Nanotroopers Episode 17: Lions Rock Read online

  “Reconfiguring now, Gabby. It’ll take a few minutes.”

  Galland saw how concerned the atomgrabber looked. “He’s just a machine, Wings. Come on…you know it’s the only way.”

  “A few months ago, I would have agreed with you. But now…it’s almost like he’s become a fellow nog. A buddy. And he reminds me of that all the time. Troopers don’t leave anyone behind.”

  “He just says that because he’s heard you say that. He’s parroting the words back to you, like a child. He doesn’t have any concept of loyalty or courage. It’s not part of his program…you heard what Doc Frost said.”

  “He’s like a child, for now. But I think this child is starting to grow up.”

  Several minutes later, the cabin was quiet, save for the sound of the air pumps laboring against thickening dust. The shimmering blue fog had exited the geoplane. Outside, somewhere above and behind them, a small swarm of nanoscale entities was burning a tiny tunnel upward through hard quartzite rock, laboriously disassembling molecules atom by atom, cautiously boring a pilot hole and sounding gently ahead, to keep the massive rock plates from shifting anymore and crushing Gopher and her two-man crew.

  Inside the geoplane, Johnny Winger and Gabby Galland were now completely alone, with only remnant ANAD swarms holding their hull together, CO2 levels building, oxygen running out and cabin temperatures steadily rising inside.

  Johnny Winger closed his eyes and wondered if he had done the right thing. They had no entrusted their very survival to an increasingly precocious, yet unpredictable teenager named ANAD.

  It took nearly twenty hours for ANAD to complete the pilot hole and breach the surface. In a grass-covered valley seven kilometers north of Haleyville, a bright light suddenly emerged from the ground. A small gathering of elk scattered in alarm as the globe of light lifted away from the ground and hovered for a few moments like a shimmering radiant fog.

  Then the fog began flowing southward, toward the distant mesa of Table Top Mountain.

  ANAD activated its quantum coupler link and broadcast a repeating emergency message:

  ***This is ANAD on Q1…any station, any station, emergency code…troopers are down and need assistance…here are the coordinates--***

  Flowing over the ground like a windblown mist, the ANAD swarm maneuvered on max propulsor toward the Quantum Corps base at Table Top, broadcasting the same message on all coupler channels. After analyzing probabilities, ANAD decided to take additional measures to ensure the alert was noticed.

  Using configs already stored in memory, ANAD initiated a maximum rate replication, essentially the same Big Bang scenario it had simulated many times for its fellow nogs at the wargaming range at Hunt Valley. Hacking and cleaving atomic bonds at a furious pace, the nanoscale assembler copied its own structure over and over and over again, exponentially expanding across the face of the mountains like a slow-motion explosion of flickering light.

  The assembler knew that such activity would be immediately detected by protective bots circulating high in the atmosphere, the BioShield system that alerted Quantum Corps to uncontrolled, unrestrained nanobotic activity.

  Detection took only a few minutes.

  It was First Sergeant Marty Rivers at BioShield Los Angeles Center who first noticed the blinking light on his board.

  Curious and somewhat startled by the alarm—there hadn’t been a real alert in North America in months—Rivers sat up straight and his hands started flying over the keys, toggling the detectors to focus on the source of the disturbance, running routines to characterize the threat, sending alertgrams to a dozen different sections and also activating the Quantum Corps warning system.

  Twenty-six thousand meters over southern Idaho, a small swarm of BioShield nanobots received instructions from LA Center and maneuvered into a tighter formation, probing earthward with pulses of sound and EM, trying to get a fix on the locus of the source. The returns fingered the swelling ANAD swarm and fixed its real-time location and heading. Moments later, Sergeant Rivers had the same data.

  Immediately, he opened a vidlink to Table Top Mountain.

  Mighty Mite Barnes was in the Containment center when the duty officer from Ops poked her head in. She was a big-boned blond six-footer and her name plate read Spinner.

  “Sorry to interrupt, Sergeant, but there’s something you should see. Signals just got a feed from a nano-source and it’s close by, just a few kilometers from here. LA BioShield just routed the details to us.”

  Barnes had been concentrating on some quark flux imagery from a probe of some odd molecules she’d scrounged up from the Lions Rock mission samples. She looked up.

  “What is it?”

  Corporal Spinner shrugged. “Not sure, ma’am. A nanobotic source and it’s growing fast, almost like a Big Bang. BioShield says it looks like some loose ANAD…maybe there’s been a breach here?”

  “Not a chance,” Barnes insisted, as she powered down the imager. “But I’ll take a look.” In the back of her mind, she wondered. Was it possible…it had been hours since they’d lost contact with Gopher. He followed Spinner to the Ops Center to see what all the fuss was about.

  Johnny Winger’s head snapped up. His eyes were dry and his head throbbed like it was being squeezed in a vise. He tried focusing his eyes on the instrument panel, dimly aware that the CO2 level was surely building toward toxic levels. His eyes found the dial and he studied it until it blurred into focus.

  Nearly five thousand ppm. No wonder he felt so groggy. They had passed out, how many hours ago?

  He shook himself awake, slapping his face, pinching his arms. Galland was still cuddled in his arms. He had tried to comfort her hours before and then instinct had taken over. It had been quick, almost violent, not very satisfying, but it had kept their minds off their predicament. Then they had both passed out. “Gabby. Gabby Galland, wake up!” He leaned over to jab at his fellow trooper. “Get up and move around, will you? The air’s bad—“

  Up on the command deck, both of them stirred and groaned loudly.

  “We’ve got to do something…anything…to get out of here.”

  Galland rubbed her face, buttoned the front of her tunic. Winger noticed her lips were faintly blue…the first signs of hypercapnia were already visible. They had to move now…or they would die in the coffin that Gopher had now become.

  “Mmmm…what is…what’s wrong…Wings--?” Her head dropped again and she nearly drifted back toward the bliss of unconsciousness. But Winger grabbed her chin and jerked her head up. Then he unbelted her and dragged her from the seat.

  “Gabby…we can’t stay down here any longer. We’ve got to do something.”

  The movement around the cramped and buckled, dimly lit cabin seemed to momentarily energize them. Galland leaned against the bulkhead, holding her head, while Winger force-fed her some water from a canteen. She swallowed hard and tried to breathe, but coughed violently when she tried, spewing water everywhere.

  “Any word from ANAD?” she mumbled.

  Winger shook his head. The dust in the cabin was now so thick it refracted the fading light of the emergency lamps into strange, menacing shadows.

  “Nothing. And we can’t wait any longer.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  Winger’s lips were set in a tight, determined line. “I’d rather try to bust out of here, even if we die in the process, than sit here and suffocate to death. I want to try the treads again…maybe we can ram ourselves a little higher, closer to the surface.”

  “The void we’re in will collapse. The whole fault may give way, Wings. It would be suicide.”

  Johnny Winger slammed a hand against the bulkhead. Dust swirled in sheets from the impact of his fist. “I’d rather go that way than be stuck here trapped like rats.”

  Their eyes met for a moment. Galland nodded slowly. “I guess you’re right.”

  “I’ve been thinking about ANAD. Something mus
t have happened. I can’t raise him at all but I don’t think he would leave us here.”

  “Maybe we should give him a little longer.”

  “We don’t have much longer.”

  “I know, but ANAD’s a trooper too. He wouldn’t leave his buddies behind. He’ll be back.”

  It was the foundation creed of a Quantum Corps trooper and they both knew how badly ANAD wanted to be just like the other nogs.

  “Two hours…that’s it,” Winger decided. “No ANAD by then…we’re busting out of here. Even if we die in the attempt.” He scrambled aft through the hatch heading toward E deck, just to be doing something, anything. “I’m going to check out the tread controller one more time.”

  Gabby Galland’s eyes were growing heavy again and she sank to the floor of the command deck. Me too, she thought, but just let me rest here for a moment—

  “It is ANAD,” Mighty Mite Barnes decided, studying the acoustic returns from BioShield. “I’d recognize that structure anywhere. ANAD, Version 3.0, to be exact…replicating like a madman. We’ve got to get that contained right away and bring the little guy in from the cold.”

  Spinner stood behind Barnes, along with Murchison and several others. The alert center was crowded and stuffy.

  “Sergeant how can ANAD replicate Big Bang like that without some kind of command? Doesn’t the master processor have inhibits to prevent that sort of thing?”

  Before Barnes could answer, the coupler link in the back of her head chimed in and she knew immediately there was a message coming in, a quantum message.

  ***…is ANAD calling on any channel…Q1, Q1…emergency code…ANAD requesting all possible assistance…troopers are down and need assistance…ANAD transmitting on any channel--***

  Barnes linked in. Spinner, Murchison and the rest looked on in bewilderment as Barnes seemed to be talking to herself.

  “ANAD, this is Trooper Barnes…what’s the nature of the emergency? Why are you replicating Big Bang in violation of BioShield ordinances?”

  ***DPS1, is that you? It’s good to hear your voice again. Troopers Winger and Galland are trapped below ground…here are the coordinates--***

  ANAD rattled off the latitude and longitude of Gopher’s location.

  ***ANAD requesting assistance to extract troopers. Situation is critical…geoplane hull breached in many places…treads not operable…oxygen low…troopers in danger of termination***

  Barnes was furiously scribbling notes even as her own coupler received ANAD’s report. She showed her notes to Spinner. The duty officer’s eyes grew wide.

  “I’ll contact Major Kraft right away. And the search and rescue squad.” Spinner hustled out of the alert center.

  Barnes watched the video and acoustic feed from BioShield. From an altitude of several thousand meters, as the BioShield bots focused on the spreading swarm, ANAD’s Big Bang looked like an explosion in slow motion, a time-lapse supernova of light billowing out along snow-covered trails along the flanks of Signal Mountain.

  “ANAD, you must terminate replication immediately. Maximum rate replication endangers the environment. Terminate at once. If you don’t, you’ll trigger a BioShield response.”

  ***Trooper Barnes, ANAD has a duty to help troopers in need of assistance. No nog ever leaves his buddies behind. Maximum replication permits ANAD to render necessary assistance. Algorithm 801556 Sub-Module E is cited***

  “What the—“ Barnes shook her head. There was no such algorithm in ANAD’s memory, that she could think of. ANAD refusing to stop replication…that could only mean one thing: a logic fault somewhere in his CPU. A breakdown in code somewhere.

  And several miles away, the assembler swarm was replicating out of control.

  There was only one thing to do.

  Barnes grimly dredged up the code of the back door cutoff from memory.

  “ANAD…this is a command override. Authorization is Moses Level One. Override all executive modules. Transfer executive control to this node. ANAD…this is a command override—“

  Though she could not see it, Barnes knew that somewhere several kilometers away in a snow-dusted valley west of Haleyville, Idaho, the shimmering blue-white ball of light that was an assembler swarm in exponential overdrive was fast fading into a dim gray fog, boiling over the rocky outcrops and gullies like a summer morning mist.

  At least, that’s what she hoped was happening.

  The Sim Tank at Table Top’s Ops Center was crowded with brass when Barnes came in. Major Kraft was there, his forehead veins taut with worry over the fate of Gopher’s crew. Murchison, the project engineer, was present, as was General Alexander Kincade, c/o of Quantum Corps’ Western Command and base commander at Table Top.

  The assembled officers were studying a 3-D display of geologic strata created by SOFIE. A flashing red dot embedded in layers of rock indicated the geoplane’s estimated position.

  Kincade stroked a bushy moustache. “This is where ANAD says Gopher is located?”

  “That’s affirmative, sir,” Kraft told him. “We worked out the coordinates with Sergeant Barnes here, an hour ago. Best estimate puts them about a thousand meters down, some twenty-one kilometers northwest of here, past Hunt Valley and below Signal Mountain. We’ve confirmed some small-magnitude seismic vibration in the general area of this location…consistent with a source of that size. It’s probably pumps and valves in their power plant and environmental control system.”

  “And the crew?”

  “Alive when ANAD left the geoplane.”

  Barnes explained how the assembler swarm had bored its way gingerly to the surface. “General, if what ANAD tells me is true, Gopher’s trapped and in critical condition. Time is very short. If we don’t begin rescue operations soon, the crew—Lieutenant Winger and Lieutenant Galland—won’t survive. They may have only a few hours left.”

  Kincade mulled over the situation. “Suggestions, gentlemen. This is a tough one.”

  Murchison pointed out the latest acoustic profile of the underground strata. “If we try to drill, we stand a good chance of loosening this fault enough to slip again. I’m not sure Gopher can survive that.”

  Barnes interjected a point. “After interrogating ANAD, I learned that he bored a small tunnel to reach the surface. This path is microscopic, approximately ten microns in diameter. ANAD recommends using that hole, bored out to a larger diameter, to rescue the crew.”

  Murchison was skeptical. “I don’t think the fault is stable enough to do that. We’re getting low-magnitude tremors all the time now. It’s just a matter of time before the crustal plates move again.”

  “All the more reason to move now,” Kraft argued. He studied the three-dimensional diorama that SOFIE had projected. “Just how do we extract Winger and Galland through a small borehole?”

  Barnes elaborated on ANAD’s idea. “Continue nanobotic swarm operations inside the hole, removing just enough material to make a passage wide enough to crawl through. ANAD can secure the boundaries of the opening with a massive enough swarm, kind of like forming a barrier to keep the tunnel open.”

  “But how do we get them out?” Murchison asked.

  Kraft saw a way. “Lower a couple of hypersuits. That’ll give them air to breathe and their boot thrusters can lift them out.”

  Kincade paced around the sim tank, circling the floating projection of Signal Mountain and its buried geoplane. “Damned tricky, if you ask me. But time is short.” The base commander’s moustache seemed to straighten out when he had made a decision. “Let’s get going. Get ANAD reconfigured and programmed to widen that bore hole. And get the battalion medics out there too. There’s no telling what kind of condition those troopers will be in when we pull ‘em out.”

  First Nano’s rescue squad lifted to the surface coordinates that ANAD had identified. The location turned out to be a small ravine still dusted with powdery snow in the middle of the summer, on the western flanks
of Signal Mountain.

  As the squad offloaded their gear from the lifters, Major Kraft stepped off the platform and looked around, spying a pair of staghorn elk studying them from a small ledge halfway up the side of the mountain.

  Fellas, he muttered to himself, you’re about to see something you’ve never seen before. I just hope to God this cockamamie stunt works.

  He wasn’t sure First Nano could survive without Winger and Galland on board.

  The ANAD swarm emerged from the mobile TinyTown that had been lifted to the site. Mighty Mite Barnes linked in to give ANAD last minute instructions.

  “Just make the hole wide enough to let a hypersuited trooper through, ANAD. Use the dimensions I gave you. I’ve loaded a new config, optimized for disassembly of basaltic molecular lattice. I don’t have to remind you that time is of the essence.”

  Hovering like a backlit ground fog, the ANAD swarm flickered and pulsated with eerie radiance as it maneuvered to enter the ground. Already replicating quickly, the fog was swelling as it gained enough mass to attack the hard black volcanic rock that lay beneath the snow.

  ***ANAD estimates seven hours, sixteen minutes to reach the target. ANAD requests permission to re-config part of my swarm when near the target***

  “Re-config? For what purpose, ANAD?”

  ***Below the nine hundred meter level, standard densitometer reading, ANAD is within an hour of reaching the geoplane. If ANAD had config data for respirocyte conversion, part of my swarm could continue on to the target through the existing hole and provide an oxygen boost to the crew. Analysis indicates oxygen levels will be at life-threatening minimums in six hours and forty-five minutes***

  It was a tempting strategy but General Kincade nixed the idea. “Tell ANAD to concentrate all efforts on boring and shoring up a wider hole, so we get those troopers out of there.”

  Barnes issued the final command string to ANAD’s processor and authorized the assembler master to begin operations.

  The swarm sank toward light snow drifts as Barnes warned the rescue squad away from the injection point. Soon enough, the snow blazed with a fierce blue-white radiance as the assembler swarm filtered into the snow bank and attacked the hard still-frozen ground below. In minutes, the entire ravine was bathed in a white hot incandescence, laced with tendrils of steam, as the globe of light gradually subsided into the earth, like a miniature sun setting beside Signal Mountain.