, spinning cloud of assembler mechs that had engulfed her.
"Bond breakers!" yelled another cadet, An Nguyen. He had been wrestling a containment pod into position beside his gurney when the eruption came.
"They've gone airborne!" Johnny Winger recognized the scenario, too late. They'd wargamed it enough times at Table Top. "Fall back…fall back! Lieutenant, maybe we should go to TACREP 1!"
Burke and Walz were cycling the chamber doors, but emergency inhibits had already lock
ed them down. Now, if they could just get the beam injectors powered up--
Tactical Response One was already loaded in the consoles. Burke gave the okay and Winger pressed a few buttons on his wrist keypad and pushed through the thick spongy mist, struggling hard to make it to the injector console and help the Lieutenant.
They didn't have long to act. TACREP called for the affected unit to do an emergency opposed-force setup of the ANAD system. Retrieve the master, get containment going, re-establish comm links, and counter-program like hell to beat back the assault before it consumed everything. And this was supposed to be a training exercise.
Something had gone horribly wrong.
"Re-config IC!" Winger yelled. He worked with several others to get Nguyen to the perimeter of the chamber, away from the worst of the swarm.
"Re-configging--done now!" D’Nunzio called out. "She's ready to go." Nguyen was okay for the moment, Winger noted. Ditto the other cadets, and Lieutenant Walz. The brunt of the swarm was forming on the other side of the room.
Winger hunkered down on the floor, covering himself as best he could, to punch out commands on his keypad. Beneath his knees, the floor itself writhed and hummed like a thing alive. He could feel the high-freq vibration through his field boot. It wouldn't be long before he'd have to ditch the IC and retreat the hell out of there.
If they