***ANAD understands….attempting to withdraw…I am now fully engaged with the enemy…master bot coming about…I’ll have to sacrifice replicants…***
“Do it, ANAD! Hold your position…we’ll swing by.”
At Galland’s command, Strakes steered for ANAD’s position. The replicated daughter bots could be abandoned. By design, once the coupler link with the master was broken, a timer circuit ensured the replicants committed atomic seppuku and were disassembled so there was nothing for the enemy to capture.
“I’ve got the signal!” said Winger. “BOP, steer right and center on heading zero eight five.”
Strakes complied and Scooter was slammed again by another round of tremors. Creaks and groans echoed through the hull. “She’s sluggish…we may have lost some tread, Skipper.”
“Just keep going,” Galland told him. “We’ve got to get out of this stratum before Scooter’s crushed.”
The ship shimmied and shook like a wet dog as Strakes drove them to ANAD’s position. Winger had killed the coupler link. The last remnants of the swarm were quickly being overwhelmed by Red Hammer bots…no sense in following that.
“At least, the borer’s still operating,” Strakes muttered to no one in particular. If Scooter lost that, she’d be stuck but good, trapped five hundred meters below the Catskill Mountains of New York.
“ANAD bot master signal less than ten meters away,” Stivik reported, fiddling with the acoustic and EM detectors. “He may have been damaged…I’m seeing some signal dropout, intermittent spikes and drops.”
“ANAD,” said Winger, “do you read? Make your way to the capsule port…full propulsor. We can’t wait forever.”
Scooter had several launch and capture ports spotted around her hull. ANAD masters and swarms could enter and exit quickly from the ship through their own dedicated lockouts.
But there was no reply over the coupler circuit. “Looks like we’ve lost comms, Sensor. What’s the little guy doing out there?”
“Hard to say with all the seismic noise,” Stivik replied. “Best guess: he seems to be in motion…I’m getting acoustic returns that read like propulsor operation. And the signal’s getting stronger.”
“Okay, as soon as he comes aboard, we’re out of here.”
Word came less than a minute later, as Scooter rolled and porpoised and shook from more tremors and quakes.
“Got ‘em, Skipper!” said Stivik. “That’s the port cycling…positive ID on capture signal…and something else too…I’m getting EMs forward, looks like ANAD…maybe part of the swarm came back too.”
“What are they doing forward?”
The answer came seconds later. Strakes saw an immediate drop in borer ops. “Borer swarm mass down ten per cent…I’m compensating, loading new config to make more bots—“
“Is the bot master aboard?”
“Affirmative, Skipper,” said Winger. I’ve got positive signal from inside the port. It’s ANAD, all right.”
“Borer still losing mass!” Strakes said. The BOP1’s fingers flew over his keyboard, countering the effect. “I’m trying another config—“
“Red Hammer…it has to be…” Winger muttered, checking weapons status: HERF was charged, magpulsers were ready. “Skipper, the enemy has somehow infected ANAD, rode back home with him. That has to be what happened. Remember ANAD said he was fully engaged with the enemy. We may have some onboard…maybe even inside the borer.”
Galland didn’t want to believe it but her tactical sense told him the DPS was probably right. The question was: now what? If Red Hammer had infected their borer with its own bots, Scooter was sunk. And if ANAD had brought enemy bots onboard—
She made the difficult decision. “Strakes, shut down the borer. Shut it down. And isolate that capture port. We’ve got to scrub Scooter from bow to stern…then we can re-boot the borer.”
“Ma’am, if I shut down—“
“Do it now!”
Strakes managed the shutdown and Scooter’s forward momentum died off.
For the next half hour, Scooter was dead in the rock, while Armadillo closed to within a few dozen meters, ready to lend assistance if needed. Galland ordered a full sweep of her geoplane, bow to stern. When ANAD was onboard and in full capture, any bots left over had to be Red Hammer.
Johnny Winger led a small team, including the BOP Sergeant D’Amato and SS1 Sergeant Stivik, moving cautiously aft from deck to deck, HERF guns charged, mag weapons enabled, hunting for loose bots. They found a few on C deck and hosed the intruders down with rf and magnetic loops, frying anything that wasn’t ANAD.
Finally, Winger pronounced Scooter clean. “That was close, gentlemen,” he said, as they made their way back to the command deck. “Red Hammer bots somehow coupled with ANAD and we brought a few onboard. But I think we’re sterile now.”
Galland ordered D’Amato to get the borer up and operating again. She conversed on the coupler link with Lieutenant Gerhart aboard Armadillo.
“We engaged but the bad guys were out-replicating us so we pulled back. We were close coupled so we inadvertently brought some nasties on board but we’ve gotten Scooter scrubbed down now and we’re clean.”
Gerhart said, “Wait one…standby…” The link crackled for a few moments, then : “I’m getting something from my SS1…have your guy check it out too. Heavy seismics…the system says it’s a geoplane signature…could be the mother ship and she seems to be moving off…the signal’s changing aspect—“
Galland consulted with Stivik. The SS1 studied his board, fiddled with his waterfall display and quickly concurred. “Armadillo’s right, Skipper. SAP says it’s a geoplane signature…and not one of ours. Must be the original target. It’s moving off, bearing one two five…heading out right underneath the New York Bight, underneath the seabed.”
Galland rubbed her chin. “Running away? They fought ANAD to a draw…why run now?”
Winger said, “Maybe they were just probing…testing us.”
Stivik waved a hand in the air. “This is odd, Lieutenant. I was following the signal…everything indicated a bearing of one two five, depth about a thousand meters below the seabed, but now it’s shifting. She’s coming up…see there?” He pointed to a set of narrow spikes on his display. “Signal’s stronger…she’s coming up. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she’s breaching…coming up above the seabed.”
Galland’s eyes widened. “A geoplane with submarine capability? I haven’t seen anything from Q2 about that.”
Winger remembered the hide and seek game Mole had played with a Chinese submarine just a few days before. “I’d have given anything to have submarine capability when we left Lions Rock. Even a little buoyancy would have been nice.”
“Can you follow it, Stivik?”
The SS1 shrugged. “Signal’s getting fainter…if she’s above the seabed, like a submarine, she can outrun us pretty easily.”
Galland swore softly. “Damn. Get every scrap of signal you can…and try to get a firm bearing. Q2 needs as much intel as we can give them.”
“Bearing is definitely one two five…east by southeast, growing fainter…I’m losing it in all the seismic noise around here.”
“A geoplane that’s also a submarine…” Winger had to admit he was impressed. “Maybe they’re headed back to Lions Rock…what’s left of it.”
Galland shrugged. “Why stop there? They could make it to Paryang, in Tibet. Cruise like a sub across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, then head belowground, burrow underneath the Himalayas and surface inside that monastery…they could almost go anywhere.”
“We could never catch them,” Winger agreed. “A geo-sub-ship…they could show up anywhere with no warning.”
Galland decided to focus on the present. “Grab what you can, Sensor and then we’re heading back to base. Best time from our current location--?”
Sergeant Zhi, the geotech, did some quick calculatio
ns and plotted a return course. “We can make the launch point in New Jersey in about three hours, best speed.”
“Very well…when Sensor has all he can get, turn Scooter around and make tracks. Wings, let’s you and me go aft, grab a drink and get some chow. We need to talk.”
Winger secured Scooter’s defensive suite and the two of them crawled aft through the gangway to C deck and the geoplane’s tiny mess compartment. Inside, D’Amato and Zhi were slurping coffee and snarfing doughnuts. For a moment, Winger and Galland hung back and listened to the troopers chat.
D’Amato was talking, his mouth crammed with doughnut. “They never should have launched ANAD, you know. It was nuts…anybody could see that.”
Zhi agreed, slurping at her coffee. “All those Quantum Corps guys are just atomgrabbers and boy scouts…geeks who like to play with bots and atoms. They should leave geo ops to the adults.”
“Yeah, like you and me are adults.” Both crewmen chuckled at that.
D’Amato said, “You know, it’s Quantum Corps’ fault we couldn’t track and follow that geoplane contact. They want to swarm the thing like a hive of bees.”
“Yeah, kill the geoplane and you kill the bots.”
Galland and Winger came into the mess compartment and Zhi and D’Amato looked nervously at each other.
“Lieutenant Galland, Lieutenant Winger, uh—“
“We heard it all, guys” said Galland. “No sense trying to suck up now. So you think you know how to fight off swarms better than atomgrabbers?”
“No, ma’am,” said D’Amato. “It’s just that—“
Winger held up a hand. “No use trying to paper over things now, Sergeant. It’s evident Boundary Patrol and Quantum Corps have a lot of work to do to mesh as joint crews.”
Galland helped herself to the last doughnut and made sure she enjoyed it loudly, smacking her lips. Zhi steamed quietly, lowered her eyes and watched D’Amato squirm out of the corner of her eyes.
“Lieutenant, all we were really saying is that we know geoplane ops. You’ve got ANAD. You know swarm ops. But down here, it’s different. You can’t just release a swarm with no thought as to how it affects the environment. Already, we set off tremors practically every time we go with ANAD. Maybe there are better ways of dealing with Red Hammer.”
“No doubt,” Winger admitted. “But the enemy gets a vote too. They’ve chosen to use swarms of nanobots to set off tremors themselves. We fight fire with fire, swarm against swarm.”
“Sir, no disrespect, but maybe we have to be smarter than that. Fighting swarms with swarms underground around tectonic plates and fault boundaries is a good way to get everyone killed. We need a better way.”
“I’ll put your thoughts in my after-action report, “ Galland told them. “Now, finish up your sugar and lard break and get back to your station. We’ll be back at the ingress point in three hours.”
Zhi and D’Amato were quick to squeeze their way out of the mess compartment and wriggle forward through Scooter’s central gangway.
When they were out of hearing, Winger looked at Galland. “He’s right you know…we do need a better way of combatting Red Hammer down here.”
“Save it, Wings. Save it for the debriefing.”
Scooter and Armadillo made it back to their ingress point in northern New Jersey in good time. Both geoplanes breached the surface in the woods behind the shopping mall, which was already lit up for the night and its parking lots jammed with shoppers and visitors, all enjoying a Friday night fireworks show and laser spectacle. The geoplanes were quickly loaded onto crewtracs and a small convoy pulled out of the woods, looking for all the world like some kind of circus troop heading for its next gig.
An hour later, the convoy had reached Newark Liberty International Airport, where two cargo hyperjets waited at the end of one ramp. Scooter and Armadillo were smartly loaded on board their carriers and the jets veetolled away during a lull in late-evening air traffic. Once airborne, the jet carrying Armadillo headed for a Boundary Patrol station in south Florida. Scooter and her crew, along with all the nanotroopers, headed west to Table Top.
The debrief wasn’t long in coming, as Major Kraft and Major Chandrasekar of UNBP appeared on vid screens in the crew galley of hyperjet Mercury, as she streaked across the top of the atmosphere westward to Idaho. Galland had already squirted an early synopsis of her report to Battalion and both commanders were anxious to get her verbal side. Lieutenant Gerhart, of Armadillo, had already recorded his report and Galland had appended that to her own.
“To sum up, sir,” Galland was saying, “the engagement was pretty inconclusive. We deployed okay, and detected and tracked a Red Hammer target—it had geoplane signatures, so we’re pretty sure the cartel has geoplanes. We also detected swarm activity—thermals, EMs, acoustics all consistent with nanobotic swarms, so we engaged with our own ANAD.”
“ANAD moved to contact and was in close-order battle with the Red Hammer swarms,” Winger added, “but all of a sudden, they started to disengage. Dispersed completely. We tried to maintain contact, but they seemed in a hurry to leave the area. Some tremors and quakes were generated. I haven’t seen any damage reports.”
“Damage was minimal,” Chandraksekar said. “Some buildings got rattled in Manhattan. A bridge off Staten Island has structural damage and is closed. That’s about it.”
Major Kraft scowled on the vid screen, his Black Forest moustache swollen and throbbing. That only happened when Ironpants was pissed off. “Galland, Winger, what you’re telling me is that none of us really knows how to fight underground. Subterranean ops with ANAD swarms is a whole new battlefield and tactics are still being worked out. Is that about it?” Kraft didn’t like for the Corps to be seen by others, especially by Chandrasekar, as anything less than perfect and overwhelmingly powerful.
“Sir, “Winger spoke up, “what we need is something to augment ANAD. ANAD is fully capable of navigating through rock and other solid structures, but it takes time. We need some kind of weapon that can neutralize Red Hammer seismic swarms and geoplanes without creating more damage than we prevent.”
Kraft was chewing on the end of his moustache like a mouse with a mountain of cheese. “Lieutenants Winger and Galland, come to my office on the double when you arrive back here. We’ve got a joint project with Boundary Patrol underway right now in our Lab. It may be just what we need.”
Winger looked at Galland as the vid went dark. Both of them were thinking the same thing:
They’ve already been working on this problem and we never knew a thing about it.
Nanotroopers Episode 18: Geoplanes Page 12
