Johnny Winger and the Serengeti Factor

by Philip Bosshardt

  ***Increment counter for next carbon group***

  The swarm of ANAD mechs closed with Serengeti and flung themselves against the enemy.

  Newly armed, ANAD seized a phosphor group on the nearest mech's effector and twisted atoms until the bonds broke. Liberating thousands of electron volts, the disrupter zapped the enemy mech and shattered its outer shell, ripping off probes left and right. Serengeti shuddered and spun with the pulse, then re-engaged to fight off another bond snap. It was a maneuver Winger had practiced a hundred times in the sim tank back at Table Top.

  Throughout Bilbao's tegmentum, trillions of ANAD replicants duplicated the same tactic.

  "Take that!" Winger was exultant, twisting his sticks left and right. His fingers flew over the controls, managing config, pulling more molecules to add shielding, all the while fighting off thrusts and slashes from the enemy mechs.

  The cytoplasm churned and frothed with furious combat.

  Yet unseen by anyone, a small force of Serengeti mechs had detached from the main formation. Detected but not noticed, the force exited the ventral tegmentum and beat its way at flank speed toward the optic nerve, a bundle of fibers in Bilbao's visual cortex near the front of his brain. Passing the Nodes of Ranvier, the force silently cruised outward along the fiber bundle, steadily closing on the inner membranes of the addict's eyeball.

  It was the quickest way for any mech to exit the brain.

  Caden and Macalvey and a scattering of Detachment grunts stared at the speckling blooms of light winking on and off…the imager captured the sound and fury of nanomech battle deep inside Bilbao's immobilized skull and converted the acoustic waves to visual. It was like watching some mad kaleidoscope of swirling dots, washed with brilliant daubs of color.

  "Like a thousand battles of Verdun," Macalvey said. "All in a space the size of a walnut. Incredible--"

  "Reading high heat signature," Gibby reported. "Vascular grid's registering something like a hundred thousand picojoules, and rising."

  Winger acknowledged the figure. "This fellow's out like a slab of stone and he's emitting like a supernova." He refreshed the imager with more data. "Quick count, Doc…look at that, will you? ANAD's pulsing the plasma and the density's dropping."

  Macalvey saw the data. "Fewer mechs, maybe? Or a tissue leak?"

  "Hard to say at the moment. Maybe ANAD's holding its own. Sure wish we could get an image--"

  "When the dust settles, Lieutenant. Patience." Macalvey watched the same density readings Winger had pointed out. Sure enough, the numbers were falling. The original spike signaling the first thrashing moments of battle had now leveled off--all replications were done and Bilbao's brain was thick with nanowarriors swarming to the melee--yet the density was steadily dropping.

  And still unnoticed, the small detached force of Serengeti mechs had reached its objective. Slowing to transit the narrowing tube of interstitial fluid, the force passed through the lachrymal duct at the corner of Bilbao's eye and surfaced like a fleet of miniature subs through the corneal film to the outer surface of the eyeball. There they floated for a few seconds, until the replication order came.

  A few dozen centimeters below the small fleet, uncounted trillions of Serengeti mechs had been cleaved and slashed into atoms before the enemy master had managed to stabilize the battlefront. Then, for several minutes afterward, ANAD and Serengeti stalked each other relentlessly, drifting on brief propulsor bursts, sounding the fluid swamp with acoustic jolts, then listening, always listening, in a deadly game of hide and seek. Both forces were exposed, both had suffered massive losses of replicants. Each sought refuge in the dendritic jungle of Bilbao's ventral tegmentum. One misstep, one maneuver too far could be fatal. A billion billion times smaller than their submarine ancestors, who had prowled the oceans like predators stalking prey, Serengeti and ANAD drifted silently across Bilbao's cranial sea, scant microns from each other, hidden yet ever alert, waiting for that one chance to close and dismember the enemy forever.

  Johnny Winger had somehow managed to massage the imager enough to fine tune its resolution. A few adjustments made, he coaxed a grainy image of the cranial plasma and axon fibers crisscrossing the terrain. Then he took hold of the IC panel and started hunting again.

  "Doc, I've got the strangest feeling," he admitted. "Like I'm dueling with a very keen intelligence here--"

  Macalvey wasn't surprised. "Serengeti's processor seems to be light years ahead of anything we've ever seen. You're dealing with a mechanism maybe a hundred nanometers in basic dimension, with the cognitive abilities of a small child."

  "Or I'm dealing with another controller. Some hotshot IC running the show from a covert base here in Hong Kong."

  "A distinct possibility," Macalvey admitted.

  The hunt went on for several minutes. Taking a fix from the vascular grid, Winger navigated Bilbao's Islet of Duchin and cruised in expanding circles through jungles of thick axons, stopping from time to time to listen, occasionally sounding the debris for telltale pulses.

  It was damned frustrating but Winger tried not to show it. He'd tried several tactics to find out what Serengeti was doing to the addict's limbic system, but this swarm was smarter and more aggressive than the one he'd encountered inside Nalinka's head, seemingly always one step ahead of ANAD. When Winger tried to outmaneuver, the enemy swarm countered. Every maneuver seemed to be anticipated; it was quickly evident that Serengeti (at least this variant) was programmed to defend itself and wouldn't give up control of its host without a fight. And to make matters worse, he'd been unable to grab an enemy mech for analysis.

  "Nothing, Doc," he said. "It's like he's just disappeared."

  "Perhaps ANAD has dispatched the enemy completely."

  Winger figured that to be unlikely. "Anything else on the vascular grid?"

  It was Sergeant Gibbs who saw the pressure spike from Bilbao's eye, a fraction of a second before the swarm ballooned into the room.

  "Ah…Lieutenant, something seems to be--"

  "LOOK OUT--!!" Deeno's scream filled the examining room.

  No one was quite sure when the first effects of the Serengeti attack were felt. The debriefs later seemed to converge on the two CQE's, working hard to tweak ANAD's templates for the next phase of the engagement. Deeno D'Nunzio had been working with Gibby on new configs for ANAD and Darcy Rota was helping, filling in for Ozzie Tsukota, who broken a leg in Charioteer's crash in France.

  Both engineers noticed it right away; a shrill keening high-freq tone, almost beyond human hearing, yet irritating in a vaguely unsettling way. Both wore hypervests, partial rigs that provided some protection, and their sensors registered the attack right away. Sergeant Rota's panicked distress call from the corner of the room as the nanomechs bored into her rig and arms would linger in everybody's memory for a long time. The other CQE, Sergeant D'Nunzio, reported a different effect--just as panicky--when she found she couldn't squirm away along the floor as fast as she wanted to…by then, the Serengeti swarm was thick enough to form a barely visible fog, almost a blanket, muffling the examining theater with exponentially thickening mist. It was something you could barely see but every sensor and caution alarm was going off in hypervests all over the place and you sure as hell could feel the resistance to movement.

  "Mass assault swarm!" somebody yelled over the crewnet. It was Tallant's voice. The CC2 was already on one knee, swatting madly at the whizzing, spinning cloud of assembler mechs that had engulfed her.

  "Bond breakers!" yelled Joe McReady. Mac had been wrestling a containment pod into the room when his arm servos quit. The pod slipped and slid out under its own weight, pinning him against the wall. "---aaarrrggghhh!!"

  "They've gone airborne!" Johnny Winger recognized the scenario, too late. They'd wargamed it enough times at Table Top. "Fall back…fall back! Go to TACREP 1!"

  Tactical Response One was already loaded in the IC's. Winger pressed a few buttons on his
wrist keypad and pushed through the thick spongy mist, struggling hard to make it to the hall outside, and help Mac.

  They didn't have long to act. TACREP called for the unit to do an emergency opposed-force setup of the ANAD system. Retrieve the master, get containment going, re-establish comm links, and counter-program like hell to beat back the assault before it consumed everything.

  The worst thing was that Macalvey and Keino didn't even have hypervests to protect them.

  Winger knew full well they had only a few minutes at best. In wargames, ANAD had demonstrated bond-breaking, molecule-disassembling speeds up to a hundred thousand nanometers per second, about a tenth of a meter every second, blown away as just so much atomic debris. Serengeti was undoubtedly just as fast, if not faster. If they didn't get countermeasures going quick, ANAD Detachment would cease to exist, not to mention Bilbao and all their evidence.

  "Re-config IC!" Winger yelled. He worked with several others to free Mac and together they managed to extricate the CEC2. It was like swimming in oily water, trying to exert any effort against the mechs.

  "Re-configging--done now!" Nathan Caden called out. "She's ready to go." Caden was okay for the moment, Winger noted. The brunt of the swarm was forming on the other side of the room.

  Winger hunkered down on the floor, covering himself as best he could, to punch out commands on his keypad. Beneath his knees, the floor itself writhed and hummed like a thing alive. He could feel the high-freq vibration through his field boot. It wouldn't be long before he'd have to ditch the IC and retreat the hell out of there.

  But he'd be damned if he was going to leave ANAD or their hard-won evidence behind.

  Winger flailed at the swarm with one hand while he punched buttons: Comm link to SELECT…Program to FBS--Fly-by-Stick. Launch would be opposed insertion. Active defense…ISR Mode. That stood for Intelligence-Surveillance-Reconnaissance.

  At last, he was done.

  "ANAD master in the tube!" called out Moby M'Bela. "Primed to go, Lieutenant!"

  "Launch all groups!" Winger shouted. "Airborne counternano--and get these civilians out of here!"

  Dana Tallant and Winger coordinated the insertion, while Caden hustled Macalvey and Keino away from the examining room. They'd be secure enough for the time being with the convoy outside. For good measure, Caden erected a small MOBnet around the line of trucks, giving the two doctors strict instructions to stay put.

  Back inside, ANAD was ready. With a whoosh of compressed air, the TinyTown pod injected the recovered stream of ANADs into the midst of the enemy swarm.

  "Full imager?" Tallant yelled back.

  "Do it!" Winger commanded. "But run active defense first--it's programmed. We've got to give these critters something else to chew on--besides us!"

  A thermal bloom nearly shorted out Winger's eyepiece as the ANAD swarm defaulted to maximum-rate replication. Active defense Alpha was a set program they had run scores of times at Table Top Mountain. It called for the ANAD swarm to replicate basic structure at the fastest possible rate, then seek and destroy all non-self devices it could detect. ANAD's disassembly speed was set at the best possible rate for fighting through van der Waals forces and cleaving atom bonds.

  "Got an image, Lieutenant!" Tallant struggled to see her eyepiece through the dust churned up by the furious enemy swarm. "I'm porting it to the net now…EMs are shaky…interference from the enemy, looks like."

  Eyepieces were useless. The thermal bloom and dust exploded into a ball of fire, as ANAD swelled rapidly in an enveloping cloud, engaging the Serengeti swarm in a set piece battle of ionizing electrons and atom groups. The white-hot heat expanded like a small nova, almost pulsating as the front lines churned back and forth; ANAD's exponential armies rallying to the assault, tangling with uncounted trillions of enemy mechs.

  Winger ported the image straight to his eyepiece. Tallant was right; as the image settled in, it looked like a churning, frothy mess. The air grew thick and black with molecular debris.

  "Need to grab one of these critters," Winger muttered to himself. He pressed a few keys--noting the pressure of the enemy assault against his skin and helmet seemed to have lessened a bit--he took direct Fly-by-Stick control of a small platoon of replicants. If I can just surround one…damn…like trying to corral a herd of bees.

  He used the twin control sticks on the IC panel to zero in on a detached group of Serengeti mechs, scooting away from the main axis of attack, swirling near a corner of the room. What the hell were they up to? Were they under remote control too? Was there some controller miles away joysticking the swarm through the assault? There was no way to tell.

  Winger dove his ANADs at the Serengeti group and executed a perfect entrapment maneuver, neatly bracketing the swarm in a classic octahedral lattice. The Serengeti mechs pressed outward, buzzing angrily, trying to break out of the lattice, probing for weak spots, but Winger had quickly reinforced his scout group with extra ANADs.

  "Gotcha!" he exulted. Now they'd have something to take back to the Detachment bivouac at Chek Lap Kok Airport.

  But his triumph was short-lived. Even as he commanded the ANAD lattice to propel itself back toward containment, sheparding the trapped Serengeti mechs, fending off steady probes of the bond breakers, one of the enemy devices separated itself from the main body. In the imager view, Winger stared in horror as the nanomech suddenly shed all its outer atom group armament in a puff of molecular debris and executed a daring fold/collapse, imploding in on itself in a flurry of segment cleavage and destruction. Whirling on picowatt propulsors like a mad dervish, a blurry core of atoms exploded out of the sleet of fragments and rocketed through the lattice like a bullet. In a fraction of a second, it was through the lattice and gone, off the field of view.

  Johnny Winger could only shake his head at the maneuver. They'd wargamed tactical escapes from all kinds of capture maneuvers but nothing like this. It didn't even seem possible.

  Ten to one that was the master replicant, he told himself. Programmed to evade capture anyway it could, or commit atomic 'suicide' if it couldn’t. He couldn't help but wonder if he wasn't jousting with an unseen human IC somewhere nearby.

  The skirmish continued for another five minutes, but Winger could tell the ANADs were steadily losing the battle. Group by group, the ANADs were steadily and surely overwhelmed by sheer numbers. He began to notice increasing resistance to movement again, a clear indication the Serengeti mechs had re-established themselves inside the examining room. Soon the high-freq whine became audible again.

  "Dana, I can't hold them back!"

  Dana Tallant, ten feet away and nearer the door, had already lost all servos in her hypervest. She lay on her side, virtually helpless, still fingering her own wristpad, pecking out counter-attacks against the stiffening Serengeti resistance.

  "I've lost servo power myself! Help me up--"

  Johnny Winger clawed his way around the bed, where Bilbao lay pale and still, enveloped in a gray swirling mass, and went to his buddy's side. He wrestled her up to a kneeling position.

  "--Jesus, it's like water polo…trying to move an arm's almost impossible--"

  Winger could see the situation was getting hopeless. "Just mindless replication. They're going to smother us, if they don't eat us first--"

  Tallant was tapping keys without effect on her wristpad. "I'm not linked to ANAD--"

  "--I lost him," Winger admitted. "I was trying to snag a master…thought I had him but he slipped out…damndest thing I ever saw--"

  Tallant finally gave up on her wristpad and concentrated on standing up.

  Winger helped her get upright. "This is no good--" His own hypervest was minus a few servos and he was wobbly to boot but at least it offered some protection. "Dana, I can't hack fast enough to counter-attack. This stuff is unbelievable…somebody's really juiced up the rep rate. If it's an ANAD, they've really been tinkering under the hood."

  "There's nothing
left…we've got to get out of here…unless DPS can give us some breathing room."

  Winger got on the crewnet. "CC1 to Detachment…fall back! Fall back at once! Fall back to the convoy--"

  He slogged toward the door, through spongy mist a few paces and then made another call. "CC1 to DPS1. Guys, get your HERF guns spooled up. It might not work but we need all the help we can get!"

  "Already on line, Lieutenant!" It was Reaves' strained voice, from somewhere in the hospital lobby. "I'm coming as fast as I can…we had to secure the convoy first--"

  "Reaves, fire short bursts of RF! See if you can clear us a bubble or a zone around this hall! I'm not sure we can get back to the convoy otherwise! And make it quick…Lieutenant Tallant’s injured…infested! We’ve got to get her out of here.”

  Indeed, several hospital orderlies and nurses had already been lost to the swarm. Their disfigured corpses lay in crumpled heaps along the corridor.

  "CC1, we've now lost containment!" It was Sergeant M'Bela.

  "Forget the pods, Moby!" Winger came back. "Form up around me if you can. DPS is going to try and stun these buggers with a big kick of RF, give us a chance to get the hell out of here!"

  Seconds later, the drone of the HERF pulse gun blasted through the hospital corridors. A thick breeze of momentarily stunned nanomechs clattered against Winger's hypervest. When the second pulse shook the building and he felt the thermal of high-frequency RF wash over them, Winger willed himself into motion, half carrying, half-dragging Dana Tallant. The first seizure had died off and her body was limp.

  "Fall back now! To the street, to the convoy…everybody--on the double…DPS, give 'em another shot!"

  Another drone-snap of radio energy and another wave of heat. Winger slogged through the mist, kicking and pummeling blindly, pulling his load with him.

  At last, blinded and disoriented, he stumbled through the corridors and the chaos of the lobby, making the nearest carrier truck out by the long stone wall, and practically crashed into the crew compartment. A flurry of hands helped him hoist Tallant inside, rolling her to the back, where she curled up like a baby. The rest of the Detachment fell in--after Caden had momentarily dropped the MOBnet--a sorry, bedraggled lot…weary, frightened, half-eaten hypersuited nanowarriors, scrambling against heavy resistance, scrambling just to pitch headlong onto the floor of the crew bay in the carrier's rear. Already the whine of the turbine motors was drowning out everything else.

  "One more pulse, DPS! Max power…leave it on and let it burn out! And get your tails in gear, folks! You'll only have a few seconds."

  The two Defense and Protective Systems techs, Reaves and 'Buddha' Nguyen, cranked up the HERF gun they had erected in the lobby and let it pulse at maximum power. Rolling thunderclaps shook the entire structure and the team stumbled as they clawed their way to the carrier, but the pulse gun did the trick…momentarily flooding every cubic inch of the Four Winds Clinic with high energy radio waves. It was shock therapy for a nanomech swarm in mindless exponential overdrive, replicating and disassembling matter at blinding speeds.

  Just enough shock therapy to stun the swarm into a stupor, just long enough to weaken the resistance to movement and give ANAD Detachment a fighting chance to evacuate what had now become a combat zone.

  Behind them, they had no choice but to leave the rest of the hospital, filled with groaning nurses and attendants and patients caught in the Serengeti storm. Winger gave them a moment's thought, but it couldn't be helped. They didn't have enough of ANAD left to isolate the area or immobilize the enemy swarm.

  Maybe it'll just burn itself out, he hoped.

  Struggling, whining, overheating and shuddering from the thunderclaps of collapsing HERF fields, the crew carriers rumbled off into the dark night sky, kissing the stone walls at each sharp turn, as they spiraled down Namkok Road into the bowels of Kowloon City, finally turning south and west and slowly but surely putting distance between themselves and the nanomech cloud. Johnny Winger eyed the carrier driver warily through the sighthole as he fought to keep control of the vehicle on the steep winding road. Only when the buffeting and the sonic pulses and the high keening wail of nanomech hell finally died off, did he finally begin to relax.

  The very first thing he did was quick-disconnect the hypervest helmet, yank the hat off and gulp tons and tons of cold, salty, night-time Hong Kong air.

  It was better than ice cream on a hot summer day.

  Then he crawled through all the groaning bodies to the rear of the compartment, to see about Tallant.

  They limped back to the airfield at Chek Lap Kok and pulled into the bivouac two hours later, a fatigued, beaten, hollow-eyed shell of a combat unit. They had lost much of their gear but no casualties had been taken among the Detachment, outside a few scrapes and burns and bruises. They had been lucky…except for Tallant.

  More importantly, they had lost the ANAD master and all their containment pods too.

  Dana Tallant’s prostrate and sedated body was taken to the airport medical station and placed in isolation. At Johnny Winger’s insistence, a Level 4 bioweb was erected around the bed, encompassing the entire ward.

  “Prep her for ANAD,” the Lieutenant ordered. “We’ve got to go inside, try to beat these buggers before they do any more damage.” The very thought made him sick; by now, Serengeti could have done irreparable harm, even paralyzed her completely.

  He was grimly determined as he helped Gibby set up an interface control station beside the bed. Dana, if you’re in there, I’m coming. Hold on, kid, just hold on a bit longer. I’ll smash those jokers once I’m inside.

  Gibby and Macalvey were the only ones allowed inside the web. Outside the ward, the rest of the Detachment hovered nervously, nursing cold drinks, tenderly dabbing at burns and scrapes.

  Buddha Nguyen sat immobile in one corner, a blank look on his face, hands folded in prayer. A steady hmmmmm emanated from his lips.

  Sheila Reaves paced back and forth, shoulder to shoulder with Deeno and Mighty Mite Barnes, the women mumbling between themselves.

  Moby M’Bela leaned against a doorway, eyes shut, swaying slightly. Beside him, Joe McReady was idly troubleshooting a part from a coilgun bot, pieces arrayed in a neat circle on a cloth spread out before him.

  Inside the web, Johnny Winger knew that time was critical. Every moment’s delay gave Serengeti another moment to dig deeper into Tallant’s skull and take over other functions.

  “ANAD ready in all respects, sir,” Gibby reported. “Excepting the fact we have no master.”

  “I’ll be the master, Sergeant. Launch ANAD.” Winger bent to the IC controls and waited for the small assembler force to take up position.

  The insertion went smoothly and moments later, ANAD was transiting into the capillary network in Tallant’s neck. Macalvey had already powered up the vascular grid and was tracking the force as it drove deeper inside.

  “Got a good mage,” the Scotsman reported. “Anatomically, ANAD’s right where he should be.”

  Winger was grim and stone-faced, concentrating on piloting the ANADs toward the brain stem, forcing the blood-brain barrier and engaging Serengeti mechs.

  Hold on, Dana, I’m coming. I’m going to blast those sons of bitches if it’s the last thing I do.

  Winger steered the assemblers through heavy plasma currents, tacking from one side of the capillary tube to the other. At length, he came to a narrow defile and chopped ANAD back to one-third power, while he hunted for the best way across the barrier. Macalvey studied the mage too.

  “Endothelial dam, Lieutenant. Those lipids are tighter than a whore’s ass. But this looks like as good a place as any.”

  Winger said little, driving ANAD through the blood-brain barrier in no time, revving its propulsors against the currents.

  “Now would be a good time to replicate, Lieutenant,” Gibby muttered. “See all those lattices off to your right. Brainstem tissue…mesoencephalic nucleus
. That’s the way to the tegmentum.”

  “Good idea.” Winger toggled the rep switch and deep inside Dana Tallant’s brain, the platoon of Autonomous Nanoscale Assemblers/Disassemblers grabbed atoms and churned out replicas of themselves in good order. A few minutes later, Winger saw the rep counter pass 10 exp 12—over a trillion copies made in less than five minutes. A small horde but there was safety in numbers. “Now,” he said, flexing his fingers around the joysticks, “let’s go hunting.”

  The encounter wasn’t long in coming. This time Winger was ready.

  “Look out—there they are--!”

  “I see ‘em.” Winger’s fingers flew across the keys, commanding ANAD to attack position. The swarms closed rapidly on each other, and were soon engulfed in furious combat.

  “Slam ‘em, sir! Slam ‘em to hell and back!”

  “Getting small—“ Winger muttered. He dispersed his own force and quickly flanked the main body of Serengeti mechs. Up close, the spinning, folding enemy devices bristled with arms and effectors. The plasma frothed with bonds snapping. Millions of electron volts surged out as atom and lattice fragments spun off into the distance, carried by currents surging across the tissue gaps. “I’m staying on the outside, Gibby…had an idea the last time we did this—“

  “Poke and probe, sir?”

  “More like kick and scratch. I’m not ready to go for the main force yet.”

  Minutes passed as the combat blossomed across the jungle of axons. The imager view vibrated with the ferocity of the attack. Atomic wreckage filled the screen, as chains of molecules came unhinged, drifting like flotsam in the currents. The fluid was soon choked with debris.

  Johnny Winger poked and probed, with lightning slashes through the enemy force, grabbing outlyers and stragglers, then quickly withdrawing. Every time Serengeti tried to close, Winger piloted ANAD back deeper into the tegmentum, running from one axon bundle to another, playing hide and seek.

  “I don’t know how long we can keep this up,” he muttered.

  “You’ve got ‘em flustered, sir. Completely bamboozled—“

  “I know. But that’s not good enough.” He reminded himself that Dana Tallant’s skull was the battlefield. Somehow, some way, he had to roust the enemy from her brain and destroy them. “Damn things are faster than I am, Gibby…that’s the whole problem. I can’t get in with enough mechs to make a dent in the swarm.”

  Macalvey had seen the problem. “Lieutenant, a suggestion—“

  “I’m all ears.”

  The Scotsman shook his head. “It’s the processor, I’m afraid. Serengeti’s got a souped-up brain of its own. It’s just too fast. The best you can do is keep it occupied, keep it contained.”

  Gibby saw what he was driving at. “Maybe you can herd ‘em, Lieutenant. Just like a bunch of feisty colts. Corral ‘em into a smaller area and detach enough ANADs to keep ‘em occupied. That way, they can’t infest Lieutenant Tallant’s whole limbic system.”

  Winger bit his lip. “You may be right. But…blast it! I can’t just leave her like this…infested…eaten up with mechs. There’s got to be something I can do—“ He slammed his palm with a fist from the other hand. “There’s got to be a way—“

  “Try it,” Macalvey suggested. “See if you can force the horde into a smaller area. That’ll give us more time—time to work on something.”

  Winger dove ahead, driving his brood forward, sheparding the enemy swarm with the same punches and probes. In close combat, Serengeti always seemed to get the better of him, so he had to be nimble every time he engaged. But slowly, gradually, with Gibby navigating and pointing out targets, he managed to herd the main enemy force into a tiny pocket of tissue, a thicket of axons deep inside the tegmentum. Drenched in sweat, his neck and shoulder and hands aching from the battle, he completed the encirclement and Gibby let out a whoop.

  “Hang it, Lieutenant! You did it! Got ‘em cornered!”

  Winger sank back, wrung out and exhausted. Beyond the panel, Dana Tallant moaned softly. Her body quivered with the slightest tremble.

  What are they doing to you, Lieutenant? What the hell have the bastards gotten control of?

  “I’m attaching a small group,” he announced finally. “We’ll need ‘em to grow another master back at Table Top. I’ve got the rest of my guys programmed to herd and shepard these jokers. For the moment, we seem to be in a truce. Jabs and probes here and there, but no major movement.”

  Gibby agreed. “Looks like a standoff. They’re faster and we’re smarter. Brains wins out again.”

  Winger smiled ruefully. “Thanks…I think. Maybe we’ve gotten her stabilized.”

  Macalvey was already studying vitals on the bed readout. “Blood pressure’s low, but steady. Respiration’s good, heart rate good…don’t yet know about neural function. We’ll have to see what effects the infestation has. Could be appetite regulation, any number of things. The tegmentum is basically a group of dopamine-secreting neurons. They pretty much all end up in a place called the nucleus accumbens. It’s a big interchange of pleasure and reward pathways. The Lieutenant’ll have to be carefully monitored…we could see unusual activity in any number of basic behaviors that involve reward feedback: anger, joy, sadness, hunger, certain compulsions. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  Winger stood over her body and looked at her pale, taut face. A slight tremor washed over her lips. I did the best I could, Dana. But one way or another, I’ll get those bastards out of you.

  At least, she was still alive.

  “Prepare to extract ANAD, Gibby. Let’s get this mob back into TinyTown.”

  Sergeant Gibbs re-captured and safed ANAD and wheeled the TinyTown cylinder out of the ward. Once Macalvey was sure Dana Tallant was stable, he ordered everyone else out of the bioweb.

  “Keep the barrier up, though. I don’t want anything disturbing her for the next few hours. I’ll have to bring her out of sedation and do some tests, see what effects the swarm has had.” He rubbed tired eyes with his fists. “This will be a first. I don’t know of any other case of Serengeti that’s been confronted and stabilized with another nanobot swarm. We could get some good data from this…maybe even a new treatment for S factor addiction, if we’re lucky.”

  Johnny Winger started to power down the IC, then stopped. He’d programmed the left-behind replicants to maintain encirclement around the enemy mechs, hoping they could handle it. An inner sense of caution, and maybe just a bit of worry over what might yet happen to his CC2, made him stop.

  “I’m staying powered up, Doc. If I have to go back in and do battle again, I don’t want any delays.”

  “Fair enough,” Macalvey said. He was already deep into setting up a neural function test for the Lieutenant when she came to. “Go get cleaned up and leave the two of us alone.”

  Winger hesitated. He felt sick, sick knowing he’d been responsible for what happened. Maybe he’d made a bad decision, doing the insert at the clinic with Bilbao. Maybe he’d missed some defensive steps…they could have worn full hypersuits, or he could have ordered a HERF gun brought in closer, just in case. They’d seen what Serengeti could do, they’d all seen it at Uliba.

  He shrugged. A thousand worries, a thousand other tactics. Which ones might have worked better? Which ones might have kept mechs away from Tallant, from all of them?

  Gibby was finishing up securing TinyTown and seemed to read his mind. “Don’t beat yourself up, Lieutenant. It couldn’t be helped. Look at it like this: we still got her with us, right here. It’s just a matter of time before we figure out how to beat these buggers. Then we’ll smash ‘em but good.”

  Winger took one last look at Dana Tallant and sighed. “I hope you’re right, Gibby. I really do. She didn’t deserve this. She didn’t deserve this at all and I’m going to find a way to bring her back. I promise you that.”

  Johnny Winger's after-action report was blunt and
sobering.

  "ANAD Detachment got its ass kicked at that clinic, Major. Plain and simple."

  Major Kraft was vidlinked in from Table Top Mountain. Winger had filed a verbal debrief on the ride down from the Four Winds Clinic and SOFIE had transcribed it for the review. The battalion commander winced at the details as he read them.

  “How’s Lieutenant Tallant? She going to make it?”

  “We’re not sure yet, sir,” Winger replied. He explained what had happened. Kraft nodded gravely as he listened.

  “Very well…keep me posted every twelve hours ‘til we get her back to Table Top. She was probably lucky.”

  Maybe…maybe not, Winger thought. Time will tell.

  Kraft scowled as he scanned the report further.

  "If it's Red Hammer, Lieutenant, they seem to have gained a higher level of mastery of ANAD technology than we counted on. It's going to take time to construct another master replicant and get it shipped out there. Any comments?"

  Winger spoke up. He was still thirsty and bruised from the encounter. "Doc Macalvey and I have discussed the fight, Major. It's obvious to me that at least this variant of Serengeti is programmed or has evolved to defend itself."

  Gibby piped up. "Definitely airborne capability, sir. The Lieutenant was slugging it out with them inside this addict we found and part of their formation just up and exited the sucker's body--right there in the examining room."

  Deeno D’Nunzio was still nursing skin lacerations on her face and arms. Her cheeks and forehead were red and splotchy, but the redness was subsiding as nanomeds stitched her back up from inside. "Somehow, this mech's able to survive on its own."

  Kraft was intrigued at that. "Outside any growth medium?"

  Deeno nodded to the cam. "It sure looks that way, Major. How long, I couldn't say. Gibby?"

  Gibby was still picking debris from his hair. His eyes were watery and tired. "This is a mech I've never seen before. It lives off the land. Possibly, the damn thing could survive airborne indefinitely, depending on its programming…its capabilities. I suspected as much after what we saw in Uliba. Remember, we found only traces of mech residue at Soweto's grave."

  Dr. Keino, the WHO inspector, agreed. He sipped thoughtfully at a fruit drink, laced with something more potent. "There's another possibility, gentlemen, that we should be worrying about."

  On the viewer, Kraft's face crinkled with distaste. "What's that, Doctor?"

  "Just this: now we know just what Serengeti is capable of. There's every reason to believe there could or soon will be supercolonies. Master swarms in the atmosphere, perhaps already replicating. That makes this threat even more ominous. Not only HNRIV victims but literally anyone, anywhere, could be assaulted by such swarms, if they are truly airborne, mobile and intelligent, or under remote control."

  There is something else, Sheila Reaves thought. She wanted to raise the matter, but the discussion veered off into tactics. Throughout the swarm attack, she had noticed something strange about the mechs. Somehow, Lieutenant Caden had never been assaulted. He'd been inside the clinic when the swarm blew up, and yet, she was sure she had seen the mechs flow over and around him, like he was protected by a MOBnet, only he wasn't. Friggin' peculiar, she thought, but she didn't have time to wonder about it, not when everybody was being chewed to bits by the buggers. Maybe they recognized him somehow. She hadn't really thought much about it until they'd gotten back to Chek Lap Kok. Now she remembered…she wanted to get it into the after-action review. Lieutenant Caden was at the other end of the table, going over some notes on a tablet.

  She wanted to tell Lieutenant Winger about it, but something stopped her. Had she just imagined it? Maybe it was just a fluke of swarm behavior.

  "We already know some of these Serengeti mechs have architectures and capabilities similar to INDRA," Winger was saying. "I'd bet my next month's pay on it."

  Kraft stirred uneasily, the lines around his mouth tightening. "That's extremely bad news, Lieutenant. I hope you understand the seriousness of what you're saying. Any thoughts? Anybody want to disagree?"

  No one disagreed with the assessment. Gibby and Deeno nodded solemnly.

  Kraft's lips had become a tight line. "That's what I was afraid of. You know this means we're dealing Mustafa Gaidar again."

  "And probably Red Hammer," Winger added. "Just to make it a perfect evening for everyone. Major, we've got to get a closer look at one of those mechs--intact--find out what makes it tick. Find out who--or what--is in control. And where."

  They all knew that meant only one thing: a recon probe into the very heart of Red Hammer's Hong Kong operations.

  The Lion's Rock complex.

  Caden spoke up. "Major, there has to be some kind of countermeasures for this gizmo."

  Moby M’Bela was dubious. "Our first problem is re-generating a new ANAD master. That'll take a week, maybe more."

  "I'll get Quantum Engineering on it right now," Kraft said. His face turned from the cam, as he pecked out orders.

  Johnny Winger was already thinking. "The best countermeasure for Serengeti's speed is to juice up our own processor, if we can, sir. But we may not have the right architecture, so we're always behind the curve." He had an idea. "Major, permission to bring Dr. Frost and the Northgate lab in on the mission?"

  Kraft was already thinking along the same lines. "Already done, Lieutenant. I've got Frost and Mary Duncan on a Corps hyperjet to Table Top right now. We'll need their help with the regeneration anyway. Any new ideas…now's the time to put them out for discussion."

  Dr. Macalvey appeared in the command post, disheveled and tired but upbeat. He acknowledged the battalion commander on the vid with a weary wave of his hand, then pulled out a pipe and fussed with the stem for a moment.

  Kraft was direct. “How’s the Lieutenant doing?”

  The Scotsman shrugged. “About as well as could be expected. I’ll be running more tests in a little while. Then we’ll see.”

  “She going to be okay, Doc?” Deeno’s face was lined with worry.

  “For the moment, she’s stable.” Macalvey lit up his pipe with a glorious puff of acrid smoke, and began to relax. “Thanks to the Lieutenant here, the infestation’s contained. Nanobots herding nanobots, right inside her brain. Probably a medical first…if it lasts.”

  “I tried everything I could think of, Major. Finally, we had to settle for just keeping the damn things in check, keeping ‘em occupied with ANAD probes so they couldn’t replicate any further, do any more damage.”

  “Or exit the body and go berserk,” Gibby muttered. He still had skin lacerations on his head from the episode at the clinic.

  Kraft seemed satisfied. “We’ve got to work on tactics, that much I see.”

  Winger had another idea. "What about tactical deception, Gibby? Like we did at Pine Bend?"

  The IC2 shrugged, remembering the incident at the water treatment plant. "It could work. But Serengeti's speed makes even that problematical. In all the sims and wargames, ANAD has a known and measurable response time. You can factor that in, Lieutenant. I'm not sure you could devise a deception it couldn't react to, even at the last second."

  Winger was getting discouraged. He ran his hands over his buzzcut, rubbed weary eyes. "There's got to be something we can use from our sims. We've wargamed every possible scenario--"

  "--but we haven't wargamed radical leaps in technology," Kraft cut in. "That's the wild card SOFIE can't program in."

  Sheila Reaves agreed. "One thing that's come out of all our wargames with ANAD is a better feel for just what kind of animal nanowarfare really is."

  "Certain principles…" Kraft explained to Macalvey and Keino, "…seem to make for winning strategies when you fight battles at nanoscale dimensions…deception and concealment, feints, diversions, swarming-type attacks--"

  Winger continued the list. "Defense by dispersal, entrapments, operational s
peed, structural robustness. We've taken to calling it the 'Eight-Fold Way.'"

  "Clever," the Scotsman replied. "Now we're all Buddhists."

  "The trouble is," Kraft added, "we appear to have a mechanism in Serengeti who's made fantastic leaps in every one of these areas. How the hell do you fight that?"

  "We just have to be smarter," Lieutenant Caden said. Winger and the others looked at him…it was Caden's first remark in the review briefing. Caden looked around puzzled. "--than the enemy, I mean. What's the matter with you guys anyway?"

  Kraft had heard enough. "We're wasting time here. I'll get the engineers started regenerating ANAD. Lieutenant Winger, work on tactical maneuvers to get inside Lion's Rock, something that'll work against this mech. We've got to get control of this menace before--"

  "--before the swarms go global and we're facing a pandemic worse than HNRIV," Macalvey finished the thought. Keino nodded in agreement.

  "Understood, sir. Guess I better get with SOFIE and see if I can find a way to beat these critters. Come on, Doc. Looks like we're going to be making a house call at Lion's Rock." Johnny Winger sat himself down at the field sim unit they had packed and booted up. The sim was satlinked back to Table Top Mountain so that SOFIE could drive the tactical scenarios and throw in a few obstacles to make the sim more realistic.

  "Lieutenant, you've got three days to come up with new tactical options. By then, we should have a new ANAD master regenerated and ready to ship. I want options for getting inside Lion's Rock and grabbing a mech. And if Lion's Rock is where this menace comes from, I want options for shutting it down. Something I can take to UNSAC."

  "You'll have it, sir. I'll work SOFIE 'til she squeals. There's got to be a way of dealing with these mechs. While ANAD's regenerating, we'll recon Red Hammer's base and work out a plan."

  Kraft signed off. Gibby then showed Macalvey how to log onto the sim as a wargame referee.

  "You'll get the hang of it, Doc," he said. "It's like playing God with little toy armies. See, Lieutenant Winger here…he's a real whiz at simming ANAD. Loves to tinker under the hood, try out weird things, and generally treat the rest of us like country hicks who wouldn't know a molecule from a marigold." He winked at the Scotsman.

  Winger settled himself in at the IC panel. "Sergeant Gibbs is just jealous, Doc. He knows he'll never be a champion atomgrabber and it just makes him sick." He flexed his fingers over the keyboard like a pianist. "You got to have a knack for this sort of thing--"

  Macalvey ignored the jibes and let Winger select a scenario. Then he called up all pertinent referee notes and quickly scanned what had and hadn’t worked in past sims, plus SOFIE's history of Winger's performance. Referee status gave him a God's-eye view of the artificial warworld Winger was immersing himself in.

  "Doc, my gut feeling is we have to set up some kind of feint or diversionary assault, to initially 'fix' Serengeti in one state, then follow up with an actual assault, convergent-style, from some kind of screened position. What's your take on the problem?"

  Macalvey gave it some thought. "I'm just a scientist, not a warrior. I try to think like a virus."

  "ANAD can outduel any virus, Doc," Gibbs said. He settled in beside the IC panel, nursing a cold drink. "A virus isn't even alive…just a protein coat and few snippets of DNA. ANAD's got brains."

  "Maybe so, but I keep remembering something from an old Epidemiology professor I once had in med school. Something about plagues and viruses."

  "And what pearl of wisdom did this professor have for you?"

  Macalvey stroked his red beard. "A virus is nature's perfect warrior. They live only to reproduce themselves, if they can be said to live at all. Basically, they're copying machines, except every time enough copies are made, it kills the host cell. They adapt faster than anyone can react. They've lived on earth far longer than we have. No victory is ever final or complete against them. They're relentless, implacable. And now, with ANAD and this Serengeti device…what do we have? An intelligent, programmable virus. Like you said in Uliba, part organism, part mechanism. With quantum computing, we've given Nature's most efficient killer the smarts to outsmart us all." He sat down next to Winger, ready to start the sim. "I just wonder how long we can stay ahead of them."

  Gibbs put down his beer with a disgusted thunk on the counter behind them. "Doc Macalvey, don't you go morose on me and ruin a perfectly good drinking binge. With the Lieutenant here and me in a rough and ready outfit like this, no enemy stands a chance…virus or human or halfway in between."

  "Amen to that," Winger chipped in. "Viruses can't be sneaky, like I can. What do you say, Doc…try the diversionary assault?"

  Macalvey shrugged. "You're the soldier, Johnny. We did it at Pine Bend and it worked. But Serengeti seems to react far faster. You've got to feint plausibly--something logical, something Serengeti--or whoever is controlling it--would expect. Then you have to strike the replicant master--if you can get to him--hard and fast, from an unexpected direction."

  Winger chewed on that for awhile. Then: "What if ANAD replicates and configures to resemble an actual observed Serengeti form, say like the neurostimulants we saw at Uliba…sorting rotor and so forth?"

  "And?"

  "And then while Serengeti's dealing with our diversionary feint, we insinuate a few trillion ANADs in disguise into the Serengeti formation. At the right moment, we turn ANAD and re-configure for attack from within the enemy swarm. Slash and burn while they're configured to fight a different ANAD, Trojan-horse style."

  "Or perhaps like Admiral Nelson slipping in between the French ships of the line at Trafalgar." Macalvey mulled over the possibilities. "I'm no warrior. All I can say is game it, Johnny. If anybody can make it work, you can. The only question is speed of reaction. Can ANAD insert enough replicants without tipping off Serengeti? And can they change state before Serengeti can defend?"

  "Only one way to find out, Doc." Winger readied himself at the sim controls. "Let 'er rip!"

  The game lasted twenty minutes and Macalvey let SOFIE work in a few problems just to make it tougher.

  Macalvey and Gibby were soon joined by Caden and Deeno, hooting and placing bets in the background as Johnny Winger set up a full-scale entrapment and ambush-style assault, hacking out configuration parameters for ANAD as if he were whistling through a Sunday afternoon checkers game. Truly, the Lieutenant was a natural-born IC man, able to manage system controls and absorb information and visualize things at infinitesimal scales the way some people just had a knack for music or painting.

  The Lieutenant unleashed the assault on the simulated Serengeti, then with the practiced fingers of a concert pianist, re-programmed ANAD in record time and somehow managed to work the 'Serengeti' clones inside the enemy's formation without so much as a twitch from the enemy.

  At the right moment, he sprang the attack and nursed a trillion replicants through a hurricane of Serengeti mechs, cleaving and probing and slashing until he'd beaten his way to the master. In a memorable fight to the finish, Johnny Winger 'flew' his tiny brood into a slashing free-for-all in the very heart of enemy territory, and somehow managed to disassemble and capture the master before succumbing to the swarming mech attack of the drones.

  When it was done, he shook off a sheen of sweat and sat back at the sim controls, spent but well satisfied with the tactical victory he had won. SOFIE crunched data for a few moments, then displayed the results.

  Even Caden was impressed. "If SOFIE's right, you may just have yourself a strategy, Lieutenant. I'm not sure how accurate the sim is, but it looks like it'll work."

  Winger shrugged. "SOFIE seems to think so. But there's still some fine-tuning to do. Plus we owe the Major a tactical assault plan by this time tomorrow."

  "I hope this game fully captures Serengeti's true capability," Macalvey warned. "I don't know about you, but I'm not feeling too confident. These buggers have sprung surprises on us before. Who
ever's running Serengeti is devilishly clever and damned hard to trump."

  "Meanwhile," said Dr. Keino, who had just wandered in where the game was running, "the plague spreads further and further every day. Time is critical, gentlemen. WHO just issued new updates on mortality and morbidity." He waved a thoughtpad at them. "The news isn't good."

  Johnny Winger knew it didn't take a wargame to know what the end result might be. Before long, half the world's nations would be at each other's throats. City after city would degenerate into chaos and anarchy.

  "Quantum Corps won't let you down, sir. ANAD Detachment's got lots of tricks yet to play."

  "We are counting on you, Lieutenant." Keino's eyes narrowed. "Perhaps more than you realize. If Red Hammer or whoever is behind this pandemic isn't stopped soon, none of us will be safe."

  Winger was already powering down the field sim.

  "Then let's get going! Small is all!"