Nanotroopers Episode 5: Table Top Mountain Read online

Nanotroopers

  Episode 5: Table Top Mountain

  Copyright 2016 Philip Bosshardt

  A few words about this series….

  1.Nanotroopers is a series of 15,000- 20,000 word episodes detailing the adventures of Johnny Winger and his experiences as a nanotrooper with the United Nations Quantum Corps.

  2.Each episode will be about 40-50 pages, approximately 20,000 words in length.

  3.A new episode will be available and uploaded every 3 weeks.

  4.There will be 22 episodes. The story will be completely serialized in about 14 months.

  5.Each episode is a stand-alone story but will advance the greater theme and plot of the story arc.

  6.The main plotline: U.N. Quantum Corps must defeat the criminal cartel Red Hammer’s efforts to steal or disable their new nanorobotic ANAD systems.

  Episode #TitleApproximate Upload Date

  1‘Atomgrabbers’1-14-16

  2‘Nog School’2-8-16

  3‘Deeno and Mighty Mite’2-29-16

  4‘ANAD’3-21-16

  5‘Table Top Mountain’4-11-16

  6‘I, Lieutenant John Winger…’5-2-16

  7‘Hong Chui’5-23-16

  8‘Doc Frost’6-13-16

  9‘Demonios of Via Verde’7-5-16

  10‘The Big Bang’7-25-16

  11‘Engebbe’8-15-16

  12‘The Symbiosis Project’9-5-16

  13‘Small is All!’9-26-16

  14‘’The HNRIV Factor’10-17-16

  15‘A Black Hole’11-7-16

  16‘ANAD on Ice’11-29-16

  17‘Lions Rock’12-19-16

  18‘Geoplanes’1-9-17

  19‘Mount Kipwezi’1-30-17

  20‘Doc II’2-20-17

  21‘Paryang Monastery’3-13-17

  22‘Epilogue’4-3-17

  Chapter 1

  “Quantum Shadows”

  Singapore and Table Top Mountain,

  Idaho, USA

  October 30, 2048

  6:00 pm

  Inmate 287455 stood still for a moment, listening. The sound finally came…a heavy iron door clanging shut behind her. The sound brought a smile to her pale face. Changi Prison was behind her now. For good. Freedom…it tasted like salty air wafting up from the harbor. Like bougainvillea lining the manicured sidewalks of Tanah Merah Besar Street. Like spicy fish on a grill, from somewhere beyond the concertina wire and steel fencing that surrounded the white stone and pink facing of the prison.

  Inmate 287455 started walking. She didn’t have to look behind to see in her mind’s eye the mustard yellow cinder block and blue cell doors she was leaving behind, after five years. She walked straight down the street, heading in the general direction of Queenstown and her goal.

  They had released her, four years ahead of her parole date, for a reason. Swallow this, the parole officer had said, giving her a small blue capsule. It was nanoderm and some other things—she knew that much—and it would slightly change her facial appearance, the nanoscale bots morphing her epidermis and skin muscles to more closely resemble someone else. Sign this, they had told her, and pushed some papers she could barely read in front of her. She signed. Be at this location by six p.m. tonight, they had marked a map for her and plotted out a route. She was following that route right now.

  Oh, they gave Inmate 287455 a whole new identity…new chip, new cards, new face, new voice.

  And for agreeing to all that, she was set free slightly more than halfway through her sentence and given a job to do. A strange job, to be sure, but then when Parole Officer Jurang dangles a pass to the outside world, commutes all charges and slaps some spending money on the table, then orders her to head for Queenstown, Inmate 287455 was not going to argue.

  She walked and inhaled the luxurious aroma of freedom, hearing ships’ horns blaring down by the harbor, the delicious honking of cabs and limos scuttling up and down Bukit Panjang Road, and the bustle and chaos of a city in full, delirious motion.

  Presently, she spied the upper towers of her target. It was Queensgate Hotel. She didn’t hurry. In fact, she stopped at a roadside vendor and bought an ice cream. It tasted like heaven. She took her time. Why hurry? She didn’t have to be at her goal until six p.m.

  Inmate 287455 decided to walk a few blocks beyond the hotel, exploring a narrow warren of shops and carts, all jammed together in a seemingly endless bazaar, before finally turning back to the hotel grounds, set in an idyllic paradise of eucalyptus trees and azalea bushes and an amusing topiary of fanciful fairy-tale dragons and elephants and things that had no name.

  She walked in and headed to the Registration desk promptly at six o’clock.

  Sheila Reaves stood on the balcony of her hotel room, spying the funnels of container ships and naval frigates easing past each other along the Bedok South channel. The air was sweet with the cloying scent of tapang trees and the sunset visible over the tops of the trade center and the university and the masts of the sailing ships at the marina looked promising, swathed in the orange and maroon of late afternoon thunderclouds boiling up from the tropics.

  She polished off the wine the room service bot had brought up an hour ago and went inside, flopping on the bed for a huge yawn and a stretch. The Corps had given her three days’ liberty after being rescued from that stone coffin called Lions Rock in Hong Kong. Colonel Batu, Eastern Command base commander, issued the pass personally, with instructions from Major Kraft himself.

  “We’re putting you up for three days and nights at the Queensgate, on the Corps. Kraft figured it’s the least he can do after all the bother with getting you exfiltrated from Lions Rock—did you really climb out through solid rock?”

  “I did, sir,” Reaves admitted. “Tunneled out by ANAD…not something I want to go through again.”

  Batu rubbed his chin, handed over her liberty chip. “Don’t get too comfortable. Kraft wants you back at Table Top at 0700 hours, morning of the third. You’ll be catching hyperjet Mercury right here. Two hours hopscotching across the Pacific and you’ll be right back to work—rehab, re-training, probably a new assignment. Live it up while you can.”

  Reaves saluted, even though she was in civvies…a cute skirt and sarong number she’d gotten from the PX. “Yes, sir. I’m planning on maximum relaxation for seventy two hours.”

  “Very well, Sergeant Reaves...dismissed…and go have some fun.”

  She needed no further orders to do that.

  As she lay awake tossing about in her king-sized bed, she noticed a faint light outside the window. The suite was on the fifth floor of the Queensgate, a special suite reserved for heads of state, dignitaries and celebrities. Reaves watched the light for a few minutes. It was diffuse, almost blue-white in color. And it was getting brighter, even as the sun had dropped below the horizon.

  She got up to investigate.

  As she approached the window, she knew right away what the light was. Already she could hear the keening buzz of nanobotic conflict; the bots of the security barrier were already engaging something outside the window. Reaves inched closer.

  Almost immediately, the light flared into blinding brilliance and a sharp hiss could be heard. Reaves staggered back and lost her balance, falling heavily to the floor, completely blinded by the light flooding in. A wave of heat washed over her as she scrambled away from the window. Then as she squinted at the battle now joined outside the windowpane, the buzz reached a shrill peak and cool air began drifting in. The window vanished in a flash and Reaves quickly found herself en
veloped in a cloud of bots.

  She flailed, tried screaming but found the pressure of the cloud was too great. She was being smothered, suffocated, fighting and kicking and scratching and clawing there was no air and slowly, but surely the tunnel yawned wide and she tumbled headlong down the black corridor at breakneck speed, spinning spinning spinning until at the end….

  There was nothing and she lost consciousness.

  The flickering cloud descended over the prostrate body of Sergeant Sheila Reaves, fully engulfing her in a small supernova of incandescent brilliance.

  Half an hour later, the ball of light began to dim and in a few minutes, the light died off and the cloud dispersed. The body of Sergeant Sheila Reaves, Defense and Protective Systems Specialist 1 for 1st Nano, had vanished…seemingly consumed by the cloud.

  The room was dark and only the tattered, smoking shreds of curtains remained, flapping in a gentle early evening breeze wafting up from the harbor two kilometers away.

  The Buffalo Range looked surprisingly appealing to Sheila Reaves as hyperjet Mercury banked hard left and lined up for her final approach to Runway 32 Left. There was a frosting of snow on the higher peaks. Probably the wind‘s blowing a gale, she told herself, as the jet bumped down, kissing the tarmac and she lurched forward against her shoulder harness in the hard braking. Some things never change. Sure doesn’t look like Singapore, she sighed.

  But a girl’s gotta make a living.

  She disembarked, dropped her gear off at the Barracks and headed for Major Kraft’s office in the Ops center.

  Kraft was at his desk, diligently pecking away at a commandpad. He waited a moment, as Reaves stood at attention, saluting.

  “Come in, Sergeant. Be seated.”

  Reaves came in.

  Kraft finally finished his hand pecking and looked up. “Reaves…it is good to see you whole and hearty. Sorry about Lions Rock. At least, ANAD was able to tunnel you out. I trust liberty in Singapore had the intended effect?”

  Reaves said, “Yes, sir…it did. Most appreciated.”

  “You saw all the sights and did the typical tourist things, I presume.”

  “Sir,” Reaves corrected the Major, “I drank myself into a stupor and passed out on my hotel bed for three days.”

  “Excellent. A true nanotrooper. I’ve got a new assignment for you. 1st Nano’s going to be participating in a new wargame we’re working up…this time as the OpFor. A little urban nano-combat, in fact. Assembly bots are working on the scenery right now up at Hunt Valley. We’re calling the town Kraftville…imagine that. Your job—1st Nano’s job—is to defend my little hamlet from any and all intruders. And just to make matters interesting, the intruders could take any form…birds, bees, dust, rain drops, anything the diabolical minds of the game referees can think up.”

  “Yes, sir. What kind of TOE are we going to have?”

  Kraft massaged his Black Forest of a moustache, which seemed to have grown in the days since Reaves had last been at Table Top. “As you know, Lieutenant Winger has recently come from Northgate University with a new friend…an embedded ANAD master bot. Took him awhile to recover from that bad swarm he had inside of him….it was close. Red Hammer’s getting cleverer every day…we have to be on our guard at all times, Sergeant. Now, Winger’s part of the Symbiosis Project. The whole purpose of this wargame, Operation Quantum Shadow, is to see how that plays in in a combat sim. Can we get ANAD out and deployed faster, with better configs and effectors? Based on the results of this little kriegspiel, the next step is furnishing all of 1st Nano with embedded bots. Blended man-machine warriors, that’s what I’m after, Reaves. Drawing nanotroopers and ANAD together so seamlessly, that you can’t tell one from another. That’s where warfare is going in this new medium.”

  Reaves considered that. “Major, from my experience at Lions Rock, I’d say that’s where Red Hammer’s going too. Anything we can do to stay a few steps ahead, I’m all for it.”

  “Good.” Kraft detached a small memcube from his commandpad and shoved it across the desk. “Take this to Lieutenant Winger. It’s got my instructions, commander’s intent and some other goodies. We’ll have a pre-op briefing tomorrow at 0700 hours. If he’s following orders, the Lieutenant should be at Mission Prep this afternoon…with everybody else.”

  “Yes, sir.” Reaves reached across the desk and retrieved the cube.

  At first, Kraft hadn’t noticed how Sergeant Reaves slightly fumbled with the cube. It could have been anything…maybe she was still feeling the effects of Lions Rock and climbing out through a solid rock mountain. When he thought about the incident later, Kraft told himself he had imagined the whole thing.

  As Reaves reached for the memcube, her fingers seemed on first glance to be of different texture than the rest of her arm, almost translucent, fuzzy at the edges, even blurry.

  Maybe I had one too many coffees, Kraft surmised.

  Then when the red-haired sergeant and 1st Nano DPS tech tried to pick up the cube, the thing slipped through her fingers…or more accurately, her fingers slipped through the cube. Kraft shook his head to clear the cobwebs. Right through the cube, as if it was made of dust. A solid object he had just handled himself. And Reaves’ fingers slipped, brushed, passed through the device as if it were made of—

  No, I did not see that, Kraft told himself firmly, for when he looked again, Reaves had the cube in the palm of her hand and was pocketing it as if nothing had happened. Her hand and arms seemed completely normal.

  She stood up, and saluted, like normal.

  “Dismissed,” Kraft said, snapping off a return salute. After the sergeant had left, Kraft took a deep breath. This job’s driving me nuts. I guess I need a break.

  Sheila Reaves left Ops and made her way across the wind-blown quadrangle to the Ordnance-Mission Preparation complex, a series of bunker-like buildings near the hangars for Table Top’s lifters and hyperjets.

  Inside, she scanned in and found the rest of 1st Nano in a squad ready room two floors down.

  Lieutenant Winger was at a small console, examining some ANAD variant in a nearby containment tank.

  Reaves saluted. “Reporting for duty, sir. I’ve been cleared for all ops.” She handed Winger the memcube. “Just came from Major Kraft, sir. He said to give you this.”

  Deeno D’Nunzio and Mighty Mite Barnes were at a small table next to Winger, sorting and cleaning parts for several of the platoon’s coilguns and HERF weapons. The table with strewn with generator casings, scopes and sights, trigger assemblies and magazines.

  D’Nunzio piped up. “Well, well, well…welcome back, Sergeant Reaves. And how was your honeymoon in the exotic Far East? You’re looking pretty fit in those barely regulation fatigues.”

  Reaves went to the table and started examining one of the carbines with a critical eye. “I lived like a queen…room service every day, luxurious sponge baths—had to get all that rock dust from Lions Rock out of my pores, mani-pedis every afternoon, shopping in the bazaars. Man, I never dreamed life in the Corps could be so good.”

  “Yeah,” said An Nguyen, working on a hypersuit helmet, “that’ll teach you to bury yourself inside a mountain. We wore little ANAD out just tunneling all over the place trying to find you.”

  “I’m glad you did,” Reaves admitted. “Another day inside the mountain in that coffin of a cell and I would have gone bonkers. Compared to that, climbing out through ANAD’s tunnel was a snap.’

  Barnes tossed her a HERF coil. “Hey, DPS 1, see if you can figure out why that bastard won’t energize—“

  The coil came at Reaves in a lazy toss. She reached out and the thing passed right through her hands. Nobody seemed to have noticed--though Nguyen’s eyes narrowed—when the coil fell clattering to the floor.

  “Hey watch it, girl,” said Mighty Mite. “That’s expensive government property there.”

  Reaves picked up the coil immediately, fumbling it a mome
nt, then placed the device back on the table. “Off hand, Buddha, I’d say your leads are all shot to hell.” She pushed the coil back and again her fingers passed right through both the coil and part of the table.

  Barnes and Nguyen both saw that. Reaves noticed too and immediately withdrew her hand, jamming it in her jacket pocket.

  Mighty Mite was concerned. “Girl, are you sure you feel alright? You look a little pale to me.”

  “No, really…I’m okay.”

  Winger had seen what happened. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. “We’ve been hitting our gear pretty hard this afternoon. I’m calling a halt. Everybody to the commissary. Let’s grab a bite and then we can come back to this.”

  “Suits me,” said An Nguyen.

  “Hey,” said Mighty Mite, “I hear they’ve got slopburgers today.”

  The squad headed to the squat brick building attached to the PX, on the opposite side of the Barracks and Bachelor’s Quarters.

  It was early and the lines weren‘t too long. Gibbs secured a few tables in the corner, underneath an old Quantum Corps recruiting poster that some wag had decided was artsy enough to hang on the wall.

  “Looks like the Lieutenant, doesn’t it?” said D’Nunzio. “Notice the cheek planes, the alabaster skin, the rippling muscles…makes me want to sign up right now, all over again.”

  Winger ignored them all.

  When Reaves had her tray, she balanced it precariously on her forearms, an odd way to carry a food tray. And when she was about to sit down, the tray slipped off. Actually, it slipped through her forearms. Only Nguyen noticed how the edge of the tray passed through her elbow. The others weren’t looking.

  “Trooper Reaves,” Winger said, “you’re relieved. Go back to the Barracks and get some rest. And check yourself in to the Infirmary. I want medic approval before you report back for duty…get some rest. That’s an order.”

  Reaves seemed flustered. “Really, Skipper, I’m okay. I feel a little—“

  D’Nunzio volunteered to escort her back to bed. “I’ll make sure she takes her medicine, Lieutenant.” She started to grab Reaves’ shoulder and arm, but the trooper pulled away. “Come on, Sergeant Reaves. We need to get you horizontal.”

  The two of them stopped by the Infirmary, made an appointment for later that evening, then D’Nunzio firmly directed the DPS tech to her bunk in the Barracks. When she was finally in bed, D’Nunzio pronounced her own diagnosis.

  “Girl, if I didn’t know better, I’d say you’ve got a bad case of Singapore sling…too much fun in the sun. I don’t know what happened after we released you on that unsuspecting city, but whatever it was, name if after me, okay?”

  “Sure, Deeno…I’ll just get some rest. Thanks. I’ll be okay.”

  D’Nunzio blew her a fake kiss and disappeared.

  That’s when Reaves waited five minutes, then got up and re-dressed herself in fatigues and stepped outside.

  Her programming directed her to turn south, toward the low dome of the Containment center. Reaves came to a small hedge forming a green perimeter around the outer security fence of the center. Nobody was around. She pulled a hand out of her jacket and waved it across the top of the hedges. They were moist, laden with early evening snow that had partially melted. Her hand had partially disassembled and now resembled a fuzzy tennis ball. Bots streamed off the fuzzy ball and drifted onto the top of the hedge. For a brief moment, the hedge lit up with the flaring of atomic bonds being broken, bots slamming atoms to change config, forming themselves up into an ersatz hedge. That lasted half a minute. When the glow had subsided, a new layer of hedge existed, where none had before.

  But this hedge was not what it seemed.

  Reaves wandered about the lower end of the Table Top complex for awhile, toward the Sim/Training building. She performed the same ritual with other routine objects: a trash receptacle, a small bench outside the entrance to the Drexler Field parade ground. Turning north along the eastern side of the mesa, she came to the grassy quadrangle of the Ops Center, now lightly dusted in snow. Here, Reaves came to a statue on a pedestal. It was a marble likeness of Sun Tzu, legendary Chinese warrior-philosopher and patron saint of the Quantum Corps. Reaves let several people pass by. She saluted a Captain, recognizing one of the hyperjet pilots. Bartello something or other, she seemed to remember.

  When there seemed no one else in sight, she pressed her fuzzy hand against the statue for a moment. Bots streamed off like a cloud of fireflies. The statue was soon enveloped in a glowing cloud, as uncountable trillions of mechs chewed into the calcite and dolomite molecules of its carbonate structure. The fog lasted about five minutes, during which time Reaves scanned up and down the walkways for anyone approaching. She saw no one.

  When the fog dissipated and the glow subsided, the statue of Sun Tzu was still there, seemingly to a casual observer to be unchanged. But it had changed. It was now a loose aggregate swarm of bots, resembling in almost every visible detail its previous form.

  Reaves started to head toward the entrance to the Ops Center, when a voice erupted out of the darkness.

  “Stop right there, trooper! Keep your hands where I can see them and don’t move—“

  The voice was male, a Quantum Corps Police officer whom Reaves hadn’t seen. But the officer had seen what had happened to the statue. He emerged into the glare of a streetlamp and trained a small hand weapon—a HERF pistol—on Reaves.

  Reaves froze. She heard the officer calling on his mike for backup. In seconds, two more officers had appeared.

  Her programming was clear. Do not be taken prisoner. It was a Category One directive, to be implemented any time the master bot was threatened.

  The threat was clear and the directive was implemented. At once, Reaves began disassembling, breaking down into the constituent bots of which she had been formed. Her skin became immediately fuzzy, blurry and indistinct. Bots sloughed off and streamed toward the stunned officers like a flickering, strobing snake of lights.

  “Jesus Christ…It’s a swarm! Get back!”

  “Don’t--!” Another officer pumped a few rounds of high-energy rf into the thing. The concussive boom rattled windows in the front of the Ops Center.

  “I’ve got something---we can MOB it!” The third officer backpedaled, even as he was extracting a small canister from his belt. Mobility Obstruction Barrier mesh spewed out of the canister in his hand, expanding rapidly, colliding with the bots that had once been Trooper Sheila Reaves. The mesh swelled outward, sparking and flashing in the collision with the Reaves bots and eventually completely enveloping the rapidly disassembling form of the soldier.

  Soon, the MOB mesh had pinned the Reaves-thing to the wet grass, writhing and thrashing about. Pops and bursts of light flickered where the bots and the MOB mechs fought each other.

  MOB won the battle. In moments, the barrier had completely cloaked the buzzing form that now thrashed and twisted and squirmed on the ground to no avail.

  For good measure, the QP officers pumped round after round of rf into the wriggling mass. Finally, the thing stopped squirming.

  “Get it over to Containment!” an officer yelled.

  It was like dragging a sack of bees. The MOB mesh twisted and buzzed but after a few minutes, the QP squad had managed to haul the bag into Containment and secure it inside the Level Four facility.

  Electron beam guns were set to their highest setting. Engineers then set to work ‘unzipping’ the MOB screen.

  Outside, across the mountain, more swarms were erupting. Chaos and confusion seized Table Top Mountain as uncontained swarms burst forth from hedges near the Containment center, from a trash receptacle near Sim/Training and a statue outside the Ops center.

  “They’re everywhere!” someone yelled, fleeing across the quadrangle. “All around us!”

  Indeed, nobody could be sure what was real and what wasn’t. Everyday objects seemed normal one m
inute and burst into swarms the next, menacing everything and everyone. Quantum Corps Police flooded onto the grounds, assisted by any available troopers. HERF guns and magpulse carbines were handed out and swarms were battled from one end of Table Top to another.

  Two hours later, the worst of it seemed over. Johnny Winger had heard the commotion and run out of the BOQ, where he had been getting ready to bunk down. He had taken charge of a small contingent of troopers, some 1st Nano, some from other units, as they swept the northern end of the Mountain, poking and probing into every bush and corner, not assuming anything, sweeping the grounds from the lifter pads to the Ops center.

  “Jeez, it’s like you can’t trust anything!” said one trooper.

  And it was true: trash cans, benches, light poles, cars, assorted gear…nothing could be bypassed. Nothing could be ignored. Somehow, Red Hammer swarms had infiltrated onto the Mountain big time and it was a close run thing to get them contained.

  Winger thought about launching his own embedded ANAD…they had done that in the Nathan Caden affair, when he’d been studying for his Atomgrabber’s test. But the swarms were everywhere and he didn’t know what they might be facing. Better to stick with the big guns…HERF worked, although it smashed everything else in the process.

  By mid-morning, through some frantic mobilizing and liberal use of counter-swarm measures, along with high-energy radio frequency blasts across the Mountain, the worse of the infiltration had either been smashed or contained.

  Winger checked on his charges. Some of the troopers had burns and lacerations from swarm assaults. There were cuts, bruises, abrasions and one broken leg. He helped the worst off to the Infirmary, where medbots and medics were working furiously to mend injuries and treat the most serious wounds.

  Winger headed for the Containment center. On the way across the grounds, dodging pack bots and repair crews cleaning up debris and shattered clumps of mechs, he ran into Major Kraft.

  “What the hell was it, Major? We haven’t been slammed like this in…months, maybe never.”

  Kraft was scowling, moving at a surprisingly fast clip for a man of his girth. “Red Hammer, Winger. I met with Sergeant Reaves, one of your DPS techs, just a few hours ago. Apparently, she wasn’t quite what she seemed.”

  They scanned into Containment and cycled through locks and hatches until they came at last to the Level Four chamber. Outside, two techs were preparing to analyze a faintly visible fog of bots, what had once been Sheila Reaves. Yardley was on the imager console, manipulating the view on screen. Kumoda was verifying containment and boresighting the electron beam injectors, in case something went wrong.

  Kraft studied the image, looked through a tiny porthole into the tank and back. “So that’s it? This is…or was Sheila Reaves?”

  Yardley was a balding, former wrestler with well-developed pecs still straining at his uniform top. “Sir, this is a class 1 nanobotic swarm with one hell of a config manager. I don’t know about Sheila Reaves. But this thing—“ Yardley rubbed the top of his skull like it was a good luck charm—“sir, this is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. To be able to hold config tight enough to resemble a human being and to fool others—that takes some serious processor chops. I had no idea Red Hammer had this capability.”

  “Neither did we,” Kraft scowled.

  Winger was just shaking his head. “And to think we mistook this…thing…for Sheila. There were some edge effects…her hands sometimes went through solid objects, when she turned a corner, her shoulder would slice through the door jamb…but nobody seemed to notice it at first. Later, in the Commissary, I saw some looks---we had suspicions.”

  Kraft agreed. “If Red Hammer can pull off a stunt like this, what else can they do? Yardley, how do I even know you and Kumoda are real?”

  “Agreed, sir,” Yardley admitted. “You can pinch me if you like, sir. I’m disgustingly real.”

  “I’ll pass,” Kraft said. “QP and anybody else they can draft have been sweeping the mountain all night long, end to end, every square inch. If Red Hammer can do this, then we can’t trust anybody…or anything. Your bunkmate could be a swarm. Hell, the bunk itself could be a swarm. Or your shoes. Or that file cabinet over there. We have to assume the worst of everything. I’m telling you, this infiltration is inspired. They’ve got us doubting each other and everything in between.”

  Kumoda was done with the injectors. “We were just about to start dissecting this little bastard…still haven’t located the master bot, though. It’s in there somewhere.”

  On the imager screen, the faint mist flickered like a horde of dying fireflies. It boiled and swirled with unseen energies, an angry thundercloud in miniature ready to envelop all of them if containment was lost. Kumoda felt a shudder roll through his chest. He wasn’t a very religious man, not even a very good Buddhist. But he couldn’t help thinking they were looking into the face of Hell itself.

  Kraft said, “If this isn’t Reaves…or what’s left of the Sergeant, then where is Reaves?”

  Winger reminded him, “Corporal Barnes and Sergeant D’Nunzio pulled Reaves out of Lions Rock just a week ago. She was real enough then…they all hugged her tight when she crawled out of that tunnel ANAD made.”

  “And I gave her liberty in Singapore,” Kraft recalled. “It must have happened then. Somehow, Red Hammer located her and—“ he realized he had no words for what they were facing. Was Sheila Reaves even alive anymore?

  Johnny Winger began to wonder about his own ANAD embed. “Major, maybe I should run a full diagnostic on my guy. I haven’t had any indications of anything but I’d like to be sure of what I’m carrying.”

  Kraft agreed. “Schedule it, Winger.” To the technicians, he gave brusque orders. “Find out what makes this thing tick. How can Red Hammer hold swarm configuration so well, they can resemble human beings that pass even close inspection? What capabilities does the master have…maybe things we don’t even know about? And what counter-measures can we take? We know HERF still works. But if every person and every object is potentially a swarm, there must be a way to detect that.”

  Kumoda and Yardley answered in unison, “Yes, sir…we’ll pick this bugger apart atom by atom.”

  Kraft left but Winger stayed behind. For now, the wargame prep was put aside. He wanted to assist in the analysis. More than that, he wanted to find out what had happened to the real Sheila Reaves. Maybe ANAD could help….

  Under Winger's guidance, ANAD maneuvered among the jostling molecules of chlorine and sodium and potassium. A huge kinked snakelike cluster of hematite molecules drifted by. Winger had an idea. He signaled ANAD to grab a few hematites as a shield. Seizing oxygen atoms with its effectors, ANAD clutched several molecules.

  Gradually, the shape and size of the master bot that had once been Sheila Reaves became clearer. Bristling with effectors and arms, it looked like a miniature Apollo Lunar Module. The head was a multi-lobed cluster of spheres and hexagons; inside the churning electron cloud dimmed out any detail.

  Below the head was a cylindrical sheath, covered with pyramidal facets and undulating beads of proteins - the assembler's probes and effectors. Winger was frankly awed at the sight.

  "Hell of a lot of gear for this bastard," he said. "Wonder if this is the swarm’s base template."

  "So many different kinds of effectors," Yardley marveled.

  Indeed, the horde of assemblers was rigged out like battleships, with devices for every conceivable mechanical or chemical action. A flatplane baseplate capped one end of the sheathed body. The tail structure was dense thicket of fibers, each tipped with penetrator clusters. The penetrators enabled the bot to attach to and enter any structure.

  Winger brought ANAD to a complete stop. The hairs on the back of his neck bristled. Something wasn't quite right, but he couldn't put his finger on it. The data was all wrong…no nanobotic swarm was supposed to be like this at all. Maybe because it
had once been Sheila….

  "Yardley, Kumoda…what do you make of this?"

  Both techs were amazed at the images ANAD was returning. "It's the basic semi-viral structure we've seen before with early ANAD. But it's enhanced, somehow. Changed or evolved. I've never seen so many effectors. Amazing. That probe for instance--" he fingered a dark, indistinct structure to one side of the nearest device--"looks just like a saw. And that--I believe I recognize…I'll be damned--"

  Winger had seen it too. "Sorting rotor?"

  "That's what it looks like." At Winger’s request, Yardley fiddled with the resolution, managed to tweak the view even sharper. Dim outlines became clearer. "A segment of a sorting rotor. Cam-driven with carbene grabbers and--" he squinted down at the imager, adjusted his glasses "--looks like--yep, diamondoid follower rods. "Probably process upwards of several hundred thousand molecules per cycle." Yardley shook his head with grudging respect. "Neat workmanship. But I'd bet my aunt Emma's life savings that bugger's not part of the original template. This is new."

  “That must be some kind of comm link…maybe an antenna,” said Kumoda. He indicated a small structure on the side of the bot’s actuator mast. “Wonder if it’s putting out anything?”

  “Try coupler channels,” Winger suggested. “We stole that idea from Red Hammer anyway…sending signals in entangled quantum states. They’ve probably advanced light years beyond us by now—“

  Kumoda pecked at some keys on a nearby keyboard. “I’ll search for decoherence wakes…if Dexter here—“ he patted the side of the panel “—picks up any, it’s a sure sign we’re dealing with coupler comms.”

  The analysis went on for a few minutes. Sure enough, Kumoda’s Decoherence Examining and Troubleshooting System chirped with a hit.

  Kumoda pumped a fist. “Gotcha, you little dirtbag. Faint but definitely there…see for yourself…decoherence wakes. Not that I can follow the signals…they’re almost like ghosts or shadows.”

  Winger studied Dexter’s output, studied the signal characteristics. “Any chance you’ve got enough to triangulate? If we could come up with some kind of bearing…that might lead us to a physical place we could investigate.”

  Kumoda shrugged, rubbed fingers through jet black hair that kept falling into his eyes. “Probably not but I can try. There are ways to boost the gain, backtrack some of the quantum states…it’s dicey but worth a try.”

  “Do it,” Winger said. His stomach growled. “I’m starved. You guys want anything from the Commissary?”

  Yardley yawned, stretched. “I could do with something edible. Maybe a wrap and some tea.”

  “Done.” Winger cycled himself out of the Level 4 Lab and summoned a nearby servbot. It whirred down the hall and stared with its single blinking red eye at him. If it had been a dog, it’s tail would have wagged. Winger told the bot what they wanted, adding, “Light on the mayo and no chili on my dogs, okay?”

  The servbot acknowledged the order and paused momentarily, just long enough to arouse a flicker of suspicion in Winger. Can I trust this thing? Is it compromised…a swarm itself?

  But the servbot spat out a receipt, wheeled about and trundled off to its port, where the order would be put through. Winger watched the thing perform its programmed tasks and wondered. He decided it was just paranoia. But that same feeling had served him well before. Maybe, when the meals came, he’d check them over really well.

  He went back to the Lab.

  Kumoda was all smiles. “Got something here, Lieutenant. I was able to grab enough deco wake to do some calculating. Washed it through the state buffer a few times, and plotted what came out. I think we’ve got some kind of signal bearing here…a cluster of comm signals seem to be coming and going from these coordinates. And it’s repeatable…maybe the master bot’s downloading something or asking for instructions.”

  “So what have got?” Winger asked.

  Kumoda displayed target latitude and longitude on the screen. “Best match is here…forty eight point eight five degrees north by two point three degrees east. Here, I’ll show you—“

  He called up a map display. The coordinates put the deco wake cluster squarely in the middle of Paris, France.

  “Can you zoom in tighter, narrow it down?” Winger asked.

  “I can try.”

  Kumoda finagled with the results. The map zoomed in to sharper resolution.

  Winger now knew why the hairs on the back of his neck were standing up.

  “It’s UNIFORCE Headquarters. The Quartier-General—“

  Yardley shook his head. “That can’t be, Kenji…re-do your analysis. Wash it through Dexter once more.”

  Kumoda did that. “Running diagnostics now.” The screen blinked and whirled for a few moments as the system crunched the faint decoherence wake signals and plotted intersecting radials of signal gain. The map settled back down to the same view. “Dexter checks out fine. These coordinates are the best match.”

  Winger sucked in a low breath. “This can’t be. If Dexter’s right, the master bot in that tank is executing comm sessions with a target inside UNIFORCE Headquarters…or nearby.”

  Kumoda agreed. “I don’t see how that can be, but that’s what Dexter’s coming up with.”

  Yardley swallowed audibly. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this, gents.”

  Winger was already cycling through the lockout, pecking out a call on his wristpad. “I’d better let the Major know what we’re dealing with here. A Red Hammer bot talking to UNIFORCE Headquarters…. it’s nuts. It’s insane.”

  He stepped outside the Containment Level Four chamber and made the call.