Nanotroopers Episode 17: Lions Rock

by Philip Bosshardt

  The boiling swarm of Red Hammer mechs closed with ANAD and flung themselves with fury against Gibby's shield.

  The battle lasted five minutes but ANAD was equal to the task. The assault swarm waded into the middle of the Red Hammer formation and, with Gibbs and Winger in command, slammed the enemy mechs with everything. Bond disrupters fizzed and crackled in the air and the troopers hunkered down to the floor while combat raged over their heads. It was like two stormfronts colliding, complete with flashes of lightning and thunder from the rumbling floor below them.

  “Jeez,” muttered Reaves to Mighty Mite Barnes, nearby. “It’s like being inside a monster’s belly.”

  “Yeah, girl…a monster with indigestion.”

  When the assault had petered out, Winger got to his feet and the troopers worked their way methodically up the rock stairs, sanitizing one cavern level after another. The scope works and labs on Level 2 were followed by more scope works on Level 3 and finally, by a pile of rubble and rock on Level 1 that had once been the Security barracks.

  Emerging onto the top level, beamfire suddenly erupted across the cavern.

  “How many?” Winger yelled on the crewnet.

  Barnes was defiladed beside him, both of them behind a rockpile. “’Fly says half a dozen, maybe more. Multiple thermals…some mechs ahead too, sir. We don’t want to get trapped here.”

  “And the pulser emitters are above us. We’ve got to get to that castle on top of the mountain.”

  Another series of violent tremors and quakes shook the mountain. That was all the opening the troopers needed.

  Winger hand signaled several troopers from Galland’s force, the Badger crew that had come aboard Mole, to flank the ruins left and right. Suppressing fire on my mark, he whispered over the crewnet. Forms and shapes scurried off through the thick dust, dodging lances of light as the Red Hammer troops cut loose again with beamfire. Huge gouts of rock erupted from the walls behind them as the beams struck home, showering them with rubble and dust.

  Winger worked with Gibbs to hack out a better config for ANAD. “Grabbers here—“ he pointed to a diagram on his wristpad, “—and here. Extra disrupters on top of the casing…he’s got a spot.” They got the config squared away, sent it to ANAD and moments later, the dust overhead glowed with the fires of atoms being stripped, bonds being broken and new structure being slammed together. When it was done, ANAD reported ready.

  ***New config laid in, Skipper…let me at ‘em***

  “ANAD…go!”

  The swarm eased forward on picowatt propulsors and swept across the ruins of the barracks, smothering the Red Hammer troops and quickly engaging a defensive shield of mechs. Flashes of light strobed through the dust, while more tremors jostled the cavern and rock rained down on everybody. Winger watched over top of their rockpile as a furball fight erupted. The troopers held off HERF fire but pumped round after round of magnetic loops into the melee, scattering debris everywhere.

  Gibbs was exultant, pumping a fist behind the rockpile. “We slammed ‘em, Lieutenant! Nice work on that config…Q2 was right on the money.”

  “Yeah,” added Galland from nearby. “Good intel’s even better than a fully charged mag carbine.”

  “We’ve got to get upstairs to that pulser array,” Winger decided. “ANAD’s got the bastards pinned down here. Gabby, take a squad and get topside. My eyepiece is telling me the emitters are on the southwest face of the mountain, just at or around that old castle up there.”

  “Will do,” Galland told him. She got on her crewnet. “Glance, Willows, Concepcion…you’re with me.”

  The four of them scooted off and were lost in the dust.

  After some hurried scouting and reconnoitering, Galland’s squad found a small tunnel that led to a service entrance. The tunnel opened on to the top of Shih Ho Mountain, near a broken billboard stand. The screen of the board was dark, but tatters of posted signs nearby indicated they were at the entrance of Lions Rock Country Park.

  They crept forward, sensing motion in the bushes nearby. The park was famous for its wild macaque monkeys and one trooper claimed to have spotted one.

  "Lieutenant, look out!"

  From behind the ancient Han dynasty castle that perched atop the mountain, a squad of Red Hammer guards had breached the squad’s camou field, slicing through the mesh in a flurry of arms and legs and shouts. The muzzles of laser carbines flashed in the faint light. Beam fire erupted across the ground.

  Galland ducked as the first volley narrowly missed her, carving out a seam in a boulder field behind her. Rock and debris exploded, flying everywhere.

  Concepcion and Glance dove for cover behind the boulders. Glance rolled, found an opening between the rocks and squeezed off a few coil-gun rounds. The programmable kinetic slugs slammed into the lead Red Hammer guards before detonating. The concussion was deafening as smoke and body parts scattered.

  "Keep 'em pinned down!" Galland shouted. "I'm trying to help Glance out--"

  "Nothing left to pin down, Lieutenant," Concepcion called back. Her aim had been true, sighting in the rounds after slaving the slugs to her tracker.

  "Superfly's got nasties all over the place," Willows watched the remote infrared take on her own eyepiece. "All over the top of the mountain…they'll be on our perimeter in no time, unless we get some help from ANAD."

  "ANAD's busy, Corporal." Galland told him. She brushed herself off, climbed back to her feet and launched her own embedded ANAD from a shoulder capsule, piloting her own swarm right into the heart of the melee.

  "Whatever you are," she muttered to himself, "you act a helluva lot like ANAD." She worked the config controller, at the same time pulsing in and out of contact range with the main enemy group, slashing and weaving, scrunching up atoms and twisting bonds to zap the bastards with their own electron charge.

  Keep coming, you atomic assholes…keep on coming…right into my hands--

  She bored right into the heart of the enemy horde, slashing left and right.

  Galland drove ANAD deep into the formation. She cruised in at flank speed, propulsors whining, and seized a phosphor group off the nearest mech, twisting atoms until the bond broke. Liberating thousands of electron volts, ANAD's disrupter zapped the mech and shattered its outer shell, ripping off probes left and right. The Red Hammer assemblers shuddered and spun with the pulse, then re-engaged to fight off another bond snap. Throughout the cavern, trillions of ANAD replicants duplicated the same tactic.

  The air burned with furious combat.

  Glance was exultant at the maneuver. "Eat my carbene effectors, you jerks!"

  Galland grinned in spite of herself, deftly steering through the floating detritus of shredded assemblers. "Gotcha…" She changed config, realizing she had to grab one of the mechs before it was completely disassembled. "…right with your pants down."

  The tiny squad beat back the Red Hammer assault and kept them pinned down with Galland’s ANAD re-configged into a defensive screen. Once a path was clear for them, Willows and Concepcion went probing around the other side of the castle and found the platform containing the pulser emitters soon enough, wedged into a small crevice below a steep gabled parapet on the castle’s west corner.

  They scrambled across the rocky escarpment, even as Red Hammer mechs probed the ground around them. Seconds later, the first contact occurred as the ANAD barrier ran out of steam. A thick black horde darkened the night sky and trillions of enemy mechs poured through the gap.

  "Fry 'em!" Willows yelled back to Concepcion. Willows re-sighted her HERF gun and lit off a charge. The thunderclap of the discharge sent searing waves of hot air roaring across the ground. The two troopers flattened themselves against the mountain top, letting the pulse pass. It was like riding out a tornado.

  For the next few minutes, they fought a series of running duels with Red Hammer's flying mechs, all the way to the very edge of Shih Ho Mountain. Below and behind
them, night time Hong Kong lay liked a jeweled carpet, Victoria Peak festooned with lights as the din of midnight traffic from the streets below wafted skyward.

  "More bots!" yelled Willows as Concepcion leveled her mag weapon at the pulser emitters. "Here they come…hit the deck!"

  Wanda Willows swatted at the clouds of stinging mechs closing on their position. Red Hammer had discharged clouds of the mechs around the top of the mountain, hoping to penetrate the ANAD barrier and snare the intruders before they could escape.

  “Fire now, girl!” she yelled. “Blast that thing so we can get the hell out of here!”

  Concepcion pumped round after round into the emitter platform. The dishes, swivels and mounts exploded in a shower of debris and metal shards. But the Red Hammer mechs had already closed on their positions and Concepcion was quickly engulfed in the cloud of bugs.

  “AAARRRGGGHHH!! Get ‘em off…get ‘em off me--!” Concepcion dove to the ground, swatting and flailing as Willows scrambled to help her. She batted and swatted and fired off a few HERF bursts but the bugs were everywhere, replicating like crazy and she had to back off…there wasn’t anything she could do and it made her mad and crazy at the same time. She saw Concepcion go down, buried in an avalanche of bugs, then the mountain top shook again as more tremors hit and rock cascaded down on them from the cliffs behind, rock and pieces of glazed tile from the castle’s swooping roofs and turrets.

  “Shit!” Willows screamed at the top of her lungs. She hosed down the writhing form of Concepcion but it was too late, already half a leg had been disassembled and the rest wouldn’t be pretty. There was nothing she could do for the poor corporal and when Lieutenant Winger’s voice crackled over the crewnet, ordering all hands to assemble at the geoplane, she flung down her HERF rifle in disgust and dove for the tunnel they had come up.

  Wanda Willows ran, stumbled blindly and practically fell through five levels of stone steps, nearly losing her balance once when a particularly violent tremor shook the whole mountain. She made Level 1 and saw the assault force humping it toward Mole, even as part of the cavern ceiling let go and seams of rock and boulders tumbled across the floor.

  Winger and Galland counted off their troops one by one as they boarded the geoplane. “Two casualties,” Galland reported when all were inside. “Both mine: Shania Concepcion and Miros Lukasc. Shania was with Willows topside. They smoked the pulser emitter but enemy mechs swarmed them at the same time. Concepcion didn’t make it.”

  Winger was grim. “Our prisoner just got hauled aboard. He’s secured on D Deck, still MOB’bed. Theo Souvranamh…can you believe it? Ruling Council. He won’t have a brain cell left once Q2 gets through with him.”

  The tremors were coming faster now, and more violent. The ceiling had started to buckle and the last spasm of quakes had collapsed part of the cavern’s far wall.

  “Wings, let’s get the hell out of here. We’ve done what we came for…this place may go any second.”

  Winger and Galland were the last to board. They took positions on the command deck. Winger checked the instruments.

  “Borer online?”

  BOP1, Troy Erromango, replied “Online and cooking at full spread, Lieutenant.”

  To Julie Rice, Winger gave the order to withdraw. “DSO, engage treads and back us the hell out of this place now.”

  Mole shuddered and shook like a wet dog as her treads bit into the hard ground. Something heavy banged on the topside hull, just as the geoplane creaked and groaned into motion.

  “Treads at fifty percent, Skipper. Backing now—“

  Moments later, Mole had submerged into the borehole from which she had come and was gone. Huge boulders and seams of rock cascaded down and the ceiling of Level 1 started to slump.

  It wouldn’t be long before Lions Rock collapsed in on itself completely.

  The next two hours were a nerve-wracking and tortuous descent back into the subterranean world of rock plates and granite domes and feldspar seams and quartz inclusions. Mole hummed and shuddered and shimmied as all around her, tectonic forces shoved them sideways and down.

  At the geotech Kruizenga’s recommendation, the geoplane descended only two hundred meters and began hunting for a smoother course to follow away from Tai Po Valley. After a harrowing two hours, Mole emerged into softer layers of sandstone and the shaking, rattling and rolling died off to a steady thrum.

  “DSO, make turns for two kilometers an hour and steer heading one two five degrees. Geo, best estimate on time and distance to the rendezvous point?”

  “Aye, sir,” came back Rice as she worked the controls to swing Mole’s nose around to the proper heading.

  Kruizenga did the computations. “R point is six hours ten minutes at this speed, coordinates thirteen degrees north by one nineteen degrees east. Middle of the Sulu Sea, southwest of the Philippines…Mindanao to be exact. Recommending we surface at that point.”

  “Very well,” Winger said. “DSO, best speed and rig the ship for cruise.” He leaned back in his seat, checked that his harnesses and belt were snug and let the fatigue wash over him. He felt like he had just swam the Pacific Ocean while tugging a few tons of bricks behind.

  Galland saw Winger’s eyes droop down to slits and smiled. She felt the same way. She eased her way out of the command deck and went aft, to check on her troopers, to have a look at their prize catch and then to grab something from the mess compartment.

  Six hours was a hell of a long time to spend burrowing through the Earth’s crust. As long as we keep moving and don’t go too deep, she told herself.

  “R point dead ahead,” announced geotech Kruizenga. Mole had been cruising for hours, burrowing her way beneath the seabed of the South China Sea, through dense granitic rock layers.

  Winger had been up on the command deck, in a light doze, when the word came. He shook himself awake.

  “Take us up, DSO. Time to enter the world of the living. We’ve got a submarine escort waiting topside.”

  “Aye, sir,” replied Rice. Mole’s deck angled upward and all aboard could feel the extra strain from the borer as the bots chewed harder into the surrounding rock.

  Winger checked the stratigraphic display. “One hundred and ten meters. DSO, how long until she breaches?”

  “At this speed, sir, about half an hour.”

  Winger got on the 1MC and alerted all hands. “Attention! We’re ascending now. Breaching in half an hour. Stow all loose gear and strap yourselves in. We’ll be at eleven hundred meters sea depth when we come up. I’m expecting UNISEA will have our escort nearby.”

  Mole continued her ascent. When the nose of the geoplane broke through the seafloor, the ship shuddered and wallowed for a moment.

  “Kill the borer!” Winger ordered. Outside Mole’s bow, the white-hot half-globe of borer bots collapsed in a spray of light and bubbles, as the ship eased her way on tread power alone. Moments later, the geoplane was resting in a shallow valley surrounded by steep cliffs and a seamount, some one hundred kilometers southwest of the island of Mindanao.

  Winger studied his board. “Sensors, anything around?”

  The Sensors tech, Anatoly Balderis, checked his sonar display. “Twin contacts, close aboard, Skipper, high rpms…must be small craft.

  That made Winger’s neck hairs stand up. “Two contacts…what the--?”

  But before he could finish, Balderis had cut in. “High-speed screws, Lieutenant…torpedo in the water…make that two torpedoes, bearing two six two, estimated range less than a thousand meters—“

  Winger froze at the tech’s words. “Two contacts…torpedoes…what’s going…” They’re best hope was to re-submerge into the seabed. “DSO, BOP, can we get below the seafloor…Sensors, how long to contact?”

  Balderis’ voice had shifted to a high pitch. “Estimating time to contact one from blade count…I’d say forty seconds, Lieutenant…the second contact fifteen seconds after that.” />
  Troy Erromango was the borer operator. “Negative on the borer, Skipper. It’ll take several minutes to re-constitute.”

  “We don’t have several minutes. DSO, get us moving…see if we can hide behind that seamount.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Mole lurched forward on her treads, trundling along the smooth lava plain of the Sulu Sea, creeping forward at an agonizingly slow pace to sequester herself in the lee of the huge seamount. She had just made a slight turn, when a terrific explosion rocked the ship from directly above.

  “Contact one!’ Sensors cried out. “Less than ten meters above us—here comes contact two--!”

  “All hands, rig for collision!”

  A second explosion rocked Mole on her treads and whipped the geoplane nearly ninety degrees, lifting her hull right off the seafloor and spinning her slightly to port. She settled back on her side, then fought the list and re-stabilized in a slow-motion crash, skidding as her treads bit into the muck.

  Debris and rock cascaded down on top of the geoplane.

  “It’s a mudslide!” yelled Kruizenga. “Avalanche—“

  A steady drumming sound beat down on them as tons of rock and mud slid downslope along the flanks of the seamount. Mole was partially buried up to her hatch seals, rocking and shuddering like a cold wet dog as the slide pounded her from above.

  It was over in a minute, though the hull continued to take hits every few seconds. But Mole’s hull had mercifully held. Smoke and dust grew thick on all decks. Coughing and groans filled the air as Mole’s hull creaked and whined under the weight.

  Winger dragged himself up to his seat, helping Gabrielle Galland off the deck as he did so. He tasted grit and dust in his mouth. “Damage report…now!”

  All decks reported back over the next few moments. No casualties. A few bumps and bruises. One pretty severe facial laceration back on Stores deck…it was Jud Strakes, one of Badger’s crew, who had been cut by falling dishes from a shelf that had come loose. Their prisoner, Theo Souvranamh, had come through unhurt, still restrained in a MOB net.

  “How about our friends outside?” Winger asked.

  Balderis checked his scopes. “Skipper, I did a signature analysis on those two contacts. They’re unmanned drones…Manta-class. That’s where the torpedoes came from.”