Chapter 4
“Operation Himalaya Strike”
Puranpur, India
November 29, 2049
0530 hours
The Lama Zohar hadn’t seen such a gathering since the day the monastery opened twenty five years ago. He stood on the stone parapets of the ancient dun-colored building, originally built during the days of Alexander the Great and watched a flock of black lifters streak by overhead, then settle to earth by the entrance to the abandoned Pura River ruby mine. At the same time the lifters came, a convoy of military trucks and transports roared through the village on their way up the meandering gravel road to the same Pura River mine entrance two kilometers away.
All the trucks bore the blue earth logo of UNIFORCE. Decades after Pura River had been abandoned, the Army suddenly and without warning had acquired a keen interest in the old mine. Zohar wondered why.
As he watched the assembling of military men and equipment at the head of the rugged valley, Lama Zohar carefully poured a small pouch of black seeds into a bowl on the edge of the parapet. He made a swirling pattern in the seeds with his fingers, mumbled a soft incantation to the Enlightened One, then poured the seeds back into his pouch, repeating the process several times.
A nearby teacher, a rinpoche clad in saffron robes from a distant monastery, observed Zohar carefully. The Lama explained, over the racket of the lifters: “One must endure the boredom of repetition eight times, before the natural energy of the seeds will come forth. Only then will you free yourself from want.”
The rinpoche, a bespectacled and wrinkled old skeleton, nodded wisely. It was true. All things possessed their own life energy. One had but to still one’s mind to hear the rhythm of nature’s frequency. The teacher closed his eyes and willed himself to utter silence, slowing his breathing and heart rate with fierce concentration.
Only the distant hum of lifter jets and a growing sense of foreboding interrupted the rinpoche’s meditation.
For Mighty Mite Barnes, the assault force now gathering along the hard, pebbly banks of the Pura River was also quite a sight. First Nano had veetolled in on a squadron of lifters from Quantum Corps East at Singapore. All of their gear was now being offloaded by men and packbots, marshaled in neat rows outside the mine entrance.
The trucks and tracks were UNIFORCE motorized units, specifically UNIFORCE 1st South Asian Brigade, 2nd Company, or 2/1 UNIFORCE South, as it was known to the soldiers who manned the column. The commanding officer was a small-boned Indian officer with a high forehead, sunburned skin and a toothy smile, Captain Vanilu.
Vanilu loudly supervised the deployment of 2/1, spreading his men and their robot totes around the perimeter of the valley, cordoning off the Pura River at the monastery on the south end and at a narrow pass in the higher elevations to the north.
“We make you a secure perimeter,” Vanilu explained. “Keep the villagers out, while you set up.”
Villagers, yes, thought Barnes. But 2/1 UNIFORCE had no nanobot swarm defense embedded with it. For that mission, 1st Nano would be on its own.
Time to put ANAD to work.
“Fall out!” Barnes ordered and the three nearest lifters disgorged their crews into combat formation. Barnes counted them off, as the troopers scattered to their duties around the landing zone.
Operation Himalaya Strike was about to get underway.
“Full hypersuits!” Barnes yelled over the crewnet. “Get those tin cans on and zipped up! Get the gear staged forward to the mine entrance. Al, you and Gibby help with the geoplanes.” Barnes headed off from the landing zone to see about the offloading of Gopher and Mole from the cargo lifters. It was a ticklish operation, looking for all the world like huge black spiders hatching long, cylindrical eggs.
“Oh, boy,” muttered Nicole Simonet, as she snapped her helmet down and secured her own suit. Servos whirred as she flexed her limbs. “I just can’t wait to climb into my garbage can.”
“It’s for your own good,” said Mary Swanson, as she struggled with the HERF guns, rocking one back and forth until it could be hoisted onto a packbot for transfer. The HERF would be loaded into Mole’s tail pod, where most of their equipment and munitions were stored for the mission. “You want to crawl like a worm underground for two hundred kilometers without one?”
Simonet wisecracked, “I don’t want to crawl underground for two hundred nanometers. And the only worm I want to see is in a tall cool glass of tequila.”
For the next several hours, 1st Nano deployed its equipment around the entrance to the mine and checked out the two geoplanes. Squatting on the river banks, Mole and the newest Gopher looked like huge caterpillars, their circumferential treads squealing in the crisp early morning air. Barnes was already on the command deck of Gopher, flexing its articulating grapple arms and wearing in the treads, readying the geoplane for its critical mission. General Kincade had chosen Hoyt Gibbs, the detachment’s CC2, to pilot Mole.
Barnes decided to launch ANAD before they got underway. It was against all regs, but she didn’t care. The tiny assembler seemed to behave better when it was allowed out of containment, congregating in flickering translucent swarms in odd corners of the geoplanes.
***it’s good to be out, Control…ANAD is currently in State 1 config, receiving signals on all channels…how do you read me?***
“I read you just fine, ANAD,” Barnes said, as she climbed up the ladder and into Gopher. “Just stay out of the way and don’t touch anything, okay?”