could clear the inhibits and unlock the doors before the electron beam injectors went off.
Winger flailed at the swarm with one hand while he punched buttons: Comm link to SELECT…Program to FBS--Fly-by-Stick. Launch would be opposed insertion. Active defense…ISR Mode. That stood for Intelligence-Surveillance-Reconnaissance.
At last, he was done.
"ANAD master fully re-configged!" called out D’Nunzio. "Primed to go, Wings!"
"Launch all groups!" Winger shouted. "Airborne counternano.”
D’Nunzio and Winger coordinated the insertion, while Burke hustled the other cadets away from the affected gurney. They'd be secure enough for the time being. Walz was down, being nursed by Barnes and another cadet.
ANAD was ready. With a whoosh of compressed air, the bot master ejected itself into the air, right into the midst of the enemy swarm.
"Full imager?" D’Nunzio yelled back.
"Do it!" Winger commanded. "But run active defense first--it's programmed. We've got to give these critters something else to chew on--besides us!"
“Mr. Winger—“ it was Lieutenant Burke, “—fallback to the door…the injectors will be going off any second now…that’s an order!”
But Winger wasn’t listening. Instead, he was concentrating on driving ANAD right for the master bot of the airborne swarm.
A thermal bloom nearly shorted out Winger's eyepiece as the ANAD swarm defaulted to maximum-rate replication. Active defense Alpha was a set program they had run scores of times at Table Top Mountain. It called for the ANAD swarm to replicate basic structure at the fastest possible rate, then seek and destroy all non-self devices it could detect. ANAD's assembly speed was set at the best possible rate for fighting through van der Waals forces and cleaving atom bonds.
"Got an image, Wings!" D’Nunzio struggled to see her eyepiece through the dust churned up by the furious enemy swarm. "I'm porting it to the net now…EMs are shaky…interference from the enemy, looks like."
Eyepieces were useless. The thermal bloom and dust exploded into a ball of fire, as ANAD swelled rapidly in an enveloping cloud, engaging the airborne OPFOR swarm in a set piece battle of ionizing electrons and atom groups. The white-hot heat expanded like a small nova, almost pulsating as the front lines churned back and forth; ANAD's exponential armies rallying to the assault, tangling with uncounted trillions of enemy mechs.
Winger ported the image straight to his eyepiece. Deeno was right; as the image settled in, it looked like a churning, frothy mess. The air grew thick and black with molecular debris.
"Need to grab one of these critters," Winger muttered to himself. The exercise called for the cadets to grab a sample of the enemy. He pressed a few keys--noting the pressure of the enemy assault against his skin and helmet seemed to have lessened a bit--he took direct Fly-by-Stick control of a small platoon of replicants. If I can just surround one…damn…like trying to corral a herd of bees.
He used the twin control sticks on the panel to zero in on a detached group of mechs, scooting away from the main axis of attack, swirling near a corner of the room. What the hell were they up to? Were they under remote control? Was there some controller miles away joysticking this swarm through the assault? There was no way to tell.
Winger dove his ANADs at the group and executed a perfect entrapment maneuver, neatly bracketing the swarm in a classic octahedral lattice. The mechs pressed outward, buzzing angrily, trying to break out of the lattice, probing for weak spots, but Winger had quickly reinforced his scout group with extra ANADs.
"Gotcha!" he exulted. Now they'd have something to take back to the lab and show off to Burke and Walz and all the other cadets.
But his triumph was short-lived. Even as he commanded the ANAD lattice to propel itself back toward containment, shepherding the trapped mechs, fending off steady probes of the bond breakers, one of the enemy devices separated itself from the main body. In the imager view, Winger stared in horror as the nanomech suddenly shed all its outer atom group armament in a puff of molecular debris and executed a daring fold/collapse, imploding in on itself in a flurry of segment cleavage and destruction. Whirling on picowatt propulsors like a mad dervish, a blurry core of atoms exploded out of the sleet of fragments and rocketed through the lattice like a bullet. In a fraction of a second, it was through the lattice and gone, off the field of view.
Johnny Winger could only shake his head at the maneuver. They'd wargamed tactical escapes from all kinds of capture maneuvers but nothing like this. It didn't even seem possible.
Ten to one that was the master replicant, he told himself. Programmed to evade capture anyway it could, or commit atomic 'suicide' if it couldn’t. He couldn't help but wonder if he wasn't jousting with an unseen human controller somewhere nearby.
Lieutenant Burke managed to contact someone outside, ordering the beam injectors to be disabled before they went off automatically and fried everything inside the chamber. He slumped against the wall, eyed the nearest injector array and wiped sweat from his forehead.
“That was too close…” he muttered. He made sure the other cadets were huddled against the heavy door, then went back to Winger and D’Nunzio.
The skirmish continued for another five minutes, but Burke could tell the ANADs were steadily losing the battle. Group by group, the ANADs were steadily and surely overwhelmed by sheer numbers. He began to notice increasing resistance to movement again, a clear indication the rogue mechs had re-established themselves inside the containment room. Soon the high-freq whine became audible again.
"Lieutenant, Deeno, I can't hold them back!"
D’Nunzio, five feet away and nearer the door, had already lost all servos in her hypervest. She lay on her side, virtually helpless, still fingering her own wristpad, pecking out counter-attacks against the stiffening mech resistance.
"I've lost servo power myself! Help me up--"
Johnny Winger clawed his way around the bed, where their anaesthetized monkey lay pale and still, enveloped in a gray swirling mass, and went to his buddy's side. He wrestled her up to a kneeling position.
"--Jesus, it's like water polo…trying to move an arm's almost impossible--"
Burke could see the situation was getting hopeless. "Just mindless replication. They're going to smother us, if they don't eat us first—we’ve got to get everybody out of here, then blast this place with electron sleet!”
D’Nunzio was tapping keys without effect on her wristpad. "I'm not linked to ANAD--"
"--I lost him," Winger admitted. "I was trying to snag a master…thought I had him but he slipped out…damnedest thing I ever saw--"
D’Nunzio finally gave up on her wristpad and concentrated on standing up.
Winger helped her get upright. "This is no good—Deeno, Lieutenant, I can't hack fast enough to counter-attack. This stuff is unbelievable…somebody's really juiced up the rep rate. If it's an ANAD, they've really been tinkering under the hood."
"There's nothing left to do, Mr. Winger…we've got to get out of here…soon as these containment doors cycle open.’
Just then, the door seals hissed and heavy motors drove the doors slowly open. They had to get out fast, before the OPFOR swarm moved. “Training detachment…fall back! Fall back at once! Outside now, on the double!"
They slogged, crawled and limped toward the door, through spongy mist a few paces and then made another call. When all cadets had exited and counted off, Burke ordered the containment chamber to be sealed again.
The corridor outside was thick with hypersuited troopers. A Sergeant Betters was in command. Betters stabbed a button on a wall panel and the heavy doors swung shut in ponderous slow motion. From inside, the enemy swarm was already on the move, drifting steadily toward them like a slow-motion miniature thunderstorm.
Betters took charge as soon as everyone was clear. "French, Guyson, front and center! Fire short bursts of RF! See if you can clear us a bubble or a zone around this hal
l! I'm not sure we’re totally clear here…I don’t want even an atom outside containment! And make it quick…we’ve got injured …infested! We’ve got to get them out of here.”
Seconds later, the drone of a HERF pulse gun blasted through the corridors surrounding Containment Chamber C4. A faint breeze of momentarily stunned nanomechs clattered against Winger's hypervest. A few bots had escaped…there could always be more. When the second pulse shook the building and Winger felt the thermal of high-frequency RF wash over them, he willed himself into motion, half carrying, half-dragging Dana Tallant down the corridor.
"Fall back now! To the street, outside…everybody--on the double…DPS, give 'em another shot!"
Another drone-snap of radio energy and another wave of heat. Winger slogged through the mist, kicking and pummeling blindly, pulling his load with him.
At last, blinded and disoriented, he stumbled through the corridors and the chaos of the lobby, making it through the security doors and stumbling, falling, headlong with his load into the grass outside.
"One more pulse, DPS!” Betters yelled. “Max power…leave it on and let it burn out! And get your tails in gear, folks! Get away from the building! We’re gonna MOB the whole place!”
Maybe it'll just burn itself out, Winger hoped, though he knew deep down inside that could never happen.
A half dozen crewtracs had assembled outside Containment, snorting