CHAPTER 28
Jomo Kenyatta International Airport
Nairobi, Kenya
February 17, 2111 (U.T.)
0130 hours
Johnny Winger looked out across the darkened ramp and pronounced himself satisfied. Two lifters, bearing Detachment Alpha, sat with propulsors whining, ready to leap into the night time sky. Overhead, the killdrones had already spooled up and lifted off. The drone squad had formed up a hundred meters above them and was ready for its escort duty, ready to accompany the Detachment into Indian country, across the Sanctuary boundary, ready to deal sudden death to any bots or anybody who got in the way.
Winger turned to Linda Tracey, his IC1, second in command. “Let’s button up and get going.”
“Aye, sir,” came the reply. Tracey gave a gesture and the loading ramp squealed as it close up behind them. Winger headed into a forward cabin, while Tracey did a quick check of her troops, now all snug as bugs in their hypersuits. Lee, Varanesi and Wold. With Tracey and Winger and the girl, Alpha Detachment numbered five troopers. Five seasoned atomgrabbers and one…what, exactly?
General Winger’s daughter. An angel. And UNSAC approved this?
Both lifters leaped into the sky and turned northeast, onto a heading that would bring them in less than an hour, to the very foothills of Mount Kipwezi.
In the rear compartment, troopers Tracey, Lee, Varanesi and Wold sat in their webseats, pensively eyeing the crimson and red glow on the horizon.
“That’s Kipwezi,” Linda Tracey told them. “Active volcano, magma, lava, all that good stuff.”
Corporal Gina Wold, the Detachment DPS tech sniffed. “I’m betting that’s no lava, Sarge. More likely bot screen. Chewing up the air and rock around the summit.”
‘Yeah,” said Corporal Kwan Lee, the CEC1. “And we’re next.”
“Stow all that,” ordered Tracey. “Check your gear and keep your eyes open. Sanctuary boundary in thirty seconds.”
The lifters passed into the African Sanctuary without incident, but as they began their descent to nap-of-the-earth profile, a hundred meters over the darkened veldt countryside, the starboard killdrone lit up the night sky with a few HERF barrages. The lifter pilot, a Cuban lift jockey named Gonzalez, came over their headsets.
“Bugs to starboard, light botscreen looks like. Defensive mechs. Hawk One engaging.”
The killdrone lay down a rolling wave if rf thunderclaps, plowing through the screening barrier of defensive bots that hung like a curtain along this part of the border. Hawk Two joined the fray a few moments later and the skies outside looked like an east African thunderstorm for awhile.
Presently, Gonzalez announced, “We punched through okay. Dropping down to approach altitude. On vector…LZ two minutes ahead.”
Tracey barked at her troops. “Okay, ladies…get your tight little asses ready. Button up tin cans. Arm all weapons. Set ANAD embeds to Launch Enable and stand by—General?”
One compartment ahead, Johnny Winger had seen the firefight outside his own porthole. He checked Rene seated next to him. She was in angel form for the trip, not contained, but in the dim cabin lighting, she looked almost real, like a wax doll dressed for safari. “You okay there, Button?”
Rene nodded, grimacing as Gonzalez jerked the lifter around to put them on a heading to the LZ. “Okay,” she grunted out. She squeezed her eyes shut. The dreams and images were bad today, coming at her like a night-time ride on a roller coaster. Snatches and fragments of visuals made her dizzy, even a little nauseated.
“Okay, Linda,” Winger replied. “Load Assault Five configs and make ready for opposed entry. DPS, anything up ahead?”
Wold’s hypersuit was patched into the lifter’s sensor array. Everything Gonzalez saw, she could see as well. “Picking up some thermals, some EMs. Low level…may be screening bots or a defensive barrier.”
“Very well. Gonzalez, it’s your show. Put us on the ground.”
The lifter pilot acknowledged. “Aye, sir…standby for extremely rapid descent.” He pulled back on his stick, like reining in a horse and the lifter shimmied slightly as Gonzalez maneuvered them for a gut-wrenching drop down to the LZ.
Winger extracted a small containment capsule from his hypersuit and thumbed it open. Lights glowed red around the lid.
“Okay, punk…remember what we talked about? You go inside here for the landing. Don’t want anything to happen to my little jewel here—“
Rene opened her eyes. The images were coming fast and hard now and she bit her lip. “I remember, Daddy. I’m just feeling a little funny, you know—“
Winger could see it too but Rene did as he asked. While Gonzalez whipped the lifter around into approach attitude, Rene’s whole body began to blur and fuzz out. Slowly, top to bottom, she was deconstructing, like a video wipe and fade effect, the bots forming her outer structure de-linking and separating, diffusing into the air. Even as he watched, Rene began to fade noticeably. First her shoulders and arms, then her legs and feet. For a brief moment, only her head and neck remained as the config change took hold. A disembodied face looked up at him and a faint smile tickled the corners of her lips.
Just like a Cheshire cat, Winger thought. He smiled back and then grabbed a hold bar as Gonzalez pulled the plug and the lifter plummeted earthward. When he looked back, the face and the smile were gone. Only a faint, sparkling mist remained. It began flowing toward the capsule.
Just then, the lifter touched down with a hard thump and Winger unstrapped himself. The containment capsule was still lit up red, indicating the Rene swarm was still in capture mode, but even as he unbuckled the last of his straps, the lights went green and the lid went down automatically. Rene…what had once been Rene in the normal sense…was now a diffuse collection of bots captured and contained in the capsule. Home sweet home.
Winger pocketed the capsule in his hypersuit web-belt and headed aft.
The strategy for Detachment Alpha was simple enough to explain. Step One: take four Mark I disentangler units and place them as close as possible to the cave complex near the summit of Kipwezi, as close as they could get to Config Zero. Step Two, activate and test said units, to be sure they worked. Step Three: get the hell out of Dodge as fast as possible.
Winger came back to the rear compartment, as Tracey and the troops were positioning themselves to exit.
“Gonzalez, hit the ramp! Detachment, dismount in squad order. And DPS, get Superfly up and operating pronto.”
Corporal Wold patted two pouches slung from davits on her waist. “Heckle and Jeckle are itching to fly, sir.”
Just then, the aft ramp hissed open and dropped to the ground.
Tracey’s voice was loud and clear on the crewnet. “GO…GO…GO…GO….!”
One after the other, the troopers of Detachment Alpha streaked out the back end of the lifter.
Wold let her birds fly and the two ornithopters chittered into the night sky, quickly giving Alpha better eyes and ears overhead. Right away, Wold saw the problem.
“BOTS! Just past those bushes ahead…lots of bots! Spikes on all bands…coming this way!”
Winger had anticipated the unpleasant reception. “Defense Three…spread out…launch your ANADs now! Config Assault Five all sectors. And get those HERF batteries up and boresighted.”
Working quickly like a single well-trained creature, the Detachment used their trenching jets to prepare ground and set up and sight in the HERF guns. Uncoiled and ready for battle, troopers scattered to pre-planned sectors, guiding their ANAD swarms into position. Defense Three called for max rate reps and, for a few moments, the air burned around the LZ with uncountable gazillions of bots in replication overdrive, big banging swarm mass to meet the oncoming enemy.
Winger switched views on his helmet display and saw what Heckle and Jeckle were seeing from fifty meters overhead. It didn’t look pretty.
Boiling across the flat dusty countryside at the
foot of Kipwezi, the oncoming swarm looked like a single massive dust devil, raging forward and consuming everything in its path.
Winger swallowed hard, patting the containment capsule with Rene inside. Pumpkin, looks like this is going to be one hell of a carnival ride.
He cycled the action on his own mag carbine, then switched display views again and took an early peek at what his own embedded ANAD was seeing.
One good look at the bots coming their way as all he needed to know. In about one minute, Detachment Alpha was going to be in a world of hurt.
At the same time, fifteen hundred kilometers northwest of their position, Lieutenant Antonio Livio and Detachment Bravo were creeping toward the Hotel Napoli along the Via Condotti in an unmarked van, slogging through central Rome’s notorious traffic jams like a million other motorists, one big honking, tire-squealing mess of turbos, jetcabs, scooters and electrics. Ahead of them, the Piazza Augusto looked like a hornet’s nest, with cars and bikes stirring thick and angry, boiling out into the surrounding streets and alleys.
Should have lifted in, Livio muttered under his breath. Symborg’ll be scattered to hell and back by the time we make our coordinates.
“Hotel coming up, Lieutenant.” The CEC1 was driving. Shih Kejiang swerved suddenly to avoid pedestrians darting among the slow-moving traffic. “Assuming we aren’t killed before we get there.”
“Roger that. Detachment, get ready. We’ll move out just like we simmed. Remember, we’re a hotel cleaning staff, so act like one.”
“Yeah,” remarked the DPS tech, Corporal Maya Likasi, “a cleaning staff with big-ass guns.”
Bravo Detachment was coordinating its efforts with Alpha Detachment. Livio went over the details in his mind as they crept toward the hotel, now visible above the exhaust fumes, its red slate roofline nicely framing the murky brown of the Tiber River beyond. As soon as General Winger and Alpha had their disentanglers in place, Bravo would move on target Symborg. Q2 said he was holed up in the Hotel Napoli all afternoon, in preparation for a big Assimilationist rally in the Piazza Augusto that night. The mission was to grab Symborg’s master bot, slam it into containment and scram. If Alpha’s disentanglers worked as advertised, and signals to and from Config Zero were well and truly messed up, the swarm of bugs that was Symborg should be easy pickings for Bravo.
That was the plan. Livio shook his head slowly, then checked around. He didn’t want anybody else to see that. There were only about a million things that could go wrong with this stunt and the Berlin op Quantum Corps had tried a month ago had revealed only some of them.
“There’s the entrance,” Livio noticed. A circular drive wound through a small grove of eucalyptus trees to a porticoed entrance. A service drive bore off to the right. Corporal Shih went right, just as the mission plan called for. Moments later, he parked the van at a utility entrance and all aboard dismounted.
“Okay, Detachment, gather ‘round and let’s go over this one more time.” Livio waited to let some maintenance types saunter by, out for a stroll on their smoke break. When it was clear, he went on.
“DPS, get your fly-eyes ready to go. I want to recon that corridor, see what defenses are in place. After Berlin, we’re not taking any chances.”
Maya Likasi extracted the two entomopters from a satchel on her web belt and twisted their tails. Instantly, the bugs’ rotors started spinning up into a blur.
“Gnat and Skeeter all ready to go, sir.”
“Launch ‘em now. Let’s take a look upstairs.”
Likasi released the fly-eyes in a single smooth toss. Both bots buzzed off into the air. Over the next few minutes, both would work their way inside the hotel, looking for all the world like flies. Riding up ventilation ducts, they would soon emerge on the eighth floor, giving the Detachment extra eyes as to what they would encounter.
“Let’s get ANAD up there too. Q2 says Symborg never stays anywhere without a botscreen around him.”
Corporal Shih tapped a button on his wristpad and a small port opened up along his left shoulder, exposing the capsule underneath. “ANAD reports ready in all respects, Skipper. I’m in Config Delta Ten, all eyes and ears.”
“Go,” Livio told him.
Shih tapped a few more keys on his wristpad and a small faint mist soon formed around the port. Like a faint trail of smoke, the bot master and its base swarm exited containment and drifted its way upward, maneuvering on picowatt propulsors, rising like a faint waft of dust on gentle breezes, even sparkling in the early morning air. Soon, it was gone.
Shih was already getting imagery back as the bots steadily replicated, thickening the dust, building swarm mass, now grabbing photons from all around them. “ANAD’ll be at that landing on the eighth floor in about seven minutes…nothing so far…background EMs, acoustics normal, thermals normal….it all looks like baseline stuff, Lieutenant. No evidence of swarm activity yet.”
“I’m sure that’ll change,” Livio decided. “Okay, the rest of you get your ‘cleaning’ gear out…carts, mops, rags, whatever. And try not to look like troopers, for once.”
The Detachment went at it with determination. In five minutes, they stood with all their gear alongside the van, outfitted in dingy white utility coveralls and caps. To an untrained eye, the squad was nothing more than a crew of janitors ready to go to work.
As one, they moved out, heading into the Hotel Napoli through a service entrance. The troopers got through the security scan and made their way inside without incident. They stopped at a service elevator for a quick recon.
“Just got a ping from Skeeter,” Likasi announced. Both fly-eyes had found their way to the eighth floor and were sending back imagery as they caromed around the corridor. “Just like you thought, Skipper…botscreen around the suite. Looks like barebones stuff…we can punch through that crap easily enough.”
“Let’s go,” Livio ordered. Bad memories from the Berlin op kept showing up in his head but he tried focusing on something else, anything else, like how you couldn’t tell what a cute butt Maya Likasi had inside her hypersuit.
Intel from Q2 had placed Symborg and his entourage at the hotel a few hours before the huge rally. All the troopers were embedded with ANAD masters, carried in their shoulder capsules. Additional weapons and gear, standard issue HERF and mag carbines, were carried in innocent-looking tool boxes.
As a unit, the troopers rode a service elevator to the eighth floor. The door hissed open and right away, a nanobotic security barrier made getting off a hassle. Likasi jammed the door open, while Jonas Lorenco, their CQE, launched his own embed. They didn’t use HERF or mag on the barrier, since the noise would probably wake up the entire hotel.
“ANAD launched,” Lorenco reported. A faint sparkling mist issued from the trooper’s shoulder capsule. Immediately, a spider-web of light brightened at the elevator door, as the ANAD master slammed atoms to build out its swarm and engage the barrier bots.
The entrance was momentarily bathed in an eerie blue-white glow as the bot swarms collided. Moments later, the barrier flashed and went dark.
They were in.
Livio led the way. According to intel, Symborg was holed up in a suite of rooms around the corner, rooms 820 through 825. Cautiously, Livio crept down the hall, flanked on either side by Lorenco and Likasi. The rest of the Detachment stayed back, to cover the elevator and make a path for their escape.
The Lieutenant carried the special containment capsule for grabbing Symborg’s master bot and slamming it down. If all went well, once they got word from General Winger and Alpha Detachment that the disentanglers were in place, Livio’s job was to force the barrier and penetrate the suite, locate the master bot that ‘ran’ Symborg and grab it. Then Detachment Bravo would make tracks and exit the scene in great haste, heading back to the lifters they had parked at Da Vinci Airport. In an hour, according to plans, Bravo would be at Quantum Corps Base Balzano and already loading up a hyperjet with
Symborg’s master bot, ready to burn a hole in the sky on a two-hour suborbital hop over to Table Top.
They reached Room 820 and found another barrier, pulsating over ornate doors gilded in gold leaf trim.
Livio held up a hand. Over the crewnet, he asked Lorenco, “Anything from Alpha, Jonas?”
The CQE checked his coupler. “Nothing yet, Skipper. Channel’s open…we’ve got comms but no signal yet.”
“Okay,” Livio decided. “We stop here. Get your mops and rags out. Start cleaning. We’re here to clean. Jonas, let me know the instant Alpha chirps.” He motioned Lakasi over. “Maya, I want to see inside that suite. Can you squeeze one of your fly-eyes past that barrier, without setting off alarms?”
“Sure can, Lieutenant. Skeeter’s got a special configuration he can go to…he can squeeze himself down to almost nothing. Plus he puts out pheromones and noises just like your average Musca Domestica. Unless the barrier bots are tuned for that, he should be able to slip inside. I recommend we use that ventilation shaft. Bots may be thin there.”
Livio knew they could try using ANAD to work his way right through the walls…but transiting solid-phase lattice structures was time consuming and sometimes left a thermal or acoustic signature that could be detected. He hoped nobody would bother with a few flies darting around.
So Bravo Detachment went to work, as the custodial crew they were trying to be, dusting picture frames and washing down windows, vacuuming the carpet and watching carefully as imagery started coming back from two innocuous flies that were working their way through ductwork and air registers into the suite that Symborg and his crew occupied.
Now if only Alpha Detachment would do their part. Livio didn’t know how long they could keep up the pretense of being janitors, without arousing suspicion.
The swarm was on top of Alpha Detachment in less than five minutes. Gina Wold let fly the first HERF barrage, timed to hit just before Tracey’s ANAD swarm collided with the enemy. A hot wave of rolling thunderclaps boomed across the flat bush country, stirring up sheets and clouds of dust as veins of lightning streaked across the night sky. Only this was no African thunderstorm. Swarm armies collided in midair a few dozen meters away and the line of engagement was like a snake on fire, writhing and snapping through the air, as trillions of bots chewed at each other like mad dogs.
Winger joined in the fray with the others, discharging his own mag carbine left and right, swatting and flailing at the swarming bots as they thickened and swept over the LZ. He wanted to go small and see what ANAD was dealing with but he knew this wasn’t their fight. They couldn’t take on the whole Sanctuary. They had a mission to put disentanglers in place, get them up and running and get the hell out.
Winger let fly another blast and took a quick peek through his suitscope at the darkened flanks of Kipwezi. Somewhere up there was a ledge, and that ledge was emplacement point number one. They had no business down here, being chewed up by bots at the LZ.
“DPS, you and CEC set your HERF guns on max, full discharge! I want to put a bubble of clear air around us so we can punch out on boost and get up to that ledge. The first disentangler goes there. Tracey--?”
The IC1 was hunkered down behind some acacia bushes, spraying mag loops everywhere, just trying to keep from being overwhelmed. “Here, sir---just hosing down some bots!”
“Put the lifter on auto-orbit and get it out here! Set it to hover and hold five hundred meters up, tight pattern to the south. I don’t want to find a smoking shell left when we get back! Detachment, prepare to boost on my command—we’re heading for that ledge I’ve got my track beam on.” Winger tapped a key on his wristpad and the infrared beam shot skyward, pointing out to every trooper’s nav system their target two thousand meters up.
Linda Tracey tapped at her own keypad, flinging and smashing bugs with her hands, occasionally sweeping her area with mag to keep the bots from closing in. Moments later, the lifter’s propulsors spun up in a small gale of dust and fried bots, and the flyer leaped into the air, corkscrewing its way to the hover and hold altitude Tracey had just programmed in.
Winger watched the ship disappear through the sparkling mist that had swept over them and swallowed hard. Now they were well and truly alone. If anybody’s boost failed—
He didn’t even want to think about that.
Lee and Varanesi made one last sweep with their HERF guns, and sheets of bots clattered to the ground. For a brief moment, a bubble of clear air surrounded them. Now was the time.
“Detachment…light ‘em up! Boost on max and follow me--!”
As one, the troopers of Alpha Detachment toggled their suit boost to max and whooshed into the air as if they had been lifted and flung into the sky by some giant’s fingers.
The first flight lasted only half a minute. One after another, they alighted on the precarious edge of a small abutment two thousand meters above the LZ. Winger was the first to drop down, coming to a rest in a four-point crouch, the safety lights of the distant lifter winking red and white, red and white, a kilometer away, now below their position.
“Okay, ladies, let’s get DNT One out and in place. Gina, you and Tracey, secure the perimeter…and keep your fly-eyes close. I don’t want any bugs making an unwelcome visit to our little perch here.”
“Aye, sir.” The DPS and the IC1 scuttled off to opposite ends of the ledge.
Kwan Lee carried the disentangler in a small satchel attached to his web belt. He extracted the device, sprang its legs and hunted around for a good spot to set it up. Spying a patch of level ground next to a few scraggly plants, he sat the DNT down on its legs and thumbed a control stud on the side panel. Instantly, the legs fired and drove the body of the device into the hard ground with a few hammering thumps of dust. Now secured, the thing winked and hummed as Lee went about the activation sequence.
Winger drew Varanesi over. “Singh, you’re going to do a little recon trip around the mountain. Find us three more spots for putting down the rest of the DNTs. Ledges, niches, burrows, anywhere you can find level ground with a good view of the summit.” They both craned for a better look at the reddish glow emanating from the top of Kipwezi. “Config Zero’s up there somewhere in a cave. I want these gizmos to be able to jam and spoof every last burp and fart that bastard makes. Got it?”
The CQE nodded and re-charged his own HERF weapon from a power pack hanging from his backframe. “I’ll find us some good spots, Skipper. What about you?”
Winger took a deep breath and looked up again. “I’m headed up there, to the summit. Right into the dragon’s mouth. I’ve got a little experiment I want to try.” He didn’t say that the whole side trip was definitely not part of the mission, except in the most roundabout way.
Varanesi boosted off the ledge and in seconds, his hypersuited form disappeared around the edge of the mountain, although the glow from his boosting continued to play fingers of light on the rocky slope for a few moments. Winger advised the others of his personal recon trip.
“Get that unit going. Singh’s scouting for more sites now. As soon as he finds them, boost off and get the rest of the DNTs in place and going. I want to scout around the summit for a few minutes. Kwan—“ he said to the CEC still activating DNT One, “—when the whole network’s all green and clean and all the gadgets are working up to spec, send code Buffalo to Bravo Detachment like we briefed. Lieutenant Livio should be in position and ready to move on Symborg then.”
Kwan half saluted, still kneeling at the controls of the DNT, not an easy thing to do in a hypersuit. “Aye, sir…code Buffalo when the net’s at operating condition Prime One.”
With that, Winger wasted no more time on the ledge. He lit off his suit boost and was airborne and heading upward in seconds. Soon the red-orange glow of Kipwezi’s summit filled his viewer and he turned down the gain on his scope.
He finally found the cave on the steepest slopes of the northwest flan
ks of Mount Kipwezi, nearly ten thousand feet above the surrounding plain.
The cave complex, when he located it, was well hidden in the folds and crevices of the upper slopes of the volcano, above a cloud deck and slick with ice and snow drifts. The wind screamed and gusted at well over eighty knots at this altitude and he had to hunker down in the lee of a rocky barren to keep from being shredded with ice shards and rock chips scoured off the mountainside.
The entrance was little more than a fold in the ground, like a bed sheet bent over and tucked under, maybe a meter across in its widest dimension. But the cave was the nerve center for swarm operations inside the East African Sanctuary.
The cave held Configuration Zero. Config Zero…the master swarm itself.
Carefully, maneuvering sideways in his hypersuit, he slipped through the meter-wide crack and stood in the twilit dust confronting a nanobotic barrier shimmering before him, stretching from floor to ceiling.
He extracted the containment cylinder containing Rene from a port on the underside of his suit backframe. Winger thumbed the port control and set the cylinder down on the ground.
Time for a little company, he told himself. He watched as the open port disappeared in a thickening mist, flowing in flickering pulses outward and upward, issuing like smoke backlit by fireflies all around the little cave opening.
Rene appeared first as a detached pair of feet, clad in the same beige hiking boots she always liked to wear around the apartment, sometimes even to bed, despite all Dana’s threats and warnings.
For a few more moments, her form filled in and solidified, almost as if she were walking toward him from inside a fog bank. Finally, appearing almost lifelike with blond tresses dangling in her eyes, Rene Winger stood before him in a light blouse and jeans. She seemed to shiver in the damp chill of the cave.
“Here, honey…wear this—“ Winger gave her a small wrap he had carried just in case. Already he had peeled off his hypersuit helmet. “How do you feel now?”
She shrugged and slipped the wrap over her shoulders. “Kind of creepy. Cold too.” She looked around the cave opening, the walls veined with streaks of damp something, the flickering of the bot barrier deeper inside. A shudder came over her. “I’ve been here before.”
“It’s the cave where you were held by Config Zero. I want to know if you’re…you know, seeing anything in your mind. Any dreams? Images, that sort of thing.”
Rene moved about the cave, experimentally touching the walls, running her fingers along the rock face.
“Just snatches of things. I can’t quite get them…they disappear when I try to concentrate. How come we came back here?” She didn’t seem afraid, not even annoyed, like she often was when she cocked her mouth just so. More like curiosity.
“We’ve got an important mission. You’re part of it. I want to see if you can communicate with—“ but Winger stopped in mid-sentence, aware that something, someone else was now in the cave with them.
When it appeared, the swarm materialized out of the rock ceiling of the cave. At first, the swarm resembled nothing more than trembling shadows, a pale flickering ghost seemingly contoured with the cave ceiling and walls. As it descended from above, the swarm gathered itself into a roughly spherical shape, still pulsing, still throbbing, backlit from within by the fires of atomic bonds being broken, new structures being slammed together, new bots being formed.
Configuration Zero hung in the misty air like a swollen cloud, ready to dump torrential rain on a tropical forest. But they were a long way from any rain forests. The swarm
unfurled itself and hung in the air like a great storm front, a trembling fist, flashing purple and orange and magenta all at the same time.
Rene wasn’t afraid of Config Zero. That alone surprised Winger, after all she had been through. She eased forward and pressed a finger into the body of the swarm, pulling it back quickly when a high-pitched keening buzz came. She tried touching the swarm again, but this time, her own hand had partially dematerialized, so that on contact, the two swarms seemed to merge: the edge of Config Zero and the blurry stump of Rene’s right arm. Lights flashed where the swarms collided, popping on and off like tiny light bulbs.
Winger was fascinated by scene. Maybe they’re checking each other out, sort of tasting each other.
There was no other sound in the cave but a voice came to his mind.
>>Why have you come?>>
For a moment, Rene didn’t react, said nothing, just let the bots that comprised Config Zero flow over and around her hand and arm. She smiled faintly.
“Daddy, we’re home. This is my home.”
It wasn’t what she said so much as the way she said it. Winger moved to intervene, to snatch his daughter away from danger, but he stopped short. Maybe she was right. Maybe this was home.
“Honey, can you speak to it…him…whatever? Can you talk?”
“I hear a voice in my head, if that’s what you mean. And I see things…pictures and images…like before.”
The voice came again, not so much heard as felt.
>>This configuration is modified from initial state…state one must be restored>>
The great swarm darkened and roiled with something like irritation or so Winger thought. It had swelled to envelope nearly the entire cave, a thundercloud boiling and seething as its trillions of bots slammed atoms to maintain some kind of structure.
“What do you see now, Rene? Tell me—“
His daughter moved a little closer to the swarm, so close that in the dim light of the cavern, they almost seemed to merge.
“It’s like an old vid, Dad…only speeded up. Jerky, like it was in fast-forward—“
“What images are you seeing, Rene…this is important.”
She scrunched up her eyes, all the while letting bots from her own rump of a hand flow into and around the greater swarm. “Trees…plants…they’re all growing like super fast. Looks like a lake…or a swamp, maybe. And there’s light flickering far away…like a volcano…it’s so jerky, it stops and starts, but everything is speeded up…it’s called a Prime…Prime—“
“—Key,” Winger finished for her. That cinched it. Maybe she was seeing some kind of imagery of what the Prime Key meant to Config Zero, or to the mother swarm. Hyper-growth…a swarm…volcanoes…the Prime Key…it seemed to Winger that somehow Rene could dip into the bastard’s comm stream, pick up signals to and from this beast…and what she was seeing was snatches of signals.
“…now something’s moving…it’s crawling out of the swamp, like a snake or something…or a fish…no…it’s a bot…eyes blinking…all kinds of arms and legs, dozens of them…it’s expanding…growing…moving away from the water…it’s growing wings—“
Johnny Winger wished to hell Doc Frost were here. He would know how to make sense of all this. Or at least Doc II. He wondered if maybe Rene could do more than just grab snatches of signals.
“Honey, can you stop the images? Can you change them…affect them in anyway?”
Rene shrugged. She was now nearly embracing the huge swarm, which boiled and flowed around her. Winger was becoming alarmed at the sight.
“I don’t know. I can try…now, I’m seeing something else, Dad…it’s dark, heavy, smothering, lots of rock…like this cave. And hot too. Inside…maybe underground…things are moving, shifting around, the rock’s sliding…very heavy…”
Winger realized Rene was somehow picking up a tremor or a quake. Config Zero was organizing another strike. But where?
“Focus on that imagery, honey…try to dig down…tell me everything you see, everything you sense.”
For the next few moments, Rene rattled off a stream of imagery and impressions, just as they came to her. Tons of rock sliding, shaking and rolling, sounds of thunder, grinding, shearing and screeching, swarms of bots moving through the rock, chewing away at the rock, more sliding and shaking…and it was nearby. Very near.
Winger knew he needed to get word out to Boundary Patrol. Config Zero was maneuvering to set off more tremors…more swarms were sliding along tectonic plate boundaries, loosening plates, chewing up just enough shale and chert and limestone to set vast strata free and shake the earth’s upper mantle with devastating effect.
But before he could get off any kind of comm to the Detachment outside, he saw Rene beginning to de-materialize right in front of him. It had been a kind of creeping absorption that now was becoming a full merge of two swarms.
Right in front of him, his little girl began to fuzz out. It started with her arms and legs and he had almost ignored that for too long. Now her face was almost translucent…he could see right through it to the cave walls beyond. Her neck and her shoulders began to thin, like fog in sunlight, disappearing inch by inch.
The voice came to his mind again.
>>This configuration is modified from initial state…state one must be restored>>
He knew what was happening. The thing that was his daughter had been made that way by Config Zero years before. But time and Dr. Falkland had changed her configuration and Config Zero sensed that. She was ‘corrupted’ and she would have to be deconstructed, filtered and re-seeded back to the original configuration.
All Winger knew now was that Rene…his Rene…was disappearing right in front of his eyes.
Without even thinking, reacting from years of nanotrooper training, Johnny Winger knew he couldn’t lose Rene again. He let loose a full barrage of HERF fire from his carbine, hosing down the cavern, spraying thunderclaps of radio freq pulses everywhere. Seams and gouts of rock exploded from the walls and the hot pulses shredded the outer limbs of the vast swarm almost immediately as trillions of bots were fried and tinkled to the ground.
“Not this time, you bag of bugs…how about some more of this, huh?!!”
He cycled the carbine and pumped more rf into the beast, but already he knew deep down inside that it was too late.
He stopped firing after a few moments, realizing there was nothing left to fire at. The big swarm had already dispersed. Worse, it had taken Rene too. His daughter…the thing that used to be his daughter…was gone. Config Zero and Rene had become one and dispersed and he had no idea where they had gone.
For a brief moment, Winger wanted to plunge deeper into the cave, to hunt down the bag of bugs and clobber it with HERF. But his coupler chimed.
It was the CEC, Kwan Lee.
“Skipper, all units in place…up and operating. I just sent code Buffalo to Bravo Detachment.”
Winger stowed his weapons. “Very well…get the Detachment back together on the ledge. I’m coming down—and get the lifter ready for egress too.”
“Aye, sir.”
Winger figured activating the disentanglers may have caused Config Zero to scram and attend to its replicant swarms scattered around the world. He took one last look at the cavern.
Hope I never see this hellhole again.
Then he pulled on his hypersuit helmet and backed out of the place as fast as he could.
Winger was saddened and sobered by losing Rene a second time. Dana wouldn’t be happy about that. But they had really lost Rene ten years ago, right in this very cave, when she’d been deconstructed by Config Zero. The mission was done, the DNTs were in place and he knew he had to get Alpha Detachment out of the Sanctuary alive and well before anything else happened.
Winger departed the cave and boosted back down to the ledge. The rest of the Detachment was all there.
“Get your gear together. We boost to the lifter in five minutes.”
One after another, the troopers lit off their suit boost and rocketed across a kilometer of night time sky to the lifter, still hovering and circling Kipwezi in auto-orbit. Winger was the last to make the open ramp.
When everyone and everything was stowed and secure, Winger ordered a return to Nairobi and a waiting hyperjet. He wanted to find out how Bravo Detachment had fared on their end of the mission.
Corporal Maya Likasi worked the tiny joystick on her wristpad as Skeeter emerged into the hotel suite where Q2 had determined Symborg was holed up. Reconfigured as something like an ordinary housefly, Likasi was sure the tiny bot would never be noticed by the suite’s inhabitants, as long as she was careful and didn’t give them too much signature…too much EMs, acoustics or thermals. The trick was to take it easy…nice, easy turns and maneuvers. The less disturbance, the better.
“Got an image, Lieutenant,” she announced presently. “Porting to the crewnet now—“
Livio saw a grainy, staticky picture materialize on his viewer. Once it settled down, the view showed a normal looking, if slightly more ornate, even plush accommodation. Gilded portraits lined the walls. Red damask curtains hung over floor-to-ceiling windows. Baroque sculptures were strategically placed about the two-level suite. Thick beige carpeting throughout.
There he was. A faint cloud or mist thickened near an antique rococo desk along one wall. A half-formed upper torso and face was still recognizable. Below his waist, Symborg was a cloud of bots. Skeeter’s sensors saw the same thing and neatly bracketed the image with targeting crosshairs.
“That’s our buddy,” he decided. “Loose config at the moment. “
Likasi noticed something else too. “One more botscreen, Skipper. Looks like it lines the whole suite around the windows and door seams. Perimeter security…different config from the corridor. But I think—“ she opened another window on her wristpad screen and scrolled through some config designs…”—yep, we’ve seen this one before. Just like C-66…icosahedral with phosphate and sugar groups top and bottom. Nasty bond disrupters too. But we’ve got countermeasures.”
Livio was whispering into his crewnet mic while he mopped the floor. A couple back from an evening date strolled giggling from the elevator, squeezed by the ‘custodial’ crew and headed around the corner to their own room.
“Okay, troops, we’ve got to blow this botscreen fast. Symborg’s inside, but he’s in loose config…it won’t take him long to get his defenses up…or disperse and be out the door right under our noses. We go in just like we simmed…fast and violent. Smash the botscreen, blow the door, HERF the perimeter and surround the target. He’ll try to slip between us, config as something else like a chair or a table, maybe even a dust cloud or one of those sculptures. He may have defensive configs Q2 doesn’t know about. Shih, you got the capsule ready?”
Shih Kejiang patted a pouch on his web belt. “Already powered up and open, Skipper. All you have to do is run a swipe through the cloud and you’ve got him.” He carefully extracted the capsule.
“I’ve got to grab the master bot,” Livio reminded him. He took the capsule from Shih. “That’s why the rest of you have to force Symborg into a small space, so I can have a decent chance at grabbing the master. Okay, let’s get in position.”
The custodial crew threw down their mops, brooms and pails and surrounded the double doors that led into Suite 820. Livio counted down the seconds, while Likasi and Lorenco prepped their embedded ANADs for quick-launch.
Hope to hell this works. “Five…four…three…two…one…launch ANAD! Burn those doors down now!”
In seconds, the hallway was filled with a flickering fog as trillions of bots slammed into the doors and the botscreen. Shih Kejiang had once called the effect like ‘quiet lightning’ for the assault resembled a thunderstorm in miniature, with veins and streaks of light flashing and popping all around the perimeter of the entrance, all mostly in silence except for an eerie hiss as furious atom-grabbing burned the air.
A few moments later, the once-gilded doors were a smoking slag heap. Livio knew that speed was essential now. They had to get in and engage the target before Symborg could re-config or disperse.
“GO…GO…GO…GO!!”
One after another, the troopers slipped through the still-smoking doorway…Hope, Shih, Jon
as and Maya Likasi.
“Clear left!” called out Likasi as she swept her HERF carbine around that sector.
“Clear right!” called Jonas Lorenco.
That was when Livio first saw Symborg…now rapidly de-constructing right in front of them. The robotic messiah was still half-human…his upper body and face still vaguely recognizable but below the waist was a fog of bots even now beginning to scatter. He was a dark-complexioned man, faintly Mediterranean in appearance, though Livio knew that was just a config. Symborg could appear anyway he wanted to, any way that suited his audience.
Livio already had the capsule out and lunged forward. Even as he approached, he could feel the sting of Symborg’s loose bots clawing at his face and arms. He flailed and flung them away and Tony Hope came over to help, pumping a few rounds of HERF at the swelling cloud of bugs. That did the trick. Bots sloughed off Livio’s arms in sheets as he thumbed the containment capsule open and swung his arm in a great arc through the fading Symborg, hoping to somehow snatch the master in one vigorous pass.
It felt like slashing through gelatin at first, but Livio wasn’t sure he had his prize. He slashed again and again through the mess, shaking his arm with each pass as bots clung and clawed and chewed at him.
Hope and Likasi let fly volley after volley of HERF while Jonas Lorenco tried to kill off stray bots with rounds from his mag pulser. Loops of magnetic energy shattered vases and wall sconces and tore gashes in the carpet, but that didn’t concern the troopers.
“Keep him contained!” Livio shouted. With each pass, he checked the status lights on the top of the capsule. They were supposed to go green when the device detected what it thought was a master bot inside. Livio glanced down again: still friggin’ red! Where the hell is that thing? Had the master bot already fled the scene?
Again and again, he swiped and slashed through the now-fading cloud of bots, until at last, the capsule beeped, went green and ported shut.
“Gotcha, you little bastard!” Livio slapped at bots trying to munch on his face and slammed the capsule into a pouch on his web belt, then hand signaled the Detachment to withdraw. “Fall back! Fall back to the van!”
One after another, the troopers exited the smoldering ruins of the hotel suite.
“Housekeeping ain’t gonna like this!” yelled Tony Hope as he pulled back into the corridor.
“Yeah--” agreed Maya Likasi, making one last sweep at the bots with her HERF. Dishes exploded, crystal sculptures shattered and paintings crashed to the floor. “—well, they can put it on my bill!” She ducked out and they were scurrying down the escape stairs and out across the utility parking lot moments later.
The van doors auto-opened as they approached.
Livio was sweating in all his gear, but exultant, pumping fists at the hotel as he clambered aboard. Somehow, they had caught Symborg flat-footed. Code Buffalo had come in from Alpha Detachment, meaning the disentanglers were in place, up and operating and Bravo had smashed its way in to the party completely uninvited. The bastard had tried to disassemble, tried to big bang his way out of the trap but Bravo had covered every escape, covered every possibility, the DNTs had scrambled comms with Config Zero as advertised and Livio was proud as hell of his guys. They’d trained and simmed their butts off and this was the payoff. He felt for the capsule inside the pouch on his belt.
And you, my little friend, are about to take one hell of a long trip.
Shih threw the van into reverse and sped down the service drive and out onto the roundabout that circled the Piazza Augusto. He honked madly and braked and steered left and right, sometimes on two wheels as they negotiated early afternoon traffic and were soon speeding down a narrow highway toward an open field they’d commandeered, right behind the Immaculate Heart of Mary convent, where even now a lifter was already settling down. With any luck, they’d be at Balzano in less than an hour.
Livio went over the drill in his head, for about the millionth time. Quantum Corps engineers would do a quick check of the containment capsule contents, just to make sure they truly had captured the master bot, then the capsule would be secured in even-tighter containment, electron beam injectors primed for any eventuality, and packed off on a hyperjet to Table Top Mountain and the greedy little claws of Q2’s engineering geeks.
Livio settled back in the van, took a sip from a nearby bulb of something cool and delicious, and closed his eyes. A faint smile came to his lips.
What Table Top did with the bot master after that was really none of his concern. But if he’d had any say in the matter, what was left of Symborg could be ripped atom from atom for all he cared.
Johnny Winger and the Great Rift Zone Page 51
