***Swarm will comply…scanning now…***
Winger stepped back and motioned the others back too, as the swarm surged forward. In seconds, the massive door was blanketed in a thick, flickering mist. Small light bursts rippled up and down the length of the door, as the two swarms engaged.
Reaves followed ANAD’s progress with her imager. “Skipper, looks like he’s going to something octahedral, unusual grabbers…haven’t seen anything like those before—“
Winger studied the image himself. But before he could say anything, the door flared to a white-hot light, too bright to look directly at, then came a piercing shriek as the massive structure super-nova’ed into incandescence. The fierce light strobed and throbbed like a living thing for a few moments, then faded, not completely, but to a hot translucent membrane.
Inside the antechamber beyond, the scene resembled a view from underwater.
The air was thick with nanobots, clotted like clouds and clumps and myriad other shapes, floating and swimming as if they were a thousand meters undersea. Lightning and flashes erupted in a chaotic symphony, spotted through the dense medium that filled the room. A few humans, or at least, human-forms, moved languidly about their business, attending to a large device in the center.
Jeez, it’s just like Kipwezi, Winger thought. Not this crap again--
As Winger scanned the room with his own imager, a massive decoherence wave erupted from the device, momentarily washing out everything, so that only a milky white glow was visible. For a brief, almost imperceptible instant, the glow collapsed into a careening kaleidoscope of images, like a slide show gone mad, as an infinite parade of probability states swept outward. A great tidal wave of all possibilities collided into each other right before them.
The wavefront passed by in less than a second but in that single second, Alpha Detachment disappeared from view and was instantly re-assembled into a facsimile of its previous state. Johnny Winger blinked hard and saw Reaves, Tsukota, Singh—all of them wink out, then split apart into pinwheels upon pinwheels of themselves, carved into ever smaller slices that whipped by too fast for the eye to comprehend.
Then it was gone and Winger shook his head, feeling his arms and legs, as if to reassure himself that he was still there. He saw the others doing the same.
The curtain of roaring silence lifted and he heard someone saying—“…the hell was that?” It was Klimuk, shaking himself like an animal startled from a deep sleep.
Winger got his senses back and realized that they were staring face to face with the very source of the quantum disturbances.
He signaled for ANAD to execute the breaching, but there was no response…nothing from the swarm at all. The door was still there, open or not, he couldn’t tell, but translucent enough for them to see through.
Inside, at the very center where the entanglement wave had emerged, Johnny Winger squinted and could make out the faint contours of some kind of platform. He remembered the small sphere at Engebbe but this was bigger, different.
About the height of an average man, four tetrahedral legs supported the small platform. Atop the platform, a quartet of spheres was mounted. Each sphere was studded with scores of small projections and protuberances, so that the spheres resembled puckered lemons. The whole thing resembled a big basket of fruit gone bad.
“ANAD…prepare to breach the barrier. Assault configuration—“ but there was nothing. No swarm, no signal. “Victor…have you got ‘em?”
Sergeant Klimuk pecked at keys on his wristpad, trying to get a fix on the swarm. “That last pulse must have dispersed them, Skipper. Or altered config. I’ve got nothing.”
I’ve got to get in there, Winger told himself. The doorway was still shielded; a quick touch produced a needle-sharp sting to his fingers and an angry ripple in the barrier bot shield.
“What about the HERF, Major?” It was Reaves. “Fry ‘em with rf, then big-bang our way in. Always worked in the war games before.”
Winger had to admit she was right. “Charge up the batteries, Sheila. But once we slam ‘em, I’m driving ANAD myself.”
Reaves and Singh brought up the radio frequency pulse weapons and sighted them in on the door.
“ANAD,” Winger told the swarm, “go to Config One and give me control of the master. I’m piloting this assault.”
Nanotroopers Episode 7: Hong Chui Page 10
