Nanotroopers Episode 7: Hong Chui

by Philip Bosshardt

  ***ANAD acknowledges. Preparing to launch--***

  Winger felt the sting of the launch and watched the swelling fog of replicating bots billow out of the lifter ramp, spilling out onto the grass and mixing with the uncontained ANAD that was also deploying. The fog swelled rapidly in size, twinkling and fluorescing as it stripped atoms from the air and built up structure. In a few minutes, the entire park was surrounded by a barrier of nanobotic mechs, sparkling and winking in the humid morning air. And all along the periphery of the clearing, ANAD engaged the uncontained fab bots. Crackles of light and seams of distorted air highlighted the engagement points.

  “ANAD’s letting ‘em have it!” Mighty Mite Barnes observed through a lifter porthole. “Right in the chops!”

  “Like riot control, only at atomic scales,” Tranh agreed. “My E-team just doesn’t have the resources to contain all this…it’s out of control.”

  Winger could see the problem. “Years ago, we would have deployed in hypersuits for protection. Now we have an embedded ANAD swarm. We carry our own barriers with us.” To his Detachment, Winger ordered. “Okay, troops…. we’re going in hot—“

  One by one, the nano-troopers disembarked with their gear. Reaves, Barnes, Simonet, D’Nunzio, Villa and the rest exited by the aft lifter ramp, each shielded by ANAD ‘bubbles’ and loaded up the crewtracs for a little jaunt deeper into the city.

  At the same time, Tranh had ordered a squad of local Quantum Corps techs to rendezvous with Alpha Detachment at the landing zone. In ten minutes, the two crewtracs were loaded and Tranh’s squad appeared at the edge of the clearing.

  “Give ‘em the pass codes,” Winger ordered. Reaves gave Tranh the current day’s home config. The techs took that and ‘tuned’ their own barrier nanobots to be able to penetrate the ANAD barrier without opposition. Inside the shield, the two units linked up.

  Lieutenant Fordham recognized the squad leader. He was a burly African non-com.

  “Sergeant Kano, glad to see you’re on this gig. What’s the situation?”

  Kano shook hands all around, warily eyeing the ANAD swarm pulsating in the background. Even as the African sergeant gave his report, ANAD re-configged into a ghostly, vaguely para-human form.

  “Red Squad’s detailed to cover the Howrath district, Major. My squad’s been under fire practically the whole time. We’ve got loose fabricator bots replicating uncontained all over the place—“ Kano gestured toward the trusswork towers of the distant bridge—“the concentration is highest around that bridge. There used to be a bazaar there but some wise guy bought a fab in and unzipped the core right on the spot—no containment or anything. Pretty soon, all the doodads inside were going berserk…like a big bang. They were disassembling the bridge when we showed up…my guys had to work fast with everything we had, to disperse the swarm.” Kano shrugged. “It’s like mashing a balloon…squash it here and it just shows up somewhere else. We counter-banged until we got on top of the situation—but the bridge...” Kano shook his head.

  Johnny Winger was intrigued about the fab design. “Sergeant, did you get any samples? I’d like to see what config these mechs are using…what type of design.”

  Kano recognized Winger and his unit as Quantum Corps, 1st Nano. “Glad you’re here, Lieutenant. We need all the help we can get…to answer your question, sir, we haven’t had time to get any samples. Contain and disperse…that’s all we can do with what we have.”

  “Sergeant,” Fordham explained, “First Nano is here to help us but they’ve got another mission too.” He briefly explained the quantum interference that seemed to be emanating from a source in the city. “UNIFORCE is concerned about the magnitude of the interference; it could be this Symborg bugger. Maybe there’s a Red Hammer safe house. It’s scrambling every quantum coupler circuit this side of Cairo. Something big is pumping out decoherence waves all over the planet and Paris wants to find the source.”

  Kano shook his head. “We can’t use our couplers at all but I thought it was just a temporary effect, Lieutenant. And you think the source is here?”

  Winger called up the locating algorithm and beamed it over to Kano’s crewnet. In seconds, Red Squad had the same intel as Winger’s Alpha Detachment.

  Kano scanned his eyepiece. Another tech standing next to him—his name patch read PERVEZ—spoke up.

  “Sarge…we know where this is…over by the Rabindra lakes. Probably that temple complex…what was the name?”

  Kano remembered. “Bugger…you’re right! Shavindra…something or other. We did a containment op near there just last week. Regular bot blizzard, it was.”

  Winger brought up a Kolkata city map on his own eyepiece. He queried his wrist computer and soon enough, the Hindu temple compound of Shavindra was highlighted, with a shortest route already plotted.

  “If this place is one of the stronger loci of deco waves, that can only mean one thing: some kind of big time quantum signaling is going on there. Maybe Symborg and his cronies are holed up there. A Hindu temple might make the perfect cover. That’s where my Detachment needs to be.”

  Winger ordered the Detachment to board their crewtracs. He offered Kano a lift but the sergeant declined.

  “I have to relieve a detail I posted at the Howrath Bridge. They’ve been trying to contain swarms for the last twenty-four hours straight…it’s an epidemic over there.”

  “I can detail some of my people,” Winger decided. “Turbo, Spite, go along with Kano.” Sergeants Adnan Fatah and Ray Spivey came over. “Then catch up with us at this Shavindra temple when the situation’s stabilized.”

  “Yes, sir,” both nanotroopers saluted. The two of them hustled off with Kano’s men, exiting the defensive barrier in a flash of light, then hopping aboard a semi-trac for the quick ride to Howrath.

  “Load up!” Winger ordered. The rest of the Detachment swung their gear aboard the two crewtracs. The huge snorting vehicles were dual-tracked, with articulating arms front and rear to manipulate or hoist heavy objects. Powered up, each vehicle shimmered in the hazy morning sunlight as its ANAD shield formed a twinkling, flickering defensive barrier around itself, like a huge, pulsating carapace of bots.

  The crewtracs rumbled off, through the barrier ANAD screen, which sparkled as they passed by, and then turned right, onto crowded Hanagar Street, heading east for Shavindra and the great temple complex.

  Hanagar Street was thick with traffic, choked with pedestrians and rickshas, pedicabs and jitneys. Down narrow lanes branching off to the sides, dense smoke and fab swarms added to the humid haze of a late summer morning. The crewtrac drivers maneuvered gingerly through the throngs, honking at the wizened old wallahs as they pulled their rickshas in every direction, heedless of the traffic.

  Major Fordham studied the scene through a porthole. “In Kolkata, some things never change.”

  The Shavindra temple compound was west of the city center, set in a tree-lined park called Bhattan. From the Hanagar Street roundabout, the ornate stepped pyramids of the main temple poked above the trees, a brooding presence in the early morning mists. Traffic thinned out as the crewtracs navigated the circle and accelerated out along the Varanasi Road connector.

  Johnny Winger had been studying a layout diagram of the temple on his eyepiece when the crewnet voice circuit crackled to life.

  “Skipper—“ it was the lead DPS tech, Sheila Reaves—“I’ve got high-freq decoherence waves slamming away…all around us. Working on a fix now…but whatever it is, it’s big.”

  Winger saw the same pattern on his eyepiece…Reaves had ported the readings to the crewnet. Whatever it was, the source was undoubtedly nearby. Something was shaking and snapping spacetime like a wet rag, sending out massive waves of collapsing probability states.

  “Try to get a fix on it, Sheila. And start recording. I want Table Top to see this too.”

  “Lots of thermals too,” added Taj Singh. Singh was the Detachment’s se
cond Defense and Protective Systems specialist, a rookie atomgrabber fresh out of nog school. “All bands…EM, acoustic, whatever it is, it’s intense. Reading big nano ahead.”

  Winger trained the crewtrac scope on the ornate spires—the gopuram—of the huge temple. Elaborate carvings of lions’ heads and fanciful creatures leered back at him. The visual shimmered in the morning haze and it wasn’t humidity that caused the shimmer.

  “Barrier bots,” the atomgrabber muttered. Not entirely unexpected. The entire temple compound was shielded by a screen of nanobots, with enough density to haze the air around the compound. “Work us in as close as you can,” he told Sergeant Victor Klimuk, who was up front driving the crewtrac. “ANAD…config state one…prepare for opposed entry.”

  At Winger’s command, the loose swarm of ANAD bots that had been riding the crewtrac in the back corner of the crew compartment began changing shape, losing its para-human form as the assemblers re-distributed themselves and configured for the combat insertion that Winger had commanded.

  The crewtracs eased through a huge iron gate adorned with serpents’ heads and tiger paws in stone, and stopped a few meters away from the shimmering barrier that shielded the temple. Through the translucent shield, crackling with bursts of light, the Sacred Pond of the Lillies reflected morning sunlight from an inner courtyard. A stone relief of Lord Shiva rose from the pond and a slender spire brooded over a frozen gathering of spirits, also in stone. Beyond the water, a colonnaded portico surrounded the courtyard. Inside, the Hall of a Thousand Pillars was dark, save for clots and denser swarms of bots moving along the colonnade.

  “We’re going in at Tactical One,” Winger decided. “Be ready to engage. Coilguns and HERF batteries…prepare to barrage on my command. We’ll shock ‘em with rf and see if we can burrow inside while they’re chewing on that.”

  Alpha Detachment dismounted from the crewtracs and scurried into position for the assault.

  “DPS…give me your best bearing to those decoherence waves. Are we in the vicinity?”

  Sheila Reaves studied the readouts on her eyepiece, moving laterally around the colonnade to get a better angle. “Dead ahead, Skipper. Whatever’s slamming quantum states is inside…Jeez, it’s like an earthquake.”

  “Maximum barrage,” Winger ordered. He was hunkered down in the shadow of a grinning sculpture of Shiva, propped up against one of the deity’s legs. “GO…GO…GO!”

  The air burned with multiple thunderclaps as Alpha Detachment opened up. The High-Energy Radio Frequency bursts rhythmically pounded the temple barrier. At the same moment, a barrage of coilgun fire swept across the inner courtyard and pond, sending geysers of stone chips and dust everywhere.

  Nanoscale assembler bots shrieked as waves of HERF thundered across the courtyard, ripping the barrier to shreds. The clatter of fried bots tinkling onto the stone pavement could be heard between coilgun rounds.

  “MOVE OUT!” Winger yelled. Each nanotrooper surged ahead through the shredded remains of the barrier. Bursts of light, like fireflies flickering on a summer night, tickled all along the edges of the barrier.

  The Detachment moved as one across the courtyard, through a line of columns and toward the massive oak doors of a large chamber—the Hall of a Thousand Pillars—Winger’s eyepiece annotated on his viewer. Winger switched views to check on ANAD and see how the assembler formation was doing.

  ANAD had replicated like crazy and was busily engaging the nanobots of the temple barrier, even as the rest of the Detachment zeroed in on the fix Reaves had given them. Winger wanted to see what kind of bots ANAD was dealing with.

  The momentary disorientation when switching to nanoscale passed quickly enough and Winger soon had a view like flying through a sleet storm. Shadowy shapes—polygons, tetrahedrals, dodecahedrons—flitted by as he settled into the view. Moments later, the image resolved to a clearer view of the battlefield.

  The ANAD bots were advancing on full propulsor along a ragged line. At the point of the advance, several replicants had already engaged the enemy. Winger tweaked the gain to get a better image.

  The barrier bots were all effectors, whirling and slashing as they blocked ANAD’s path. Bursts of light erupted like firecrackers going off as ANAD tore at the enemy’s appendages, liberating thousands of electron volts with each slash.

  Debris and loose atomic fluff thickened into a sort of fog, reflecting acoustics everywhere. The image fritzed and careened as the combat intensified.

  Use your enzymatic knife, ANAD, Winger muttered. The tiny assembler had been slashing with his bond disrupters but it was like hacking through thick vine in a dense forest. The enzymatic knife was a broader area weapon. It would slice through the churning melee easily.