NanoSymbionts

by Joseph Philbrook

  Less than three minutes after the attack began, Jake deposited David on his feet next to the door concealed as a mere recession, that looked identical to a series of large recessions. That were evenly spaced along the base of the bridge support pylon. David was only slightly surprised that Jake had located the exact spot where the access control was concealed but there was no time to waste thinking about that.

  From this vantage point near the river he could see the water had begun to boil. He tried not to think about his friends in the surrounding countryside. Somebody was damn well going to pay for this but for now, all he could allow himself to think about was stopping the power distribution satellites that were being used as weapons against them. He pushed his hand against the concealed biometric scanner. Then he spoke his pass phrase. The bottom of the recessed surface swung inward reveling a concrete stairway. David began down the stairs.

  “You'll have to go on yourself from here,” Jake's nano-pod spoke from inside David's ear canal. “If I'm going to keep the shield over the island, I'll have to remain out here. But I'll be with you anyway.”

  “Good!” David replied as he took the steps two at a time. “Because I'll need you to let my signal through when I'm ready to transmit.”

  David said no more as he continued through another concealed doorway and down some more stairs. Into the part of the secret facility under the bridge that he hadn't told the government about. He had been concerned about a growing tendency for the government to see potential military applications as the important part of his work. So he had wanted to be able to run experiments that they didn't know about.

  He had some idea's about high energy manipulation that he didn't intend to share with them unless he found a viable nonmilitary use that was worth the risk of letting them use it to build better weapon systems with. To do that he needed a source of energy that the government couldn't measure his use of. The hydroelectric power system concealed in the structure of the bridge could do just that. At least it could when he ran it at night. After making sure nobody happened to be on the river, at least not close enough to the bridge to notice the change in the way the water flowed under it. This time he wouldn't care who might notice.

  Finally he reached the power control room and fairly threw himself at the control levers that would raise the flow barrier dams. Which in turn would redirect more than half the rivers volume to the rapidly opening water intakes. As he yanked the last lever into the correct configuration for maximum power, David spun on his heals and began running back up the stairs to the laboratory the government did know about.

  By the time he got there they had been under attack for 7 minutes. David was breathing hard as he staggered into the chair at the primary control console.

  “It'll take me a couple more minutes to encode the override codes into a suitable signal,” David said out loud, in the hope that Jake was still monitoring him somehow. “Then I'll need a 5 second hole in your defense shield above the dish at the top of this pylon. Once I've transmitted, it should take less than a minute for those power station satellites to shut down.”

  Even as he said this, David noticed that his weather console had detected 6 additional heat sources adding to the intensity of the firestorm. He shuddered as he realized that the only possible sources of the extra heat were from satellites located so far away as to require them to beam their energy at such an angle through the atmosphere as to make precise targeting of his island impossible. Whoever was responsible for this atrocity must have detected Jake's defense shield, and decided that overcoming it was important enough, to warrant reducing the whole region to cinders. This frightened him greatly but not nearly as much as it made him angry.

  “That'll be cutting it a bit close David,” Jake's nano-pod replied. “But we can just about do it, I think. Just give me a one second warning when your ready to transmit.”

  Jake looked with apprehension at the pulsating cigarette lighter he was holding. It had begun to glow the moment he had called upon it to power his overloaded defense screen. It hadn't taken long for the glow to become a flashing red light that alternated with an unsettling warning tone. Which signaled a rapidly approaching critical threshold point. When the microcontainment system would fail, resulting in a small nuclear blast.

  The amazing thing was the amount of power it was producing. Fully 10 percent of which was being consumed by the process of extracting enough hydrogen from moisture in the surrounding air to keep the reaction going. Another 40 percent was used up in the process of force fusing individual pairs of hydrogen atoms into helium and collecting most of the resulting energy released. The remaining 50 percent had so far proved to only just barely be enough to keep his expanded shield intact.

  If he had been able to settle for a significantly smaller shield dome, his lighter could have supplied the power almost indefinitely. Unfortunately each time he'd had to double the size of the shield, it's power requirements quadrupled. In order to include the cottage where Richard Winters and his wife had been sleeping, inside it's protection Jake had needed to expand it to the absolute limit of it's capacity. His nanites were expending themselves at a frightening rate to keep the defense screen in operating condition. When they failed to repair it fast enough, it would crumble.

  It was, he decided, a tossup as to whether the defense screen would fail first. Letting in all that destructive energy that was being beamed at them. Or whether the microfusion power plant would explode first.

  Arnold had been watching the sunrise via a pseudo-window when the attack began. Mary was snuggled up against him. She knew he was still brooding about the cold blooded brutality of the terrorists who had blown up the Scuttlebutt.

  He'd been mumbling all night about their needing help from one or more mainstream government factions to operate the way they did without getting caught. As Luna shuttle pilots, they both recognized the nature of the attack the moment it began. Neither needed any explanation from the other to know what they meant when, a few seconds later, they both broke the momentary silence at nearly the same moment.

  “How could they dare?” Arnold burst out in shock. Even before he was done speaking, Mary also spoke up in a dismayed voice.

  “Who could possibly have done this?” she asked.

  Neither had expected an answer but Arnold knew the answers to both questions as soon as he thought about Mary's question.

  “I'm afraid I know who could have done it,” he began with an anger that was quickly becoming pure rage. “I knew the bastard had strong ties to the isolationist faction. But I never dreamed he'd do something like this. But the only way anyone who could, would possibly dare, was if they were in the middle of a de facto coup. And to pull that off they had to have complete control of Luna. There's only one bastard who could've done that in the time I've been planetside.”

  Hearing Arnold's reasoning, Mary also realized who had to have done this terrible thing. She didn't want to believe it.

  “But Richard wouldn't...” she began.

  “I wouldn't have believed it either,” Arnold cut her off. “But nobody else could've.”

  ***

  “I'm ready to transmit!” David yelled, though he was certain that Jake would've heard the slightest whisper.

  “Now!.” Jake's voice said a heartbeat later.

  David touched the final button of the sequence and the bowl shaped antenna at the top of the pylon began to emit the precoded burst transmission. The signal passed through a small hole that suddenly appeared in the defense shield just above the antenna. At the same time some of the searing heat leaked in through the same hole. Fortunately the antenna had been well constructed. It's shape remained intact until after the 5 second burst was over and Jake had closed the hole in his shield. At which point the antenna began to sag from the accumulated heat. 45 seconds later the three brightest spots went dark, followed by the other six a few seconds after that.

  Jake was finally able to shut down both the defense shield and the microfusion pow
er plant. When David stepped back outside, he found Jake staring numbly at the still faintly glowing lighter he was holding.

  “I guess we made it then,” was all David said.

  “Just barely!” Jake replied, as he held up the lighter.

  “I take it you've taken down the whole powernet?” Arnold spoke from the path a few feet away.

  Neither David nor Jake had noticed his approach but both of them spotted the change in his demeanor immediately. Instead of appearing distraught, he displayed no visible emotion whatsoever.

  “Yes”, David replied. “It was the only way.”

  Arnold blinked twice, before continuing in a strangely calm voice.

  “Then I must find another way up there,” he said. Then after a brief pause, he continued in a voice so devoid of emotion it sounded cold as ice. “He isn't done, you know. He must be stopped. And he absolutely must not be allowed to hide his part in this.”

  “He?” David asked.

  By which time Mary had caught up with her husband.

  “Only the commander could have pulled off the coup that it would have taken to do this,” Mary said.

  “And, if such a coup as that hasn't happened,” Arnold resumed speaking. “Then only commander Richard Smith has the balls to do such a thing as this anyway. Either way, it's him.”

  “But if he did pull off the coup up there,” Began Mary.

  “Then he will find a way to reactivate the powernet and try again,” finished Arnold.

  “I'm afraid that fits my assessment also,” David spoke up. “But on a brighter note, I disabled the primary resonance sequencers in such a way that it will take the best team they have, at least a week to re-sync them.”

  “In that case,” Arnold concluded. “He will disengage the primary safety interlocks on the defense cannon and fire on us directly. That will only take him about 36 hours.” Then after a moments thought Arnold added, “Of course he'll have to take the main battery off line while he does so... Tell me Jake, can that device of yours that powered your defense shield, be adapted to power my shuttle?”

  Jake lifted the lighter up and looked at the feeble blinking light it was emitting.

  “Not any more,” Jake replied. “I'm afraid it will take me quite some time to repair it without the use of certain high energy tools.” Then almost as an after thought, he inquired. “But what about that hydropower station of yours David? Could you transmit enough power to his shuttle to get me up there?”

  “Get us up there!” Arnold asserted.

  “Perhaps,” David replied. “If I spend about 4 hours putting a maximum capacity charge on my power cells, there might be enough juice to do it. It'd take me that long to adapt my transmitter to send a compatible signal anyway. But why would you want to go Arnold. You gotta know that once we get someone with Jake's abilities past the outer defenses and inside the Luna complex, he'd be an unstoppable force. But he wouldn't be able to spend his time shielding you. You'd be a sitting duck.”

  “Because my knowledge of the defense system will improve Jake's chances of getting through those outer defenses,” Arnold replied. “And that in itself is enough to be worth expending myself. But don't be so quick to write me off when I get there. I'm a security team leader up there, I know when and where to duck. And I might just have a few allies up there, who'll do what they can to help me.”

  “In other words,” Jake said. “Brer Rabbit here, was born and bred in that particular brier patch... Alright if you feel so strongly about it Arnold, you can go. Just try not to get yourself killed, Mary would never forgive me.”

  “Well I better set the dynamo to start building up that charge,” said David. “I'll need the resonance value of your shuttle's power chip Arnold.”

  Suddenly Sam ran down the path to them. He looked very upset.

  “I've had a look at the area from the top of the hill,” Sam began. “It's terrible. As far as I can see in all directions there is nothing but scorched ground. How far does this circle of death go?”

  “According to my scanners it's an ellipse,” David answered. “The outer boarder of which varies from 60 to 100 miles from here.” Sam's face drained of what little color it had had left as the implications of such large area sunk in. Suddenly he screeched hoarsely, “No! Sue! No! No!” As he turned and began running back up the path.

  “Sue!” he screamed as he ran, pulling things from the backpack Sandra had made for him. “Sue...” he whimpered as he began assembling the frame at the top of the hill. His nano-toys, as he called them didn't have a microfusion reactor but there was enough energy in their power cells to form and launch a small ‘ultralight’ powered hang glider. “Sue!” he tried to scream again as he took flight but all he could manage was a hoarse whisper.

  Both David and Arnold were puzzled by Sam's reaction.

  “What was that about?” David began to ask, when he noticed tears streaming down Jake's face.

  “I wasn't letting myself dwell on what this attack did to some good friends,” Jake explained. “Who would have been on a cross country trail. But I'm afraid Sam got far too close to the sweet girl who owned the horses. I wish I could afford the time to help him come to terms with it. But right now the Luna mission is just too important to let such feelings get in the way. We've got a lot of prep work to do.”

  Sam was sick with dread as he flew. There had been precious few pockets of life where the shadow of some hill had provided a small shallow patch of shade. Worse, any of those that had contained a tree had been burned as the tree itself caught fire and collapsed down into the shaded spot. Sam didn't have much hope as he persisted in his search. He'd had a pretty good idea of how far Sue had had time to travel. If he was right, she wouldn't have been anywhere near any hill tall enough to make such a shady patch. That thought was enough to make his stomach churn.

  By the time he got there his stomach was empty. He'd been down to dry heaves for the last 20 miles. He could scarcely make out where the trail had been. Everything looked different. What remains he found near the campsite were charred to the point that it was hard to prove anything had once been human. There was however, a little bit more left of the horses. As he neared the overhanging rock he noticed that there was also a smell like burnt meat mixed in with the pervasive aroma of charcoal. When he entered the stone shelter he found something that made no sense at all.

  It went against everything he'd ever heard about horses but evidently one of them had died trying to crawl on it's belly, into the narrow cave opening. The air had become so hot that the poor beast had simply been cooked alive. Or at least the back 3 quarters of it had. It had tried so hard to stuff itself into the cave opening that it's body Had completely sealed the opening. The poor beast must have suffered horribly. Yet even as Sam wondered at what could possibly make a horse lay down as it tried in vain to get through the low opening, he recognized the pattern of the discolored markings on the remains as belonging to the old mare.

  “Poor Nelly,” he said to himself, as he worked to pull the carcass out of the cave opening. He had to use a pouch of strength enhancing nano-meds before he could even begin to budge the remains of the hapless beast. Even then it didn't budge far.

  He wasn't quite sure why he bothered but he had accounted for the charred remains of all four horses, and only three of the riders. At first he thought that perhaps whoever had been in the cave when the hot air got to them would be sufficiently intact to at least identify the remains. He didn't know if he hoped that would be Sue or not. Either way, it was sure to feel like being stabbed with a dull knife.

  It wasn't until he discovered that the horses neck seamed to still be partially uncooked, that he began to have hope. Maybe the heat hadn't made it all the way to the stream. Maybe there was still a little oxygen left in there. Then he thought, maybe she was only now running out of air. The thought that Sue could be drawing her last breath as he tried to get Nelly's body out of the way was enough to trigger an adrenaline rush. Suddenly he found that his n
ano-med fortified muscles were fairly tearing Nelly's body into pieces and throwing them over his shoulder. He shuddered at the thought of what he was doing but the slim chance that Sue might still be alive drove him to a frenzied state.

  He was only vaguely aware of the fact that he nearly ripped one of his fingers off when it scraped across a sharp rock edge. He hoped the nano-meds had enough left to stop the bleeding but he didn't even slow down. Suddenly he realized that his grizzly task was done. There wasn't anything left blocking the passage. He didn't stop to test the air, just surged forward as fast as he could crawl. The air was foul, smelling of burnt horseflesh but there was still a little oxygen in it. When he reached the drop off that led to the underground stream, he fairly dove in head first.

  He was nearly knocked unconscious as his head hit the bottom of the stream. He fought to turn himself upright. By the time his head made it back to the foul smelling air, he had half a lungful of water. Even as he coughed and retched, he was fishing in his pockets for the small flashlight he kept on a key ring but he found her before he found the light. She wasn't conscious but she had tied her cloths together along with her belt to form a sling just big enough to hang over a projecting rock formation and wedged her arm into it up to her shoulder. It had held her head out of the cold water. He had been worried about how hot the air might have been. Now he was worried about hypothermia. That is until he discovered she wasn't breathing. Then he could only pray that the cold had induced something like a divers reflex.

  His nano-meds were depleted. He didn't have anymore packets to take. He was exhausted and bleeding from a partially healed finger. As well as the gash in his head but somehow he found the strength to drag Sue's unconscious form up the steep slope to the cramped passageway, where he performed CPR for what seemed like hours. Sam, who had never been very religious, thanked every god and daemon he'd ever heard of when she coughed and began to breath on her own. At this point he dragged her still unconscious form out of the foul smelling cave, into the relatively fresh smelling air outside.