Chapter 4
“Quantum Collapse”
Via Verde, Republic of Valencia
South America
January 6, 2049
Early morning….
Johnny Winger didn’t know what to expect when the Detachment finally made their LZ a hundred and fifty kilometers west of Afalamos, Valencia. All he knew was how thick and impenetrable the jungle was below the lifter skids and how forbidding the terrain seemed from several thousand meters. Clumps of misty clouds drifted lazily over the quilted green carpet as far as the eye could see. Even finding the Yemanha River was hard; the building clouds offering only occasional glimpses of the muddy brown ribbon.
“Village coordinates coming up, Lieutenant,” said the lifter pilot, Sergeant Graves. “Dead ahead…around that bend in the river, looks like—“
“I don’t see a thing…not even a clearing.”
“Me neither, Skipper. I’m hunting now for a place to set you guys down.”
Their mission was simple enough to state, if damnably hard to pull off: reconnoiter the village of Via Verde and its surroundings. Ascertain who or what was causing the atmospheric perturbations BioShield had detected. Was there some kind of illegal nanobotic reservoir in the area, modifying the air locally? Was Red Hammer behind it? And find out where those strange, predatory demonio creatures came from. Dr. Del Compo had theorized there was some kind of nursery in the vicinity of the abandoned Xotetli village. What connection did the creatures have with the changes in the atmosphere?
Sergeant Chris Calderon was CEC1 for the Detachment, in charge of containerization and environmental control. With the ANAD master embedded in a capsule in Johnny Winger’s shoulder, the CEC’s didn’t have a lot to do. Winger had put Calderon to work monitoring the atmosphere as they approached the LZ.
“CEC, what’s the air like outside?”
Calderon was a humorless, by-the-book type, and a bit of a tinkerer. He read tech manuals for entertainment.
“Reading minor fluctuations, Lieutenant, that’s all for the moment. Oxygen levels down ten percent, actually dropping even as I speak. Nitrogen’s good, but CO2 is up over a thousand parts per million…that’s about three or four times normal. We need to stay in our suits. Soon as we set down, I’ll release the sniffers.”
If we can find a place, Winger thought. “Very well. Graves, it’s up to you. How about that small beach over there?” The atomgrabber pointed to a narrow peninsula jutting out into a bend in the river.
Graves cleared his throat. “I’ll try it, Skipper.”
The lifter whirred sideways, scuttling through the air like a drunken bat, tilted and eased down to a soft thump on the bank of wet sand. Graves let her settle gingerly, unsure of their footing on the soil. But the lifter stabilized and he cut the rotors.
“Detachment, fall out!” Winger buttoned up his own hypersuit—it went without saying the suits were universally detested, but in Indian country, it was best to have the protection. With each trooper plugged into the crewnet, the whole Detachment could move and make tactical decisions almost as a single organism.
Alpha Detachment assembled on higher ground above the LZ, while the packbots offloaded their gear and set it up: the MOB canisters, the HERF guns and mounts, coilguns, camou-fog generators and SuperFly pods.
Winger got on the crewnet. “Okay, let’s get ‘Fly up and circling. I want some eyes overhead.”
“Underway, Skipper.” DPS1 Sergeant Sheila Reaves was the Detachment’s comic cutup, with her red hair burred down to the nubs and a flair for the unpredictable. Disarmingly clumsy with a snorky kind of laugh, she was also the Corps’ reigning coilgun master marksman and could put a magazine of rounds on target faster than you could blink your eyes. Reaves unbundled the case of tiny fly-sized entomopters and spun them into the air, activating their motors. Moments later, a horde of ‘flies’ buzzed overhead, competing with the native Drosophila swarming around the LZ.
Winger had already programmed their ground route and called up the path. The ghostly lines flickered on a dozen eyepieces simultaneously.
“We head north by northwest, according to the sat images and what Dr. Del Compo said. Along the riverbank. Those caves and the grotto are that way. Calderon--?”
The CEC1 had just released a swarm of sniffers, tiny dust-mote sized sensors spreading out to check the air. “Definitely deteriorating, Captain. Sniffo reports CO2 levels rising rapidly…now reading over five thousand parts per million. O2 partial down and dropping. Pressure’s fluctuating too, mostly down…we’re in a little bubble of Mars, almost.”
“That’s a good sign,” Winger decided. He whirred his suit servos into action, setting mobility on auto. The motors moved his legs with no effort on his part, gyros keeping him upright and stable in the slippery footing along the riverbank. “Means we’re heading in the right direction. Okay…move out.”
As one, the hypersuited troopers slogged forward along the edge of the jungle, surrounded by hordes of flies, as they headed west by northwest. The going was hard, owing to the treacherous footing, though the undergrowth was minimal, mostly hard ropy vine and cypress ‘knees’ half buried in wet sand. Out on the river, a formation of tapirs made a “V” in the water as they padded upstream, their black snouts just visible above the wake.
“Lieutenant…look at this!” It was Corporal Chandra Singh, the DPS2, running point guard for this leg of the trek.
Winger cut his suit back to manual and thumped up to the high ground where Singh stood by the weathered trunk of an araucaria tree. It mushroom canopy rained sharp needles on them in a slight breeze.
Singh had found some sort of sign or totem: two tapir jawbones, still filled with teeth, slung from a low branch of the tree, crossed in the shape of an X.
“What is it?” asked Reaves. Her own suit motors hummed trying to keep her level in the soft earth. “Some kind of warning?”
“Maybe,” said Winger. “We’ve seen plenty of evidence of the Xotetli around here. Look over there—“ his pattern recognizer had found more evidence of habitation and bracketed the image in his eyepiece.
A cone-shaped cage fashioned from sticks had been gouged into the ground just inside the tree line. Alongside it lay a perfectly round, soot-blackened clay pot.
“The universal language of the jungle,” surmised Master Sergeant Al Glance, the CC2 and Winger’s second-in-command. “It means ‘stay out’. ‘ Come no closer’. We must be real near the Xotetli village.”
“Or what’s left of it,” Reaves said uneasily.
“Something sure came this way,” Singh added. “And it wiped out the whole tribe.”
The hairs on the back of Johnny Winger’s neck bristled. It was a sign he had long ago learned to pay attention to. He clicked open a separate channel to ANAD.
“We’d better get you launched and formed up, pal. I don’t like the looks of this. We’re exposed as hell and the atmosphere’s going south in a hurry.”
Nanotroopers Episode 9: Demonios of Via Verde Page 8
