Nanotroopers Episode 8: Doc Frost

by Philip Bosshardt

  Chapter 3

  “Rescue”

  Kurabantu Island, the Marquesas

  South Pacific

  November 26, 2068

  Early morning…

  From the air, Kurabantu Island looked like a mouth. Or a big claw, thought Dana Tallant, as Charioteer orbited the coral atoll at three thousand meters. And about to bite our asses, if we’re not careful, she added. She hoisted herself up, letting the suit servos propel her upright as she shuffled through the compartment to the lifter bay. A gravelly voice sounded over the loudspeaker.

  “ANAD Detachment lay aft to the lifter bay on the double. Insert point coming up—launch in five minutes—“

  Back at Table Top, all hell had broken loose. The Red Hammer defector, Nigel Skinner, had been picked up in the waters off Kurabantu a week before, delirious, dehydrated, mumbling something incoherent about Quantum Corps scientists being kidnapped and brought to the island. Doc Frost and Mary Duncan had been assisting in the regeneration of ANAD at Table Top. After Q2’s interrogation and memory tracing of Skinner, Major Lofton knew that Doc Frost wasn’t really Doc Frost, something that had been happening a lot lately.

  The angel, and its assistant, had been quickly contained and examined, before the things could do any lasting damage.

  But there was still a question about the newly regenerated ANAD. Could it be trusted?

  And the interrogation produced yet more intel. Frost and Duncan were still alive, now thought to be imprisoned on a small volcanic spit of land in the south Pacific, ostensibly working for Red Hammer now, likely under duress.

  A mission was formed to rescue the two scientists. And Lieutenant Dana Tallant was put in charge of the detachment, much to Johnny Winger’s chagrin. Ironpants Kraft had something else in mind for Winger.

  Lieutenant Dana Tallant was a by-the-book commander, unlike Johnny Winger, who tended, or so she thought, to fly past the rules by the seat of his pants a bit too often. Doctrine said that when you made a forced entry into Indian country, you did it with full packs, hypersuits, weapons enabled and SuperFly watching your six…just to be sure. And that was precisely what Dana Tallant intended to do.

  She swore under her breath however, every time they had to do more than walk two meters in the blasted hypersuits. It was like living inside a garbage can, with all the maneuverability of a bulldozer, though the suits were lifesavers in the event the unit got swarmed.

  “Come on…come on, ya’ll move like old ladies —“ Tallant griped as Bravo Detachment boarded the lifter for the descent to the island.

  Sergeant Jeffery Collin was her CC2, the backup command rating, and a helluva gorgeous muscle monkey in the gym. Collin’s suit motors whirred and vibrated as he throttled the leg actuators forward as far as they would go.

  “I’m tryin’, Lieutenant…I’m tryin’, but this tin can won’t move any faster.”

  “Yeah, Skipper,” said Sergeant Samoya, their senior DPS tech. “—can’t we ‘chute these things down and go in like civilized people?”

  Tallant nixed that. “You can when the enemy starts acting civilized. Okay, troops…saddle up and climb aboard. This train’s about to leave the station.”

  The lifter was an articulating jet-rotor ship with enough legs to look like a flying spider. The Detachment strapped in and moments later, the launch table spun and slung the lifter out the back of Charioteer, which zoomed off to establish itself in a safe orbit five thousand meters over the island.

  The lifter scuttled through the air on its own jets, and arced like a hungry spider sensing food through choppy early morning thunderclouds, breaking out into blinding shafts of dawn sunlight over the lagoon that formed the center of the island’s claw.

  “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” someone muttered behind Tallant. The commander of Bravo Detachment snorted. You may be more right than you think, she thought.

  The lifter settled down on a small beach overlooking the lagoon. Tallant got on the crewnet and barked out orders.

  “Bravo Detachment, fall out! This is a Level One insertion--opposed entry…DPS, get SuperFly up and sniffing around. Is ANAD enabled for launch?”

  Sergeant Joey Mwate was CEC1 for the unit. He was a lanky Nigerian engineer, a newcomer to the Corps and fresh out of nog school. Since nobody in Bravo had the implant like Johnny Winger, the ANAD master was transported in a mobile containment cell, a small cylindrical TinyTown. Mwate wore the unit on a backpack frame.

  “ANAD reports ready in all respects, Lieutenant.”

  “Very well…” Tallant stepped out of the rear hatch of the lifter and plunked her hypersuit boots into the wet sand. “Keep your eyes and ears open, folks. Who knows what we might run into down here.” Tactical doctrine called for proper protection any time an ANAD detachment went into unfriendly terrain.

  The Detachment debarked and organized itself into formation. Tallant hand-signaled for the rest of their gear to be off-loaded. The lifter squatted down to accommodate the process. It looked for all the world like a fat mosquito, its articulating landing skids retracted to ground level for unloading.

  Kurabantu Island lagoon shone turquoise and blue in the early morning sunlight, surrounded on three sides by dense jungle vine and wiry stands of pandanus and screw pine. Through the branches to the northwest, the misty peak of the central volcano—Tuontavik, it was called—poked above a ring of clouds. Most of the island was rocky valleys filled with choking undergrowth. Limestone cliffs ringed the northern flanks of the island. It was from those cliffs, so the debriefing said, that the Red Hammer agent Skinner had jumped. And it was inside those cliffs, so Q2 believed, that Doc Frost and Mary Duncan were likely being held captive.

  Tallant studied the feed on her helmet eyepiece. Nothing from Superfly…yet. The sooner they got ANAD up and launched, the better.

  “What about the atmosphere?” Tallant asked. “Any disturbances…perturbations nearby?”

  Corporal Eric Richter was SDC1, in charge of stealth and defensive countermeasures. He was a lean, hard-edged, red-haired kid, and he ran a small fleet of chem sniffers that had just gone airborne. “Minor fluctuations, Lieutenant, that’s all for the moment. Oxygen levels down ten percent, actually dropping even as I speak. Nitrogen’s good, but CO2 is up over a thousand parts per million…that’s about three or four times normal. We need to stay in our suits.”

  “Hell we’re in the middle of a jungle, Red,” said Tech Sergeant Claudia Rialto, their CQE1. “We ought to be drowning in carbon dioxide with all these plants and trees and vines.”

  “I already adjusted for that…Sniffo says this is different.”

  Tallant was supervising equipment setup and corralling everybody into formation. “Any bearing on a source? Q2 says Frost had a beeper implanted a year ago.”

  “Negative, Captain….pretty amorphous right now—it’s everywhere. And no beeper signal anywhere.”

  “Fly’s picking up something, Captain,” It was Sergeant Samoya, their DPS1. “Just now…heat source…a local thermal bloom and it’s not the weather. Bearing two six oh degrees, almost due west. Through that patch of trees right there.” He pointed to an opening across the water.

  “Airborne, DPS? Or ground source?”

  “Hard to tell, Lieutenant…’Fly’s heading over there now. My read is the thing’s probably airborne.”

  Tallant felt the tingle of a cold sweat inside her hypersuit. “Okay, everybody button up. Joey…launch ANAD. Full rep…full effectors. Let’s get some teeth into the air.”

  Even as Joey Mwate complied, a loud screech sounded across the lagoon. Tallant looked up in time to see a flight of collugoes gliding across the beach above them, webbed and menacing, gliding from tree to tree. There were soon dozens of them soaring overhead, their translucent bat wings nearly invisible in the sun.

  She shuddered at the sight.

  “Flying lemurs,” Mwate explained, as he readied ANAD for
launch. “We have something like them in Nigeria back home. They can glide for hundreds of meters, just like that.”

  “Samoya, was that your heat source?”

  The DPS tech wasn’t sure. “I don’t think so, Lieutenant…I’m still getting something

  from ‘Fly…and it’s getting bigger.”

  There was an audible whoosh as the ANAD master exited the containment cell and into the humid morning air. Moments later, an expanding ball of light speckled and blossomed into view, as ANAD tore atoms from the air and replicated itself rapidly. Soon, a shimmering cloud formed over the lagoon, as the swarm ballooned outward, forming a defense barrier around the detachment.

  At that same moment, the first fat drops of a tropical downpour splatted into the lagoon.

  “Here it comes!” said Samoya. He was glad, for once, to be encased in the laminated armor of the hypersuit, even though footing rapidly became treacherous in the wet sand.

  “Head for the trees!” said Tallant. “That’ll give us some cover. Samoya, best bearing to the heat source—“

  “Now two five oh degrees, Captain…and its expanding too. No longer a point source. Whatever it is, it’s getting bigger…and coming this way.”

  A reception committee, Tallant thought, as she slogged forward, revving up her leg servos to gain better traction in the beach sand. The tree line was sixty meters away, said her ranging beam. She remembered how Johnny Winger and ANAD had triggered off a thunderstorm at the Hunt Valley range, and how it had shredded her own defense swarm in the wargame.

  As the detachment headed for cover in the forest, Tallant knew she didn’t want that to happen again. “Jeff, let’s get ANAD tightened up ‘til we get deeper in the forest. I don’t like the looks of this rain.”

  “Hunt Valley all over again, huh, Lieutenant? I had the same thought.”

  The senior interface controller was Sergeant Chen Liu, a slightly built, gnomish Chinese national. As IC1, it was his job to run the ANAD formation and drive the assembler through its paces, even in combat.

  “Chen, bring ANAD down to ground level…contract the swarm and have it form up in a minimum radius. I don’t want any trouble from this rain.”

  Liu complied, sending the commands through his acoustic link with the master. “ANAD re-deploying, Lieutenant….minimum swarm.” Training and doctrine had given them plenty of practice at this maneuver, where the swarm compacted itself to a shimmering ball of light barely a meter across.

  They made the tree line and plunged into the dense cover of the jungle. It was dark and thick with brush, long vines of strangler fig and tapang roots making their footing slow and treacherous. The hypersuits both helped and hurt in the jungle. The boosted exo-skeletons had the raw power to smash through steel buildings, if needed. But they were cumbersome and slow, though the protection was surely welcome in the mosquito-infested, drenching humidity and rain of Kurabantu’s marshy woodlands.

  The unit slogged and hacked forward for a few minutes, grunting and sweating even in their ceramic cocoons. The pulsating, flickering sphere of the ANAD swarm followed along, bending and flowing around trees and stumps like an unearthly fog.

  It was Samoya who sounded the alarm first.

  “Lieutenant…dead ahead…’Fly’s right on it…expanding thermal….it’s a swarm all right and a big one…I got thermals all over the place, every bearing, expanding fast, rolling this way—“

  Tallant was almost relieved to engage the enemy…waiting and probing and not knowing was the worst part of these missions. Now they would find out fast if ANAD was up to snuff.

  “Okay, troops, this is it…spread out and make sure you’re buttoned up! Chen, kick start ANAD and let’s get in the game!”

  “I’m on it, Captain,” said Liu. He fingered a few keys on his wristpad, sending new commands to the swarm. In seconds, the ANAD formation erupted like a miniature nova, swelling through the trees and the canopy of limbs and leaves like a slow-motion explosion. “Porting acoustic link to your viewer, Lieutenant—“

  “Acknowledged—“ Tallant came back. She wondered briefly if Johnny Winger was right. Maybe implants and coupling was the way to go…you could get ANAD launched and ready for action a lot faster. But for now, she’d have to do it the old fashioned way.

  The collision, when it came, was a noiseless seam of light speckles, like a streamer of light cutting through the trees. Rain pounded down on top of the jungle canopy, but little of the shower made it to the ground. In the twilight gloom of the forest, Tallant and her Detachment saw only the lights, flickers and flashes and iridescent sparkles as the two armies collided overhead.

  The acoustic view wasn’t much better but Tallant wanted to get a glimpse of the enemy ‘bots. Maybe it was a config she’d recognize…they’d done assembler recognition drills all the way from Table Top.

  She deployed the Detachment in tighter to give ANAD a smaller perimeter to defend. On her eyepiece imager, the first grainy view of the enemy mechs materialized. It was like squinting through a sleet storm, as weird shapes and polygons and snaking chains of molecules whipped by. She changed the perspective. “Drive in closer,” she ordered Chen Liu, who was manipulating the assembler master from a small joystick on his wristpad. “I want to get a closer look—“

  As crackles of light exploded all around them among the trees, Liu piloted ANAD in for a better look. Sure enough, an enemy mech hove into view, bristling with peptide chains and carbene grabbers, a small icosahedral sphere festooned with tools. Its propulsors churned in a blur as it maneuvered to grapple with ANAD.

  “I’m sounding now, Lieutenant,” said Liu. He sent acoustic pulses at the mech, reading off distance and config, letting ANAD’s computer calculate likely weak points. “Bond energy maps not showing much…maybe up top, where those phosphates are jiggling…I might be able to punch through there.”

  Even as he spoke, ANAD was quickly surrounded by more of the mechs, gathering for the kill.

  “Bugger replicates like hell,” said Claudia Rialto. The CQE1 was hunkered down beside a huge tree root, watching the show on her own eyepiece, while she fiddled with the commo link to Charioteer still orbiting overhead. “Snip…snap and shazzam! It’s like the bastard’s optimized to replicate.”

  And it was true. Even as they watched, the tiny ANAD force was enveloped by a swarm of mechs, all gyrating and throbbing, circling like hungry sharks nosing in for the kill.

  “Chen—“

  “I see ‘em, Lieutenant…” Liu toggled his own rep command and ANAD blurred, as it grabbed atoms and churned up a froth, dividing and multiplying structure as fast as it could. “I’ve simplified config—dropped off a few chains, so ANAD can keep up.”

  “Keep at it, Chen,” Tallant told him. “Ten to one this ain’t the main show. Probably just guard ‘bots, keeping nosy visitors like us away.” She checked their position, scanning around with her helmet sensors.

  The Detachment was deep in a tangled mass of jungle vine, more or less sheltered from the torrential downpour that made visibility back across the lagoon impossible. Even the lifter was nearly invisible. Hope she’s buttoned up, Tallant muttered to herself. That’s our ticket home from this hellhole. Chen Liu was on point, driving the ANAD master into the enemy swarm, which crackled and sizzled in the air over their heads like frying bacon. The rest of the Detachment was defiladed among the trees and roots of the jungle floor, wherever shelter could be found: Jeff Collin was right on her tail, following Chen’s config changes closely, ready to butt in if he stumbled, or got swarmed. So far, ANAD’s barrier over the detachment had held, but you couldn’t be too careful. One breach and they’d be in a world of hurt fast.

  “I’m going for the phosphate link on top,” Chen announced. “Nothing else to hit. I need a burst of HERF, Lieutenant. Slam ‘em a few times and that’ll give ANAD a better chance to close and engage. Priming electron lens, activating enzymatic knif
e now—“

  Tallant agreed. It was all by the book. That’s the way she’d trained them: hard and straight-up. None of this quantum collapse and fancy maneuvering for her. She’d leave the hotshotting to Johnny Winger. Close-quarters combat in nano-war: you probed and feinted like a wary boxer, getting structure on your opponent, looking for a weakness, looking for a way in. Then when you had ‘em mesmerized, you slammed with RF and stunned the bastards long enough to close and bash the bejeezus out of them. Hold ‘em by the nose and kick ‘em in the ass. And snatch off a few polypeptide chains while you were at it.

  A strong gust of wind slashed through the trees, blowing rain squalls into the jungle and Tallant ducked her helmet down, letting the dirt and leaves fly past. The rain was annoying and potentially a threat to ANAD, but beneath the dense canopy, the jungle floor was mostly dry, as dry as it ever got, covered with moss and mulch and decaying branches. With any luck, Chen would smash this force right here and they could be on their way. Locating Frost and Duncan was going to be a challenge, she could see that now. And if they’d been halo’ed--

  Recon from Charioteer had said the source of the perturbations was deeper in the jungle, in the direction of the cliffs that terraced up to the summit of the big volcano. She checked their locations, just a couple hundred meters inland from the lagoon beach, and their bearing. Once the guard ‘bots were beaten off, the Detachment would have to head almost due west—two six zero degrees, over rising terrain—to reach the source. Richter was still in touch with his sniffers.

  Tallant peered over her eyepiece, looking outside her helmet. The rain was beginning to penetrate the clearing but through the trees, nano-combat was in full swing. Heavy limbs sagged with the growing weight of raindrops but in between them, like fireflies in a fight, ANAD and the enemy ‘bots grappled. Flickers of light popped in and out of view, then erupted into chains and whirls and jagged seams of fluorescence.

  Like silent lightning, Tallant had always thought, watching assemblers beat each other’s brains out. Like miniature lightning strikes, as uncountable zillions of mechs stripped atoms from each other, liberating millions of electron volts, ionizing air molecules into visible radiance for a brief second. As the rain pelted down, it was hard to believe a furious battle was unfolding all around them, on a battlefield the size of atoms. The entire engagement could have been held inside a thimble.

  “It’s working!” Chen Liu exulted, pumping his fist in the air. His suit servos complied with the command. “ANAD’s got ‘em on the run—phosphates all over the place…he’s ripping them apart!”

  “Kick atomic ass!” yelled Samoya, manning the HERF gun.

  “Give ‘em a blast!” Tallant commanded. “Slam ‘em, Sammy! Full bore!”

  Samoya primed the radio pulse weapon. “Charging…charging…charging …weapon is now enabled…here she goes!!”

  A thunderclap bolted through the trees and a hot wave of RF energy washed over them. In the monsoon, the sound seemed appropriate but it wasn’t a discharge from the sky.

  “Again--!” Tallant told him.

  Samoya primed the weapon. “NOW!”

  Another thunderclap and rolling wave of heat. Tallant buried herself into the muck of the jungle floor, let her suit servos keep her level and closed her eyes. When the wave was past, she checked her eyepiece. It looked like Dante’s Inferno.

  A blizzard of atomic debris streamed past the acoustic image.

  “How’s ANAD?” she asked. They couldn’t slap the assembler with RF too often or the tiny fellow would be lost. But he was sturdy enough to withstand a short barrage and the radio waves always shredded enemy swarms, stunning the ‘bots into a stupor long enough for ANAD to finish them off.

  “Still holding on,” Liu announced. He checked parameters, keyed a few buttons. “Still got a signal…still got a master. I’m probing…sounding…but I’m not seeing much. The bad guys are on the run.”

  Tallant knew they couldn’t waste any more time. “Command barrier down, Chen. Let’s get moving.”

  “Lieutenant,” it was Collin lifting himself upright behind her, “there’s still pockets of resistance around here. Is that smart?”

  Tallant got up too. “Maybe, maybe not…but the worst of the swarm’s gone. We’ll have to chance it. We’ve still got a mission…and our objective is—“ she scanned around for the SDC1. “Richter--?”

  “I’m on it, Lieutenant. Sniffers are high and still sending…still two five zero degrees.” The trooper was twenty meters away, halfway up a massive screw pine tree on hypersuit boost, homing on the signal. “Reading massive fluctuations in air quality up toward the volcano. Just beginning to get a beeper too.”

  “Okay, Detachment…move out! Tactical two…keep together. Chen…moving barrier...minimum radius. We can take a few hits…just keep a full swarm off us.”

  “Copy that, Lieutenant.” Chen Liu signaled ANAD to disengage and form up into a mobile screen ahead of and overhead of the detachment.

  Single file, they moved out, away from the clearing, deeper into the jungles of Kurabantu.

  And Dana Tallant wondered just what else this hellhole had in store for them.

  Climbing a steeply pitched path through thick brush, Bravo Detachment was grateful they had their hypersuits, even though it was like walking inside a garbage can. At times, the vine became so thick, that Tallant told Chen Liu to separate part of the ANAD swarm for clearing operations. The tiny assembler became a small horde of disassemblers, chewing a narrow path through the ropy vine. It slowed them down a bit, but the going became easier after ANAD had set to work.

  Richter monitored the air as they climbed. Soon enough, the terrain had risen to nearly the height of the tree top canopy. Ahead lay the lush foliage and steep escarpment of Tuontavik itself. Above a ring of mist at the summit, plumes of smoke belched into the sky. All around them, a sea of green extended to the horizon.

  “Lieutenant…” it was Samoya, just behind Richter up front. “Superfly’s sending something…I’m enhancing now. I’ll put it on the crewnet, visible wavelengths—“

  Throughout the Detachment, everyone’s eyepiece focused into view, looking over the tops of the trees at the base of the volcano. A faint shimmer flickered from the base.

  “A fire?” somebody asked.

  “In this rain…are you nuts?”

  “That’s no fire,” said Chen Liu. “It’s another swarm…and there seems to be a cave at the base of the mountain.”

  Tallant called a halt to the march. “There always is…dig in and spread out. Chen, detach part of our ANAD group and send them over. “Let’s see what’s cooking.”

  The Detachment halted and the troopers let their hypersuits lower them into defilade position, spread out in a semi-circle and hunkered down in the brush. It was open ground from there to the base of the volcano, except for the thick stands of wiry grass. Samoya signaled Superfly to close in for a better look. Ahead of them several hundred meters, the tiny entomopters, not much bigger than houseflies, wheeled about in unison and formed up over the target, sending back imagery to Samoya. The DPS tech ported the imagery straight away to the crewnet so everyone could see.

  “I’m detaching a recon element,” Liu announced. He ripped off a few commands on his wristpad. Overhead, unseen but as commanded, a small part of the ANAD swarm that had been flying top cover over them pulled away and sped off toward the shimmering glow at high speed. “It’ll take about ten minutes,” the IC1 announced. ANAD ran on picowatt propulsors, churning like flagella in the air, but their power output was low. At best, the assembler could make about five thousand nanometers a second.

  Sergeant Collin was curious, studying the image on his own eyepiece. “What do you make of that, Skipper?”

  Tallant shrugged, invisible in her hypersuit. She could switch her eyepiece image from Superfly to an acoustic or EM image from ANAD with a flick of her tongue o
n the control stud inside her helmet. “It’s a shield of some type, that’s what I make of it. Whoever or whatever’s inside, they’ve got protection. ANAD’ll tell us what we’re dealing with.” By the book, she told herself. Scout the enemy and know what you’re up against. “Richter, what about the air around here? Any changes?”

  “Big changes, Captain…I just saw it myself...” Richter was in control of a small horde of sniffer ‘bots circling overhead, nearly invisible motes no bigger than particles of dust, tasting the air for toxic compounds, measuring pressure and temperature. “Sniffos are having a time in this rain—“ The downpour had slacked off to a steady drumming of big, wet drops. “—but oxygen’s way down, less than five percent partial pressure. Nitrogen’s fluctuating, plus there’s all kinds of weird trace elements—fluorine, helium, it doesn’t make any sense, Lieutenant…there’s no obvious source. Even the ground pressure’s going up and down like a cork in the ocean…I don’t get it.”

  “Could be the volcano belching,” Collin suggested. “Burning off stuff that’s been piped up from deep underground.”

  “Maybe,” said Tallant, but she wasn’t buying it. “BioShield said it didn’t look like a natural process. Signatures don’t conform. Eric, can you tell if the disturbances center on that cave?”

  Richter did some finagling with his sniffers, checking winds, triangulating fluxes. “That’s affirmative, Skipper. Best fix for the source, if there is one, would be right around that cave.”

  Then that’s where we have to go, she muttered to herself. Frost and Duncan were probably inside. Trouble was, the book didn’t say anything about this.

  “ANAD’s got an image—“Liu reported.

  Tallant studied the scene on her eyepiece as it materialized and settled down. Switching back and forth from her own eyes, with hypersuit enhancement, to Superfly and then to ANAD’s view of the world of atoms and molecules was disorienting, to the say the least. The image was blurry, like looking underwater, though dark shapes were present. “What the hell is it, Chen?”

  “Our friends from the lagoon…same ‘bots, looks like. Formed up into a barrier around the mouth of that cave.”

  “Okay…let’s get ANAD ready for assault. We know what we have to do. Tony, get your HERF gun spooled up too. We’ll slam ‘em with RF, then storm the cave entrance with ANAD. Detachment, on my command, advance—“

  She gave the word and in unison, twelve hypersuits boosted their wearers into assault position. The detachment advanced in tactical formation, crouching through the thick, wiry grass, mag guns ready.

  Overhead, the full ANAD swarm was already replicating, flashing through the rain like silent lightning as the assemblers grabbed atoms furiously. Under Chen’s guidance, the swarm worked its way across the plateau and fell upon the barrier mechs at the cave with planned ferocity.

  “Okay, DPS…let ‘em have it! Three pulses…then we go in!”

  Samoya had already sighted the HERF weapon in.

  “Charging…charging…weapon is enabled….firing NOW!”

  A searing thunderclap of heat rolled through the grass and boomed off the flanks of the volcano. A hundred meters ahead, the barrier around the cave suddenly collapsed in a shower of sparks, before flowing along the base of the mountain, trying to reconstitute itself in another location.

  But Samoya was wise to the move and fired the HERF gun again, several more times, spraying RF waves off the sides of the volcano.

  “ANAD’s going in!” Liu yelled. “Config one…full effectors…bond disrupters ready—“

  “We got the bugs on the run!” someone yelled over the net.

  “Detachment…move in!” Tallant ordered. She cycled the action on her own magnetic impulse weapon and felt its reassuring heft as her suit servos drove her forward. It wouldn’t stop a full swarm for long but it could damage a lot of ‘bots…and knock the snot out of any human within three hundred meters.

  The hypersuits lunged forward.

  That’s when the rain became an enemy.

  Tech Sergeant Claudia Rialto noticed it first.

  “Hey—what the—“ Rialto stumbled forward, pitching heavily into the brush, as her suit gyros hiccupped. As she toggled buttons, trying to get the suit upright, she heard something she’d never forget as long as she lived….and that wasn’t going to be long, if she didn’t get up. A high-pitched, whirring sound, coupled with the unmistakable vibration of something eating away at the laminate armor of the suit outer shell. “Hey…hey!—I got a problem here guys---uh oh--!!”

  Samoya dropped the HERF gun into the grass and peeled off from a dead run to see about Rialto. Even from a distance, he was stunned—what he thought was rain wasn’t…the rain drops had mutated, changed config, for Christ’s sake!...changed into nanobotic mechs and they were rapidly boring into Claudia’s suit.

  “The rain---look out, it’s—“

  And Tallant felt it too, the shrill whirring behind her neck. Zillions of ‘bots swarming her and her whole Detachment, falling out of the sky as rain, but it was only a disguise…they’d come in and changed config, like Samoya said, and were eating up Bravo Detachment.

  And the ANAD swarm was a hundred meters away assaulting the cave.

  Tallant put her suit servos at max gain and tried to flail at the bugs but it was no use. She was stunned at the speed of the assault, at how the ‘bots had concealed themselves as raindrops, at how the Detachment had been penetrated…at how she hadn’t seen it coming—

  The swarm fell on the Detachment with a fury and there was no place to hide.

  “I can’t hold structure!” Rialto yelled over the crewnet. She was trying to writhe and twist inside her suit, rolling like a big ceramic log through the grass, but it was no use. “They’re inside…they’re…AARRGGHH!—“

  It wasn’t a pretty sight but no one else saw it. In a few minutes, Tech Sergeant Claudia Rialto had ceased to exist, reduced to elemental atomic fluff and molecular debris. From inside her helmet, the flicker of nanomech hell pulsated then died away.

  Collin, Liu, Mwate…everybody was fighting their own battle.

  “Sammy…get the HERF--!” Tallant yelled. “Blast ‘em to hell and back—“

  Sergeant Samoya backpedaled away from Rialto’s suit and scrambled on all fours through the grass, kicking faster than his leg servos could fire, crawling, reaching for the weapon. He could hear the high keening whine at his neck and shoulders—just a few more millimeters of laminate—and he’d be food for the bugs just like Claudia—he groped and groped until his gloves found the barrel of the thing.

  Antonio Samoya gritted his teeth and ordered his suit to set him upright. With a grinding gnash, it tried to but something failed and the best he could do was knees. Kneeling in the tall grass, Samoya charged the HERF and lit off the weapon—

  “Fire in the hole!”

  The searing thump and hot wave of air erupted out of the grass, flattening everything within several hundred meters. Tallant felt the clatter of stunned nanomechs raining onto her helmet. Ahead, two hundred and fifty meters away, the cave entrance beckoned. The cave and the ANAD swarm—

  “Detachment…move out! Head for that cave! Sammy…fry the bastards again! Set the damn thing on auto—“ She knew after about ten pulses, the HERF coils would melt and they’d be defenseless. But if they could just make the cave…and get ANAD back—

  “IC1…break off the attack…we got to get ANAD back to cover us—“

  Chen Liu was trying to fend off his own swarm. He had somehow managed to stand up, slapping away at the buggers, wobbly and unsteady as the suit gyros stabilized. “I’m trying to, Skipper…” But ANAD was caught in a vise at the cave entrance, battling a barrier shield of dumb sentry ‘bots and re-deploying to take on the mutated rain ‘bots.

  Another thunderclap and Tallant kickstarted her leg servos into high gear. A hot wind gusted across the plateau and swirled like a tornado.
With any luck, HERF could give them a few more blasts…just enough cover to make the cave and get behind ANAD’s protection.

  She didn’t hear any more buzzing or whirring; the first pulse must have stunned the bastards.

  GO, BABY… GO-GO-GO-GO-GO-GO-GO-GO…

  The rest of Bravo Detachment staggered and scrambled and stumbled their way across the grass, dodging HERF blasts, fending off what was left of the rain ‘bots. Somewhere behind was Chen Liu, letting his suit slog ahead on full auto, while he drove ANAD from his wristpad.

  The rain ‘bots---whatever the hell they were—had fully engulfed ANAD.

  Chen was breathing hard, gasping for air, even though the suit was doing the work. That’s when he realized the ‘bots had breached his inner shell…he was fully exposed to the atmosphere around the volcano, the toxic air, the aire toxico…shit…better bust open the emergency supply…

  He toggled the e-pack and seconds later, fresh oxygen streamed into his helmet from the emergency pack on his back. He had about ten minutes worth of good air.

  Chen Liu let the suit carry him to the cave, keeping up with the Detachment, and went back to his eyepiece. ANAD was in the fight of its life.

  No time to replicate now…got to get free…signal daughters…

  Chen fired off a burst of instructions to gather all daughters ANAD had replicated going in. It might be too late.

  His eyepiece view shook with the collision, then careened sideways. At that moment, the suit legs almost dumped him on his head…the left leg had stumbled across a gully and only quick action and gyro-stabilizing kept him upright. Chen bit his tongue, gritted his teeth. Don’t lose it now…don’t lose it now. That was the trouble with full auto in a hypersuit. The frontal sensors didn’t see everything.

  More blasts from the HERF gun, but Chen could tell the thing was giving out. The impulse was getting weaker. Any moment, the rain ‘bots would re-assemble.

  The cave was still thirty meters ahead, yawning like a jagged mouth with palm fronds for a moustache.

  Back to the eyepiece. The imager view was raw acoustic. Whatever ANAD sensed with probes of sound waves, Chen Liu also saw.

  The scene vibrated with the ferocity of the attack. What the hell were these nanobots that could masquerade as raindrops and flash down from the skies without warning?

  Chen squinted, maxing the gain, studying the enemy close up. Chains of oxygen molecules, pressed into service as makeshift weapons, whipped across the screen. The scene was soon choked with debris.

  Got to get in closer…take a look—Chen wanted to see one of the rain ‘bots for himself, see what kind of structure it had, what kind of weaknesses. If it had any.

  Cautiously, he piloted the ANAD master toward a blurry shape, dimly visible in the sonic view, cutting back propulsors, approaching on a tangent, just to get a quick peek.

  All around him, the hypersuit carried him forward, pumping his legs on auto as the cave and cover drew nearer. Though he didn’t notice them, what was left of the Detachment scrambled forward with him, stumbling along on both sides.

  “Got to check this joker out…” he muttered to himself. Quickly, he signaled ANAD to prime its defensive mechanisms, and slowed the approach to a crawl.

  Reconnoiter first. He remembered a line from Sun Tzu, the great nanowarrior of ancient China…

  He who is skilled hides in the most secret recesses of the earth.

  Under Chen’s guidance, ANAD maneuvered among the jostling molecules of chlorine and sodium and potassium. These things shouldn’t even be here. A huge snakelike cluster of chlorine molecules drifted by. Chen had an idea. He signaled ANAD to grab a few chlorines as a shield. Seizing the ends of the molecule with its effectors, ANAD held on tight, as commanded.

  Gradually the shape and size of the rain ‘bot became clearer. Bristling with effectors and arms, it looked like a miniature Apollo Lunar Module from the mid-twentieth century. The head was a multi-lobed cluster of spheres and hexagons; inside the churning electron cloud dimmed out any detail.

  Below the head was a cylindrical sheath, covered with pyramidal facets and undulating beads of proteins—the assembler’s probes and effectors. Chen was frankly awed at the sight.

  Hell of a lot of gear for this bastard. I wonder where you came from?

  Indeed, the horde of enemy assemblers were rigged out like battleships, with devices for every conceivable mechanical or chemical action. A flat baseplate capped one end of the sheathed body. The tail structure was a dense thicket of fibers, each tipped with penetrator clusters. The penetrators enabled the mech to attach to and enter any structure.

  Chen brought ANAD to a complete stop. The hairs on the back of his neck bristled. Something wasn’t quite right, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. The data was all wrong…there was no way BioShield should have ever let something this sophisticated into the open, outside of containment…

  They had almost reached the cave when the first coilgun rounds exploded right behind Chen, knocking him forward in his hypersuit. He lost stability as the gyros toppled and pitched him headlong into the grass, landing with a heavy thump on his side, knocking the breath out of him.

  The voice in his ears was Jeff Collin’s.

  “Bandits at eleven o’clock! Spread out--! Take cover!”

  Programmable kinetic rounds sizzled through the air, exploding in a coordinated pattern among the scrambling Bravo Detachment. The nanotroopers peeled away from each other, commanding their suits to lower them into cover, which happened much slower than it should have. Joey Mwate took a direct hit and his hypersuit exploded in a geyser of flame and debris.

  “JOEY!!!--”

  Inside the cave, several faces appeared, human faces, in crude breathing gear, armed with coilgun launchers. Both fired several rounds, peppering the ground with death and shrapnel. The PKRs could slice through a hypersuit like a hot knife in butter.

  Dana Tallant grunted as she fell chest first to the ground. Finally, the bastards show themselves…with human faces. “DPS, get our guys airborne…launch the whole shebang and shred that position!!”

  Samoya was already scrambling through the grass. “I’m on it—“ Crap…The launch canister had been jerked off its mount when his suit had hit the ground. He fumbled in the grass, grabbed the cylinder and toggled the firing panel. Holding the canister upright at a slight angle, like a mortar, it self-pressurized and then whooshed a small tornado of hot gas as it discharged a horde of coilgun ‘bots into the sky. The tiny uav’s formed up in a tight V, like geese returning from winter, and lit off their own rounds at the enemy position.

  A line of explosions rocked the mouth of the cave, stitching flame and death at the entrance.

  “That ought to keep their heads down!” Tallant crowed. “Chen, can you break off an element of ANAD, and execute a clampdown inside that cave? Ten to one, there are more where they came from.” Now that the enemy had shown himself, she intended to grab the bastards by the throat and throttle them but good. And there were still the rain ‘bots swarming overhead…they had to get into some kind of cover or the Detachment was finished.

  Chen was still wrestling ANAD closer to the nearest rain ‘bot. “I’ll try, Skipper…but I’ve got my hands full keeping these bugs off our backs!”

  Jeff Collin had gone through some IC training a year back. “Give me a batch, Chen…I’ll do the clampdown! We’re getting eaten alive here and we’re exposed…detach now and I’ll take ‘em with my controls.”

  Chen obliged, severing a portion of the ANAD swarm and handing off control to the exec. Collin’s fingers flew over his wristpad, setting up the link. Soon enough, he had a signal.

  “I’ve got it…I’ve got it…forming up now—“ he pecked out the codes for the clampdown maneuver as fast as his fingers would fly, all the while hearing the high whine of approaching rain ‘bots, ready to swarm the detachment again.

  “Execute…execut
e NOW!” Tallant yelled. There was no telling how many Red Hammer guards might be inside the cave, or whether they wore suits or had protection. There was no time to wonder about it. The rain ‘bots were coming back and they had no defense. Their best chance, maybe their only chance was to make the cave and try to hold off the buggers until help came. “Smother ‘em so they can’t breathe!” She signaled Samoya over the crewnet to get ready in case more guards appeared and the Detachment came under fire. “Replicate max rate, Jeff…carbenes and radicals at the ends…blanket the place!”

  Dr. Frost and Dr. Duncan would just have to wait.

  Collin manned the config controls, stabbing out commands on his wristpad. He sent the command, silently praying that this small part of the ANAD swarm would perform the clampdown properly. Any foul-ups now and Bravo would be atom fluff in minutes. No hiccups today, he muttered to himself. Not ‘til we’re in, not ‘til we’re inside that cave….

  In seconds, the air itself burned with the pressure of exponentially dividing ANAD replicants; a heavy, searing weight pressing down on everything in sight.

  Just inside the mouth of the cave, a small force of Red Hammer guards tried to scream.

  The defenders, unable to react, clawed at their lungs and staggered back from the entrance, pitching backward, ears and eyes bleeding from the pressure, suffocated by ANAD.

  It was all over in less than a minute.

  Tallant waited until the clampdown was lifted and on command, ANAD began to disperse. “Get the MOB ready, we’ll put it on ‘em,” she told Collin. “Keep ‘em away from the entrance…when Chen gives the word, we’ll break for the cave.”

  Collin tapped commands on his wristpad. “Done, Lieutenant.”

  “Chen--?

  The IC1 studied the tactical situation. The rain ‘bots were gathering and hypersuits were useless…they’d already lost Mwate to coilgun fire and Rialto was gone…they had to get some cover and regroup, re-config ANAD to hold off the rain ‘bots—Jesus, what kind of assembler could disguise itself like a raindrop and chew up hypersuits like stale bread?

  More importantly, they needed to bring back one of the ‘bots to examine…if Red Hammer had advanced this far, there was no telling what they could do.

  Recon showed the source of the beeper signals emanating from Kurabantu came from the cave…even Skinner, in his memory traces had alluded to caves near the volcano. This had to be it.

  “I’m re-configging ANAD, Skipper…trying something new—“

  Tallant eyed the swirling squall that was a nanomech storm apprehensively. So far, the IC1 had duked it out with the enemy ‘bots and held the worst of the swarm off, barely.

  “Whatever it is, Chen, make it quick.”

  “I’m trying, Skipper…I’m trying—“

  Tallant knew they have to make a break for the cave in the next few moments, swarm or no. “Form up on me,” she ordered the rest of the Detachment. As the troopers scrambled closer, Chen pecked out commands on his wristpad, commanding trillions of ANAD assemblers to swarm into a new formation, a faint coruscating iridescence pulsating through the air. “Okay, troops, here’s what we’re going to do.”

  She laid out the plan. “Samoya, when I give the word, lay down suppressing fire with your coilgun ‘bots…all along the mouth of that cave. Chen, at the same time, can you give us a bubble to move in?”

  “I think so, Captain…it won’t last long as we move, but I can hold ‘em off for a few moments.”

  Tallant figured that was good enough. They didn’t have a HERF gun anymore. It was fried. “I don’t know what’s in that cave, but we’ll have to take our chances.” The mission had been to reconnoiter the island and determine the extent and scale of Red Hammer operations, then locate and grab Frost and Duncan and get the hell out of Dodge. Now, they’d be lucky if they could last long enough holed up in the cave to get reinforcements.

  “Eric, can you work the comms?”

  Richter had crossed trained with Rialto. “No sweat, Skipper. I’m qualified in quantum couplers, satradio and all the rest.”

  “Super…get a message to Table Top…tell ‘em were surrounded and outgunned…some kind of badass assembler swarm that can masquerade as rain and God knows what else. We need relief and fast. Tony—“

  Samoya came on the crewnet. “Here…Skipper.”

  “Charioteer still orbiting the island?”

  Samoya checked the readouts on his eyepiece. The hyperjet was on full autopilot, cruising around Kurabantu at five thousand meters. “Like an old dog, Captain…you want me to bring her in?”

  “Get her ready…we may have to try a new trick…she’s got fastcables, doesn’t she?”

  Samoya nodded, then added, “I think she does, Skipper, but…we haven’t trained on extraction like that in a long time…”

  “I know, I know…but it’s an option,” Tallant said. And not one we want to use if we can help it, she said to herself. Yanking a trooper from a standing start off the ground and reeling him in like a fish wasn’t for the faint of heart. “Okay…Tony…if this works, we won’t have to fastcable…give me some suppressing fire…right on that cave entrance—“

  The cave was less than fifty meters away. The Detachment buried themselves in the grass as best they could.

  “On the way, Skipper,” Samoya said. He sent the signal and the coilgun microbots broke formation, sliding around the perimeter of the enemy swarm to get into position. The rain ‘bots buzzed in reaction, the swarm re-shaping itself to intervene. But the micros were faster, more maneuverable. “I’m bringing up the whole battery….”

  On Tallant’s hand signal, Samoya commanded the ‘bots to fire. Tallant crossed her fingers and prayed.

  Fifty meters ahead, the foot of Tuontavik volcano had a new kind of fire in its belly.

  The rock walls of the cave entrance cracked open, dissolving in a spray of flame and rubble.

  So much for covert entry, Tallant thought. Everybody knows we’re here now.

  At that same moment, Chen Liu raised his fist in a pre-arranged signal.

  “MOVE OUT!” Tallant ordered. “Head for the cave!”

  As one, the Detachment rose and kicked their hypersuits into high gear. At the same time, Chen toggled the ANAD swarm to flow down into a blocking position, forming a quick barrier screen between the rain ‘bots and the troopers.

  “GO…GO…GO…GO…GO…!”

  One after the other, the soldiers of Bravo Detachment lumbered toward the cave, sliding through the grass, skidding on rubble at the mouth, ducking under the arch and into the dim recess beyond.

  Behind them, still screening, ANAD poured into the cavern on their heels. Tallant ordered a portion of the swarm detached for perimeter guard, securing the entrance. As they gathered inside the entrance, more guards lay strewn about the rubbly floor, gasping for breath from the clampdown. Some wore breathing gear, some didn’t. Tallant didn’t have time to test the atmosphere.

  “Secure the entrance…as well as you can!” she ordered. She turned to face deeper into the cave, looking around the complex, nearly losing her footing on the downslope. “Form up and let’s go. Sammy…get your coilgun ‘bots back and bring ‘em inside. And make sure the MOB canisters are ready.”

  “Will do, Lieutenant,” Samoya sent the commands.

  Beside Samoya, Chen Liu crossed his fingers, praying in the name of his honorable ancestors that ANAD could block the rain ‘bots from following.

  The place was a vast maze of tunnels, hewn right out of the bowels of the volcano. Tallant led the Detachment deeper, while Chen brought up the rear, monitoring the rain ‘bots approach. On his eyepiece, he could see the swollen shimmering blur as the ‘bots engaged the ANAD swarm, blocking the entrance. Crackles of light flickered on the cave walls.

  Jeff Collin was right behind Tallant. “Must be the mother lode, Skipper.” As they descended a curving ramp, they passed side caverns fille
d with equipment, consoles lit up and humming, and tanks surrounded by piping.

  But there was no sign of Frost and Duncan yet.

  “What the hell is this place?” said Samoya, nosing into one of the caverns with the muzzle of his mag gun.

  “Some kind of control center,” Tallant muttered. She switched scenes on her eyepiece, from the cave entrance, where ANAD was engaged in a ferocious firefight with the rain ‘bots, to infrared and EM signatures ahead of them. “Uh oh…we may have company….”

  Inside the next cavern, Samoya spotted a pocket of Red Hammer technicians, struggling to get up, still stunned and gasping for air from the clampdown.

  Samoya charged his weapon. “Enemy ahead…nine o’clock…I count four—“

  “Weapons?”

  “None that I can see, Skipper.”

  Tallant figured the enemy was fully aware of their presence. No need for stealth now. “Okay…MOB ‘em. Secure the cave. Let’s go hunting.”

  Samoya acknowledged the order. With his wristpad, he took control of a small portion of the ANAD force from Chen, accepting replicants as fast as the master could slam atoms together and churn them out. He detached the force and tapped out a command sequence…in seconds, the swarm under his control had reconfigured itself. A fine smoky mist formed overhead, oscillating in and out of view.

  Samoya took a fix on the Red Hammer techs and fed the coordinates to his brood. The smoke pulsed and throbbed like a thing alive, then floated over and descended on the enemy, forming a Mobility Obstruction Barrier around the helpless group. ANAD assemblers interlocked into an amorphous gel, cordoning off the technicians in a flexible prison cell of tightly bound assemblers. Several techs clawed at the MOB, to no avail. They were steadily forced down to the cavern floor and immovably secured there by the ANAD screen.

  “MOB in place, Captain.”

  “Very well…Richter, what’s up?”

  The SDC1 had caught sight of something, a twitch in one of ANAD’s sensors. “Sounding pressure change. Uh-oh…sounding heat pulse, big time heat pulse…looks like the cavalry’s coming—“

  Light flashed through the cavern and a resounding BOOM! echoed off the walls. Gouts of flame and rock erupted from the explosion, forcing the Detachment to take cover.

  “Spread out!” yelled Tallant. She hand-signaled Collin to move right, further right, and take Samoya with him. Try to outflank ‘em, she mouthed.

  There were voices ahead, and heavy footfalls. A Red Hammer detail, heavily armed, had emerged from deeper in the cavern.

  Immediately, Tallant understood the nature of their predicament. Behind them, the rain ‘bots were straining at the barrier ANAD had formed at the cave entrance. They couldn’t go back, not without risking a full swarm attack.

  They couldn’t go forward, not easily, without dealing with the enemy ahead.

  More light flashed---coilgun rounds, she realized…hypervelocity bolts of condensed matter—and the concussion was deafening. Rock and rubble sprayed from the walls, pelting the Detachment.

  Trouble was there was no real way to outflank the enemy force. Red Hammer techs blocked the main passage and they had to know the caves better. Tallant got on the crewnet to Chen.

  “Chen…give me part of your swarm…I need recon…I need something to find out what we’re up against.”

  “Can’t do it, Skipper…” Chen came back. He was several dozen meters behind the Detachment, still in line of sight contact with the main swarm. “If I detach any more, ANAD can’t hold. And I can’t replicate much when we’re engaged like this—“

  “Never mind,” Tallant said. They couldn’t afford to weaken their rear. The only way was to move forward. “Samoya…Richter…when I give the word…give me as much suppressing fire as you can…a full spread across the cave ahead—“

  “I’ll have to retrieve the coilgun ‘bots, Skipper…they’re still outside. And coming through that swarm at the entrance—“

  Tallant knew all that. “It’s a chance we’ll have to take. Get the ‘bots in here and lay down a screen….that’s the only chance we have to break through. We’re in a fix here…we might as well go forward and see what damage we can do.”

  Samoya finagled with his wristpad, sending commands to the small squadron of dust mote-sized coilgun fliers orbiting over the cave entrance outside. If he worked the approach right…and coordinated with Chen…he might just be able to sneak enough ‘bots into the cave without getting shredded by the mechs duking it out at the entrance.

  Outside the cave, a small, nearly invisible cloud of microbots formed up to enter the complex.

  Samoya waited for Chen to give him the signal. At the right moment, ANAD would disengage momentarily from the attack, leaving the entrance to the rain ‘bots. Samoya would signal his coilgun fliers to max speed and stream them as fast as they could go through the very middle of the swarm. If their luck held, the rain ‘bots would swell to occupy the space momentarily vacated by ANAD, and in re-deploying forward, would thin out enough to let Samoya’s force through with minimal casualties.

  It was the only chance the Detachment had to move forward and keep from being pounded into rubble by the Red Hammer force inside.

  “Disengaging…NOW!” yelled Chen. His fingers stabbed a button and the ANAD swarm began to pull back.

  At the very same moment, Samoya squirted a command to the coilgun ‘bots and as one, the tiny squadron sped down from altitude and slammed into the mechs screening the cave entrance. He knew he’d lose some to the maneuver…that couldn’t be helped. The Detachment needed their fire inside, to open a path ahead.

  “Force approaching--” he announced over the crewnet. His eyepiece showed him the results…not too bad. About a third of the fliers had been shredded by the rain ‘bots as they surged forward. “Weapons are charging…charging…charging…weapons are enabled, Skipper! Where do you want fire?”

  “I’m blocking now—“ Chen Liu cut in. He commanded the ANAD swarm to intercept the rain ‘bots, cutting off their move into the cave.

  “Bearing…two five niner!” Tallant said. “Right below that overhang ahead—“ she put a cueing mark on the track and instantly, Samoya saw the rock shelf. Dim shadowy figures moved below it. Flashes of return fire from the Red Hammer techs briefly illuminated the enemy force. A full battle of coilgun rounds and magnetic impulse fire raged across the cavern. Behind Tallant, an explosion knocked her suit servos silly and she staggered, letting the system right itself, while a seam of rock and rubble pelted her.

  That was close, she realized. If they didn’t get suppressing fire on the enemy’s position soon, they could pretty well pick their own poison: get creamed by increasingly effective coilgun fire from the Red Hammer detail or get swarmed from the rear by rain ‘bots.

  Neither alternative appealed to her.

  “Let ‘em have it, Sammy!” she called out.

  The staccato bbrrrppp of the coilgun fliers letting fly their programmable rounds ripped the air. Across the cavern, the microfliers sprayed death like a horde of angry bees.

  The concussion of detonating rounds reverberated around the cavern and part of the cavern roof collapsed on the Red Hammer techs. There was a grinding crash of tons of rock and debris, punctuated by screams of pain.

  Samoya deployed his fliers closer and they let loose another volley of rounds, peppering the enemy’s position with a deafening discharge. The entire far wall of the cavern erupted in a blossom of smoke and flame, and moments later, the floor gave way, crashing out of sight amid a thick pall of smoke.

  “GO…GO…GO!” yelled Tallant. “Move out!”

  The Detachment struggled forward cautiously, checking for life signs ahead. Tallant switched her viewer to thermal, but saw only the speckles of smoking rubble, nothing else moving. A gaping chasm, where there had once been a rock wall led down through smoldering seams of rock to a curving ramp. The ramp spiraled down deeper
into the bowels of Tuontavik.

  “Skipper, you figure this is some kind of control center?” asked Richter. His face was lost in the opacity of his hypersuit helmet, but Tallant could well imagine his red freckles inside the blank faceplate. Richter was a young stud and one hell of an SDC.

  “Got to be,” Tallant decided. They crept cautiously down the curving ramp, everybody on thermal to see in the thick smoke, noting another side cave filled with equipment. The stuff seemed to be running by itself, quietly humming. And no sign of their targets…the beeper signals seemed to have petered out. “Chen…get up here and take a look. What do you make of this place?”

  Chen Liu came forward and squeezed into the opening. He switched view scenes, scanning the room in all EM wavelengths, before announcing, “It’s a nursery, Captain. Or a hatchery.”

  “A nursery?”

  “For nanobots. Look at the hull plating on that chamber—“he pointed toward a squat semi-spherical structure that looked like an inverted bowl. “—see the beam injectors. Recognize anything?”

  Samoya had squeezed in beside him. “Containment chamber…it’s has to be. So what are they containing?”

  “Ten to one it’s the same ‘bots that are screwing up the atmosphere. Red Hammer’s growing them right here,” said Jeff Collin. “We need to get samples—“ he started into the chamber but Chen grabbed his arm.

  “Hold on—I wouldn’t get too close—see that mist in the center?”

  Collin halted two steps inside the cave, standing on a small ledge that overlooked the oblong space. Bright lights on tracks beamed down from the ceiling. The room was actually a small cave with ledges on multiple levels, like shelves. Containment tanks lined the ledges all around them. Huge spherical tanks with intricate piping occupied the lower levels. Control consoles and displays were interspersed with the tanks, mounted on stanchions supporting the ceiling of the cave. What had seemed at first like steam in the air wasn’t steam at all. The mist throbbed and speckled with pinpricks of light…the telltale signature of nanobotic action…replicators revving up.

  “Swarm?” he asked

  Chen nodded silently, though no one could see it inside his suit. “Most likely…looks like it’s seen us, too.”

  “Fall back,” Tallant ordered. “Fall back…Chen…where the hell’s ANAD?”

  Warily, the Detachment retreated out of the cave.

  The swarm thickened and flowed after them, boiling out of the shadows like a thing alive, sweeping forward, closing fast to engage the intruders.

  “On the way,” the IC1 said, “but it’ll take a few minutes. I’m still engaged at the cave entrance.”

  “Fall back and head down the ramp!” Tallant announced. “Chen…anytime you want to block that swarm….would be good for me!”

  Chen concentrated on his viewer, trying to scope out the newest threat and get a scan, letting his hypersuit follow the tactical retreat program, sensing and feeling its way along, as it followed the rest of the Detachment on automaneuver. Outside the side cave, he realized they had just run out of time.

  “Oh, Captain…looks…like…WE…GOT…MECHS!” The IC1’s fingers flew over his wristpad keyboard and joysticks. “ANAD replicating…I’ve got a few ANADs but not nearly enough…ANAD replicating at full rate…making a cage…all effectors out max…I am in automaneuver…” He stumbled down the ramp after the Detachment, deeper into the bowels of the volcano, letting his suit servos keep him upright as best they could.

  “Get down!” Tallant commanded. “Get small…and cover yourselves!”

  As ordered, what was left of Detachment Bravo hunkered down to the ground, each soldier forming a hump of laminate armor, trying to protect vital seals and ports from the oncoming swarm as long as possible.

  “Sammy?” Tallant yelled. “Can we—“

  But Samoya already knew the answer to the question. “Coilgun fliers are lost, Skipper. No link…no comms…I don’t know what’s happened.”

  Great….just friggin’ great, Tallant muttered to herself. They never should have set down in the lagoon without adequate backup. They had no coilgun support, no HERF left and only a scattering of smaller arms…some mag guns and a few rounds of kinetic stuff. ANAD was their best chance to get the hell out alive. But Chen was fighting on two fronts at the same time, still blocking the rain ‘bots at the cave entrance and now dealing with the newest threat.

  The IC1 punched out commands, setting up his small but expanding group of assemblers with full shields of fullerene arms, each one bristling with sticky molecules, juiced with torqued bonds, ready to zap all comers. Even as he configged the swarm, Jeff Collin took control of a small element of ANADs himself, as fast as they could be replicated, piloting them away from the melee, trying to flank the enemy, pinch off the assault from both sides, a pincer movement at atomic scales.

  The boiling swarm of mechs from the nursery closed with ANAD and flung themselves with fury against Chen’s hastily erected shield. The controller prayed silently to his esteemed ancestors for guidance, maybe even a miracle.

  Chen’s fingers flew over the controls, managing config, pulling more atoms to add shielding, all the while fighting off thrusts and slashes from the enemy mechs.

  “Change config!” Tallant yelled. “We’re getting slammed from the rear…do it now…Tactical Two—“

  Chen sent the command, ANAD trying to confuse the enemy swarm by shedding outer atoms in one big puff. They’d wargamed it before…it didn’t always work—

  Ten meters in the air, trillions of ANAD assemblers received the same instructions: alter configuration to this design…grab atoms…cleave this group…fold here…build lattice here…the air churned with furious activity. The cavern was suddenly bathed in an unearthly pale blue light as vast but unseen armies collided. The gotterdammerung pulsed like a flickering aurora as the swarms clashed head-on.

  But the newest swarm was something ANAD had never encountered before.

  “What the hell?” Chen frowned as he fought the controls, tickling propulsors, spinning ANAD, managing effectors…”I can’t grapple the damn things!”

  Jeff Collin, on the other side of the cave, had found the same thing. Sweat broke out on the CC2’s forehead, in spite of the cool damp air. “It’s like I’m too short! Sluggish. Chen…check my config…what’s wrong with my effectors…what the hell am I doing wrong here? I’ve got no probes, grapples, it’s like my pyridines are minus a few atoms--!”

  Chen was in the midst of his own predicament. If he grabbed more assemblers from the cave entrance, he weakened their defense against the rain ‘bots, already pressing in everywhere from outside. If he didn’t, the bigger swarm inside would soon overwhelm them.

  Chen was more frustrated by the moment. He was losing it—an agonized scream pierced the crewnet and out of the corner of his eyes, he saw someone—was it Richter?—go down, his suit breached.

  “GET THEM OFF….JEEZ, GOD…GET THEM OFF…!!!!”

  But he couldn’t watch. Collin needed help, hell he needed help…both their defensive screens of ANAD assemblers were falling apart faster than he could react. “I can’t explain it either,” he gritted through clenched teeth. “No electron lens…no enzymatic knife…no effector control. It’s like ANAD’s crippled.”

  “Lobotomized, Chen. I can’t hold at all. I’m showing propulsor failure, major bond breaks, shielding’s gone…main structure being disassembled…we’ve got to withdraw now—“

  “Withdraw?” said Tallant. “Where the hell to?” She was hunkered down against a ledge, squinting through her eyepiece at the shimmering combat all around her. The Detachment was pinned down good, unable to move forward against this swarm and unable to fall back to the cave entrance.

  She put her hypersuit in motion, letting its motorized boot treads propel her along the ground like an inchworm, still hoping and praying that she wouldn’t get swarmed. But before she could link
up with Collin and Chen, another agonized voice cried out.

  It was Tony Samoya.

  Tallant couldn’t stand to watch. The DPS1 had wedged himself into a cleft in the wall, semi-standing, cycling the last few rounds into his mag gun when the first fingers of the swarm enveloped him. Hypersuit armor was a tough laminate, supposedly impervious to nanomech action—at least all known nanomechs—but it might as well have been butter, for all the good it did.

  “AAAARRRGGGHHH….HELP MEEEEE…..OHHHH…!!!”

  A pale blue mist boiled over Sammy’s head and his face was soon lost in the fires of nanomech hell, as the suit was breached. Seconds later, the suit and whatever was left inside collapsed in a heap to the ground.

  Now, it was just her, Collin and Chen.

  “Lieutenant---look out!”

  Tallant had seen movement beyond the veil of the swarm, on the other side of the cavern, below their level, and coming up the ramp in a hurry. The muzzles of laser carbines flashed through the haze. Beam fire erupted across the ground.

  Collin and Tallant ducked as the first volley narrowly missed them, carving out a seam in a boulder behind them. Rock and debris exploded, flying everywhere.

  “We got nasties all over the place!” Collin yelled.

  “And no more ammo…ANAD’s the only hope…Chen…how about it…can you replicate a screen and give us cover to move out?”

  “No can do, Skipper,” Chen muttered. “It’ll weaken ANAD too much.” He was kneeling now, at the top of the ramp, ducking fire himself, as he steered one swarm into the heart of the melee. He handed off the rear swarm, blocking them from the rain ‘bots, to Collin, so he could concentrate on the enemy at hand.

  “Whatever you are,” he muttered to himself, “you act a helluva lot like ANAD…only souped up about a million times.” He worked the config controls, at the same time pulsing in and out of contact range with the main enemy, slashing and weaving, scrunching up atoms and twisting bonds to zap the bastards with their own electron charge.

  Keep coming, you atomic assholes…keep on coming…right into my hands—eat my carbene effectors, you jerks—

  Chen was in the midst of trying to outflank the swarm that had them pinned down, when a stray burst from the Red Hammer techs caught him flush in the chest. The shot spun him around and killed the suit servos, knocking him off his feet. The impact with the ground smashed his wristpad, chopping the link with ANAD. In seconds, the enemy swarm surged forward, now overwhelming the three remaining Detachment members.

  Tallant saw what had happened. Frantically, even as the high keening whine of mechs eating at the outer layers of her suit filled her ears, she wrestled with her own wristpad, trying to link up with ANAD.

  But it was no use.

  Collin’s suit was already nearly breached. Whatever these mechs were—and Chen hadn’t been able to get structure on them—ANAD couldn’t handle them. Too fast, too well armed, too nimble…she couldn’t tell and even as she pecked away at the keypad, jiggling the joystick for some response, she knew it was hopeless.

  Shadows loomed over them, giants dimly outlined in the shimmering mist of the swarm. She’d heard the high-freq buzz, knew the mechs were dining on her suit, but so far, it hadn’t breached. She wondered why.

  Then she realized why.

  The giant shadows were the Red Hammer troops who had moved forward and were now close enough to reach out and touch. They’d held the swarm back.

  She saw muzzles flash in the light. All of them were trained on her. Slowly, she lifted her hands and put them behind her helmet. Three meters away, Jeff Collin was roughly rolled over onto his back like a wounded beetle and found himself staring down the muzzle of a laser carbine.

  They were surrounded. Chen was fried, burned in a lucky beamshot. The rest were---atoms and little else.

  They were all gone…the whole Detachment…Rialto, Mwate, Samoya, Richter, now Chen. ANAD was contained by the enemy swarm, probably being disassembled even as they were roughly hoisted to their feet. A phosphorescent gel descended over them…a MOB barrier, she realized, quickly immobilizing them in restraints, except for their legs.

  They’d seized control of the suits too, somehow hacked into the controllers. With no command from her, Tallant’s suit limped forward seemingly on its own, its arms stiffly pinioned to her side, its legs and servos now under enemy control. It wasn’t a hypersuit anymore. Just a cage.

  Jeff Collin and Dana Tallant couldn’t see the faces of their captors. It was just as well. The two of them were marched in unison, down the steeply curving stone ramp, deeper into the ground, below into the fiery belly of the Tuontavik volcano.

  That’s when she wondered if Chen and the rest of them had been the lucky ones.