Nanotroopers Episode 17: Lions Rock

by Philip Bosshardt

  Rounds counted down the range. “Inside of fifty meters, Skipper. Big time EMs now, acoustics show massive swarm approaching, just off our starboard bow.”

  “Go, ANAD! Launch now!”

  Outside the ship’s hull, the bot master and its replicants jetted off.

  ***ANAD underway on full propulsor. All effectors extended, bond disrupters fully charged. Working my way through solid-phase lattice now--***

  It was like fighting an enemy through heavy vine and brush, hacking your way forward even as you did battle.

  “I’ve got ANAD!” reported Rounds. “He’s closing fast…tell him to bear right ten degrees…I make the enemy mass centroid at ten degrees further to starboard!”

  Mendez passed the vector along and ANAD adjusted. He decided to take a peek at the imager.

  The scene was chaotic and confusing. The regular crystalline lattice was visible enough, ordered ranks of silicons and oxygens lined up like headstones in a graveyard. Something shadowy and formless moved steadily through the ranks…that was ANAD, the assembler bots twisting and squeezing and shimmying left and right to move through the rock strata. Further ahead, more shadows could just be made out.

  The swarms collided twenty-two meters off Prairie Dog’s starboard quarter.

  ***ANAD engaging now…moving in!***

  Even at nanoscale dimensions, close-quarters combat was still part momentum and part surprise and ANAD had both. The assembler swarm quickly enveloped the bots of Red Hammer. Mendez tweaked the imager, trying to get better resolution, but the view was like cats thrashing in a pool of water, all flying effectors and probes and quick flashes of disrupter fire as each side shot electron volt discharges and tore furiously at the other.

  After a few minutes, the DPS1, Corporal Ng was bathed in sweat. His fingers whizzed over a keyboard as he sent config changes and effector commands, trying to counter what the enemy bots were doing. It quickly became evident that the enemy bots were weakest around their equatorial ring, where most of their effectors couldn’t reach. The cylindrical barbell bots had multi-lobed heads, top and bottom, each covered with all manner of effectors that could easily slash, tear and slice unwary ANAD bots that approached on the wrong vector.

  “That’s the sweet spot--“ Ng muttered. “Right in the middle…but it takes timing. You have to catch ‘em when those effectors are engaged in another direction. Then, blam…you dive in and zap ‘em with everything!”

  The battle was a seesaw affair for many minutes. Mendez checked with Rounds, the sensor tech.

  “We’re slowly losing mass, Skipper. I can see it in the acoustics and EMs, thermals too. Enemy bots are out-replicating us. ANAD disables one, but two more show up right away…we’ve got to put some new configs in there.”

  Mendez was hacking away at his own keyboard. “I’m trying, I’m trying…I don’t see anything in the archive that--“

  Just then, Prairie Dog shuddered again and a loud groan could be heard forward of the command deck. The ship shuddered and slipped and then something slammed them from the starboard. Mendez grabbed a seat back just in time to keep from being thrown to the deck. Beside him, Robles wasn’t so fortunate. The DSO was flung to the floor grate and came up bleeding at the temple; his head had struck a stanchion nearby.

  The geo tech shook her head. “We’re losing it, Skipper!” Rono said. “Seismic signals everywhere…strata shifting all around us! Hang on!”

  Mendez didn’t need to hear anymore. “Robles, get cranked up…get us the hell out of here! ANAD, return to the ship…we’ll pick you up!”

  ***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 Mendez’ command, Robles 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 Ng. “BOP, steer right and center on heading zero eight five.”

  Robles complied and Prairie Dog 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,” Mendez told him. “We’ve got to get out of this stratum before Prairie Dog’s crushed.”

  The ship shimmied and shook like a wet dog as Robles drove them to ANAD’s position. Mendez 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,” Robles muttered to no one in particular. If Prairie Dog lost that, she’d be stuck but good, trapped two thousand meters below the Zagros Mountains of northern Iran.

  “ANAD bot master signal less than ten meters away,” Rounds 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 Mendez, “do you read? Make your way to the capsule port…full propulsor. We can’t wait forever.”

  Prairie Dog 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,” Rounds 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 Prairie Dog rolled and porpoised and shook from more tremors and quakes.

  “Got ‘em, Skipper!” said Rounds. “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. Robles 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 Rounds. I’ve got positive signal from inside the port. It’s ANAD, all right.”

  “Borer still losing mass!” Robles said. The BOP1’s fingers flew over his keyboard, countering the effect. “I’m trying another config—“

  “Red Hammer…it has to be…” Ng 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.”

  Mendez didn’t want to believe it but his tactical sense told him the DPS was probably right. The question was: now what? If Red Hammer had infected their borer with his own bots, Prairie Dog was sunk. And if ANAD had brought enemy bots onboard—

  He made the difficult decision. “Robles, shut down the borer. Shut it down. And isolate that capture port. We’ve got to scrub Prairie Dog from bow to stern…then we can re-boot the borer.”

  “Sir, if I shut down—“

  “Do it now!”

  Robles managed the shutdown and Prairie Dog’s forward momentum died off.

  “What about that capture port?”

  Rounds didn’t like what he was seeing. “I’m getting mixed signals, like the port’s both open and closed. ANAD’s inside, I’m sure of that. But there’s something mixed in…I’d better go take a look—“

  The SS1 unbuckled himself, steadied hims
elf against more pitching and heaving of the command deck, and disappeared down the central tunnel. The capture port that ANAD had reached was aft, amidships on D Deck, Stores and Supplies. Rounds slipped into the tunnel and worked his way to D deck, holding on to anything he could as Prairie Dog slid and rolled and vibrated from the tremors. It was like being inside of a barrel going over a waterfall.

  When he got to D deck, he spun the hatch wheel and shoved himself inside.

  Stores and Supplies was filled with crates and boxes and pallets of gear. It was Prairie Dog’s pantry and attic closet. But that wasn’t what caught Rounds’ attention.

  Drifting in among the crates was a glowing fog, slowly filling every vacant space on the deck. The fog was flecked with pinpricks of light, like a silent thunderstorm building overhead.

  It wasn’t ANAD.

  The SS1 was just able to get off a warning. “Attention from D deck…we’ve got—“ and then the swarm was upon him, enveloping him, smothering him. “---arrrggghhh…I can’t—“

  Complete disassembly took about seven minutes. Mendez left the command deck and was poking his head onto D deck in eight. He saw what had happened…what was left of Rounds and quickly slammed the hatch, dogging it shut. He hustled back to the command deck.

  Before he could make it, Prairie Dog shuddered violently and began a slow clockwise roll, with a sickening screech coming from somewhere forward. Mendez crawled and staggered up to the command deck. Chaos and panic filled the space.

  Rono, the geo tech, was barely clinging to her console. “---P wave coming, high magnitude transverse waves, lots of ‘em, coming this way—“

  The crew of Prairie Dog didn’t know it at the time but the Red Hammer swarms had somehow managed to lubricate the rock strata surrounding the geoplane. A punishing series of tremors radiated outward through the region, oblique convergent plate boundaries letting go as the rock underlying the Zagros Mountains gave way in a spreading fracture zone, propagating outward like a sheet of glass cracking.

  The swarms of nanobots had insinuated themselves into multiple fault zones and disassembled enough rock to release the massive strain which had built up over the centuries. Massive seams of slate and feldspar, hundreds of kilometers long, suddenly wrenched forward with crushing force, sending shock waves and seismic energy halfway around the Earth, as crustal plates rebounded and jostled each other.

  Geoplane Prairie Dog was caught like a bug in a vise. Mendez shouted over the din of the crushing force now slamming them downward.

  “ANAD…ANAD, if you can hear me…ANAD, launch NOW! I’m sending a config to form up a shield…try to hold back this—“

  But he never finished the sentence. Seconds later, the plates shifted again, twisting and crumpling Prairie Dog even further downward, wrenching off her nose and borer lens and crushing the ship into a twisted pile of wreckage.

  Geoplane Prairie Dog was destroyed, smashed into oblivion, and all aboard her were lost.

  Fifteen hundred meters above them, Teheran was on fire as killsat K-10 swept its particle beams through the outskirts of the capital city, flash-frying everything it touched.

  Chapter 3

  “Tectonic Sword”

  South China Sea

  Two Hundred Meters below the Seabed

  August 10, 2049

  0000 hours

  Geoplanes Mole and Badger both angled downward and squeezed through another dense layer of granite as the ships closed steadily on the eastern end of the Pearl River estuary.

  “Just passing plate boundary, Lieutenant,” announced Sergeant Kruizenga, geotech for Mole’s crew. “Eurasian plate ahead, inclusion zone with hard granite… dead ahead.”

  “Very well,” Johnny Winger replied from the command deck. “SS1, is Badger keeping up?”

  The Sensors and Surveillance Tech (SS1) was Sergeant Balderis. The trim, mustachioed Russian adjusted knobs on his scopes and studied waveforms trickling across the screens. “Yes, sir…Badger shows off our starboard quarter, one thousand meters, maintaining depth and angle.”

  Winger mused over the stratigraphic plot in front of him. “Granite’s hard stuff. We’d better slow down. DSO, chop speed to two kilometers per hour.”

  “Aye, sir,” came back Corporal Rice, Mole’s Driver/Systems Operator. “Cutting tread speed to two k.”

  “Make sure Badger does the same.”

  “Badger answers back…showing speed dropping to match.”

  Geoplane Mole, accompanied by her sister ship Badger, was two hundred kilometers southeast of the Pearl River estuary, and the islands of the city of Hong Kong. Lions Rock was in Hong Kong. Both geoplanes were nosing through a zone of hard tonalitic granite, two hundred meters below the seabed of the South China Sea.

  If all went well, the Tectonic Sword force would cross beneath the estuary opening in less than five hours, and begin angling up toward the volcanic peaks of Hong Kong. North and west of the old walled city of Kowloon, the geoplanes would penetrate the subsurface foundations of Lions Rock itself and begin a surprise assault on the Red Hammer base, from an unexpected direction…from below ground.

  A slight tremor shook Mole and all on the command deck looked up with momentary alarm. They had just crossed over a plate boundary, cruising at a stately two kilometers per hour from the Philippine Plate into the mass of the vast Eurasian plate and fault zones were notorious for steady tremors.

  Mole shimmied for a moment like a dog throwing off bathwater and then steadied down.

  “Geo, any signs of stronger movements?”

  Kruizenga shook his head. “Small-amplitude P waves, sir…nothing serious, yet. These fault zones shake, rattle and roll like creaking carousels sometimes.”

  But this was no ordinary P-wave. The geoplane was suddenly slammed sideways and the screech of resisting metal sounded through her hull.

  “Strike-slip fault, Lieutenant! Big P-waves all around…we’re gonna get hammered!”

  Winger got on the 1MC. “All hands, brace for quake! Secure everything—“ He had barely gotten the words out of his mouth when a series of waves struck the geoplane broadsides.

  Winger’s words were cut off as Mole shuddered violently. For a brief moment, there was an unmistakable sensation of sliding, sliding sideways and downward. Almost at the same moment, something hit Mole’s nose with a sickening crunch and the geoplane shuddered again and ground violently to a halt. The cabin tilted to port and stayed tilted.

  Mole’s cabin was deathly still for a few moments, then the creaking and groaning of the hull under tremendous pressure started.

  “What happened?” Winger asked, wincing as the tortured sounds of the hull being compressed grew louder.

  “Borer offline, Skipper,” reported Corporal Erromango, the ship’s BOP1, Borer Operator. “I am reconstituting the bots, going max reps.”

  “Treads? Do we still have treads?”

  DSO Rice checked her traction controls, pulsed her sticks and offered a rueful smile. “Treads not damaged, sir. We can still maneuver. I’m showing increased friction on B tread…maybe something caught…but I can compensate.”

  “Message coming in from Badger,” said Balderis. He silently mouthed the words as the coupler received and translated the pulses. “They reporting major damage, sir…borer offline, A and C treads de-tracked, possible hull breach…they’re dead in the water and requesting assistance, sir.”

  Winger could visualize the chaos on the command deck of Badger. Gabrielle Galland was CC1...she would even now be popping the EAB air flasks to overpressure Badger’s hull, to keep air inside. Badger was critical to the mission. Tectonic Sword couldn’t go without Badger and her crew and her squad of nanotroopers.

  “Swing us around to starboard, DSO,” Winger ordered. “Put us on a course that intercepts Badger and places us about fifty meters away…no closer. I don’t want to set anything else off.”

  Even as he spoke, more tre
mors rattled through Mole’s creaking hull and the ship struggled to stay vertical, fighting the force of tons of rock all around her. All aboard felt the heading change as the deck angled slight to starboard and their speed dropped off. Moments later, Mole was on course to hunt down and intercept her stricken sister ship.

  Mole had a crew of six, counting Winger as mission commander. She also bore a small squad of five nanotroopers, plus contained elements of ANAD 2.0. The assault force IC1, Sergeant Hoyt Gibbs, came forward onto the command deck from B deck, aft of them. Gibby clung to a bulkhead as more tremors rattled and shook the geoplane.

  “Badger’s hurt,” Winger told Gibby. “We’re heading that way now.”

  Gibby winced at the news. “Didn’t see any damage aft, Skipper. Some pots and pans slung around the mess compartment but that’s about all. Mighty Mite’s cleaning up. What does this do to our timeline?”

  “Nothing good. If Badger can’t go, we’ll have to offload their crew and troops. That’ll make things tight in here. But we need all of you to make the assault on Lions Rock.”

  Gibbs stared at the stratigraphic plot. “That means more time…ANAD’ll have to bore an escape tunnel through this crap outside. Everybody gets into hypersuits, grabs weapons and supplies…that’ll take hours.”

  “Can’t be helped. We can’t surface inside Lions Rock and bust out of the cave walls with half a force.”

  Gibbs’ nightmare turned out to be true. Winger got the bad news as soon as Mole came to a stop. Gabrielle Galland came on the coupler circuit. Both geoplanes were at all stop, less than fifty meters away from each, but separated by tons and tons of Cenozoic granite and sandstone.

  “Badger’s hurt pretty bad, Wings. No serious casualties but we’re definitely no-go.” Her voice was strained. “Pretty thick dust in here too, but we got the hull breach patched. Our borer ANAD’s lost containment…we’re dead as dirt here.”

  “I’ll get an ANAD tunnel started right away, Gabby. Get your troops together and give ‘em the word. Grab your weapons and anything else you can…you’re coming aboard Mole, as soon as ANAD makes a hole.”

  “Understood…but doesn’t this make hash out of our timeline?”

  “Can’t be helped. Get going now…all these tremors make me nervous. We need to get away from these plate boundary zones as quickly as we can.”