***Play the card, Johnny….my analysis of this simulation protocol indicates that playing the card will execute the INDRA operation when you play it…play it now***
Roy looked over with a lifted eyebrow. “Well, Jamison…we’re waiting. You going to keep us in suspense?”
Johnny Winger played the INDRA card, laying it down on the table with exaggerated care….
…and in that instant, the entire room, the entire cabin at Ford’s Creek exploded in light.
Seconds later, a deep rumbling could be heard beneath the dissolving floorboards. The wooden walls dematerialized, in a stuttering flicker of light, like a strobe, to be replaced by hard granitic walls.
It was a cave, Johnny realized. It was the Cave. At that same moment, he sent an encrypted coupler signal to the geoplane force outside the monastery.
It was time to execute Himalaya Strike Phase Two.
And the roof of the cave began collapsing on all of them….
The shaking and shuddering was the worst Barnes had ever experienced aboard a geoplane. When the tremors came, the first shocks were deceivingly light. Gopher began a series of gentle, rolling motions, shuddering like a slow-motion dog shaking off water after a dip in the ocean. But she knew that wouldn’t last.
The first wave hit seconds later and Gopher rang like a bell from the impact, as hammering waves pounded them, a giant fist smashing and driving them down, deeper.
“We’re going deeper!” Simonet yelled, eyeing the densitometer. “We’re sliding…down and to the right!”
“I see it!” Barnes had seen the same thing. The profiler showed what had happened, even as ANAD continued loosening more rock, even as the huge tectonic plates and faults shifted and heaved.
The geoplane had parked less than fifty meters below the valley floor, to avoid damage from mudslides and avalanches cascading down the mountainsides all around them.
Now, as the ground buckled and indescribably powerful forces rammed rock into rock, crumpling kilometers of Tibetan plateau like so much tissue paper, Barnes knew they could never hope to ride out the tremors in their current position.
“DSO, take us back topside!” she announced. Simonet pulled back on the yoke and Gopher’s treads angled upward, driving them through the shifting maelstrom toward the surface. There, at least, the geoplanes and their assault teams could avoid being smashed completely.
Like riding a roller coaster or a raft in the middle of a hurricane, the geoplane made her way arduously upward, boring through hard granitic and basaltic layers, until after what seemed like an eternity, Barnes saw the densitometer reading fall off sharply.
“We’re breaching, Nicole…kill the treads!”
Gopher lurched forward and her treads spun in the air, grabbing for traction. The hull of the geoplane burrowed out of its hole and wallowed in snowdrifts and falling dirt and mud for a few seconds, before settling to a stop. Loose rock and rubble pelted the top of the hull in a steady clatter.
Barnes and Simonet looked at each other. Barnes wiped sweat from her eyes.
“That was close.”
“Amen to that…ANAD must have found one hell of a fault zone.”
Even as she spoke, the tremors seemed to be subsiding. Gopher rolled and bucked for a few more moments, but the amplitude of the shocks was definitely falling off.
“That’s our cue,” Barnes said. She got on the crewnet. “The quakes are just about over. Prepare to exit, full combat load.”
One deck behind them, 1st Nano’s assault force erupted in a flurry of activity.
“All right, boys and girls…get your gear together and let’s get those pretty little asses moving!” Sergeant Al Glance growled as he clanked down his hypersuit helmet.
All around him, hypersuited nanotroopers flexed their boosted arms and legs, and the whir of suit boosters going off stirred a small tornado of dust in the compartment.
One by one, the troopers wriggled into the access tube and boosted their way aft toward the lockout chamber, each one holding his weapon in front as the lift pushed them along.
From outside, geoplane Gopher looked like a fat metallic walrus half burrowed in a snow bank. Rock and snow continued to cascade down the mountainsides as the lockout doors unsealed and swung open.
Then, one after another, the nanotroopers of the United Nations Quantum Corps fell out into the deep snow and lit off their suit boost to right themselves. With a speed and deftness born of countless hours of training, the DPS tech Mike Bodle along with troopers Swanson and Jung formed themselves up into a three-point perimeter defense, sighting in their coilguns on nearby approach paths. While that was occurring, Simonet and Glance extracted their HERF guns and registered them along the assault vector that would lead the team to the Paryang monastery, now dimly visible in the swirling snow dead ahead.
The Red Hammer command post was a shadowy jumble of stone parapets and squat towers, a faint orange-yellow glow emanating from the windows facing them. ANAD had already breached the surface ahead of them and was approaching the monastery.
Bodle lasered the range. “I make the distance at about two kilometers, from here.”
Barnes checked the timing of Winger’s encrypted coupler alert. “The Major inserted and activated INDRA at 1632 hours. Config Zero should be pre-occupied now, if all went well.”
“Let’s hope,” said Bodle.
Barnes gave the command. “Light off your suit boost and move out now…squad order!”
Scant meters ahead of the defiladed assault team, the front courtyard of the Paryang monastery was a snowy lightshow, as auroras collided overhead and a pulsating cloud of tiny pops and flashes growing more intense by the moment, billowed outward. Furious combat erupted between ANAD and Red Hammer’s nanoscale barrier, a throbbing blue-white flickering fog caught like a strobe in the falling snow, with the gargoyled front columns of Paryang lending a grotesque air to the battle.
“How’s it looking now, Mike?” Barnes asked Bodle.
The DPS tech slithered forward a few more meters to get a better reading, scaling a snow bank scarcely a dozen meters from the monastery’s front steps. He let his suit burrow him into the snow for protection.
He never saw the shadows of the Red Hammer squad skulking along behind the nearby columns, settling into ambush position below the steps. The blizzard had picked up and with all sensors trained on the swarms, the enemy troops had infiltrated the grounds unseen.
Just a momentary thermal spike on Barnes’ viewer—
“Watch out!”
A volley of pulse rounds erupted from the columns. Bodle was caught in the middle of the fusillade.
As the Detachment came under fire, the DPS1 disappeared in a bright flash of rubble and fire, his hypersuited body pulverized in crisscrossing bolts of high-mag flux.
Corporal Mike Bodle never had a chance.
“Let ‘em have it!” Barnes yelled over the crewnet, but she didn’t have to. The Detachment opened up on the enemy squad with everything they had.
They were soon joined by troopers from geoplane Mole, just surfaced a half a klick to their west.
Suddenly, a big thermal spike attracted Sergeant Mary Swanson’s attention. “Uh oh…what is this?” She studied the imagery on her helmet head-up display, reading off figures. “Skipper, thermals dead ahead, all wavelengths, major source right in front of us. Electromagnetics too…something’s happening—“
Before she could finish her sentence, Barnes called a quick halt to their advance. “Hold up!” she ordered.
The assault teams hunkered down in rising snow drifts.
The entire monastery complex had begun to fade out in the driving snow. Flashes of light surged in waves across the face of the structure, followed by pops and sparkles of more light.
“The whole damn thing—“
Barnes couldn’t believe her eyes. The monastery was dissolving right in front of them. The monastery complex was itself a huge nanob
otic structure. And it was reconfiguring right before their eyes, losing structure, almost melting.
“Jeez, will you look at that!” muttered Hoyt Gibbs, from the Mole.
The hairs on the back of Barnes’ neck stood up. “Get those HERF guns spooled up. All units, hold your position! And prep all ANAD systems for combat launch! We’ve got to get a barrier up quick!”
The crewmen of Gopher and Mole buried themselves against snow drifts, still feeling the tremors shaking the ground beneath them. Rock and snow cascaded down the sides of the steep hills surrounding Paryang Valley. One after another, the troopers cycled their shoulder capsules, initiating the launch sequence for their embedded ANADs. The reports came back rapid-fire to Barnes over the crewnet.
“My ANAD’s juiced and ready to go,” said Jung.
“Ditto me,” added Simonet.
“Just give the word, Skipper,” said Glance.
Barnes saw out of the corner of her eye that Nicole Simonet had slithered into better firing position with her HERF weapon, sighting into the centroid of the vast swarm along the top of an ice-flecked boulder. On the other side of their line of advance, just past a statue of Buddha that had already toppled to the ground, she saw two of Gibbs’ people from Mole do the same thing.
Barnes winced as more tremors hit, shaking the ground like a wet dog after a bath. “ANAD’s really doing a number down below,” she said to herself. Then she got on the crewnet to Gibbs, Mole’s commander.
“Gibby, we can’t stay here topside. It’s not safe.”
Gibbs agreed. “I’m not sending anyone into that. Jeez, I never saw anything like that.”
“The whole complex is one big swarm. Gibby, take your people and fall back to Mole. Get below and back off a few klicks.”
“What are you going to do, Mite?”
Barnes had an idea. “It’s a cinch Major Winger’s already inserted INDRA. Otherwise, I don’t think this monastery would be dissolving. Config Zero probably held the whole thing together.”
“There’s nothing more we can do here. We don’t have the firepower to take on a swarm this big, even if we ganged all our ANADs together.”
“I’m going after the Major.”
“What…in that hurricane? Mite, it’s a big bang. You’ll never make it through, even if you do locate him…Winger’s a dust flake in a tornado now…you can’t possibly detect any signatures in this.”
Barnes wasn’t so sure. Winger, the real Johnny Winger, had surprised people before. “Mary—“ she called up her Sensors and Surveillance tech, “can you get a fix on the Major’s coupler signal?”
Swanson crabwalked across snow and rock, stumbling and pitching forward as more tremors hit and came up to Barnes. “Very faint, Sergeant. Intermittent. Signal’s almost swamped in all this ruckus….Right now, I have something, but I couldn’t give you a bearing from it.”
“Try, Mary. We need a bearing. Gibby, get Mole out of here. I’m taking Gopher below ground. We’re going to maneuver as close to Winger’s location as Mary can put us, then surface, even if it’s inside that swarm, inside the monastery.”
Gibbs was incredulous. “Mite, are you insane? You’ll never survive inside that swarm…Gopher’ll be eaten alive, if you aren’t crushed first.”
“Gibby, stop arguing and get the hell out of here.”
For a long moment, the two mission commanders glared at each other, both thinking the same thing. It was the Code. Nanotroopers didn’t leave their buddies behind. Nobody got left behind.
Gibbs shrugged, accepting the finality of the decision. “I’ll put Mole a few hundred meters under you and back off one kilometer. I’m not leaving without you.”
“Agreed. Now, git--!”
Gibbs disappeared into the swirling snow. Over her crewnet, she heard Gibbs ordering his crew to fall back to the geoplane. Moments later, a higher pitched squeal—Mole’s treads engaging—could be heard over the howl of the wind. The ground rumbled as the geoplane clanked and coughed, and moments later, her borer head disappeared below a snow bank in a glowing puff of steam and snow.
“Fall back to Gopher!” Barnes commanded her own troopers. “Mary, lock onto the Major’s signal the best you can. We’re going inside that swarm…and coming up from belowground. Put us right underneath the Major and we’ll grab him and get the hell out of here.”
At that very moment, the entire face of a cliff at the far end of the valley sloughed off and avalanched to the ground in a great crashing roar of snow and rock. It was a surreal scene they witnessed as, one after another, the troopers of Himalaya Strike boarded Gopher’s lockout and slipped inside.
“Button her up and let’s get to burrowing,” Barnes ordered as she scrambled down the rocking and rolling central gangway toward B deck. “Bring the borer online now…soon as she’s up, engage treads and get us out of here!”
Moments later, the geoplane rumbled and creaked as she sank below ground. Just beyond her parking spot, another large statue of Buddha toppled over, thudding into the snow and pitching head first into the crater left by the geoplane.
“Mary, give us your best bearing,” Barnes said.
Swanson pored over her S&S table, adjusting instruments, widening and focusing the scan. “Very faint, Skipper, but here goes…steer left zero five five degrees. I make the source as about two thousand meters on that bearing, slightly above our elevation….”
Barnes ordered the driver/systems operator (DSO) Nicole Simonet to steer that heading. She was about to command max rate borer so Gopher could speed up, when Swanson reported a message coming in.
“Flash traffic on the VLF, Sarge…it’s UNIFORCE.” She let the printer crank out a slip of paper, tore it off and handed it up to Barnes.
The CC1 scowled as she read. “It says the Chinese PLAAF are scrambling a squadron of J-27 fighter aircraft and half a dozen troop transports toward Paryang Valley. We are to exfiltrate with all possible speed….and don’t leave anything behind.”
Al Glance was the borer operator (BOP1). He snorted. “You mean like a pile of smoldering wreckage?”
“And one big ass swarm that’ll eat fighter jets like corn flakes,” added Vance Jung, the geotech.
Barnes just shook her head. “UNIFORCE needs to slam the whole Valley with beamfire from their killsats. If that swarm’s not contained, it could eat half of Tibet.”
“I guess the Chinese know that,” Glance observed. “They’ve been in cahoots with Red Hammer for a decade.”
“I’m not sure they know about Config Zero,” Barnes said. “Until now…Mary…still on course?”
“Maintain current heading. The Major’s coupler signal is actually getting stronger.”
Gopher shook and shimmied with more tremors and her hull plates creaked and groaned from the pressure of thousands of tons of rock squeezing them on all sides. “So’s the shaking. DSO, let’s make tracks. Al, go to max on the borer. Treads at full rpms. The ground around here’s unstable and I don’t want Gopher to get trapped.”
“Voids up ahead,” announced Jung, checking his densitometer profiles. “Don’t want to go there…steer right ten degrees…could be a temporary fault zone.”
Barnes gave the command and Gopher heeled hard right, her deck canting slightly as the DSO swung them to starboard. “If we slide into a void with all this rocking and rolling, Gopher could be smashed in an instant.”
The geoplane slowly maneuvered her way through fault zones and voids directly beneath the swelling swarm that had once been the huge Buddhist monastery. From above, the entire Paryang Valley seemed to be a seething, boiling mass of snow, rock, flickering light and roiling clouds. Gopher had settled onto a course several hundred meters below the valley floor, sliding and melting her way through hard granitic rock toward a very faint coupler signal that Barnes and her crew hoped and prayed was Major John Winger…or what Winger had become.
Presently, Swanson held up a ha
nd. “Skipper, best bearing match puts our source almost directly overhead, about sixty meters, slightly to port. “
“All stop,” Barnes commanded. “DSO, take us up…slowly. Vance—“ she motioned for Jung to leave his geotech’s station. “Get a barebones ANAD ready to go out once we breach. Config C-55-“ she said from memory. “Put up a bubble around Gopher. We may have to go outside and hunt around for the Major…it’ll be like looking for a few leaves in a hurricane.”
“Got it, Skipper.” Jung slithered aft down Gopher’s central gangway to the lockout chamber on G deck. He unslung a containment capsule from the cabinet and sprang the capsule port, starting the initialization sequence for the master ANAD bot inside. As soon as Sergeant Barnes gave the word, Jung would slam the capsule into the lockout chamber, cycle the outer door and moments later, the capsule would be exposed to the outside world and big banging a C-55 swarm around the lockout door. If it worked, anybody unlucky enough to go outside would emerge from Gopher into a protected bubble of bots, while chaos swirled all around them.
That was the plan.
The crew soon felt the geoplane breaching the surface, as her treads spun up and the ship momentarily lurched forward.
“All stop,” Barnes said. “Simonet, you’re with me and Jung. Everybody else stays onboard. Mary, give me a final fix and prep that portable scanner. I’ll need it outside.”
At the lockout on G deck, Barnes gave her team last minute instructions.
“Stay close. Once the ANAD bubble’s up, we go out single file, weapons charged and ready. Mary has put us just a few meters below the strongest signal so I’m hoping the Major’s right here…or his swarm. I’m taking an empty containment capsule to grab him. Nicole, you and Vance have perimeter guard. I’ll hunt for the Major. Any questions?”
There were none.
To Jung, Barnes gave the order. “Okay, launch ANAD now.”
The geotech sprang the containment capsule and a small faintly sparkling mist issued forth, moving steadily toward a small lockout chamber. The mist penetrated the lockout and was cycled through, emerging into the maelstrom of the vast swarm that had once been the Paryang monastery.
“ANAD’s through,” Jung reported, studying the feed on his wristpad. “Configured C-55, reporting high thermals, off-scale high and electromagnetics the same.”
Mary Swanson added, “Decoherence wakes are out of sight, Skipper. Don’t touch anything out there…you could be yanked off to who knows where.”
Barnes agreed. “Let’s go.”
One after another, first Barnes, Simonet, then Jung cycled through the lockout.
Outside, they stood in what seemed like the middle of a hurricane. All around, the monastery had deconstructed into knots and gales of bots, swirling and swarming and pulsating and throbbing like a slow-motion thunderstorm. The swarm was so thick it was difficult even to move about.
“Like being underwater,” muttered Jung.
“Any read on Major Winger?” Barnes asked, though how they would ever locate and grab the Winger swarm was hard to imagine.
“Picking up faint coupler signals now,” Simonet announced. She turned first left, then right. “Three meters this way—“ she pointed “and below us…near the bottom layer—outside ANAD’s bubble.“
The trio punched through the protective shielding of ANAD bots and slogged through the swarm centimeter by centimeter, with Simonet trying her best to home on a very faint coupler signal.
“It’s there…then it’s not there,” she said in frustration. She bent down to her knees, then groped her way forward, probing ahead with her fingers, studying her wristpad. “I think…maybe there?”
“Grab it!” Barnes ordered. “”Swipe your capsules, both of you and let’s get out of here. ANAD won’t hold much longer.”
Simonet and Jung both unhooked empty containment capsules and, with Simonet’s guidance, made several sweeps through the thick swarm. Jung checked his capsule, already tuned to detect bots of likely configuration.
“I may have him!” he decided. “Reading C-22…snatches of other configs. Recognizable stuff here.”
“Sweep one more time,” Barnes ordered. She eyed an onrushing wall of bots, building like a slow-motion tsunami, surging down from above, ready to break right on top of them. They would soon be swept away themselves if they didn’t hurry. “Grab more and we’ll sort it out later. We’ve got to get out of here now!”
Simonet and Jung did one more sweep, then both secured their capsules and attached them to web belts.
“Come on!” Barnes hustled them both back inside the ANAD barrier and took one last look at the dust and debris of what had once been a huge Buddhist temple.
Hope to hell I never get back here, she decided. The entire monastery structure had disintegrated into a vast swarming cloud of bots, flecked with falling snow and surmounted by swirling dust and flickering light as uncountable gazillions of bots slammed atoms and built structure to maintain some kind of config. It was like being inside a huge bee hive.
The troopers ducked back into Gopher’s lockout and cycled through. Shedding her hypersuit helmet, Barnes got on the ship’s 1MC and ordered Al Glance to power up the borer.
“Max reps, Al. Nicole will be up there in a moment. Soon as the borer’s ready, pull us out of here and set depth for two hundred meters. I’ll signal Mole we’re underway.”
“Roger that, Skipper,” said Glance over the intercom.
As they scrambled forward, Barnes and Simonet felt the geoplane lurch into motion. Her treads squealed and clanked as she backed underneath the huge swarm and disappeared down her approach tunnel.
Simonet assumed her DSO station and strapped in, feeling the tread controls respond to her touch. “Gopher now underway at two knots, Sergeant. Recommend departure heading of two five two degrees, at this depth.”
Jung, now back in his geotech’s seat, concurred. “That’s softer stuff, Skipper. Quartzite with inclusions, according to the densitometer and profiler.”
“Do it,” Barnes ordered. “Let’s get the hell out of here. And hope the assault ANAD has timed out so we don’t get smashed by any more tremors.”
Gopher ducked below Paryang Valley, turned about and slowly bored her way south. Mole was several kilometers further south, beyond the valley, ‘orbiting’ at six hundred meters depth. Barnes smiled as she saw the coupler light up with a text message from Gibbs, commanding the other geoplane.
Welcome back to the land of gophers and moles, Barnes. You got the Major?
Barnes took a deep breath. We’ll soon find out, she messaged back. She closed her eyes and let the fatigue wash over her. Then she settled back in the command chair and tried to work up enough nerve to go aft and see what they had grabbed.
They were nearing the Nepalese border when Mary Swanson reported a message coming in. “Flash traffic on the VLF, Sergeant. UNIFORCE priority—“
Barnes startled herself awake. “Read it, Mary—“
Swanson read out loud. “It says two battalions of Chinese PLA troops were airlifted into Paryang Valley this morning, supported by a squadron of PLAAF fighter aircraft and helicopter gunships. The monastery had collapsed into rubble due to continuing tremors and earthquakes in the area. The Chinese are reporting that a massive dust and ice storm is hampering rescue efforts.”
Barnes had to laugh at that. “A massive ice storm…right. An ice storm with teeth and effectors and propulsors. I wonder how the Chinese will deal with Config Zero.”
The 1MC chirped from G deck. It was Vance Jung at the lockout chamber. “Skipper, I’ve been scanning the containment capsules we used inside the monastery. I think you’d better come back here and take a look.”
Barnes said, “On my way—Nicole, how long until we reach Puranpur?”
Simonet checked. “Three hours best speed. Vance has plotted a course through softer rock, so we’re maintaining our speed p
retty well. Mole reports the same.”
“Maintain heading,” Barnes said. She disappeared down the gangway.
Jung had an imager powered up, showing the contents of the containment capsules, when Barnes arrived.
“What have you got?”
Jung indicated a scaffolding mounted in the center of the imager display. “I discharged the capsules into this small containment tank and took a look.” Mounted on the scaffold was a small dark mass, looking for all the world like a bunch of grapes hanging on a trellis. The grapes seemed to be beating to some inner rhythm. “This is all we got.”
“Major Winger…or what’s left of him?”
Jung shrugged. “Hard to say, Skipper. They’re fragments of ANAD clones…I can tell you that much. If you zoom in, you see recognizable casing fragments, pieces of effectors, a propulsor shaft, some flagellar fibers. There’s some other debris as well…I’ve got it quarantined in another chamber. Probably Config Zero fragments. But this—“ he pointed to a small knob on the side of one of the ‘grapes.’ “—this is what’s special.”
“A growth of some kind?”
Jung shook his head, tweaked some knobs to improve resolution. “Part of a processor core. I managed to extract some files…including one labeled…best I can tell…Configuration Buffer Status Check. That’s the file Doc II said he loaded with Major Winger’s basic memory and personality traces and engrams.”
Barnes studied the processor ‘button.’ “That’s all we got?”
“So it would seem.”
Barnes felt a cold chill down her spine. “Okay, save that. Protect it well, Vance. I’m not sure anything can be done with it. Any sign of Doc II…anything that looks or reacts like Doc II?”
“Nothing. Sorry, Skipper. That’s all we got.”
Barnes was about to make a decision, when the 1MC chirped again. It was Simonet, up on B deck.
“Just thought you’d like to know…we’re approaching the ruby mine at Puranpur, Sergeant. Mole has already started her ascent. We should be breaching in about an hour.”
“Continue the ascent, Nicole. Put us inside that mine. I’m coming up.”
It had been a two-day journey south, from the high country of Tibet and the snowy rubble of Paryang Valley, south paralleling the Gangdise Shan range, across the Nepalese border, then doglegging further south to the Indian frontier at Utter Pradesh state.
Just shy of 1750 hours, on a cold, cloudy, blustery day, geoplanes Mole and Gopher breached the surface inside the abandoned ruby mine at Puranpur and clanked to a halt at the end of a long curving side tunnel.
A UNIFORCE platoon from South Asian II Corps was on hand to greet them. The c/o was lean, sunburned Bengali Major named Jamshedpur, who smiled a toothy smile and shook hands with each geoplane crewman as they emerged blinking and squinting in the glare of flood lamps.
“Welcome to Utter Pradesh,” the Major said. “We’ve just now rolled up in a convoy of crewtracs from Agra. Your lifters are on the way from Singapore, as we speak.”
Mighty Mite Barnes jumped down to the rubbly ground, sliding on loose rock. She wondered briefly if any loose rubies might be down there. “My crews need food and water, Major…got any rations?”
“Of course,” Jamshedpur snapped a finger and two packbots rolled up, bearing Q-ration kits for all. “And a message from your General Kincade…on my coupler. He wants you to notify him when the lifters are loaded and ready to leave.”
The geoplane crews dove into their ration kits with gusto, while cargotracs appeared at the mouth of the tunnel, ready to winch the geoplanes out and load them on their transporters.
Outside the mine shaft entrance, Barnes met up with Hoyt Gibbs, Mole’s commander. They shook hands firmly, then hugged. A stiff wind was blowing across the mine front and both decided to shelter inside one of the crewtracs. Overhead, two black lifters circled to gauge the swirling winds, seeking a safe landing spot. One after another, the spidery craft descended carefully to the ground and spun down their rotors to idle, while packbots and crewmen loaded up gear from the geoplanes.
Kincade’s face was already beaming at them from a wristpad vid.
“Congratulations to both of you. Himalaya Strike was a smashing success. Paryang has been physically destroyed, according to sat images we’re seeing and the sigint from our Chinese sources corroborates that. There will be hell to pay for somebody in Beijing tonight.”
“The entire monastery was nothing but a shell,” Barnes said. “A nanobotic structure, maintained by Config Zero. When the structure started dematerializing, we figured Major Winger had been successful inserting INDRA. It bollixed up Config Zero but good.”
Kincade agreed. “We’re detecting only localized decoherence wake disturbances now, Sergeant. Looks like Config Zero’s been silenced, for the moment. Best evidence from Q2 is that the threat has been effectively neutralized. For how long, we don’t know. There is some evidence that the swarm’s trying to reconstitute itself. But the Chinese may have something to say about that. In any case, Red Hammer’s main base is rubble and the link to the Old Ones, whoever or whatever they are, has been severed. We’re seeing no detectable quantum activity at all. Again, congratulations. Were you able to retrieve Major Winger?”
Barnes looked at Gibbs. “Sir, we grabbed something that may be pieces or elements of the Major’s processor. We can’t be sure. My geotech’s got quantum systems training. He thinks we can re-build the Major with the right feedstock and algorithms. But we need better facilities.” She swallowed hard, trying to imagine what the days ahead would bring.
Would quantum specialists at Mesa de Oro ever be able to reconstruct Major Johnny Winger? It was like trying to create a statue from a shadow. Barnes had her doubts.
Kincade tried to be realistic about their chances. “Well, whatever happens, Himalaya Strike wouldn’t have worked if Winger hadn’t inserted INDRA. The world and the Corps owe a great debt of gratitude to the Major. I’ll see the reconstruction effort gets our best people.”
Gibbs spoke up. “General, I heard some scuttlebutt from one of the lifter pilots…some new kind of organization being spawned off UNIFORCE?”
Kincade’s face tightened. “Keep that to yourselves for now. But it’s true. It’s to be called UNISPACE. They’ll have a mission to search the skies for any evidence that the Old Ones are real…or that they’re approaching. Or that they may already have arrived. UNISPACE will be mandated to prepare to engage and defeat any such intruders, when and if they ever come. The org charts are being worked out now. We should be able to stand up this new force in a few months.”
Gibbs was impressed. Barnes smirked. She could already see the wheels turning in his head…he was already drooling over new missions, new gear, new adventures.
Kincade signed off and Barnes and Gibbs boarded the last of the lifters. Both geoplanes had already been slung beneath the huge craft, which took off in tandem in a swirl of snow and dust, then wheeled about and headed south, for Singapore. An hour later, the flotilla was winging its way across the Bay of Bengal.
Mighty Mite Barnes grabbed herself some coffee and doughnuts from the canteen in the aft compartment and perched on the side of a webseat to watch the moonlight glinting off the wave tops thousands of meters below them.
Reconstructing Major John Winger. A new force called UNISPACE. Paryang imploded into a pile of rubble and bots. Config Zero contained…they all hoped.
Barnes slurped and munched thoughtfully, thinking there was no way anything that the future might bring now could be anything more than a fitting Epilogue to what had already happened.
But then again, as Major Winger had often said, ‘Small is all.’ You didn’t join Quantum Corps and become a nanotrooper to live a quiet life.
Gibbs joined her outside the canteen. “Mite, I’ve seen that look before. I can’t imagine anything could surpass what we’ve been through lately, especially
the last few weeks. What’s percolating in that feverish brain of yours now?”
Barnes smiled wanly. “I was just wondering about Major Winger. Can we bring him back? The quantum guys say it should be possible. But it’s dicey. And the hell of it is: is reconstructing a swarm of bots into something that looks like Major Winger even a good idea? We may have defeated Red Hammer and Config Zero, for now. But I’m afraid we’ve opened a new door that we’ll never be able to shut again.”
Gibbs slammed down about three doughnuts at once. “Thinking like that just gives me a headache. After this coffee, I’m bunking down. I need about five days shuteye to reconstruct myself.”
“Amen to that,” Barnes agreed. They both laughed, then lunged for the nearest webseat at the same time. “Last one in turns out the lights.”
END
About the Author
Philip Bosshardt is a native of Atlanta, Georgia. He works for a large company that makes products everyone uses…just check out the drinks aisle at your grocery store. He’s been happily married for 25 years. He’s also a Georgia Tech graduate in Industrial Engineering. He loves water sports in any form and swims 3-4 miles a week in anything resembling water. He and his wife have no children. They do, however, have one terribly spoiled Keeshond dog named Kelsey.
To get a peek at Philip Bosshardt’s upcoming work, recent reviews, excerpts and general updates on the writing life, visit his blog The Word Shed at: https://thewdshed.blogspot.com.
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