Nanotroopers Episode 2: Nog School

by Philip Bosshardt

wrong—Heydrick assured them that such things never happened…almost never, anyway—the injectors would flood the chamber with billions of electron volts of energy, pretty much frying everything inside, bots, cadets, anything with arms and legs and a brain. He swallowed hard.

  Heydrick stepped outside the chamber and cycled the hatch shut with a solid thud. Autobolts engaged in a staccato pattern, securing them inside. And keeping what was inside from ever getting out.

  D’Nunzio’s voice had a slight quaver to it. “I heard it’s better to think of pleasant things…keep your mind occupied. One cadet even told me he sang during the whole ordeal… even taught me the song…want to hear it?”

  “No,” said Winger and M’bela in unison. Winger noticed that Moby seemed to be manipulating something in his hands. He would often handle trinkets and charms at stressful moments but such things were verboten inside the Swarm Chamber. But like a mindless machine, his hands and fingers were rubbing and clenching and kneading anyway, working on nothing but thin air.

  “Subjects…are you ready in there?”

  The three of them answered in the affirmative. “Yes, sir! Small is all!” The atomgrabbers’ rally cry was always barked out at times like this.

  For a few minutes, nothing seemed to be happening. Johnny Winger looked about the chamber, trying to locate the ports from which the bots would issue. Heydrick had given them strict instructions to stay put, stay on the bench as long as they could. But he soon spotted what he thought were the launch orifices…a line of tiny openings in one corner.

  Will they come from above or below, he wondered? Did it even matter?

  It was Deeno who gave the word. “Ouch!” she muttered, slapping at her arms and shoulders, as if mosquitoes had suddenly enveloped her. “Ouch--!” She writhed and squirmed, pinching and slapping at her face and neck.

  “This is it!” M’bela yelled.

  That’s when they saw the first puffs of a phosphorescent fog, issuing from a corner just above the hatch.

  At first, the fog seemed almost invisible. It was there…no… I imagined it. Nope, there it is. The air itself sparkled and the sparkling grew brighter, more numerous, like a trillion fireflies setting out on a journey.

  It has a certain beauty, Winger imagined himself saying. But these fireflies had teeth. Not to mention effectors, propulsors and they could replicate like the bejeezus too.

  The three atomgrabbers stirred uneasily.

  D’Nunzio muttered. “Wish to hell I had a HERF gun about now. I’d make mashed potatoes out of these buggers. Fry ‘em up good.”

  M’bela had stopped his hand motions and was staring wide-eyed at the swelling cloud of mechs. The air was growing foggier by the moment. M’bela swatted at something and you could see a track where his hand had swished through the fog. The bots were getting that thick.

  “Ouch!’ D’Nunzio slapped her cheeks again. “That hurts…get off me, you freaks!”

  Winger felt something lightly brush against his face. He was determined he wasn’t going to lose it, like they’d already seen several times that morning. More than one cadet had pressed the “Kill” button they all held in their hands, screaming to stop the test and be let out. On one occasion, once the hatch had been cycled open, the crazed cadet had burst through the technicians and fled the chamber, screaming and flailing at the top of his lungs.

  Winger, D’Nunzio and M’Bela had made a pact at the mess hall that morning over scrambled eggs and toast.

  All together, in or out. If one gave up, the others would too. But together, they would be strong.

  Winger felt fingers nudging his hand. It was Deeno. She didn’t look at him but he could see the thousand-yard stare in her eyes. Her lips were a tight line; her whole body tensed up tighter than a bow string.

  He squeezed back. You can do it, Deeno. We can both do this.

  The bots were already thickening inside the chamber and soon enough, the fog became an impenetrable soup, backlit with the fires of atomic bonds being broken, atoms being slammed together as the bots built structure and mass and replicated in exponential overdrive.

  The next few minutes were excruciating. It was like having a swarm of bees stinging every square inch of your face and neck and hands and arms. Each individual bite wasn’t so bad; but in the aggregate, the swarm assault was like running headlong into a hailstorm or a tornado of nails.

  Almost without thinking, Winger found himself hyperventilating. “The anticipation is worse than the assault; focus on small things,” Lieutenant Heydrick had told them, in the pre-test briefing that morning. “Focus on your favorite food…your favorite show or vacation…some pleasant memory…the last time you got laid—“

  Hey, Deeno almost blurted out. This is a family house of horrors, isn’t it?

  The air had thickened so much it was getting hard to breathe. Winger gave up Deeno’s hand and stopped wondering about M’bela, who was beginning to writhe and squirm next to him. Instead, he tried focusing on the day his Mom and Dad had been in that car crash, Diablo Canyon outside of Colorado Springs.

  That had been a nightmare…the word from Principal Costner at Net School…the turbo ride up the highway…blasting along well over any sane speed limit…seeing his Dad inside the bioshield…his mother already dead…signing the papers to transport her to the funeral home….

  Winger realized he was holding his breath, as if withholding oxygen from his brain would make all that go away. He’d heard that the Corps was working with law enforcement on a new technique of using ANAD in memory tracing, using the bots to penetrate a brain and sniff out highways of glutamate concentrations, re-building recent memory tracks that had been laid down. Jeez, if they can do that, he thought, maybe ANAD can erase memories as well…like the day his Mom and Dad had been in that car crash.

  If I can get through that, I can get through this.

  Winger became dimly aware that Moby M’bela was no longer sitting next to him. It was impossible to see more than a few inches…somewhere in the buzzing, flickering murk that was the swarm, M’Bela had gotten up. Winger heard a faint banging and realized it was Moby at the hatch, banging to get out. Over the high-pitched shrill keening of the swarm, he could hear Moby’s voice.

  “Let me out…I want out…open the hatch…I want OUT NOW….!”

  Winger thought to get up and pull M’bela back to his seat but he couldn’t stand…the air was thick and gelatinous and now the stinging biting pinching of the bots really hurt like hell. He swatted and rubbed at his face, then remembered something Heydrick had told them.

  “Just remember small is all, cadets. Small is all. When you’re in the middle of a swarm, get as small as you can, minimize your surface area, cover your faces and make like a baby. Fetal, tucked in tight, curled up like a ball of twine…that’s what you want to do.”

  Winger decided now was the time to get small. He rolled over on the bench and shrunk himself down to as tight a little ball as he could. He was vaguely aware of Deeno doing the same thing next to him. They bumped and Deeno went sprawling right off the bench, landing hard with an oomph onto the floor.

  Sorry, girl, Winger said. But he knew she wouldn’t hear that.

  Scrunched up into a tucked position, his head buried in his knees, Winger imagined he could feel the bots slicing into his skin…he could feel it, he could hear them shrieking, he imagined rivulets of blood oozing down onto his back. Or was that sweat? Or something else?

  He screwed his eyes as tightly shut as he could and he could feel his face and neck crawling with a gazillion little feet—actually, effectors and grabbers and enzymatic knives and pyridine probes and flagellar thrusters and all kinds of effectors grabbing at him. To keep from thinking about the stinging and the pain, he tried focusing on what he could recollect about how ANADs were constructed…there was a diamondoid base and outer casing, with picowatt thrusters at the base. You built the bot up as a series of nested cylind
ers, right up into the main casing and actuator mast, then there was spherical processor and control module on top like a pumpkin’s head, studded with sensor ports. The whole thing was draped with effectors up and down.

  Just when he was about to scream out loud and stab the kill switch he was still clutching tightly in his hand, he thought—maybe he was imagining it—that the pressure of the swarm had begun to lessen. At first he wasn’t sure, but the stinging had begun to subside, he was sure of that.

  Just as he begun to puzzle about the swarm, a bright flashing red light flooded the chamber and horns and warning klaxons blared at full volume. Now, he was sure the bots had slackened off and the air was suddenly thick with some kind of bot rain…they were dying, fried by something, tinkling onto the floor of the chamber.

  What the hell?

  As the fog cleared, he saw M’bela on his knees at the hatch. He was clawing at the hatch edges, trying to get out.

  “Pleeeease….pleeeease…let me out…!”

  “Moby—“ Winger and D’Nunzio said at the same time. They went to M’Bela. “Moby…get up…did you hit the kill switch?”

  The switch lay on the floor. It too was flashing red. Moby had already pressed the button, which meant he had had enough and the test had to be stopped.

  That was why the swarm was slacking off.

  “Moby…you didn’t…remember: all together, in or out?”

  Winger helped the Cameroonian cadet up to his feet, just as the last of the swarm dissipated. The big bang had been stopped early and the bots swept out of the chamber by vacuum. Winger felt his ears pop as the hatch swung open. Bright lights flooded into the chamber.

  Faces appeared in the door. One was Heydrick. Other technicians poured into the chamber.

  M’bela spied the outside light of the control room and tore himself from Winger’s grasp. He fled the swarm chamber screaming and flailing, pushing everyone aside. In seconds, he was gone.

  Winger and D’Nunzio looked at each other. Heydrick was grim as the techs helped the cadets outside. Both received a quick scan for residual bots, then a tall glass of iced tea. They both downed their glasses in one gulp.

  “I had to stop the test,” Heydrick told them. “Regulations…any time a kill switch is pressed, everything stops. Doesn’t matter who pressed it, although I see it was Cadet M’Bela.”

  D’Nunzio stretched, picked mech debris from her sleeves, brushed her hair out of her eyes. “Does this mean we failed? I never pressed anything.” She handed her switch to Heydrick. Winger did the same.

  “It means you’ll have to be re-tested, unless Major Kraft decides otherwise.”

  “Oh that’s just swell…I can’t wait to go through that again.”

  Nobody ever saw Oscar “Moby” M’Bela again. Scuttlebutt had it that Moby had disqualified himself from nog school completely and left Table Top. Winger and D’Nunzio were philosophical about the loss.

  They swapped thoughts over beers at The Grabber, a club for cadet officer candidates just behind the Barracks.

  “Moby was a good man,” Winger decided. “I don’t know what happened. Maybe he just freaked…it happens. You don’t know how you’ll respond to being swarmed until you go through it. He had talents…he would have made a good atomgrabber.”

  “Yeah,” said D’Nunzio, “But at least Ironpants gave us a pass. We did ninety percent of a swarm chamber anyway. So it’s over and thank God for that.”

  “One step closer to graduation. What’s next, Deeno? Something quiet and sedate, I hope.”

  D’Nunzio consulted her eyepiece, scrolling down through the courses, the curriculum to come. “Class time for a few weeks, looks like. Languages, Math, something called Molecular Engineering…more SODS time. Quantum Systems, Containment 101, DPS…I think we’ll be on the mountain for a while…no more fighting off bugs and bots. This gal needs some quiet time.”

  “Hey, look what the cat dragged in—“Winger spied Mighty Mite Barnes just entering the club. The diminutive cadet acknowledged them, grabbed her own beer and came over.

  “Too bad about Moby washing out,” Barnes took a seat and slurped at the beer, wiping suds off her lips. “He’ll miss out on all the fun day after tomorrow.”

  Winger and D’Nunzio both looked puzzled. “What’s up day after tomorrow? Curriculum agenda says class time…” Winger checked his list “—in fact, it says right here: NanoTactics and Molecular Ops.”

  Barnes grinned mischievously. “Look closer at the fine print, boys and girls. The curriculum says class and lab time. ‘Practical application of concepts will be demonstrated.’ You know what that means?”

  “What?”

  Barnes snorted. “Another day up at Hunt Valley. Wargame time again. Live-fire tactical exercise…just got the word from Lieutenant Wormy outside. We got a briefing tomorrow morning at 0600 hours…up at O/MP.” The O/MP building was for ordnance and mission preparation. “Full kit too…tin cans, weapons, live bots, the works. Wormy called it Operation Slammer. Two squads: the Devils and the Spiders. We’ll get the scenarios and rules of engagement tomorrow.”

  “Tin cans…hypersuits…must be serious.” Winger was still learning what buttons to push and what not to push on the boosted exoskeletons.

  Deeno slumped over the table with a morose sigh, staring down at the dregs of her beer. She swirled the suds with her finger, and licked them off. “Crap. And I was hoping for a quiet day in the classroom, someplace I could catch a few zzz’s.”

  Barnes commiserated. “No rest for the weary.”

  “Say…who’s that studmuffin?” D’Nunzio looked up in time to spot a tall, rangy, Asian cadet entering the club. The new cadet glided over to the bar and ordered something tall and frosty. He was erect, with an angular face and short black hair, one lock of which hung down over his right eye. His arms were built like pistons and the bulges in his T-shirt and tunic, open at the collar, spoke MUCHO GYM TIME in capital letters.

  D’Nunzio’s lips made a lascivious curl. “Well, well, well…welcome to my wet dream, young man.” She started to get up, but Barnes pulled her back down into her seat.

  “Oh, that’s Joseph Ng…just transferred in from Singapore…Eastern Command. Word is he’s tight with Ironpants…some kind of special ops guy, I heard. Black missions and so forth.”

  But D’Nunzio wouldn’t be restrained any longer. She cast off Mighty Mite’s hands and got herself standing, a little wobbly from too many adult beverages.

  “I think I’ve got just the mission in mind for this cat.” She went over to the bar.

  “Pixellated in Hunt Valley”

  North of Table Top Mountain

  September 25, 2048

  9:00 a.m.

  Johnny Winger found himself assigned to a unit called Spider Squad. He thought it sounded like something he had made up as a five-year old, playing cowboys and Indians and alien invaders with kids from other ranches and farms near the North Bar Pass. But then at least he wasn’t part of Devil Squad. That one was headed up by Dana Tallant, the opponent Opfor for Operation Slammer. Devil Squad would defend. Spider Squad would assault. The objective was Valleyville, the inevitable and ersatz village that had been attacked and defended countless times over the years at Hunt Valley. Looking like a Hollywood backlot set of fake buildings and streets, the ‘Ville was set to host yet another exercise in tactical nano-ops, this time to use newly juiced-up ANAD systems to conduct a set-piece assault on a fixed, well-defended position.

  And this time, the Solnet/Omnivision people were sending a reporter to cover “how we train our troops,” as Major Kraft had informed them the day before.

  Swell.

  Johnny Winger would command 1st Nano. An Nguyen would run the Interface Controls as IC1. Containment would be handled by Joe McReady as CEC1. Deeno D’Nunzio and Colleen Barnes would run comms and serve as quantum engineers for the squad. Their ratings were called CQE1 and CQE2.
And the newbie from Eastern Command, Joe Ng, would function as squad DPS1 along with Edward Ivanchik as DPS2. That meant Defense and Protective Systems.

  Joe was a hunk and Deeno could hardly take her eyes off him. The others found Ng a little different, a little off, but nobody could quite put their finger on it. “It’s an Asian thing,” Nguyen decided.

  They had ridden a lifter up to Hunt Valley and put down in an LZ carved out of snow and ice on the south slopes of the Valley, overlooking a switchback trail that led down to the village. After dismounting, Winger’s neck hairs started bristling right away. They had long served him as an antenna for trouble. He didn’t plan on giving Dana Tallant and the pukes of Devil Squad the luxury of an ambush. They needed eyes and ears right away.

  “Joe, get Superfly up now…I don’t trust those Devils worth a rat’s ass…they’ll drop on us out of nowhere if I know Dana’s way of thinking.”

  Ng extracted the microdrone and spun up its props with a flick of his wrist. He did a passable imitation of a fastball toss and Fly was chittering away on its four whirling props in no time.

  “Fly’s away, CC1. I’m porting all channels to the crewnet. We should be getting vid momentarily.”

  “Any indications around us?”

  Ng checked his sensor net. “Nothing on EMs. Thermals are background. Acoustics showing background. Nothing indicating nano in the immediate vicinity.”

  Winger nodded. “Okay, move out. Tactical One, squad order. Ivanchik, you’re point on this leg. Keep your eyes open. If I know Tallant, she’s got something particularly nasty up her sleeves.”

  “Especially since you waxed her ass in the qualifying test, huh, Skipper?” That was Deeno. She chuckled mischievously.

  Winger knew Tallant would have it in for Spider Squad to get back for being bested in an especially creative way during the Atomgrabber’s Qualifying Test several months before. They would have to be particularly alert on approach to the Ville.

  Ivanchik had his HERF carbine out and powered up with a full charge. He led them down a series of narrow trails that switched back and forth down the southern slope of the mountain. It was cloudy, with a threat of snow in the forecast. Gun-metal gray skies hung low and swollen, ready to dump their contents on the squad at any moment.

  They reached flat ground and straight away, Ng reported activity dead ahead.

  “Fly’s got something, sir. Showing rising thermals…may be some bond breaking up ahead…I make the distance at about fifty meters.’

  Winger found a small hillock and pulled himself up, adjusting his eyepiece for long-range. “I see a cabin. Some sheds. Piles of lumber and scrap. Broken pallets lying around.”

  “Could be the structures,” Ng agreed. “Or maybe the dirt around them. Maybe we should launch ANAD?”

  “I say we hose it down first,” Mighty