 
# Quantum Troopers

Episode 8: Doc Frost

### Published by Philip Bosshardt at Smashwords

### Copyright 2016 Philip Bosshardt

### Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

A few words about this series....

_*** Quantum Troopers_ is a series of 15,000- 20,000 word episodes detailing the adventures of Johnny Winger and his experiences with the United Nations Quantum Corps.

*** Each episode will be about 40-50 pages, approximately 20,000 words in length.

*** A new episode will be available and uploaded every 3 weeks.

*** There will be 22 episodes. The story will be completely serialized in about 14 months.

*** Each episode is a stand-alone story but will advance the greater theme and plot of the story arc.

*** The main plotline: U.N. Quantum Corps must defeat the criminal cartel Red Hammer's efforts to steal or disable their new nanorobotic ANAD systems.

*** Uploads will be made to www.smashwords.com on approximately the schedule below:

Episode # Title Approximate Upload Date

1 'Atomgrabbers' 1-14-16

2 'Nog School' 2-8-16

3 'Deeno and Mighty Mite' 2-29-16

4 'ANAD' 3-21-16

5 'Table Top Mountain' 4-11-16

6 'I, Lieutenant John Winger...' 5-2-16

7 'Hong Chui' 5-23-16

8 'Doc Frost' 6-13-16

9 'Demonios of Via Verde' 7-5-16

10 'The Big Bang' 7-25-16

11 'Engebbe' 8-15-16

12 'The Symbiosis Project' 9-5-16

13 'Small is All!' 9-26-16

14 ''The HNRIV Factor' 10-17-16

15 'A Black Hole' 11-7-16

16 'ANAD on Ice' 11-29-16

17 'Lions Rock' 12-19-16

18 'Geoplanes' 1-9-17

19 'Mount Kipwezi' 1-30-17

20 'Doc II' 2-20-17

21 'Paryang Monastery' 3-13-17

22 'Epilogue' 4-3-17
Chapter 1

" **Post Mortem"**

Boise, Idaho

November 20, 2048

1950 hours

For Dr. Irwin Frost and Dr. Mary Duncan, travel was a necessary evil. They had boarded the TransAmerica jet at Philadelphia for the four- hour flight to Boise International Airport earlier that afternoon. Several Quantum Corps officers would be on hand at the Boise airport to greet them and take them up to Table Top Mountain. There, Frost and Duncan would examine the current ANAD master bot; word from 1st Nano was that there were suspicions ANAD had been severely compromised after encounters with powerful swarms and bots in Kenya, India and Nepal. Frost tended to discount some of the more lurid speculation he'd encountered...that 1st Nano had a mission to take down the world's newest celebrity Symborg, that they'd run into strange quantum devices in Kolkata, that swarms of unknown origin and incredible capability had surged out of Tibet and nearly destroyed the platoon.

"More likely, ANAD just needs a little tweaking," he told Duncan, over peanuts and wine on the long flight across the Midwest. "If half of what we're hearing is true, the boys will need more than ANAD to accomplish their missions."

Duncan tended to agree. "I hope Johnny's embed is behaving itself. That's the ANAD version we had so much trouble with in the beginning. The one with the code from Engebbe."

"I'm sure that's behind us," Frost was certain. "I borrowed some genome sequences from an ancient virus, that's all. We tested it thoroughly in the Lab...put it through all its paces. I don't think ANAD can spring anything on us we haven't seen before."

"But we haven't been exactly forthcoming with the Corps on what you did, Irwin. Not all of it, at least."

Frost shrugged, polished off his wine. "I did what I had to do...you remember how it was. We had a contract with Quantum Corps. We were behind schedule. That virus had a genome that had solved some of the same programming problems we had, and had done it a billion years ago. I took what Nature did and just altered it slightly."

"You're not bothered we've married a quantum processor to a virus...made Nature's most resilient survivor programmable, with the smarts of a five-year old child?"

"Mary, don't be so dramatic. I'm only bothered if we can't deliver to the Corps what our contract calls for. This whole Man-Machine Symbiosis Project's been a godsend for the Lab...and the University, you know that. If ANAD can be properly controlled and can help the Corps accomplish its mission, I think everyone will be satisfied. And we'll get our money."

The airliner touched down at Boise International a little after seven p.m. local time. Deplaning, Frost and Duncan spied the two Quantum Corps liaison officers in their black and gold uniforms straight away.

The taller one was Lieutenant Chambers. Chambers was angular, sharp-edges to his cheeks, with a shock of black hair that spilled out from under his cap. The second officer was female, a Lieutenant Robles. She was shorter, muscular, with a buzzcut that would have done any _nog_ school cadet proud. A hint of a pony tail bob stuck out the back of her cap.

Greetings and handshakes were made. Chambers said, "Drs. Frost and Duncan, we've got people getting your luggage now. They'll take it straight to the lifters."

"We're not driving up?" Frost asked, disappointed. "This time of year, I was hoping to show Mary the Buffalo Range from close up, all the snow and the aspens should make for quite a show."

Chambers was apologetic. "Sorry, sir, my orders are to get the both of you to the Mountain as fast as possible. We'll go by lifter."

They left the concourse, took a small Corps sedan out to the far end of the ramp. Two black lifters squatted like supersized spiders on their articulating legs, jets and rotors already turning. The two scientists were quickly hustled on board one of the lifters.

"Why two ships?" Frost asked, over the whine of the turbines as they spooled up for liftoff.

Robles smiled, somewhat mechanically Duncan thought. A well-rehearsed reflex, perhaps. PR types did that.

"Just backup, ma'am. Just in case."

The two lifters sprang into the air and turned about onto a northwesterly heading. They scooted up to five-thousand meters altitude, flitted through a few wispy late night clouds, then began the hour-long cruise up to Table Top. A crescent moon shone hard and bright over a snowy landscape below, crumped hills and valleys dotted with lights on the lower slopes of the mountains.

Frost watched thoughtfully. He had been to Table Top before. He knew most of the lights were vast lodges and mansions plastered all over the slopes of the hills, playgrounds for the rich and famous who came to this part of Idaho for the skiing and the scenery, and mostly to show off.

He didn't at first notice it when the second lifer began drifting off into the clouds. It was Mary Duncan who felt a measurable turn underway and tapped Frost on the shoulder.

"We seem to be turning away from the other plane," she observed.

Frost watched the darkened hillscape sliding by below. The mountains were still there, but there were fewer lights. The longer he watched, the more certain he was that they were leaving the mountains behind and the land was becoming flatter.

Presently, he looked up at Chambers. The Lieutenant seemed lost in thought as well, staring out the porthole on his side. When the lights they had been studying ended abruptly in a well-defined straight line, Frost realized they had turned off to the west and had been flying a westerly course for quite some time. He stirred a bit uneasily.

"Is that the coastline below, Lieutenant?"

Chambers at first said nothing. Frost looked more closely, Duncan peering out the porthole alongside. No question about it: they had crossed the Pacific coast, either Oregon or Washington, and were headed out over the ocean. Lieutenant Robles abruptly got up and came over to sit next to Frost. The hairs on the back of Frost's neck suddenly stood up.

"We're not going to Table Top, are we, Lieutenant?"

Robles seemed very real, but her expression also seemed a programmed reflex. Frost resisted trying to pinch the woman to see if she were an angel. He didn't think she was, but you couldn't always tell.

Robles forced a tight smile. "Not directly, Dr. Frost. We're just making a little detour. Relax...enjoy the ride."

Frost knew he would do anything but that.

The lifter bearing Frost and Duncan, with their Quantum Corps liaison officer escort, sped out over the Pacific, cruising along at a steady four hundred knots. Before long, the lights of the coastline dropped below the horizon. Now, only the black of the Pacific Ocean at night was left.

Frost looked over at Duncan. There was nothing they could do but sit back...and wonder.

UN Quantum Corps Base

Table Top Mountain

Idaho, USA

November 20, 2048

2200 hours

The crew's mess at Table Top was just outside the Commissary, attached by tunnel to the PX and within a short walk of A Barracks, known as 'Small Hall." The bar was done up in a South Pacific theme, with tiki birds everywhere, thatch roofs over the counter, the robo-bartender sporting a Panama hat at a jaunty angle and drinks that sometimes tasted like hog piss.

It was called "The Lagoon."

Johnny Winger was glum and reflective when he came in. Straight away, he spotted Deeno D'Nunzio, Mighty Mite Barnes and Moby M'Bela, all at one table. D'Nunzio had some kind of drink with a tiny pink parasol sticking out the top. The other two had beers. They waved the Lieutenant over and he ordered a beer from the slate menu. Moments later, the servbot was setting the frosty mug down on a table scarred with too many stains and cigarette burns.

"Why the long face, Skipper?" asked D'Nunzio. "You're back in one piece, you're in _The Lagoon_ and you've got a beer...what more could you want?"

"I could want my Detachment back whole and hearty," he said, between chugs. "Just came from the after-action review on what happened in Kolkata...Helms was an angel and nobody saw that coming. He even passed the PSV. Somebody should have known. _I_ should have known—"

"How do you figure that, Lieutenant," asked Barnes. "Helms was just out of nog school, a rookie, just passed the PSV and we all know Red Hammer's got some damn good bots now, damn good configs. You can't tell angels from Normals anymore. I mean, what could you have done?"

Winger shrugged. "Got my guys out of there faster. Noticed that Helms wasn't quite kosher when he reported to the Detachment. And the worst thing is ANAD...the little bugger may have been corrupted at Kipwezi...he was making an uncommanded launch, before we blasted our way out of that hellhole."

M'bela was sympathetic. "So what does Ironpants say about all this?"

Winger finished his beer, brushed off the bot when it came back offering a refill. "That there'll be an inquiry. That I may even be grounded for awhile...losing a whole Detachment, nearly losing my own ANAD...there are plenty of reasons for the Board to chew on. Major Kraft said I had a lot of things I'd have to answer for...personally, I think he's on my side, but you can't tell with these inquiries. I feel bad enough as it is...there had to be more I could have done."

D'Nunzio said, "Lieutenant, don't beat yourself up. Red Hammer's nasty...they've got all of us chasing shadows, jumping at our own reflections. This Symborg character's got the whole world stirred up...jeez, there are one hell of a lot of messed up people out there, with all that Assimilationist crap going on. What about ANAD?"

"Kraft said he's already drafted Doc Frost to come here, to Table Top. Doc'll decide what ANAD needs—" Winger checked the time. "In fact, his lifter is due to touch down any minute now."

That's when the chime on Winger's wristpad rang. It was Kraft. The message was simple:

Meet me in Containment in ten minutes. K.

Winger finished the dregs of his beer and headed out. Mighty Mites Barnes bit her lip at the sight. The Lieutenant looked like a dog headed to the pound.

Dr. Irwin Frost's avuncular face was the first thing Winger saw when he scanned through all the biometrics and locks and came into Containment Bay 4. Kraft and Lofton were both there, along with Frost's long-time assistant, Dr. Mary Duncan.

Frost's face brightened. "Johnny, it's so good to see you again. I heard you and ANAD had some adventures recently." The doctor didn't offer a hand, something that Winger noted, but didn't think any more about it at the time.

Winger made greetings all around. "Major Lofton, Major Kraft—yes, Doc, it's true. ANAD may have been corrupted at Kipwezi. We were inside a cave, approaching what we thought was Symborg and ANAD started to make an uncommanded launch. My shoulder port came open."

Frost gave that some thought. "I have the master here in containment. We were just about to take a look."

With Mary Duncan's help, Frost powered up the imager and set resolution at max. On the display, a scaffolding materialized into view. Something that looked like a bunch of grapes hung off the scaffolding, quivering slightly, beating to some inner rhythm. Frost clucked and hmmm'ed as he methodically scanned the device, from one end to another. "...propulsors look okay...flagellar thrusters seem okay...don't see any seams in the outer casing...of course, we'll have to run ANAD through some full operating cycles...Johnny, can you describe what you were doing...exactly what happened?"

Winger went over the details of their encounter with Symborg at Kipwezi, then the strange occurrences at the temple in Kolkata. "That platform at the temple seemed to be some kind of communication device. I don't know if it affected ANAD or not...but the little guy's been sluggish ever since. He accepts commands, but execution isn't always accurate...it's like something's scrambled in processing."

Frost said, "You may be more right than you know, Johnny." To Kraft, Frost added, "Major, the only sure way to recover ANAD's full capabilities is to regenerate. Mary and I will examine his processor line by line to be sure. But it would be quicker to start over. "

This idea made Kraft wince. His face resembled a cherry pie that someone had just dropped on the floor, with a cat's tail of a moustache thrown in. "Doctor, we don't have time. I've got tasking for follow-on mission to deal with Symborg and other Red Hammer targets. We want to recon that device in Kolkata and put it out of commission for good. I need ANAD whole and hearty. Can't you just give him a quick checkup and make some adjustments?"

Frost and Duncan looked at each other. To Johnny Winger, the Doc seemed a bit more distant than normal; perhaps, it was the pressure of the moment. His face seemed pale and he kept jamming his hands in his coat pocket...something Frost had never done before. Doc Frost always used his hands as an extension of his mouth. He couldn't say a coherent sentence without his hands. But now---

Frost took a deep breath. "Major, when I first created ANAD, we had some pretty tough programming issues. They stumped us for months. The Corps was pressing hard to have a functioning unit as soon as possible...so I had to take some shortcuts."

"You're talking about using the genome of that virus. I already know all about that."

"True enough," Frost admitted. "But there are still things in ANAD's basic kernel that we don't fully understand. We did what we had to do to make ANAD work. But we're still finding a few surprises. Major, ANAD's like a five-year old child, in many ways. Computationally, he has the cognitive capacity of a five-year old. But as with any five-year old, ANAD sometimes does things that surprise us. I'd like to have the time to get inside his core code and pick everything apart...someday, I'll do that. But you need a functioning autonomous nanoscale device for your missions, and you need it as quickly as possible. Major, what I'm saying is that if I regenerate the ANAD core from scratch, you're more likely to get what you need sooner."

Winger spoke up. He didn't want to lose one of his true buddies. "Doc, ANAD and I have become pretty close ever since he was born. If you regen, will he be the same?"

This made Kraft roll his eyes. "Lieutenant, ANAD is just a weapon. I know they teach you in _nog_ school that your weapons are your best friends. That doesn't mean he'll drink beers with you at the O club...or floss your teeth for you."

Frost was sympathetic. "Johnny, if the Major allows me to run the regeneration again, trust me: ANAD'll be as good as new. Maybe better. More to the point, he'll respond to your commands and execute programs with no problems. And that's what we all want."

It wasn't what Doc Frost said but more the way he said it. Winger acknowledged the thought, but there was just something different about the Doc today. He couldn't quite put his finger on it. Mary Duncan too. Normally, they argued like an old married couple. Frost muttered like the garage tinkerer he was. Duncan was forever making him wipe his mouth and tuck his flannel shirt in...in this, she was like a grandmother, to Frost and to Winger. But now...they seemed almost formal, distant, almost distracted. They thought for long seconds about everything Kraft and Lofton said. They answered in flat monotones.

_I guess we all act like bots sometimes,_ Winger decided. _Occupational hazard, when you worked with them all the time._

Kraft was about to order the Doc to get on with it, when Major Lofton interrupted. He'd been streaming some kind of news feed on his wristpad. "Hey, take a look at this. Another SOLNET special about Symborg." He tapped a button on his wristpad and the feed went 3-D, expanding out into the containment room right in front of them....

Solnet/Omnivision Video Post

@anika.radovich.solnetworldview

November 20, 2048

2230 hours

SOLNET Special Report:

An Epidemic of Angels?

_This Solnet Special Report will cover the growing epidemic of_ angelizing _that has been sweeping the world over the last few months. It's been going on for weeks but has become more common in recent days. All over the world, in most major cities and countries, millions of people are reporting that friends and loved ones have disappeared and the person they thought was a loved one is not, but rather someone or something different. Reporter Anika Radovich visited recently with noted psychology professor Dr. Seth Gaylord of UCLA, and reports on what could be causing such a mass hallucination._

"Good morning, Dr. Gaylord. Thank you for taking the time to be with us today."

"My pleasure, Anika. I'll try to answer your questions the best I can."

"Dr. Gaylord, law enforcement and health authorities worldwide are increasingly overwhelmed in many cities and regions with this phenomena that has come to be known as 'angelizing'. This epidemic has many people on edge. Some religions are reporting that what is happening is evidence of an impending Day of Judgment and the end times. Are we seeing some kind of mass hallucination at work here?"

"Well, Anika, as a scientist, I like to define my terms first. When we say angels, what exactly are we talking about? The most effective definition of an angel would be a swarm assembly of nanoscale robotic elements, so configured as to resemble a human being in all measures. A sort of pseudo-human, but made up of nanobots."

"Angels, as you describe them Dr. Gaylord, have been around for years, have they not?"

"They have, Anika, but in recent months, for a variety of reasons, the growth of angel technology and angel acceptance by our society has exploded."

"To what do you attribute this growth?"

"Primarily, I attribute this growth to the spread of Assimilationism. This is an ideology, some would say a religion,that promotes and celebrates angels and the associated technology."

"Why has Assimilationism become so popular today, Dr. Gaylord?"

"Well, Anika, this is an interesting psychological phenomenon. As you know, I have written extensively on this subject. (see Gaylord, Dr. Seth, "Epi-social Spiritual Phenomena among Technologically Advanced Stage 4 Populations."). We find even among many so-called advanced societies a vestigial longing for stability and security. This is an innate coping mechanism among Homo sapiens and has endured in our genome for thousands of years; it helps us survive and adapt to environments which are changing rapidly, as ours is."

"How does this longing for security relate to the rapid growth of angels, Doctor?"

"Well, because angels are so prevalent today, we often say you can't even tell about your own neighbor: are they real humans? Are they angels, that is, are they swarms of bots that resemble humans so closely, you can't tell if they're real? Because of this insecurity about what is real and what is not, we seek answers, totems, icons, explanations, whatever you want to call them, to cling to. Things that we perceive are real. Things that are solid and stable. Assimilationism offers this assurance...that there is an explanation for all these changes, that there is a greater story here and they offer believers a chance to be a part of it."

"You're taking about the Old Ones and the so-called Mother Swarm."

"Certainly. For many people, God has vanished. But throughout history, human beings have sought explanations for things they don't understand, things that they can't explain. The ancients created gods in every part of nature: a sun good, a moon god, a god of the oceans, and so forth. Later, we subsumed all our gods into one overall benevolent Heavenly Father. Now, that no longer seems adequate to comfort us when our neighbors, our friends, even our spouses may be something other than we thought. They may be angels."

"Doesn't science provide explanations? I mean, angels are just nanoscale assembler technology that have achieved incredibly real and lifelike configurations. There's a technical explanation for all this."

"True enough, Anika, but our gods provide one thing that science can never provide."

"What is that, Dr. Gaylord?"

"Science provides detailed explanations. But science does not provide meaning. It doesn't provide purpose. Those are moral and ethical concerns. That's what makes Assimilationists so compelling...that's why Assimilationists celebrate angels and de-construction and being absorbed into a mother swarm...it provides a purpose for all we see going on."

"Dr. Gaylord, do you think what the Assimilationists claim about the Old Ones is true? Do you think the Old Ones are real? Or are they a projection of this longing you describe?"

"As a psychologist, I have to say that something you believe in is as real as it takes for you to believe in it. To you, to any believer, it is absolutely real. If you act and move and think as though something is real, then for you, it is real."

"Actually, I was speaking objectively, Dr. Gaylord. Are the Old Ones a real entity that we all can see and agree is real?"

"Ah, now Anika, you are beginning to sound just like a psychologist. That's the old Cartesian dualism, isn't it? Real and material versus something in my mind. _I think, therefore I am._ You know, there is a school of thought that says we created the Old Ones. That we _are_ the Old Ones. I find that an appealing answer to your question."

"Then you believe the Old Ones aren't real?"

"Oh, I believe they're real, all right. I believe that you, investigative reporter Anika Radovich are real too. But then, you might well be an angel, too, and a very attractive one at that. How can one tell these days?"

"Thank you, Dr. Gaylord, for taking the time to be with us today."

"It was my pleasure, Anika."

As a part of our continuing effort to bring the most compelling and newsworthy stories on the angel phenomenon to you, Solnet Special Report sent correspondent Anika Radovich to Freeburg, Tennessee, to interview the citizens of this small town and get their views on what is happening. While every news source is unique, Special Report found that the views and opinions of the people of this mountain hamlet were particularly representative of the most commonly held views across our audience.

"I'm standing here on the side of Main Street in Freeburg, Tennessee, with one of the more notable citizens of this lovely town, nestled in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. Mr. Lanier Barnes has achieved a certain notice, some would say notoriety, for Freeburg as a result of his strongly-held opinions about angels and Assimilationists. Mr. Barnes, welcome to _Special Report_ and thanks for taking the time to be with us."

"Well, shoot, Anika, what's a fellow going to do when a pretty young thing like yourself comes sashaying by. Where'd you say you were from?"

"Thank you, Mr. Barnes. Actually, Germany. Mr. Barnes, could you explain what all these people have gathered for? I see you've got some kind of rally going."

(COMMAND TO DRONECAM: Altitude 20 meters. Wide-angle establishing shot...be sure to center Barnes and get the Courthouse Square and those mountains in the background...I'll add effects later)

"That's right, young lady. Every day this week, we got a rally going right here on Main Street. Just look at 'em, must be several hundred of these good folks today."

"What's the purpose of your rally, sir?"

"Well, we've been rallying and Net-blasting for some time now, trying to call attention to the gravest problem we face today."

"Which is--?"

Barnes' face takes on a pained look, like something he had eaten didn't agree with him. "Those pointy-headed bureaucrats at the UN won't enforce the danged Sanctuary Laws. You know, all the Containment Laws. Hell, we already fought wars over that, didn't we? All the friggin' haloheads and asses are taking over."

"Mr. Barnes, I am assuming you are referring to angels and Assimilationists?"

"Darn right, sweetie. Angels and asses. They should be quarantined, like the scum they are. We need to stick the lot of 'em into camps, like we did to the Japs back in the 20th century...you know: enemy aliens."

(DRONECAM IMAGE FILE 223.832: Placards and signs wave in vigorous agreement with Barnes. Other members of the rally close in around the speaker. There is some good-natured shoving and shouts of "Damn right!" "Give it to 'em straight, Barnes!) (AR Annotation File).

"Mr. Barnes, angels are just machines. Swarm configurations of nanobots configured to resemble human beings...surely you don't think of these machines as enemy aliens?"

"They're bugs, all of them. I don't think of dangerous viruses as enemy aliens either...but I don't want 'em around. All these bugs are eating our food, drinking our water, mating with our women...they need to be in camps."

"Excuse me, Mr. Barnes...did you say mating with our women? I'm not aware of any angels accused of sexual engagements with actual humans."

"Oh, Missy, you don't know the half of it." A middle-aged woman with short-cropped black hair squeezes out of the crowd and stands before Anika. The reporter whispers into her lip mike _DRONECAM...get a close-up of this_ —"These bugs have been defiling our daughters and sisters for years. I know it's supposed to be illegal, but you know it goes on. What kind of offspring could possibly come from such infernal liaisons...monsters, half-bred freaks, that's what."

Barnes cuts in. "We're rallying today to get the Town Council of Freeburg to take a stand. Here...get your friggin' bird-camera down here and I'll show you—"

Radovich sent the command and the dronecam wheeled about and descended slowly on its whirring quadrotors, hovering just over their heads. Its multiplex cameras zoomed in and Radovich adjusted the view she was getting on her SuperQuark glasses, pecking at a small wristpad. _DRONECAM...hold there_ —

"You're holding up a sign, Mr. Barnes. Would you mind reading out loud and then explaining what it's about."

"Surely." Barnes held the placard so the dronecam would get a clear closeup. "It says _MAKE CHASTAIN HILL A BUG CAMP!_ We want the Town Council to designate the whole Chastain Hill area as a sort of re-settlement camp for haloheads...er, I mean angels. Keep 'em separate from the rest of us, so they won't contaminate everything in sight."

"Just enforce the damned Containment Laws!" came a voice from the back of the crowd.

There was a chorus of "Yeahs!" and a sea of fists waving and pumping up and down.

Anika Radovich quietly instructed the dronecam to rise back to twenty meters and pan the crowd, which was getting more agitated.

"Mr. Barnes, you have referred to your followers as Hellcats. Why this name?"

Barnes sniffed, waved his hand expansively around the gathering. "We think of ourselves as normalizers. We enforce normality. Haloheads and asses ain't normal. We call ourselves Hellcats 'cause we intend to make life hell for these scumbugs."

Anika Radovich found it expedient to thank Barnes for the interview and back herself out of the crowd, which was closing in steadily, shouting, jeering, fist-pumping. She had started to feel smothered and hand-waved the dronecam to follow. Radovich retired to a street corner on the other side of Main Street, out in front of Collier's Drug Store.

While Barnes and his followers surged like an angry mob down the street toward the town hall, she decided to add some commentary to the footage they already had.

"It should be noted that Lanier Barnes and the rallies he has been leading the last few days here in Freeburg are anything but exceptional. Similar rallies and protests exist in many countries and cities around the world, in Europe and Asia, even parts of Africa. The rallies and the demands sometimes take different forms. But the underlying animosity toward angels and Assimilationists in general is the same. A deeply-felt sentiment is growing that angels need to be contained and Assimilationists should be gathered into concentration camps and isolated from society.

"Solnet _Special Report_ always strives to be fair and objective in our reporting. Before making this trip to Freeburg, this reporter spent some time at a Church of Assimilation rally, an 'awakening', as they call it, just outside of London. We interviewed assimilation volunteers in a queue at the Westfields Market, lined up to be de-constructed... about just why they are doing this...."

LINK TO VIDEO POST FILE V.399.122....

Establishing shot from dronecam Sparrow One, at one hundred meters altitude, longitude 0 degrees, fifteen minutes, latitude fifty-two degrees, thirty minutes.

Anika Radovich annotation file: A sea of humanity covers the car parks that surround Westfields Market. Inside the mall, shoppers browse as usual, seeking bargains, buying vids and other gear, new shows, football jerseys, the usual stuff. Outside the mall, chaos reigns. But it seems to be a happy chaos.

All along one end of the car park, in place of lorries, cars, taxis and buses, are the booths. These booths are emblematic of any Assimilationist rally. These booths are where the awakening occurs, to use the Church of Assimilation's own literature describing what is to happen. Some say it is a form of mass, assisted suicide. Some say it's insane. Assimilationists say it is the truth of the universe, a re-absorption of our essence into the great mother swarm. A necessary step to prepare for the coming of the Old Ones.

_Special Report_ came to Westfields Market to find out which point of view is right. Maybe a little of both.

Her name was Lucy Nkira. She was tall, maybe with a bit of Masai in her background, proud, a bit fluttery and nervous. She grinned sheepishly as one of the techs helped her into the assimilator booth.

"A great day," she muttered. "Great day...so proud."

The assimilator tech was named Gavin. He sat at a console just outside the booth, while another tech helped Lucy inside and made her comfortable on the seat. Gavin shut and latched the door, pressing a button to begin the seal and containment process. In seconds, a tight bot-proof seal had been formed around the interior of the booth, a barrier formed of electron injectors and a dedicated botscreen.

"Let's do it," Gavin said. The other tech pressed buttons.

Inside the booth, a fog had formed...that was the first layer of nanobots released into the compartment. Lucy disappeared into the fog, only a leg and a shoulder could be seen.

The fog thickened. A faint buzz could be heard from inside the booth. Gavin watched as the cloud of bots thickened. More and more bots were released and replicated, swelling to fill every cubic millimeter of the booth.

Lucy didn't move. Anika Radovich commanded the dronecam in tight, focusing on her right leg. At first, it was unchanged, a smooth black leg with a section of her print dress showing, hitched up just above her knee. But even as Radovich watched, the black of her skin had begun to fade. In moments, it was almost gray, like the fog itself, oscillating between darker and lighter, but still gray. Then the gray became a translucent shimmer, almost like a ghost, flickering slightly, but growing ever dimmer. Her shoulder was the same.

Lucy Nkira was slowly but steadily being disassembled. She was being steadily broken down into a pattern, a pattern of atoms and molecules.

The end came softly, almost as if the woman were walking away in a light rain. Her body, the physical Lucy Nkira, began to fade inside the booth. At first, it had been barely perceptible, just a faint blurring of her skin, her extremities, a smearing of her legs and shoulder, as if a photo had lost contrast.

In time, and the time was less than five minutes, Lucy Nkira had devolved—that was Anika Radovich's word—into a nearly translucent shadow, still recognizable in form, but without substance. You could see right through the form and the shadow to the other side of the booth.

And then she was gone. Enveloped and enmeshed and at one with the greater swarm of nanobotic mechs that was Symborg.

And Anika swallowed hard...seeing in her mind's eye the face and the disappearing Cheshire cat smile of Lucy Nkira.

Anika Radovich Annotation File: This was a typical sequence of events occurring all over the world at Church of Assimilation rallies, awakenings, as they call them. As you can see, the 'volunteer' is quite gone and fully disassembled. There is no effective means that this reporter knows of to re-construct the volunteer, or reverse the process. It is, in fact, a form of assisted suicide.

We'll try to move in and get some comments and interviews with other supporters and volunteers....

"Excuse me, sir...ma'am... I'm Anika Radovich, Solnet _Special Report_. I'd like to ask you a few questions...what exactly are you trying to achieve here at Westfields?"

A young woman, early twenties, hair in a severe crewcut, with braided bangs off to one side, consents to be interviewed. She yells in Anika's face:

"FOLLOW SYMBORG NOW! SYMBORG IS TRUE LOVE!"

Others nearby join in and the air is filled with the same rhythmic chant.

"FOLLOW SYMBORG NOW!"

"Uh, Miss...could you tell me... _Miss_? Could you tell me your name, please? We're live on Solnet _Special Report_ right now...." She pointed skyward at the leering dronecam hovering ten meters above them.

"It's...um, it's...yeah, that's right... _Follow Symborg_...it's Jane...Jane Nyquist."

"You've got a big rally going here...what's it all about, Jane?"

"We want Symborg to come here, be with us here. Now. He's somewhere in Asia and he's our hero."

Radovich consulted her wristpad, pulled up an image of the robotic messiah who had mesmerized the world over the last few months. "How do you know he's still around?"

"He has to be. Symborg can be anywhere...we just want him to come here."

"Some people say that Symborg is a menace, that he advocates violent overthrow of governments. Some say he's just a machine, you know, a collection of bots."

Jane looked hurt. "Nonsense. Symborg epitomizes all that is good and right with Assimilationism. _Follow Symborg now_!"

Others around Jane and Anika Radovich joined in. The dronecam captured all of it.

_Jeez, this'll make great footage_ , Anika thought. Then she saw a commotion on her wristpad vidfeed...a disturbance along the far end of the Westfields car park. Anika commanded _Sparrow One_ to wheel about and investigate.

A long queue near one of the assimilator booths had broken down into a violent confrontation. Chaos and bedlam had come to Westfields. Soon, Metropolitan Police squads in full riot gear pushed their way into the crowd.

_Sparrow One_ captured it all on vid.

Solnet Special Report Ends

Major Lofton switched off 3-D from his wristpad. "Gives me the creeps. You know, we had to institute Physical Security Verification protocols because of that scumbag. Once Trooper Helms turned out to be an angel...that insert mission in Kolkata that Winger mentioned...we had to really tighten up the PSV procedures. You just can't tell anymore."

Kraft nodded. "Table Top's on lockdown now." He turned back to Frost and Duncan. "Doc, get on with it. Full regeneration. Make it work and make it quick. I've already got more tasking to go after that creep Symborg and his Red Hammer buddies again."

Frost said, "Very well, Major. With your permission, I'd like to have Johnny Winger with us for awhile. I'd like to make sure what we regenerate is compatible with his shoulder capsule and coupler...make sure everything gets synched properly."

"As you wish, Doctor. But I'll need the Lieutenant for a full briefing tomorrow morning at 0600 hours."

With that, Kraft and Lofton cycled out Containment Bay 4. Frost, Duncan and Winger watched them depart, then settled in for a long night of work.

"I'll get a couple of coffee pots," Winger offered.

Work began right away. For Winger, watching Doc Frost and Mary Duncan dump ANAD's core was like watching his brother Brad go through a lobotomy...not that such an idea was all that bad. But it was sad.

"He's been a real buddy of mine from the beginning," he said. "Almost like a brother, actually better than a brother. We've become really close. Will the new ANAD be like the old...same personality, same quirks and so forth?"

Frost was sympathetic. Bringing up ANAD from bare code to a fully functioning nanoscale robotic assembler had been for him like watching the child he'd never had grow up, with all the pains and heartaches and thrills any parent could experience.

"That's the plan, Johnny. We start with the basic kernel of code, add the core components—main memory, buffers, config translator and the rest of his processor. Stick on the main platform and actuator mast, the power cells and the propulsors."

Mary Duncan was manipulating the outer casing shell of the bot onto the scaffolding inside the containment tank. The imager showed what she was doing. It was like trying to split a hair on your head with scissors while wearing gloves, but the atomic force scope had quantum tweezers that could do the job. She added, "Then comes all the sensors and actuators, Johnny. Pyridine probes, carbene grabbers, enzymatic knife, hydrogen abstractors."

"And the bond disrupters," Winger said. "Don't forget those."

Frost showed him a tablet with all the steps of the regeneration procedure listed, in order, with materials and special tools needed, listed with times and appropriate cautions and warnings. Frost had done the list for the Corps had the outset of the Man-Machine Symbiosis Project.

Winger perused the list:

Lay in triggers

Seed growth medium

Base replication

Learn-in comm centers

Activate sensor algorithms

Test basic operations

Unit readiness checks

While he scanned the list, Winger didn't notice two others had just entered the containment bay. One was a tall, lanky trooper named Pierce, with a shock of blond hair sticking out the side of his hairnet.

The other was a female, a newly-minted Lieutenant fresh out of nog school. She was a petite, tough-talking brunette with a bite and her name was Dana Tallant. In some ways, she reminded Winger of Deeno D'Nunzio, only with a menace to her tight-lipped smile and hard cheek planes that gave him pause.

Tallant stuck out a hand. "Dana Tallant. Major Kraft sent me over to help out in the re-gen. I'm commanding 2nd Nano."

Over the course of the evening, Winger and Tallant got to know each other, in the same way two bulls circled each other sniffing and snorting and pawing the dirt.

By 4 a.m., the master bot that would become ANAD 2.0 was coming along nicely. Frost looked old and haggard but the crooked smile behind his bent glasses gave away the growing satisfaction he felt at watching his creation take shape before their eyes. For her part, Mary Duncan looked composed, though fatigued, rather like your grandmother looked after staying up all night with a sick child.

"Let's take a short break," Frost suggested. "The unit readiness checks are next and we need to be fresh for that. Plus I want to initialize your shoulder capsule, Johnny, and make sure it's ready to receive ANAD properly. "

Tallant's eyebrows went up. "Unit readiness checks?"

Winger wasted no time showing off what he knew. "Sure...look, here they are: load tactic- al config templates, combat swarm ops, basic replication exercises, program and control system integration, response checks, exercise all inhibits and constraints...."

Tallant noticed Winger had moved particularly close to her face. She inched away and glared up at the atomgrabber saying, "I like the part about exercising inhibits and constraints best, Lieutenant Winger."

"Hey, just Johnny will do. What say, we cycle out and get some fresh air? Maybe a coffee or two."

Tallant agreed to that. They stopped by the commissary, picked up some caffeine from the servbot and headed outside. It was a cold, clear night in the Buffalo range and stars speckled the sky from one horizon to the next. The winds whipped across the top of the mesa and both troopers sheltered themselves in the lee of a panel truck, unloading supplies for the coming day.

Winger sipped cautiously at the scalding liquid, his face wreathed in steam. "Major Kraft hasn't told me much about 2nd Nano. I knew it was coming. Is your TOE the same as ours?"

Tallant shrugged. "We should have the same ratings as you. Command and control, I/O, containerization, quantum engineering, DPS, the usual stuff. We stand up in a few weeks. Not all ratings are filled yet. Kraft wants to go over the records of recent cadets...I do get to have a say in who joins up." She slurped some coffee, spilled a bit, and swore.

Winger watched Tallant out of the corner of her eye. She intrigued him, almost as much as ANAD itself. "Been on any ops yet? In the field?"

Tallant looked up, a set to her lips that spoke volumes. "Just sims and exercises and you don't have to gloat about it. I know all about you, Winger. I know what you've done. I don't need it rubbed in my face. When the time comes, 2nd Nano will be able to take care of itself. We'll be the Corps' poster child for kick-ass atomgrabbers."

Winger backed off. She spoke like a fourth-year nog, all spit and vinegar, and she had a cute butt as well. Maybe a little rough around the edges but field ops had a way of polishing that off.

"I can't wait to get my ANAD back. Him and me, we've been through a lot lately, what with Mali, Lions Rock, Kipwezi, Kolkata. It's not gloating...just the facts, ma'am."

Tallant chuckled. "Winger, are you consciously trying to aggravate me or are you just naturally an asshole?"

Winger finished off his cup, set it down on the tire of the panel truck and spread his hands. "Hey, what can I say? ANAD and me got thrown into the fire before we were ready. I'm just saying: the same thing could happen to you. Don't be surprised if old Ironpants sends you off to Timbuktu...you know, we weren't far from there when we were in Mali, by the way—before you've even got your pants on. Atomgrabbers have to be ready...small is all."

Now Tallant had to laugh. "At ease, Cadet Winger. We're not in nog school anymore and you're no recruiter. I can see we've got a lot of crap to get through, you and me, Lieutenant. Before we can buddy up on an op, I mean. I know what I don't know. I know I'm a rookie. I know there's a lot you can teach me about ops and command and all that crap. I just don't like having it rubbed in my face, you know?"

"Fair enough," Winger said. _Touchy little bitch, this one._ "You've seen how ANAD gets built tonight. Yours should be similar. So what's next for you?"

Tallant warmed her hands around the fading heat of the coffee cup, rubbed the edge against her cheeks. "Kraft wants me to sit in on some intel briefings. Lofton and his crew. There's scuttlebutt that Q2's working with some agents inside Red Hammer...sources they've turned and are trying to get placed as high as possible. Kraft said that may be our best hope to get at the guts of the cartel...maybe even take down Symborg and his cronies."

Winger and Tallant headed back inside, cycling through all the biometrics and locks into Containment Bay 4. "Could be ticklish, doing that, Tallant. I know from experience that catching Symborg is like catching flies. Unless we can crash the nest, it won't do any good."

Tallant was sober about what they were facing. "Just between you and me, Wings, Kraft and Lofton are working on an idea...a snatch and grab somewhere in east Asia. Ironpants has told me there is one source they'd like to pull out of Red Hammer before the Bigs get wind that he's betraying them. Somebody's got to lead the op...somebody the Hammer doesn't know. I volunteered."

Ignoring the fact that she'd just called him 'Wings', Winger decided he wanted to get to know this touchy little atomgrabber better. Maybe a bite of breakfast at Ptomaine Hall, a.k.a the Mess Hall, could be arranged.

"Be careful what you volunteer for, Lieutenant," he told her, as they checked in on ANAD's status. "You might just get it."

Frost was all smiles when the two troopers approached the containment tank. "I think we have a new baby boy here. Johnny, sit over on that couch...let's get your capsule prepped and ready. Mary will help you. ANAD 2.0's about to have his coming-out party—"

That's when Tallant and Winger both noticed Frost's left hand, manipulating the keypad that would eventually release the tiny bot. His hand was faintly fuzzy, pale and shadowy, as if it were something less than solid skin. Frost saw their look and quickly jammed his hand back in his coat pocket.

Chapter 2

" **Defector"**

Kurabantu Island, the south Pacific

November 21, 2048

1100 hours

Nigel Skinner had worked at the Red Hammer compound on Kurabantu Island for nearly a year. His job was simple, relatively straightforward: to release, monitor and control small swarms of nanobots into the air over the island. It was all part of the Project, always the Project, and Skinner had been diligent and reliable for the most of the year he had been there. Nobody could say otherwise.

Today was different. Skinner had been having second thoughts about the Project, about being part of Red Hammer, even being assigned to this lush tropical island, for quite some time. He kept his doubts to himself. Hong Chui, or Red Hammer as it was more often known around the back alleys of East Asia, was notorious for secrecy and security. You opened your mouth at your own risk. Skinner wasn't afraid of dying; on the contrary, he was afraid of living, living a single day longer in the belly of the beast that the Project had become.

The truth was that Skinner had been planning to defect for some time now. Just when the idea had formed in his mind, he wasn't sure. You had to be careful when you had a halo, for even subversive thoughts could get you in trouble. He had worked out the rudiments of a plan to defect and contact UNIFORCE, to let them know what was going on deep within the bowels of a small island in the Marquesas chain of the south Pacific.

Why? Revenge, perhaps. Souvranamh and the Ruling Council wouldn't allow him to transfer out, wouldn't allow him up to the mountain in Tibet, where the real work was done, and where some of his questions could be answered. Conscience. Bad dreams, though that could have been the halo at work, snooping along trails of glutamate molecules inside his brain, hunting down thoughts and memories that shouldn't have been there. Maybe a little fear too.

Unfortunately, Skinner had been prevented from pursuing any ideas about escape by the presence of Red Hammer's halo...it was something every member of the organization hosted. An embedded nanobotic control system infesting his mind and body, a hammer that would keep him from disrupting the Project or performing acts disloyal to the cartel.

Everyone had a halo. It was a personal shield that went wherever you did. Made sure you did what you were supposed to do, that nothing and no one could interfere. Another member he had met once, an American Indian named Windsinger, had put it this way: "I think and my halo acts. Like the great spirit of the mountains, always watching over me. My shadow, my armor...even my soul."

It was the price of membership in Red Hammer.

But Skinner had discovered a fatal weakness in the halo and the time had come to take advantage of it.

Earlier that night, after the sun had gone down, he had slipped out of the residential quarter tucked into the foothills of the island's great volcano Tuontavik, and made his way through steep forested ravines and narrow dirt paths to a headland of rocky cliffs overlooking an isolated beach on the northwest flanks of the island. With him, he carried a small pod, not much bigger than a loaf of bread. It was a portable containment cylinder, filled with nanobotic organisms, well secured inside the cylinder.

Skinner was, of course, well aware of the existence of UNIFORCE's BioShield nanobots circulating in the lower troposphere of the Earth's atmosphere. He knew as well that BioShield was especially sensitive to the presence of rogue or unlicensed 'bots. Knowing that, it was a small matter of concocting a batch of the mechs inside the lab, not enough to warrant concern but sufficient to trigger a reaction from BioShield and bring unwanted attention to what was going on at Kurabantu Island.

He had worked out the plan in scraps and pieces, so far successfully compartmentalizing the details enough to avoid intervention from the halo. There had been probes and jabs, to be sure, often coming late at night when he was trying to sleep—he could feel them—but so far, nothing serious had happened. The halo, if it had detected anything, hadn't found a pattern to interpret.

Skinner prided himself on knowing how the blasted thing worked, knowing how the 'bots sniffed out residual trails of glutamate molecules, the freight carriers of memory, and constructed crude renditions of memory traces inside a brain, even up to fifteen days after the trail had been laid down. He knew the halo 'bots were designed to shuttle around inside your head like a bunch of bees, sniffing out calcium sinks in every neuron, looking for equal concentrations, down to the parts per trillion. He knew that everywhere the concentrations were equal was a pathway, burned in, a sort of memory trace, like an echo. The 'bots looked for that, sent back data on whatever they found—calcium levels, sodium levels, activation times, lots of data. In the master 'bot's processor, all that data could be re-constructed into a very crude version of what had originally laid down the trail.

He knew all that, but knowing it and defeating it were different things. Still, he had to try.

Only a year and a half had passed since Skinner had been sponsored into Red Hammer membership and allowed himself to be halo'ed. He'd signed on with Red Hammer, South Asia division, only in the fall of '47, sponsored by none other than Souvranamh himself, the _neurotraficante_ of the Ruling Council. He'd been put to work on something known only as the Project; with talents in environmental engineering, nanoswarm control algorithms and meteorological engineering, Skinner figured he'd be a worthy addition to the effort.

Assigned duties at Kurabantu station, Skinner plunged into the details of his work: generating and maintaining nanobotic master assemblers, improving their capabilities, initiating and maintaining swarm dispersion for atmosphere modification. He had no other life anyway. He was rootless Brit, like so many of his ancestors had been in the Colonial Service of the Empire. Born in Birmingham (ca. 2003). Something of a child prodigy in school. Honors and letters from Cambridge in Chemistry and Environmental Sciences.

He had lived in India most of his life. Both parents had died in a lifter crash in 2040. For the last ten years, he had lived in a New Delhi high-rise, worked for the Interior Ministry in freshwater remediation, met engineering and nanobotic pollution abatement.

He'd joined BioShield in 2045 after the Serengeti plague, worked on swarm communications and controls, and had been released in '46 on suspicion of embezzlement and misuse of agency resources (even now, Skinner could hear his own voice rising in anger at the hearing: "this charge of unauthorized tampering with core ANAD BioShield algorithms without approval is patently ridiculous...nothing but a witch hunt—")

But he was out on the street, nonetheless, and he thirsted for a way to embarrass BioShield and get back at the pinheads who had thrown him out on some kind of technicality. That was when Skinner learned through the New Delhi underground of something called Hong Chui.

His highest level contact inside Red Hammer had always been Souvranamh's deputy Kawati Chandrigarh, a musician turned gene designer whom Skinner had taken an instant liking to. One day, curious and frustrated by the lack of detail about his job, Skinner had asked Chandrigarh about the Project.

Chandrigarh had thick, bushy eyebrows that framed a cat's face with ludicrous animation. He explained the Project was an effort to discredit UNIFORCE and the Quantum Corps by making BioShield ineffective, so UNIFORCE would have to use Red Hammer designs under license.

Skinner had done his job well enough. By the end of the year, though, he had become increasingly uneasy at the planned extent and depth of atmosphere modification being undertaken. He related his concerns to Chandrigarh, his discomfort with the extent of the modifications, wondering if "we really need to go this far."

Chandrigarh told him not to worry.

Later, Skinner had an attack of conscience and tried to weaken the control links and blunt some of the worst effects of the swarms.

That's when his halo went off.

It was his first experience with Red Hammer discipline and it wasn't pleasant. Skinner began to suspect he had made a mistake joining Hong Chui, suspecting he had gotten into something he couldn't get out of.

He was a competent enough nanobotic engineer, though, so he decided he ought to be able to figure out how to 'dial back' the worst effects of the swarms. The Project wasn't what he thought it was...somehow it had gone beyond teaching UNIFORCE a lesson and had entered new territory...now people were dying, lots of them, and growing swaths of the planet's atmosphere were becoming toxic and uninhabitable. Serious, perhaps irreparable damage was being done to the Earth's atmosphere. The ransoms would come later, he'd been told.

Chandrigarh chided him for being naïve. "Don't be so dense...that's the whole point of it," the Indian scientist had said. That's when Skinner first learned of rumors concerning the leader of Red Hammer, the Keeper of the Sphere. Not even human, they said. A machine. A spirit. Something halfway in between. At first, Skinner didn't put a lot of stock in the tales.

With conditions worsening, angels exploding in popularity, Symborg a new menace and a global crisis brewing, Skinner tried several times to modify and weaken the swarms, but his halo wouldn't let him. To join Red Hammer, he had given up free will and control of his mind. By early '48, he knew he was effectively a prisoner.

Out of desperation, he began looking for a way out, a way to escape. Completely opposite to his original disgust with BioShield, now he wanted out of Red Hammer and somehow, he had to let UNIFORCE know what was going on. Revenge was no longer so important. With the halo, it was more a matter of survival.

But first he had to find a way to beat the halo. After investigating and experimenting, he learned that the nanobotic control system embedded in the ventral tegmentum of his brain became effectively useless at the point of death. The brain's 'death chemicals' could override the halo and blunt its effects.

Skinner didn't want to die. He just wanted to come as close as possible to it, so he could be rid of the halo forever. He figured if he could come close enough to death to cascade a flood of death chemicals throughout his brain, the halo would be weakened enough to succumb to a quick shock injection of something like ANAD.

Late one evening, on a walking trip to the limestone cliffs on the northwest side of Kurabantu Island, he began formulating an incredible plan....

Now standing on the high bluffs overlooking the rocky surf a hundred meters below, Skinner eyed the steep drop under his feet. Waves crashed and hissed over the reefs. A few clouds scudded across the sliver of moon low in the eastern sky. Otherwise the stars had already materialized overhead.

He began opening the containment cylinder, full of 'bots, turning the screws and knobs by feel, as he had practiced so many times before. First, the pressure release, then the biobarrier knob, then the protective shield of ionized air. The cylinder hissed, then beeped, telling him a dangerous mechanism was about to be let loose.

Was it a mechanism, he'd often asked himself. Or was it an organism, half virus, half computer? It didn't matter now. All that mattered was escaping from Kurabantu, from Red Hammer, from the Project, and especially from the halo. If he could somehow trigger a massive UNIFORCE response to an outbreak of rogue bots, all of these things could happen.

There was a barely audible whoosh of air as the last barrier was dropped and the master 'bot transited the opening and escaped into the stiff breezes above the cliff.

There. It was done. Even as he felt the first twinges of pain in the back of his head, and dropped to his knees, he saw out of the corner of his eye the faint blue-white iridescent glow of replication, like a shimmering mist hovering ten meters over his head. The bots were already in overdrive, mindlessly copying themselves over and over again, grabbing atoms and building structure as fast as they could. With any luck, BioShield would pick up the signature in less than an hour.

Skinner's head felt like it was caught in a vise and he writhed in agony on the ground. The halo had reacted and the first fires of dopamine hell were already roaring between his ears. He screamed out loud, bit through his tongue and blood poured from both sides of his mouth.

Deep inside the ventral tegmentum of his brain, uncountable trillions of mechs were stirring the dopamine soup, pumping synapses with the stuff and sucking them dry just as fast, working the synaptic gaps like a musical instrument. Each cycle sent Skinner into shudders and spasms.

He jerked across the top of the limestone cliffs, staggered up to his knees and promptly went into convulsions, back-snapping contortions. The halo was bad shit, no two ways about it. When you had the buggers in your skull, you weren't yourself anymore, more like a robot or a lab rat. His brain was infested with gazillions of the bastards, all working in unison, all stimulating and massaging the neural pain and pleasure circuits.

A symphony of agony played out on Skinner's contorted face. Even as he fought the halo, he knew he'd eventually lose the battle. But Skinner had planned on this and he knew what he had to do.

Half blinded by pain, he crawled closer to the edge of the cliffs. Below, waves crashed and hissed over coral reefs that formed a barrier across the northwest approaches to the island. From a pocket, he withdrew a small hypodermic, already loaded.

Inside the hypodermic chamber were a swarm of new nanobotic devices, called respirocytes. Experimental devices. When deployed in your lungs and bloodstream, the 'cytes would allow you to breath in places humans couldn't normally breathe. You could even be resuscitated from near death, if they worked right.

But first, he had to 'die.'

Skinner was well aware of the risks, but there was no other way. If he could take his body to a point near enough to death, all the way to Stage 7 it was said, the halo 'bots would no longer have any control of his pain and pleasure circuits. Scuttlebutt was that when the brain was flooded with death chemicals and the catatonia and unconsciousness finally came, the halo 'bots would exit the body and you'd be free.

Skinner then figured the respirocytes would revive him, sending blood and oxygen into his brain and lungs, manufactured right from seawater.

He felt cold, shaking and shuddering, as he groped his way further out to the edge of the cliff. In the skies overhead, the bad bots had already exploded into a nebula of coruscating, shimmering, pulsating lights, exponentially replicating. He grimaced at the sight, knowing the risk, but it was like sending up a rescue flare. Soon enough, BioShield would pick up the signature. UNIFORCE would then descend on this little hellhole of an island and put a stop to this madness.

Gripping the hypo, he injected the primal stream of 'cytes into an artery in his left arm.

Then, Skinner stared for a moment out to sea, and down at the foaming waves hissing onto the beach below.

He took a deep breath, then leaped into space, plummeting down into the deep hiss of the waves several hundred meters below.

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 knife 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 on 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...execute _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 filled 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.

Chapter 4

" **Quantum Superposition"**

UN Quantum Corps Base

Table Top Mountain, Idaho, USA

November 30, 2068

0750 hours

When word came back to Table Top that contact with Bravo Detachment had been lost, Major Jurgen Kraft was white hot with anger. The vein on his forehead—the most reliable indicator of Ironpants' state of mind—was red and throbbing. Johnny Winger fully expected a full-scale outburst at any second; he had already hunkered down in his seat awaiting a hail of verbal blows.

Kraft boiled and sizzled, just barely in control. Winger thought he might fling the small commandpad right at him.

"Winger, I didn't send you to Kurabantu because I needed you here with ANAD. We're losing this fight with Red Hammer. We need new tactics. That's why I kept you here at the Mountain."

"Yes, sir...I'm in the lab every—"

Kraft didn't want to hear it. "Lieutenant Tallant is a fine young officer. Bravo Detachment was well led, well-equipped. What the hell happened out there? Was it ANAD? Are we dealing with a corrupt master bot? Winger, anything from the Lab on this?"

Winger decided he's better get an answer out fast, before the Kraft volcano blew its top again.

"No, sir...Doc Frost...or what we thought was Doc Frost...did a good regeneration."

"Is it possible this Doc Frost angel...obviously a Red Hammer saboteur...did something to ANAD, something we can't detect? Bollixed up the processor, inserted some kind of malware?"

Winger didn't think so. "If he did, we haven't been able to find anything yet. I deal with ANAD very closely, every day. There are some differences with this new version, but nothing that would compromise its capabilities. ANAD's combat-ready, Major. I'm sure of that."

Kraft sat back. He'd always viewed Winger as something of a work in progress...talented, yes, capable, certainly, but in need of a little polishing. Not quite a hunk of stone, but not quite a Renaissance masterpiece either. "I'm glad you're so certain, Winger. Because I'm sending you and Alpha Detachment out there. I just got out of a briefing with Lofton and his Q2 weenies. They still think Frost and Duncan are on Kurabantu, or nearby. Everything we got from that defector Skinner points to that. Red Hammer's using that island as a major control and operations center for something...something big and even Q2 doesn't know what it is. There are theories...everybody and his mother has a theory. But precious few facts."

"What about Bravo Detachment, sir?"

Now Kraft slammed his chair back down on the floor and leaned forward on the desk. His Black Forest moustache was straight as a ruler, with little curls at the end that Winger imagined as miniature fists, ready to counterpunch any poor slob who disagreed.

"Damn it, read your Nanowarrior's Code, Winger...atomgrabbers don't leave their buddies behind. UNISPACE grabbed a faint locator signal off a satlink this morning...one of ours. What they got was scratchy, intermittent, but Q2 thinks it might be Tallant's locator. There were other snatches of signals mixed in. You're taking Alpha Detachment back to Kurabantu and you're going to find Bravo Detachment, Winger...whatever may be left of them. Frost and Duncan have to be there too...all the evidence points that way."

"Yes, sir...sir, can I pick my own men and women?"

Kraft scowled. "Winger, you can pick my grandmother Else if you want. Send me your request by 1200 hours...and your TOE request as well. I'm not waiting on UNIFORCE for this one...somebody's still alive out there and I want you to find them and get them the hell out of there. Formal orders will be on your crewnet in an hour. Get our people out of that hellhole. Find Frost and Duncan and get them out too...if they're not already working for Red Hammer. And find out what Red Hammer's up to. You've been working on new tactics, Winger. Use them."

Winger stood up and saluted. "Sir, one more thing—"

Kraft flung a return salute, like he was a fastballer on the pitcher's mound. "What is it, Lieutenant?"

"What are my orders if we find Doc Frost and Dr. Duncan have been turned...that they're working for Red Hammer?"

Now Kraft's face hardened into stone. "Terminate...extreme prejudice. That'll be in your orders too. _Dismissed_!"

Winger hustled out of the Ops Center and practically ran up to the Mission Prep bunker. It was a cold and clear late November day and light snow had dusted the slopes of the Buffalo Range to the north of Table Top. A strong wind was gusting across the mesa.

Winger knew he had about a million things he needed to do to get a Detachment ready for departure. Kraft's orders chimed in on his wristpad as he scanned himself inside the bunker. Hyperjet _Mercury_ would be departing Table Top at 1800 hours on the button.

He had less than six hours to pull the mission together and that included final checks on ANAD and loading the little guy into his shoulder capsule.

Kurabantu Island, the Marquesas

South Pacific

December 1, 2068

0700 hours

"Launch coordinates coming up, sir."

Johnny Winger was in the rear bay of the hyperjet _Mercury,_ checking out the cockpit controls of the Quantum Corps floater _Sea Ray_. Part aircraft, part submersible, the ship had been detailed to the rescue task force for use in searching for the lost members of Bravo Detachment.

"Acknowledged." Winger tested _Sea Ray's_ propulsor and steering controls, making sure she would be seaworthy when the time came. His CC2, Al Glance, sat beside Winger. "She looks easy enough to operate from here...flight controls, diving controls, navigation and sensors. How about your side?"

"All copacetic, sir." Glance was synchronizing _Sea Ray's_ nav computer with _Mercury_ 's. "I say we drop and go for a swim."

Indeed, that was the mission plan. Launch coordinates were a fixed point in mid-air, about ten kilometers northeast of the coral atoll of Kurabantu Island. Once _Mercury_ was stable in hover, her rear bay doors would open and _Sea Ray_ would be dropped a thousand meters to the ocean surface. Once she was trimmed for cruise, the ship would descend beneath the waves and begin search operations.

Winger climbed out of _Sea Ray's_ cockpit and went aft to check stores and supplies. The briefing earlier that morning in the Ready Room at Table Top had been short and to the point: further interrogation and statements, corroborated by memory scan, of the Red Hammer defector Skinner had established that there was probably a new complex in the vicinity, previously undetected by UNIFORCE...a semi-automated compound in an underwater canyon about ten kilometers east of the island.

According to Skinner, this base was a principal design and development center for the Project....an effort for which Skinner's memory traces seemed incoherent, even confusing. Whatever the Project was, it was big, it was important to Red Hammer and it had even sucked Doc Frost into its vortex.

According to Quantum Corps Intelligence, Skinner thought it likely that the captured members of Bravo Detachment had also been taken there.

Winger stepped through the airlock, out of _Sea Ray,_ and came forward to the crew station, where the rest of the unit was busy checking out their gear.

Deeno D'Nunzio was passing out small thumb-sized capsules to the rest. "Got your respirocyte dose here, Skipper." She handed the capsule to Winger. "Everybody else has done theirs."

Winger knew the respirocyte treatment was a necessary step in prepping for submerged missions. The capsule contained a complete replicated cycle of nanobotic artificial red blood cells. Once ingested, the 'cytes would augment a trooper's respiratory system, by delivering over two hundred times more oxygen to lung tissues than normal. Spherical diamondoid pressure vessels less than a micron in size, the' cytes would enable Quantum Corps troopers to survive underwater with no further assistance, wearing only skinsuits, comm gear and utility and weapons belts.

Winger was just glad to be rid of the tin can hypersuits.

He opened the capsule port and inhaled, letting the pressurized stream of respirocytes flood into his throat. There was a brief tingle and he felt his face flush red and turn warm for a few seconds...the result of an extra charge of oxygen from the 'cytes as they went to work.

"Nobody light a match," joked Gibby, as he slipped into his skinsuit. "This place'll go up like a torch."

Sheila Reaves cycled her mag gun and holstered the weapon on her belt. "I feel so light-headed." She feigned a breathtaking swoon, staggering around the crew station.

Deeno snorted. "Sure she's so light-headed...'cause there's nothing upstairs."

"Yeah," said Ozzie Tsukota, nearby. "Nature abhors a vacuum—"

"Can it," Winger ordered. "Gear up and let's get aboard and get everything stowed away. Launch in five minutes."

_Sea Ray_ was outwardly an ungainly-looking craft, a far cry from anything sleek or hydrodynamic. The crew compartment was a squat biconic dish, like two dinner plates pressed together.

The interior was divided into three smaller compartments, a forward space for command and control, an engineering space with a diver's lockout and a weapons and stores space. The dish of _Sea Ray's_ main cabin sprouted two legs, actually nacelles housing the hydrojet plants and propulsors. A small bubble of an observation platform sat on top of the dish.

"Ready to launch, Lieutenant." Al Glance's fingers flew over the control board, readying _Sea Ray's_ navigation, diving and propulsion systems.

"Very well." Johnny Winger felt a slight burning in his lungs—the result of the boosted oxygen charge created by the respirocytes. For a few moments, he felt warm and flushed. Inside his body, the 'cytes were steadily taking over the function of his red blood cells.

" _Mercury_ , _Sea Ray_ is powered up and ready to drop."

The hyperjet pilot, Lieutenant Matumba, radioed back. "Okay, Lieutenant...we're maneuvering into position now. Synch your nav system and we'll squirt you the coordinates—"

Glance pressed a few buttons. _Sea Ray's_ nav system was now fully updated.

Matumba was all business, her voice steady, even laconic. "Bay doors coming open—"

_Mercury's_ rear cargo bay doors clamshelled open. The hyperjet was now in full hover, a thousand meters above the choppy, turquoise waters of the south Pacific. It proved to be a beautiful, cloudless day.

"Launch deck is clear—"

" _Sea Ray_ powered up...our props are turning—"

"Extending launch table—"

The floater rested on a cradle which now canted upward at the rear to a shallow angle and slid aft on rails toward the clamshell doors. At the same time, an electromagnetic catapult beneath the cradle primed itself to discharge _Sea Ray_ into the air.

"On my mark...ten seconds."

Winger and Glance nodded faintly to each other. Behind them, strapped into couches were half the Detachment, the troopers who would man the floater and conduct the search and rescue mission from underwater. The other half would stay aboard _Mercury_ , conducting their part of the mission from the air.

"...five seconds—"

Winger took a deep breath and found his heart racing and blood rushing as the 'cytes in his bloodstream ramped up O2 for increased demand. He cinched his five-point harness tighter, took one last scan of the controls and fixed his gaze on the swells of the ocean breaking and foaming a thousand meters below them.

"Two...one...launch commit...and—"

Matumba's words were lost in the roar of the catapult as the power banks discharged and _Sea Ray's_ cradle jerked forward. Like a huge slingshot, the cradle accelerated down the tilted ramp, pulling the floater along with it.

_Sea Ray_ rocketed out the rear doors of hyperjet _Mercury_ and arrowed straight down for the ocean, aiming to enter the sea at an angle calibrated to minimize shock, to the ship and her crew.

The foaming waves came rushing up to meet the windscreen. There was a loud shudder— _bang_! as the floater slammed bow first into the water and quickly submerged. Vibration damped quickly beneath the waves. Shafts of diffuse sunlight streamed down from above.

_Sea Ray_ angled downward at a steep angle as the hydrojets kicked in.

"Bring her around to two zero two degrees," Winger commanded. "I'm leveling off at a thirty meters. Let's sound and scan a few minutes, get our bearings."

"Copy that," Glance said. He massaged the helm controls and _Sea Ray_ banked to her new heading.

"Skipper—" it was Mighty Mite Barnes, strapped into one of the aft seats. "—I'll start getting the mantas ready to deploy."

"Very well, get 'em spun up and synched to _Sea Ray_. We get any kind of decent pings, I want them out the door and sniffing."

The mantas were **m** obile **a** utonomous **n** on- **t** ethered **a** ssault and **s** urveillance bots, inevitably robotic 'crabs' to all who ever saw them. _Sea Ray_ carried a complement of three, to extend her eyes and ears beyond normal sonar range.

Barnes unstrapped and slipped into the weapons and stores bay to begin prepping the robot scouts.

The mantas were stored on cradles outside of individual launch tubes. Each scout resembled a large beetle, its carapace studded with sensors, probes and manipulators. Hydrojet thrusters provided mobility, while the manta's face mounted cameras and more sensors.

Barnes set to work. She synched each manta to _Sea Ray's_ computer. Then she primed the hydrojets, set the onboard processor to Full Auto and toggled a few more switches. One by one, the robot scouts came alive and crawled on articulating legs into their launch tubes.

"Mantas prepped and ready for launch," she announced up to the main cabin.

"Very well," Winger said. "Standby...let's get _Sea Ray_ into position—"

Winger used his sidestick controller to bank the floater to port.

"—coming around to heading two five five degrees," said Al Glance. "There's the gap in the canyon wall we saw on the map."

"I'll steer us right through the front door..." Winger was concentrating on a murky scene on his display, vaguely matching the dim outlines of a rugged underwater escarpment dead ahead. He pulsed his sidestick and the floater responded, rocking slightly, easing forward toward a V-shaped cleft in the mountain. Moments later, _Sea Ray_ was abreast of the canyon entrance. All around them, the steep rutted flanks of massive rock walls rose up toward the surface a hundred meters above them.

"Manta One...prepare to launch."

Barnes flooded the launch tube. "Tube is ready, Skipper."

Winger silently counted down the seconds, then quickly reversed _Sea Ray's_ hydrojets.

"Launch now!"

A deep _thrummm_ reverberated through the floater's hull as a high-pressure slug of air discharged the first scout. Through _Sea Ray's_ forward windows, the beetle-like robot streamed off, trailing twin wakes as its propulsors revved up to speed.

"Manta One is away...I'm reading clean, green and mean across my board." Barnes monitored a stream of telemetry showing status of the robot's onboard systems.

"Very well," Winger started backing _Sea Ray_ out of the canyon. "Now we've got some eyes in this little corner of the ocean."

Glance toggled the displays to show the launch points for Mantas Two and Three. The Red Hammer defector Nigel Skinner didn't know the precise location of the underwater complex east of Kurabantu Island. Underwater topography charts had pinpointed several possibilities. _Sea Ray's_ scouts gave her the ability to reconnoiter a much larger area.

"Two more to go, Skipper." Glance slaved the display to give heading information to the next launch point.

Kurabantu Island was itself the topmost plateau of a huge underwater seamount, the tallest of a ridge of mountains and submerged mesas that rose up out of the abyssal plains of the Marquesas basin and toward the surface tens of thousands of meters above. Only the upper fifty meters or so breached the ocean's surface, forming the island with its central volcano of Tuontavik.

Beyond the perimeter of the seamount, the Marquesas basin was honeycombed with a labyrinth of underwater ridges and canyons, a tortured seascape alive with mudslides, avalanches and tremors. Winger intended to make good use of _Sea Ray's_ brood of scouts, while executing a complicated search pattern himself, seeking any sources of unusual ground motion, heat or chemical disturbances in the ocean.

With such an active quake zone surrounding them, the floater crew would have to keep their eyes open at all times. Sudden, catastrophic danger lurked everywhere.

Mantas Two and Three were launched in the same way. _Sea Ray_ now had a small covey of robotic scouts cruising the underwater canyons around Kurabantu Island.

"What's the latest intel we have?" Winger asked. "Any more hypersuit emissions detected?"

Al Glance had been monitoring comms with Table Top and the air search force. "Nothing more, Skipper. Navsats haven't updated the last fix...the best coordinates were in a box about three kilometers square, centered ten kilometers north-northeast of the island. I've initialized our search pattern at one corner of the box."

Winger nudged the sidestick forward, easing _Sea Ray_ deeper, out of the sunlight zone. Bit by bit, the ocean darkened before their eyes. Beyond a hundred meters, they had entered the realm of eternal night—too deep for sunlight to penetrate.

"I'll level off at a hundred for now. Set up a grid search pattern, but we'll have to keep our eyes open. UNISEA reports said these underwater mountains could be treacherous...lots of blind alleys and narrow passes. Plenty of places to get stuck...or trapped in a slide."

Glance programmed _Sea Ray_ to follow the search pattern ordered and set the floater to auto-run. It soon became a roller-coaster ride, as the floater dived, twisted and turned to avoid the canyon walls that surrounded them. On the waterfall display of the ship's active sonar, the canyon walls and mountain peaks made swirling patterns.

"Looks like a Van Gogh painting to me," Glance muttered. "No way we'll be able to follow a straight line down here."

Corporal Chandra Singh was manning the sensor station aft of the command deck. Winger called back to the DPS tech.

"Taj—what have we got cooking with the other sensors?"

Singh did a quick scan of the board. "Nothing yet on thermal, Lieutenant. Just background heat sources, mostly diffuse, probably magma channels in these mountains. Acoustic shows nothing unusual yet either. Lots of creaking and groaning...nothing man-made. I'm scanning visual, EM on all bands, even radiation flux. So far...it's all background stuff."

"I'm looking at quantum channels myself, Lieutenant." Deeno D'Nunzio was at one of the aft stations in the main cabin. "There's just a chance we'll be able to grab something out of the ether...maybe even a decoherence wake."

"—or nanobotic activity," added Moby M'bela. The CEC1 was manning the quantum coupler controls next to Deeno. "There's a good chance we'll be able to pick up the signature of a quantum processor by the leftover wakes it leaves behind. I've got this baby tuned extra-sensitive."

Winger was tight-lipped. "So...we search—" It was all they could do.

For several hours, _Sea Ray_ cruised in and out of canyons, valleys, ravines and narrow gorges, skirting the outer perimeter of the Kurabantu seamount in an ever-tightening spiral. On Winger's orders, Barnes broke out rations from a stores locker and the crew nibbled at their meals, keeping their eyes on instruments or staring numbly out the tiny portholes at the murk of the ocean that surrounded them. Even the murk wasn't featureless, as flashes of light momentarily lit up the water, revealing gaping jaws and sinuous finned and crested creatures cruising alongside them. All of them seemed to have gaping jaws and long, needle-like teeth. Many trailed long, dangling antennae behind them. Most were black or gray though a few shone red and one that darted into view was a bright electric blue.

"Lieutenant—" it was M'bela, furiously squeezing some ornamental trinket around his neck. "—Lieutenant...there's something here—"

Winger had been in a light doze, and came instantly alert. "What is it, Moby?"

"I'm not sure, sir...molecular debris...some thermals, maybe—"

Barnes cut in from the weapons bay over the crew circuit. "I'm seeing it, too...it's Manta Three. Particle flux, atom trash, lots of radicals, heat...it's nanobotic activity, sir...I'm sure of it."

"Where's Manta Three now?"

Barnes quickly scanned her board. "Bearing one five five degrees, about four kilometers southwest of us." She massaged the display to get a terrain map of the seafloor. "—just past Poseidon's Massif...a little canyon she was reconning."

Winger studied the same display on his panel. "Can you get closer...pinpoint the source?"

"Maneuvering now," Barnes reported. She tweaked the sidestick controller, pulsing Manta Three's hydrojets. Four kilometers away, the robotic scout banked left and slowed down, sniffing and sounding its way toward the target. "I'm queuing visual too...but the water's cloudy...lots of sediment from landslides around here."

"Use your flood lamps," Winger told her.

Barnes steered the scout through a W-shaped formation called Devil's Tooth and into the narrow gorge behind the towering Poseidon Massif. Manta Three slowed and began probing its surroundings in more detail, tasting and sniffing at the trail it had discovered.

"Water's really churned up ahead...acoustics say there's a minor landslide off to our left." Glance was studying the passive sonar display, which speckled like a meteor shower with the reverberations from tons of falling debris.

"Unstable zone," Winger muttered. Hell of a place to put a base.

"Nanobotic activity's going through the roof," Barnes reported. "I've got spikes across the board...radicals everywhere, high heat signature. Going to visual now—" She switched on Manta Three's forward lights and commanded the autonomous craft to a dead stop.

At first, the visuals were grainy, staticky, shot through with streaks of light in a dense gray murk, like firecrackers going off in a heavy fog. Sediment and mud and debris rained down from above, swirling and shaking as tons of dirt and rock slid hundreds of meters down the flanks of Poseidon Massif, shaken loose in one of the dozens of daily seafloor tremors that afflicted the area.

Just visible behind the veil of sediment was an indistinct glow, as if the scene was being backlit from beyond the canyon walls by some vast lamp. The glow pulsated in a slow but steady rhythm and, as Barnes propelled Manta Three closer, seams in the glow could be faintly seen...like cracks or shadows in an otherwise seamless curtain of light.

"It's a defensive barrier," Al Glance said quietly. "Covering one entire wall of that canyon. A nanobotic shield...Jesus...the thing must be a half-klick wide."

Winger agreed. He had put _Sea Ray_ into a racetrack holding pattern some four kilometers east of the massif and canyon badlands. "The question is: what's being shielded? Mighty Mite, can you get us any closer? I want to see what kind of bots we're dealing with."

"I'll try, Skipper...but this place is rocking and rolling pretty good right now." She nudged her stick, commanding Manta Three to ease forward at a few knots. Gradually, the visuals became clearer. "I'm probing acoustically now...and switching on my imager."

Manta Three reached out and touched the nanobotic barrier with a tight stream of quarks, sending back details on fine structure. The imager view flipped over and over as greater and greater resolution filled the screen, drilling down further into the world of atoms and molecules. Soon, the grainy blurry outlines of a familiar icosahedral structure materialized into view.

Winger sucked in his breath. "An ANAD clone...just as I thought. Same effector layout, same platform design. A defensive barrier of basic ANAD mechs. I'm betting Red Hammer's complex is somewhere behind that barrier."

Glance studied the imager. "I doubt we can take _Sea Ray_ safely into that canyon, Skipper."

"Probably not," Winger agreed. "But I've got an idea...Mighty Mite, give me a bearing to Manta Three."

Barnes came back. "Steer left, three one five degrees, Skipper. Maintain depth at one two five meters."

Winger maneuvered _Sea Ray_ to the new heading. The floater cruised north by northwest for about ten minutes.

"Seamount margins ahead," Glance announced. "Cliffs and rough terrain, it looks like." He indicated the active sonar display on the control board. The display was lit up like a Christmas tree. "Want to let us in on the plan, Lieutenant?"

Winger steered _Sea Ray_ to a stop, less than fifty meters from the steep flanks of an underwater mountain. He pressed a button and bright searchlights shot out, painting the mountainside with light. A thick veil of sediment rained down the steep slope.

"The edge of Kurabantu seamount itself," Winger announced. "This is our way in."

Glance looked over at the Captain. "I don't see any kind of entrance here. How far are we from Manta Three?"

Winger checked the display. "This ledge is about a quarter klick southeast of Manta's position. If I'm right, the nano-barrier is just off to our right, on the other side of this escarpment."

Winger's idea suddenly dawned on Glance. "We're going _through_ the mountain?"

"Exactly." Winger changed the display to show a topographic map of the seamount complex and its surrounding mountains and valleys, radiating outward like waves frozen in rock. "Look, there's no way we can penetrate that barrier without setting off alarms all over the place."

"Agreed."

"The way I figure it...we use ANAD to breach a path through the mountain here and tunnel into the complex from the rear. We've got skinsuits, weapons...plus we're all boosted with respirocytes. The enemy will never expect an assault from that direction, from inside the mountain."

"Skipper—" said Singh, "the barrier may not even be active from the mountain side of the complex."

"Exactly." Winger was already unbuckling his seat harness. "Let's get moving. Bravo's in trouble, Doc Frost too, and we've got to get them out of there."

The Detachment prepped themselves with dispatch and quick efficiency, despite the close quarters inside _Sea Ray_. Mag and HERF weapons were checked and charged, MOB canisters secured and the mobile TinyTown activated to ready ANAD for launch. Moby M'Bela cycled the containment pod systems to be sure the tiny assembler was prepared.

"Solution parameters in the green, pH normal, concentration gradients look good...I'm initializing the replication counter to zero—"

"Load tacticals one and two," Winger told him. The pod imager showed a grid wavering in aqueous solution, with what looked like a bunch of grapes hanging off a trellis in the center. The Autonomous Nanoscale Assembler/Disassembler quivered slightly, its internal clock beating a silent rhythm. "This version of ANAD is pretty crude, Moby...older processor, no quantum coupler, no voice system...just barebones nano. It was the best I could do on short notice. I'll have to drive him, once he's launched and replicating."

M'Bela detected the slight smirk in the Lieutenant's voice. What atomgrabber worth his electrons didn't like driving nanobots through the atomic world?

"You never lose the knack, sir...it's like I've always said...'a grabber's gotta do atoms.'"

_Sea Ray_ was quietly maneuvered into position, nuzzling up to a small knobby outcrop of the seamount. The floater's nose nestled against the rock wall and a flexible tube was extended from the airlock. The tube pressed flush against the sheer face.

M'Bela had wheeled the TinyTown unit into the diver's lockout chamber and completed last minute checks.

"ANAD reports ready in all respects, sir."

Winger was still at the forward command deck. To Al Glance, he said, "Keep scanning, Al. All bands. I don't want any unexpected guests trying to crash our party." Winger unstrapped and slipped aft. An interface control unit had been mounted on a bulkhead near the lockout.

Winger looked around at his assembled troopers, gathered about the chamber: M'Bela at the TinyTown panel, Gibby initializing the interface so Winger could drive ANAD into the side of the mountain, Barnes, D'Nunzio and Singh. All eyes were on him.

"Dana Tallant's out there, guys. So is Doc Frost, maybe others too. We're going after them. And we're not going back to Table Top without them. Understood?"

"Perfectly, Lieutenant..." said Singh.

"Launch ANAD," Winger said at last. He turned to the IC unit Gibby had been prepping. "And let's kick atomic ass!"

The tiny assembler exited the TinyTown cylinder with a faint whir of air. On his IC imager, Winger toggled up an acoustic display...letting the blurry scene settle down as the sounder slowly resolved finer and finer detail. Whirling, colliding shapes materialized on the screen...a blizzard of polygons and snake-like carbon chains, twin-lobed oxygens careening off L-shaped nitrogens, like some kind of mad volleyball game.

Johnny Winger blinked hard and focused. It always took a few moments, even for an ace atomgrabber, to mentally orient himself in the frenetic, dizzying recoil of the atomic world. It was like walking through a door into another dimension, in the middle of a blizzard, underwater.

The tactical plan was simple enough in principle, if damnably hard to execute. Once ANAD had been launched, the lockout chamber would be flooded. ANAD would make his way toward the face of the mountain, after replicating a suitable mass, disassembling molecules, tunneling right into the side of the mountain. Several hours later, as the swarm continued its work, the Detachment would don their skinsuits and weapons and follow.

A narrow tunnel, just wide enough for a fully outfitted nanotrooper, would be burned into the flanks of the seamount. ANAD and its replicant swarm would steer toward the coordinates of the source of the defensive barrier.

"A hundred to one...our target's there," Glance had reasoned.

Once outside the _Sea Ray_ , the nanotroopers would be assisted by their respirocyte-boosted lungs. ANAD would seal the tunnel after the last of the troopers had entered, helping to maintain pressure.

The tactic was risky, Winger knew, but it had the advantage of complete surprise. The defensive barrier was surely protecting something, something important.

1st Nano was determined to find out what.

Winger let the disorientation and dizziness slowly subside and found himself standing in a blizzard of sleeting molecules, bounced and buffeted like a surfer hunting for the next big one.

Let it come to you, ANAD had always told him. Relax and flow with the currents. You can feel your way through...just skate where the seams are.

"I'm piloting..." Winger announced. He let the van der Waals forces wash over him, the molecular quivers of Brownian motion and....there! He tweaked his propulsors and jetted forward, careening like a balloon in a gale but somehow finding a way to tack and maneuver ahead. "...I'm piloting...on Fly-by-Stick. Flood the lockout."

Deeno D'Nunzio wet her lips and cycled the controls for the chamber. She knew Lieutenant Winger was physically seated next to her, focused on the interface controls. But she also knew the Skipper was mentally engaged somewhere else, present in the nanoscale world that was invisible beyond the imager screen.

"Lockout flooding," she announced. Beyond the heavy door, seawater poured into the chamber with a roar, quickly rising to the top. The whole process took less than two minutes.

The only noticeable effect that Winger could detect was an increase in the buffeting and jostling, making steering and propulsion that much harder. Soon after, a great cascade of twin-lobed water molecules crashed into him, sweeping the assembler off in a new direction. It was like shooting whitewater rapids on a raging, foaming river.

Winger struggled with the controls for a few minutes, fighting the sleet of molecules, but in time, his atomgrabber's instincts took over. With practice and some finesse, he was soon able to surf and skate and slide through the onslaught like the polished stick man he was.

"I've got it now...." He announced. He settled back to let the onrushing river of molecules crash by, bobbing and careening like a balloon in a hailstorm. "I'm sounding ahead now...showing denser structures ahead at forty thousand microns. Crystalline lattice structures—"

Al Glance concurred. "That would be the seamount wall, Skipper."

Winger studied the acoustic returns. The display showed a grid of pyroxene and olivine and quartz molecules, taut dodecahedral structures linked on all sides like a dense forest of tangled limbs.

"Intermolecular distances are small," he answered. "Maybe a few hundred nanometers at most. This one's gonna be a tight squeeze."

Under Winger's control, ANAD streamed closer and closer to the lattice.

"I'm starting my replication cycle," Winger said. He toggled the controls, squirting the commands off to the tiny assembler. Less than twenty meters away through _Sea Ray's_ hull, ANAD received its new orders and began grabbing atoms to build copies of itself. "Better to do this now...while I have some room to maneuver."

Mere centimeters from the rough, rocky surface of the seamount, the black water began glowing with an ethereal phosphorescence. Through a nearby porthole, Taj Singh witnessed the unearthly glow.

"ANAD's at work...I can see it right out the window."

In less than ten minutes, the rep counter had ticked over to the commanded value. ANAD had built himself a family of several quadrillions of daughter molecules.

Now it was time to go to work.

Gibby had been up on the command deck, studying the results of the assembler's acoustic probes.

"This is garden variety igneous stuff, Skipper," he radioed back. "Nothing unusual that I see. Just gazillions of quartz and feldspar molecules all lined up in formation. My guess is you break the thing at the tetrahedral joint...between the silicons and the oxygens. Bond strength would be weakest there."

"Agreed." Winger programmed the sequence, telling ANAD just where to begin working his way into the lattice. Quartz made up much of the first few centimeters of the Kurabantu seamount...a crystalline grid of corkscrewing tetrahedrons composed of a silicon molecule and a pair of oxygens. ANAD would have the fastest results if he went to work on the tetrahedral joints.

Winger sent the commands. Acting in unison, the Autonomous Nanoscale Assembler/Disassembler swarm jetted forward and penetrated the lattice, all its effectors fully extended. Engaging the first arrays of the lattice, the swarm began quickly ripping into the molecular formation, severing bonds and burrowing ever deeper into the rock.

In minutes, the glow along the sheer face of Kurabantu's submerged flanks brightened to a searing white hot incandescence. Nanometer by nanometer, uncountable swarms of assemblers burned their way into the side of the mountain.

It was Singh and Deeno at the porthole who first spotted the faint outlines of ANAD's 'tunnel.'

"There's our way in, just like the doctor ordered," Deeno said.

Ten meters from the porthole, a shadowy opening in the rock face slowly materialized from the flickering light and silted water. Barely a meter wide, the fissure was easily overlooked in all the folds and crags of the mountain; only the pulsating glow of atomic disassembly made it visible. From deep inside the fissure, a faint amber glow throbbed like a warning beacon.

Johnny Winger studied parameters on his IC panel. "My reps are all good...all effectors deployed and in the green. ANAD proceeding on one-quarter propulsor. Carbene grabbers are really going crazy...I'm pulling silicons like some kind of madman."

"How long before we can enter the tunnel, Skipper?" asked M'bela. He had sized up the dimensions by estimating from the porthole and wasn't sure he really wanted an answer.

Winger did some quick calculations. "At his current rate, ANAD'll have a tunnel deep enough for all of us to fit in about twenty minutes, give or take. Get prepped now...skinsuits checked, belts and masks on, emergency breathers set to max." Winger checked his watch. "We cycle the lockout and start deploying in half an hour."

The time went by quickly enough. Singh, D'Nunzio, Gibby, all but Al Glance donned their skinsuits and checked their gear. The CC2 would remain behind to operate _Sea Ray_. By twos, they back-checked each other's preparations...connections, fasteners and quick-disconnects, weapons charged, any mistake now could be fatal. Winger ordered Barnes and Singh into the lockout first. As Defense and Protective Systems Tech 2, Singh was particularly well armed, carrying a small coilgun assault rifle as well as a HERF pistol for close-quarters combat. Barnes herself was packing a particle-beam weapon.

"Once you get inside the tunnel," Winger was telling them, as he switched his gaze from ANAD acoustics to the two nanotroopers, "use your suit boost. Set it to minimum and watch your heads. You should be able to get enough traction off the walls to go forward." Winger took one last look out the porthole. "With any luck, we'll surprise the hell out of them by coming in the back door. I just hope nobody has claustrophobia."

From the command deck, Al Glance did a quick sonar sweep of the area and pronounced everything clear. The lockout chamber was closed and flooded. Inside Mighty Mite Barnes and Taj Singh stared straight ahead, not daring to look at each other. Three minutes later, the chamber was fully flooded.

"We're moving out," Singh announced. It was a strange, unnerving feeling wearing only the form-fitting skinsuit and mask, with its emergency breather pack, knowing the only way your lungs were getting oxygen was from the billions of respirocytes circulating in your bloodstream. Singh eased out and the shock of the cold stunned him momentarily. The ocean was painfully frigid at this depth, cold, dark and oppressively close, as he shoved the chamber hatch out of the way, grunting with the effort.

Singh kicked ahead, floating through the hatch and in seconds, was steering himself carefully into the dim outlines of ANAD's tunnel.

His shoulders and belt just cleared the entrance, scraping along the edges, as he went in. Singh wore boosted flipper/assault boot combos on his feet. As soon as he was fully inside the tunnel, he lit off the boost and peered straight ahead, deeper into the tunnel, toward the still flickering swarm a dozen meters ahead. The tunnel walls were slick, glassy and still warm from ANAD's work.

Singh felt a coppery taste of panic in the back of his mouth, as the walls seemed to press in on him but he fought it off, focusing instead on feeling every square millimeter of belts and gear...anything to keep his mind from falling prey to the fear of the tunnel collapsing.

Maybe it was the glow from ANAD up ahead but he was sure the walls were moving, as if he was being swallowed by some huge snake.

_Don't even think about it_ , he told himself. Instead, he began reciting verses from the Bhagavad-Gita. Just a few meters ahead of his face, the ANAD swarm burned deeper into the mountain.

One by one, the rest of the assault detail followed: Barnes, D'Nunzio, Gibby. Johnny Winger was the last to exit the lockout chamber.

Inside the tunnel, his vision blocked by Gibby's feet only centimeters from his face, Winger took deep breaths of respirocyte-boosted air and synchronized his suit boost to the speed of ANAD's tunneling. He closed his eyes—there wasn't much to see anyway.

The whole approach would take several hours before the troopers were in position to breach the inner structure of the compound and begin the assault.

Four hours later, the ANAD swarm had disassembled its way through a long curving tunnel from a point a quarter kilometer south of the compound's underwater location. The breach path followed a sinuous route through layers of shale and quartz and feldspar, growing warmer and more oppressive as the swarm neared its target.

Taj Singh was in the lead and patched in along with Winger to the acoustic feed from ANAD.

"ANAD sounding ahead, Lieutenant," the DPS tech reported. "Rock density dropping off...possible aspect change...looks like a different structure dead ahead...less than fifty thousand microns."

Winger had noticed the change too. "Could be the outer wall of the compound." He studied the acoustic display. "My read is reinforced concrete with embedded steel and carbon fibers. Molecular signature seems to match—"

"Thank God," breathed Barnes, a few meters ahead of Winger. "If I have to spend another minute in this coffin—"

"Cut the chatter," Winger ordered. "Get your weapons ready." He monitored ANAD's tunneling closely, noting when the lead assembler reached the wall surface. Before letting the swarm penetrate, he signaled ANAD to come to a stop. The swarm hovered just centimeters ahead of Taj Singh's face and the amber glow subsided as molecular disassembly halted.

Now only the helmet lamps of the troopers provided any illumination inside the tunnel, casting stark shadows on the still warm walls, fused with glassy residue from ANAD's passage.

Johnny Winger primed his own coilgun and ordered the others to arm all weapons.

"When this thing blows, all hell will break loose."

"Lieutenant—" it was Gibby. The CC2's suit boost stirred dust and rock chips right into Winger's face. "...any sign of a barrier ahead...any nano we might have to deal with?"

Winger checked the status of all ANAD systems on his mask eyepiece. Everything was clean and green. "Nothing but concrete and steel dead ahead...the pressure hull seems clean. I'm not getting any signatures."

"We got 'em by the cojones," exulted Deeno. "Complete surprise."

"Remember," Winger told them, "Dana Tallant and the rest of Bravo may be in there, Doc Frost too...keep your fire to a minimum and stay on your vectors. Anybody gets trigger happy now and we may put friendly fire on the wrong targets. Understood?"

There was a chorus of replies.

Winger sent commands for the ANAD swarm to resume the breaching operation. The amber glow returned and, if anything, seemed to brighten. Soon the tunnel was bathed in an intense white light and the walls grew too hot to touch.

The concrete and carbon matrix that made up the compound's outer hull was a dense atomic lattice. Winger kept a close eye on ANAD's progress, noting the swarm seemed to slow as the assemblers chewed into the denser structure.

Just a few more minutes...

A ping sounded in Winger's earpiece. At the same time, warning flags lit up his eyepiece...ANAD was nearing a void in the structure...the inner wall surface. Winger signaled the assembler swarm to slow to one-tenth propulsor power, just barely creeping forward a few dozen nanometers at a time.

"Detail...standby. Taj, you're the point man. Once the breach is through, you go in and give us ten suppressing bursts with the HERF. That'll stun anything alive long enough for Barnes to come through. We'll continue that sequence...each trooper through gets suppressing fire for ten shots. It won't take long so get your asses in there fast!"

"Got it, Skipper—" said Deeno. She gripped the handle of her coilgun carbine even tighter. It would feel great just to get out of this hellhole of a tunnel and blast somebody.

Singh made the call everyone had been waiting for.

"Heads up...ANAD's through...ANAD's through—I see lights ahead." He tweaked up his suit boost, waited impatiently for the glow to subside and kicked forward, crashing through the melted wall into a dimly lit stores room, stacked with crates and shelving.

He lit off the HERF gun and hot searing radio frequency waves reverberated through the congested space. Crates and shelves rattled and went flying.

"I'm in!" he yelled over the crewnet. "Get ANAD in here quick...get a barrier set up!"

Singh scrambled away from the hole he'd just fallen through, moving in a coordinated pattern around the darkened room. Behind him, another body crashed through the opening and thudded onto the floor.

Corporal "Mighty Mite' Barnes leaped up and lit off her own HERF round. The thunderclap deafened both of them.

_So much for covert entry_ , Singh thought sourly. Still, the rf rounds gave the assault team a protected bubble of space and time.

One after another, the rest of the team burst into the stores room. Lieutenant Winger was the last to drop onto the steel matted floor. At the same moment, a shaft of light stabbed the darkness at the far end. A door swung open and a shimmering fog poured into the room...mechs!

"Swarm assault!" somebody shouted. Singh rolled onto the floor and came up with his coilgun firing, pumping magnetic loop after loop into the heart of the beast. The fog thinned in a few places under the assault, but continued enveloping the room.

Someone behind Singh lit off another HERF round, blasting everything and everyone with a thunderclap. The enemy swarm scattered from the rf shock...just long enough for Winger to get off re-config commands to ANAD.

"---go to tactical two...pyridines and enzymatic knives extended...bond disrupter primed...GO ANAD...gogogogogo...."

He sent the commands and scrambled forward between HERF bursts, coming up behind Singh and Barnes. The door opened wider and through the residue of the shimmering fog, they saw faces. Human, vaguely Asian faces.

Red Hammer troops! Muzzles swung into the room and the crackle of particle beams sounded. They were under fire in a confined space surrounded by a swelling swarm of enemy mechs. Bolt after bolt of particle beams lanced out, stitching a line of death across the wall.

Barnes returned fire with a volley of coilgun rounds while D'Nunzio opened up with her own beam carbine. The air sizzled and popped with rounds as the two swarms collided overhead.

Winger buried himself behind some crates, getting off an occasional volley of coilgun rounds himself. Tactically, the situation was serious, but not yet desperate. The swarms now engaging in a flickering aurora of combat overhead would tell the story. For the moment, the assault team was pinned down with only two avenues of escape: back through the tunnel or ahead through the door.

Winger gritted his teeth and switched eyepiece views to nanoscale. He closed his eyes to limit the disorientation, took a few deep breaths, noting the continuing crackle of particle beams and the hot thump of HERF rounds, then opened his eyes into ANAD's world once again.

The grappling was both immediate and suffocating and Winger felt the enemy mech's force close on him like a vise. It was a type of effector he'd never seen before, spiky and faceted like a soccer ball, studded with carbons.

_What kind of bastard are you?_ he asked. He tweaked ANAD's propulsors and sent the swarm jetting forward to engage the Red Hammer mechs.

With the Lieutenant now handling ANAD, Deeno D'Nunzio knew he would need cover. In the middle of a furious volley of beam fire, she crabwalked over to the crates and, with Barnes and Singh on her flanks, set up a perimeter to shield the Skipper.

_Hope to God ANAD can handle 'em,_ she thought. If the Lieutenant couldn't fend off the enemy swarm and clear a path out of the stores room, the assault team would be pinned down and chewed to pieces. She didn't relish the prospect of having to retreat back through the tunnel. And they'd all heard what Red Hammer did to its enemies.

Now fully engaged in nano combat, Johnny Winger massaged his wristpad controls like a pianist.

"Carbenes to full deploy...I am in Auto Maneuver...enzymatic knife primed...bond disrupter primed...electron lens cooking...."

He drove ANAD head-on into the melee, grappling with the nearest gang of mechs.

ANAD speared one with his bond disrupter, twisting off a pair of oxygens dangling from the mech's backbone. There was a bright flash as the bond let go, liberating its stored energy. The mech recoiled and turned to swing a phosphate group around for shielding. It wasn't quite fast enough.

_Gotcha...you little prick!_ Winger exulted. His atomgrabber's instinct said look left...look left! Out of the corner of his image, he spotted the effectors slashing into view, just in time, and twisted ANAD out of the way.

The mech's grabbers were strong and sure but not as fast as Winger's reflexes. A wicked 'knife' of hydrogen radicals sliced through ANAD's perimeter defenses, pinching off several effectors. But Winger had seen it coming.

He quickly deployed ANAD's hydrogen abstractor and caught the enemy mech's knife with one of his own. The molecules collided and torqued in a great train wreck of debris. Winger severed ANAD's damaged effector and while the enemy mech was still trapped, he tore its grappling arms off with the abstractor. The recoil sent the mech spinning off into space, colliding with other mechs, trailing molecule debris as it drifted away.

_That'll teach 'em_ , Winger muttered. He turned ANAD to engage more mechs.

Bit by bit, ANAD and its replicants beat back the enemy swarm. As the flickering fog retreated, the Red Hammer troops seemed to lose heart, realizing their primary defenses were weakening. One by one, they slipped out of the room, firing behind them to cover their withdrawal.

"We got 'em on the run!" Barnes exulted. She lay down a furious burst of beamfire sweeping the room back and forth.

Winger set ANAD to work finishing off the enemy swarm and pulled himself out of the nanoscale view. Overhead, in an otherwise darkened compartment, the fog of assembler combat flickered like heat lightning on a hot summer night.

"Secure the doors!" Winger scrambled forward, ducking below the high keening wail of the mechs and headed for the doors. Barnes cut in right behind him.

They inched the door open and peered out into a dimly lit corridor. Emergency lightning cast stark shadows on a metal grate floor. Voices and shouts echoed back at them from around a nearby corner.

Winger gathered his troops around him at the door.

"Okay...here's the plan: we put ANAD out first...detach an element and let him recon the corridor. He'll send back visual, infrared, any EM threats. Once we know what we're facing, we move out."

"Same tactics, Skipper?" asked Singh. The Indian DPS tech shouldered his HERF gun and slammed a new charge cartridge into the slot.

"Five rounds of HERF, both directions," Winger described his plan, "then we move out, in pairs. I'm using ANAD to locate infrared sources and analyze them on the go. He's programmed to alert me if any target matches the profile of a nanotrooper."

"We need to find the control center," D'Nunzio said. "If we can take down the control center to this hellhole, we should be able to access everything: files, controls, systems, everything."

"Agreed," said Winger. "If ANAD returns any data on targets with strong EM emissions, that may be our baby. Remember, we have two objectives: find any Bravo Detachment held here plus Doc Frost and Dr. Duncan and get them out...and shutting down this place once and for all."

Gibby had noticed the flickering swarm overhead was gradually dimming, throwing the stores room into darkness.

"Looks like ANAD has pretty well finished off the bastards, Skipper."

Winger fingered his wristpad, sending new commands to the assembler horde. Unseen overhead, the swarm finished off the remnants of the Red Hammer mechs and began reconfiguring for its next mission. Moments later, ANAD had detached a small element of assemblers and formed an invisible EM lens, a nanoscale 'antenna' to triangulate electronic emissions. If the compound's control center emitted anything detectable, ANAD would find it.

"Let's move out—" Winger ordered.

Singh swung the door open and pumped out five rounds from his HERF gun...first left, then to the right.

The corridor went dark and shook with the reverberating thunderclap.

"GO!" Winger yelled.

Singh punched out into the corridor, with Barnes right behind him. They ducked and veered left, hitting the floor in a roll, while the ANAD swarm swelled out into the hall and tuned itself to probe for electronic emissions.

Two by two, the rest of the assault team poured out into the corridor, periodically deafened by the searing hot pulses from the rf weapons.

Winger ducked out with the last group and linked in with ANAD as he scrambled forward. He followed right behind Gibby as they made their way along the corridor, trying to keep his balance while he plunged into the nanoscale world. His eyepiece view of the corridor dissolved into a driving sleet storm of every imaginable shape and color...the world of careening atoms and molecules.

Then he stumbled and bumped into Gibby's backside.

"Here...Skipper...let me help you along." It was Gibby's voice. Winger felt the CC2's arms haul him upright again. "Just hang on to me."

Already, ANAD's electromagnetic 'antenna' was focusing on a strong source, bearing two five five degrees. The photon bucket that the assemblers had formed now channeled what it had detected back to Winger, who saw the effects as strobing pulses of light, like distant lightning on the horizon...the stronger the flash, the stronger the detected signal. Winger blinked in amazement at the light show and quickly homed in on the source.

"That way," he pointed, clinging to Gibby's belt. "Strong emissions that way."

Gibby hoisted up his coilgun carbine and scrambled off down the corridor, with Winger clinging to his belt.

Just to be safe, Winger changed ANAD's config again, leaving a small element to direct photons. The rest of the force configured for assault, priming all effectors, flowing over and ahead of the rescue force as they crept toward the control center.

Two left turns later, they came to a heavy shielded compartment hatch, at one end of a side hall.

Winger scanned ANAD's take, just to be sure. "This has to be it...photon cascade everywhere, a regular gusher of EM."

Gibby checked everyone's position. Barnes and D'Nunzio were to the left, Singh and he to the right.

"HERF is charging..." he muttered.

"Lock and load," said Barnes. She cradled her coilgun, ready to let fly when the door was breached.

Winger set ANAD to work on the heavy door, rapidly disassembling its massive lock system. An intense orange glow engulfed them, as the assembler horde tore into the hatch.

_At least there's no nanoshield or barrier here_ , he thought. At least, not yet. When the door was breached, though ANAD would have to be ready.

"Standby---" Winger said. The orange glow flickered and pulsated, then began dying away. Checking his eyepiece, Winger saw ANAD's status lights all drop into the green. "Okay...we're ready here...no detectable nano signatures around the door, beyond ANAD."

"MOB canisters ready, Skipper," said Mighty Mite Barnes. She lifted a small cylinder from her utility belt and slammed it into the dispenser.

"When we finally breach..." Winger was outlining the tactical plan, "...lay down three HERF rounds for stun effect. Then MOB anything that moves...I'll slave ANAD to MOB control for the first few minutes. That'll leave us free for other threats. Anyone takes fire, you're authorized to return fire...coilguns, beamers and kinetic rounds if you have to." Winger's eyes met the others. "We've got to be smart about what we shoot at."

"What about our rear?" Singh asked. "It's odd we haven't run into any more resistance than we have."

"Yeah," said Deeno D'Nunzio. "Where'd all those Red Hammer troops go anyway?"

"Unknown," Winger admitted. The very same thought had occurred to him. "Just to be safe, I've detached an element of ANAD for perimeter defense." Even as he spoke, the troopers could hear the faint buzz that indicated nanobotic activity nearby. "Okay...let's do it."

On a count of three, Gibby kicked in the heavy door. The hatch swung open and clanged against a bulkhead.

D'Nunzio burst in first and immediately lit off the HERF gun, followed by Barnes. Hot, rolling waves of sound energy deafened the room.

The control deck was roughly semi-circular, concentric rows of consoles arranged in a broad U around a curving wall of monitors.

At the precise moment the door was forced and HERF rounds pumped inside, the sparse control room shift consisted of a handful of technicians and a squad of troops...the same troops who had fired on them from the stores room door. As D'Nunzio lit off her HERF gun, she dropped to the deck and came up ready to fire. The beam weapons of the Red Hammer defenders returned fire in unison, but the rf pulse killed their aim. The first rounds went wild overhead, stitching a seam of death across the ceiling. Hot metal and duramide shards rained down on them.

"I got 'em!" yelled Barnes, from somewhere off to the right. The SDC2 let fly a burst from her coilgun carbine. The spray of mag energy rounds lanced out and one loop caught a Red Hammer defender flush in the face. His head came apart in an explosive puff of flesh, blood and bone, peppering the nearby consoles and a trio of technicians cowering nearby.

Beam fire streaked back and forth across the control deck for a few moments. Deeno lit off another HERF round, to cover Gibby and Winger as they rushed into the room. Momentarily stunned, a pair of Red Hammer troops caught a volley of flechettes in their chests; Gibby had flung off a flock of microbots into the air and the 'bots had discharged their full loads at the targets. The enemy defenders crumpled in a thick spray of blood as their torsos were shredded by the hypersonic needles.

After the first fusillade had died off, Barnes discharged her MOB canister. A faint mist issued into the air and in seconds, the three nearest crouching technicians were immobilized, struggling and clawing at the barrier bots as the net tightened and inexorably forced them to the floor.

"Secure the room!" Winger yelled. He went to the MOB'ed trio to see that they were well pinioned. Singh slid over too, shouldering his coilgun.

"Make sure they're nice and comfy, Taj."

"Roger that, Skipper." Singh laid down another layer of Mobility Obstruction Barrier bots just to be sure.

Winger was about to begin puzzling out the control systems in front of him when an alert sounded in his mask earphone. It was ANAD. He linked in to the acoustic feed from the master assembler...and instantly, his blood ran cold.

A large swarm was gathering in the corridor, moving rapidly on their position.

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph," he muttered. Over the crewnet, he sounded the alarm. "Mass swarm...enemy bots right behind us. Make sure this room's secure..." he was furiously tapping out commands on his wristpad as he peeled off orders. "...Barnes—get that door shut now. That'll buy us a few minutes. Gibby...get the weapons away from those troops. We may need them. And Taj, make sure the civilians are out of the way...I'm reconfigging ANAD now."

The Quantum Corps troopers buzzed about the room, carrying out the Lieutenant's orders. The monitor screens in front flickered with scenes from around the complex, inside and out, including a slow-motion view of another landslide along the flanks of Kurabantu seamount.

But no one had time to look.

Winger reconfigged ANAD to confront the approaching enemy swarm: pyridines to assault state one, bond disrupters primed, radicals and carbene grabbers extended and locked...he toggled the rep switch, telling ANAD to replicate like mad, build mass in a hurry for the coming onslaught.

Moments later, they knew the Red Hammer mechs were upon them. A piercing shriek tore through the air as the mechs chewed into the massive door. The heat of atomic disassembly grew intense enough to blur the inner surface of the door, like hot pavement on a summer day.

"I'm sending ANAD forward...engaging now," Winger said. Propulsors up to ninety percent. He sent the commands...and waited nervously.

All about the control room, every eye was on the door.

The collision was like a distant explosion at night...you could see the light but the sound was muted. The shriek increased to a fierce whine, and a glowing ball of light emerged from the top of the door, which now resembled a melting heap of metal.

"Slam 'em, ANAD!" came Deeno's voice over the whine. "Slam 'em to hell and back!"

Johnny Winger linked in and tried to make sense of the chaos that erupted in his mask eyepiece. He was a lone voyager in a driving blizzard, buffeted by gale force winds and fierce gusts of stinging sleet...molecules of air and metal torn and whipped by the fury of nanomech hell. He focused on what the ANAD master was doing.

The onslaught stunned him.

"Jesus..." he muttered, more to himself, as the first outlines of the enemy mechs came into view. "They look like battleships....I've never seen so many effectors." He recognized the same cleft in the middle of the enemy mech structure that he'd seen before. "I know what to do with that—"

He steered ANAD right for the cleft, dodging its effectors, as he closed in.

Winger rolled ANAD right, then left, keeping just out of reach of the snapping grabbers and reconnoitered the beast's outer membrane, looking for a way in, anything he could use, a weakness of some kind.

Halfway aft, almost invisible among the rows of effectors, he saw the small cleft in the membrane, the cavity where groups of phosphate molecules made a wedge-shaped bond.

Instinctively, Johnny Winger steered ANAD toward the cleft. As he approached, he unsheathed his bond breakers and flexed the devices up and down.

With any luck—

ANAD sped forward and slashed hard at the phosphate arms with his bond breakers.

Just a little push here, a snap there...

Johnny Winger commanded ANAD's bond breakers into action. He seized one end of a polypeptide chain and tugged hard. It stretched, resisted, then with a crackling flash, it broke. A puff of atoms went spinning off in every direction.

That's more like it.

Winger now drove the assembler deeper into the cleft, unfolding every effector ANAD had: hydrogen abstractors, carbon manipulators, electron lens, enzymatic knife. It was like chewing into the side of a mountain.

Soon, the air was swimming with debris from shattered bots.

"You got 'em!" Gibby exulted. "You got 'em on the run!"

The intense blue-white globe of light began to cool and shrink. Most of the control room door and some of the bulkhead had been hit, burned away like so much paper mache. Moments later, Winger began to pull ANAD back from the front lines, leaving a small force of replicants to mop up the remaining mechs.

That's when Barnes saw something on one of the monitors.

"Skipper..." she rushed over to the console. Several screens flickered with displays, different views of the same location. "Skipper...we got something—"

Winger, D'Nunzio and the rest came over.

It was a small room, apparently in the living quarters section of the complex. There were bunk beds arrayed around a central aisle. But at the end of the aisle, a pair of formless humps writhed on the ground.

"Skipper...that's some kind of MOB net, sure as I'm standing here."

Winger peered at the display, studied the console and located the quarters. "A few halls away, on the other side of these utilities ducts. It's got to be Dana and the rest of Bravo. Maybe Doc Frost, too."

"What are we waiting for?" Gibby asked.

The assault team gathered their gear and set off. Winger ordered ANAD to replicate a small force to secure the control room and make sure their captives were still held immobile in MOB. Once that was done he configged the master assembler for perimeter defense. As the nanotroopers headed off to find the living quarters, ANAD would accompany them outside of containment, hovering overhead as a defensive screen against any more Red Hammer bots.

After one wrong turn, Winger and his assault team found the residential section. It was a warren of small compartments, buried deep inside the mountain. The outer hatch was locked but Deeno made quick work of the mechanism with her particle beam carbine. The smoking slag heap of what was left of the door was easily kicked in.

"Dana? Lieutenant Dana Tallant!" Winger burst in right behind Barnes and Singh. "Lieutenant Dana Tallant, U.N. Quantum Corps...front and center!"

A series of low groans came drifting up from the rear of the compartment.

Barnes was the first to arrive. "It's them!" Without thinking, she tugged at the MOB net and the mechs resisted with an insistent buzz, stinging her hands like angry bees in response. She winced and pulled her hand back. "No way I'm going to release 'em that way."

Winger steered the ANAD swarm that had been accompanying them down to the restraint mesh. He bent down, realizing the net was a much tighter weave than anything Quantum Corps used.

"Dana...Dana Tallant...is that you? Are you hurt...any injuries? Can you breathe?"

The hump moved sluggishly and words were said, but they came out an indistinct murmur, more a series of moaning grunts than anything else.

"The net's so tight...it must be compressing her face too," Gibby said in disgust. "Damn buggers are squeezing the life out of her."

Winger was already reconfigging ANAD. "Not for long—" He sent the commands to the assembler swarm. "Okay—everybody...stand back. Soon as there's an opening big enough, we're going to haul her out of there. Taj...check that other one." He indicated another hump a few feet away. Singh bent down to probe it for signs of life.

Winger maneuvered ANAD to the restraint net. A faint wavering in the air around the mesh showed the assembler swarm was at work, disassembling the mechs that formed the net. All of a sudden, the hump came alive, hearing the buzz of nanobotic activity and began writhing furiously.

"Hold still... hold still, will you? It's ANAD working on the mesh...I've got control of him...don't thrash around so—"

"I hope ANAD can bust her out of there, Skipper," said Barnes, peering down. "She panicking—"

Winger felt helpless. If it was Dana Tallant inside that mesh, she had become spooked by the sound of ANAD. "Damn mesh bots have probably been driving her crazy."

Then a narrow seam in the net became visible. A nose stuck out, then a mouth, sucking in air frantically, followed by a faint smile, then the eyes. The seam grew larger, as ANAD continued working. Soon, a full face stuck out.

It _was_ Dana Tallant.

Johnny Winger almost cried with relief. He grabbed her face and patted it like a baby's, wanting so much to plant a big wet kiss on her parched lips. But she wasn't free yet.

"Come on...come on..."

It took another five minutes before the seam was large enough. Winger and Gibby grabbed her arms and carefully hoisted her up to her feet. Dana Tallant blinked and nearly collapsed to the floor, but smiled and coughed, heaving in great gulps of air. It was better than ice cream on a hot summer day.

"What the hell took you so long, Wings?"

Winger cuffed her on the head. "I knew how stubborn you are. We didn't want to show up too soon."

Tallant was given a canteen of water and shuffled a few meters away around the dormitory, flexing her arms and legs. A few meters away, Taj Singh was probing the other MOB'ed victim. The hump groaned and shifted around on the floor.

"Hey...this one's alive too."

Tallant came over. "Jeff Collin, my CC2. We're the only survivors, as far as I know. We got ambushed."

Winger sent ANAD commands to 'unzip' the nanobotic barrier. A buzzing sound accompanied the shimmering halo of air around the prostrate form. Moments later, a seam was open and Winger was tearing at the gap with Barnes, their bare hands fighting off tenacious remnant bots.

Collin was nearly unconscious and had to be hauled out by hand and stretched out on the deck.

Barnes was already readying an injection. "This'll help...'cytes can boost his blood oxygen. The rest of the cocktail kickstarts his metabolism." She slammed the injector into Collin's neck. Moments later, his eyes fluttered open.

"None of the others made it?" Winger asked.

Tallant shook her head, wincing at some pain in her shoulders. "Like I said, it was an ambush. ANAD couldn't hold 'em off. Red Hammer bots had mutated out of some kind of tropical rainstorm, just like we simmed...remember the war games at Hunt Valley? Buggers were just too fast."

Winger understood. "Yeah, we ran into the same thing... I had to drive ANAD myself...we had some kind of quantum jamming that scrambled his processor...damn near fried it. He's being regenerated now. All we got are older versions here...ANAD without the upgrades."

"Can we fight Red Hammer at all, Wings?"

Winger described the midline cavity he had seen on the bot. "There is a way, Dana. But you gotta drive the thing right into that cavity...it looks like there's no room but there is. Inside...they're exposed as hell...all kinds of sensitive areas. You can finish off a bot real quick from inside that cavity...if you can get in. I just—" he was interrupted by a grinding shudder that shook the entire complex. A series of dull thuds followed...then the floor tilted at a precipitous angle and there was an unmistakable sensation of movement...the entire complex was moving.

"What the—"

Singh scrambled to his feet. "The whole place is moving—"

"Landslide!" Barnes said. "The mountainside's giving way!"

Winger then figured out what had happened. "Those outer barrier bots kept the compound from being swept off of the seamount. They anchored the place to the mountain."

"And when we started the assault," Gibby finished the thought, "the bots re-deployed inside to defend. The compound was left exposed—"

"...just when another tremor hit. See if you can raise _Sea Ray_ on the coupler. We've got to exfiltrate...and fast."

"What about Doc Frost? Any sign of the Doc?"

Winger queried ANAD. The bot had found no other emissions not already accounted for, emissions indicating unknown live humans in the compound. "He and Duncan must be elsewhere...we've got to get out of here now."

A shriek of tortured metal sounded through the walls, followed by more heavy thuds, then a hammering vibration. More rending metal...then a more ominous sound.

"That's the pressure hull," Gibby decided. "Feel your ears hurting? It's been breached and bulkheads are collapsing."

They all heard the panicked shouts and the tread of dozens of feet on the deck outside the living quarters.

"Skipper...we don't have any extra skinsuits!" Singh reminded them. The assault plan had called for _Sea Ray_ to remove any survivors.

Winger was thinking fast. "Make sure these two are boosted. Do it now!" While Sheila Barnes finished injecting 'cytes into Tallant and Collin, Winger bent to his wristpad, the nucleus of an idea forming in the back of his mind.

If ANAD could hold pressure inside that assault tunnel, he just might be able to form a protective bubble big enough and tight enough to shield the rescue team and the survivors from full seawater pressure at this depth.

Winger hacked together a basic config off the top of his head and commanded ANAD to replicate at max rate. Then he ordered everyone to bunch together as tightly as they could.

"Before we go," Tallant said, "there's something you should see."

"We don't have time, Dana...this place could collapse at any time...we're sliding down the side of the seamount now...you can feel it!"

"This will only take a minute...come on!" She led Winger out of the dormitory, through a series of narrow corridors, down several flights of stairs to a vault-like space deeper under the mountain. Before they left, Winger told Gibby to contact Al Glance and get _Sea Ray_ moving.

"We're going to need her," Winger said. "This place is going to go at any second."

"What about Lieutenant Tallant and Sergeant Collin?" Gibby asked. "We can't take them back through the tunnel."

Winger was already pressing buttons on his wristpad. "I'm configging ANAD to form a pressure enclosure. We'll form a nanobarrier around the both of them and drag 'em back to _Sea Ray_ that way, if we have to."

"Aye, aye, Skipper." Gibby set to work helping Sgt. Collin get ready to evacuate.

Tallant had taken Winger to the innermost chambers of the Kurabantu compound, two levels below the living quarters.

"This will blow your socks off, I guarantee it." At the vault door, Tallant withdrew a small piece of film that looked like a patch of human skin. It was mounted on the end of a stick.

"I managed to concoct this before Jeff and I were completely MOB'ed," she explained. "I hacked into one of their smaller swarms...got into the master processor no sweat, and had the thing run off a simulated biometric. Like a fingerprint." She grinned at Winger. "Bet you never did that before."

Winger snorted. "Can't say that I have."

Tallant used the nanoderm patch to fool the vault lock. In seconds, the massive hatch was swinging open. Just as Tallant was about to lead Winger inside, the entire compound shuddered again, lurched and tilted. Heavy thuds clanged on the outside of the pressure hull.

"Boulders...feels like we're sliding again...the structure's breaking up—we've got to—"

"Just take a look inside, Wings...you won't believe your eyes." She pulled him deeper inside the vault.

The interior was warm, dark, and humid. He let his eyes adjust to the low light level for a few seconds. There was water inside—a pool or a small pond, he could hear waves lapping. Something splashed nearby.

When his vision cleared, he realized he was standing on the banks of a semi-tropical grotto laid out before them.

The whole compartment was nothing but a nursery, an incubator for the same creatures he and Barnes has encountered in the cave at Engebbe. Featureless shapes shifted languidly in the water, despite the shuddering of the compound, partially formed half-men, some headless, some without arms or legs.

"Just like before," he whispered. Even as he watched, holding onto the vault door, the habitat lurched once again. "Same as Engebbe—Dana, what the hell do these things do? What are they for?"

Tallant let a particularly violent shudder subside, then she knelt to the floor and groped in the dim light with her hands. "Hell if I know...there...here's what I wanted to show you..." She held up a small metal bowl to the light.

Inside the bowl were a handful of small spherical objects, featureless white in the poor light of the nursery, smooth as eggs yet hard, polished and made of some material Winger had never seen before.

Experimentally, he touched one. At the moment his finger tip made contact, a hot flash of pain lanced through his body and, for a few moments, he staggered, semi-conscious and wobbly. A reel of memory fragments careened through his head, like some mad projector at hyperspeed.

"Whoa..." Tallant grabbed him by the shoulders before he could pitch headlong to the deck. Winger felt dizzy, his face flushed red. "What was that?"

"It happened to me too," she admitted. "First time I touched one of these babies, I nearly passed out. It's like somebody trying to rip your brain out of your skull through your nose."

Winger braced himself against more shudders and lurching. "So what the hell are they?" He nudged the spheres with the toe of his boot but didn't touch any more.

Tallant watched a nearby creature slide off the side of the pool into dark, oily water. It seemed to have no arms...only a partially formed head and stumps for legs, like an abandoned store front dummy. The creature thrashed momentarily, then slid below the surface, leaving only a few bubbles.

"I'm not sure what they are...but I've seen the technicians take the same balls and insert them into the backs of their necks. There's some kind of skin flap or something back there...I only saw it from a distance. The fully formed ones all get the same treatment. A technician opens up that skin flap and somehow attaches one of these balls inside. Maybe it's some kind of control system or a biocomputer...something like that, maybe?"

Winger was thinking fast. "We should take one back but I don't know how—" then an idea came to him. "ANAD can do it. We already use him to form MOB nets. Since we can't touch the thing, I can have ANAD replicate a small force and detach it to secure one of these spheres. Doc Frost has got to see this!"

Even as Winger was tapping out commands on his wristpad, the Red Hammer base shook with a fury that threw them both off balance and nearly pitched Tallant into a nearby pool. Water splashed on both them...along with a few hands and feet. Tallant quickly slithered away in disgust. Winger quickly grabbed her and together they groped their way back to the vault entrance.

"Pressure hull is fully breached, Lieutenant," came a voice over the crewnet. It was Gibby, back up at the living quarters. "We've got to move—"

"On our way!" Winger replied. With Tallant ahead of him, he finished commanding an ANAD element to seek out the coordinates of the nursery. "I just hope ANAD can get an element here before the place collapses completely. Come on!"

They scurried down a corridor, passing several panicked Red Hammer technicians going in the opposite direction, while emergency lighting flashed, and warning sirens blared, until at last they had made it back to the dormitory.

In the center of the room, a glowing blue-white orb had already been formed...a nanobotic barrier just formed by ANAD. It floated like some weightless egg, a flickering fog of twinkling lights, radiantly shimmering in the dim red emergency lighting. Jeff Collin was already cocooned inside, peering out through the faint veil like a ghost's face.

"In you go, Lieutenant," Gibby helped Dana Tallant through a faint orifice in the side. Once over the threshold and secured, Tallant and Collin stared back at them as the orifice swirled shut. Now the two survivors were snugly embraced by a nanobotic pressure enclosure, a sort of MOB-net in reverse.

"Come on, Skipper," said Barnes, securing her mask and stowing her coilgun. "This place is ready to blow."

Winger could only hope that ANAD had been able to secure one of the strange spheres. All around them, the shriek of rending metal grew unbearable. The air itself burned with heat as millions of tons of seawater pressed in on the compound, buckling walls and frames. The roar of the wave overwhelmed everything in its path and in the ensuing maelstrom, Johnny Winger knew what a molecule truly felt like, bounced and battered and blasted in every direction at once by forces he could only imagine.

Kurabantu seamount was rapidly engulfed in a thick billowing veil of dirt, rock and mud as violent tremors loosened thousands of tons of sediment. The pressure hull of the Red Hammer base, perched as it was on a narrow ledge, was breached by falling rock in dozens of places simultaneously and crumpled under the onslaught of mass. Torn from its anchorage, no longer protected by a nanobotic barrier, the structure was shoved downward and crushed into rubble by the landslide.

The Quantum Corps rescue force barely escaped. Through a widening seam outside the residence module, a supersonic wall of water crashed into the habitat, sweeping everything before it.

Winger, Barnes, Singh and the rest swam for their lives. Winger was swept up into the vortex and battered into walls repeatedly before he was able to regain some sense of balance. The skinsuit gave him some protection and respirocytes cycled oxygen to his blood, but the fierce pressure pulse slammed his ears and he was thrashed by violent currents in a hundred directions at once. The water cleared just long enough for him to catch a brief glimpse of the remains of the habitat, crumpled as if by a giant's fist, sliding off into the abyss five thousand meters below. Then the heavy veil of thousands of tons of silt closed over him and he was simply spinning, floating, now falling, the cold ever penetrating as the vortex hammered him relentlessly.

How long he had been unconscious, Johnny Winger couldn't say. He was cold, but not uncomfortably so...drifting freely. The water was thick and turbid, but he could still make out the faint outlines of Kurabantu or what was left of it.

Maybe he could raise someone.

Winger felt for his wristpad and opened up a channel.

"Any station...any station...this is 1st Nano rescue force on channel one...does anybody copy?"

Static and chirps and pops and crackles filled his headset. Then, suddenly, the clear and strong voice of Al Glance came through and Winger nearly wept with relief.

"Skipper...is that you? UNQCS _Sea Ray_ responding to distress call on channel one...Skipper, if that's you, transmit again so we can fix your position, over—"

Within an hour, the welcome outlines of the floater materialized into view. The twin-dish submersible hovered a few meters away, while her portside airlock swung open, beckoning him forward. Winger dolphin-kicked and flailed his way over and wearily hauled himself aboard.

The lockout chamber cycled and as the water drained, he could see faces peering at him through the porthole. Al Glance's pug nose was centered in the view pane, surrounded by Deeno's snarly grin and Taj Singh.

The heavy door was pulled open and strong hands helped Winger out into the ready room. Hands and faces crowded around, slapping him on the back.

"Give him some room to breathe," barked Gibby, who helped the Lieutenant pull off his mask, then began peeling off the skinsuit. In spite of the heated compartment and the press of bodies, Winger was shivering. Barnes threw him a robe.

Then he saw Dana Tallant.

Johnny Winger cracked a weak smile as he let others change him into drier clothing.

"Welcome aboard..." Tallant said. "I thought you'd never get here." She grinned back at him, cradling a steaming mug of coffee with both hands.

Winger was still disoriented from his ordeal. "Me too...I kept hallucinating...wondering if all this was real."

"All too real, Skipper," said Barnes. She helped him pull on the robe and handed him a mug of his own.

"That whole complex went right over the ledge," added Gibby, who was standing by the lockout door. "Straight to the seafloor...four kilometers straight down."

"Everybody made it out okay?"

"All present and accounted for," said Al Glance, who had been manning _Sea Ray_ during the assault.

An alarm sounded over the intercom just as Glance was heading up to the command deck. He killed the blaring horn and saw contacts on the active sonar display. He called back to the lockout compartment.

"Skipper, we're pinging something small and close aboard...several hundred meters astern."

Winger climbed the ladders and appeared right behind Glance, sitting himself gingerly in the captain's seat.

"Any signature? Can you make it out?"

"Well, sir...I'm not sure of this but since it's such a faint return...just barely there...I'd almost be willing to say it was—"

They both looked at each other with the dawning realization of what _Sea Ray_ had just detected.

"...it's got to be ANAD."

Glance maneuvered _Sea Ray_ closer to the return, coming abreast of the target. A quick visual check through the forward portholes confirmed their suspicion: the faint glow of nanobotic activity right outside the window was unmistakable.

"Bring him aboard," Winger ordered. "And carefully."

Moby M'Bela was ready in the lockout with the mobile TinyTown unit when ANAD jetted inside. Once the autonomous assembler had arrived, the CEC1 reported that ANAD had brought something along.

"It's a small, white sphere," he radioed up. "Held in MOBnet by ANAD. I got it bagged and tagged for the time being. And ANAD is captured and in containment."

"Whatever you do," Winger warned, "don't touch it. It's some kind of control pack for the weird creatures we saw inside. I want Doc Frost to take a look at it. Any signs of life out there?"

"Just detected a small vessel, submersible probably, headed south by southwest. Maybe some kind of escape pod. I can't tell if it came from the compound."

"Get a bearing. Maybe we can follow it."

Glance was one step ahead. "I've already slaved Manta Three to the target bearing. Intercept in about twenty minutes. Manta should be able to follow, as long as her power cell holds out."

"Good thinking, Al. I'll let Table Top and UNISEA know what we're tracking."

"Object is secured," M'Bela said. "I'll leave it in the lockout for now."

Winger nodded to Glance, who had _Sea Ray's_ helm. "Okay, Al, we got what we came for...let's get the hell out of here. And keep me advised on Manta Three. Doc Frost may be onboard that sub."

"Gladly, Skipper. Now ten degrees up-bubble." Glance steered the floater toward the surface. As they ascended, the water brightened slowly from deep black to a purple hue, then to a more diffuse green, finally turquoise and soon enough, the ocean was thick and teeming with life.

_Sea Ray_ breached the surface with as roar of air and waves and floated uneasily on long, rolling swells while Winger contacted hyperjet _Mercury_ , still orbiting overhead.

A welcome voice crackled through the speakers. " _Mercury_ standing by for pickup," said Lieutenant Matumba. "My drop doors are coming open and the recovery cradle is in position."

Winger sighed a deep sigh of relief. After hours underwater, crawling like ants through claustrophobic tunnels, getting shot at from all directions and nearly crushed in a landslide, it was pure heaven just to grab some chow and take a hot shower and hit the bunk.

"Matumba...this is _Sea Ray_ on the surface. We are ready to execute recovery sequence. I'm lifting off now...we'll be in position in about ten minutes. Set a course for Table Top Mountain."

Matumba was a tall and statuesque Ibo woman, originally TDY'ed to Quantum Corps from UNIFORCE West Africa. "Roger that, Lieutenant...course is laid in and we have clearance 'over the top.'

"Very well," Winger replied. He secured his seat harness as Glance revved _Sea Ray's_ engines. The floater lifted away from the surface of the Pacific in a spray of foam and water and banked hard to port to climb to recovery altitude. "Advise Table Top one more thing, Lieutenant. We have two survivors onboard from Bravo Detachment...Lieutenant Tallant and Sergeant Collin. Two survivors and another mystery as to where Doc Frost is. One of our mantas is tracking a small submersible now."

"Will advise," Mutumba reported. "And _Mercury_ has you in sight astern of us. Activating recovery program now."

Less than an hour later, hyperjet _Mercury_ was rocketing up into space on three good engines, cleared by UNISPACE Traffic Control 'over the top.' The long suborbital arc would take them to the very edge of space, nine thousand kilometers back to Table Top Mountain in less than two hours.

As he nodded off to sleep in his web seat, Johnny Winger watched the deep blue of the Pacific, dotted with white puffs of clouds, roll by underneath. He had no idea that in the days ahead, he and his fellow nanotroopers would be off on yet another adventure, trying to locate and rescue Doc Frost and Mary Duncan, this time in the jungles of South America, battling Red Hammer and the _Demonios of Via Verde._

Moments later, Winger had drifted off to a deep, dreamless sleep.

END

About the Author

Philip Bosshardt is a native of Atlanta, Georgia. He works for a large company that makes products everyone uses...just check out the drinks aisle at your grocery store. He's been happily married for 25 years. He's also a Georgia Tech graduate in Industrial Engineering. He loves water sports in any form and swims 3-4 miles a week in anything resembling water. He and his wife have no children. They do, however, have one terribly spoiled Keeshond dog named Kelsey.

For technical and background details on his series _Tales of the Quantum Corps_ , visit his blog at http://qcorpstimes.blogspot.com. For details on other books in this series, visit his website at <http://philbosshardt.wix.com/philip-bosshardt> or learn about other books by Philip Bosshardt by visiting www.smashwords.com.

Download the next exciting episode of _Quantum Troopers_ from www.smashwords.com. It's called " **Demonios of Via Verde.** " Available on July 5, 2016.

To get a peek at Philip Bosshardt's upcoming work, recent reviews, excerpts and general updates on the writing life, visit his blog _The Word Shed_ at: http://thewdshed.blogspot.com.
