***Wings…Wings…I feel funny…this is hard to describe…I feel kind of dizzy…can’t control my effectors…executing sequence 223872…executing sequence 486621…this is so weird…something’s making me…***
Winger tried to setup his MOB canister, thinking to mount the thing on the forward edge of a small boulder. But his hands seemed to be paralyzed. He strained, grunted, but his hands, then his arms, had a mind of their own. He could lift them, but after that, his movements degenerated into spasms and uncontrollable tremors, twitches and shakes.
“What the—Dana, what are you doing? Stop messing around up there.”
D’Nunzio’s voice crackled over the crewnet. “Sorry, sir…I didn’t quite catch that—“
Winger concentrated on making his arms and hands move…with effort, he found he could manipulate the canister and set it up. “Sorry, Corporal…just talking to myself.” And to someone else in my head, he didn’t say.
Fighting through the spasms, he was able to get his MOB launcher ready.
The quake, when it came, surprised both of them. There was a shudder, then the ground seem to liquefy, sliding sideways in waves. Winger’s suit tried to compensate but he tumbled backwards and landed hard in a hollow of flying dust and rock. Even as he fell, he could see sheets of rock sloughing off the edges of the gully, an avalanche in slow motion.
If I don’t boost out of here, I’ll be buried alive.
That’s when the lights went out completely and Winger found himself hurtling down some kind of curving corridor at breakneck speed. He was tumbling end for end, getting dizzier by the second until the corridor came to an abrupt end and he found himself hitting some kind of solid ground with the rump of his suit, a hard landing right on his bottom. The suit servos whined and squealed down and the corridor collapsed in a spray of light, crushing him into unconsciousness.
His last thought before the night came was this: that was no moonquake. The Keeper had burped and belched, kicking him somewhere else in time and space. A displacement transient, the techs like to call it.
But where? And when?
The first sensation he had was the smell, an antiseptic smell. Winger opened his eyes to slits, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.
Then it came to him. It was the hospital. The hospital in Denver. The hospital where his Dad lay gravely ill.
Dana, somehow you’re doing this….
Johnny Winger arrived at the hospital shortly after sunset. The Critical Care Unit was on the fifth floor, north wing. The waiting area was half full, with small knots of people engaged in whispered conversation, two children joysticking remote action bots along the wall, and a wraparound active display showing live scenes from Vail and Aspen and Steamboat Springs. The admin nurse showed Winger down a hall to the Active Care Unit. Through the bioshield, a sort of containment zone inside of which active nanodevices were at work, Johnny came up to the bed where Jamison Winger lay enveloped in thick ganglia of wires and hoses.
A faint coruscating blue glow surrounded the bed, the inner containment field pulsating with active nano to protect the patient from further infection.
A swarthy Egyptian doctor, Sethi Hassan, attended a small display, with imaging views that looked familiar to Winger. Two nurses also attended.
Dr. Hassan sensed the presence of someone new, but did not at first look away from the screen. His right hand manipulated a tiny trackball and the view on the screen changed with each manipulation.
“Lieutenant Johnny Winger,” the nanotrooper announced himself. “This is my father—“
Dr. Hassan stole a quick peak at Winger’s black and gold Quantum Corps uniform. “I imagine you’ve seen this kind of gear before, Lieutenant.”
Winger bent over the bed, pressing lightly against the field. A keening buzz changed pitch and invisible forces pressed back against his fingers, forcing his hand away. Standard mobility barrier, he told himself, almost without thinking.
“How is he, Doc?”
Hassan sighed, flexed his fingers around the trackball and did some more manipulations, delicately driving the medbots under his command.
“Stable…for the moment. Two hours ago, we perfused his brain with a small formation of neurocytes…you’re no doubt familiar with the technique?”
Winger nodded. “Quite familiar. Is it Serengeti?”
Hassan took a moment to tap out a few commands on a nearby keyboard. Probably changing config, Winger noted from behind his back.
“Seems to be. Whatever it is, his brain’s infested with active nanodevices, viral programming from the looks of it. These neurocytes are hunting now. I detached a small element just an hour ago, got them into position to block a serotonin avalanche that was firing off inside his limbic system…nasty buggers, they were. We got the convulsions mostly stopped…although there’s been some leakage into the hippocampal regions.”
Winger studied his father’s face. His eyes were screwed shut, tension lines all converging along his forehead. He was clearly still in pain. His lips trembled and a rhythmic twitch made his fingers and feet move in fits of shaking.
Dad…Dad, I’m so sorry. This shouldn’t be happening to you…to anyone. You don’t deserve this—
“You’ll have to engage them close up, Doc. I’ve battled them myself. These neurocytes…what’s the core version?”
Hassan shrugged. “Our unit grew them from a config we got from Northgate University, about six months ago. Mainly they’re antivirals…you know: Alzheimers, meningitis, that sort of thing. Fellow from Northgate came by a few weeks ago, when we started to get a lot of cases like this. He tweaked the program.” Hassan seemed at a loss. “All I can do so far is keep them from spreading. The ‘cytes can find them, and I engage when they do. But…well, you know how S Factor is.”
Winger wanted so badly to touch his father’s face. The shield wouldn’t let him. It was the only thing keeping the enemy mechs contained.
“My guess is the neurocytes don’t have the programming to deal with Serengeti. You don’t have bond disrupters, enzymatic knives…that sort of thing.”
“I don’t have military nano here at all, Lieutenant. I’m trying to save lives.”
“That’s what it takes to deal with Serengeti, Doc. You’ve got to be nimble and ruthless. You’ve to be able to close on them quick and sling atoms like a banshee. And it doesn’t hurt to be kind of sneaky too. Serengeti’s program seems able to counter pretty much any kind of normal assault you’d make. It seems to know what to expect from garden-variety bots.”
“So how do you fight it?”
“You do the unexpected.”
Jamison Winger stirred slightly. His eyes fluttered half open. They focused on Johnny’s face for a moment, then recognition sank in. His trembling hand lifted, bumped against the inner barrier and quickly dropped, as the shield bots buzzed back.
“Dad…Dad, can you see me? Can you hear me?”
Jamison Winger smiled weakly. “Is that you….Johnny—“
“Dad—“ Winger bent as close as he dared to the barrier. He could feel the sting of the mechs tickling his chin. “Dad—I—how do you feel now?”
Mr. Winger summoned his strength and replied. “Like I’ve just been to about a hundred New Year’s Eve parties—“
“Dad…it’s S Factor…they’re inside you…inside your head.”
“I know—I hear ‘em. There’s a lot of horns going off all the time. And my arms—“
“—you’ve got neurocytes inside you, too. Dr. Hassan’s driving. He’s hunting down the mechs, rooting them out.”
“—making a hell of a racket doing it…if you ask me—“
“Dad…you’ve got to hang in there—remember when you got the patch…remember what the doctors told you?”
Mr. Winger started to convulse—his arms and hands went rigid, then spasmed fluttering off into the air, brushi
ng against the barrier. The mechs buzzed back. Beside the bed, Hassan busied himself driving the herd of neurocytes onward, tracking down the errant discharges. Seconds later, as he swarmed the ‘cytes into a herd of Serengeti mechs, the spasm gradually died off. Mr. Winger’s arms dropped, his fists unclenched. The doctor looked up; his eyes saying that was too close.
“The patch…that was different…just chemicals—“
“I know…but you had to go through hell while they went to work. Remember what Doc Givens told you? ‘Imagine climbing a mountain…that’s how the dopamine sponge works. It’s easy at first, then the hill’s steeper and you think you’ll never make it, you think you’re going to slip back, maybe even fall off. Then, all of a sudden, if you can just hold on, you’re there. You’re at the top. And that’s when the view is so great. You’ve finally made it. You just have to have faith, faith that there is a top up there somewhere…”
“You always had…a better memory…than me, son.”
Johnny gritted his teeth. If only I had ANAD here…I could smash those bastards for good…yank the lot of ‘em out of Dad and give him his mind back. He knew what his father was feeling, what it was like to have a billion needles jabbing into the back of your head, what it was like to have a puppet’s arms and legs, jerking out of control so hard you were lucky you didn’t break a bone.
The truth was he’d done a hell of a lot of growing up, after his mom had died. That had been 2047, just a few days after he’d graduated from Pueblo Netschool, two days after his Worldnet wizard Katie Gomez had awarded him a citation for excellent work. Mr. and Mrs. Winger had been so proud of their son. Then Ellen Winger had driven to Colorado Springs, just visiting friends, bragging about her boy. On the drive back late at night, her car had been sideswiped by a truck and she’d lost control. The police had estimated the ravine was about seven hundred feet deep…there hadn’t been much left of the car when it stopped rolling.
Those two years from ’47 to ’49, had been hell for Johnny, for the whole family. Mr. Winger had been devastated by the loss; in some ways, you never got over something like that…you just wore the pain like an old shirt, eventually, even deriving a bit of comfort from the hurt, like a scab that wouldn’t go away. Each of them—Mr. Winger, Johnny, his brother Bradley, his sister Joanna, dealt with grief in their own way.
For Mr. Winger, that meant long hours alone in his barn, behind the house. He’d always been a tinkerer, and the barn had long been his lab and shop. Now, without his wife, he just tinkered with a ferocity they’d never seen before, seldom coming out except for dinners and essential matters. Jamison Winger had made a lifetime of working on inventions and gizmos and gadgets that never had any future and he did so with a single-minded determination now that was at times a little scary.
For most of that period, at least until Jamison Winger had gotten the patch treatment for depression, Johnny and Brad and Joanna had pretty much run the ranch business. Johnny had put off any further thoughts of more school and settled in with grim determination to learn the business of ranching through and through.
The most difficult time of all came in midsummer of ’48, when drought and low beef prices caused the Winger kids to have to sell off more than half of the North Bar Pass Ranch to a resort developer. The developer then proceeded to put in place a faux ‘dude’ ranch-Wild West showplace called Highhorn, catering to rich city people. Johnny had hated himself for agreeing to that decision ever since. Just seeing the stylized Highhorn signs and billboards and all the para-sailors wafting overhead on mountain thermals near the ranch perimeter made him sick.
It wasn’t too long after Jamison Winger had gotten the patch treatment that Johnny had seen on Worldnet some stories about a new organization called United Special Operations Force. They were offering scholarships, for a six-year hitch.
“Dad—“ he called through the flickering bioshield. “I’ve got to go on another mission…we’re fighting Serengeti, a big cartel too. I wish I could stay—we’ve got equipment that would help…but—“
Jamison Winger smiled up gamely at his son. “A lot of people…a lot…are depending on you, son.”
“You depend on me, too, sir.”
Mr. Winger nodded. “I always have…since your mother died. Come closer—did I ever tell you—“
Johnny bent down as close as the shield bots would let him.
“—tell you…” he stopped, shuddered for a moment, then squeezed his lips into a tight line and fought back against the wave of pain—“did I ever…tell you I know…what you did…what you did with old Bailey--?”
Bailey? He hadn’t thought of the old flyer for several years. Bailey had been his favorite pet, a constant companion out on the ranch, helping him herd the cattle to and from their grazing fields.
“Dad…where is old Bailey…what’s he doing?”
Mr. Winger shook his head, or was it a shudder? It was hard to tell. “Bailey’s crapped out…just sitting in the corner of the barn. Needs a new motor…fandrive gave out, son. When I opened…him up, I saw what you’d done—the new sensors and stuff…really souped him up, you did—“
Johnny reddened. Bailey the flyer bot—he’d always called him Bailey the Flying Dude—had been one of his most loyal companions as a child. Unknown to his parents, Johnny had often opened up his second-floor window at home and by remote-control, teleoperated Bailey right into his bedroom. The flyer had spent many a night in that room, either hovering gently in the corner, its red eye winking on and off, or sitting on the luggage trunk at the end of his bed, whirring softly in sleep mode.
Johnny had always liked to tinker, especially with Bailey. There was one trait he’d definitely gotten from his Dad. He’d thought for years his father had never known. While he was growing up at the ranch, Johnny had spent countless hours modifying Bailey’s processor, giving him greater memory, teaching the bot to respond only to his voice, adding sensors, and souping up the propulsor motors. Bailey was at the same time Johnny’s hot rod and pet. He’d always loved the bot like the little brother he never had.
“—I loved old Bailey, Dad…we were close, like brothers.”
“I know…” Something pained Jamison Winger. His lips twitched, words ready to spill out, but held back somehow. Another spasm? He looked over at Dr. Hassan. “—I know, son. Come…” his hands beckoned Johnny closer. But the bioshield buzzed, keeping them apart. “—I wasn’t very good, son…I’m sorry…I wasn’t a very good father—“
“What are you saying? You taught me a lot…you were—“
“—always in the shop…always in the barn, wasn’t I?” His father tried to force a brave smile, but gave up. “Kind of like Bailey…I just… sort of crapped out. Gave up the ghost.”
“Don’t say that, Dad—“ he looked at Hassan again. Was it the ‘cytes? Was it Serengeti, squeezing some circuit, making him say things? Maybe the patch was wearing off. Maybe it was Dana up in his own head, stoking glutamate, activating long-buried memories… “Don’t be silly…you taught me how to work on things. That’s how I got Bailey all fancied up. He could fly circles around any other bot out there.”
Mr. Winger closed his eyes, sighed, his forehead wrinkles finally relaxing. “I love you, son. I’m…very proud…very proud of you.”
Dr. Hassan had been driving a flock of neurocytes through Jamison Winger’s limbic system the whole time. He didn’t like what he was seeing.
“I’m sorry…I think it’s best if you leave now, Lieutenant. I’m going to have to replicate more, expand my zone of operation a bit. The infestation’s spreading—see for yourself. I’m afraid the buggers are into the limbic striatum…volition and intentionality circuits. He may not—“ Hassan stopped, waggled his hand, not quite willing to go on.
Johnny Winger swallowed hard, watched his father lying inside the bubble, seemingly at peace. But a war was raging inside his skull and the out
come was in doubt. Winger wiped away a tear. Instinctively, he touched the shield, until the bots pressed back. He knew he couldn’t touch his father. That made it worse.
“I’ve got to go, Dad. Got a mission. Fight ‘em…fight the buggers hard. I’ll be fighting ‘em too. At least, we can be together that way.” He turned to leave. “I want to be kept up to date on his progress, Doc—“
Hassan gave him the net address. “I’ll post anything new. Any changes, I promise you’ll know.”
That was good enough. Johnny Winger took a last, tearful look at Jamison Winger. His arms were shriveled like old tree branches. Every few seconds, as the S Factor bots steadily took over, he shuddered and a low moan escaped his lips.
Johnny Winger couldn’t watch any longer. He screwed his eyes tightly shut to choke off more tears and left the room.
One way or another, I’ll lick this bastard menace, if it’s the last thing I do.
Johnny Winger shook his head. This can’t be right. I’m back in the hospital…it’s September 2048. It’s happening all over again.
Winger had lived with it for months. Always, he had wanted to do the medbot insert himself. Get in there and fight Serengeti himself. The doctors had advised against it. Could kill the patient… critical functions could be affected…tissue might be damaged….
Winger was fully aware that none of this was real. Some of the details were wrong…how his Mom had died…the accident reports from the freeway…the ravine, the position of the car, the autopsy results.
Dana, stop this. Stop activating memories…you’ve gotten it all wrong…
Something had changed the memory. This was a sim, that’s what it had to be. Somehow Dana or maybe the Keeper had thrown him back into his own past, or concocted a reasonable facsimile from his own memory, but there were subtle alterations. Maybe some kind of glutamate tracing was going on, affecting his recall, generating memories of things that had never happened.
Or maybe his memory was just faulty. Yet when he touched his Dad, when the med barrier was dropped and he could feel the flushed hot skin of his forehead, the pulsing of his neck veins, he felt real. What was this? A dream? A sim? A different reality, a different time and space, a universe sliced in a different direction?
Winger tried to ignore his own feelings and put some analysis to the situation. I can reason my way out of this, he told himself.
Rational analysis said there were two decisions to be made here. What to do about his Dad? And how to get the hell out of this nightmare and back to his Detachment teammates?
Maybe they’re related. Maybe making one decision forces the other. Quantum systems did entangle, after all.
Eventually, it came to him that the only way he could move forward or backward in this sim (for that was how he had come to think of it) was to confront the decision he had never made in the past, to do the medbot insert, battle Serengeti inside his Dad and try to save him. He’d tried to drown the guilt over that for months, guilt over the fact that he didn’t or couldn’t try the insert and he’d carried it with him, deeply buried to be sure, for nearby two years.
Johnny Winger told himself: the Keeper’s running Dana now, that has to be it…he or she wants me to engage Serengeti. Okay, pal, I’ll play your little game.
He wasn’t sure he understood what was going on but it seemed like Dana was somehow sensitive to emotional conflicts inside him. She had the ability to sniff out these burned-in memories and draw them out—maybe some kind of memory tracing, like glutamate sniffing—like a giant therapist. Now, confronted with the one of his most painful memories, Johnny Winger decided he had to resolve it, here and now, even if it was only a sim.
He snapped at Dr. Hassan. “Drop the barrier.”
Dr. Hassan spluttered in confusion. “Lieutenant Winger, I don’t think—“
“Drop the barrier. I’m doing an insert here.”
“But you’re not—“
Winger yanked the doctor by the arm and forcibly seated him at the control console. “Run the panel. Do what I say.” To the attending nurses, Winger said, “And get him prepped for an insert. I’m going inside.”
"Okay, Lieutenant." The lead nurse, whose nameplate read Nalinka, patted down the incision she had just made in the side of Jamison Winger’s skull. "Subject's prepped and ready."
Reluctantly, Hassan handed Winger the injector tube, attached by hose to the containment chamber.
The insertion went smoothly enough. A slug of plasma forced the replicant master into Jamison Winger’s capillary network at high pressure. Johnny Winger got an acoustic pulse seconds later and selected Fly-by-Stick to navigate the system. A few minutes' run on its propulsors brought the Autonomous Nanoscale Assembler/Disassembler to a dense fibrous mat of capillary tissues. An image soon appeared on the IC panel.
"Ready for transit," Hassan told him. "Cytometric probing now. You can force these cell membranes open any time."
Winger used ANAD's acoustic coupler to sound the tissue dam ahead, probing for weak spots. "There, right to starboard of those reticular lumps…that's a lipid duct, I'd bet a hundred bucks. I’ll try there."
He steered ANAD into the vascular cleft of the membrane. He twisted his right hand controller, pulsing a carbene grabber to twist the cleft molecules just so, then released the membrane lipids and slingshot himself forward. Seconds later, ANAD was floating in a plasma bath, dark, viny shapes barely visible off in the distance. The plasma was a heavy viscous fluid. Winger tweaked up the propulsor to a higher power setting and took a navigation hack off the vascular grid.
"Ventral tegmentum, Doctor. Just past the mesoencephalic nucleus. Looks like we're in."
Winger navigated ANAD through the interstices of his father’s brain for the better part of an hour. He had programmed the assembler to send an alarm when it encountered any kind of unnatural activity…especially assembler maneuvering or replication. If there were any remnants of Serengeti left in his brain, Johnny Winger wanted to be ready.
Hassan was practically holding his breath, watching the acoustic pulses come back. “Lieutenant, your father’s not strong enough for this. Using an insert at this point is a really bad—“
“I’ll take responsibility for what happens,” Winger told him. “Besides, you’re not real anyway. I’m just doing what I should have done a year ago.”
"Hopefully, the last treatment with Serengeti finished them off," Hassan muttered to himself.
At 1824 hours, ANAD sent back an alarm.
The imager screen was at first murky, crowded with the spikes and cubes of dissolved molecules. Lumpy, multi-lobed sodium molecules darted across their view like shadowy ping-pong balls. Winger studied readouts from ANAD's sounder…something was there, hidden in the data traces on the scope. He fiddled with the gain on the imager, tweaking it, subtracting foreground clutter.
Something approximately sixty nanometers in one dimension, narrow with a globe structure at one end…and scores of probes, effectors, cilia, whatever. Incredible mobility…triple propulsors beat an idling rhythm as ANAD closed in….
“Doc, I think we found what we’re looking for.”
On first inspection, the alien bot showed no hint of unusual capabilities, at least not in its outer structure and effectors. Johnny Winger tried to remember the details of all the devices he had seen in recent months; from memory, they were outwardly simple things…a few grabbers and maybe an enzymatic knife or two. Nothing like bond disrupters or anything like that.
This ought to be a piece of cake, he told himself. But, even as he drove the master ANAD bot closer, warning bells were going off in the back of his mind.
This is your father you’re dealing with here. You’re inside the brain of your own Dad, trying to fight off this Serengeti infestation. No room for error or miscalculation here.
Or was he?
Dana, I don’t know what you’re doing up there bu
t this is no longer funny….
Johnny Winger could only be sure of one thing. Whether this was a simulation, or a dream or a nightmare, he had one choice: go forward. Finish what he should have done six months ago. He’d been living with that for far too long.
He pulsed around with ANAD’s sounder. Tissue structures came back, but nothing else. Only a single bot lay ahead. That in itself was odd. Normally, Serengeti would have replicated like crazy. There should be zillions of bots churning and pumping along the neural pathways of his Dad’s brain. But there was only one.
Okay, so it’s mano y mano…if that’s what you want. Winger stoked ANAD’s propulsors and jetted forward, closing the remaining distance rapidly. The Serengeti bot seemed oblivious to his approach. It seemed to be engaged in re-building a small network of dendrites and making some kind of new junction. Re-wiring Jamison Winger’s brain. We’ll see about that.
He primed ANAD’s bond disrupters and when he was at a good range, let fly a few blasts. The crack of the disrupters seemed to ignite something…all of a sudden, Winger felt himself spinning, thrashing, he was back in the endless tunnel and the lights went out completely and he found himself hurtling down some kind of curving corridor at breakneck speed. He was tumbling end for end, getting dizzier by the second until the corridor came to an abrupt end and he found himself hitting some kind of solid ground with the rump of his suit, a hard landing right on his bottom. The suit servos whined and squealed down and the corridor collapsed in a spray of light, crushing him into unconsciousness.
When he came to, he saw a face…it was D’Nunzio peering down at him. Her mouth was moving, yes, something was coming through his earpiece….
“—all right, sir? You took quite a spill there.”
Groggy and dazed, Winger let hands pull him up to a sitting position. His suit servos whirred, helping him up. “I don’t…what happened? Where am I?”
“Right where I left you, sir,” D’Nunzio checked over Winger’s suit carefully…seals good, no flags on the display, everything in the green.
“It was some kind of quake,” D’Nunzio told him. “We were maneuvering to open fire on the Keeper, but then—“ you could almost see the shrug of D’Nunzio’s shoulders inside her suit. “—all hell broke loose. The ground moved, there were rock slides, we got separated.” She looked up. “Seems like the Keeper’s expanded a little…it’s gotten closer. We’d better back off and go at this again.”
Winger punched a button on his wristpad and his leg servos hoisted him immediately to a standing position. He was still a little dizzy, but the servos steadied him.
“That was no quake. It was a quantum displacement event. I went somewhere…back in time and space…back to a place I hadn’t been in months. The same thing must have happened to you.”
D’Nunzio had a funny look on her face. “I don’t think so, Lieutenant. After I picked myself up from that quake, I couldn’t find you. I searched for a few minutes, and there you were…right outside this cave.”
Cave?
Winger hadn’t noticed the cave before, but she was right. The ground had shifted in the quake. The small gully into which he had fallen now opened onto the entrance to a small cave, a lava tube barely two meters across, which bore more than a passing resemblance to something else Winger had once encountered…the cave at Mount Kipwezi. Config Zero’s home. That had to be coincidence. Somehow, Winger had been displaced in time and space to the Denver hospital where his Dad lay ill from Serengeti, then displaced again back to his original time and space. But that made no sense. Maybe this was some kind of defense mechanism the Keeper used….like a buffalo’s horns or a bee’s stinger. But why displace back to the original time and space…or was Deeno right: had he never really left in the first place?
Dana, stop messing with my head….
Winger shook his head. This kind of thinking always gave him a headache. The Keeper could do that.
“Lieutenant—“ D’Nunzio hopped up onto a small outcrop a few meters away. “Sensors show activity inside there…nanobotic activity. High thermals, EMs, acoustics. Maybe some of the Keeper’s inside.”
The appearance of the Keeper seemed unchanged, although it seemed to have expanded in breadth. A veil of dust from all the geysers partially obscured the sparkling, twinkling fog that any swarm of bots generated. From their distance, the thing resembled a fat tornado in slow motion, churning and burning across the tortured terrain of the lunar surface.
“Maybe the master bot,” Winger surmised. He checked D’Nunzio’s readings with his own sensors. “The core of the thing. Tactically, we’d be smart to recon this cave and make sure we’re not leaving something that could come at us from behind.”
“Is that wise, Lieutenant?” asked D’Nunzio. “That thing out there looks like the main show. Maybe there’s a small branch inside the cave, but we can seal the cave if we have to. I vote we MOBnet the cave opening and have a go at the main body out there.”
Winger decided that they would enter the cave first, check out the source of the atom smashing their sensors were showing, then come back to the surface and continued their advance on the main body of the Keeper. “I don’t want any elements of this thing sneaking up on us from behind.”
D’Nunzio followed Winger into the cave. The ground dropped steeply just after they squeezed through and both troopers had to use their servos to stay upright and keep their balance.
Winger turned on his helmet lamp and picked his way deeper into the cave, D’Nunzio so close behind that they occasionally bumped into each other.
“Still got those readings, Deeno?” Winger asked.
“Yes, sir,” said the DPS tech. “Dead ahead…forty plus meters and below our level, maybe about twenty meters below us.”
Winger took a deep breath and cautiously lowered himself along icy walls veined with dark red and brown streaks. “Corporal, I’m sure this is why I joined the Corps. I just needed more adventure in my life.”
D’Nunzio grunted as his foot momentarily lost traction. He slid a few meters, but ran right into Winger, who helped her stay upright. “I think you’re about to get your wish, Lieutenant.”
Winger and D’Nunzio descended lower into the cave, following the readings on the DPS’s sensors. Deeper into the cave, they followed a drifting mist that wavered in and out of view. Bots, Winger realized. His fingers twitched on the carbine trigger, but he did nothing. They descended several levels, crossed a rock bridge across a deep chasm and maneuvered through more tunnels. Lighting was created by the mist, a pulsing, flickering light that cast deep shadows on the gnarled veins of rock lining the cave. The floor was slick, patches of ice everywhere. Unexposed to the vacuum, it had survived for who knew how many eons. Soon enough, they came to a narrow opening, barely waist high. More light flickered from inside.
The mist of bots which had floated with them swirled like dust in a storm and gathered around the opening like a frame, coruscating and flashing as if lit from within.
Cautiously, the two of them edged forward.
It was the light they first noticed. D’Nunzio sucked in a breath as they both halted, at the same time.
“Lieutenant, my readings are going off-scale…EMs, thermals, all of it. Whatever it is, it’s big—maybe we should stop here?”
Winger gave that some thought. “That light is where we need to go. Come on—“
The light grew stronger, blinding, so powerful it hurt, and both troopers tuned their visor filters to maximum setting to shut it out. Still, the light was overpowering.
They came at last to a small branch and a shoulder-high opening.
“Which way, Deeno?”
“To the right, sir. Readings are all off-scale now…but I’d say to the right.”
So they went right. Hunched over, picking their way carefully down a slight decline, sliding on ice patches and loose rock.
The center of the light was a sw
arm of incredible density. Winger called a halt. Ahead, blocking their way was a blinding orb of light, liked a small supernova, pulsating, throbbing with brilliance so strong they could almost taste it. Fierce light and throbbing motion, it was like looking into the heart of a star.
On top of everything else, Winger had developed a terrific headache.
D’Nunzio had screwed her eyes almost shut. Her visor was on auto, full filter. Still, it hurt. ‘What the hell is it?”
Winger squinted. “Unless I’m mistaken, Corporal, we’re looking at the core of the Keeper. The very heart. My sensors are gone, useless.”
“Mine, too, sir…is it my imagination or is that thing coming our way?”
The orb…sphere…ball…whatever you wanted to call it, did seem to be expanding. Every corner and seam of the rock walls glowed with incandescence, like the entire cave was on fire.
“I think you’re right. Enable weapons…we may have to—“
But he never finished the thought. For in that moment, the orb seemed to explode at them.
“Fire!” Winger yelled.
Both troopers let fly a volley of rf from their HERF carbines. The radio waves shattered sprays of rock and ice off the cave walls and reverberated around the cave in a crescendo of waves, nearly knocking them off their feet.
There was no discernible effect on the orb, which shone like the Sun at the back of the cave.
“Again!” Winger yelled. “Light ‘em up!” He triggered pulse after pulse of HERF fire, hosing down the orb from top to bottom, methodically working his weapon across the face of the thing. Each blast loosened gouts of rock and ice from the walls, which rained down on them, then cascaded in sheets to the floor. Stifling hot dust billowed everywhere.
“It’s not working!” D’Nunzio cried. “I’m going to max!” She cycled the burst selector to FULL and leveled more fire into the very heart of the beast. Again, they fired pulse after pulse after pulse and the orb didn’t dim or change in any way they could see. Instead, it swelled outward like a brilliant balloon, creeping inexorably forward, filling every cubic centimeter of the cavern, until Winger was afraid the ceiling would collapse.
“Back up! Fall back! We’d better give this bastard some room!”
D’Nunzio didn’t have to be told twice. The Defense and Protective Systems tech scrambled backward, stumbling, kicking, firing blindly at the oncoming thing.
“It’s not working,” Winger fell back too, nearly right on top of D’Nunzio. “The bots are replicating as fast as we burn ‘em…Jeez, I’ve never seen anything like that before. Let’s get back to the main tunnel!”
The two of them stumbled and crawled and staggered back up to the branch opening, half blinded, as much by feel as anything. The orb continued to throb and pulse, overwhelming the cave with blinding light.
Winger knew they needed help, ideas, something, anything. ANAD may have an idea. His embed usually could be counted on for logical suggestions. He tapped a button on his wristpad and a small port swung open on his hypersuit shoulder. While he and D’Nunzio steadied themselves, hiding behind at outcrop of rock, and took stock of the situation, a small sparkling mist issued from the port on Winger’s shoulder. In moments, the mist had formed the faint outlines of a face—Doc Frost’s face—in the blinding glare of the light, the face was hard to see, but Winger knew it was there. It was Config 33, one of ANAD’s favorite formations.
His headache suddenly got worse. He figured it was the Dana bots trying to fight back at ANAD. A weird kind of rivalry, two swarms, one inside his head, one in a shoulder capsule, fighting like two-year olds.
Not now, Dana. Not now. He gritted his teeth.
“ANAD, we need help…that thing replaces bots as fast as we fry ‘em. The HERF guns won’t go any higher…any ideas?”
Nanotroopers Episode 13: Small is All! Page 13
