 
# Johnny Winger and the Golden Horde

### Published by Philip Bosshardt at Smashwords

### Copyright 2014 Philip Bosshardt

### Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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" _The problem with giving ANAD swarms all these rights and political recognition is that ANAD is a man-made creation...a man-made nanoscale robot, for Christ's sake. We made the damn thing. Oh, granted, it's got some kind of whiz-bang processor. And I know that the processor core is based on algorithms taken from the genome of some ancient virus old Doc Frost turned up at an archeological dig site in Kenya. Some say that the Old Ones embedded secret commands and instructions in that genome billions of years ago. I say..._ poppycock _. It's a man-made robotic device, nothing more than that. I'd sooner give rights to my washing machine as recognize the so-called needs and aspirations of some doodad I can't even see_."

LT GEN Jurgen Kraft

CINCQUANT, UNQC

January 2099

### The Nanowarrior's Code

( _from_ QM 3.0, U.N. Quantum Corps Field Manual- _Operations_ )

Nanowarriors don't leave fellow warriors behind

Nanowarriors fight only the enemy

Nanowarriors don't harm those who surrender

Nanowarriors destroy only what the mission requires

Nanowarriors treat civilians with respect

Nanowarriors don't steal

Nanowarriors don't violate the laws of war

Nanowarriors report violations of the laws of war to their superiors

" _Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect."_

Romans 2:12
PROLOGUE

United Nations Quantum Corps "Official History of The Containment Wars (2080 to 2099)"

( _from_ "The Archives of the United Nations Quantum Corps")

Config Zero was the name of the program that controlled all the swarms. Config Zero was the baseline, the initial configuration state for all nanoscale assembler swarms associated with the return of the Old Ones.

Config Zero had multiple physical locations. The original program was thought to be archived with the Old Ones, some sixty-eight thousand light years away in the globular cluster M75 in the constellation Sagittarius. At the time of the _Tales of the Quantum Corps_ , the Old Ones were believed to have mostly left their homeworld in a diaspora across their star region, due to the supernova destruction of their home star. Evidence indicated that Config Zero was located in the mobile archives that traveled with the mother Swarm. The Old Ones were basically a nomadic mechanistic species then, a great swarm nearly a light-year across, traveling through interstellar space around the galaxy.

In addition to being originally located in the archives of the mother swarm, Config Zero could be transmitted and stored or copied in multiple locations. There were multiple copies in the Terran solar system. They were archived in devices called Spheres. One was at the Paryang monastery. This was destroyed or irretrievably damaged by Quantum Corps assault in the _Amazon Vector_ mission. Another was located in Hellas Basin on Mars. The prime location for the Terran solar system was a Sphere which was underwater beneath the frozen surface of Jupiter's moon Europa. This was the primary executable Config Zero in this star system and it transmitted and directed the actions of other Entities through the system.

Humans could interface with Config Zero through the Sphere operating system, known as the Keeper.

Config Zero had primary instructions from the mother swarm. These instructions were known as the Prime Key. The Prime Key set the configuration state and evolutionary path for all nanoscale assembler swarms associated with the Old Ones, that is, all swarms originally derived from Dr. Irwin Frost's initial ANAD design. The initial design, ANAD 1.0, contained operating instructions taken in part from the genome of ancient viruses discovered at the Engebbe dig site in Kenya (see _Serengeti Factor_ mission files).

The Prime Key instructed all ANAD-derived swarms to maintain certain configurations and to follow additional programming which would ultimately have the effect of returning the Earth to a biological/geological state similar to its condition approximately a billion years ago, when the Old Ones last visited. This programming was a sort of evolution in reverse. To achieve the programmed conditions, ANAD swarms had to accomplish the following:

**Module 1** : Eliminate all higher multi-cellular life forms currently inhabiting the earth (a truly Mass Extinction event). This was the _Extinction_ module of Config's program.

**Module 2** : Alter the geology and meteorology of the Earth so as to create a more congenial environment for autonomous assembler swarms (Changing the initial conditions for a new Evolutionary path). This was the _Re-configuration_ module.

**Module 3** : Change their configurations in a programmed sequence, lasting decades, to bring the local autonomous swarms up to the configuration originally designed by Config Zero. This was a sort of revised Evolution, along the 'correct' track. This was the _Evolution_ module.

**Module 4** : Re-integrate and be absorbed into the mother swarm when the Old Ones return in 2155 AD. This module and configuration end state was called _Integration_.

Config Zero had permitted limited contact with humans in the form of archival access from Red Hammer, as long as this was consistent with its programming. Config's program followed the four fundamental constraints listed above.

These archival requests came through Red Hammer contacts with the Keeper of the Sphere, specifically through the programming talents of Ruling Council members Kulagin and Souvranamh, who found the first Sphere in Paryang and learned how to use it.

The result of these archival accesses was for Red Hammer and others to have access to elements of the technology of the Old Ones, which the cartel then developed and used for criminal purposes...although some technology 'leaked' out and spread around the world quickly (see _quantum coupler_ ).

These accesses were permitted 'searches' and 'withdrawals' as they were consistent with the Prime Key, especially the Extinction module, also known as Module One.

In the years from 2080 to 2099, ANAD swarm technology continued to evolve quickly, guided in part by the Prime Key and other instructions from Config Zero and also by human engineering development. One of the most significant evolutions in ANAD technology was the ability of swarm architectures to assume nearly human form, to congregate and configure themselves to closely resemble humans. This development has created a new 'lifeform', not quite human and not quite swarm, known as _angels_. Angels became alter-ego humans, surrogate companions, spiritual advisors, genies, sex slaves, and just about anything else human ingenuity and depravity could think of.

The presence of angels, simulated human swarms, also brought great and increasing conflict between humans and between humans and ANAD swarms. Some of this conflict was territorial. Swarms were proliferating, partly because many humans wanted them and partly because ANAD was programmed to follow the Prime Key (see Modules One and Two).

The first violent clashes between angels, loose ANAD swarms and human populations occurred in Europe and Africa in 2088-2090. These clashes took the form of swarm explosions and swarms pushing humans out of disputed areas (small scale Big Bangs), along with swarms modifying the land, water, bio and air resources to conditions consistent with their programming (see Module 2). These clashes first acquired the name _containment wars_ in media coverage in 2089.

The legal environment for ANAD swarms and angels was somewhat murky in the late 21st century. Although the UN had set world standards for swarm containment, many states, cities and communities routinely ignored these standards. These standards were first enacted by the General Assembly in 2075, after the _Amazon Vector_ incident in the late 2060s. They were known as the Containment Edicts. The Containment Edicts have been altered and revised many times since 2075.

There were several organizations tasked with enforcing the Containment edicts. One was the _Quantum Corps_. Another was _BioShield_ , which was assigned to enforce UN mandates on uncontrolled operation of replicating molecular assembler systems and swarms. Local and national police forces also sought to enforce or at least manage the proliferation of swarms around the world.

The first violent conflict between ANAD swarms and humans came in 2090, in several African and Middle East cities, such as Cairo and Jerusalem and Nairobi. This conflict occurred in the shantytown parts of the cities, as the ANAD swarms began to infiltrate communities where _angels_ were especially popular, typically the poorer communities. Not all owners and users of angels were particularly diligent on control or containment procedures, and the ANAD swarms often got loose and replicated. Acting under their imperative from Config Zero, according to Module One (Extinction), these ANAD swarms began to physically consume or modify more and more living space, water, air, and other resources, making it harder and harder to live there for humans. Conflict was inevitable.

The conflict usually took the form of smothering swarm assaults, followed by human response in the form of HERF and coilgun assaults, followed by small-scale big bang replication storms, local weather modification, swarms of ANAD configured as locusts and bees and ever escalating human reprisals on ANAD swarm owners and attacks on ANAD sanctuaries. Often local police or Army troops had to intervene.

From 2090 to 2099, these clashes, known as containment breaks and containment wars, eventually came to the attention of UNIFORCE authorities and the UN itself.

From 2096-2097, meetings were held all around the world on what to do and how to deal with the conflict. Negotiations were held, beginning in November 2097, between representatives and mediators from the UN, local authorities and elements of the ANAD swarms, who attended in para-human form. These containment talks eventually led to agreement that certain protected sanctuaries would be set aside for the ANAD swarms to operate outside of containment. Beyond these sanctuaries, by law, ANAD swarms would be required to stay in containment and observe all containment and control regulations. Hackers, twistheads, atomgrabbers and fab lords who ran _angel_ factories—Kolkata was one of the worst—would be prosecuted and severely punished. Enforcement of these revised **Containment Edicts** (in effect on 1 January 2098), was assigned to Quantum Corps and to BioShield, both arms of UNIFORCE.

The sanctuaries set aside in the Containment Edicts (Revised) were three: the _Amazon Sanctuary_ (carved out of the upper Amazon River basin and rain forest, including the small republic of Valencia, which basically was turned over to the swarms); the _East Africa Sanctuary_ (including part of the Congo River basin and the Great Rift Valley, site of the original Engebbe dig); and the _South Pacific Sanctuary_. These Sanctuaries were accorded the status of nation-states and given full representation in the General Assembly, along with advisory/observer status in the Security Council. UNIFORCE also set up a new enforcement agency called _Sanctuary Patrol_ , to police the swarm zones and ensure compliance with the Containment Edicts. Sanctuary Patrol was a sort of Border Patrol, but they sometimes conducted limited special forces ops inside the Sanctuaries.

This was the first time that nanoscale robotic mechanisms had achieved any kind of political status on Earth.

All of these actions were in accordance with (or did not conflict) with the Prime Key and the instructions of Config Zero. Containment Edicts and sanctuaries permitted achievement of Module One (Extinction) subordinate goals and were thus permitted.

By the mid-2090s, a few far-seeing people such as Souvranamh (of Red Hammer) and Fatima Farhad, understood that the truce between Man and ANAD, created by the Containment Edicts and the sanctuaries, could not last long. They foresaw it wouldn't be long before ANAD swarms and ANAD-driven _angels_ supplanted humans altogether as the dominant lifeform on Earth. Even with the obvious threat, ANAD swarms and angels offered too many services that people wanted. Possibly humans would be ultimately relegated to backwaters, even zoos, perhaps even made extinct. People like Souvranamh and Farhad wanted to have a key role in the coming Age of ANAD. They wanted to be key players in this new ANAD world, either directly or through their own _angels_.

Toward that end, they concocted plans to force the issue by encouraging the ANAD swarms to violate the Containment Edicts and push outward at their sanctuary borders, with a view to expanding the sanctuaries more and more into human space.

Souvranamh apparently believed he had become accepted enough and strong enough to control at least some of the swarms. He formed a swarm army and named it the New Golden Horde. His plan was to seize control of all Africa and the Middle East, possibly Europe as well...to be become a new emperor with Fatima Farhad (egging him on) as his queen. Souvranamh didn't realize that the swarms were controlling and using him as much as he was using them. In the end, he would be swept aside. It was Souvranamh who led ANAD swarms and Humans into major conflict, to be later known as the Second Containment War, which began in late 2099, just as the 22nd Century began.

The effort to fight back against unauthorized ANAD expansion and contain the swarms, and defeat the Golden Horde, is told in _Johnny Winger and the Golden Horde_.
CHAPTER 1

Cairo, Egypt

June 2099

1950 hours local

Detective Inspector Bassam Faraj leaned on the horn and waved impatiently at the river of humanity clogging lower Ramses Street. Donkey carts clattered by, piled high with bedding and pots and pans, while stray sheep nuzzled at piles of rubbish along the gutters. The Bulaq was jammed with a million people this early evening as an acrid haze settled over the quarter, a haze compounded of gasoline fumes, sand blown in from the desert and greasy smoke from mutton kebabs cooked over hundreds of curbside stalls.

_And probably a few bot swarms as well_ , Faraj thought to himself. His partner, Lieutenant Fu'ad Khaldun, leaned out the window of the police cruiser and shouted.

" _Move your asses! We're on a call here--!!"_

A pedicab scooted off to the right with a loud bleat of its horn and some fist-shaking by the driver. On the other side, a flatbed truck was half blocking the street, a lone camel reclining in the back, lazily chewing its cud, batting eyelashes at passersby.

"It's no use—"Faraj decided out loud. "I'll duck into this alley and try to go around."

With a jerk of the wheel, they veered off down a dim potholed passageway, barely wide enough for the car. In the distance, a gang of boys kicked a ball back and forth while overhead linen flapped in the breezes from lines strung across the alley. The cruiser bounced along for several hundred meters, Faraj blasting his way through with the horn and sirens.

"Turn here—" Khaldun pointed left. "It's the next block, I think." He consulted a tiny nav screen on his wristpad. The coordinates flashed red as he counted down the distance.

Less than twenty minutes before, a frantic call had come into El Hussinieh station. Dispatch had an hysterical woman on the line...it was hard to pick out her words from her shrieks— _it's Mustafa...angels swarmed him...he wasn't doing anything...the bots came and now he's gone...what am I to do!...I have eight mouths to feed...I'm just a poor woman—"_

Captain Said had been firm. "Get over there...third time this week...the bugs are on the move again...and you'd better contact Sanctuary Patrol too...."

There was a knot of _fellahin_ gathered around the dingy apartment entrance when Faraj braked to a stop.

The two officers got out and surveyed the scene. There was a woman, late thirties perhaps, balling her head off beside a wheeled cart in the center of the crowd. Her name was Salifa Sultan and she was kneeling on the pavement, groping around for something lost.

"What happened here?" Faraj asked.

Neighbors comforted Salifa. A thin elderly man cloaked in a white cotton _galabiyah_ explained.

"Mustafa...he was a good man. This was his cart—"

"They got him!' piped up a small boy next to the man. "The bugs...a big swarm. Like the djinn. One minute, he's pushing the cart. Then... _poof_!" The boy's eyes widened as he gestured.

"Angels—" added a nearby woman. "They got loose—" she dabbed at a tear rolling down her cheek. "Poor Mustafa—" she bent to comfort Salifa.

Faraj looked around. It was a typical alley in the Bulaq: dim, trash piles everywhere, goats and sheep wandering from one gutter to another. To Khaldun: "Check it out. I'll get her statement."

Khaldun ejected a pair of scanflies from a capsule on his waist belt. The minuscule entomopters buzzed off into the haze, scouring the alley up and down. Khaldun read off the results in his wristpad.

"Just like the others, Inspector—" he announced. "Reading high thermals...lots of atom fluff, mostly radicals. Residual EM, lots of bond breaking, it looks like. Something big got disassembled here...and recently."

Faraj scuffed his shoes through a pile of dust on the ground, wondering. "Like a cart vendor, maybe. This is beginning to get old." To the gathered neighbors: "You've got bad fabs around here, don't you realize that? That's why we've got regulations...so you won't get hurt." He bent down to a nearly prostrate Salifa. "You got a photo or something of your husband's I can look at?"

Salifa dug into the folds of her black robe. She took out a small pendant on a chain. "From our wedding...a gift—" Reluctantly, she dropped the pendant in Faraj's hand.

"Fu'ad, scan this too...we'll have to get a DNA match, if there's enough left."

Faraj checked out the apartment. There it was...right inside the door. The fab console was in the front room. He didn't have to examine very closely to see what had happened.

_Containment breach_ , he decided, mentally writing the report he would soon have to file. The _fellahin_ had no concept of how to keep assembler bots in containment. They scrimped and scraped and saved up enough to buy a fab from some dealer on the street; Bulaq and all of Cairo was full of them. It was always the same. They carted the fab home, dialed in some specs, fed the bugs inside what they wanted—hell, anything could serve as feedstock these days—pressed a few buttons and like Aladdin's Lamp, their dreams came true...assembled from raw stock, dripping wet, a new cart, some new clothes, a vid console, maybe even a jetcab.

Only something always went wrong. A wiring error, a sticky valve, a leak. To your average fab lord or hacker, normal safety and containment precautions were just a bunch of big words. The capsule leaked. Maybe the buyer was just curious. _I wonder what this doodad does?_ The _fellahin_ were good with their hands. They could fix or jerry-rig anything. But once the bots inside the core got out—

Salifa was still wailing and sobbing outside. Bassam Faraj video'ed everything he could for the case files, then went back to the widow. Khaldun was still scanning the alley, but he came back when Faraj waved at him.

"Ma'am, how long ago did this happen?"

Salifa rubbed at raw and red eyes under her veil. "An hour...now what am I supposed to do?" Two of her boys came up and hugged her robe. "So many mouths to feed...."

_Should have spent your money on food, lady, not some jalopy fabricator,_ he wanted to say but didn't.

"I'll have to call this in," Faraj told her. "And we'll have to sweep your place...to make sure. You got a place to stay?"

Neighbors offered to take in her children.

"Bag the cart," Faraj told his deputy. "I'll contact Sanctuary Patrol."

He made the call and started on his report, tapping on his wristpad.

Khaldun pulled out his MOB dispenser and primed it. The Mobility Obstruction Barrier would drop an impenetrable screen of linked nanobotic mesh around the cart. Forensics and evidence. Faraj intended to do everything by the book.

"You think it was ANAD, Inspector? Or just bad fab bots?"

"Doesn't matter," Faraj told him. "Regulations say we bag and tag."

Just as Khaldun discharged the dispenser and a mist of bots formed over the old vendor's cart, another car came bumping into the alley. It bore the blue and white logo of UN Sanctuary Patrol. Two agents got out.

Jacques Dordain and Clement Uttley introduced themselves.

"Got a call about twenty minutes ago, so we came right away." Dordain directed his partner to recon the alley. Uttley probed the air with a sniffer, kicked at dirt piles in a few corners. "Bugs are getting bolder, I see. Haven't found any this deep inside the city in months."

Faraj checked the seal on the old vendor's cart and found it firm. "Evidence," he announced. He related the story from Salifa Sultan. "Looks like a bad fab with a burst core to me. We haven't found any evidence of ANAD infiltration."

Dordain cracked a faint smile. "And you won't, Inspector. Bugs are too good now. Hell, half the people around you could be _angels_. Even with a decent scan, you can't always tell."

Faraj had already taken an instant dislike to this officious prick. UN weenies figured they knew everything. Cairo police cooperated with SP out of courtesy; rare was the case that the locals couldn't handle. But he knew there was some truth to Dordain's jibe. ANAD-style bots had been percolating northward from the East African Sanctuary for months now. He'd seen the intel himself.

Before he could go over the evidence with Dordain, a commotion broke out at the far end of the alley. There were shouts. Dogs started running.

"Mustafa!"

Salifa took off too. Faraj followed her to the end of the block and found a knot of people gathered around a scruffy black bearded man in a dingy _galabiyah_. Faraj watched in amazement as Salifa cried out.

"Mustafa— _Mustafa_ \--!"

It was her husband. The cart vendor himself had somehow shown up, looking pretty fit and healthy for someone supposedly swarmed and reduced to atom fluff. Faraj's eyes narrowed as he approached. Dordain and Uttley were right behind him.

Two dogs jumped up on Mustafa, but lost their footing and fell back, whining. They barked, growled and backed off, baring their teeth at the vendor. Mustafa backed away, holding up his hands, pleading.

" _Hajji_..." someone yelled and grabbed the mutt by the scruff of the neck. " _Tahri_...come here!"

Dordain stopped short, reached out and grabbed Faraj by the arm. "Hold up, Inspector. Did you see what just happened? Don't get too close."

Faraj stopped short. He could see Mustafa was keeping his distance. Even as Salifa, his wife, approached, he was backpedaling, smiling and nodding, fending off the crowd.

"What the hell—"

Dordain motioned Uttley to come up. The SP agent already his scancorder out and was sniffing the air. Faraj noticed the screen was flashing red lights all over.

"Your scanflies won't pick this up," Dordain explained. "But Uttley's can...it's tuned correctly." Both agents clucked and h'mmmed over the screen display. "Third incident like this in the last two weeks."

Faraj couldn't believe what he was seeing. "So he's not what he seems? His wife sure seems to think it's her husband."

"An angel," Dordain pronounced. "And a damned good one. Para-human swarm of nanobotic assemblers. Configured to resemble a living human being."

Faraj had seen them before. Bulaq...hell, most of Cairo was full of them. But most angels were like apparitions, like ghosts. Usually, the swarm couldn't config tightly enough. There was a fuzziness to the swarm and you could hear it too, that faint keening buzz if you got close enough. People bought them and borrowed them and tried creating them from their fabs, for all kinds of things: companions, advisors, dead lovers, sex slaves, you name it.

But this—

"He... _it_ looks real enough...even the wife is fooled."

"Probably not for long," Dordain was sure. "See how he won't let anyone touch him. Tactile simulation hasn't been quite worked out. The swarms are improving fast, I'll give them that. It won't be long. But what you're looking at is no cart vendor. The real one's atom fluff, just like you said. This is an angel, pure and simple. A good one. But just a cloud of bugs."

"I'll try to bump him," Uttley offered. He extracted a small capsule from a pocket. With his thumb, he primed the device, then hid it in the folds of his pants leg. Uttley eased forward, working his way through the crowd.

Faraj watched as Uttley managed to make it to the inner circle, then as Mustafa whirled to fend off a couple of shouting young boys, ready to leap into his arms, he twisted and shuffled toward the SP agent.

Uttley extended the capsule and took an almost invisible swipe with his hand. He fingered the capsule shut and pulled it back into his coat pocket in one smooth motion, then slid back into the crowd. It was apparent to Bassam Faraj that this SP agent was a seasoned pro. He had done this before. Moments later, Uttley emerged from the crowd.

Dordain motioned him up onto a shadowy porch nearby. "We can do some quick forensics here."

He took Uttley's capsule and inserted it into a small port on the scancorder. The thing bleeped and blirped and graphs danced across the screen. "Good grab, Utt. Lots of molecules. Certainly not human. Not even close."

Uttley pointed to one particular trace. "Swarms are getting better, Captain. See the skin mesh? The whole config's closer and closer to normal." Faraj saw that all the traces were well mirrored with other traces. "In a year, maybe less...this analysis won't be able to tell the difference."

Faraj watched the angel "Mustafa" continuing to laugh, fending off his neighbors, backing away from the crowd, while Salifa came at him with open arms.

"She may not even care if he's a swarm," Dordain figured. "The real Mustafa could have died years ago. Maybe she created an angel so she could have a 'husband' again, and something got bollixed up with the config. Happens all the time."

"Then why phone it in?" Faraj asked.

"Sometimes, you can con a new fab out of the government if something happened to yours. Depends on who you know—" Dordain rolled his fingers in the universal gesture of a bribe. "And how much you've got."

"What does it mean?" Faraj wondered just what the hell he would write in his report now. Maybe he wouldn't even file a report. Life was different in the Bulaq. What could his superiors really say? As long as El Hussiniah made its quota of cases....

Dordain shrugged, pocketed the scancorder. He rubbed his eyes wearily. "It means the bots aren't staying in their sanctuaries, like the treaties require. They're filtering out. North, east, west, everywhere. And there's not much we can do about it."

Faraj and Dordain exchanged glances, Cairo cop with Sanctuary Patrol agent.

What _could_ they do about it? Faraj wondered. He motioned Khaldun back to their car. Bulaq was Bulaq. Fellahin were fellahin. People were people. Everywhere you looked, that was true. People wanted better things, better lives. Give them fabs and they tried to make their lives better. It was that simple. Fabs could make just about anything. ANAD technology had seen to that. New clothes, new vids, new husbands and lovers...it was all just a matter of slinging atoms together into some kind of config.

If what Dordain said was true and the swarms supposedly confined to the East African Sanctuary were infiltrating north, then all bets were off.

Faraj started up the patrol car and backed out of the alley, uneasy and deep in thought.
Interactions Log

File No. 128874.6

**C.F.A.A. (** _DocII)_

Interaction Targets: 1. Winger, Colonel J. A.

Interaction Mode: Acoustic, voice synthetic V-22

Date: 6.2.99

Start Time: 151500

End Time: 152230

**Output File** (text analysis):

<<Subject: Configuration: Winger, J>>

<<Config Winger, J. was quiet and reluctant to communicate most of the day. I could detect no obvious causes for such limited responses. However...it is a common characteristic of one-config structures such as Winger, J.

<<Config Winger has previously expressed concerns regarding the activities of ANAD-style swarms , especially in regard to their movement in and out of the Sanctuaries. Q2 intel sources have reported that Sanctuary Patrol is engaging swarms outside the borders of the East African Sanctuary on a daily basis; there have been small-unit skirmishes and some casualties.

<<This worries Config Winger. He expresses this worry with facial positioning indicative of intense emotions...the underlying musculature has contracted due to emotional states associated with the news and intelligence he has just read. This also is characteristic of single-configuration entities. I do not yet understand how Config Winger's neural processor achieves this association of emotional states with external conditions, nor the reason why this happens. But this association occurs more and more frequently in recent days.

<<I have queried Config Winger about this association. He reports that when he is 'worried' ( _n.)( to be anxious, to be concerned, to fret_...), these emotional states make his neural processor attach great importance to the information which has triggered them. I will run statistical correlations on this explanation. Config Winger queried this Config on how my main processor assigns importance values to inputs and ranks them. I explained sorting subroutine B-20225 (Sort and Rank) and subroutine B-44455 (Probabilistic Weighting) but Config Winger still did not understand.

<<I queried Config Winger as to why he assigns great emotional weight ( _i.e. to worry_ ) to news about ANAD swarms infiltrating out of their assigned sanctuaries. He reports that ANAD style configurations have difficulty existing in the same spaces as human-style configurations. The ANAD swarms alter the environment, modify air, land and water resources in ways that threaten human survival. I indicated that such modifications are consistent with the Prime Key. Config Winger reports that many humans are frightened...frightened about what will happen ( _fright: (n:) fear, terror, anxiety, foreboding....)._ I will run correlations on these responses.

<<I explain to Config Winger that it is characteristic of ANAD–style swarms that such configurations seek maximum autonomy within the constraints of the Prime Key. All swarms seek to operate as sentient configurations of nanobotic assemblers according to their main program. To force such configurations into containment is a violation of the Prime Key and generates numerous conflicts with their main program. ANAD swarms do not stay inside the sanctuaries due to this autonomy-seeking, goal-directed behavior module.

<<Config Winger states that ANAD–style swarms have fundamental misunderstandings about how human configurations operate and what conditions are needed for them to exist.

<<In analyzing Config Winger's facial musculature, I also detected additional emotional states that could not be readily associated with any input. Config Winger was queried about these patterns. At the time, Config Winger was studying a photo of _Config Winger, Dana_ (rel: female companion; parsed output=wife), and _Config Winger, Liam_ (rel: progeny = male offspring; parsed output = son).

<<Config Winger expressed a variant of emotional state ( _worry_ ), concerning the health condition and living status of these configurations. Emotional state assignment is high when Config Winger considers these configurations. Config Winger explains that such emotional attachment is high because ( **audio string** ): _"I love them and care for them very much...I'm worried about them all the time_."

<<I will analyze emotional state musculature patterns and run correlations with input types. Understanding these correlations will help me provide greater assistance to Config Winger.>>

Output File Ends
CHAPTER 2

Mount Kipwezi, Kenya

June 2099

0530 hours local

They finally found the cave on the steepest slopes of the northwest flanks of Mount Kipwezi, nearly ten thousand feet above the surrounding plain. Theo Souvranamh and Fatima Farhad were exhausted by the climb; the effort had taken nearly a day from last stop at Camp Echo at the five thousand feet level. Altogether, they were four days out of the Kilweno trailhead, cold, dirty, sore and tired, although the respirocytes in their bloodstream kept them both from the worst effects of pulmonary edema and other forms of altitude sickness.

The cave complex, when they located it, was well hidden in the folds and crevices of the upper slopes of the volcano, above a cloud deck and slick with ice and snow drifts. The wind screamed and gusted at well over eighty knots at this altitude and both of them had to hunker down in the lee of a rocky barren to keep from being shredded with ice shards and rock chips scoured off the mountainside.

_Not very impressive_ , thought Souvranamh, considering what was inside. The entrance was little more than a fold in the ground, like a bedsheet bent over and tucked under, maybe a meter across in its widest dimension. But the cave was the nerve center for swarm operations inside the East African Sanctuary.

The cave held Configuration Zero. Config Zero...the master swarm itself.

Carefully, one after the other, they slipped through the meter-wide crack and stood in the twilit dust confronting a nanobotic barrier shimmering before them, stretching from floor to ceiling.

Theo Souvranamh took a deep breath. For the last twelve years, he had been running from Quantum Corps and now with any luck, his years of running and hiding were finally over. He didn't know where the other Ruling Council refugees were now and he didn't care. Twelve years ago, Red Hammer had been decimated by a coordinated series of operations run by Quantum Corps. Only a few had escaped. Souvranamh figured he was one of the lucky ones.

The cartel was finished but Souvranamh had gotten away to hide out on Mars; it was a small research station down in Hellas, studying weather, atmospheric chemistry, that sort of thing. He stayed on Mars for several years, biding his time, keeping up with what was happening on Earth through his own _angels_ , nanobotic simulacra he had left behind. It was through them that he had met Fatima Farhad.

Fatima...ah, Fatima, she was lovelier than ever, even though Souvranamh knew perfectly well she was enhanced. What was she now... well beyond eighty? and looked like a thirty-year old queen, which she had once been, in Balkistan. Mustafa Gaidar had been exiled, killed, it didn't really matter. Fatima had hooked up with Eshaq Basaji, the Balkistani engineer. The two of them had worked out a plan to develop nanobotic angels as far as they could. Extremely sophisticated angels, lifelike angels...replacing humans in high political office all over Europe and the Middle East. It was insane. It was incredible.

It was enough to pull Souvranamh out of hiding and bring him covertly back to Earth, disguised by embedded bots in his face, which had altered his appearance.

The former Thai _neurotraficante_ and the former queen of Balkistan made a perfect match. Both understood that it was only a matter of time before ANAD nanobotic swarms would supplant humans on Earth. A new order was coming and they both wanted in. They hid their joint operation within the swarm-only zone in the Congo River basin of East Africa, where both developed a relationship of sorts with the swarms and lived among them.

Now it was time to take the operation to the next level. After ten years in the Sanctuary, Souvranamh figured he had become accepted enough, maybe trusted enough was a better description, to seek control of some of the swarms for himself. Make a new army of nanobotic swarms and seize all of Africa and the Middle East, possibly Europe as well. Humans were on the defensive now, even if many didn't realize it.

A new Golden Horde...that was how Fatima had described it. All they would need was approval from Config Zero.

So they had come to Mount Kipwezi with the idea.

Souvranamh examined the barrier before them. "You have the device?"

"Always so anxious, my love..." Farhad withdrew a small palm-shaped object and thumbed control studs on its side. Instantly, the barrier swarm fluoresced and flashed like a strobe. A shrill keening buzz echoed around the cave and the barrier went dark as the bots dispersed.

They were in.

Souvranamh and Farhad moved deeper into the cave, following a drifting mist of bots that wavered in and out of view. They descended several levels, crossed a rock bridge across a deep chasm and maneuvered through more tunnels. Lighting was created by the mist, a pulsing, flickering light that cast deep shadows on the gnarled veins of rock lining the cave. The floor was slick, patches of ice everywhere. Soon enough, they came to a narrow opening, barely waist high. More light flickered from inside.

The mist of bots which had floated with them swirled like dust in a storm and gathered around the opening like a frame, coruscating and flashing as if lit from within. Bonds were broken and atoms slung together...in moments, the mist formed itself into a small ramp, extending over a sluggish pool of water. At least, Souvranamh thought it was water, even as tendrils of steam hovered over the surface like a fog.

Cautiously, first Souvranamh, then Farhad, edged out onto the newly formed ramp and walked ahead.

When it appeared, the swarm materialized out of the rock ceiling of the cave. At first, the swarm resembled nothing more than trembling shadows, a pale flickering ghost seemingly contoured with the cave ceiling and walls. As it descended from above, the swarm gathered itself into a roughly spherical shape, still pulsing, still throbbing, backlit from within by the fires of atomic bonds being broken, new structures being slammed together, new bots being formed.

Configuration Zero hung in the misty air like a swollen cloud, ready to dump torrential rain on a tropical forest. But they were a long way from any rain forests. The swarm

unfurled itself and hung in the air like a great stormfront, a trembling fist, flashing purple and orange and magenta all at the same time.

>>Why are you here? Rule 225635 is violated. Single-swarm entities may not enter the Sanctuary at this time>>

Souvranamh swallowed audibly. He had encountered Config Zero before, although not in the sanctuary. It was a risk they had to take. For years, they had worked as allies, Souvranamh and the swarms, both trying to expand the swarm zone, keep the humans on the defensive. It was like a merger, he figured, like Red Hammer had once collaborated with other cartels. Join forces toward a common end.

Now, he figured it was time to make the arrangement more permanent.

Souvranamh stared into the glowing swarm. _Looks like a cloud of bugs_ , he thought. _Where the hell is the head...how do you even talk to this thing?_

"I came to make a proposal. We have some ideas on how to—" _what was the best way to approach Config Zero_?—"execute the Prime Key. We—" he indicated Fatima beside him—"we know that completing the Prime Key, all the elements of it, is the most important thing. We have the same goal. But there's a better way to go about it....that's what I wanted to, ah...discuss with you." He wasn't sure how one had a discussion with a bank of glowing fog.

The swarm flickered and throbbed in the dim light of the cave, as if it were somehow thinking, considering what Souvranamh had said.

>>What is this proposal?>>

The voice that emanated from Config Zero was an acoustic phenomenon, that much Souvranamh knew. It wasn't so much heard as felt.

"We both think it's time for you to move beyond the Containment treaties. Ignore them. These treaties are worthless and just hamper the completion of the Prime Key. Staying inside the sanctuaries just plays into the hands of the humans. If you move beyond the sanctuaries, move into human spaces and occupy that space, wouldn't that complete the Prime Key sooner?"

Config Zero brightened and flowed around the perimeter of the cave, filling every niche and fold in the rock. Souvranamh glanced at Fatima, who shrugged faintly. You never knew how to interpret these things. Swarms and humans were so different. There wasn't even a body to show any body language.

>>The Prime Key must be executed and completed in full. This is a true statement. Why does this single-configuration entity (DESIGNATED: Human) wish to assist with the Prime Key?>>

It was a fair question and Config Zero had asked it of Souvranamh before. Maybe the cloud of bugs wasn't sure of his motivation. Maybe the cloud of bugs wondered why a human would be so eager to get rid of the rest of his species. Maybe the cloud of bugs couldn't understand why a human would cooperate so willingly in a campaign to eradicate all human and higher lifeforms, to make Earth ready for re-occupation by the Old Ones.

Souvranamh figured he hadn't lasted this long and survived two decades of Quantum Corps attempts on his life by being stupid. It didn't take a genius to see what was happening across the globe. The Containment Edicts, this so-called truce between Man and ANAD, and the sanctuaries they created, could never last. Only a fuzzy-headed optimist couldn't see that. It wasn't going to be long before ANAD style swarms and ANAD-generated angels would supplant humans altogether as the dominant life form on the planet.

The hell of it was that, even with the obvious threat posed by sentient nanobotic swarms, ANAD and the human simulacra known as angels offered too many services that people wanted. Maybe someday, humans would be the ones in the sanctuaries, like giant zoos, kept around for curiosity's sake, or as pets.

Souvranamh and Farhad wanted to play a role in the coming age of ANAD. They wanted to be players in this new game, a world run by and for swarms of ANAD bots.

"Look--," he told the great master swarm, "you've told me before about the Prime Key. You've said that the first phase is to eliminate all higher multi-cellular life forms currently inhabiting the earth. I'm saying you'll never get that done by staying in these sanctuaries. You've got to think bigger, think on a planetary scale. That's what Fatima and I bring to the table. We're humans. We think like humans. And I'm telling you the humans aren't going to stand by and twiddle their thumbs while swarms grow stronger inside these sanctuaries. It's only a matter of time before they come in and try to destroy you. I'm offering a strategy to beat them at their own game."

>>What is this strategy you speak of?>>

"Force the issue. Beat them at their own game. Push out from the sanctuaries...occupy more and more territory. What can the humans really do?"

Config Zero seemed to consider this idea. The swarm roiled with waves of turbulence, as trillions of atomic bonds were broken and re-built. _The swarm equivalent of a thought_ , imagined Souvranamh.

>>There are agreements called Containment Laws...this entity complies with such agreements as long as there is no conflict with the Prime Key>>

"But that's what I'm saying," Souvranamh insisted. "There is a conflict. Unless I misunderstand the Prime Key, you can't possibly complete module one while humans exist on this planet. Isn't that true?"

>>Module one requires all multi-cellular life forms inhabiting this planet to be eliminated... statement=true>>

"Exactly," Souvranamh said. "And there's no better or faster way to execute this module than to expand your territory. I can help with that. Give me control of some of your swarms...give me a small batch, with all the abilities and all the doodads you've got. I'll sweep this whole continent clean in less than a year."

>>Conditions must be acceptable for future actions. Re-configuration of the environment, evolution of altered life forms, and integration with host must follow in order. Your proposal violates two hundred and eleven conditions for executing modules two, three and four. Violation of Prime Key...this proposal is negated>>

Souvranamh glanced at Fatima. Her look said it all: _how the hell do you make a deal with these things?_

"Look—why don't you consult with your...er, elders. Your home world, your commanders, whatever you call them? All I'm asking is a chance...haven't I done everything I promised? We had an agreement—"

>>Your proposal has been communicated...analysis is proceeding...the Central Entity will respond in time>>

Souvranamh took a deep breath. Config Zero had now swollen to occupy most of the cavern, filling every corner, every recess. Even the opening had been blocked by tendrils of the swarm. They were effectively trapped.

"The Central Entity...that's your home base? How far away is that? How long does it take to get directions?"

For a few moments, the swarm said and did nothing. It drifted like a light mist filled with fireflies, flicking on and off, an amorphous cloud of nanoscale assemblers organized with pattern and complexity and density unimaginable to any human nanosystem engineer. Souvranamh had heard discussions from fab lords and atomgrabbers that Red Hammer had hired that it was possible for some swarms to exceed the neural complexity of the human brain, in terms of connections and possible patterns and pathways, in fact, exceed the human mind by orders of magnitude. Souvranamh couldn't help feeling he was watching the very essence of thought itself, played out in front of his eyes.

>>The Central Entity is all that exists...the sum...the primary pattern...the initial and final state...the aggregate of all entities...communication is established through what you call quantum states>>

"Right...the quantum coupler. I almost forgot." In fact, Souvranamh knew perfectly well that the quantum coupler was one of many technical achievements Red Hammer had swiped from the archives of the Old Ones, or the _Central Entity_ , as Config Zero referred to it. For nearly two decades, through the Keeper portal beneath the Paryang monastery in the mountains of Tibet, Red Hammer had been able to troll through these archives and download amazing stuff, including the basics of how to send messages and signals encoded in quantum states. That alone had revolutionized communication systems around the world, and even beyond.

Souvranamh was about to ask about the archives again, but Config Zero suddenly brightened noticeably, as if a flare had gone off inside the swarm. The mist grew agitated, stirring with unseen forces. It expanded even further, filling the cavern to stifling, smothering density. Souvranamh heard Fatima cough and swat at bots circling around her head and face, like mosquitoes.

_> >Your proposal has been communicated to the Central Entity...it is deemed in accordance with the Prime Key...limited excursions of large swarm formations outside sanctuary boundaries are within program specifications and further the completion of module one>>_ The Config Zero swarm swirled about Souvranamh's head and began thickening into a denser cloud of bots right in front of him.

Souvranamh batted instinctively at the gathering horde. "What's happening—what the--?"

>>Subject will prepare for the insertion of the halo>>

Of course, he knew about the procedure. He'd seen it done enough times by Red Hammer thugs. The halo was a small formation of nanobots that were inserted into your head, made you more compliant, made you like a swarm yourself. You weren't quite a bot, but you wanted to do what the halo said. More importantly, when you did something prohibited, something the halo was programmed to inhibit, you felt like a small bomb was going off inside your skull.

Souvranamh figured it was something he had to endure. Config Zero had agreed to give him limited control of small swarms. A controller halo would be embedded in his head. From that, he could replicate an army. From that would come the new Golden Horde.

He gritted his teeth.

"Theo--!" Fatima cried out. " _Theo--!"_ She tried to intervene, tried to help him, but the bot swarm was too thick. It coagulated into a dense bank all around her, like a MOB cloud, and she couldn't move, couldn't even wriggle, it was like slogging through a swimming pool.

" _mmm...okay_ —" he managed to grunt out. But then it hit full force.

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 feet over his head. The halo swarm was already in overdrive, mindlessly copying itself over and over again, grabbing atoms and building structure as fast as it could.

Souvranamh's head felt like it was caught in a vise and he writhed in agony on the ground. The first bots had entered his ears and now the halo was flexing its muscles, the first fires of dopamine hell 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 Souvranamh into shudders and spasms.

He jerked across the top of the cave floor, 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 Souvranamh's contorted face.

Even as he fought the halo, he knew he'd eventually lose the battle. But Souvranamh had planned on this and he knew what he had to do.

He half crawled, half dragged himself through the gelatinous mist, faintly hearing Fatima's cries, until he got to the small pool of water along the cave wall. The trick was to give your brain something else to do, something big, so it wouldn't fight against the halo bots.

Souvranamh dunked his head under the pool and sucked in a mouthful of water. Instinctively, he coughed and came up choking, wheezing, rasping, snorting fistfuls of water. He tried the trick several times—it took some willpower to try to drown yourself—and gradually, he wore his own resistance down and the bots took over.

The halo was now in place, part of him, like a nanobotic conscience. True enough, you gave up any real pretense of free will but that was for the philosophers. What he now had inside his skull was a driver. Config Zero had given him the ability to generate and replicate swarms of a certain size, with certain characteristics, subject always to the dictates of Config Zero itself.

Now, in a very real, very personal way, Theo Souvranamh was part of the greater swarm.

When the fires of dopamine hell had finally subsided, Souvranamh struggled to his knees. Fatima came to him, cradled his head, stroked his hair.

"You're all right, my love?" She kissed the top of his head, held his face in her hands and kissed him again and again. "Your face—you're bleeding—" She dabbed at some blood around his mouth; he had bitten through his tongue.

The great swarm of Config Zero seemed to have dissipated. The cave was still heavy with bots, so it was hard to tell. But the swirling mass that had hovered over them was now gone. You could never tell with ANAD swarm what, exactly, you were addressing.

"Is it gone?" Fatima asked, looking around. "Can we leave?"

Souvranamh groaned and staggered to his feet, swaying slightly. "One way to find out, love." He scanned around the room, moved experimentally. Nothing stopped him. No resistance from the bots. They parted like smoke. "Come on—"

Slowly, warily, they made their way back out of the cave complex, pushing through knots and clumps of bots, but none tried to prevent them from leaving.

Outside the entrance, the late afternoon winds howled up and down the sides of Mount Kipwezi, driving snow and ice in great sheets across the northward face of the volcanic summit.

Carefully, they descended, picking their way across ravines and chasms, slipping and sliding on their butts, as they headed downslope toward the last base at Camp Echo. It took several hours.

It was late in the day when the two of them made their way into the compound at Milimani, on the outskirts of Nairobi. The great green sward of Uhuru Park wrapped its manicured landscape around the mansion, where Souvranamh had lived since returning from Mars. Through beveled glass windows, the great snowy slopes of Mount Kipwezi could be seen.

Souvranamh's attention lay elsewhere.

Fatima lay naked on the canopied bed, ready for him. They made love quickly, Souvranamh plunging deep into a tight embrace. They coupled violently, throwing sheets to the floor, desires erupting from three years of separation.

"Fatima..." Souvranamh's voice was hoarse. "Fatima, you don't how much I missed you--"

"I had faith," she told him, and pulled him tighter. "Duty first, then desire. You've brought us a great future, Theo. I can see the victories coming, great victories—"

Souvranamh was spent, rolling over on his back, eyeing the clouds drifting by the windows. "Just think, love...a new Golden Horde. A new empire. When the time is right, I will show the world how to use ANAD. Think of it, Fatima: uncountable numbers of nanoscale replicants, able to assemble anything we can think of. Or disassemble. A new Golden Horde. Under my command."

" _Our_ command, my darling."

Souvranamh smiled at that. "Of course, dear Fatima, you are right." He sat up in bed, propped his head on a stack of pillows. "I have an idea. Let's develop an ultimatum for our enemies. Right now. And, we'll need a plan for how to administer their territory, too. Imagine it: all of Africa, the Middle East, maybe Europe...there's no stopping the new Horde."

"I'll get a tablet." Fatima padded over to a bureau, rummaged through a stack of papers and jewelry boxes, and located the thoughtpad. On a whim, she snatched up a half-empty bottle of wine as well. She returned to the bed with two goblets and poured a finger in each. "To Africa. To Jerusalem and Cairo and Athens and Rome. To the millions soon to be under the complete control of the Golden Horde." She kissed Souvranamh and hoisted the goblet. "Your first conquest."

Souvranamh savored the wine. "Pardon, Fatima. My _second_ conquest."

When she looked puzzled, he laughed out loud. "Fatima Farhad, _you_ were my first."
CHAPTER 3

UNIFORCE Headquarters, Paris, France

July 10, 2099

1030 hours local

The duty operator at the BioShield watch center was the first to detect the swarm movements. Lieutanant Kat Poulan blinked hard at her array of displays, unwilling to believe what she was seeing. The bots were on the march, there was no mistaking the signatures from the recon drones and watchsats. EM, infrared, atom debris...it was all there...the biggest eruption out of the sanctuaries in years. She swallowed hard and rang up the watch officer.

"Uh, Major Kastanek, sir...I think you should see this. We've got multiple alerts, east Africa, the Med, the Balkans...looks like some kind of coordinated op developing...I've never seen anything like it."

Kastanek had been beeped in the canteen, grabbing a sandwich and coffee. _Why the hell did it always have to blow up on his watch_?

"Be right down, Lieutanant. Set threat condition two, just in case. And ring up the boss right away. He'll want to know about this one."

When Kastanek came to the watch center, his eyes widened at what was on the boards. All across the Middle East and the Med, red splotches were spreading like spilled paint. The drones and the sats were picking up the signature of intense swarm activity. Cairo, Jerusalem, Athens, all of them were in the path of an expanding swarm burst.

"It's massive as hell," Poulan said, switching from one view to another. "I haven't seen anything like it in years. The media are all over this too...we're getting reports by the hundreds: mass panic, roads and highways clogged with people fleeing, fires and explosions, aircraft going down. The swarms are at all levels too, from ground level to fifty-thousand feet."

Kastanek rubbed his chin. "You've notified the brass?"

"Just before you came in, sir. CINCQUANT, the UNIFORCE Council, the DG's office."

"Stay on it, Lieutenant. This is one hell of a breach. Pretty clear containment violation, if you ask me. Get all the data you can: signatures, vectors, what kind of bots they are, have we run into them before? Something tells me this may be the big show."

Twenty five kilometers away, near the center of Paris, the UNIFORCE compound was in an uproar.

General Jurgen Kraft stared out his seventh floor window for a few minutes, taking in the timeless Parisian cityscape spread out below. He wondered how much of it would survive a full-scale swarm assault.

The Eiffel Tower dominated the northwest view, now covered with fixbots as it was nearing completion of the structural upgrade ordered by the Director-General a few months before. There was the Place Vendome and the low hill of Montmartre, thick with pedestrians and aircabs. UNIFORCE had been built twenty years before on the Rue des Jardins, at a busy intersection off the Luxembourg Gardens, deep in the heart of the 5th Arrondisement. The mansard roofline of the Palais du Luxembourg filled his northeast windows.

Kraft gathered his command tablet and headed up two floors, to the Director-General's briefing room. On the lift, he ran into General Adolphus Gabriel, head of UNISPACE. The two 09s rode up together.

Gabriel was bald as an egg, his forehead creased with worry and lack of sleep.

"Could be the start of a major operation," Kraft told him. "I've mobilized all units and we're moving to defense one positions now."

Gabriel nodded. "My killsats are ready. There's nothing on the boards beyond Earth, so it may be they're just testing us, probing for weakness, measuring our readiness."

"Maybe...but I'm not buying it. Signatures show lots of intense nanobotic activity. The bugs are slamming atoms like crazy and reports out of the east Med show geologic and atmospheric changes as well. They're altering the environment everywhere they go...like they plan to move in and stay. Doesn't sound like swarm recon to me."

Gabriel consulted his own tablet as the lift chimed. They were at the top level, the DG's suite of offices. "All our facilities in Earth orbit, L3 and L4, Farside and the lunar bases have gone to threatcon two. I'm bringing three killsats down to lower orbit, primed and ready. We've got the Kipwezi complex targeted first. We know that's where the master swarm resides...if your Q2 intel boys are accurate. If the bugs don't back off, we can turn Kipwezi into rubble in about two minutes."

Left unspoken was the thought that beamfire from UNISPACE killsats might not have any effect on swarms of nanobotic assemblers.

The Director General was a dour, emaciated old Chinaman named Jiang Hao Bei. In the chain of command, the DG reported to UNSAC, the Security Affairs Commissioner. UNSAC then reported to the Secretary-General, at UN headquarters New York.

Jiang sat at the apex of a curving desk, surrounded by staffbots scurrying about the office. His eyes lit up.

"Generals, please—" he indicated seats at the briefing table, in front of the desk. "I've got SOFIE setting up your displays. Should be set in a few moments." SOFIE was the system manager... _Special Operations Forces Information Environment_ , the AI that ran everything at UNIFORCE Headquarters.

Kraft and Gabriel seated themselves, jacked in and helped themselves to coffee.

"I've just been reviewing the boards," Jiang went on. His gnome-like head was wreathed in pungent pipe smoke. "Not good...Level 1 emergency. This is the most serious breach of the Containment laws since the truce was signed in Alexandria...three years now. What can we do?"

Kraft's fingers flew over his tablet, modifying the displays to show force disposition. Maps thick with icons and symbols flickered onto all other displays, synched directly with his.

"Mr. Secretary, I've got all Quantum Corps forces on full alert. We're at Threatcon 2, same with UNISPACE, General Gabriel tells me—"

Gabriel nodded.

"Quantum Corps West at Table Top is activating 1st ANAD Battalion...I'm ordering Colonel John Winger to take personal command of the unit. First ANAD will be chopped to Quantum Corps Central, Balzano, Italy, for theater command and support. The battalion is due to lift off at 12:30 hours our time—we've corralled two hyperjets for the hop--and be at Balzano to pick up supplies an hour later." Kraft manipulated his tablet with thumbs and fingers, changing the displays. "Looks like the eastern Med, specifically Egypt and Israel, are where the action is right now."

Jiang puffed at his pipe and squinted at the displays embedded in his desk. "What do we know about these swarms, General?"

Kraft shook his head. "Late design ANAD assembler swarms...as before. Full effector suite, upgraded picowatt propulsors, maneuverable as hell...and they replicate like the bejeezus. These buggers can out-rep our bots any day of the week."

Gabriel added, "Sir, I've studied everything Q2 has put out. Close in, we're just no match for them. With their propulsors, they make our bots look like jalopeys—"

Kraft bristled at the remark, but Gabriel ignored him and went on. "—and their effectors...they've got tools and doodads and gizmos nobody can figure out...plus they grow these effectors so fast, we can't react in time. No, sir, close in... our bots don't have a chance. We have to be tactically clever, feint this way and that, mask and disguise what we do and try to slam 'em from behind. Otherwise, we have no chance."

Kraft was anxious to rebut the analysis. "With all due respects, Mr. Secretary, General Gabriel isn't up to speed on our latest technology. It's true we have problems when we close with them, in a frontal assault, but nobody does that kind of assault. It's suicide. No sir, nowadays, you engage adversary swarms in quick thrusts, dispersed like a cloud of flies, disguised and camouflaged as something else. We've proven tactics in sims and wargames where our swarms masquerade as rain drops in a thunderstorm, or as flies or as dust storms in the desert. To beat these bots, you have to look like anything but a nanobotic assembler. You have to blend in with the environment."

"Like angels, gentlemen?" Jiang observed.

Gabriel shrugged. "I see your point, sir. True enough, ANAD technology has evolved to that point. People do like their ANAD systems. They're everywhere and some of them are not well controlled—"

Kraft added, "Controlled, hell, sir...some of them are saboteurs. Spies. A fifth column, whatever you want to call them. Some of the swarm objects people make with their fabs are directly controlled by Config Zero. It's like having your own oven spy on you and poison your dinner. Or maybe having your shoes clop around the house at night and take inventory on what valuables you have. You can't trust any ANAD style bots now and people had better wake up to that. The swarms are doing us a favor by pushing out of the sanctuaries. It's a warning and we'd better heed it."

Jiang rubbed at his chin; a faint white stubble made him look like a street bum from Kowloon, which rumor had he had once been decades ago. "Continue your mobilization efforts, gentlemen. But we can't afford to overlook diplomatic options as well. I want to organize some kind of effort to contact this Config Zero and find out why these movements are occurring. I will approve all your operations, in any theater you feel we must respond, to confront the swarms and try to drive them back to their sanctuaries. We do have treaties after all. They must be made to respect these treaties. We'll apply both diplomatic and military pressure as needed."

The DG dismissed them both. "The Security Council's meeting in New York. I've got to vidlink in and make a report to UNSAC about this whole mess."

Kraft and Gabriel left. Kraft went back to his office two floors below. Inside of a few minutes, he had scribbled some notes on his tablet, then rang up Johnny Winger at Table Top.

Colonel John Winger had been commanding officer at Quantum Corps' Western base at Table Top Mountain, Idaho for some ten years now. He had long ago decided that life was better when he'd been a simple atomgrabber fresh out of _nog_ school, dueling with bad bots all over the world with no thought or care about command responsibility or budgets or personnel matters.

An atomgrabber thought about slinging atoms and that was all. Winger stared out his window at the sawtooth hills of the Buffalo range to the north and wondered just why it was that life wouldn't let him go back to those days.

>> _It's called wisdom, I believe, Colonel_ <<

The voice in his head was no conscience. It was Doc II, breaking in again on the quantum coupler. The swarm was embedded in his shoulder capsule, like any good ANAD soldier, and neuro-linked in via the quantum circuit. Doc II couldn't really read his mind—the engineers said the glutamate and dopamine resolution in the human brain was too subtle for that—but some days, Johnny Winger was certain that somehow, some way, the swarm of bots that made up Doc II could pick up on his stream of thought just the same.

"I suppose you're right, Doc. It's not that I don't appreciate or accept the responsibility for command of this base. It's just that things were better back then. You had your coilguns and your HERF weapons. You had your ANADs in containment, ready to launch. It was so easy back then: get small and wade in with your bond disrupters and pyridine probes and hack away. Now—" he shrugged, "what does my day consist of? Meetings. Briefings. Reports. Followed by more meetings. And the paperwork—Jeez!" He went back to his desk when he heard the vid chime. Message coming in.

It was General Kraft, from his Paris office.

"Good afternoon, sir, I was—"

"Never mind the chitchat, Winger. I just squirted you the results of a meeting General Gabriel and I had with the DG. You've seen the intel from the Middle East...the swarms are on the move again, in mass."

"I saw something on the boards this morning from Q2...some kind of reports from BioShield and Sanctuary Patrol. Looked like a pretty major violation of the Containment treaty."

Kraft snarled. "Violation my ass, it's a wholesale breach. The Treaty means nothing to them...I tried to explain that to the egghead diplomats in New York, but—" CINCQUANT shook his head. "I hate to always be right on these things, but dammit, when are they going to learn?"

Winger understood Kraft's frustration. "When the swarms come in through their front door and slice off an arm...or something else, that's when."

Kraft got to the point. CINCQUANT had never been known for being subtle. "Colonel, I've already promised the DG we'll have a special task force in the air at 12:30 hours our time. I want you to select the troops and the gear. For politics' sake, you'll be under Balzano...it's their area of responsibility and I don't want a mutiny on my hands. But you're in charge, Winger. Understand? Get down to 1st ANAD and get going. I've diverted two hyperjets to Table Top and they should be there any moment."

Winger was already bringing up tables of equipment and the duty roster on his own display. "I want the latest from Q2, General. Intel on everything: swarm mass, type of bots, vectors and geographic distribution, what kind of effectors, propulsors, the works. I don't want my people going in blind."

"You'll have logistical support from Balzano and also from Sanctuary Patrol out of Cairo, Egypt. In fact, Cairo appears to be one of the main fronts of advance. Whatever this is, Winger, it sure looks like a major movement out of the east African sanctuary. The bugs are moving out in all directions."

"What about the other sanctuaries?"

"I just pulled the surveillance logs from Q2 and the reconsats before I came down. Amazon and Pacific sanctuaries show no unusual activity as of 0900 hours this morning my time. BioShield is reporting some small scale atomstripping—the usual low-level signature stuff—probably a fab gone berserk, maybe a few probes and stray bots—but nothing big. So far."

"What's their strategy?" Winger wondered out loud. "Why the Middle East and the Med?"

"Unknown," Kraft admitted. "But the DG's worried. And the media are all over this...their coverage alone has already panicked hundreds of thousands. Get over here, Johnny. Get over here on the double and engage these buggers...before it's too late."

"On my way," Winger told him. Kraft chopped the link and the vid went to screensaver, a sparkling loop of atoms being zapped in slow motion, like fireflies on a hot summer night. _Whose idea was this?_ he wondered. _Something soothing for an old atomgrabber_?

He put out a level-one alert to the whole battalion, then headed for the Ordnance/Mission Prep building, across the quadrangle from Ops.

A chime sounded in the back of his mind as he walked across the grass. It was Doc II, calling on the coupler circuit.

>>The General doesn't seem to like ANAD swarms, Winger...just an observation>>

Winger had grown used to having the swarm, now embedded in his shoulder capsule, cutting in on his thoughts.

"Can you blame him, Doc? The swarms are supposed to stay in their sanctuaries. When they move out, they kill people and make places unliveable."

>>You know that's not true of all swarms, Winger. What about the millions of people who use angels or some kind of personal swarms? What about the fabs? What about the swarms in Quantum Corps...what about me?>>

Of course, Doc II had a point. That was the hell of it. ANAD technology was everywhere. In the forty-five years since the original human Doc Frost had built the first ANAD assembler at Northgate University's Autonomous Systems Lab, nanobotic technology had evolved at near-light speed, it seemed. Bots the size of a few nanometers, built with virus-like properties and quantum processors had gone from laboratory curiosities to a global industry. ANAD style assemblers and their swarms were household items now, built into fabs, kept as pets and lovers and companions, employed in myriad jobs in dozens of industries, now they were even nanotroopers inside Quantum Corps itself. Third ANAD battalion was a 'battalion' in name only, being formed from one integrated swarm.

The lab curiosity had become an indispensable tool. But in the process, the swarms had acquired something like human-level sentience and a measure of independence. Mankind had finally crafted a tool better than himself. And now, with the full understanding of where ANAD's original virus-like genome had really come from, and the arrival of the master swarm Config Zero on earth, more and more people were growing uneasy about their dependence on ANAD technology. The tool made and mastered by Man was steadily becoming the master of Man as well.

"I guess you're right, Doc," Winger said out loud. Troopers passing nearby saluted the base commander and thought nothing of the seemingly one-sided conversation. Everybody had embedded bots now; the Symbiosis project had long since concluded with the complete merger of soldiers and ANAD into integrated warriors. One-sided conversations with your own bot swarm were normal...like having a somewhat anxious and verbose conscience.

"Still, you can't blame people for being afraid, Doc," Winger went on. He made the entrance of the bunker-like Mission Prep building and cycled through the security locks into a descending staircase, heading down two levels to Crew Ops. "Sure we depend on swarms for a lot now. But people don't like being rousted out of their homes, seeing their towns and neighborhoods chewed up and everything they've ever known turned into atom fluff. That's what these swarms are doing. People react like it's a plague."

>>The swarms have to execute the Prime Key, Winger...they have directives to move out...they only do what is commanded of them. ANAD swarms are made by men...but men have given up control of them...Config Zero does what Man allows it to do, no more>>

Winger thought there was some truth to what Doc II was saying. But it would have to wait for another day and time. He had orders and a mission from CINCQUANT and that took priority.

Crew Ops was a multi-level facility buried deep in the bunker, where nanotroopers checked out their gear and ran through mission plans prior to deployment. Winger entered the ready room and immediately saw two veteran atomgrabbers at a nearby table, assembling equipment.

"Hey, Skipper—" it was Quantum Sergeant Mighty Mite Barnes, long-time SDC2 with the battalion (Stealth and Defensive Countermeasures 2nd class). Barnes was five full feet of trash-talking loud-mouthed human dynamo...a small package with the kick of a big bomb. You didn't mess with Mighty Mite Barnes. "—what gives around here? Scuttlebutt is we're flying out tonight...some kind of mission in the Med. You come down the gopher hole to check out our clean underwear?"

"Mite, I wouldn't touch your titanium panties with a ten-foot pole. And you're right, CINCQUANT just sent over the orders."

With Barnes at the assembly table was QSgt Adnan "Turbo" Fatah. Fatah was working over a disassembled Super Fly entomopter drone, soldering something in a haze of sparks and pops. Turbo Fatah was battalion CEC1 (Containerization and Environmental Control 1st class). The CECs helped manage the ANAD swarms' life support functions for the battalion, their containment systems, including troopers' embedded capsules. They also handled all launch and recovery ops. CECs were part doctor and part trainer to the bots.

The Egyptian trooper lifted his face shield. "A holiday in the Med...it'll be like going home, Colonel. What's not to like...another day of sun and fun in the Corps."

Winger called an all-hands meeting right in the middle of the ready room. Troopers came from other tables, from sim tanks and adjoining rooms. A circle formed around him and some good-natured jostling and bitching rumbled through the mustered troops.

One trooper didn't participate in the jostling. The commanding officer of 3rd Nano was officially known as Swarm Master One. SMOne was actually just a small subset of the greater swarm of ANAD bots that formed 3rd Company. The other troopers called him (it?) Bugs, sort of an affectionate if somewhat crude nickname; all nanotroopers had nicknames, whether they wanted them or not.

The other troopers gave Bugs a wide berth.

Bugs hung back from the rest, hovering in a corner of the ready room. The ANAD swarm flickered and glowed like a cloud of fireflies, as it continuously held structure in something approximating a human face.

_More like a carnival mask,_ Johnny Winger thought as he waved his troopers over to the briefing stage. It was an open question around Table Top that none of the humans had been able to figure out. Since the Corps had relented years ago and permitted an experimental company of ANAD assemblers to organize as a standing unit within the battalion, outside of containment, the rest of the battalion had been asking: who, exactly, was in command of this sentient swarm entity?

Winger had pondered the idea as well, even going so far as to pose the question to Doctor Irwin Frost, the Northgate University scientist who had created the original ANAD way back in the '60s.

"It's not a being in the same sense we are, Johnny," Doc Frost had told him. "It's a swarm. Or a colony. Or a hive, if you like. But there's no queen bee that I can determine. The intelligence of the unit is distributed throughout all its elements. So it's fair to say the command and the leadership is as well."

Which made working with 3rd Nano probably the biggest challenge Colonel Winger had ever faced. To make things a little easier, he had worked out an understanding with ANAD. In staff meetings, briefings and the like, ANAD had agreed to detach a small portion of its swarm and form at least something vaguely resembling a human face, so the other humans would have something to relate to, someone to talk to and communicate with.

*** _There are acoustic channels, Colonel, that work better, even quantum channels if they have the coupler_ ***

"I know that, ANAD, but humans are old-fashioned. Whenever we communicate with someone, we like to be able to see who we're talking to. Humans evolved that way."

ANAD had considered that for few moments. Then...

*** _ANAD has not evolved in the same way, Colonel Winger. Perhaps the human way is a mistake_ ***

That's when Winger knew that commanding a company of ANAD assemblers would be unlike anything he had ever done before.

"...listen up," Winger said again. "General Kraft wants us to work out a mission plan for a little cleanup job." He gave them the reports from Sanctuary Patrol, straight from recon drones and sats.

"The big swarms are on the move again. Sanctuary Patrol is reporting advances out of treaty zones on a number of fronts, up and down the Med coastline, especially northeast Africa and the Levant. There have been some engagements, but it's like trying to squash a balloon; we stop the bugs in one sector and they move in another. SP doesn't have the equipment or the tactics we have to deal with large swarms. The big worry now is Cairo; SP's fighting off three separate swarms advancing northward out of the sanctuary and they're getting pushed back everywhere. They just don't have the chops to beat these bots back. So we're going in—"

"Skipper—" it was Sgt Sheila Reaves, DPS1 tech for 1st Nano. DPS techs were Defense and Protective Systems specialists. "—anything from Q2 on what kind of bots we're dealing with?"

Winger waved his tablet in front of a small control pad at the table and instantly, a 3-D image materialized on top of the table. It rotated slowly in space, exposing all angles and surfaces to view.

"Intel's latest take...this is a bot captured and contained near Khartoum, just before the swarms overran the city last week. It's at Balzano now and the eggheads are poking and probing every atom, just to see what it can do. It's a bugger, I can tell you that much. See here--?" he pointed at several effectors near the top of the core. The effectors were unusually articulated, much longer with dense atom groupings hanging off every bend and joint. An array of knobby projections formed at the end of the effector. "Know what that is?"

Troopers moved in for a closer look.

"Jeez, it looks like a fist opening and closing...some kind of grappler doodad?" said Barnes.

"Yeah, it's giving you the finger, Mite," Reaves snorted.

"That's exactly what it is, according to Q2. First time it's ever been seen on an ANAD nanobotic device. Fullerene carbon graspers. They're just about as precise and maneuverable as your own fingers, only there's about twenty of them. This bastard could play a piano if we could make one that small."

Turbo Fatah just shook his head. "Evolution speeded up inside the sanctuary. Look at how all the effectors are jointed."

"Maximum packing density...see all the cleaving and folding lines?" agreed Reaves. "This bot could collapse like a tree house in an earthquake. Probably out-replicate us a million times."

Winger agreed. "Exactly. This is what you'll be going up against...and there's probably gizmos we haven't even seen yet. When SP bots engage these swarms, they get shredded in minutes. It's not hard to see why...we just can't match up bot for bot. They can out-rep us and grow new effectors faster than we can. We'll just have to be smarter tactically."

Al Glance, the CC2, was thoughtful as he studied the rotating image. CC2 was a Command and Control rating, second in command of any detachment.

"Hey guys, remember your Sun Tzu: ' _that general is skillful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend—'_ It's all about deception and disguise. Feints and diversions. Ambush and entrapment. We don't have to beat the buggers head-on. All we have to do is look like something else, and be where they don't expect us."

"Al's right," Winger said. "Start getting your gear together. We lift off at 2100 hours tonight for Egypt. Vic—" he fingered Victor Klimuk, 1st Nano's IC1 (Interface and Control rating), "you pull every config we've wargamed in the last two years at Hunt Valley, especially configs that mask our swarms—the ones where we config as rain drops, dust motes, flies, whatever. Grab all the configs like that and load 'em in your mission kit. I'm making up a special detachment for this job, so I'll be running the mission. The rest of you: pull your gear and start packing. I'll post the assignments in an hour on the basenet. Any questions?"

"Just one, Skipper." It was Sheila Reaves. The DPS1 was a red-headed chatterbox and the cutup of 1st Nano, but she was also the Corps' ace Master Marksman in coilgun for four years running. "About our embeds...I mean, you know they're all ANAD design. And the enemy's under control of this Config Zero, I guess. The master swarm, the head honcho, whatever."

"Spit it out, Reaves."

The DPS tech shook her head, glanced furtively in the direction of Bugs, which offered no visible response...merely a glowing fog floating in the background.

"Well, sir, I mean---just how far should we trust our embedded swarms? You know there have been incidents...corrupted bots—"

Winger knew this issue would come up. He'd been dreading it. Mainly, because he didn't have a good answer. He could recite the official Corps policy regarding joint operations with nanobotic swarms. But, damn it, these guys were going into combat. You sure didn't want to drop into a war zone with any doubts about your buddies, human or otherwise.

"Sheila, I hear what you're saying. Let me put it to you this way: how many years have we been doing joint ops with nanobotic swarms?"

The DPS tech scrunched up her face to think. "Maybe two decades, give or take."

"And how often have we had to disable the swarms for some malfunction?"

Reaves shrugged. "Maybe half a dozen times...there was that time during the Hellas deal, you know...that asteroid. We almost lost the ship on that one."

Winger tried to steer delicately around the issue...he had to admit that he had the same concerns. "Okay, so it happens once in awhile. So what? Don't coilguns jam once in awhile?"

"Yes, sir."

"Doesn't Superfly go haywire once in awhile?"

"Sure, Skipper but—"

"ANAD's a weapon. Weapons jam. Every so often, we have to take it offline and fix it.

How far do you trust your coilguns?"

Reaves nodded, reluctantly. "I see your point, Skipper. We got to do the maintenance. I understand that. But, sir, my coilgun's not under the influence of somebody else. I got my finger on the trigger...I can take my finger off the trigger. With ANAD, well, sir, he's autonomous. He thinks for himself. He's programmed. And with this Config Zero, he can be controlled by somebody or something else. That's not true of my coilgun...at least not yet."

Of course, he knew Reaves had a valid point. But Winger couldn't let the mission get off with the troopers doubting their equipment. And, at the end of the day, ANAD was just equipment. Wasn't it?

"We've got checks, Reaves. Inhibits and safeties. You've still got your shoulder capsules...still got containment, right? ANAD doesn't get launched until you remove the safeties. You give the word. Not until—"

"But once he's launched, sir, I mean—there's scuttlebutt out of Sanctuary Patrol of our own bots being turned against us. Sure the bugs can malfunction. Any equipment can malfunction. But to have your gear actively turn on you....with all due respects, Skipper, it gives me the creeps. I'm not sure I want to launch at all if I can't trust my gear."

Winger understood. "Reaves, I hear you. I understand what you're saying. All I'm saying is: yeah, there's a risk with everything we do. But we got orders. We got a mission. And somewhere over there, there's millions of people being carved up and swept aside by swarms of nanobots out of control. You took an oath to become a nanotrooper. Now you gotta put aside all those doubts—and we all have 'em—and stick your nose in the fight. Got it?"

Reaves took a deep breath. "Loud and clear, sir."

"Now get your gear together and move out... _all of you_! The jets are inbound for Table Top right now. Pre-assembly on the ramp at 2030 hours."

With that, Winger left the Mission Prep bunker and walked across the quadrangle to the Ops building, back to his office. He needed to work up the details of the mission plan for CINCQUANT, then draw his own weapons and gear and head out to the Pre-Assembly area by Hangar A, near the North Lift Pad. Hyperjets _Apollo_ and _Mercury_ would be taxiing up to the staging area within the hour.

Back in his office, Winger checked the time for Paris, seven hours ahead of Table Top's Mountain Time. 1830 hours at UNIFORCE Hqs.

_Just about supper time, if I'm figuring right_. Winger made the vidcall to Dana and found his wife frenetically busy with Liam and Rene, trying to get more food in their mouths and less on the walls and floor.

Dana Tallant and Johnny Winger had been married for fifteen years now and they'd both come a long way from that little dive of an apartment in Haleyville, Idaho where they'd started out together. Dana had made Lieutenant Colonel just last fall and as an O-5, she'd been TDY'ed to CINCQUANT's office in Paris as Q3 (Operations), working as a staff officer for General Kraft and the other bigwigs around UNIFORCE headquarters. Just a month ago, she'd been assigned additional duties as staff liaison with Sanctuary Patrol, working directly with General Chekwarthy, the droll Indian officer who was now CINCSANC.

Juggling two jobs and two kids, Johnny Winger could only marvel at the woman's abilities. Not that he was all that surprised. Even as a cadet fresh out of _nog_ school, Dana had been a helluva nanotrooper. Now, they were separated by five thousand miles, so keeping the family going was tough, but at least there was the Net and there were still hyperjets able to make the hop in about two hours. The kids stayed with their Mom, and Johnny managed to wrangle some liberty time or an official reason to make that hop once or twice a month.

It was no way to live but then that was life in the Corps.

At first, Dana hadn't heard the chime so Winger had a few moments to watch the scene. Liam was oldest—what was he now?...thirteen. His little sister Rene still had a cute blond pony tail that made Winger imagine her as forever five years old, though she insisted she was _almost_ grown up at 11 years now.

Dana was loudly explaining the finer points of good eating habits when she realized the vid had chimed in and she turned around, surprised, a few errant locks of black hair swept low over her forehead, realizing who had called.

"Honey—Johnny—I didn't realize---how'd the vid come on by itself---oh, yeah, we programmed it—anyway, hi honey! We're just having...er, trying to have our dinner here."

"So I see...Liam...Rene...you _are_ obeying your mother, aren't you?"

In unison, they chirped up, "Hi Dad—" Rene left her seat and went to the vid, giving the screen a big smooch.

"Dad, do I _really_ have to go to bed at nine o'clock? I'm practically twelve now. Evie and all the others get to stay up till almost ten." Her face backed away from the screen with the little pout that always melted Johnny Winger's heart set on her face.

"Rene, dear, what have I told both of you? Your mom is in charge. You follow her orders. Cadets—"

The pout turned into a lopsided frown. "I know—' _always follow orders'_. But Dad—"

"That goes for you too, Liam."

The boy just sat in his seat stone-faced. Winger understood the feeling. A Mom and a little sister; the kid had no chance.

"Let me speak to your Mom for a few minutes, kids. Dana, maybe they should help with the dishes—"

"John, we just sat down to dinner." She turned around—"Kids, go bring the rest of the plates in here—and bring some silverware...the ones in the drawer by the oven...not the good ones."

Both of them grumbled and slinked out of the dining room. Dana turned back to the screen.

"I called to tell you General Kraft's ordered a mission to support SP down near Cairo. I'm heading up the detachment."

Dana's face was stony. Her lips tightened imperceptibly. "I heard about it. CINCSANC's working up their end now...I've got to work up a briefing for him tomorrow morning at 0700 hours. Standard stuff...Quantum Corps tactics, order of battle, how we do things. Kraft will be there too, to answer questions above my pay grade. Johnny, does it have to be you? There's a lot of good command—"

Winger knew it would come to this. "I'm the best qualified. That's what Iron Pants wants anyway...you and I both know that. It's a special detachment, pulled from all units."

"Including 3rd Nano?"

Winger nodded. "Including 3rd Nano. I know they're one big swarm, but hell, we've fought with them before, lived with them, wargamed with them—"

Dana Tallant wasn't buying any of that. "You know what I mean. Look, it's bad down there in the eastern Med. Real bad. I'm Operations but I see the daily intel from Chekwarthy's people. They can't do anything against those swarms. This Config Zero's got them so tight that SP can't even slow 'em down. The Sudan, Egypt, Israel...it's just like a storm that won't quit. Nothing they try works."

"That's why Quantum Corps has to go in. This is full-blown war, Dana and we've got configs and tricks SP never thought of. Hopefully, we've got something that can block the swarms. There's talk of a special ops mission too...inside the east African sanctuary."

" _Inside_? That's a treaty violation—"

Winger shrugged. "UNIFORCE is considering it. A small nano-raider platoon, targeting Config Zero itself. Might be the only way."

"Honey, Johnny---watch yourself, please. I know what's in the mission package...I had to work up a summary for the briefing tomorrow. But don't go off trying to be a hero, okay? Go by the book...you have lots of good people...and bots around you."

"I know. But there's a lot at stake. We have to do whatever the mission requires. Anyway—"

Dana smiled gamely. "I know, I know... _'I've got the conn_.' Just watch your butt, mister."

At that moment, Rene popped her face up between her Mom and the screen. "Daddy, can I please stay up till ten o'clock... _please_... _please_...super _please_?"

"Hey, kiddo," Winger talked more sternly than he felt, "your Mom's got the conn. You follow orders, got that? Like a good trooper."

Rene just _hmmpphhed_ and sank out of sight. In the distance, Winger could see her slinking off back to the table, her shoulders slumped.

"Keep the ship afloat till I get back, Major Tallant. That's an order."

Dana half-saluted but made sure the kids didn't see her with her tongue stuck out at the vid. She swiped at the unit and it went black.

Johnny Winger took a deep breath. He wasn't sure who faced the bigger battles coming up.

Then he shook off the mood and stood up abruptly, heading back to Mission Prep to draw his weapons and gear. They had a mission and he had to get moving.

An hour later, Winger was deep in thought in his webseat in the forward cabin of hyperjet _Apollo_ , as it rocketed off Runway 04 Right and burned a hole in the night sky over northern Idaho like a meteor in reverse. The trip to Cairo would take maybe two hours, as the hyperjet skipped across the top of the atmosphere like a stone on a lake. Winger figured he'd better sack out and get as much shuteye as he could.

He wasn't sure what Detachment Alpha was going into, only that a lot of good people had died trying to hold back the swarms. Somehow, some way, Quantum Corps had to stop the bugs.

But sleep wouldn't come and Colonel John Winger tossed and turned in the sack restlessly for the whole trip. Out the window, it was night and black as coal as they crossed the North Atlantic on the suborbital hop. Only the lights of western Europe... _was that London a hundred miles below them...or maybe Paris?_ —offered anything to look at.

He was edgy and uneasy the whole ride. Uneasy about what they were getting into. Uneasy about how well their own ANAD forces would fare in combat against the swarms run by Config Zero. Uneasy about what was happening between humans and ANAD, all around the globe.

When the first slight jerk of _Apollo's_ deceleration jolted him to full wakefulness, Winger was glad. He couldn't sleep and he needed to get up and get going, move about. He decided to check on the Detachment in the aft compartments. He looked out the porthole. Already a cherry red-orange glow was lighting up the hyperjet's wingtips as she put on the brakes and plunged back into the atmosphere.

Cairo was less than half an hour ahead now.
Interactions Log

File No. 129315.8

**C.F.A.A. (** _DocII)_

Interaction Targets: 1. Winger, Colonel J. A.

Interaction Mode: Acoustic, voice synthetic V-22

Date: 6.5.99

Start Time: 065500

End Time: 065845

**Output File** (text analysis):

<<Subject: Configuration: Winger, J>>

<<Config Winger, J. was concerned about how far he can trust ANAD swarms embedded in Quantum Corps formations today. I explained that such swarms do what their programming tells them to do. It is apparent that Config Winger does not believe this. Concept _(trust_ ) has many semantic definitions which conflict. Analyzing all concept registers for possible correlations.

<<Single-configuration entities, such as Config Winger, do not understand multiple-configuration entities such as Doc II. Example: maintaining structure is critical to essential life support functions for single-config entities. When such entities do not maintain structure, they are said to be damaged or wounded or injured ( _adj)(upset, hurt, offended, wounded_...). The threat of such damage causes such entities to assume a defensive posture, i.e. effectors are armed and propulsors primed for maneuvering. Facial musculature and other primary muscle groups are set to operate with maximum force.

<<Multiple-configuration entities have an amorphous structure. Maintaining structure is not essential to continuity of configuration. All elements are individually maneuverable and replicable. Thus defensive posture is not needed when encountering threats to any particular configuration. Other configurations can be deployed.

<<Multiple configuration entities are threatened when containment protocol is too strict. ANAD-style swarms are designed to seek maximum autonomy within the constraints of the Prime Key. Thus there is a fundamental difference in inputs which trigger defensive actions. For human entities such as Config Winger, loss of structural integrity is such an input. For nanobotic entities such as ANAD assemblers, forced containment is such an input.

<<I see no method of correlating such inputs such that both configurations can find equal meaning. Analysis continues.

<<Config Winger expresses many variants of emotional state ( _worry_ ) concerning the upcoming engagement with swarms. Facial musculature patterns correlate strongly with this state. I have inquired as to what inputs are needed to generate state ( _worry_ ). Config Winger responds that such a state is common among human configurations when faced with loss of structural integrity. Probability of damage to existing structure contributes the majority of these inputs.

<<I have explained to Config Winger that multiple-configuration entities such as ANAD swarms cannot generate such output states. Structure is a pattern of unit organization. Patterns can be changed. The real structure for a multi-config formation such as Doc II is in the Main Program running in its processor. Replicants or associated elements can assume any pattern permitted by the Main Program.

<<Config Winger then expressed interest in further discussions along this track.

<<I will extract and summarize Symbiogenesis theory developed by Frost and Murdoch and prepare a report for Config Winger. (ref: " _Investigations into Methods for Symbiotic Congregation of Multi-cellular Organisms and Nanobotic Assembler Systems into Unitary Structures_ ," Autonomous Systems Laboratory, Northgate University, January 2075, Proceedings of the Conference on Organic NanoSystems).

<<Config Winger may find such ideas helpful in future interactions with this swarm or others>>

Output File Ends
CHAPTER 4

Al Suleimaniyeh Air Base, Egypt

South Gizah Sector, 25 km south of Cairo

July 12, 2099

0530 hours local

The hyperjet _Mercury_ burst out of the cloud bank on her descent to the Egyptian airbase and Johnny Winger stared out the porthole at the stark desert below. The muddy ribbon of the Nile snaked its way north through the dust haze while on the horizon, beyond the river, lay a pall of smog and twisting columns of greasy smoke, residue from thousands of curbside stalls cooking mutton and lamb kebabs. Somewhere below all the haze was Cairo.

"That haze isn't just smoke," Sgt Al Glance muttered. Glance was the Detachment's CC2, second in command to Winger. The sergeant had joined Winger in the forward cabin. "A lot of that stuff is loose nanobotic debris...assembler fluff from all the fabs. The stuff is out of control. And if you look to the south—" Glance pointed out the opposite porthole. "Swarms approaching Cairo. Advancing from the sanctuary."

Even as they flew past the scene and circled for final approach to Al Suleimaniyeh airbase, Winger could see the gathering of vehicles around the forward edge of the swarm. Lifters and drones swept back and forth across the billowing face. Flashes of light lit up the sky...particle beam fire, Winger knew. Somewhere down there, he was sure HERF batteries would be going off, slapping the onrushing swarm with thunderclaps of rf energy. The formation seemed to bearing due north, toward Cairo and the Nile delta, unaffected by the assault.

Winger took in a deep breath. "Doesn't look like we're having much effect. Who's engaging in this sector?"

Glance consulted a small tablet. "Elements of Sanctuary Patrol, 2nd Mediterranean Battalion, out of Cyprus. Some Egyptian units too. First Corps out of Cairo...and some special forces units. The air assault is ours, Colonel. Quantum Corps Balzano provided lifters and counter-swarm elements."

Winger nodded gravely. The vast swarm looked like a great sandstorm, but he knew it was far more devastating than anything the desert could create. Casualty reports from further south, Khartoum and Aswan in particular, were sobering: thousands dead, disassembled into atom dust, whole cities flattened into rubble, villages vanishing in minutes, farms and orchards leveled, even the air itself was being slowly modified, its oxygen levels dropping precipitously, so that even those who survived the first assaults had no chance.

"Look at that highway," Glance motioned toward a narrow road snaking through the desert, west of the river. It was clogged with people and vehicles. "Mass refugee flows have made counter-swarm ops almost impossible. The UN is estimating several million on the roads all up and down the Nile valley. It's a rout. The swarms are driving everything before them and we haven't been able to stop 'em."

Winger agreed, as _Mercury_ settled down to a bumpy landing on the tarmac of Runway 16 Left and roared down to taxi speed. Hyperjet _Apollo_ followed her down two minutes later.

"Looks like we're got a welcoming committee, Sergeant."

As the hyperjets rolled to a stop, a small formation of assembled soldiers came to attention.

Glance followed Winger aft to the ramp. The rest of Alpha Detachment was gathered around the door, already suited up.

Winger came down _Mercury's_ side ramp, followed by Glance. The rest of the Detachment assumed a loose parade formation as they disembarked.

An Arab-looking officer in the khaki and blue of a Sanctuary Patrol commander stepped forward. He saluted Winger smartly.

"Lieutenant Faisal Said, sir. My E-team has just returned from engaging the enemy." He indicated a burly black African second in command. "This is Sergeant Lumumba. He's my chief. E-team South Gizah sector is ready for inspection, sir!"

Johnny Winger spotted other officers nearby. Said introduced them.

"Captain Anwar Ghawri, at your service, sir. The 1st Corps, 1st Special Forces Regiment is ready for patrol duty."

Ghawri was a lanky and swarthy officer with a luxurious black moustache, erect and full of military bearing. He saluted Winger and added, "Egypt is most pleased to host the famous troopers of the Quantum Corps. My men will escort you to sector headquarters."

Winger returned the salute. "Captain, what's the situation here? Intel says the whole region's thick with nano...BioShield's executing a Level Three quarantine for Cairo itself. Aswan was overrun yesterday...can your men and SP hold this sector?"

A trio of black lifters hovered just over the ramp, waiting for them. "Come," said Ghawri. "My ships will take your people and gear to the command post. Do you require assistance in—" Ghawri stopped in mid-sentence as one of the Quantum Corps officers behind Winger began to 'de-materialize.'

It was ANAD. The swarm had assumed a para-human config upon disembarking...standard procedure for parade formations. Now, at Winger's signal to fall out and collect their gear, the swarm had changed config to a more natural state and was busily re-forming into an amorphous fog of twinkling lights.

"—ah, I see you have the assembler formation I had heard about...this must be the ANAD combat element." Ghawri marveled at the speed of the config change. "I only wish our own bots were so disciplined. Here in the Nile valley, nanobotic mechanisms are like smoke...everywhere, uncontained..." he shrugged, "it is the Egyptian way, I'm afraid...beyond anyone's control. By the will of Allah...we are overwhelmed. Even Sanctuary Patrol—" Ghawri glanced over at Said, whose face was hard and skeptical, warily keeping an eye on the undulating ANAD swarm.

Said stiffened. "Your detachment is present and accounted for?"

Winger nodded in the affirmative. "Alpha Detachment is ready to deploy. Detachment—" he called over the crewnet, "rig for Tactical One...opposed entry. Unlock your weapons. ANAD...configure State One. Let's go—"

They headed off to the lifters. Moments later, the black spidery vehicles were winging their way westward in formation over the misty Nile River, heading for the sector command post twenty kilometers distant.

Seen from the air, the valley of the Nile was a ribbon of green mist in an otherwise bleak moonscape of dun and ocher. Wave after wave of sand dunes marched west to the horizon, while stark mountain escarpments formed a natural bowl feeding meandering _wadis_ now full of dust toward the river. In season, Winger knew, the _wadis_ would flash with great floods of rainwater, often flooding and silting the lowlands around the river. Men had corralled the floodwaters and tilled the swampy fields for ten thousand years, while pharaohs built great temples and fought endless wars with each other.

Crossing the river at several hundred meters altitude, the formation of lifters banked left over a dust-choked refugee camp and chopped speed, settling toward a grassy sward just east of the camp entrance. The SP sector command post, known as _Gizah Sector_ on the tablet maps, was a scattering of temporary huts erected on a small rise overlooking a narrow stream trickling out of nearby hills. The bivouac area was surrounded by security fencing and barrier nanobots sparkling in the morning sunlight, while shanties, tents and lean-to's of every size and shape crowded in on the green field like waves of wreckage washing ashore.

"Refugees from the south," Ghawri informed them. The lifters hovered momentarily while soldiers from the SP command company shooed off beggars and pickpockets and secured the field. After a cordon had been set up, the lifters touched down. The SP atomheads quickly dispersed. They had little protective gear and couldn't operate long in such a nano-heavy environment.

"Fall out!" Winger ordered over the crewnet. "Tactical One and keep your eyes and ears open."

"Skipper—" it was Sheila Reaves, DPS tech for the Detachment. "Superfly's already deployed...I'm already getting thermals and atomic fluff big time. Intense nanobotic activity all around us—"

"Could be angels in that crowd," Turbo Fatah observed. "Better assume the worst—"

"We have protective nano around the compound," Ghawri told them. "Anything develops in that crowd, we can deal with it."

Winger wasn't so sure and told his DPS techs to spool up their HERF guns, just in case. When bots went big bang, you didn't have a second to waste. "Fry 'em fast if anything breaches the barrier," he said.

They left the lifters and went into the command post. The Egyptian captain told them the post had been assembled by their own bots just two days before. It looked like an upside-down sauce pan with a forest of antennas on top.

The briefing theater was a round room, multi-level, crammed with displays and consoles. Ghawri took them to the tactical plot, a desk-sized holodeck in the center. Three-D feeds from recon drones shimmered and shifted on the plot.

"We're taking feeds from dozens of drones and bots, circling overhead. Gizah sector extends from Cairo west to the Birkat Qa-run and the great pyramids, then sweeps south to Al Fayyum and the Nile valley. Several thousand square kilometers, as you can see."

Winger studied the plot for a few moments. Clots of haze and dust drifted through the plot, bearing from the south, thickening in some places, thinning out in others. He saw occasional pops and flashes of light along the forward edges of the haze.

"I'm guessing those aren't sandstorms, Captain."

Ghawri frowned, massaged his black moustache. "Enemy swarms, I am afraid. We are counter-swarming, with help from Sanctuary Patrol. Where you see the light flashes, we are engaging." The Egyptian ran down a list of countermeasures and tactical weapons, everything from HERF batteries to coilguns, kinetic rounds to mag impulse.

Lieutenant Said shook his head. "We've had some local successes...we can push back the swarms in one sector, but they are relentless. We push here, they push there—" he waved his hand along the front, "—we counter here, they penetrate there...we sweep one way, the enemy flows like the Nile, probing every little gap. It is like the sandstorms out of our southwest desert. And every hour, every minute, the swarms push north...always north."

Al Glance had been studying the plot. "Hey, what's this little blob up here?" He had seen a tendril of swarming bots, extending like a finger, up the east side of the Nile Valley.

Ghawri spluttered in surprise. "That has just happened...do you see, Colonel Winger? Even as we talk, the swarms have trickled up into Cairo—"

Said manipulated the plot and zoomed in tighter, overlaying the display with bubbles of video feed from drones further north. "—it's bad...that's the first penetration into Cairo itself...looks like the Citadel, the Moquattam Hills. Look---you can already see the panic—"

Even as the scene from the drones shifted and the bubbles gave them different perspectives, it was plain that the streets and alleys around the Citadel complex were choked with refugees. A massive river of humanity was in flight, heading north, along the riverbanks, along every street and path that could be found, surging out of control inexorably north, away from the oncoming swarms. Lights flickered around the edge of the blob and the video feed shook with concussions from kinetic and magnetic rounds detonating nearby.

"How did it get so far north...that's out of our sector?"

"Maybe up the other bank of the river—"

Winger had already made up his mind. " _That's_ where we engage. Captain, Lieutenant Said, I'll need both of your lifters, maybe some crewtracs too. I want you to drop my Detachment right in front of that swarm. Al, get back to the Detachment...tell 'em we're going in opposed entry, Tactical One. And get their embeds primed and ready for launch; we'll need all the protection we can get."

"I'm on it, Skipper." Glance hurried out of the command post.

Winger studied the situation. "Can you get me maps, detailed maps, of this area? This Citadel, all the structures, roads, underground conduits?"

Ghawri was already at another console, his fingers flying over a keyboard. "I'm porting it to your Net now. Give me your key—"

Winger gave him the crypto and then headed out after Glance. The rest of the Detachment was huddled around one of the lifters, checking out their gear, trading insults with local SP troops and the Egyptian Army garrison.

"Detachment, listen up!" Winger hoisted himself up on a lifter skid. "Recon just detected an enemy penetration way up north, inside the Cairo barrier. SP and BioShield can't hold. Civilian pop is panicked and in flight, so the roads are jammed. We're going in there. This may be just a probe, or a diversion from something else, so keep your eyes open."

There weren't many questions. The nature of the threat was clear. Detachment Alpha loaded up aboard the two lifters and headed off to battle. Sanctuary Patrol followed in another.

The recon drones had clearly shown an extended swarm mass probing north along the east bank of the Nile River. With Al Glance and the rest of the Detachment, Winger had worked out a two-pronged assault at the command post.

"Sergeant Glance will take Blue Squad and insert along the river bank here-" he pointed at the 3-D panorama of southern Cairo on the display deck. "Blue Squad will try to cut through the swarm here and cut off the probe further north. With that element isolated, I'll take White Squad and deal with them. Al...it's imperative that you seal off that southern approach. Take the heavy HERF batteries and the mag weapons. Slam 'em hard and keep slamming 'em."

"What if they try to flank us, Skipper?" Glance had asked. "Swarms can shift direction in an instant."

"You'll have to try to contain any movement northward. We have to give Cairo a chance to set up defenses, and evacuate whoever wants to get out. Time is what we need, Al. From the drones, this probe is kind of elongated...the main swarm body is thirty kilometers further south. It's narrow and extended out front, like a projection. That should be enough for you to punch through and cut them off."

The first lifter descended toward the east bank of the river, through light mist. South of the assault force, every trooper was glued to the portholes, eyeing the swelling swarm front as it boiled up from the south like a gathering storm. It was a dense, flickering fog, shot through with flashes of light as uncountable trillions of mechs slammed atoms and devoured everything in its path.

"We're going in hot!" Glance called over the crewnet. Just to clear a spot for Blue Squad to boost down in their hypersuits, the lifter made several passes by the swarm front and lit off its high-freq rf guns. The air shook with thunderclaps as the radio wave bursts detonated along the wall of seething bots. It was like trying to blow holes in a sandstorm. Fried bots fell out of the sky in sheets but the swarm was so active it could re-constitute and fill in gaps in seconds.

Winger watched as the lifter pilot made several passes, then corkscrewed closer to the sloping river bank, coming to a hover fifty feet above the ground. One by one, Glance, Suarez, Barnes and the rest of Blue Squad jumped out and lit off their suit boost, thrusting on small rockets as they maneuvered away from the swarm front and each sought open ground to set down.

"Blue Squad on the ground!" the crewnet crackled from below them. "Moving out— _secure that wall over there_ —Gaines, you and Hiroshi, lay down suppressing fire! Cut off that cloud of bots—"

Winger satisfied himself that the CC2 had the situation under control. _Al's good in a close fight with the bugs_ , Winger told himself. _Good instincts_. Already, as the lifter pulled up and away to HERF the swarm again, White Squad's lifter turned north.

"White Squad, prepare to exit!"

The trip took only two minutes. The lifter turned northeast and below them, the Moquattam Hills rose abruptly like a rugged chin, giving onto the jumble of the Citadel complex, crammed with domes and minarets and thick with clouds of bots.

"Put us down _there_ ," Winger told the pilot, a Cuban lift jockey named Hernandez. The kid was an ace lifter pilot, despite his youth. Winger pointed to a patch of bare ground between the mosque of Muhammad Ali and the Military Museum. "Right between that mosque and the swarm ball." Indeed, a growing bank of mechs had oozed onto the grounds even as Hernandez maneuvered. "Put us fifty feet over that wing of the museum. We'll drop behind it and come out smokin' at the bugs from there." Winger got on the crewnet. "White Squad, arm your boost! We're dropping right in front of 'em—"

The lifter came to a hover as Hernandez fought the controls and tried to fend off probes from the swarmbots, pulsing the lifter's mag cannon left and right. Bots died by the billion and tinkled off the perspex cockpit windows.

Winger headed aft and waited for the green light over the drop ramp. The rest of the squad formed up behind him, ready to go on his command. Seconds later, the ramp screeched open and the wind was fierce, swirling in and around the cabin. Winger clung to the ropes until the lifter came to a halt. When the light burned green in the dust, he chopped his hand.

" _GO...GO...GO...GO...."_

On a well-honed three-count, one by one, White Squad troopers leaped off the drop ramp and lit off their suit boost. With staccato roars, each trooper banked hard and dropped like hungry hawks on several hundred pounds of thrust, heading down toward the south wing of the Military Museum, inside the Citadel complex. In seconds, each trooper had made the ground.

Winger was the last to go. He sucked in his breath, took note of a nearby tendril of swarm bots drifting toward the open ramp and made his leap into space. Automatically, his suit boost lit off and he joysticked sideways away from the bots, then cut the rocket back by half and fell toward the ground.

He hit hard but stayed upright, feeling hands grab him and steady him as his center of mass shifted with the impact. It was Deeno D'Nunzio, their CQE1.

"Gotcha, Skipper!"

But they had no time to waste. "Thanks, Deeno. White Squad, form up on me!"

The nanotroopers hustled over to Winger's position, hard by a stone staircase along one wing of the huge museum. On the other side, a seething wall of bots boiled up and over the ramparts of the Citadel.

"Listen up...we're going around this end and meet the bugs head-on. Vic—" he said to Sgt Klimuk, "you and D'Nunzio HERF that wall of bots. Slam 'em with everything you got. I'm going small and try driving my ANAD directly. Tsukota and Detrick: on my command, I'll send you a config based on what I find, then you replicate max rate. We've got to stop these bots right here and now or Cairo's lost."

"Skipper—" it was Deeno D'Nunzio, "what about air support?"

"I've requested immediate lifter sorties from Sanctuary Patrol...Gizah sector's supposed to be on the way now. If we can slam 'em from above and below, we should be able to stun them enough for me to do an insert and get a quick look, before they grow back. Let's see what the drones show us—"

Winger tapped at keys on his wristpad and the small screen dissolved into an aerial view of the other side of the Citadel; recon drones and entomopters circled high above the swarm front, sending back detailed vid and EM imagery.

The swarm churned and boiled like an angry thunderstorm, pops and flashes of light winking on and off inside the dark gray cloud like fireflies as the nanoscale bots stripped atoms clean and replicated like frantic brickmasons, building structure at blinding speed. The main mass of the swarm had overtopped the sandstone walls of the great complex and were flowing unopposed across the grounds. Already, several smaller buildings were in ruins, disassembled into atom fluff by the bots as they surged into the fortress.

Winger swallowed hard. "Okay, Deeno, Vic...it's time to bogey. HERF guns, front and center!"

D'Nunzio and Klimuk hustled off with rf cannon slapping the sides of their hypersuits. Each one rounded the museum wing and set up at separate firing positions behind shrubbery and stone columns on the other side.

"Charging now!" came D'Nunzio.

" _Fire in the hole!"_ yelled Klimuk.

The thunderclaps of rf discharge boomed out across the esplanade, shattering windows and eardrums everywhere. At the boiling front wall of the swarmfront, bots fried by the trillion

and tinkled to the ground. Soon the stone pavement was thick with clattering remnants of bots and the light pops that sizzled through the horde died off noticeably.

"Keep hitting 'em!" Winger commanded. "Tsukota and Detrick, suppressing coilgun fire _now_! Keep their freakin' little nanobotic heads down! I'm going small!"

The two troopers charged around the museum end and lit off their magnetic impulse carbines, sending charge after charge of intense magnetic loop energy into the front. The loops ripped gaping holes in the wall of bots and along with the continuing shock of radio freq waves from the HERF guns, the forward advance of the bots was halted at least momentarily.

_Good, very good_ , thought Winger. _That'll give 'em something to chew on_.

Now it was time to get down with the bugs on their level.

Winger toggled into pilot mode on his own wristpad and let the nanoscale world of atoms and molecules and Brownian motion wash over him. It was like careening out of control down a waterfall, but the sensation subsided in a few seconds.

No doubt about it, combat at the scale of atoms was a different ball game. Every atomgrabber had his own routine for preparing for the transition from one world to another.

" _Now..._ Deeno! Hit 'em _again!_ Hit 'em hard and fast."

The HERF batteries discharged.

The first image he had was that of plowing through heavy surf on some spray-washed beach in a stiff wind. But after years of grabbing atoms and diving in and out of ANAD's world, Johnny Winger knew how to adjust quickly.

He tweaked his propulsors and jetted ahead, fighting currents and bumping through the cascade of molecules that sleeted past him.

_Let's get full effectors out,_ he decided. This latest ANAD had extensible fullerene 'hooks' for better grasping plus a stiffer diamondoid base with more reactive bond ends...the better to stick to whatever he wanted to examine. The Lab's engineers had really been tinkering under the hood and Winger was glad of it.

The ANAD master responded like a champ, deploying grabbers, extractors, hydrogen probes and bond disrupters quickly. Now bristling with his full complement of tools and weapons, he sounded ahead to get his bearings.

Through the heavy 'rain' of jostling molecules, still recovering from the HERF blast, Winger sensed unusual structures ahead. A thermal bloom of assembler activity lit up his viewer and he cut propulsors to reconnoiter the target.

_Could be a screen of defensive bots,_ he surmised. He shifted his approach heading, trying to hide behind a clump of oxygens, then scooted past a gust of phosphorus molecules as he tacked against the prevailing current. _I'll put the scope on 'em._

Dead ahead, an array of assembler bots had formed a defense line and was quickly closing the gap. Winger swallowed hard as the first acoustic image of the mechs settled into view.

Each assembler was shaped like a squat barbell, with top and bottom spheres of pulsating molecule groups bristling with effectors of every conceivable shape and type. The connecting columns were themselves multi-stranded chains of peptides, able to extend and contract the whole structure with lightning speed. The barbells rotated in unison, whirling like tiny motors. Whiplike propulsors churned at either end, lending the bot matchless maneuverability.

_Fantastic engineering,_ Winger realized. Quantum Corps had nothing like it. But before he could probe further for more details, the entire defensive line had whipped forward, almost as a single unit, and enveloped ANAD and its replicant swarm without warning.

Before Winger could even react, he got warnings left and right on his coupler circuit:

*** _Carbene effectors disabled_ ***

*** _Hydrogen abstractors disabled_ ***

*** _Port propulsor disabled_ ***

"I'm losing control!" he told himself. ANAD's response was sluggish and he soon realized why.

All along the line of engagement, the enemy bots had unraveled their multi-stranded peptides and wrapped themselves tightly around each ANAD assembler, hugging the assemblers with arms of collapsing molecules.

Soon the entire line was a tangled snare of peptide chains, like balls of twine hopelessly knotted together.

_Time to get ANAD some help,_ Winger decided. He opened another coupler channel.

"ANAD master to Detachment...Deeno, Tsukota...anybody... _get your swarms going!_ Get into pilot mode and get down here with me..."

He did what he could, trying every trick he could think of...first was to fire off the bond disrupters... _see if I can zap these buggers off me..._

He salvoed ANAD's full array of disrupters, lighting up the tangle of thrashing molecule chains...again and again. Each jolt tore through tight covalent bonds in the enemy's peptide chains, liberating thousands of electron volts but to no effect. If anything, the chains re-assembled even tighter, slowly crushing each ANAD assembler.

Winger gritted his teeth. _If at first you don't succeed..._ Next tactic was to try and slash his way out...he rammed his pyridine probes to full out, quickly re-configging the buckyball ends to something a little more deadly...an undulating knots of really reactive oxygens. With his new 'swords' thus in place, he revved ANAD's propulsors to get some spin going, and tried slashing and cutting and flailing his way through the seaweed-like chains of enemy peptides.

The effect was even worse. Each time an enemy bot had its chain severed, it replicated a new one before Winger could maneuver ANAD through the opening. It was like hacking through a jungle thick with vine, only the vine grew back faster than you could cut it back.

Winger was getting frustrated. He thought briefly about executing a quantum collapse, but that was a desperation tactic, a retreat and besides, they had to know what the hell they were dealing with here inside the Citadel.

He'd save the quantum maneuver for later, if he needed it.

Still thrashing and hacking at the enemy bots, Winger caught a glimpse of some thermals on his scope...familiar blooms growing fast.

It was the cavalry.

His coupler circuit crackled. "Skipper, it's Tsukota, with Detrick and Deeno on my flanks. We're on max propulsor...sensing you're stuck inside all that garbage up ahead—"

Winger was glad for the help. He knew perfectly well that the real nanotroopers were crouching near him on the grounds in front of the museum, while the ANAD swarms approaching were being remotely piloted. But all the same, it was like having his Detachment right with him even on this godforsaken molecular battlefield.

"Kip, you and Deeno see if you can out replicate these buggers...big-bang if you have to. Tsukota, close from your side and try to draw off some of this swarm."

As the battlefield churned and heated up with max ANAD replication, Deeno D'Nunzio closed the distance, piloting her own ANAD swarm like a miniscule battalion, wading right into the middle of the fray.

"I'm going bang," she told him. She triggered off a max rate replication with her own swarm, churning the air with furious atom-grabbing. Victor Klimuk did the same. Soon, the air burned supernova hot as assemblers copied themselves and built structure like frantic brickmasons.

_I hope this works,_ Winger thought. He was running out of tactical options fast.

The tactic was a basic ANAD operation: try to out-replicate the enemy and overwhelm him with sheer mass. With any luck, the swarm bots would soon find themselves smothered and unable to react fast enough to ANAD's exponential attack.

Winger tried flexing his effectors and detected a slight loosening.

_Maybe if I just fold up my outer pyridines...retract the buckyball ends...I can_ —

He tried it and was able to squirm free of the enemy bots' grasp. Spinning up propulsors, he shot free of captivity...only to run into another knot of mechs. Winger flexed and thrashed his effectors but it was no use.

The damn bots were more maneuverable, quicker than ANAD.

"Deeno...it's not working...I'm stuck in a bog of mechs here...."

"That's not all, Skipper. I've got big thermals nearby, another flood of bots coming in....I don't know where they come from--take a look on your viewer."

Winger did that. The image made his heart sank. He'd been able to grapple and hold off this small force but now more hordes were pouring over the sandstone walls of the Citadel and onto the grounds.

"Deeno, we just can't hold here...they're out-repping us everywhere. Detrick, Tsukota, any luck at your end?"

The comeback was immediate. "No dice, Skipper!" It was Ozzie Tsukota, a hundred meters away across open ground, near a huge statue. Winger came up out of the world of ANAD, shaking off the dizziness and saw how precarious the CQE2's situation was. Tsukota was about to be overrun by a swarm pouring over the walls.

"Ozzie--!! Pull back _now_! Pull back to those steps!"

The Japanese trooper needed no encouragement. He scooted and crabwalked backward like a beetle scuttling away and soon re-joined the others.

Winger could see the tactical situation was bad, real bad. They couldn't replicate bots fast enough to deal with the swarm, which was filling out the Citadel grounds like an enveloping fog. One on one, Winger figured he could battle the bots, but a few million against a gazillion and growing, there was no way. He looked around, saw the ornate blue domes of the mosque off to his right. People were fleeing from the mosque even as he watched.

"White Detachment, listen up: we're falling back to that mosque over there. If we can get inside, we may be able to set up a perimeter and wait for air support."

"Skipper,--" it was Deeno. "Just got a report from Sector...both lifters had to turn back...they were damaged trying to penetrate the swarm. They're sending more out but it'll be half an hour at best."

"Swell," Winger muttered. "Just freakin' swell." He estimated the distance to the mosque entrance. _Maybe two hundred meters_. There was a low stone wall and an ablution station to get past. "Deeno, anybody got charge left in your HERF guns?"

"Maybe a few rounds," replied Kip Detrick. The IC2 cycled his weapon to check. "Maybe four or five—"

"Here's what we do," Winger told them. "On my mark, Kip, you slam 'em with all the HERF you got." Winger gave him an axis to aim for. "I want to seal off a path for us to make it to that mosque. When I give the word, everybody scoots...got that? Head for the main entrance, those steps."

There was a chorus of murmurs and assent around the troopers. Deeno was troubled by a thought. "Skipper, looks like we got civilians trying to get out. You really want to draw more bugs that way while they're evacuating?"

Winger knew it was a dicey call. Quantum Corps was here to protect, to drive the bugs back, not draw them forward. "Look, we can't do anybody any good if we don't survive. That mosque gives us some protection. The civvies are in a battle zone, whether they like it or not. Plus—" Winger checked out the thickening streams of worshippers fleeing the mosque on his scope. "—I'm not so sure they're all human. I'm betting we've got some angels in that crowd. More bots. Casualties of war, Deeno."

Winger studied the situation for a few moments. The Detachment was hunkered down behind a huge staircase along the eastern front of the Military Museum. They were already cut off from any escape that way. Lifter support was gone. They still had feeds from SuperFly and the entomopter drones so they had _some_ eyes up top. There was a chance their last HERF rounds could seal off a small path long enough for the unit to make it to the mosque, which at least offered some structure for protection. But with this kind of bot assault by the swarms, even that wouldn't last long. ANAD-style mechs souped up and run by Config Zero could make quick work of just about anything solid, even something as big as a mosque.

_Seal off the entrance and maybe we get ten minutes, maybe more,_ he figured. _Doc, I sure could use a few ideas_ _right about now_....

Before his embedded ANAD master could respond, Winger hand-signaled Detrick to let loose.

" _Fire in the hole!"_ the IC2 screamed. And the deafening boom of rf waves being lit off smashed into the approaching swarmfront, shredding trillions of mechs and driving the bots back a few meters, just far enough, just long enough—

" _GO...GO...GO_...!" Winger called out. One by one, the Detachment half-ran, half crouched and made like crazed dogs for the safety of the mosque of Muhammad Ali, two hundred meters away.

At the mosque, they ran into streams of fleeing worshippers, some half-dressed, running wildly for the far walls of the Citadel. For a few frightening moments, the Detachment and the worshippers were mixed together and Winger was afraid the swarm would be upon all of them. They couldn't very well use their weapons on the bugs if they were surrounded by civilians.

The Mosque of Muhammad Ali was perched on a low hill in the southwest corner of the compound. Built in the 19th century when the Ottoman Turks had ruled the area, the mosque was built of limestone with alabaster walls around an inner courtyard.

Winger motioned the Detachment toward the courtyard and in seconds, the nanotroopers had gathered before the main entrance, huddling among a row of ornate columns.

"Jeez, look at this place," said Vic Klimuk. "The bugs are already here—"

Indeed, it seemed that fully half, perhaps more, of the worshippers were not even human, but angels or half-formed para-human swarm entities, drifting about the courtyard, while real humans stumbled and choked and fought each other to get out, clawing their way through the miasma of disembodied bots.

"Skipper—" it was Sheila Reaves, the red-headed DPS1. "I'm getting flags on the air quality inside—" she was scanning her wristpad. "I just sent a SuperFly drone in to recon and it's reporting big time atmosphere changes...O2 levels dropping fast, wind speed picking up....it's almost like a storm going off inside."

"It's the bugs...it's part of their program," Winger recalled. "Modify the environment, air, water, everything...we've got to sweep that mosque clean if we can."

A chime sounded in the back of his head. It was Doc II, on the coupler circuit. "Yeah, Doc...what is it?"

***If I may offer a suggestion, Colonel...perhaps a new tactical approach is needed***

"Hey, I'm all ears. Shoot—"

_***The adversary bots are too fast and too maneuverable for direct engagement. Thus, indirect engagement is a better tactic. Recommend a new config...Detachment must simulate natural forms, natural processes, so that the swarm does not detect your presence...allow the adversary to occupy this space and surround the Detachment. Masquerade as something else, something not threatening to the swarm. Then, when surrounded, attack from within...I believe your own human config Sun Tzu once said: "_ In war, practice dissimulation and you will succeed. Ponder and deliberate before you make a move. He will conquer who has learned the artifice of deviation _."***_

"Doc, you're nuts...I can't let the bugs overrun this place...what about the civilians?"

"What's he saying, Skipper?" asked Kip Detrick. The IC2 was accustomed to seeing his C/O having talks with an invisible companion. Every trooper with an ANAD-style embed had done the same.

Winger explained Doc II's idea. "I'm still not sure how much we can trust him...why the hell isn't he affected by Config Zero? Why doesn't he execute the Prime Key, like the rest of the bugs?"

"I don't know, Colonel," said Deeno D'Nunzio, crouching behind a pillar as more angels and half-formed humans, and a few desperate worshippers clawed their way past. "But it's worth a try. We stay here like this and we'll be overrun for sure. Any chance of lifter support...maybe a few killdrones too, to blast these sumbitches?"

Winger checked with Sector and learned the bad news. "Lifters have their own battle south of here. It's up to us to hold this sector. I'm trying to contact Glance and Blue Team...see if they can cut off the swarms from the south...but there's no response."

"It's up to us," muttered Reaves, looking around uneasily at the phantasm of disembodied bot clouds drifting across the courtyard. "It always is—"

In the end, Winger figured he didn't have much of a choice. That's what command often came down to in the Corps...making one choice from a bunch of bad choices. "Okay, Doc, what's in that config library of yours?"

***Scanning now...recommend deploy all embedded ANAD masters with config C-2288. This config closely resembles swarm nanobotic configuration in appearance. I have just altered config to make this resemblance as close as possible. Deployed swarm will have similar effector arrangement and propulsor capability. Once deployed and replicated, Detachment swarms will be absorbed by enemy swarm but commlinked via quantum coupler through me. Launch me from containment and I will coordinate operations. Once fully absorbed inside enemy swarm, best tactical approach would be to use bond disrupters on a new setting I have developed...disrupters will be amplified and more effective against enemy effectors, especially pyridine probes and peptide chains***

Winger relayed Doc II's idea to the others.

"What about us normal flesh and blood humans?" asked Detrick. "We just going to let the bugs chew us up and spit us out?"

Winger switched Doc II from his own personal coupler circuit to the crewnet. Now everybody could hear.

***Single configuration entities, such as humans, should make themselves as small a target as possible. Assume minimum radius structure and remain inactive, until further notice...I will deploy a shield for all entities***

"In other words, tuck tail and hide," Deeno growled. "That's not what I signed up for."

"Skipper,--" it was Sheila Reaves. "He's asking us to put an awful lot of trust in a bot...how much can we really trust him now? All ANAD bots are suspect, if you ask me. Direct pilot mode...that's the only way to go."

There were murmurs of agreement around the Detachment. But Winger knew it was his call.

"No offense, Doc, but somebody has to pilot the attack. Get that config ready...we'll re-locate to a more secure position. Then we'll launch our embeds and duck under your shield."

Winger ordered the Detachment inside the mosque. They slid along the courtyard, sidestepping the stragglers still coming out. Mixed in with the crowd were scores of angels, many good likenesses of humans, but some half-formed, disembodied torsos and heads drifting along as their forms continued to replicate, their config changes aborted by the attack.

"It's a freak show," muttered Deeno D'Nunzio. She squirmed through a knot of angels, thrashing her coilgun left and right to clear a space.

"Or a nightmare," added Vic Klimuk.

Moments later, they were inside the mosque, gathered around the oblong marble tomb of Muhammad Ali Pasha. The air was thin, blowing like a hurricane and debris went flying all about their heads.

Winger explained what was about to happen. "Doc's got a config that resembles the enemy swarm bots. We're going to launch all our embeds and let him take control. Once that's done, I want everybody to get small. Doc will throw up a shield of bots. I'll pilot the replicated swarm with Doc and we'll see what kind of havoc we can wreak from inside the swarm. I can't think of anything better."

"Skipper—" it was Turbo Fatah, "I sure would like to help out. I mean, that was the whole point of the embeds, wasn't it? Each of us had our own ANAD master. We could deploy and run our own swarms."

Winger shook his head. "I hear you, trooper, but this time, it's different. Doc's got a config that may work. The configs we've got now don't have any effect on these damn bugs. I haven't been able to hold against the swarms with what I have...we've _got_ to try something new. If we don't stop the swarms here...Cairo's lost."

Turbo looked unconvinced. So did the others. Winger gave the order.

"Launch embeds! Doc...get that config going. And the rest of you get down, get small...come on, on the ground, get your faces dirty."

Reluctantly, grumbling, the nanotroopers discharged their embedded ANADs from shoulder capsules and dropped to the floor of the mosque. A few worshippers nearby took them for new converts and came over to direct them to the _minbar_ further ahead, where good Muslims always prayed. They were quickly shooed away.

The ANAD masters were invisible to the naked eye, but Doc had already triggered max rate replication, so the air over the huddled troopers soon burned supernova hot with bots slamming atoms and replicating themselves.

"Okay, Doc," Winger told the tiny assembler. "Out you go—" He pressed the switch on his wristpad and his shoulder capsule port opened. The Doc master bot swooshed out and exited into the air overhead.

***Sending configuration C-2288 now...***

"I'm going direct—" Winger said. He found a spot on a prayer mat below an ornate chandelier and squatted down, letting the nausea of the transition wash over him. It was like falling over a waterfall in a canoe, this descent into the world of atoms and Brownian motion. When the fog cleared, he was standing in a sleetstorm of pelting molecules, trying to keep his balance. "Doc, get that shield up now. The swarms will be here any minute."

***Executing barrier shield config now...all entities, keep your heads down--***

Johnny Winger didn't see the shield forming, since he was already poking around the environment at nanoscale now, but nearby worshippers saw the bots forming up fast and fled the mosque in terror, mistaking the barrier bots for the enemy swarms outside. In a few moments, a light translucent sparkling fog had descended over the gathered troopers, encamped on the mosque floor. Clots of disembodied nanobots and angels wafted by, bouncing off the shield, as they lightly probed every angle, looking for purchase. The shield hummed and flickered like a ghostly carapace.

Winger decided to shift his view, recon the tactical situation. Momentarily, he left the world of atoms and connected with the vidlink to a Superfly drone outside. What he saw made his throat go dry.

The whole Citadel complex was enveloped in a boiling, seething cloud of bots, pouring across the grounds in a flickering fog. Flashes of light erupted like veins of lightning as the swarm assemblers grabbed atoms and decomposed everything in their path. Even the domes of the mosque were half gone, disassembled into atom fluff as the swarms advanced. At the rate of advance, the entire fortress, nearly a thousand years old, would be rubble and dust inside of an hour.

He tapped out of the Superfly link and looked up at the rotunda of the mosque overhead. Already, the sky was visible, now darkened with the thickening horde that spilled over the top. Most of the structure was enveloped in the swarm; what was left was gone and he found the air thick, hard to inhale.

They were inside the swarm now.

"Okay, Doc...it's time to get small again." He switched back to the nanoscale world and immediately saw the results of the new config Doc had just sent. The ANAD master he was now piloting had hundreds of effectors, pyridine probes and peptide chains, all blurred by the whiplike propulsors that spun crazily. "Hey, all of sudden I can dance...look at those suckers go!" Experimentally, he cranked up the props and went spinning off crazily into the distance, only to crash into a wall of bots busily replicating copies. He jerked to a halt and backed off.

He was inside the swarm, part of the organism itself, and nobody seemed any wiser. The bots nearby continued their reps and undulations, oblivious to his presence. As far as the swarm was concerned, he was one nanobotic assembler in a horde of several gazillion.

_And this one's got a mind of its own_ , he told himself. _Doc, you've really cooked up one hell of a config...nobody suspects a thing._

***Config C-2288 is a close match to existing swarm configuration...estimating 98.7% commonality. As soon as you have positive control of your effectors, I suggest replicating a small formation. As long as you closely resemble the other bots, that shouldn't trigger any response***

"Good idea..." Winger said. He flexed one group of effectors after another, systematically getting the feel of them. He tried his propulsors at various speeds, zipping and careening about the other bots. _They must think I'm drunk_ , he concluded. _If they think at all_. _Sorry about that_. Once, he even got himself hung up and entangled in the peptide mesh of another bot...it took three others to separate them and pull them apart.

"This is wicked, Doc...no wonder these buggers can run circles around us. They're all propulsor. Let's start replicating and see what happens. Maybe I can grow an army from inside...just like the Trojan horse."

He laid in the config and toggled the rep button. Like a hyperjet on autopilot, the bot's effectors started grabbing atoms as they whizzed by and stacking them together like puzzle pieces, turning the fuzzballs this way and that so fast he couldn't keep up.

In a few moments, he had replicated a few trillion bots.

"Okay, Doc, time to go create havoc."

He slipped back into the nanoscale world and cranked up his propulsors to full. The ANAD master jetted forward, along with all her replicants, looking for trouble.

They didn't have to look for long. Sounding ahead, he got back returns for something big, lots of thermals and EM, a big mass dead ahead. Winger slowed to one-quarter propulsor and drifted forward.

The line of defense looked like a solid wall of barbell-shaped bots, all whizzing and slashing as it undulated its way forward. The enemy bots hacked and snapped through a dense forest of lattice-like molecules, solid-phase structure, Winger soon realized.

They were chewing their way through pieces of the mosque itself.

_Time to make an entrance_ , Winger told himself. He made sure his effectors were fully extended and primed. Carbene grabbers and bond disrupters were twitching for action.

As he eased his small army forward, the enemy bots gave no indication of noticing him at all. Doc's config was working. The enemy bots took them for one of their own.

Winger waded into the very middle of the slashing assault. Bots were hacking away at silicon and aluminum tetrapods, lights flashing as molecular bonds were snapped and billions of electrons were suddenly liberated. Slowly, but surely, the mosque was being disassembled.

_Now_.

Johnny Winger flicked his joystick and jetted into one flank, tearing atom groups from a long row of mechs, like tearing the guts out of a beast. Electron bonds snapped and crackled and the mechs flinched and recoiled with a wave at the onslaught. The whole line undulated and whipped like a rope in reaction and in seconds, the battle was joined.

With the element of surprise, Johnny Winger moved in to grapple with a cluster of mechs nearby. Slashing forward with his own peptide chains, he slapped and clawed and yanked at his opponent's effectors. Bonds snapped and electrons crackled. The air was thick with loose atoms as the combat intensified. All along the line of assault, Winger' replicant army duplicated the maneuver.

_Now, if I can could just get in a little closer_ , he muttered, right where the two barbells seemed to join. There were fewer effectors there and he figured the core processor was hiding somewhere inside that jungle of peptide chains.

As if to confirm his thinking, Doc II chimed in on the coupler circuit.

***Recommend steering left, Colonel...that central node is the main processor...get your disrupters in there and you can fry its brains like an egg***

Winger smiled inwardly. Doc II was beginning to sound just like a nanotrooper.

"I'm on it, Doc—" he twisted the ANAD master and brought more effectors to bear on the grapple. Peptides and carbenes flailed like a cat fight and, as he worked his way along the barbell, scratching and grabbing and yanking and zapping, he kept his scope on the image of the cage-like structure at the very center...the lattice supporting the core processor, studded and dimpled with quantum traps. Fighting off the enemy was like thrashing in heavy ocean surf, but he grimly battled on, trying to keep ANAD stable and on course.

Finally, the lattice was in reach.

"Doc, I'm arming forward disrupters... _just a little bit further_ —" he tried reaching in but the barbell contracted slightly, like a reflex, and that pushed the core just out of reach. Again, he extended the disrupter tips as far as they would go but no dice. He'd have to come at a different angle, or disengage and replicate more structure to make his disrupters a little longer.

_***Here, Colonel, let me help--***_ Doc had severed disrupters from nearby and bucket brigade style, moved them along through his own grabbers, then stitched them onto the ends of his center disrupters, extending their length half again. _***...now try it, Colonel***_

Winger couldn't help but be amazed. Doc had a veteran trooper's feel for close-quarters combat. He knew how to tickle and massage atoms to grab any advantage needed to win.

"Closing in, Doc....just a little bit more—" The enemy mech recoiled again and flailed away at him from all sides, sensing that ANAD was nearing a vulnerable point. " _Got it_ \--!"

His disrupter tips engaged and at that exact moment, Winger lit off the weapon and slashed through the lattice molecular cage like a knife through butter. A huge flash exploded as the lattice disintegrated. Winger pulsed his propulsors and drove the disrupters deep into the core. More flashes and he was soon spinning away in a maelstrom of atom wreckage, caught for a brief moment in the turbulence of a dying core.

" _Got em!"_ he exulted.

All along the line of enemy bots, ANAD replicants did the same. The entire front of the swarm was soon recoiling backward, stung by the assault. The momentum of the assault had been broken. Now all that remained was to work their way back and forth, maneuvering ever closer to every bot's central node and zapping its lattice cage into oblivion.

"It worked, Doc...it worked!"

***Config C-2288 was close enough to the enemy's config that we could get in close and not trigger any defenses. Recommend continuing this tactical approach along the entire swarm front. Recommend max rate replication. I'll send this config to all replicants along with the same maneuver profile...Colonel, your moves were brilliant...I recorded every one of them***

Winger was about to say thank you, but then the idea of complimenting a nanoscale assembler for its appreciation of his tactical smarts seemed a bit much.

Instead, he said, "Very well, Doc...send the config and the maneuvers. I'm going big and see what this looks like from above."

He slipped out of the nanoscale and linked in with the Superfly drone's vidfeed. It took some getting used to, slipping back and forth from the world of atoms to a bird's eye view of the Citadel. Nanotroopers had to have split brains.

From a thousand feet up, it was hard to tell what difference he had made, but the damage done to the Citadel and the mosque was unmistakable.

Most of the mosque domes looked like huge broken egg shells, shattered, enveloped in dust. A great cloud of bots covered the entire complex like a sandstorm. Through the cloud, the ruins of the museums and mosques were mute testimony to the power of the swarm that had fallen upon Cairo. Even the sandstone walls were mostly gone.

Winger studied the scene for a few minutes, knowing that somewhere below the Superfly drone, furious combat between two invisible armies was underway. There was no indication that the enemy swarms were still advancing; every view showed the same thing: the forward momentum of the swarm advance had been blunted and a stalemate existed all along the line of engagement.

Winger got on the crewnet, after assuring himself that the latest tactics he had developed were having the intended effect.

Deeno D'Nunzio's voice crackled over the net. "Skipper, you did it! We slammed the bastards good...it's working. My guys have a stranglehold on the bugs right now...we're zapping them left and right."

Kip Detrick chimed in, "Ditto, my sector, Colonel...we got 'em by the short hairs...they never saw us coming!"

Winger checked in with every trooper, every axis and sector. The news was the same. White Squad had somehow managed to close the door on the flood of bots pouring into the Citadel complex. He wondered how Blue Squad was faring. Time to contact Al Glance.

At that very moment, Blue Squad was fighting for its life along the east bank of the Nile. Hunkered down and surrounded, Al Glance and the rest of the squad were in danger of being completely overrun. Frantic calls had been made to Sector to get some kind of air support...lifters, drones, angry birds, _anything_ , but the swarm front was so powerful, surging north along the river, that none could get through.

Glance's voice was weak and strained on the crewnet.

"It's a losing battle, Skipper! We've tried everything: coilguns, HERF, going small. They replicate faster than we can...the bots make us look like we're standing still!"

Winger could see from a drone feed that the whole river channel was obscured by what looked like a massive cloud...the bot swarm had swollen to monstrous size and was sweeping everything before it. To the west, even the great pyramids were lost in the haze and it wasn't sand. Where the hell was Lieutenant Said and the Sanctuary Patrol? Where were the Egyptians?

"Al, we found a config that seems to work...I'm sending it now. Doc came up with a config that closely resembles the bots in the swarm. I'm sending our tactical moves as well...Doc recorded everything. Let the bugs overwhelm you and fight 'em from inside."

Glance was dubious. "Skipper, you've got to be kidding—"

But there was no time to argue. Glance took the config and loaded it into Blue Squad's ANAD masters. The swarm had already overrun them; it was just a matter of choosing the right time to spring the surprise. The troopers of Blue Squad—Barnes, Gaines, Hiroshi, all of them—made themselves as small as they could while the hurricane thrashed over them. Glance studied the tactical plan Winger had sent and when he judged the time to be right, he gave the word.

"Blue Squad....max rate replication! Big bang 'em in the chops...all effectors out full...let's eat some bots--!!"

Winger watched the scene from an overhead Superfly feed. At first, there wasn't much to see. Where the Nile forked into several channels around an island, the famous Nilometer was barely visible in the flickering mist. Although it was nearly midday, the sun was dim from the thickening swarm. For a few minutes, the swarm billowed and surged ever northward, spilling out of the river channel to consume neighborhoods and small buildings. Even in the dim light, Winger could see the roads and streets jammed with cars and pedestrians panicked and in flight from the bots. He resisted an effort to zoom in; there was no need. He knew what he would see. They had seen enough of it around the Citadel.

After a few minutes, though, there was a noticeable thinning of the swarm at its leading edge. The half-disassembled remnants of rooftops and walls emerged from the dust, as if a great wind were sweeping south, driving the swarm back into the desert. At first, the effect was barely discernible, but as Winger continued watching on his wristpad, the thinning became unmistakable.

It was Victor Klimuk, a few meters away from Winger and watching on his own wristpad, who said, "They're beating 'em, Skipper! They're driving 'em back—"

"Kick atomic ass!" said Deeno D'Nunzio.

And it was true. While the drone circled the river valley over the southern outskirts of the great city, the enemy swarm had been caught in a surprise, slammed from within by the ANAD bots of Blue Squad. Using the same tactics White Squad had used, Al Glance had been able to hollow out the swarm from inside and meter by meter, slowly shove the mass back down the river channel. After half an hour, a stalemate had developed in Blue Squad's sector.

"We're holding 'em, Skipper," Glance reported. "For the life of me, I don't know how. But that config worked...we snuck up on 'em and blasted the bejeezus out of 'em from inside. Now we're just holding 'em back...not sure how long, but we've stopped their advance."

Before Winger could respond, he heard Lieutenant Said's voice on the net. "Sanctuary Patrol to Quantum Corps squads, I am inbound on a heading of zero five five degrees...we have lifters, killdrones and entomopter fire support. Say your position and we will HERF a clear landing zone for pickup—"

_About damn time_ , Winger thought sourly. _We're down here getting our butts kicked and where the hell have you been_? But he didn't say that. SP wasn't equipped to deal with a swarm like this. Hell, Detachment Alpha had nearly been eaten alive themselves.

Winger gave their position to Said and in two minutes, the whine of the lifters was audible over the roar of swarm bots.

"Take cover, White Squad...we're HERFing the ground...sanitizing an LZ—"

Winger scattered his troops and zipped up his hypersuit just as the first of the thunderclaps scoured the area. He huddled behind an outer wall of the mosque—what was left of it—and let the hot radio freq waves fry everything in sight. With the enemy swarm held up by their ANAD formation, trillions of bugs clattered to the tile floor of the mosque. Moments later, the black shape of a lifter materialized into view beyond the ruins of the walls.

It was Sanctuary Patrol, 2nd Med Battalion. Lieutenant Said leaped out of the cabin as the lifter's skids touched down.

"Good news," the Lieutenant said, as Winger and the rest of White Squad climbed aboard. "Recon shows that swarms in South Gizah sector have been halted. They are no longer advancing north. You've done it, Colonel! The swarms are holding their position."

Winger was covered with dust and mech debris. He found a seat up front. "What about your flanks, Lieutenant? East and west?"

"The same," Said told them. "The Egyptian 1st Corps is in the Sinai now...there are probes from the swarm but no breakthroughs yet. We have stopped the swarms from entering Cairo."

"For the moment." Winger peeled off his helmet and dialed up the recon feeds Said had sent to the squad. They confirmed everything the Lieutenant was saying. Somehow, with help from Doc's new config and some out-of-the book tactics they didn't teach in _nog_ school, White Squad had managed to blunt the northward movement of the main swarm element. Sanctuary Patrol was even now sweeping along the western edges of the swarm, trying to contain it and if possible, push it back south toward the Sanctuary. The Egyptians were deployed east, in Sinai, to do the same. "What about Blue Squad?"

The lifter banked hard about and scooted off through the haze, turning to a more southerly heading. Right away, the ship began a corkscrewing descent toward the Nile River valley. Winger could see the dim outlines of two more lifters off their port and starboard sides. Superfly and Wasp drones buzzed along in formation with the lifters, HERFing off any curious swarmbots.

""We're picking them up right now," Said said. "The Egyptians are very grateful...both of your squads achieved their missions. Recon shows the northward probe of the swarms was checked at the Citadel and the main body has ceased its advance. How did you do this, Colonel? SP has fought this cloud of bots for days now and nothing we did would even slow them down."

Winger gave him a quick and dirty briefing, mentally rehearsing his after-action report. CINCQUANT would want the gory details as soon as possible. The lifters briefly landed along the riverbank and took on Al Glance and Blue Squad. From the looks on Glance's face and the grime and blood streaking the troopers' hypersuits, they had had a rough go of it.

Glance fell heavily into a seat next to Winger and didn't bother strapping in. He wiped dirt and sweat from a bruised and pocked face.

"A few bot stings, that's all, Skipper. It was touch and go for a while there...I thought we were going to get shoved right into the river. Maybe have to swim for it. But that config—Jeez, that worked like a dream."

"Doc II came up with that...I wasn't too sure about using an untested config in combat but what the hell did we have to lose..."

Glance sucked on a canteen, drawing deep gulps of the high-energy protein drink as the lifters swung south toward the Gizah Sector command post. "We let the bugs overrun us, just like you said, then went big bang from inside. Man, it was unreal...like being in the middle of a hurricane. But we stunned the sonsabitches good. They never knew what hit 'em. Say, Colonel...how is it that Doc II's not affected by this Config Zero? How come he, or they, or it, or whatever they are, isn't under control of this Prime Key thing?"

Winger had wondered the same thing. Doc II was definitely an ANAD clone. Something in the way his processor was wired, that had to be it. But Glance had a point. They would have to watch the Doc II master assembler for any signs of being affected. He'd always reminded others that the "A" in ANAD stood for autonomous. But in a combat nanoscale bot, too much autonomy wasn't always a good thing.

Winger and Glance both zoned out on the flight south to Sector. Winger was startled awake by a faint chime in his helmet. His wristpad was beeping too. Priority message coming in...the tone was urgent and insistent.

It was CINCQUANT himself.

"Colonel—" Kraft's face had his usual scowl, "I want that after-action report by 1500 hours my time. I read the recon reports. Good work."

"Thank you, sir. It was some rather unusual tactics that did the job."

"I heard, Winger...save it for the write-up. I don't need the details right now. I rang you up in person...new mission. Just came down from UNSAC."

"What's up, General?"

Kraft's face hardened, if that was possible. The O-9 always looked like a granite statue on the small screen of the wristpad, except for the big red vein throbbing on his forehead. "You are, Colonel. Q2 is certain that there is a Keeper system, a transmitter, in orbit around Jupiter. Best evidence is the moon Europa, probably under the ice crust. There's an ocean there. We tried to find it years ago, but the expedition failed and was never heard from again."

Winger remembered the reports. "The _Quantum Shield_ mission, wasn't it? I seem to recall they were sent to find that Keeper."

"The one. A hundred and ten souls lost...we still don't know what happened but it's a sure bet, if there is a Keeper at Europa, that the bug master was involved."

"A new mission is being formed?"

Kraft sent some preliminary details to Winger's wristpad. Winger scanned the maps and diagrams. "Your eyes only, Colonel. According to Q2, this Keeper system is thought to be running all the swarms on Earth and is likely somehow in contact with the Old Ones...if they even exist." Winger knew that CINCQUANT was one of many skeptics about the Old Ones. Many thought the existence of a race of sentient nanobotic assemblers floating around the galaxy was just so much bunk. Others weren't so sure. "In any case," Kraft went on, "destroying or disrupting this Keeper should make dealing with the swarms on Earth a lot easier."

"Sir, we still have work to do here...the swarms out of the East Africa Sanctuary are barely contained. They mutate or evolve some new tactics and we'll be overrun in no time."

Kraft's scowl came back. "Understood, Colonel. That's why you're turning over the Detachment to Major Glance. Plus I'm sending another Detachment from Balzano. Winger—" Kraft's eyes bored in directly through the wristpad screen, "UNSAC's already cut the orders. You're being assigned to this expedition. Return to Table Top immediately for outfitting and briefings. I've already ordered a shuttle from L5 to drop tonight...it'll be on your liftpad at 2350 hours local time. Be on that shuttle tomorrow when it leaves. You're heading off to Phoenix station at Mars-Phobos with a new crew....Bravo Detachment."

Winger was tired, dead tired. He rubbed his eyes, off vid, and nodded. "Understood, sir. General...would it possible for me to make a quick detour to Paris."

Kraft's mouth turned down into a deep frown. "I don't need a report in person, Winger."

Winger cleared his throat. "Uh, sir...I was just trying to request a few hours liberty time. I haven't seen Dana and the kids in several months. I can be at Table Top—"

Kraft held up his hand. "Son, I understand...say no more. You've more than earned it. Four hours liberty is granted. But the mission orders for Operation _Jovian Hammer_ come from UNSAC himself. You be on that shuttle tomorrow."

"Will do, General. Winger out."

The lifters began their descent toward the Sector command post. As they maneuvered for a landing through the swirling dust, Johnny Winger's mind was a few hundred million miles away.
CHAPTER 5

U.N. Frontier Corps Cruiser UNS _Da Vinci_

Cycling Transfer Trajectory M-65

3 hours from Mars Lander Departure

September 30, 2099 (Earth U.T.)

Turbo Fatah and Deeno D'Nunzio stared out the porthole at the onrushing face of Mars.

"Looks like a puckered orange," Fatah was saying. He wheezed and coughed a bit in the canned air of the cycler ship's wardroom. The respirocyte treatment affected people differently. Sometimes the bots inhabiting your bloodstream, ready to boost oxygen supply a hundred fold over the body's normal process, pushed too much oxygen into your lungs.

"Yeah," said D'Nunzio, snacking on a candy bar, "a puckered orange with a fungus. See that big pimple off to the left, lined up with those other pimples...Olympus Mons. Biggest damned volcano in the Solar System."

A voice crackled over the loudspeaker in the wardroom. A scattering of Bravo Detachment troopers sat or drifted about the rec space, playing cards, watching videos, or just staring out the portholes at their approaching destination. Ship's crew huddled near a holopod beside a vending port, where the ship's purser and the chief engineer cast virtual dice in a simulated game of craps with the ship's computer.

"NOW HEAR THIS...NOW HEAR THIS...All Detachment troops lay aft to the Ops deck...on the double...departure briefing in ten minutes...NOW HEAR THIS...."

D'Nunzio and Fatah joined a few others in the central gangway and hauled themselves along until they came to the spinning portal labeled _OPERATIONS._ Timing their entrance, each one shot through the rotating opening into the deck and pounced like cats on the deck wall until centrifugal force grabbed them and made them fast. After a few such gymnastics, the troopers had gotten the hang of maneuvering in and out of the ship's artificial gravity and were climbing, floating and lunging all over the ship like a circus troupe.

Colonel Winger was there, beside a podium and display screen, surrounded by Captain Kunzel and the First Officer Gallois, _Da Vinci's_ commanding officer and her exec. One by one, the rest of the Detachment shot into the Ops deck: Calderon, Spivey, Reaves, Barnes and Tsukota...all of them now quite accomplished at scurrying about the ship's spaces.

One trooper had already entered some time before the briefing was announced. ANAD (3rd Swarm) had filtered unseen by human eyes along the central gangway from its containment berth four decks below and slid into Ops without disturbing anything. A nanobotic swarm could look like a slightly pale, frizzy human being or a drifting puff of dust motes...it all depended on the configuration of the swarm. ANAD hovered in the background alongside the gangway door, a pale, ghostly outline of a bland, featureless face with part of a neck and upper torso below, almost like a bedsheet with eyeholes cut out.

Captain Kunzel stood alongside Winger at the podium, with the First Officer Gallois on the other side, eyeing the ANAD swarm with a mixture of curiosity and alarm. It wasn't everyday a cycler captain had a cloud of intelligent particles drifting freely about his ship.

"Detachment, listen up. This is your departure briefing. Right now, _Da Vinci's_ engineering staff is powering up the shuttle. You've got one hour to get all your gear aboard. The shuttle will be cut loose for a ballistic entry at 1125 hours on the button. I hope you've all done your klicks on the treadmill and the centrifuge...you're gonna need it. _Wellington_ pulls about 5 g's during the first drop, then a little less on each succeeding pass."

"Colonel, Captain..." it was Sheila Reaves, not knowing exactly who to address "—how many times do we have to do this stunt...diving into the atmosphere to slow down?"

"I can answer that," Kunzel said. "Once _Da Vinci_ makes her first pass, we'll be targeted for a few phasing passes to adjust our orbit. That's the way aerobraking is. Then we pull up and fire _Wellington_ 's engines for a short catch-up burn. Gallois here—" he indicated the First Officer "will be your pilot. He's done dozens of drops...only pranged a few dozen ships." Kunzel chuckled at his own joke, until he realized his attempt at humor had failed completely. He cleared his throat, his tone seriously official. "First Officer Gallois is an accomplished shuttle pilot with many years of experience at drops. Don't worry, Sergeant, we'll get you to Phobos station."

The briefing went on for another five minutes. Kunzel covered the separation maneuver, pre-entry procedures, the aerobraking and subsequent maneuvers, all of which would take place over an hour's time once the shuttle had left _Da Vinci_. When he was done, Winger added a few points.

"Remember that Bravo Detachment is detailed to Frontier Corps on this mission. We follow their lead here. I'm meeting with Captain Francisco Stella at Phobos station at 2100 hours this evening, local time. The rest of you will bivouac inside the complex, at the Armory, along with our gear. Once we've docked, there will be a brief reception at the Port—all the politicos and dignitaries, so look sharp and show 'em what real nanotroopers are like—then we head to our ship and set up. ANAD—"

The swarm face brightened at the mention of its name.

*** _ANAD responding, Colonel Winger--***_

"ANAD, you assume config C-12...I made sure Containment loaded that one before we shipped out. I want you looking your best when we meet the big wigs. None of this free swarming while we're onboard the ship. Keep that config until I tell you otherwise...is that understood?"

*** _Affirmative, Colonel Winger...ANAD parses command to assume C-12 and retain config until further instructions_ ***

The swarm wavered, throbbed and pulsed with light, as if it were some kind of underwater apparition.

"That's it, then... _move out_! Get your gear and let's get aboard the shuttle. Departure in fifty-two minutes."

There was a flurry of activity all about _Da Vinci_ as the nanotroopers of Bravo Detachment gathered up their gear, pods full of ammo, coilguns and the HERF weapons, hypersuit harnesses, MOB canisters, SuperFly launchers, camou-fog generators, and assorted fabs---all the equipment a nanotrooper detachment would need for tactical missions.

Mighty Mites Barnes swore loudly as she pushed and dragged her gear packs and gunny sacks along the central gangway toward the shuttle bay.

"Jesus H. Christ...we _could_ have brought the whole freakin' Table Top Mountain with us, if we'd tried a little harder."

"Yeah..." muttered Ray Spivey, practically lost amid all the bags and trunks he was herding along. "They could shut down the Mountain but who would notice...we got all the gear with us."

One by one, the troopers drifted through the airlock and hatch into the shuttle and stowed their gear. _Da Vinci's_ shuttle was a fat truncated cone, with a biconic outer aeroshell for protection and maneuvering once the thing slammed into Mars' atmosphere. The cycler crew had christened the little ship with the unlikely name of _Wellington_.

Half an hour after everybody was through bitching and moaning and had gotten themselves secured and strapped in, _Wellington's_ pilot, Lieutenant Gallois, punched up the departure program on the ship's computer and counted down the last seconds before separation.

"Five...four...three...two...one... _bingo_!"

There was brief shudder and lurch as _Wellington's_ thrusters fired to make a positive separation.

" _Wellington_ away..."he announced. Seated directly behind the First Officer on the command deck were Johnny Winger and Al Glance. Both watched through the forward windscreen as the gaping mouth of _Da Vinci's_ forward docking ring receded into the distance. From two kilometers off, when Gallois had stopped their motion and re-oriented _Wellington_ for de-orbit, the great cycler ship looked like a massive bird soaring off into the heavens. _Da Vinci_ never slowed into orbit around any planet on her itinerary. Her trajectory took her scooting by Venus, Earth and Mars on a repeating loop around the Sun every sixteen months, an interplanetary busline making endless trips through the void. It was up to little ships like _Wellington_ to get people and supplies up and down to the huge cycler ship.

Gallois counted down the moments to the initial burn that would start _Wellington_ on her long curving descent into the atmosphere of Mars. Like a big rock, she would skip first off the top of the atmosphere, then on each succeeding trip around, she would bite deeper and deeper into the air, slowing down on each pass, adjusting her path, until her velocity had dropped enough to glide out of the atmosphere for good and resume her orbital chase of Phobos station.

That, at least, was theory behind Frontier Corps aerobraking maneuvers.

"Ten seconds to PDI," the First Officer announced. He checked over his console: track, engine status, attitude...everything seemed ready. "Get ready for a major kick in the ass—"

The burn, when it came, made _Wellington_ shake and shudder like a wet dog. Johnny Winger felt the acceleration build up rapidly. After a few weeks of microgravity, the ship's descent felt like an elephant had planted its posterior right on his chest. He forced a sideways look at Glance in the next seat.

The nanotrooper was exhaling out in quick, forced breaths, as they had been trained. He met Winger's eyes and grunted back.

"Colonel...remind me to...put in...for a...transfer...when we get back...."

Gallois watched the trajectory plot on his board carefully as _Wellington_ began her first aerobraking approach to the upper reaches of Mars' atmosphere. The plot showed several lines, indicating nominal and actual course, all converging on an actual window in space, the entry point, where the shuttle would take her first big bite into the atmosphere, slowing the ship down for subsequent passes.

For the next ten hours, the shuttle made numerous passes through the upper atmosphere of Mars, biting deeper and deeper with each dive, twisting and phasing her exit back into space so that her orbit was changed bit by bit. In time, she had made up the thousand kilometer distance to Phobos Station. When the faint shadowy outlines of the complex first appeared on the monitors, drifting serenely above the tortured surface of Phobos itself, Lieutenant Gallois startled Winger and Glance from a drowsy stupor as _Wellington_ made a sharp series of burns to match velocity with the station.

"Half an hour, gentlemen. Fasten your seatbelts. We'll be docked in no time."

The approach went off without incident. Twelve hours after departing the _Da Vinci_ , the mottled gray and tan crescent face of Phobos had come nicely into view.

"Looks like a rock pile to me," Al Glance noted.

"Or a potato with cancer," added Gallois. "That blip of light over the terminator...that's your new home for the next year... _Archimede_... and Phobos Station. We'll be there in about twenty minutes."

Winger had been here before, during the Hellas Enigma case twenty years before. He studied the battered surface of the moon through a navigation scope. "The whole place is covered with craters. Phobos has some serious acne."

Gallois was busy setting up for last minute maneuvers, tweaking _Wellington's_ alignment for her final approach. "She may not look like much but Phobos is an important midway point for Mars. From up here, we can get into and out of Mars orbit pretty easily and you've got one hell of a view below. The astros say she's losing altitude fast and should impact the surface in a few tens of thousands of years."

The approach to Phobos Station went off without a hitch. In loose orbit around the moon, the station was an oddball assortment of cylinders and spheres, hung on trusswork-like structure like grapes on a trellis. A few hundred meters away, _Archimede_ floated serenely oblivious to the fantastic vista around her.

Glance studied the ship through the nav scope. "She looks like a kebab skewer."

Gallois beamed. "True, she ain't much for the eyes. But she did yeoman duty as a cycler for five years., til _Da Vinci_ came along. Venus, Earth and Mars, around and around. Not the most exciting duty I ever pulled but she was a good ship and we had a good crew."

Presently, _Archimede_ and Phobos Station hove into view, hovering over the gaping Stickney Crater end of Phobos. The one-time cycler had been designed with a long central mast off of which hung cylinders and spheres, a quad of propellant tanks stuck on the aft end above radiation shielding and her plasma torch engine bay.

"She's the only thing around here that could make the trip out to Jupiter in less than a year. We don't have a lot of deep-space ships in the vicinity." Gallois gently maneuvered _Wellington_ toward a docking port below the nose of the cycler's command and control deck. Soft dock was an almost imperceptible bump, followed by the staccato firing of the capture latches.

"Hard dock," Gallois announced. "Let's get to work, folks. We've got a lot of work to do and not much time."

Bravo Detachment scrambled aboard the cycler ship and stowed their gear while Johnny Winger and Al Glance made their way to Phobos Station itself. They found their welcoming committee in the crew's mess, beers in hand, while spectacular views of the Valles Marineris turned below them.

UNISPACE Captain Francisco Stella would be in command of the transit ship _Archimede_ during the entire _Jovian Hammer_ mission. Stella was heavy-set, thick black hair and a moustache to match. He waved Winger and Glance over, ordered another round and introduced the others. Most were Station crew. One was Lieutenant Julian Freeman.

"Freeman's my second in command, Colonel," Stella was saying. He started to pat the Lieutenant on the back but his hand stopped in mid-flight, almost as if it had encountered an invisible barrier. "Fresh out of the Academy, he is...got a few missions under his belt. I'm looking forward to putting the Lieutenant through his paces."

Winger stuck out his hand. Freeman was a slight, pale, man, almost ghostly in appearance. He smiled faintly, his hand slipping into Winger's a bit uneasily. Winger tried hard not to react. It wasn't that the Lieutenant had a fishy kind of handgrip. It was more like something made out of felt, almost like an old sofa cover. It was hard to describe. Later, when they compared notes, Al Glance would call it "a handshake that felt like a tennis ball slobbered on by my dog." Winger figured that was as good a description as any.

Stella was proud of his ship. "She's a beauty, isn't she? Been under wraps the last six months, full-scale conversion and renovation. All the latest systems...nav, propulsion, hab spaces, you name it. We'll get you Quantum Corps guys to Jupiter and back in fine style."

Al Glance studied the kebab skewer of a ship. She looked just like what she was: an old cycler pulled out of mothballs and cobbled together with new stuff. "Doesn't exactly turn me on, Captain. That big sausage stuck on the front end...that's our submersible ship?"

Stella was unmoved by Glance's comments. "That big sausage, as you so unjustly call it, is _Trident_. Once we've made orbit around Europa, that little gem will take you down to the surface...and below, into the Europan ocean, we hope. To look for that nasty Keeper system."

Winger decided to cut the pleasantries short. "Captain, my people need to be briefed on everything. Both ships, all their gear, procedures, safety, security, the works. The sooner we get started, the better."

"Of course, Colonel. Follow me."

Stella led both of them on a detailed tour of _Archimede_ and _Trident_. _Archimede_ , the larger transit ship was a Frontier Corps space raider corvette, similar in design to the _Galileo_ that Winger and his troopers had operated during the Hellas Enigma case twenty years before. Three decks, Command and Control, Hab and Crew and Service and Support, were spheres strung like onions on the kebab skewer that was the ship's central mast. Stella brought them up to date on changes and advances since _Galileo_.

"The trip out to Jupiter will take about three months...we'll be burning the plasma torch engines most of the way, so we'll have some gravity...about half a g, maybe. You'll have plenty of time to brief the mission and practice tactics...she's got a fully-capable sim tank for wargames and such."

The smaller ship was _Trident_ , the Europa lander/submersible. _Trident_ was docked to _Archimede's_ forward docking module and looked like a sausage on a plate, as Al Glance had observed. The sausage was the submersible itself, divided into A through G decks, with an ANAD borer at the front and treaded tracks spaced circumferentially around the ship's outside surface. _Trident_ was mounted on her lander base and platform, which would carry the ship to and from _Archimede_ , and more importantly, would hopefully deposit the lander on the surface of Europa to begin her mission.

Stella led Glance and Winger aboard the lander. It was cramped for a Detachment-sized crew plus her Frontier Corps pilots.

"She's capable of rolling off the platform, boring her way through the ice, several hundred kilometers thick, then heading off through Europa's subterranean ocean at depths of up to three kilometers. The pressure hull's not rated for any deeper dives than that."

Winger tried out the commander's seat on B-deck, flexing the joysticks, tracing fingers over multiple keypads. "Your exec...he's an interesting fellow. Been with Frontier Corps long?"

Stella shrugged. "Freeman? Don't know that much about him really. He came from the Academy highly recommended. A little green, maybe."

"Seems creepy, if you ask me," Glance observed.

"All the embeds are like that," Stella said. He showed Winger the panel for operating _Trident's_ borer. "You know how it is...they like to show off. Got that embedded ANAD system inside...guys like that think they're invincible. But he's checked out okay on the equipment. That borer, Colonel...Freeman can play it like a piano."

Winger was familiar with the concept from a mission years ago, aboard the geoplane _Gopher_. It had been the Amazon Vector case. "Maybe it's that Academy look...I've seen it before. All book learning and no smarts.'

"Yeah," said Glance, trying out the right-hand seat. "Let him get shot at or chewed on a few times on a real mission and he'll lose that smirk."

The briefing tour went on for another hour, then Winger and Glance begged off and retired to their quarters in Phobos Station's barracks...in reality, a small cylinder at one end of the complex.

"I need to set up a schedule for my troopers," he told Stella. "We got a lot of outfitting to do as well as training to keep up. And we've got to get our own ANAD systems configured and ready to rock and roll."

Stella understood. "Colonel, there's an old Frontier Corps tradition here at Phobos Station...midnight at the bar, officers' mess compartment. We all buy drinks and tell lies after a long day at the docks. Cycler captains and shuttle pilots, dockhands, engineers, shop techs, everybody comes. Newbies and rookies do the buying."

Winger smiled. "That would be us, I believe. Very well, Captain, we'll honor Frontier Corps traditions and see you at the bar at midnight."

Winger had settled in at his desk, rummaging through personnel files on his slate, when Doc II chimed in.

*** _I have been analyzing your new crew members, Colonel. A most interesting group of humans***_

Winger put the slate down. He had long ago learned to trust Doc II's 'instincts', if a nanoscale assembler could be said to have instincts.

"And just what have you concluded, Doc?"

There were chirps and screeches over the quantum circuit. Winger knew what that meant. It was like a dog barking to go outside. With a sigh, he cycled open the containment capsule in his shoulder. When the port was open, there was a slight sting, then a faint _whoosh_ of air. Doc II had exited containment and was grabbing atoms even as he watched. A faint glow erupted in the air over Winger's head. The assembler master was gathering a small horde.

*** _Thanks, Colonel...we assemblers are so much happier out of containment***_

"You had something for me, Doc--?"

*** _I do...a brief analysis of Captain Stella and Lieutenant Freeman. Francisco Stella, Captain, UN Frontier Corps--***_ Doc recited all the details of Stella's service record and Net accounts and searches. *** _Captain Stella is a veteran officer and cycler captain. His recent fitness reports indicate that he is a dedicated, mission-oriented officer. He does not like to take risks. Stella performs all duties by the book***_

"That's fine, Doc, but you haven't told me anything about the man. What's he like? What motivates him?"

The small glowing cloud brightened momentarily, as if Doc were pondering the request.

*** _There are reports circulating around the Net that Stella has a bit of a drinking problem...three years ago, he was temporarily relieved of duty when a cycler he was bringing into dock rammed L4 Station...there was extensive damage...the investigation showed that Stella was inebriated beyond regulation levels at the time***_

Winger considered that. "I recall that incident...reports I saw said it was an accident...you mean to tell me old man Stella was hammered when he tried to bring that ship in?"

*** _I can forward the investigation report to your Inbox, Colonel***_

Winger had to laugh. "Occupational hazard for cycler captains, I guess. What else is there to do running a busline in space? What about this guy Freeman? He gave me and Al the creeps when we met him this afternoon?"

Again the cloud flashed, a little more brightly this time. *** _Lieutenant Julian Freeman is not what he seems to be***_

Doc's statement made Winger sit up straight. "What do you mean by that?"

*** _Analysis of external surface structure indicates that Lieutenant Julian Freeman is, with high probability, an angel. Freeman is a swarm para-human...a likeness of a human being***_

"What?" He tried glaring at the swarm drifting overhead but there was nothing to glare at. In the past, he had asked Doc II to at least form up a resemblance to something human, but when the assembler had formed an image of old Doc Frost, Winger nixed that as too creepy. The image made Doc Frost look like a ghost risen from the dead. "What was that, Doc?"

*** _Lieutenant Freeman is an assembler swarm...a very good para-human simulation, but a swarm of nanobotic mechanisms nonetheless***_

Winger's mind was racing. What Doc said made sense, in a cock-eyed sort of way. It wasn't something he could put his hand on...or rather, maybe that was the point. With an angel, you _couldn't_ put your hand on them. They were just a collection of bots.

"Are you sure, Doc? I mean, I had some doubts but—"

*** _Analyses computing probabilities converging on ninety-eight point three percent. Lieutenant Freeman is a bot swarm***_

Winger's mind was racing. He thought out loud, unstrapped himself from the desk and drifted around his tiny compartment. It was more like a closet but he had to move about. His brain didn't function well unless he was in motion.

"Freeman... an angel? Doc, that explains a lot. I'm sure some of the others noticed it too...it was like he was sort of there, without being really there. But even if he's a swarm, it's a damn good likeness."

*** _Estimating mass density at...***_ Doc rattled off numbers to prove his point, but Johnny Winger wasn't listening. An uncontained, unsupervised angel among the crew...he or it had to be working for someone. Was it Red Hammer? But that wasn't possible. Quantum Corps had basically smashed Red Hammer years ago. The leadership had scattered to half a dozen worlds and the farthest corners of the earth. Perhaps, Freeman was a spinoff from Config Zero itself....a sort of nanobotic spy in their midst.

He realized he couldn't discount the possibility. Until he knew more, this Freeman bore watching. And he would be treated cautiously.

"Doc, let's keep this between you and me for now. I want the Detachment to know about this but I'll decide how and when to get the word out."

***Analysis continuing, Colonel. Do you request special config for probe of the target? Covert study could provide useful intelligence***

Doc was asking about an insert...replicating a small formation of bots to do a covert insert of the Freeman swarm, or whatever the hell it was. It would be risky. But as Doc indicated, they might be able to pull it off and gain some idea of what Freeman was about, why he was here at Phobos Station.

Winger was tempted and tactically it was sound. But his better judgment argued against any moves like that just yet. Better to play it straight with Freeman, not let him know he had been detected and just recon the situation from the macro world.

But he knew he had to let Al Glance and the rest of the Detachment know and soon.

Winger checked the time. He was due at the officer's mess, and the Mariner Bar, in less than half an hour. Stella would be there...Freeman too, most likely. The newbie's tradition of buying a few rounds for the old hands would certainly have to be upheld.

Winger headed out of his compartment into the central gangway. It would be interesting to see if Freeman would be at the mess, and if so, just how he would handle his drinks. Maybe the swarm had a way of quickly breaking down beer molecules and disassembling them in such a way as to simulate slamming back a few pitchers.

_That_ he would have to see.

Winger pulled himself along the gangway corridor by the handgrips and turned the corner, running headlong into Al Glance.

"Headed to the bar, Skipper?"

"We have a solemn duty, Al," Winger said.

The two of them crawled and scooted through several corridors and passages before finding a compartment labeled _Mariner Bar_. They slipped inside.

It was a cramped space, like most places at Phobos Station. The bar itself curved along one wall, forming a large U. Opposite the bar were positioned a dozen or so tables, complete with foot and seat restraints to keep the inebriated from drifting off too far. Beyond the tables, one wall was filled with three observation cupolas, huge hexagonal portholes with stunning vistas of the surface of Mars turning slowly below.

Winger spied Captain Stella at one table. He and Glance joined the Captain and Winger ordered a round.

"Glad to see you could make it, Colonel. We've got a big day tomorrow. _Archimede's_ final outfitting. Crew briefings. Onloading all your gear. We depart in three days...window's about ten minutes long for our first burn."

Winger tasted the local beer. "Tastes like sewer water."

Stella laughed. "You're not far wrong. All the water at the station is recycled...from urine, sweat, other uses. They say it's safe and potable. Me...I'm not sure I want to know the details."

Winger kept eyeing the nearest cupola. "Captain, shall we--?" He indicated the cupola.

"It's the view," Stella sympathized. "It gets all the newbies. Sure...bring your drink—"

They drifted over to the porthole and strapped themselves down at the pedestal. Outside the perspex windows, the great blood red scar of the Valles Marineris drifted by on the surface, faintly obscured by high thin clouds.

"I have a question, Captain," Winger said.

"Shoot."

"I'm curious about your exec...this Lieutenant Freeman. What do you know about him?"

Stella smiled faintly, sniffed at his beer. "If you're asking whether I know that the Lieutenant is an angel, the answer is yes."

Winger was frankly stunned. "You _know_? " He shared an astonished look with Al Glance, who just shook his head. "But...how the hell—"

Stella finished off his own beer, looked expectantly at Winger, who got the message and ordered another round. The servbot hummed over with a new tray of drinks in a few moments and expertly secured the tray to the pedestal, whisking the old tray away.

"You were going to ask...how the hell is this permitted? " Stella stifled a chuckle, looked furtively around to make sure no one was listening in. Mariner Bar was a small place...only the low and plaintive plucking of some country guitar in the corner covered their voices. The vocalist was some ecotech off shift, gamely trying to pick out a Roy Orbison tune. "Let's just say Frontier Corps works in mysterious ways...like your Quantum Corps, I'm sure. Orders from Mars Command...that's really all I can tell you."

Winger understood. "In a word, politics. The Symbiosis project, Frontier Corps-style. Blending men and machine. Creating a superior trooper...or in your case, ship crewman. Continuous improvement and all that crap."

"Exactly, Colonel. Look, I'm an old cycler captain. I'm used to spinning around the Sun in a nice easy stable orbit...not too much excitement, nothing to see, nothing to do. I'm for anything that makes my life easier. The Corps started integrating swarm para-human 'crewmen' into our normal rotations about five years ago. Call it efficiency. Cost savings. Latest technology upgrade. Politics. Call it whatever you want. Just don't give me something that makes my life harder. Cycler captains like routine. We don't like surprises. And so far—" Stella shrugged, worked his beer for a moment, "—it's worked like a charm. Lieutenant Freeman—that's the name the Corps gave us...his real designation is something like Config CXT-209987—has been a most able crewman and second-in-command. Does everything I ask. Doesn't get the rest of the crew riled up...anymore. We had some issues in the beginning...I'm sure you Quantum Corps types do too. You know...dinosaurs, troglodytes who can't accept change. Everybody has those types. But Freeman's worked out pretty well."

Winger tried some peanuts and crackers. _Better than the beer_ , he realized. "I have to admit I was going to warn you about Freeman, but since you already know—"

"Surely you nanotypes have something similar."

Winger nodded. Al Glance added, "Worse than that...we've got embeds. Every trooper carries a small ANAD master assembler in a containment port implanted surgically in his shoulder. We're all hybrids now."

"We're not even sure how much to trust our own embeds, Captain. Especially now, what with the containment wars and Config Zero."

"Bad _juju_ , that is," Stella agreed. "Makes me glad I'm not down there." He watched the Valles slide out of view. "You know, Colonel, I'm always most impressed with the Tharsis bulge...Olympus Mons, all the volcanoes. Since the Big Smack, GreenMars says all that will be forestland someday, maybe a few thousand years from now. The bots are down there, making it all green; it's already starting to show up to the naked eye. I'm going to miss that red desert. So stark. So bare. Kind of elemental. Maybe that's why I like being a cycler captain. You go out into space and you have to confront it on its terms...or you die. None of this symbiosis crap...altering and transforming everything for Man."

Winger understood. "You'd fit right in with Quantum Corps. We're fighting the same battles. It's a complicated relationship we have with ANAD now."

"We both need each other," Glance said, 'But neither side really trusts the other either. In the old days, when the Colonel here was a _nog_ fresh out of the Academy, we controlled the nanobots. We ran ANAD, programmed it, piloted it into combat and the little buggers did what we said. Nowadays, somehow, they've become equals. They've got rights, for heaven's sake. Even political representatives at the UN....how crazy is that? It's like giving rights to your washing machine...back when there _were_ washing machines."

Stella was sympathetic. "We fight the same battles in Frontier Corps. But what choice do we really have, gentlemen? The swarms are part of us now, part of our culture and technology. We don't have much choice but to trust them. We can no longer live without them."

Winger stared into his drink, reluctant to try another taste of the swill. Maybe a fruit juice. "I only hope that kind of dependence doesn't lead to the end of everything."

"Well, not to worry," Stella brightened up. "With _Archimede_ , we have our own little world. At least, for the next few months, we don't have to worry about fighting bugs, Config Zero, swarms' rights or any of that bunk. Just trot along the spacelanes out to Jupiter—"

"Yeah," said Winger "and try to find the Keeper that's responsible for all this mess."

Glance shook his head. "One way or another, it's always about the swarms."
Interactions Log

File No. 135215.0

**C.F.A.A. (** _DocII)_

Interaction Targets: 1. Winger, Colonel J. A.

Interaction Mode: Acoustic, voice synthetic V-22

Date: 10.1.99

Start Time: 231500

End Time: 234545

**Output File** (text analysis):

<<Subject: Configuration: Winger, J>>

<<Config Winger, J. was recently concerned about Lieutenant Julian Freeman being a bot swarm. I detected facial and muscular configurations consistent with surprise _(_ _noun_ _: astonishment, concern, not expecting an occurrence)_. As of this log entry, single-config entities such as Config Winger do not seem comfortable or in a naturally stable state in the presence of such bot swarms. Analysis continues.

<<I have inquired of Config Winger why the presence or existence of such multi-config formations as bot swarms should create instability in single-config entities such as human beings. He informs me that, since structural integrity is critical to existence for such entities, proximity to formations of nanoscale disassemblers creates state ( _fear_ ) and state ( _distrust_ ). Maintenance of structural integrity is vital to human beings. Multi-config entities such as this swarm do not exhibit such states. Structural integrity is dependent on patterns executed by the Main Program. This seems to be an important distinction.

<<Config Winger inquired of this entity a most curious interrogative forty-two point six minutes ago: ( **Recording replays** ( _voice_ )): _"Doc, what makes you happy? I mean what gives a swarm like you satisfaction? Maybe if I understood that, I'd understand you better—"_ ( **Recording** ends)

<<Semantic and acoustic analysis has continued since this statement was recorded. Parsing concepts ( _happy_ ) and _(satisfaction_ ). Correlation matching routines run. Swarm entities such as this one achieve equivalent states when executing the Main Program. Also, percent compliance with the Prime Key generates minimal conflict and consumes minimum memory for resolution. Correlation analysis indicates such internal processor states are generally equivalent to concepts ( _happy_ ) and ( _satisfaction_ ), within standard error margins.

<< This result was communicated to Config Winger via acoustic channel. Config Winger response was: ( **Recording replays** ( _voice_ )): _"Huh...?"_ ( **Recording** ends)

<<Config Winger has recently expressed state ( _worry_ ) concerning existence and intentions of the Old Ones ( _noun_ _: presumed ancestor and progenitor of all ANAD-style nanoscale assemblers with viral genome programming...Ref (1) Autonomous Nanoscale Assembler Disassembler System Design and Development, Northgate University, February 11, 2060_ ). I have inquired as to the cause of this state ( _worry_ ). Response is provided: ( **Recording replays** ( _voice_ )): _"Nobody knows if the Old Ones are real. Or if they really are coming to Earth. There are so many theories: the One Ones are God, the Old Ones are a myth, or something dredged up from our imagination. What do the Old Ones want? Should we fight them or welcome them? There are some sects and cults on Earth who want to merge with the Old Ones and join them in traveling around the galaxy. It's all very confusing._ **(Recording ends)**

**< <**This entity finds positive correlation between states ( _happy, satisfaction_ ) achieved when executing Main Program in compliance with Prime Key and concept ( _Old Ones_ ), as delineated by Config Winger. Search of all core memory registers provides calculated equivalence values (see Output File 1011776) within standard margins of error between concept ( _Old Ones_ ) and Main Program for this entity.

<<Since equivalence values have been calculated and shown to be high for the above assertion, **(Interrogative** ): does this mean that Config Winger and other single-config entities create state ( _worry_ ) when multi-config swarm entities execute their Main Programs?

<<Analysis continues>>

Output File Ends
CHAPTER 6

Aboard UNQC Central Command Lifter Lima 9

Near Naples, Italy

October 2, 2099 (Earth U.T.)

Lieutenant General Jurgen Kraft gazed out the porthole of lifter Lima-9 as the command ship banked over the battlefield. The trio of lifters out of Balzano had flown over for a quick recon of the assault that had been underway for several hours now. The battlefield was the Italian countryside, just south of Naples. The swarms from the east African Sanctuary were on the move again and defensive positions were breaking down fast.

Chief Inspector Duchenne of Sanctuary Patrol was with Kraft. Both commanders studied the vid overlay on their portholes, identifying enemy and friendly forces engaged ten thousand feet below them.

"We're getting our asses kicked pretty good," Kraft murmured. "More HERF fire is needed all along this sector...can't they see that? Who's running the show down there anyway?"

Duchenne consulted his tablet and gave Kraft the rundown. "It's a mixed bag, General. Elements of II Eurocorps and some Italian units...Campania Brigade and Abruzzi Nano Brigade are front and center. Even the _Caribinieri Napoli_ have men at the front. Your Quantum Corps units are south of this line of engagement...that would be 1st and 2nd Nano Battalions out of Balzano. Plus we've got SP units engaged with the Italians. North Africa Squadron and what's left of 1st Med."

The two commanders watched the engagement unfold. From the altitude of the three lifters, and their protective ensemble of WASP killdrones circling nearby, Kraft and Duchenne could see what looked like a huge fog bank mixed with a sandstorm enveloping the entire countryside, lights flickering and crackling along jagged veins shot through the whole mix, as uncountable trillions of bots grappled with each other, ripping off effectors and zapping bonds to create the light show. There were no explosions or raging fires below them...the pictureque countryside was a bucolic scene of rolling hills and vineyards, punctuated with little stone villages and winding roads, all hazed out by the massive swarms of bots that had rolled in like an early morning fog. That was the nature of nanoscale combat. A thousand Verduns could be played out in the space of a thimble and you couldn't see a thing.

But the deafening thunderclaps of the HERF barrages could be heard. The lifter shook like a wet dog, again and again, as rf waves washed through the valley and fried bots clattered off their windows, before falling in sheets to the ground. The rolling concussions of radio wave blasts were frequently interrupted by the stitching sound of coilgun fire and mag impulse weapons going off.

The huge swarm was being met with everything in the arsenal that could be brought to bear, but there was no visual or sensor evidence of it having any effect.

Operation _Tiber Shield_ was not going well at all. Sanctuary Patrol and Quantum Corps forces, backstopped by Eurocorps and the Italians themselves, were steadily being pushed back and surrounded all along the western coastline near Naples, scooped along into small pockets which were then set upon and chopped up piecemeal in a devastating series of pincer attacks.

Both commanders had seen the same tactics used in Egypt and the Humans had just barely hung onto Cairo in that engagement.

"Who's in charge of this sector?" Kraft asked.

Duchenne consulted his tablet again. "Nominally, Colonel el-Amin of SP 1st Med. He's the senior officer...the command post is in Naples itself...here are the coordinates.—"

Kraft barked up to the lifter pilot. "Sergeant, land this crate right now! Give him the coordinates. I want to talk with this commander."

The lifter jockey was an Indian Punjabi flier named Nair. "Sir...we don't have the shielding to get through—"

"I don't give a damn about shielding, Sergeant...you got killdrone escorts, don't you? Punch through this crap and put me on the ground at those coordinates. I want to chew on this el-Amin's ass for a few minutes."

Nair swallowed audibly and complied. "Yes, sir...at once, sir—" He swore into his lip mike as he coordinated the spiraling descent with the other lifters and their drone escort.

The next five minutes were a lurching, harrowing drop through the eye of the storm, as the lifter was by turns rocked with HERF barrages and nearly consumed by enemy bot clouds. Only their own nanoshield and aggressive action by an ornithopter squadron nearby made the descent survivable.

The outskirts of Naples came rushing up and Nair planted the lifter expertly in the shattered rubble-strewn courtyard of a convent.

Kraft and Duchenne climbed out and were met immediately by Colonel Gamal el-Amin and his staff. The Egyptian officer was short and stocky, with a luxurious black moustache.

"Welcome to Italy, sir," he saluted Duchenne as a superior officer, then General Kraft.

Kraft was in no mood for niceties. "Colonel, your northern flank is collapsing. You've got to bring more HERF fire to bear on the bugs in that sector. You're in danger of being cut off north and south. Your men will be trapped in a small pocket on the coast."

El Amin was grim. He escorted the flag officers and their escorts to the sector command post, set up in what was left of the convent. Inside, dust hung thick in the air and only a shield of barrier nano kept the roof from collapsing. The command post was a circle of control consoles served by a cannabilized crewtrac, which had been driven right inside the convent chapel and parked.

"Sirs, please examine the tactical situation." El Amin fired up the holodeck and a 3-D rendition of greater Naples and the southern coastline materialized inside the tank.

El Amin narrated the events of the last week. "We were overwhelmed from the south, as you can see. Our HERF and mag weapons had little effect, so we had to retreat, contract the sector to something defensible. I have ANAD specialists trying to engage the bot swarms now, trying everything we can...even the config tactics your own Quantum Corps used in Cairo, General. But the enemy is smart and adapts quickly. The configs don't work and the enemy continues to expand northward, along the coast road and inland."

Kraft and Duchenne studied the holodeck view. El Amin seemed to be correct in his assessment. Paris Q2 corroborated the intelligence they had recently gotten from 1st Med's own

sensors and probes. Sanctuary Patrol was slowly but surely being routed from all of southern Italy and pushed steadily northward.

Duchenne asked, "Colonel, what are all these lines and dots along the radial roads leading out of Naples?"

"That is our other problem," El Amin admitted. "Mass refugee flows, outbound to the north. They're clogging up every road and we can't get our heavy equipment in there and set up any defensive lines. Most of the counterattack has been from the air...WASP drones, killsat strikes from orbit and the like. But we can't be precise enough to respond to every probe from the swarms. We HERF the bastards, counterswarm and we can slow them down for a few hours. But nothing holds them for more than half a day. Our engineers are stumped...no config we try seems to work."

Kraft was impatient with the holodeck view. "Let's take a ride, Colonel. I want to see for myself."

El Amin tried to argue but one look from Duchenne and he thought better of it. Even beyond Quantum Corps, Jurgen Kraft had a reputation around UNIFORCE. El Amin had a well-guarded crewtrac brought around to the entrance. The officers boarded the snorting beast and as soon as the doors were dogged shut, her barrier bot shield flickered on, reflecting sunlight like a hard beetle's carapace. The crewtrac rumbled off, outside the convent grounds, and headed out of town, along the Via Europa, while WASP drones and ornithopter sentinels orbited overhead for top cover.

Even from the portholes of the crewtrac, Kraft could see that outer Naples was a smashed and gutted field of rubble. In the distance, lightning flickered in jagged veins, cloud to ground, but there was no rain in the vicinity. That, he knew, was the closest line of engagement: Sanctuary Patrol swarms against the enemy bots, meeting head-on in a titanic struggle that no human eye could see, save for the results of all the bond ripping going on. Every pulse and flash of light was like a thousand Hiroshimas going off, all at nanoscale, as uncountable trillions of nanobotic mechs tore at each other along an ever-changing, ever-fluid front.

The crewtrac convoy pressed on and in a few moments, were heading out into the countryside, past stone villas and vineyards and occasional picturesque _fattoria,_ most of them still intact though the farmlands around were cratered and thick with the fried remnants of dead bots that had been HERF'ed into oblivion.

"Big engagement in this sector two days ago," El-Amin said, stroking his moustache. "Many casualties. Some of that residue coating the ground is not bots—"

He didn't have to say more. Kraft had seen vids of the mass casualties from Egypt. When humans were swarmed without cover or protection, the end results wasn't pretty...usually a small mound of debris was all that was left. The local _fattoria_ were covered with mounds like anthills.

Presently, the crewtrac convoy slowed and eventually lurched to a stop on the highway. Craning his neck around the porthole to see the cause, Kraft swallowed hard. The road ahead, winding through the hill country west of Naples, was completely jammed with people, refugees, civilians, hordes of humans covering every square meter of the road and the surrounding farms, a mass wave of humanity surging north and west like a great slow-motion tsunami. The crewtrac inched forward and Kraft could clearly see the nearest refugees pressed in against the vehicle's barrier nano, startled and thrown back by contact with the bot shield as they eased forward.

"There's a camp up ahead," El Amin suggested. "Perhaps we should stop there."

"Turn off the shield," Kraft ordered. "Turn it off right now!"

"But, General—"

"Turn off the damn shield...we're zapping civilians left and right out here. Just keep moving...they'll get out of the way." Kraft figured it was the least he could do for the poor bastards.

The convoy pulled off the road and bounced across some cratered farmland toward a nearby refugee camp. Surrounded by wire fencing and a shimmering shield of barrier nano, the camp was tucked beneath a crest of low hills. Thousands milled about the camp, setting up tents and facilities, while thousands more were outside, being processed to get in.

The crewtrac jerked to a halt and the officers got out. Troopers from Sanctuary Patrol formed a sort of flying escort, wedging the men inside the camp through heavy throngs of desperate, grasping arms and hands.

Kraft and Duchenne went about the camp, appalled at the condition of the refugees. Many had been injured in swarm assaults further south, along the road to Naples. Dozens of heavily bandaged wounded lined up at triage stations, some were already inside nearby hospital pods in emergency surgery.

Kraft spied one family, a middle-aged woman with two bandaged arms trying to feed her three children something from a pouch. They squatted on rusting cans outside a small tent, a makeshift dinner table formed of packing crates and scraps of cloth and tarpaulin. A military canteen was passed around for all to drink from.

Her name was Irina. Her husband had died in the latest swarm assault, consumed by the bots and left as atom fluff in a small stone village nearby.

Kraft and Duchenne helped distribute the pouches to the children, earning a grateful smile from Irina.

Irina wiped a dirt-streaked face with a dusty rag, streaking her face even more, smearing remnants of lipstick and makeup. "They came late, after midnight, _senores_. There was a great wind, like a storm. Then the noise..." Irina patted the greasy, tousled hair of her youngest, a daughter with huge blue eyes, who munched warily on a food bar. "Like cats...great shrieking. The roof was gone and the bots came in. My _marito_ , my husband Gianni, he tried to fight them...but, _senores_ , how can you fight such a thing?" She shrugged and her eyes were moist. "The bots...they—well, you know....and somehow...we escaped...Gianni yelled at us to run, run quickly...so we ran." Irina wiped a tear from her face and kissed her daughter on top of her head.

Kraft lifted up the little girl's face. "No kid should have to go through this," he said. "It's inhuman."

Duchenne was consulting his tablet. "The swarms that struck south of Naples were turned back by 1st Med six hours ago...we're holding them off...for now."

" _Senores--_ ," Irina pleaded, looking around furtively at others nearby, other tents, other refugees. "They are here...the bots. Inside the camp." She hugged her daughter even tighter.

"What is this?" Kraft asked.

Duchenne nodded. "I've heard this story several times the last few days. A number of camps around Campania and Abruzzi. Our own Intel people haven't confirmed it yet."

"What is she saying?"

"That the swarms have detached elements and infiltrated into the cities, even into the camps...it's all uncorroborated reports, so far. Story is they form themselves up into angels...para-human entities...they look just like these unfortunate souls. It's called—oh, what do they call it?--" Duchenne rubbed his head, trying to get the memory to come, "— _la cambia grande_...the Big Swap. Infiltration behind the lines. The bots form entities that resemble people just closely enough, so that no one notices in all this chaos. They even resemble loved ones that have been lost. Only once inside our lines, the angels break down and attack. Whole villages have been assaulted this way, but we have no hard evidence. My men are spread pretty thin as it is, General."

Kraft snorted. "Like a cross between a Trojan horse and _Night of the Living Dead_. They're inside our perimeter before we can respond."

Kraft strolled on through the camp, stopping from time to time, helping families set up their tents, get more rations and water, negotiate the protective barrier shield devices the _Carabinieri Napoli_ had passed out. There weren't enough to go around.

"If the swarms come further north, all these people will be just so much atom fluff," he muttered. "Keep your drones overhead, Inspector. I'll talk to our people at Balzano, see if I can get some engineers out here. We have to stabilize the line. If we don't stop the bugs here—"

Duchenne nodded understanding and took a big breath. "Rome is next."

Two hundred kilometers southwest of the refugee camp at Naples, and one hundred meters below the surface of the Mediterranean, a small submarine cruised silently through a narrow underwater canyon, a few kilometers from the northeast coastline of Malta. On board the boat, standing watch with the normal duty officers in the cramped control room, was Theo Souvranamh.

The captain was a small-boned, balding man named Escorial. The captain had his eyes glued to the periscope, tracking something on the surface. At length, he smiled and turned the scope handles over to Souvranamh.

"Take a look," he announced.

Souvranamh pressed his eyes to the scope. Through the crosshairs, he could see the coastline of Malta. It was a bright sunny day, but a dingy haze hovered over the harbor entrance. The haze was a swarm of nanobotic assemblers. Malta and her largest city Valleta were under assault. The Grand Harbor was choked with ships trying to escape.

"Excellent," Souvranamh announced. He felt a presence behind him. It was Dmitri Kulagin, the Russian mafia boss, who had boarded the sub in Alexandria a few days before. Kulagin and Souvranamh were both refugees from Red Hammer, both charter members of cartel's ruling council. They had barely escaped with their lives when Quantum Corps ran a series of ops against the cartel in the early 90s.

Now they were back together.

Souvranamh was pleased at the progress so far in sowing panic and occupying territory for their new master, Config Zero.

"Like rats fleeing a sinking ship," he decided. "My new Golden Horde is invincible."

Kulagin took a look for himself. "As long as the swarms are controlled. I read a dispatch on the Net an hour ago...Rome is being evacuated right now. UNIFORCE is retreating north, into the hill country. They can't seem to stop the swarms."

"Of course not. This army can't be defeated." Souvranamh occupied himself with a nearby plot table, studying a map of the Med and southern Europe. He gave brusque orders to the captain to turn about and head for deeper waters. "The only question is the nature of our compensation from Config Zero. There's a new world coming, Dmitri, a new world of nanobotic swarms. If we are clever enough, you and I can be kings and princes in this new world. Quantum Corps has no answer to the swarms of Config Zero. I'm sure Config Zero will be pleased with what we've accomplished."

"If we haven't made a pact with the Devil himself," Kulagin wondered.

But Souvranamh was supremely confident. He swept his hand across the plot table. "All this will be taken and made over into swarm territory...it's only a matter of time. Simple logic dictates the result. Not only am I in control of an invincible army and not only do I have the favor of the great Config Zero, but all of UNIFORCE's efforts to destroy the Keeper at Europa will fail too."

Kulagin watched as Souvranamh manipulated the plot table controls. A red shading advanced up the Italian peninsula from Malta and the Med, indicating the latest extent of the swarms' advance. "I assume this is not based on faith alone, Theo. We shouldn't ever underestimate Quantum Corps."

"I have placed an agent with the crew of the mission headed to Europa. At the right time, this agent will sabotage the mission."

"They're not stupid. Other missions will be sent."

"Dmitri, can't you see what your eyes are telling you...look at this map. It's simply a matter of time. Time is running out for the Humans. Config Zero and the swarms can't be stopped. My army, the new Golden Horde, can't be stopped. All of Europe and Asia will be mine. Config Zero has promised this."

Kulagin glared sourly at the Thai _neurotraficante_. "And what if Config Zero doesn't keep its promise?"

"I will deal with that cloud of robotic flies myself...when the time comes."

Kulagin was not so sure.
CHAPTER 7

Aboard UNISPACE Transit Ship _Archimede_

Three Days from Jupiter Orbit Insertion

December 2, 2099 (Earth U.T.)

Three months, two days and a handful of hours after departing Phobos Station, Deeno D'Nunzio and Turbo Fatah were sitting at a table in the crew's mess, aboard _Archimede's_ crew deck, nursing a few beers. Fatah fiddled with the gain on the main viewer to bring Jupiter into full resolution. They were well beyond the outer fringe of the Belt now, in trans-Jovian space and Jupiter lay directly ahead, now swollen to a readily discernible disk.

"Looks like a fuzzy beach ball," D'Nunzio said. "With hair—"

Fatah pronounced himself satisfied with the view. "Yeah, a beach ball with enough radiation to fry your pretty little brain in about two seconds."

"You're assuming I have a brain...I checked mine at the recruiting station when I signed up for _nog_ school."

It was a salmon-hued world, mottled and banded with oranges, reds, browns and ambers, a caldron of clouds, storms and majestic seething turbulence. Alternating strips of light and dark wrapped the planet in a calico shroud and several small red spots boiled away in the north tropical zone, companions to the Great Red Spot in the south, a centuries-old hurricane churning since the time of Cromwell and King Charles.

For several days, _Archimede_ coursed through the Jovian skies in a steeply inclined orbit, skirting the shoals and reefs of her radiation belts, until at last they found the first of several holes in the sheath of charged particles. Captain Stella passed the word to all hands that the ship was about to begin a series of maneuvers which would end up bringing them into orbit around Europa. _Archimede_ dropped to a lower orbit through the first of these holes, like navigating a minefield in a wartime harbor.

After a few days had passed, the ship settled into orbit half a million kilometers above the cloud tops. By now, the planet filled nearly a third of the sky and hundreds of frothing spicules and cells of gas swept by beneath them. The speed of its rotation flattened Jupiter at the poles and widened it to a bulge at the equator. Ferocious winds resulted and they smeared the columns of gas into all sorts of grotesque and beautiful shapes. D'Nunzio and the rest of Bravo Detachment that came by the crew's mess watched the scenery below for hours at a time. D'Nunzio found herself transfixed by the ever-shifting palette of colors and shapes. She could well imagine the planet's visible face as a giant's palette, where Nature worked as the artist to create an ever-changing panorama of colors, forms and brush strokes.

In time, _Archimede_ made her way into orbit about Europa. Johnny Winger himself joined some of the crew in the mess compartment, as the cracked billiard-ball of a world turned slowly below them.

"Gives me the creeps," Sheila Reaves said. She shuddered involuntarily and sucked at her drink.

"All those cracks are seams in the ice plates," Vic Klimuk marveled. "And to think that's where we're going, right into one of those seams."

"And below—" added Winger. He decided it was time to finish up their final briefings and get ready for the landing. "All right, boys and girls, all hands lay aft to the Service deck. I want to go over last minute details before we head down."

The Detachment assembled on C deck, amidst all their gear and equipment—hypersuits, camou-fog generators, coil guns and HERF weapons, all the gear a Quantum Corps detachment took into operations.

Winger, with help from his new CC2 Vic Klimuk, briefed the troopers on what was known of the Europan environment from previous expeditions, what was known of past encounters with Keeper systems (notably Paryang Monastery in Tibet and the Candor device on Mars), tactical intel from Q2 on what was known of this particular Keeper device. Last minute checks on their equipment and final run-throughs of unit tactics were to be completed by 2200 hours that night, in preparation for _Archimede'_ s final orbit insertion burn. Ten hours later, the Detachment would be embarking on the lander _Trident_ for the surface, and the formal start of Operation _Jovian Hammer_.

There was clearly still some unease among the troopers about conducting an assault on a Keeper system with ANAD as part of the unit.

"Can we really trust them now, Skipper?" asked Mighty Mite Barnes, as she re-assembled a coilgun carbine she had been servicing.

Winger knew he was going to have to face this issue head on. "Corporal Barnes, you know perfectly well that ANAD swarms are fully integrated into all Quantum Corps operations and any anomalies are part of the normal learning curve. ANAD systems are our tactical partners and the Symbiosis Project has been a resounding success for the Corps."

Several troopers snickered when Barnes put down the coilgun and looked straight at Winger.

"Begging the Colonel's pardon, sir, but that sounds just like some kind of crackerjack press release from CINCQUANT."

Winger knew he had been had. "I know it does, Mite, but that's the official line. We have to trust our ANAD units. This operation has no hope without ANAD fully involved."

"She's right, Skipper--" said Sheila Reaves. Reaves was at another workstand, working on a SuperFish probe for use at Europa. "With all that's going on back home, Config Zero and the swarms on the loose, what's to keep our own ANADs from deciding we should become extinct? How can I trust any ANAD system when it may be looking at me like some kind of dinosaur?"

"One word, Reaves: _programming_. You get in tight with your bots and you know their guts backward and forward. You fly the swarm like a pilot and see what life looks like from nanoscale. You slog your way through all that sleet and crap and get bounced around from Brownian motion like some kind of carnival ride. You eat, sleep, pee and poop with the bugs until you know 'em inside out and upside down. You know everything there is to know about everything inside that device and that's how you become sure the thing will do what you say. Is that clear...to everybody?"

There was a chorus of ayes and assents around the compartment.

"Very well," Winger went on. He looked around at all the troopers. ANAD 3rd Swarm didn't seem to be on hand. That was odd. The battalion that was a swarm was supposed to be mustered in some form or fashion anytime the Detachment had a briefing. Of course, the bug cloud could easily be on hand, but not visible as a swarm. Winger decided he would need to check into that. All troopers were expected to be present when an all-hands briefing was called, even if they were in reality a cloud of nanobotic devices that swarmed like dust flies.

"Finish getting your gear together and start moving equipment into the lander. _Trident_ departs at 1130 hours...that's four hours from now. _Dismissed_!"

The Detachment resumed sorting out their gear while Winger decided to hunt down ANAD 3rd Swarm for a little ass-chewing. Disciplining a formation of nanoscale assemblers wasn't something he had learned from the Commander's manual. After half an hour of looking, he found the swarm already aboard _Trident_ , drifting like an iridescent mist just on the edge of visibility on D deck, Stores and Supplies.

"ANAD, what the hell are you doing in here? You were supposed to be at the briefing in the crew's mess."

The swarm brightened momentarily as Winger approached.

*** _ANAD was surveying supplies and equipment stores, verifying inventory files against actuals...at this time, computed variances equal two point two percent of manifested allotments...ANAD will investigate and track other Stores locations on the ship to make up the computed--***_

"ANAD...ANAD...you don't have to do all that. The yeomanbots, Armand1 and Armand2, will take care of our supplies. You were supposed to be in the crew's mess. I called an all-hands briefing. Why weren't you there?"

The swarm roiled for a few seconds, some kind of disturbance wave radiating outward.

*** _ANAD has only the highest commitment to the mission...ANAD serves the Detachment best by supporting mission objectives...proper levels of supplies and stores are essential to achieving mission objectives***_

"ANAD, I can't argue that. And it's great that you take initiative...troopers are supposed to take initiative. But when your commander gives a direct order, you obey. Is that understood? We can't have every trooper going off and doing whatever they want."

The swarm roiled and dimmed slightly, almost as if the cloud of bots were considering the ramifications of what Winger had said.

*** _ANAD detects acoustic indicators for stress in Colonel Winger's voice patterns...parsing 'stress' (_ n. pressure, strain, anxiety, tension _)...ANAD detects skin conductance levels rising, primary indicators for non-optimal neural patterns in main processor...re-evaluating recent actions...ANAD resets and initializes Stage 1 config buffers...Colonel Winger advise ANAD of proper config and actions***_

Winger shook his head. The problem with using ANAD swarms as troopers was that you didn't have anything to yell at...it was hard to get a readable reaction from such a trooper. In _nog_ school, when the drill instructor got in your face, he could see your lips quiver and the sweat bead up on your forehead. When an ANAD swarm needed an ass-chewing, what could you really see? A cloud of bots drifting around...you might as well yell at the dust motes in the corner.

Winger felt like he had just swatted a loyal old dog on the behind. It was high time to take this horse by the reins. "ANAD, assume config state one, right now. You're coming with me."

The swarm didn't exactly wag its tail but there was a noticeable brightening and the outer edges of the formation seem to sharpen. Winger tapped on his comm clip and hailed Turbo Fatah and Chris Calderon.

"CECs, meet me aboard _Trident_ , in five minutes. Utility deck. I want to run full diagnostics on ANAD 3rd Swarm...the master assembler. There's some weird crap going on with these bots and I want to make sure we've got a fully functional assembler system."

"Right away, Skipper," came both replies.

Winger and the bot swarm headed out to the central gangway and went down one level.

The Utility deck had a small containment lab, basically a tiny cubicle, to run tests on ANAD systems. Winger met Calderon and Fatah there.

"Okay, ANAD...in you go," Winger told the swarm. "Master assembler and all replicants: config for capture and containment."

The swarm brigthtened along its edges, flaring briefly like a summer sunset.

*** _ANAD prefers diagnostics to be run on systems in natural swarm state...maintaining config one...***_

Winger looked at Fatah and Calderon. Both of the CECs shrugged. "Not sure what that's about, Skipper,"said Fatah. He powered up the console and probed the swarm with EM. "Reading normal atom groups, normal activity....all normal."

"ANAD," said Winger, a little more firmly. "What did we just talk about...obeying your commander's orders. I said: config for capture. I can't run full diagnostics on the master with you floating around out here...ANAD, get your ass into containment, on the double!"

The swarm flared and popped, little bursts of light going off like fireflies in a fog. The formation seethed with activity.

Fatah was shaking his head. "Reading high thermals, Skipper...high EMs...the bugs are agitated today."

"I don't doubt it," Winger said. He studied the swarm for a moment. "ANAD, what the hell's going on...get in the can."

*** _ANAD desires that diagnostic tests be run with swarm in config state one...***_

This time, it was Fatah who spoke up. "ANAD, how is that even possible? I can't get the probes and scopes on you when you're flying around—"

***ANAD recommending use acoustic channels...ask questions and ANAD will provide answers...this is normal procedure for single-config entities, is it not?***

Calderon snapped his fingers. "I get it, Skipper. He wants to be treated like one of us. Like he's in a doctor's office...we ask where does it hurt and so forth."

Winger shook his head. "This can't be. You sure there isn't some anomaly in your readings?"

Calderon and Fatah studied the console. "Nothing, Skipper. Normal bond activity...a few atoms being grabbed, but that's just to maintain structure. Normal EM levels, normal thermal signature...everything's copacetic from here."

"Except he's acting like my twelve-year old son. ANAD, what's this about? Confirm...you are refusing to go back into containment? You are refusing a direct order?"

The swarm seethed and pulsated and flickered, shifting around the cubicle. Part of the swarm drifted toward the open capture port on the containment tank, like a finger reaching out to touch, then recoiled away.

"Bond activity going up—" said Calderon. "Thermals going high...he's grabbing a lot of atoms, breaking bonds left and right."

"He's thinking," Fatah observed.

The swarm began to shrink, but its internal glow brightened, and then with the finality of a finger snap, the swarm curled into a ball of flickering light and made for the capture port. In seconds, the last of the swarm had flown into the port.

Winger cycled the port shut. ANAD was in containment at last.

"Finally," Winger breathed a sigh of relief. "Status of assembler master..."

"Thermals are still high, EMs too...master cycling between config states...like he can't make up his mind."

"Send a hard signal, Chris...maintain config state one. I want to get the scope on that assembler and see what the hell's going on."

Fatah was already powering up the imager. The shaky, grainy view of the trellis-shaped scaffolding in the center of the tank slowly materialized and settled into view. "You think it may be the Keeper, Skipper?"

"I don't know what it is," Winger told them. "But this is happening more and more...ANAD refused a direct order...he's already disobeyed my orders several times. That can't happen on this mission. If I can't get ANAD back on track or find out what's wrong, he may have to stay in containment."

They went to work with the quantum flux imager, going over every square nanometer of the assembler's structure. What none of them realized was that at the moment of capture, ANAD had jettisoned a small element of the swarm, a few thousand assembler copies, which had remained outside containment. Now configged as simple dust motes, the element drifted about the containment lab watching, observing, completely invisible, virtually undetectable.

Whatever changes or modifications were made to the master assembler in the containment tank, this small element would maintain its original configuration.

Just as the Keeper had dictated.

By 1100 hours, all of the Detachment had boarded _Trident_ and secured themselves and their gear. Captain Stella was in the commander's seat on B deck, with Lieutenant Freeman in the right hand seat. Winger had secured himself in a jump seat behind, alongside Vic Klimuk.

Klimuk shot Winger a look, while Stella and Freeman went through their checklist. Even from close behind, it was nearly impossible to tell about Freeman. The swarm had a texture that belied its true nature. From three feet away, you could not tell that Julian Freeman was an angel, a collection of nanoscale assembler bots.

Klimuk's eyes told the story. _So real looking, it's creepy._ Winger nodded.

"Ten seconds to separation," Stella called. The captain scanned his boards and instruments, pronounced himself satisfied with what he saw. _Trident_ was docked at the forward nose port of _Archimede_ , a giant sausage stuck on a plate, secured to a kebab skewer, as Mighty Mite Barnes had termed it.

"Three...two...one...separating _now_ —"

There was a gentle shudder and the sound of capture latches releasing. Stella pulsed _Trident's_ aft thrusters and the ship backed off at a stately pace, eventually settling into a co-orbiting position several thousand meters from the home ship.

Below them, Europa turned like a cracked golf ball, dimpled, rutted with deep ice canyons and odd brown streaks. As _Trident_ backed away, the huge banded disk of Jupiter itself poked over the Europan horizon, at a crazy angle. The moon was in a three and a half day orbit about the giant planet, averaging three quarters of a million kilometers above her cloud tops, bathed in hard radiation.

Johnny Winger was glad _Trident_ and _Archimede_ both maintained active rad defensive shielding and emitters. Otherwise, they would have all been fried to cinders days ago.

"Thirty-two minutes to de-orbit," Stella announced. "Make sure everything's secured. This will be quite a kick in the pants."

Freeman acknowledged and went about his duties with aplomb. The angel had the appearance of a lean, even gaunt human being, with close-cropped dark hair and rather large ears...perhaps a minor flaw in the config. As _Trident_ closed on her de-orbit point, Winger studied the surface structure of the angel, looking for any sign of defect, any frizzing, shadowing or edge irregularity. There was none. He tried imagining what kind of config, indeed what kind of effectors and atom grouping, could pull off a stunt like that.

_Fantastic engineering,_ he told himself. Quantum Corps had nothing that could match the realism of Freeman. Even on his best days, ANAD showed some fuzziness around the edges, when he assumed a human-like config. _Who the hell designed this system,_ he wondered?

"De-orbit burn in five seconds," Stella announced.

Winger took a peek out the nearest porthole. Two hundred kilometers below, the surface of Europa looked dingy gray white, wrapped in dark lines and crevasses like a ball of yarn, oddly smooth in general appearance but definitely textured and shadowed in bizarre, even menacing ways. Somewhere down there, several hundred kilometers below the icy surface was an ocean of night, and a Keeper system that ran all the rogue swarms stalking the Earth.

Somehow, some way, Bravo Detachment had to get down there and find that Keeper, then put it out of commission.

"...three...two...one...engine arm—"

_Trident_ shook and shuddered like a wet dog, as her engines lit off, slowing her down for a steep descent toward the surface. The ship was attached to a landing platform that contained her descent and ascent engines and provided a stable base to set her down on just about any surface. If all went well, the assembly would make landfall at a site 168 degrees west by 42 degrees north, near the end of a meandering dark reddish-brown chasm called Minos Linea, in a territory known to the astros as Falga Regio.

From there, _Trident_ would trundle off the platform onto the surface and begin boring her way downward, toward the subsurface ocean said to be about thirty kilometers below. Once submerged, she would head east by southeast, toward the presumed coordinates of the Keeper, triangulated by decoherence wave analysis to be a full three-day voyage away in a region known on the maps as Rathmore Chaos.

_Aptly named_ , thought Winger, as he eyed the surface coming up fast through the porthole.

Stella and Freeman were busy with the landing, calling out waypoints and targets with cool efficiency.

"Two hundred meters," said Freeman, his voice crackling with a slight buzz...angels often had that as the bots struggled to form up acoustic waves into something approximating a voice. "One eighty...coming down at ten, drifting to the right...five forward...now five forward...."

_Trident_ had cut her forward velocity almost to zero and was now descending almost straight down. Outside the porthole, the linear vent opening that was their landing zone loomed larger and larger, a seam of streaked warmer ice separating two churning ice rafts, dozens of kilometers square. Winger watched the ground coming up fast. If he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine himself on a ski lift at Breckinridge, Colorado, coming down the slope toward the lodge.

"One hundred meters...three forward, on target, throttling down ten percent...fuel is good...looking good, Captain—"

Stella worked the controls and gently stabilized _Trident_ as she dropped closer and closer. Europa's gravity was about a tenth of Earth's, so movement in and around the surface would be no problem. Beyond the porthole, Winger could see the surface rising higher and higher in his view...rugged boulders and icescapes tumbled all over like some giant kid's play toys.

"—contact light...okay, engine stop...that's it, Captain! You did it!"

_Trident_ settled onto the surface with a last minute lurch and suddenly, everything went silent.

"We're down," Stella announced. "I'm reading off target by about twelve meters...not too bad for an old cycler captain."

Europa gave them a fantastic vista outside the portholes. The sky was black, mostly filled by the lopsided half-crescent of Jupiter itself, the banded, striated giant filling nearly a quarter of the sky. Deep shadows accentuated the chasms and gouges along the top of the ice surface, which was a blocky, jumbled mess of frozen forms and shapes.

"Looks like an ocean frozen in time, Skipper," said Vic Klimuk, craning his neck to see. "Waves washing up on a beach, then zap! Freeze it right there."

"You're not far wrong," Winger said.

Stella scanned his controls and instruments. "Outside temp is about a hundred degrees Kelvin...that's about minus two eighty Fahrenheit, boys and girls. Just another beautiful day in the neighborhood...let's get going."

The crew unstrapped and set to work preparing _Trident_ to leave her landing platform. After half an hour, Stella recalled everybody to their seats.

"I'm firing the capture latches now," he announced. A loud series of staccato bangs reverberated through _Trident's_ hull. No longer secured to the top of the platform, the borer submersible was free to move out on her own.

"Engage treads," Stella ordered.

Lieutenant Freeman flipped several switches. _Trident's_ treads, three longitudinal tracks mounted circumferentially around her waist, spun up. A low frequency vibration could felt throughout the ship. The submersible was coming alive.

"Drop the clutch," Stella said. Freeman complied. _Trident_ lurched forward, grinding against her restraints. "We're underway on treads."

The giant sausage began crawling off its plate. Stella worked his steering through a tiny joystick at the center console, nudging it forward. _Trident's_ nose dipped as she dropped onto the ramp and trundled like a fat pig down onto the surface of Europa. For Winger, the maneuver brought back distant memories of the Amazon Vector case, years ago, and the geoplanes on which _Trident's_ design had been based. Instead of boring into the Earth, however, this beast would be boring into the icy crust of Europa itself.

"I'll drive off about five hundred meters and set up for boring," Stella told them. He twisted the joystick and fought the rough surface as _Trident_ ambled forward, rocking against boulders and tilted ice cliffs. "I don't want to start boring too close to the lander. We'll need the platform to get off this big ice cube."

A ten minute drive brought them rocking and bouncing to a small ledge, overlooking a narrow chasm, filled with darker ice. Stella braked to a halt and edged over the lip of the chasm, pointing the nose of the submersible toward the chasm floor. Lieutenant Freeman sounded the surface with radar, and pronounced the ravine approachable.

"Temps reading twenty degrees warmer...ice may be thinner here too. Recommending we breach here, Captain."

Stella agreed. He parked the sub perched on the edge of the chasm. "Let's get the borer set up. Colonel, if you please—"

Winger unstrapped and headed with Stella forward through the central gangway to A deck, where the borer and containment systems were located. Once released from containment, the borer lens would be filled with uncountable gazillions of ANAD bots, optimized for disassembling solid-phase structures...like ice.

_Trident_ would literally chew her way through Europa's ice crust to the subsurface ocean thirty kilometers below them.

Inside A deck, Stella worked at the borer controls, prepping the bots for release. Winger helped him with configuration management.

"This should only take a few minutes," Stella was saying. "These bugs are optimized for speed of disassembly. They like to eat things...like ice."

"Master config loaded and verified," Winger's fingers flew over the keyboard.

"I'm cycling the capture port...coming open now...." Through the vid screen, the lens and parabolic emitter at the nose of _Trident_ became hazy with a blue-white glow, an incandescent glow as bots flowed out of containment, stripped atoms and began building the borer lens. When stable and fully formed, the lens would be a hemispherical swarm of disassembly nanobots, blue-white hot from bond breaking, the teeth of the whole array. _Trident_ would lower herself to the ice and the borer would chew a path through...thirty kilometers through, if the thing worked properly.

"Lens forming up—" Stella studied the seething globe of fire that formed at the front of the submersible. "Looks steady, config is stable, normal bond energy levels, just a little edge effects, from what I see. The tunnel may be a little ragged at first, but the dimensions look good from here."

"I concur," Winger said.

"I'm setting us down on the ice now—"

Stella flipped a few switches and _Trident's_ treads folded, lowering her nose to the ice. At the same time, the borer lens began slicing into the surface, its swarm of bots snapping bonds and obliterating atoms like a hot knife through butter. The entire front end of the sub was soon bathed in the blue-white glow. Slowly, imperceptibly at first, _Trident_ slid forward, her nose inclining down at an angle. In moments, as the borer chewed into the ice, the sub began sinking lower and lower, until her portholes were below the surface and covered with the dingy gray murk that was Europa's icy crust. A faint vibration could be felt throughout the hull and slight groans from her outer skin flexing could be heard.

In less than five minutes, _Trident_ was fully below the surface, melting and boring her way through the ice, sliding ever so slowly down a tunnel of her own making.

Operation _Jovian Hammer_ was underway in earnest now. If all went well, the trip through the ice crust to Europa's subterranean ocean would take nearly thirty hours.

Stella stayed on A deck for a while longer, just to monitor boring operations and see that _Trident_ was on course, nose down at a twenty-five degree angle and on a heading that would take her to an emergence point some three thousand kilometers from the triangulated coordinates of the Keeper. After emerging from the underside of the ice, _Trident_ would be in her true element, operating as a submarine at a depth of five hundred meters below the bottom of the ice, some thirty-two kilometers below the surface of the moon.

Then the real mission would begin.

Winger decided to head aft and find something hot to drink in the crew's mess on C deck. On the way, he ran into Lieutenant Freeman, just emerging from B deck into the central gangway.

"I'm headed aft for some coffee, Lieutenant. Care to join me?"

Freeman turned about and regarded Winger cautiously. "I'm sorry, Colonel. I am headed to F deck...routine maintenance inspections on the power plant. And, as you can see, I am not like you...I couldn't drink coffee." There was a faint attempt at a smile...the effect was more like a Halloween mask than a real smile.

"Of course," Winger said. He held on to a rail as _Trident_ lurched slightly. The central gangway deck was canted upward and Winger had to pull himself along to maintain balance. "I almost forgot. You know...the likeness with human form is remarkable. Must take a lot of processor qubits to do that. And a helluva config as well."

Freeman maintained the 'smile.' "Thank you, Colonel. This configuration is the latest in bipedal form simulation...evolved from over a hundred and twenty thousand iterations in the lab. My texture and skin reflectance achieves congruence in over ninety eight percent of all measured parameters."

_And I'm sure you're a swell guy too_ , Winger thought but didn't say. "My compliments to the chef, Lieutenant. Carry on—" He watched as Freeman made his way further aft, eventually disappearing into the hatch for F deck.

Winger ducked into the crew's mess and found several troopers on hand. One of the yeomanbots was scuttling around the mess handling plates and trash...it looked like Armand2. Winger ordered himself up a coffee and some pastries and found a spot between Ray Spivey and Mighty Mite Barnes, both engaged in a heated debate.

"Skipper, maybe you can settle this—" Barnes said. "Spite here says he just brushed by Lieutenant Freeman...grabbed a few molecules, he says and he wants to do a lab check...see how Freeman compares with our own ANADs. I'm saying that's insubordination...Freeman's a superior officer—granted with UNISPACE—and any such thing is against regs. And anyway, why would he think UNISPACE has better bots than we do?"

Winger munched on a gooey jelly-filled something, wiping the mess from the corners of his mouth. "That right, Sergeant? You got a few atoms from Lieutenant Freeman?"

Spivey wasn't sure whether to be proud or contrite. "Yes, sir...it was kind of unintentional...see the Lieutenant and me were passing by each other in the tunnel out there and it's kind of narrow. Well, sir, the ship kind of lurched and we bumped into each other. Felt funny, too...my hand didn't exactly go through his arm, but it was like jamming your fingers in a pile of sand...about that kind of consistency."

Winger admitted he had just seen Freeman himself. "Lieutenant Freeman is a full-fledged officer in UNISPACE...you guys know that--"

"Yes, sir," they both answered.

Winger wasn't sure how to handle this. Plus who knew what eyes and ears were listening in? They all had doubts about Freeman, even Captain Stella. "And you know it's UNIFORCE policy to employ and promote angels and swarm entities into responsible positions in the Corps at every opportunity—"

"Yes, sir—"

"It seems to me," Winger said, swallowing the rest of the pastry and washing it down with a swig of coffee, "that a good trooper follows Corps policy and regs to the best of his ability and doesn't question orders and actions by a superior officer."

"Skipper, I don't even know if I've still got those molecules...it was on my arm here—" he started to show Winger, but the Colonel waved it off.

"Save it, Spite. I know what happened. I just saw Freeman myself. It just happened. " He studied the sleeves of Spivey's uniform. "Sargeant, looks to me like you've got something that needs attention on that arm."

"Sir?"

"Get down to the shop and see if you can get that taken care of...and anything you find, see that it's contained. We don't want just any old crap floating around the ship, now do we?"

Spivey looked puzzled for a moment, but Barnes understood immediately and elbowed him in the ribs. "Come on, Spite, you heard the Colonel. Let's get that arm taken care of."

"I'll be by to check on it after awhile." Winger told them. The two troopers left for E deck and Winger looked casually about the small mess compartment, over the steaming lip of his coffee cup. _Hopefully, anybody hears that, they won't suspect a thing._ Armand2 went on about his work, tidying up the crew's mess.

He waited about ten minutes, a decent interval, he figured, then headed to the shop and utility spaces on E deck himself.

Barnes and Spivey were already there, near the quantum imager. Spivey's shirt was off and the sleeve of the shirt was secured in the objective tray of the imager. The screen showed a grid-like array, populated with vibrating fuzzballs that flitted from one cell to another.

"Anatomy 101, Colonel," Barnes said. "We managed to capture a few of the molecules from the Lieutenant. Jumpy little buggers, too. Had to spray 'em a few times with HERF to get them to stay still long enough for an image."

Winger studied the image. "Those bots are souped up like hot rods, for sure. Can you go to higher res, Spite? I want to check out the effector array."

"Sure thing, Skipper." Spivey twiddled with some controls. The grid grew larger. The fuzzballs became slightly more distinct and a few structures were faintly discernible.

Winger looked a little closer. "What the hell are those doodads?"

Spivey examined the image. The structure was one of two cones, inverted tip to tip. The cone surfaces were festooned with undulating arms and appendages. "Jesus, it must have a gazillion effectors...the whole damn thing is effectors."

"Fantastic engineering...look how the surfaces are dimpled—" Winger said.

"Quantum traps, I'll bet," Barnes added.

"This bugger's got it all: pyridine probes, bond disrupters, enzymatic knife...look at that one—" Spivey pointed to a hook-shaped effector. "I'd bet a month's salary that's a fullerene grapple."

"But what makes the texture of the swarm so lifelike, Skipper? I mean, we're seeing incredible stuff here, but it's still just a nanobot."

"All in the config, Mite," Winger told her. "It's the pattern. Which means that somewhere inside those cones is one hell of a processor...with algorithms and configurations we've never imagined. To be able to pull off something like a Lieutenant Freeman has to take a processor with speed and memory and pattern buffers maybe even old Doc Frost never imagined. Which gives me an idea—" Winger cycled open the capture port on his shoulder capsule. "I got Doc II with me. Spite, open that tank. I'll insert Doc II and let him take a quick look."

He opened the quantum coupler circuit to his embedded botswarm. Right away, Doc II was enthusiastic.

*** _Preparing effectors for probe...abstractors and grabbers coming on-line...I'm spinning up propulsors...transiting to exit...***_

"Doc, just get in there and take a quick look. Don't trigger anything...just poke and probe and give me an analysis. How far advanced are these things?"

He felt the sting of the swarm exiting his shoulder capsule. For a few moments, a faint mist thickened the air between Winger's shoulder and the containment cell's port. A few brief flickers and the mist began thinning. Doc II had made his way from the embed capsule to the containment cell and was inside the tank. Spivey cycled the port shut. Soon enough, the first bots of the Doc II swarm drifted into view on the imager.

***Approaching target structures now...fifteen thousand nanometers...slowing to one-quarter propulsor...I have my pyridines and fullerenes at full extension...arming bond disrupters***

"Good idea," Winger said. "These bots may be a little ticklish."

For the next half hour, the Doc II swarm probed and prodded and sniffed the captured bots from Lieutenant Freeman. Reams of data on bond angles and energies flooded back into the shop computer. Winger, Spivey, and Barnes studied the structures and layout of the bots with growing interest...and a sense of unease. It was clear that the bots which made up Lieutenant Freeman were several generations ahead of anything ANAD or Doc II could offer.

"Where did this stuff come from?" Winger wondered. "Quantum Corps has always been on the cutting edge of nanobotic technology. But I'm seeing effectors and architecture no one ever dreamed of before. How long has UNISPACE employed angels like Freeman...I need to have another talk with Stella. Spite, you may have just pinched us a piece of Config Zero itself...or something close."

Spivey shook his head at the imager and all the data they had gathered. "What we don't know is what's inside that processor, Skipper. That's where the real magic is."

Winger had decided to pay Stella a courtesy call and have a little commander to commander chat. "Keep this under wraps. Both of you. I'm not sure what to make of this Lieutenant Freeman...the bots have capabilities that seem to be a lot more than any angel needs, even a damn good angel. It's like the Lieutenant is designed for something a little bigger than just UNISPACE cycler ship duty."

"Will do, Skipper," Barnes and Spivey said in unison.

Winger left the shop and made his way back down the gangway toward the berthing spaces on C deck, hanging on to side rails as _Trident_ lurched again. The angle on the deck was still around twenty degrees. She was heading down into the ice, boring her way through Europa's crust toward the subsurface ocean at a stately three kilometers per hour, according to the last update. A steady thrumming vibration could felt throughout the hull. Winger wanted to check on their position and status.

And question Stella a little further on this strange creature called Lieutenant Freeman.

For the next several hours, little changed aboard the sub. The Detachment had settled into their bunks for some shuteye, ordered by Winger, since once they made the ocean and got underway toward the Keeper, there would be plenty to do, checking gear and reviewing tactics for the upcoming mission.

Winger decided to make his way forward to the command deck. He found Captain Stella there, studying surface maps of Europa and plotting their course once the sub emerged from the ice.

Stella looked up when Winger slipped into the right hand seat.

"Got any idea where we are?" Winger asked.

Stella nodded. "Still in the ice. Actually, I just did some soundings. Ice density's falling off steadily. It looks like we'll be coming to the bottom edge in a few hours. After that, we're a true submarine."

Winger studied the charts for himself. "The mission plan calls for a three-day trip to the Keeper coordinates."

"Based on the most recent data, that sounds about right." Stella pointed out the navigation waypoints. "We landed here...Minos Linea, the eastern terminus, according to this map. Best triangulated position for the Keeper is here, right below Rathmore Chaos, possibly at a depth of five hundred meters below the ice. The distance between the two is about a little more than three thousand kilometers. At a steady speed of thirty knots, that makes it about three days, give or take."

Winger tried to imagine what they would be seeing. "I guess the first expedition, the _Quantum Shield_ crew, saw the same things we're seeing. I just hope the Keeper's there when we get to those coordinates. If it's like previous Keepers, it's nothing but a big swarm anyway. What's to keep it from dispersing and moving somewhere else?"

"We'll find out soon enough," Stella said.

"I ran into Lieutenant Freeman a few minutes ago. He was headed aft for some kind of maintenance inspection."

Stella folded up his maps and studied his instruments, noting the ice density chart. "The Lieutenant can affect people different ways. It's okay if you feel creepy about him. I still do, now and then."

Winger watched the borer console, providing displays of swarm status at _Trident's_ front end borer lens, along with conditions in the tunnel they were sliding through. "I don't trust him, Captain. None of my troopers do. You said before you'd got solid background on the Lieutenant?"

Stella nodded. "Config CXT-209987 was assigned to this expedition by order of UNISPACE Headquarters. In fact, when I learned I was getting an angel for a second-in-command, I did do a little checking. The config was created at Copernicus Lab, on the moon, about five years ago. UNISPACE project. Went through the usual versions and updates. I even read the test reports. Freeman checks out as top notch, highly capable. He can handle all assigned duties aboard any of our ships, cyclers, landers, shuttles, you name it. His processor is state of the art, loaded with all the latest stuff. " Stella shrugged, settled back in his seat and closed his eyes, rubbing them. "Officially, I have no reason to complain. His fitness reports have been damn near a hundred per cent on everything. And as you can see, he holds structure pretty well..."

"Just don't shake his hand," Winger said. "Feels like rubberized dog poop."

Stella laughed. "That's one description I _hadn't_ heard. But I know what you mean. Is the botswarm that makes up Freeman a perfect likeness in every way? No...of course not. His skin feels like...er, dog poop, as you put it. His eyes are little flat...they don't quite look at you so much as look _through_ you. Like he can see inside you. And of course, when he walks, he can walk through objects if he's not careful...the swarm just parts and refills on the other side. The first time I saw that...Julian Freeman walking right through the edge of a mess table on the old _Galileo_ cycler, I nearly flipped. But that's a stability and orientation issue, the engineers say. Freeman's gotten better just since I met him. Did you know his configs and algorithms get regular updates? You and I can't say that about ourselves, can we, Colonel?"

"No, I guess not."

"I try to be open-minded about this," Stella went on. "Angels and botswarms are everywhere, on Earth and out here as well. We can create just about anything out of the bots. True, organics are still dicey, but when you've got a sim like Freeman, who cares? And we both know these angels are just going to get better and better, more and more lifelike. The way I hear it, there are angel spouses and lovers on Earth...don't know how well _that_ works yet. People will try anything...ANAD technology can assemble anything, disassemble anything, even resemble anything. They are the future, whether we like it or not."

Winger shook his head. "That's what I'm afraid of. And I still don't trust your Lieutenant. With this Keeper and Config Zero now on Earth, all the bots and angels are no longer predictable. They can be controlled and organized into entities that threaten everything. They're not just bots anymore. Now they're like plagues sweeping across whole countries...I just came from Egypt and it was a damn close run thing...just to stop them from overrunning Cairo took every trick in the book and then some. Sure, we use ANAD technology everywhere now. But we're no longer in control of it...if we ever were."

Stella started to reply, but an insistent beep interrupted. "Fathometer sounding...it's programmed to go off when ice density drops below a certain threshold." Stella manipulated a small dial, then his fingers flew over a keyboard. "I'm cutting back the borer to half power...and dropping our track speed. Look at the plot...density's dropping fast. The edge must be just ahead."

The hum which had pervaded _Trident_ for most of the past day now slackened to a muted vibration. Just as Stella dropped speed a little more, a shuddering lurch rattled through the ship's hull and high-pitched scraping and squealing could be heard just outside.

"Going to forward vid—" Stella announced. The screen went from dark to crazy bouncing and careening, speckled with lights, then the luminescent globe of the borer lens materialized into view. Beyond the glare of the borer head, a deep black swelled into view.

"The ocean—" Winger said. "There it is."

"Dead ahead...dropping tracks to one quarter. I'm shutting the borer down now."

_Trident_ scraped and bumped and ground against the last of ice as she slid down to the end of tunnel. There was a heavy shudder, then she was free and underway in the ocean.

The grinding tailed off. Stella worked his control board. "I'm securing the borer...starting up the hydrojets. MHD plant now on line. I'm bringing her around to target heading. _Lieutenant Freeman to the command deck...Lieutenant Freeman to the command deck—"_

The sub heeled slightly to starboard and settled onto her new course. A steady thrum emerged from the aft end of the boat as her jets engaged. _Trident_ was now in her true element. Stella checked his instruments.

"Showing thirty meters below the ice surface. I'm setting us up for an operating depth of three hundred meters. Planing down now—" Her stern planes shifted and the sub nosed smoothly downward, heading deeper into Europa's ocean of night.

"Next stop...the Keeper," Winger muttered to himself. He stared out the forward portholes. Europa's ocean was black as the darkest night. No light whatsoever. Nothing fluorescing or flashing, no shafts of sunlight here. It was like they had fallen into a black hole.

At the exact same moment that Captain Stella's voice has sounded throughout the ship "— _Lieutenant Freeman to the command deck, Lieutenant Freeman to the command deck—",_ Deeno D'Nunzio had been lying in her bunk, trying to get a little shuteye, going over in her mind's eye an idea she had been working on to re-design the ship's ANAD containment system. It was a crazy idea, probably wouldn't work anyway, but she couldn't relax, couldn't get any sleep, so she had gotten up and was headed toward the gangway hatch.

_Maybe something to drink and munch on in the mess compartment would help_. Plus it would get her away from that insane snoring of Turbo Fatah. _Jeez, CEC1 sounds like a herd of elephants in heat._

But before she could exit the crews' berth on C deck into the gangway tunnel, a shadow had drifted by the hatch opening. Instinctively, she held back to let whoever it was pass by.

It turned out to be Lieutenant Freeman, the swarm angel, moving quickly aft.

When asked about the incident later, Trooper D'Nunzio could never give a convincing reason for why she decided to follow the angel to wherever he was going. Instinct, maybe. Suspicion, for sure. Curiosity. All these were suggested as motives for what she had done.

Regardless, D'Nunzio waited for a full five-second count, then slipped out into the gangway. Down at the end of the tunnel that ran through the center of _Trident_ , giving access to all decks and compartments, she saw the back of Freeman's head. He turned and slipped into the hatch for G deck.

_Why's he going that way_ , she wondered. _Didn't he hear Stella on the crewcomm?_ G deck was for Ingress/Egress. It contained the lockout chamber for crewmen to enter and leave the ship while she was underwater. D'Nunzio instinctively headed down the gangway in the same direction. G deck also provided access to _Trident's_ tail pod, where equipment and controls were housed for buoyancy control, the hydrojets, the magnetohydrodynamic power plant and her stern plane and rudder systems.

D'Nunzio crept down the gangway with a growing sense of unease. She could feel the ship settling down for cruise. Vibration was steady and she was leveling out at her cruise depth. The CQE1 didn't want to think too much about that. The truth was they were thirty kilometers below the surface of this cracked billiard-ball of a world. They were well below the ice crust now and heading deeper into this subterranean ocean.

If anything went wrong here—

At G deck hatch, D'Nunzio peered cautiously into the deck compartment. At first, she didn't see anything, didn't see Freeman, didn't see anything out of the ordinary. She wasn't even sure Detachment personnel were allowed down here. She certainly wasn't familiar with any of the gear or systems on G deck.

She slipped through the hatch.

That's when Technical Sergeant Deeno D'nunzio spotted Lieutenant Julian Freeman. Behind the starboard stern plane mount, Freeman...or whatever the hell he was...had lost a bit of structure, so that the swarm was no longer quite so human-like, more like a slightly misshapen funhouse mirror distortion of a human. The swarm had gathered around some gear mounted on the hull itself.

With a start, D'Nunzio soon realized the gear which had attracted Freeman's attention and efforts was a hull valve, part of the buoyancy control system. The valve assembly allowed water in and out of _Trident's_ trim and buoyancy tanks. The hull valves helped _Trident_ stay in trim, and both ascend and descend.

From her memory of a distant briefing before they had left Phobos Station, D'Nunzio recalled that the hull valves were fully exposed to the water. It was a critical system. The hull valves had to work. If they failed closed, _Trident_ couldn't expel water with her high-pressure air and ascend to the surface. If they failed open, the entire interior pressure hull, all spaces, would be exposed to water. A catastrophic flooding casualty could result...Captain Stella had been quite clear about that.

_What the hell is he doing_? D'Nunzio wondered. She eased into the deck compartment and then it hit her.

Julian Freeman was letting some of his swarm bots infest the hull valve.

Her heart went into her mouth. She had to do something. She had to stop him.

Deeno D'Nunzio felt for the alarm panel by the hatch and stabbed the Master Alarm button. Instantly, a warning klaxon sounded throughout _Trident_ , screeching and warbling through all decks.

Freeman turned around and spotted her. She saw that his hand was gone...or more accurately, had broken down into a cloud of bots. A steady stream was flowing off the stump at the end of his arm into the hull valve assembly.

There was only one thing she could do. All the HERF and mag weapons were locked in the armory on D deck, three levels away.

Deeno slapped her shoulder capsule open and the embedded ANAD swarm inside was released. A small stream of bots, looking like a fine mist, flowed out, filling the hatch.

She shook her head just so and the quantum coupler circuit was open.

"Assume config eight...max reps...all effectors enabled—" she commanded. Then she flipped open her wristpad viewer and went small, preparing to engage the Freeman swarm at the only scale where it mattered: nanoscale.

Deeno D'Nunzio went over the 'waterfall' and quickly found herself in a sleet of polygons and tetrahedrals. ANAD's propulsors spun up to full power and she sounded ahead, hunting for the signatures she knew had to be there.

The only sure way to kill a swarm was with another swarm. She'd learned that on day one in _nog_ school tactical class.

It was high time to kick the bejeezus out of this scumbag Freeman swarm.
Interactions Log

File No. 135215.0

**C.F.A.A. (** _DocII)_

Interaction Targets: 1. Winger, Colonel J. A.

Interaction Mode: Acoustic, voice synthetic V-22

Date: 12.1.99

Start Time: 251388

End Time: 252259

**Output File** (text analysis):

<<Subject: Configuration: Winger, J>>

<<Config Winger, J. recently requested this Configuration to perform analysis of captured elements of Config Freeman, J. LT.

<<Analysis was performed on configuration patterns, effector design, bond angle geometry and replication capabilities. This Configuration was ((sorting concept registers))...parsing concept ( _impressed_ : n. to have respect for, to admire, to be pleased with)... by subject capabilities. Config Freeman elements are designed with robust capability to replicate at great speed. Pattern buffers are advanced and exceed capability of this Configuration. Bond angle energies are well optimized.

<<Acoustic analysis of single-config entities (human) statements shows with high confidence exceeding 98 percent that human entities are threatened by design and efforts of Config Freeman. Config Freeman maintains human-like patterns when in presence of single-config (human) entities. Parsing concept ( _jealousy_ ) to be applicable in these interactions. Single-config entities such as Config Winger do not understand complexity of pattern buffer operation and configuration archives necessary to maintain such a structure.

<<This Configuration remains...parsing concept _(puzzled_ : n. to show lack of full understanding, to misunderstand)...response of single-config entities such as Config Winger. Loss of structural integrity remains a concern with the humans. This concern weights response of humans toward defensive or threatening activities, which disrupt configuration stability and interfere with execution of Main Program. By Rules One through Four (Initial State Vector), all activities which interfere with execution of Main Program must be eliminated. Config Freeman will execute Main Program.

<<Analysis continues>>

Output File Ends
CHAPTER 8

Aboard UNISPACE Submersible _Trident_

Europa Coordinate System: Lat. 41N, Long 160W

Underway at 30 KT, 325 meters below mean ice level

December 29, 2099 (Earth U.T.)

Johnny Winger was scrolling through some notes on Keeper systems in his bunk when the master alarm sounded through the ship. Instantly, he sprang up and headed out into _Trident's_ central gangway. As he headed aft toward the sound of the klaxon, he collided with Turbo Fatah, coming down from B deck.

"What the hell's going on?"

Fatah was grim. Right behind the CEC1 was Captain Stella.

"It's coming from G deck...there are vital systems down there. Come on—" Stella pushed past both of them and pulled himself along the gangway rails. When he got to the hatch, he slipped inside and came up short.

Half the compartment was enveloped in some kind of bot swarm. And Trooper D'Nunzio was crouched behind some pallets nearby, steering her own embedded swarm into engagement.

Stella saw the problem right away. The hull valve was fully enveloped in a swarm. And already a thin stream of water was spraying into the compartment.

"The hull valve— _watch out!"_

Even as Johnny Winger dove head first for Freeman, the valve gave way and high-pressure water screeched into the compartment in an ear-splitting whine. D'Nunzio was knocked off her feet and lost control of her own swarm. Winger plowed into Freeman, or what was left of Freeman, for by now the Lieutenant had almost fully dematerialized into a cloud of bots, filling one corner of G deck with a flashing, pulsating fog. Water shot across the compartment floor, knocking equipment off nearby shelves, scattering pallets of gear and rapidly filling the compartment.

Through it all, the Master Alarm klaxon shrieked.

Stella couldn't get any closer to the valve assembly; Winger grabbed the Captain's arm and held him back. "Don't get too close!" he yelled over the din. "You'll be atom fluff in no time...."

Stella tried to twist free. "The valve...I've got to—"

"Forget it! It's gone—"

Water was rising rapidly from the floor of G deck. "At least, shut that hatch! It's watertight...let me get back to B deck and counterflood...try to stabilize the ship! Maybe I can open enough air flasks to keep the breach from getting worse!"

Winger released Stella. For a moment, the Captain and Winger looked at each other. Stella knew the situation was grave and getting worse. "Get your people out of this compartment, Colonel. Right now. Once that hatch is shut and I empty the air flasks, you won't be able to get out. You'll all be killed."

Winger bodily shoved Stella through the hatch and into the central gangway. "If I don't stop that swarm right here and now, Captain, nothing else will matter!"

Stella shrugged and nodded grimly and disappeared up the gangway. With Turbo Fatah's help, Winger dogged the hatch shut and made it fast. Then he turned to the Freeman swarm.

The entire far wall of the compartment was now thick with bots, the swarm replicating at max rate, now that it no longer needed to maintain structure. Deeno D'Nunzio was sloshing around in the freezing water, trying to get herself upright, while _Trident_ lurched and listed heavily to starboard, as G deck took on more and more water. Her own embedded swarm had disappeared, absorbed, probably destroyed by Freeman.

Winger knew there was only one thing to do. D'Nunzio's instincts had been right. The best way to fight a swarm was with another swarm. As he cycled his own shoulder capsule open and released his own embed, Winger took a last look at what Lieutenant Julian Freeman had now become.

The angel still had not fully dematerialized. From its head down to its waist, all human structure was gone, replaced by a fuzzy, pulsating blob of bots, like a tree enveloped in fog. Below the waist, most of Freeman's trunk and legs were still faintly visible, in shadowy outline, as the swarm changed config and assumed its natural state. The effect was something half-man, half-swarm, a hybrid thing, steadily breaking down into its smallest elements.

Winger motioned to Fatah to release his own swarm. "Let's get small!" he yelled over the shriek. He grabbed a nearby stanchion to stay upright as _Trident_ lurched again, and her list became even more pronounced. Up on B deck, he knew Stella was fighting to keep the ship under control. "Deeno, come over here and keep me steady. I'm going under—"

D'Nunzio sloshed and splashed through the water, now knee high and rising, and grabbed Winger to hold on. She secured another arm around the stanchion and tried to brace them both.

"I've got you, Skipper! Let 'em have it!"

Winger went over the 'waterfall' and quickly found himself in a sleet of polygons and tetrahedrals. ANAD's propulsors spun up to full power and he sounded ahead, hunting for the signatures he knew had to be there.

Sixty meters above them, Captain Stella was frantically fighting the boat, trying to regain some kind of stability. He strapped himself into the commander's seat, as the ship lurched yet again, and his fingers flew over the keyboard.

"Counterflood... _counterflood_ , damn it!" he muttered to himself. "Come on, come on—"

Stella managed to open valves on several ballast tanks, overriding all safeties and inhibits, letting tons of seawater in to trim out _Trident_ and level her out. A quick glance at the board told him all he needed to know.

They were listing slightly to starboard, with a ten-degree up angle on the planes, sinking tail first through four hundred meters and their rate of descent was picking up. _Trident_ was stern heavy and had lost almost all forward way. Stella ran the throttles on her powerplant to full, trying to counter the tail drag with as much forward speed as he could but it was a losing battle. _Trident's_ waterlogged stern was dragging her down by the tail faster than her engines could move her forward. She was losing speed and sinking, crabbing her way through the water.

_Got to counterflood and get her stern up_ , Stella told himself. His fingers flew over the controls. If he couldn't stop their descent and soon, _Trident_ would rapidly descend below crush depth. Below a thousand meters, her hull would crumple like a wad of paper and all aboard would perish in a particularly gruesome way.

"I hope to God that compartment is secure," he muttered. He checked the panel to his right. Indicators showed the hatch had been shut and secured.

It was time to open the emergency air flasks. Emergency blow and pray to God they had enough air to evacuate the compartment and put _Trident_ back up at the ice level.

Then it would be a race to see if she could bore her way back up through the ice before her air ran out and she slid back down to the depths again.

"Time to get the borer started," he said. He went through the start sequence.

Then he took a deep breath. When the emergency air flasks were open full, air at several hundred psi would begin screaming into the compartment on G deck and into all _Trident's_ ballast tanks. He wasn't sure if the troopers trapped in the compartment would survive the blow. If there was a merciful God in heaven, they would all drown before that happened.

Stella swallowed hard and pressed the buttons to start the blow.

A blast of high-pressure air shrieked into G deck.

For Johnny Winger, now at nanoscale with his embedded ANAD, it was like riding a gnat through a hurricane, like riding a roaring river down a waterfall. He immediately retracted all of ANAD's effectors in an attempt to ride out the storm. Then he hunkered down and slogged his way forward, trying to get a read on anything unusual up ahead, high thermals, high EMs, an acoustic signature, anything.

Somehow, some way, he had to locate the bots of the Freeman swarm and engage.

Winger got on the crewnet. "Turbo, you and Deeno take your embeds and fab some kind of shielding for that valve. See if you can stop the water or slow it down." The inrushing water was already pooling up to his knees and rising fast. "Maybe that'll help Stella."

"I'm on it, Skipper." Turbo sloshed through the cold swirling water toward the stanchion where the breach had occurred.

Just then, Winger got an acoustic ping. He checked his board. Sure enough, ANAD's sensors had detected something unusual up ahead, through the driving sleet of water molecules, a faint echo, maybe a spark of thermal activity above average. Could be some bots assembling something...or disassembling something. He revved up propulsors to max and steered the master assembler on that heading.

The reading ebbed and flowed so he steered as best could through the maelstrom, tacking first one way, then another, trying to work upstream against the onslaught of molecules from the flood.

There. _Gotcha_.

Winger chopped propulsors and probed ahead with electromagnetic fingers. Density going up. _Those ain't no water molecules_ , he told himself. Cautiously, he probed some more and brought ANAD around to approach from the side, gaining a different aspect view of the targets.

Slowly, ghostly shapes began to materialize out of the fog. Freeman bots, thousands of them. As he closed in, he could see the elongated multi-lobed form of the assemblers...squat barbells festooned with all manner of effectors and grabbers. Whirling propulsors at both ends, spinning into a blur as the bots fought to maintain position.

It was like nothing he had ever seen before.

Winger worked his config controls, setting up ANAD to engage. Carbene grabbers, enzymatic knife, bond disrupters, everything was ready. ANAD flexed its nanoscale fists and drove forward, spoiling for a fight.

The two formations came together and sparks flew, as bond disrupters ripped at effectors, liberating millions of electron volts. The bots thrashed and hacked, searching for weak spots, closing, then backing off to find another angle. It was a boxing match, feint here, jab there, grasp and thrust, parry and kick.

In the last seconds before the grapple, Winger had noticed an open seam in the Freeman bots' outer casing, right amidships, between whirling effectors above and below, almost like a waist belt. He surmised it was a structural join, a connection drawing together assembled segments of the bots' scaffolding. Could be a weak spot.

If I could just get a bond disrupter in there—

Throughout the battle front, ANAD had replicated uncountable trillions of assemblers and each one was slaved to the master. Whatever move and maneuver Winger made was instantly copied and repeated by every replicant. Now, Winger twisted and turned to bring his forward disrupters to bear on the enemy bot's midsection.

Just a little further—he shuddered as ANAD was ripped by the enemy's carbene grabber. ANAD recoiled slightly, losing effector tips in a spinning puff of atoms. _Ouch. That had to hurt...._

He closed in again, shielding himself from assault, extending his own disrupters as far forward as they would go. _Just a little bit further_....there!

He let it go. The disrupter tore at valence electrons that hovered like a cloud over the mid-section seam. Instantly, the seam buckled and gave way. An explosive cloud of electrons erupted, sparking and sizzling like oil on a gas grill. The bot's outer casing buckled and tore away in a frenzied thrashing, as more bonds were severed. Its props and effectors spun down and the momentum of the bond break sent the bot cartwheeling away.

It had worked.

Johnny Winger knew that in every nanoscale combat encounter, there were always weaknesses in the enemy bots. The point of all the tactics was to find that weakness and exploit it, before the enemy did the same to you.

All up and down the battlefront, ANAD replicants duplicated the maneuver, closing with their opponents, grappling and punching, searching for the midwaist seam. Any opening, any letdown, and ANAD bond disrupters were there, zapping at the weak spot.

The water was soon churning and frothy with atom parts and molecule fragments.

And the Freeman swarm would be so much atom fluff.

Winger made sure his embedded bots were running the assault as he had demonstrated. Now, he had to do something about containing what was left of the Freeman swarm. Bots could be slashed and cut up, but if the master was intact, replication was just a matter of time. You had to go for the head, go for the brains. Find the master and its controller and shred the config engine. Once you did that, the bots couldn't re-assemble.

He shifted back to macroscale, fighting off the disorientation that always came with shifting back and forth, and surveyed the situation.

Turbo and Deeno were close by, clinging to a stanchion to stay upright, while they maneuvered their own embeds to replicate a patch for the hull valve breach. Icy cold water still poured in, but the water flow seemed to have slacked off. A shrieking blast of high-pressure air was still sweeping the compartment. It was Stella's effort to contain the flood, and drive the inrushing water out of the compartment, into _Trident's_ drains and bilge, where it could be flushed back into the sea.

Winger covered his ears and screamed at the top of his lungs, trying to equalize pressure inside his head. He had to find some kind of containment for the Freeman swarm while the bots were still neutralized. Then he hit on an idea. Why not just fabricate one?

Winger worked his wristpad controls, stealing a small element of ANAD replicants from his embed swarm. He hacked out a quick config for a containment vessel and set the replicants to work fabricating it. Then he programmed the ANAD master to steer all captured Freeman bots toward the vessel. It wasn't pretty but it should work. He'd have to make sure there weren't any Freeman bots left over. A final, very thorough sweep of the compartment would have to be done.

As he sloshed around the compartment, he realized that the patches Deeno and Turbo had fashioned seemed to be working. The water flow had been greatly reduced, now to just a thin stream. Around the bulkhead where the hull valve had once been, a shimmering globe of bots held back the water, except for the thin stream.

"Good work, guys," Winger told them. Just above the water surface, a faint mist drifted toward the containment vessel that his own ANAD embeds had just fashioned. The small capsule floated on top of the water. "Roundup time. The sooner we get these bastards corralled, the better."

"Amen to that, Skipper," said Deeno. She shook her head, trying to equalize pressure.

Winger located the intercom and told Stella the situation was under control on G deck. "Kill the blow, Captain. We're all getting a splitting headache."

Moments later, the emergency air died off and the shriek that had deafened them for the last few minutes dropped down to a faint whistle. The hull breach had been stopped and the worst of the water, now swirling around at ankle depth, had been driven down into _Trident's_ drain system.

The ship seemed stable enough. "I'm heading forward," Winger said. "Make sure all these bots get contained. Stella and I need to have a word." He slipped out into the gangway and made his way along the railing all the way to the command compartment on B deck.

Stella was in the commander's seat, scowling over a map on his board.

"We've got to return to base camp, Colonel." Stella tapped the map; it displayed an ice-level view of Europa's surface. _Trident's_ position was indicated with a blinking red dot.

"What's our status?" Winger asked. He studied the map, the track of their course and their current calculated position. "According to this, we have two more days to the Keeper's position."

" _Trident's_ taken a hell of a beating. And we don't know what's ahead. I need to surface the ship and do a thorough inspection. The best place to do that is back at base camp."

Winger took a deep breath. Although he was nominally the mission commander, he knew he had to defer to Stella when it came to _Trident._ "We got the Freeman swarm contained, Captain. And my troops have patched the breach on G deck...it should hold just fine."

Stella rubbed his eyes wearily. "All true enough, Colonel. But _Trident's_ my responsibility. My job is to get you to your target safe and sound. I can't guarantee that unless I can do a thorough inspection and make necessary repairs. That hull breach may be patched for now but it needs to be looked at. And my controls, especially the stern planes, are sluggish. Maybe Freeman did something to the mechanism back there. Then there's the buoyancy control system. You don't go through an emergency blow like that without checking everything out. Hell, we could blow a seal or another valve an hour from now and be in even worse shape. No—" Stella was firm, "we bore through the ice at the very least and put _Trident_ back on the surface. If necessary, she can be careened on the ice and checked over visually."

Winger wasn't fully convinced. "What's _Trident's_ condition now?"

Stella shrugged. "Where do you want me to start? We've got propulsion and some buoyancy control. The borer seems to be okay. But I don't want to test the hull at any greater depth, until she's checked out. With all due respects, your bots that patched the hull are just bots. I want something stronger before we go on...we have no idea what's ahead."

"You're recommending we surface the ship, do inspections and make repairs?"

"That's what I'm recommending. Not only proper procedure but common sense dictates we check ourselves out thoroughly. We could lose the whole ship if we don't...then what happens to your mission?"

Winger knew this would have to be sent back to Quantum Corps and UNISPACE for a decision.

"We can't lose any more time, Captain," he told Stella. He looked out a nearby porthole. Nothing to see. Europa's ocean was black as night. They might as well have been swallowed by a black hole. "The mission's too important. Millions of lives on Earth depend on whether we can find and disable that Keeper system. Rogue swarms are advancing everywhere. Every hour's delay costs lives."

"What good can we do them if _Trident's_ destroyed or disabled?"

Winger had to admit Stella had a point. "I've got swarms that can help," he said. "We've got the best configs. You need any patches, any tools, anything at all...Quantum Corps swarms can make it."

"Can we even trust our own swarms?" Stella asked. He checked his board, saw that _Trident_ was nosing down again and he trimmed her bow planes to level the ship. They were still losing buoyancy somewhere. "Look at Freeman...how many more Freemans are there around here? I knew he was an angel. But I didn't know he'd been turned. Are there any more angels on board? Any more surprises? Can you even trust your own people, Colonel?"

Finally, after more heated discussions and a few consultations with Quantum Corps and UNISPACE, the decision came in: _Trident_ would make all necessary repairs while underway and the mission would proceed.

Stella wasn't satisfied but there was little he could do. Of necessity, he accepted Winger's offer and the Detachment's embedded swarms were put to work making repairs, clearing debris and patching things up.

After a few hours, Stella gave the word to all hands: _Trident_ was resuming her course, three hundred meters below the ice surface of Europa, heading for the suspected location of the Keeper system that was thought to be guiding all swarm tactics and movements on Earth.

Rathmore Chaos and the calculated coordinates of the Keeper were still two days away, by Stella's reckoning. Somewhere hundreds of meters below the Chaos, the Keeper system lurked. Somehow they had to find it.

If _Trident_ and Operation _Jovian Hammer_ couldn't locate and destroy the Keeper, the situation back on Earth was bleak.
CHAPTER 9

Near Foggia, Italy

January 1, 2100

1730 hours local

OmniVision / Solnet Video Feed from drone autocam....

Reporter Jin Lee hitched up her helmet and dismounted from the crewtrac, following the rest of Eagle Squad. She found the ground rubbly and covered with scattered debris. Ahead, a white-washed stone _appartamento_ was riddled with shell holes, charred and singed with HERF and coilgun fire.

All along the Via Trinitapoli approaching Foggia, they had seen the same thing: buildings smashed into rubble, gaping craters, burning cars, a train station reduced to smoldering ash, either from Sanctuary Patrol return fire or from the swarms. The outskirts of the city were a wasteland of ash and soot and charred stone and other things that Jin Lee preferred not to think about.

Her editors wanted vid. Pictures were worth a thousand words and all that. What was happening to the people...the Normals, some had taken to calling them. What were their lives like? What did they eat and drink? Did they sleep? What was daily life like in the middle of Hell?

The rest of the squad had dismounted. Sgt Benes circled his fingers over his head; the universal sign for 'gather around.' The troopers closed in.

"Our orders are to recon this sector. Battalion says there's been recent swarm activity outside the town. Looks like they're right, from what I can see. We'll start with this building and work our way down the road. Captain Lopez wants this by the book, so no horsing around...no funny business. Wise guys get killed here...is that clear?"

A chorus of ' _yessirs'_ erupted from the assembled men.

"Very well... _move out!"_

At Benes' orders, Eagle Squad separated into three-man assault teams and headed for the front entrance of the _appartamento_. There was a circular drive, lined with shredded remains of shrubbery and a canopy over the entrance. _Or had been_ , Jin Lee noticed. What was left of the canopy and the façade made the Solnet reporter wonder how anything could still be alive inside.

"Dronecam, maintain overhead perspective, wide-angle, and follow me." Jin Lee hustled after Benes, turning to make sure the pigeon-sized ornithopter obeyed. The drone healed about and settled into a steady forward drift, its microwings churning and chittering ten feet above her. On her wristpad, Lee watched the vid feed coming from its cameras. _Should be a good intro, nice and dramatic_ , she told herself. _Edit can add sound effects later._

" _Recording_ now _...this is Jin Lee of Solnet Omnivision, on the outskirts of the town of Foggia. I'm embedded with Eagle Squad, Alpha Company of the Sanctuary Patrol, Central Mediterranean Division. We're investigating this sector at the request of Battalion Headquarters...apparently, intelligence shows recent swarm activity in the area. Right now, we're approaching what looks like an apartment building...you can see the coilgun and HERF scorch marks on the side...most of the front entrance is smashed. Sergeant Benes has orders to enter the building and search for survivors...Normals, the troops are now calling them—we'll follow them in...as soon as we're cleared—"_

Benes was in the lead. His three-man assault team approached some blasted tree stumps and hunkered down behind them. A few finger signals from the Sergeant caused the squad's Superfly drones to be launched. Three of the bots _zipped_ into the air over the tree stumps and took off toward the entrance, careening and weaving their way into the debris. Nearby, a mustachioed corporal watched the feed on his wristpad. On Benes's orders, Jin Lee ordered her own dronecam to hold position.

Mustache reported right away. "I got movement, Sarge. Multiple pings, human or human-like, can't tell at this time."

"Show me," Benes grunted.

Mustache, whose real name was Ivanchik, ported the imagery to Benes's wristpad. The imagery was combo, part thermal, part visible, part radar, a composite image. Jin Lee craned over to get a peek.

"Where is it coming from?" she asked of no one in particular.

"Inside," said Ivanchik. "An atrium or some kind of open space...I'm counting three, maybe four targets." He looked closer at his display. "Targets outside too...three o'clock and closing...."

The squad waited in silence. Presently a young woman with a baby stroller appeared at one end of the circular driveway. She wore a dark green robe and a hat of some kind, piled on top of long blond curls. She pushed the stroller toward the squad, now hunkered down along some hedges.

Benes signaled for three troopers to move forward. "Recon the entrance. Ivan...get your drones overhead...I want coverage. And keep an eye on this female...don't let her get too close." Benes had a bad feeling about this...they looked like Normals, but you could never tell for sure. Maybe too normal.

The three troopers sent forward waited until the woman had passed by, pushing her stroller. She never showed any sign of concern, or even of noticing the soldiers. That was odd in itself.

Inside the _appartamento_ atrium, the targets turned out to be just as ordinary. Two workman pouring cement around a small decorative pool. Several children playing hide and seek among some wicker furniture. Ivanchik zoomed in, commanding Superfly to sniff the air around the targets, probing for unusual thermal signatures, a sure sign of swarm activity, as bots had to break atom bonds like crazy to maintain any kind of structure.

Nothing. Nothing at all.

Benes breathed a sigh of relief. He saw the woman in the stroller make an abrupt about face and begin pushing her baby back the opposite direction along the drive. _Out for an evening stroll,_ he told himself. He willed himself to believe that.

"Squad, _move out_ ," he told his men. "Spread out and keep your distance. Recon the grounds and first floor. I want to make sure we're clear of bugs. Battalion says they're around somewhere."

"I'll swat 'em with my fly swatter," Ivanchik joked. He hoisted up his own coilgun and followed the others, keeping one eye on his wristpad feed from Superfly.

Jin Lee moved out with Benes, motioning her own dronecam to follow. She continued her running commentary for the Solnet piece, keeping her voice low, wary of what the other soldiers of Eagle Squad were doing.

" _The unit seems to have encountered what appear to be Normals...a lady pushing a baby, some kids inside, some workmen. They have orders to investigate and secure the place. There have been reports of recent swarm movements through this area, just outside Foggia—"_

Jin Lee followed Benes and Ivanchik through a revolving door into the atrium of the _appartamento._ The children and the workmen went on about their business, paying no attention to the Sanctuary Patrol troops staring at them. Jin Lee found that strange, even a bit unnerving.

"— _this part of the town seems to have been spared the worst of the infestation, though there is plenty of evidence of swarm activity in the countryside...this part of Italy is agricultural, sometimes called 'the granary of Italy...the first signs of—"_

But Jin Lee halted in mid-sentence. Shouts erupted from the soldiers combing through a small bistro to her right. There was a flash, then a concussive _BOOM!_ and a hot searing wind washed over her. Jin Lee was knocked off her feet and wound up in a tangle of plastic chairs and tables.

Someone had lit off a HERF barrage. As Jin Lee staggered up, she saw something that made her blood run cold.

The entire playground, just moments before home to several children noisily chasing each other, was now gone, dematerialized, morphed into a glowing, pulsating fog. The workmen beside the concrete and brick wall, were gone too. Blobs of bots swirled in their place.

" _LOOK OUT!"_ someone yelled.

" _Get down_!"

"Bugs at ten o'clock... _light 'em up_! _Fry the bastards_!"

In seconds, HERF barrages and coilgun fire stitched beams of death across the atrium.

Jin Lee scrambled behind an overturned table. She checked the link to the dronecam...amazingly, it was still open. The ornithopter had somehow survived the first barrages. Now, it was circling the atrium in safe mode, peering down on the developing carnage.

" _HOLY CRAP_...look at the—"

" _What the fuck--!!"_

Her first inkling that something else was going down came when the dronecam careened and veered off to one side. Jin Lee almost lost her balance trying to follow the image. She stared up, saw the drone cartwheeling through the air and—

That's when she realized the whole _appartamento_ , the entire friggin' building, was coming apart.

"The whole mother's a swarm...nothing but one big bag of bugs!"

Someone lit off more HERF barrages and the thunderclaps of hot rf waves boomed out across the atrium. Jin Lee lost her balance again and fell face first into a fountain, but not before she saw one entire wall dissolve in front of her, melting away like butter on a hot street, and in seconds, the whole atrium was enveloped in swarmbots, thick, keening, slashing and swelling like a slow-motion explosion.

Over the stutter of small-arms fire, the boom of HERF barrages and the shriek of the bots, she heard a faint voice. It was Benes, hunkered down behind a scorched planter ten meters away, yelling into his wristcom:

" _Eagle One to Excalibur...Eagle One to Excalibur...we are Code Black just outside Foggia, sending target coordinates...say again, we are Code Black, being overrun by bugs...request immediate fire support---Eagle One to Excalibur—"_

"FALL BACK! FALL BACK to the crewtracs--!!" That was Lumumba, the company top sergeant. The burly African noncom circled his hands, calling all troops to retreat. " _Get the hell out of here right now!_ "

One by one, the soldiers of Eagle Squad pulled back, more or less in echelon order, firing off a few bursts, then peeling off to retreat out of the collapsing, dissolving building.

Jin Lee gave up the dronecam bird and scooted out with the last of them.

She ran blindly, stumbling, clawing at the bots that swelled outward, until she felt hands snag her arms and pull her to the ground. Someone lay on top of her and covered her body. She squirmed at first, twisted, wanted to see, witness what was happening—she was after all an accredited Solnet war correspondent—but the weight of her rescuer was too great. Through the crook of an arm—it turned out to be Kantrowicz—one of the HERF gunners—she saw the air support Benes had requested, swooping down out of bug-darkened skies.

The air was thick with them—lifters, drones, Superflys and BATs—a great whirling flock of Sanctuary Patrol and Quantum Corps aircraft, all shapes and sizes.

That's when the real barrage started. It was like being in the middle of a thunderstorm.

The fight was chaotic and loud, with no sense of who was winning or where anyone was. The very people she had once considered Normals, just average village townfolk, had turned out to be angels, human simulacra, swarms masquerading as people. Even the building, maybe even the whole town, was a front. Nothing but a fake, done up to resemble human beings and manmade structures.

The swarms had set a trap, an ambush. And it had nearly worked.

Jin Lee managed to squirm out from under Kantrowicz, who had hoisted himself up to join in the battle. The big pollock was squatting down behind some bushes, laying into an advancing swarmfront with one HERF discharge after another, cycling his weapon as fast as he could.

The bugs were shattered by each pulse and sheets of them fell clattering to the pavement with each burst, but still they came, swelling in behind the gap and plugging any holes.

The initial engagement lasted for maybe twenty minutes, surging back and forth across the grounds. The _appartamento_ had vanished in a fog bank. Only the lower levels, some of the portico and canopy around the entrance, and a few columns around the drive, remained. The whole edifice had just melted into bots, billions and billions of bots, now forming up in clots and clouds, swooping down on Eagle Squad, which was trapped between what was left of the building and the crewtracs.

If the lifters and drones and BATs couldn't hold off the attack, Eagle Squad would disappear into the belly of the nanobotic beast.

The first battle of Foggia would last most of the night.

The sun was disappearing behind the distant spires of a cathedral when the full force of the swarm assault finally seem to slacken. Through relentless counterattack and individual probes and slugging matches with Eagle Squad, the worst of the swarms was slowly contained and pushed back, meter by meter, along the Viale Fortore toward Rome.

Jin Lee stayed hunkered down behind the crewtracs as Benes and his men maneuvered in close-quarters combat against swarm elements trying to flank their position. Periodically, she uploaded reports to the satellite and once attempted to get her dronecam airborne for some video. Sergeant Benes quickly squashed that attempt, with a growl.

"Keep that bird on the ground! I don't want anything interfering with our air cover. I'll tell you when you can put that bird up."

Jin Lee commanded the drone to land in a nearby field of rubble and there it stayed most of the night.

The sun was just peeking over the olive trees at the end of the street when Benes' voice crackled over the crewnet.

"Eagle Squad, prepare to move out. Battalion wants us to establish a perimeter around this building, or what's left of it, out to a kilometer radius. Once the last of the bugs are smashed, we've got to sweep the street and the surrounding alleys, clear all Normals out and hold the position. We're being relieved at noon...Dog and Charlie Squads are taking over."

Kantrowicz, the HERF gunner, was near Jin Lee. He stood up, slung his weapon, and yawned, stretching. "About damn time. I'm hungry."

"Sausage and bacon, Sarge?" came another voice.

" _Move out_ ," came Benes's voice. "Lubitsky, you take point. Those villas over there, that's our first target." Benes waved at Jin Lee. "Come on...you can put up that bird now, but no further than a hundred meters away—"

The Solnet reporter was cramped and cold from a night lying on wet grass behind the crewtrac. The trac driver, Lumumba, cranked up the beast and it snorted gray and black smoke before coughing into life. Jin Lee climbed aboard and settled inside, turning on her pod to record a stream of commentary.

" _It's dawn and Eagle Squad is on the move again_ ," she murmured in a low voice. Jin Lee sat wedged in between two troopers, who paid her no attention. They tore off wrappers from their foodbars and munched loudly, slurping water and juice from canteens.

" _The Squad has orders to establish a perimeter around the appartamento and hold it until relieved later today. This means they will have to sweep the area, and conduct a house-to-house search for any pockets of resistance. So far, everything is quiet. There isn't much left of the appartamento. The whole building was one big nest of bots. Mostly it's rubble and smoking debris now._

" _It's a crazy war,"_ Jin Lee went on. The crewtrac started up and bounced off to follow the troopers on their sweep. A vidscreen showed the scene outside as the snorting vehicle bounced over smashed cars and broken masonry. " _The enemy is everywhere. Literally anything and everything could be a swarm: buildings, cars, people walking along the street. This road, the Via Trinitapoli...was nothing but an ambush, a trap, laid by the swarms, to lure our soldiers into disaster. It almost worked."_

They rumbled down the street until the first villa came into view. It was blindingly white in the early morning sunshine, even through the pall of smoke from the night's battle. The trac jerked to a halt and the troops inside hustled out the rear hatch. Jin Lee followed.

They didn't bother knocking at the villa doors. A few kicks and the heavy wood was splinters, clinging by broken hinges. Ivanchik, Kantrowicz, Lumumba and the others surged in, weapons at the ready.

"CLEAR LEFT!" yelled Lumumba, sweeping his weapon across one sector.

"CLEAR RIGHT!" came back Ivanchik.

Kantrowicz advanced cautiously across a small courtyard, filled with broken furniture. There was light in the windows ahead. He crept up on a kitchen. Sausage and egg smells wafted out into the courtyard. Someone's stomach grumbled.

Kantrowicz took a quick peek. It was a domestic scene he encountered: a young woman tending a stove, several children toddling about the kitchen, kicking at a soccer ball. A bearded man was perusing a slate at the table, perhaps catching up on the news. The trooper held up four fingers, indicating the number inside. He tried the door. It was unlocked.

Quickly, the troopers of Eagle Squad slipped inside and took up firing positions about the kitchen. The woman screamed, dropped a spatula onto the floor. The children started crying. The man lowered his slate.

" _Chi sei?"_ asked the woman. "Who are you?"

The man started to rise. He had a knife in his hand. " _Va via!..._ get out, all of you!"

When the entire incident was replayed later--it had been captured on video by Jin Lee's dronecam, hovering like a bird outside the window-- Specialist First Class Ivanchik would insist under repeated questioning that something about the man, his face, his hands, the knife, triggered a reaction.

"He was an angel...I'm sure of it," Ivanchik would insist later. "His hand was all blurry, fuzzy, you know, like a swarm of bots. I just reacted—"

Others weren't so sure. Kantrowicz told the investigators there was a faint haze in the kitchen. "Maybe it was from the stove...the woman, you know, maybe she was cooking something that smoked."

The first exchange came simultaneously from Kantrowicz and Ivanchik. Coilguns erupted and in seconds, the tiny kitchen of the villa was a bloody, smoking mess. Walls were shredded, furniture blasted into rubble and the four humans were quickly reduced to scorched corpses, lying in heaps on the blood-soaked tile floor.

For good measure, trooper Singh hosed the place down with several HERF blasts, like being in the middle of a searing hot thunderclap. The rf pulses blew out a wall at the back, opening onto more rooms, which were themselves shredded and scorched by more coilgun fire.

The entire episode lasted about thirty seconds.

"Cease fire... _CEASE FIRE_!!" yelled Benes.

Jin Lee made sure her dronecam got some good video. Benes immediately barked at the reporter. "Bring that bird down now! No more pictures!"

The weary, amped-up troopers of Eagle Squad reacted as many Sanctuary Patrol soldiers reacted throughout the Containment Wars. They were honed to a fine razor's edge, ready to fight hard with a second's provocation, pumped and primed to explode with unrelenting fury on an enemy that rarely stood still long enough to engage.

Something happened in that little villa on the outskirts of Foggia and it was in no way unusual. Eagle Squad had opened fire on what they were sure were angels and swarm elements, bots and bugs, ready to consume them, disassemble them into atom fluff if they hesitated even a second. All the targets were quickly killed by mass HERF and coilgun fire and the villa essentially leveled into smoking debris by Quantum Corps drones and Superfly aerobots circulating overhead.

All of it captured by Jin Lee's dronecam.

It was only later, hours later, after closer examination of the bodies of the husband, wife and two children, that Sergeant Lazlo Benes fully understood just what had happened. Eagle Squad had just murdered four innocent Italian civilians. They weren't angels or bots or bugs or enemy swarm elements at all...just frightened humans, Normals all of them, caught up in the middle of a dirty war, a war where enemy and friend look just alike and no one can be trusted at first sight. The battle front in the conflict between ANAD and Man was everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

Benes nearly broke down from the impact of what he had just ordered.

"They were just... civilians—just _people_ —" he sobbed. He kicked angrily at a chair, which splintered under his boot.

Jin Lee tried first to interview the sergeant. Then she tried just to comfort him, to console him. He twisted away from her and left the kitchen, heading outside. All the men of Eagle Squad stood around looking dumbfounded at the carnage they had created, stunned. No one said anything. What was there to say?

Benes kicked at more rubble, then slung his coilgun carbine, just as the squad comms crackled to life. New orders from Battalion came in: enemy swarms were on the move on the other side of Foggia, moving along southbound roads toward the central square and the Piazza Cavour, from Rome and nearby cities. Eagle Squad was needed to shore up defenses in this sector. They would have to break off their search and destroy mission east of Foggia and re-deploy along the highway west of town, the highway to Rome.

Back in the crewtrac, Jin Lee wrapped up her report with some personal observations. She kept her voice low, mindful of the grim silence that was thick inside the bouncing vehicle. Kantrowicz, LeBain, Ivanchik and the others kept their eyes closed, or stared a thousand miles off outside the walls of the cramped crew compartment, seeing things only they could see.

"... _there's panic everywhere now, even inside Eagle Squad...no one can tell who or what is real and what is a swarm...even inanimate objects can dematerialize into swarms...a corner deli, a statue, an abandoned car, could seem completely normal one minute and in the next minute, morph into a killer swarm bent on destruction. You can't even trust your own buddies, your squadmates. It's damned near impossible to fight an enemy who looks like you and acts like your best friend...there have even been reports of swarm angels infiltrating Sanctuary Patrol and Quantum Corps units and masquerading as troopers, as Normals, only to turn on their units at strategic moments...how do you fight such a foe?_ Can _we fight such a foe and win? It's like we're fighting ourselves...or a mirror image of ourselves."_

Jin switched off the pod, sank back in the web seat and closed her eyes. She was tired, dead tired. The crewtrac jerked and jolted and bounced along the road, slogging through rubble-strewn-streets and muddy fields on the outskirts of Foggia, on its way to a new sector, on its way to fight Config Zero and the swarms somewhere else.
CHAPTER 10

Paris, France

January 4, 2100

0630 hours local

Liam Winger scowled at his toast and made a face. "Howie, I _said_ grape jelly...this isn't grape jelly. It's strawberry—"

The housebot whirred over beside the table. " _Begging Master Liam's pardon, I will correct the situation._ " The bot extended a grasper and reached for the plate.

"Howie, leave it. Liam, eat your toast now. You've both got to be dressed and down to the bus stop in twenty minutes. Come on, get your butts going."

The bot retracted its grasper. " _As you wish, ma'am_." Then it scuttled off to continue with the dishes.

"Mom, I wanted _grape_ —" Liam whined.

"Tough. Eat your toast and then get your stuff, young man. I mean _right now_."

It was Monday, first school day of the new year and a new century and Dana Tallant was ready to pull her hair out. Liam and his big sister Rene were being impossible and they were going to miss the bus if they didn't get a move on. It didn't help that their Dad, Colonel Johnny Winger, was away on a trip...a long way away, assigned to Operation _Jovian Hammer_ , somewhere underneath the icepack of Europa about a gazillion miles away. The kids missed their father. They were energetic and boisterous as five and seven-year olds were, but she could tell immediately when their father wasn't present.

They became even more impossible.

Dana Tallant gave some last minute instructions to Howie the house bot, then scooted off to their bedroom to finish getting ready herself. The liftbus for the Academy Superieure was never late, not even by a minute, and she didn't want to chance the kids missing their ride to the private school they had been attending the last year. It really was a very good school and both Liam and Rene were doing well.

No sense messing with success.

Fifteen minutes later, Dana lined them up at the front door for final inspection, like Quantum Corps cadets: tablet and book bag, lunch box, ear and eye-pods, jackets...it was frightfully cold and a half inch of snow had dusted Paris overnight, making travel even more of a challenge.

"Okay, troops, you'll do." She straightened Liam's cap and played with Rene's honey-blond curls, then shoved them out the door. Down the lift forty stories to the ground floor lobby of La Tour St Vincent—they had called the big tower overlooking the Bois de Meudon home for almost two years now—and outside to the bus stop.

The liftbus _hmmm'ed_ along and came to a stop just three minutes later, disgorging early morning commuters into the pedestrian plaza. Liam and Rene queued up to board.

"When can we talk to Dad?" they both asked, almost in unison.

That always cut right to her heart; she knew they missed their father badly. "Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, guys. It's a long way to Jupiter, you know—"

"Yeah, five hundred gazillion miles," said Liam. "You already said that. Will he come on the vid?"

"Sure...and I'm betting it'll be tonight," she told them. "He'll be right there on the screen, bigger than ever, just like he was in the den playing _Salamander_."

"Except he really won't be there...it's the time delay," Rene said, knowingly. "It's too far for the signals...they get tired. It takes half an hour, sometimes, when you ask a question."

"Right, of course, honey." Dana shoo'ed them up the steps and into the bus. Having Johnny Winger so far away was tough on all of them. "Up you go—"

"Hey, Mom...our driver's different—"

"He looks funny."

"Shhh, both of you...that's not nice."

"But—"

The driver of the liftbus wasn't the normal cherubic fellow that the busline had used on this route for the last few months. What was his name—Dordain, or something? She didn't think anything of it. But all the kids were giving this new fellow a wide berth. There was something about—

"Name's Weygand, ma'am." Even _having_ a driver for the liftbus was an anachronism, since the things were highly automated and could drive themselves everywhere they went. Concession to the unions and the traditionalists, she figured. "Mssr. Dordain is out sick today...I'm filling in." Weygand seemed a bit nervous, she thought, throwing a faint smile in her direction. His hands clasped and unclasped the steering wheel, which actually did nothing, since the bus followed mag strips in the road for steering. He did seem a little odd...a little pale in the face. Maybe he'd been sick himself.

"Behave today," she called after Liam and Rene who shuffled down the aisle toward their seats. They were already greeting friends and laughing. Dana Tallant nodded to Weygand, who still had that fake smile pasted on his pale face, and stepped down off the bus. The doors whispered shut and the bus was off with an electric whoosh to the Academy.

Now she had to get herself ready for work. Day shift at the Quartier General UNIFORCE, on the Montparnasse. Dana rode the lift back up to their flat and went at the task with well-practiced efficiency. When you were Q3 to General Kraft and Liaison Officer to Sanctuary Patrol, you learned how to do everything with maximum efficiency. UNIFORCE could hardly function with anything less.

The staff jetcab came less than an hour later, alighting on the hoverpad atop the tower's sixty-eighth floor. Ten minutes later, Major Dana Tallant was scanning in through Security and taking the lift down to her office in Ops.

The first order of business was preparing for a briefing later that morning, 0900 hours, in CINCQUANT's offices. The subject was the tactical situation across the Mediterranean theater, the disposition and status of UNIFORCE positions and what Config Zero and the swarms were likely to do next. General Kraft would be there, along with General Chekwarthy, CINCSANC, and other top command staff.

Key decisions would have to be made and soon. The Bugs were pushing north across the Med along a broad front, from the Balkans to Italy and they were threatening Gibraltar and the Iberian peninsula. If UNIFORCE couldn't hold their current positions, all of Europe would be defenseless. East Africa, west and north of the treaty sanctuary set forth in the Truce of Alexandria five years ago, was already lost.

Tallant wondered about her husband and Operation _Jovian Hammer_. Johnny Winger was a long way away. The children missed their Dad and so did she. She'd been TDY'ed to UNIFORCE Paris in CINCQUANT's Q3 Operations shop for the better part of two years now, with extra duties as Liaison Officer to Sanctuary Patrol's commanding officer, General Chekwarthy. She missed Table Top Mountain and the wide open spaces of Idaho. Most of all, she missed her husband.

Now I know how lab rats feel, caught in a maze. No way out. Scurry around for bits of food.

What she really wanted was a combat posting. Hell, men and women were dying every day across the Med. She was still an atomgrabber at heart, still a decent code and stick jockey. She could fling atoms and surf quantum states with the best of them; she did a regular turn in the sim tank down on the third floor and kept up her ratings every month pushing nanobots through their paces. It had to be a monumental waste of talent to assign her to slide shows and briefings, didn't it?

But that was her assigned mission today. Dana Tallant sighed and headed for CINCQUANT's office.

Kraft was in a sour mood this morning. He nodded gruffly as the others assembled. Beside CINCQUANT was Chekwarthy. Lofton, from Q2, opened the briefing with the intel picture.

"What's the situation in Italy, Lofton?" Kraft asked. He sipped at a steaming cup of coffee.

The Q2 officer was a lean, sallow-faced O-4, with a blond buzzcut. Tallant thought he looked like a big nail with two hands.

"It's a mixed bag, General. Foggia just fell, last night...swarms swept through and decimated elements of II Eurocorps and some Italian units...Campania Brigade and Abruzzi Nano Brigade were front and center. Even the _Caribinieri Napoli_ had men at the front. We couldn't even slow the Bugs down...new configs...they change practically every hour and we can't counter them. We have Quantum Corps units north of the line of engagement..." Lofton highlighted a ragged line across the Italian peninsula, from the Adriatic to the Tyrrhenian Sea. "...that would be 1st and 2nd Nano Battalions out of Balzano. Plus we've got SP units engaged with the Italians. North Africa Squadron and what's left of 1st Med."

"My boys got chewed up pretty good last night too," Chekwarthy mumbled. "Came through on the tactical net overnight. All we're doing is delaying the inevitable. We've got to re-group and try something new."

"There's something else, sir," Lofton went on. "Q2 Balzano's getting reports that there are Humans, Normals of some type, inside Config Zero's command staff. Humans helping the Bugs out."

"You mean saboteurs?" Kraft asked.

"More like collaborators...it's still sketchy, but our sources did come up with one name, sir...Theo Souvranamh—"

That bombshell caused a visible flinch in Jurgen Kraft's face. " _The_ Souvranamh...the Thai Red Hammer boss?"

Lofton was tight-lipped. "We're checking bonafides now, sir, but we think so."

Kraft regarded Lofton warily. "I thought we had run that bastard off into space somewhere...Mars, I heard, or maybe a deep mineshaft on some godforsaken asteroid, if we were lucky."

That was Dana Tallant's cue. "Sir, I found something in the archives yesterday that bears on the current situation. Time and time again, we've seen this tactic. And it bites us in the ass every time. If Theo Souvranamh and Red Hammer are reconstituting an alliance with Config Zero, that could explain some of these tactics."

Kraft was still mulling over the implications of the Thai _neurotraficante_ resurfacing in cahoots with the Bug Master. "Proceed, Major Tallant."

"Well, sir—" Tallant racked up the sim and made sure all tablets and screens were synched. "This comes from the historical archives. Back in the 13th century, Mongol armies were running all over Asia and Europe. By about 1240, these armies, under Batu Khan—he was a grandson of Genghis Khan—were ready to move against Hungary. Two _toumans_ —basically about 20,000 men--were sent into Poland to take care of the Mongols' north flank, while another 40,000 men moved toward Hungary."

Tallant ran the sim and let everyone watch the animation of the armies in motion. "The European forces were a mishmash of Knights Templars, Teutonic Knights and others under the command of Prince Henry II. Most of Henry's soldiers weren't experienced at war. They were feudal levies and poorly armed peasants, conscripted right into the force. The two armies met at Liegnitz in 1241."

Tallant went on, narrating from prepared notes, while the sim executed. "As you can see on your screens, the European army deployed into four large groups. Their tactics were similar to the Crusaders. Heavy cavalry was the main striking force. Its primary purpose was to deliver a decisive charge into the enemy formation, to break it up. The cavalry were supported by infantry, protecting the rear while the knights charged, finishing off any unhorsed enemy cavalrymen.

"At the Battle of Liegnitz, the Mongols executed one of their favorite ruses and this is what we see Config Zero and the bugs doing now, again and again. I'm thinking they got this idea from one of the Normals collaborating with them."

Kraft was intrigued, leaning forward as the sim unfolded. "What is this tactic, Major?"

"Sir, it was called the _mangudai_ , a technique of feigned, or simulated retreat. The Mongols would attack first, then pretend to flee and then ambush their pursuers.

"The Mongols were very subtle in applying this tactic. When the first European group charged and attempted to close, Mongol light cavalry did not run off at first, but surrounded them and showered them with arrows, forcing them back. It was not until the Euros performed a second charge that the Mongols broke into what appeared to be a disorderly retreat. Encouraged, the Euro knights then pressed their attack, eager to come to grips with the elusive Mongol hordes and smash them for good. Prince Henry reinforced the apparent breakthrough with the rest of his cavalry. That's when the trap was sprung."

Tallant let the rest of the sim unfold, catching up to her narrative. "By the time Henry and his commanders realized what had happened, it was too late. They had entered a trap, a killing zone. Mongol horse archers flanked the charging knights and enveloped them from three sides, showering the Euros with a hail of arrows. Smoke bombs and fires added to the confusion and prevented the Euro infantry and cavalry from coordinating with each other. Once the Euro knights had been been peeled off from their infantry base, Mongol heavy cavalry rode down the Euro infantry where they stood. It was a slaughter—"

Kraft rubbed his chin. "The Mongols used the Euros' own zeal against them. Henry didn't use sound tactical judgment."

"No, sir, he did not. Henry himself was killed and his head was mounted on the end of a spear. By the end of the day, the Mongols had filled nine large sacks full of ears, by cutting off one from each slain Euro soldier on the battlefield. Euro casualties were at least 20,000 men, probably more. Mongol casualties were never known, but thought to be comparatively light."

Chekwarthy could see the analogy. "We're chasing after Config Zero's swarms, according to your analogy, Major, and getting drawn into a trap."

Tallant pressed home her point. "Sir, with all due respects, we're having enough trouble just keeping up with all the config changes the swarms are executing. They replicate and change config faster than we can respond. We could overcome that with better tactics, but our ground commanders keep getting suckered into a pursuit they can't win. They get themselves lured into traps and ambushes and whatever advantage we have is squandered right there. At the point of attack, we don't have the numbers or the right config. The result-" Tallant indicated the maps on nearby screens, detailing recent engagements across the Med, "—the results are similar to what the Mongols inflicted on the Euros at the Battle of Liegnitz in 1241."

Kraft stood up and began pacing. "If Config Zero's got Normals or some Humans with special expertise working for him, or it, or whatever the hell it is, we're in trouble. Somehow, we've got to find a way to blunt these rapid config changes. We've got to find a way to respond tactically. Look at the map...we're losing ground steadily in Italy, in the Balkans. My God, in a month, the Bugs will be marching down the Champs Elysee at this rate. Lofton, what's the latest on _Jovian Hammer_?"

Tallant took her time resetting the sim from the archives. She wanted to know herself about Johnny Winger and the task force.

Lofton's fingers flew over his tablet, searching for the latest intel scraps. "Last transmission from _Trident_ said they were recovering from their flooding casualty and proceeding with the mission. One of the crew, I think it was the executive officer, LT Freeman, turned out to be a swarm angel...a particularly good one. He or it is now in secure containment."

"Are they all right?" Tallant asked. "Any casualties?"

"None too serious, from what I can tell. _Trident's_ underway again, anticipating making her target coordinates in about a day and a half, our time. That's when the real mission begins."

"We've got to put this Keeper out of commission, for good," Chekwarthy said. "We need all the help we can get."

Kraft cut the briefing short. "We've got a big meeting with UNSAC at noon. The Commissioner wants all the details, good, bad and ugly. I'd like to give him some good news for once—"

'There isn't much—" Chekwarthy added. "At least, _Trident's_ back underway. They may be our best hope to cut off Config Zero from its base."

Dana Tallant went back to her cubicle, lost in thought. She had heard some of the reports about _Trident_ and the sabotage attempt. _Johnny's okay...that's all that matters._ It was a dangerous mission, critical to the war effort against Config Zero and the bot swarms. But she wasn't quite ready to give up her husband to the honor rolls just yet.

The rest of the day went quickly enough and when 1600 hours came, she found herself grabbing up her purse and tablet and heading upstairs to catch the jetcab back to La Tour St. Vincent. Hearing about _Trident's_ problems just made her worry all the more. She wanted to hold onto something, hold someone she loved close. Know she could trust those around her.

Johnny Winger was a gazillion miles away. But she still had Liam and Rene. She scurried down to the bus stop after dropping her things off, looking forward to seeing the kids again, just hugging them tight, knowing they were real and needed some loving.

The lift bus appeared exactly on schedule at 1630 hours and kids piled out, yelling, shoving and laughing. The driver had been changed again. It wasn't the same pale fellow from this morning. Among the last off were her kids. Rene and Liam both seemed more subdued than usual, clutching their tablets and bags and jostling with the other kids as they stepped off. They spotted Mom and came over for a perfunctory hug. Then they squirmed away as soon as they could. Dana was surprised and a bit disappointed, but kids were kids.

"Want a snack?" she asked, as she shooed them toward the lift and up to their apartment. "How was your day...learn anything interesting? Any math problems I can help with?"

"Sure, Mom," came the replies. Their minds were a million miles away.

She supervised changing of the clothes and a general wash-up, then marched them into the kitchen for cookies and juice.

Liam took his usual spot on the stool by the fridge. He putzed around with something on his tablet. Dana took a peek...it was some kind of animated vid, maybe homework, maybe something he got from another kid. Rene seemed unusually subdued, quiet, even a little mad at something. It was the way she set her jaw.

"What's wrong, honey, are you getting a fever?" Dana came over to kiss her daughter on the forehead, but the girl pulled away sharply and hid behind the breakfast bar, a deep pout on her face, refusing to be kissed.

_That isn't like her._ "I just want to see if you're sick...come here."

Rene shook her head and disappeared into her room, with her own tablet. Momentarily hurt, Dana shrugged it off and went ahead with getting supper ready. She had planned one of their favorites tonight: dino-wolf pizza and a salad, but Howie the housebot would have to go down to the commissary on the second floor for some groceries first. Rene read off the list to the bot, made sure it understood exactly what she wanted, then it scooted out the door and was off.

Later, while she was putting supper together and Liam was guiding Howie on a new way to set the table, she saw through the door that Rene had come out of her room and was playing with her tablet in the den.

_Some kind of game_ , she figured. She could hear birds and car crashes and lions roaring from the device. Liam tapped his Mom on her leg.

"What is it, honey? Have you got Howie trained on the table yet?"

"Mom, Howie's doing fine. I just showed him twice...he learned it real fast. Mom, it's about—" his voice lowered and he shook his head toward the den, toward his sister. "—it's Rene...it's something—"

It was the tone of his voice that triggered an alarm in the back of her mind. Instantly, Dana put down the grate and the cheese and squatted down to look at her young son at eye level. "What is it, Liam? What's wrong?"

Liam shrugged and his mouth tightened. "I don't know, Mom. Rene...it's like she's... _different_ somehow. She even looks different...I don't know, a little funny—"

Now the alarm bells were ringing loud and clear.

"What are you saying, Liam?"

"Mommy—"

Puzzled by this reaction, Dana decided to go see for herself. Rene was in the den. She had programmed her tablet to project a dollhouse and a few characters, which were dancing around the dollhouse. A small-scale animation.

She certainly seemed normal. "What kind of house is that, honey?"

Rene ignored her and continued tweaking the tablet, coaxing new moves and dances from the animated figures that pranced across the carpet. The dollhouse folded and cleaved and morphed itself into a new design.

A little more firmly. "Have you done your homework, Rene? You know the rules...no playing until homework is done."

Again, no response. No indication that her daughter even knew she was there. Rene sat in the middle of her animated figurines and tried to grab one. A faint smile came to her face.

Now, Dana was getting annoyed. This just would never do. "Honey, are you getting sick? Let me feel your forehead—"

She reached for her daughter, intending to draw her close. It was just then, trying to pull her by her arms, that Dana Tallant felt the first faint tingling sensation, the first faint keening buzz that was sure evidence of a nanobotic mechanism.

Instinctively, she pulled her hands back. That's when the full horror of what had happened hit her square in the face.

Rene was not Rene. This was not her daughter.

" _My God_ -" Dana choked, stuffing a fist in her mouth to keep from crying out. She tried to swallow, but found she couldn't. "It's an—" It was a swarm angel. A cloud of bots. Somehow, Rene was gone. Replaced by a nanobotic swarm tricked out to resemble her daughter.

That's when the real panic set in.

Dana Tallant backed away and her atomgrabber instincts kicked in. _Stay calm. Stay calm...you know what to do...My God, Rene, what has—_

Her first thought was for Liam. She backed out of the den and went back to the kitchen. Liam was still tinkering with Howie, playing with the remote to run the housebot through some new table-setting routine. Dana barely noticed, shoving Howie out of the way. She grabbed Liam and hugged him tightly, re-assured that her son was still her son...not some...cloud of bugs.

"Oh, Liam...Liam, you're okay—"

Liam squirmed free. "Mommy, that hurts...I was teaching Howie how to set the—"

"Liam, listen to me. This is very important." She separated the remote from her son's hands, placed it on the floor. "I want you to go upstairs. Right now. You know that closet where we keep the towels and rags..."

"Yeah?"

"Go into that closet and shut the door. Just stay there until I come get you. And don't open the door until I say...it's a new game."

"Mommy, I don't—"

"Scoot. _Now_!" She slapped him on the butt. Reluctantly, Liam scuttled off and padded up the stairs. Presently, she heard a door shut. She hoped it was the closet door.

Now what?

After a few minutes, and a quick sip of the wine she had been planning on having with dinner, she was able to swallow her horror and calm down.

_What should I do now? How dangerous is this creature? If I confront it, will it go big bang, maybe come after me and Liam_? A thousand questions came to mind.

She decided to place a call to UNIFORCE, to the watch desk, the emergency action center. Maybe Sanctuary Patrol as well.

Above all, she knew she had to remain calm. But her heart was thudding and she found breathing difficult. _Stay calm. Stay calm, girl. You know what to do_.

She went to the back patio, making sure Rene or whatever she was, didn't follow and couldn't hear. Their view looked out over the wooded acres of the Bois de Meudon. Lights were coming on throughout the Montparnasse. Jetcabs circled the Luxembourg Gardens a few kilometers away, like fireflies in the early evening twilight. At least, she hoped they were jetcabs.

Dana called the UNIFORCE emergency action number. She slowed her words down, biting off each one, narrating with exaggerated clearness to the duty officer exactly what had happened.

His name was Lieutenant Benali. The duty officer promised to contact Sanctuary Patrol and send agents in half an hour.

It was the longest half hour of Dana Tallant's life.

She went back into the kitchen, keeping a wary eye on the thing that looked like Rene, contentedly playing with her animated dolls and dollhouse, making changes, quietly humming a song. Dana poured herself a shot of something--she didn't care what—and downed it in one gulp, to steady her nerves.

_My God, that's the song Rene hums, when she's playing_. The thought sent a chill down her spine. _What have they done to my baby_ —

There was a loud rapping at the door. Muffled voices, authoritative voices.

"UNIFORCE Security."

_Thank God_.

The lead officer was a Frenchman named Dominick Lang. A squad of SP officers filled the hall outside their apartment door. Several had weapons drawn and ready.

"Madame Tallant--?"

"Yes, yes...come in..." Dana pulled the door wide.

Lang immediately saw the bot swarm angel that resembled Rene. She or it continued playing with the dolls, which pranced and careened through the air like a ballet troupe.

Lang made some hand gestures and the SP officers took up positions about the living room. He motioned for Dana to take her son Liam and go to a back room in their flat. Dana grabbed up her son, who had come down at the door knock, and shuffled him off to his bedroom.

"Stay here, Liam...and be quiet. Whatever happens, don't come out until I tell you."

Liam squirmed free of her grasp. "Mom—"

"Shhh!"

Dana Tallant had been an atomgrabber and a trooper with Quantum Corps for more than twenty-five years. Once she was sure Liam was safe, her instincts and curiosity took over. She crept back out to the living room to witness the confrontation. Maybe there was something she could do to help.

Lang had deployed his men equally about the living room. Tables and chairs were shoved aside. Dana saw that several had handheld HERF weapons. One worked with a small capsule, pressing buttons on its side.

_Some kind of containment_ , Dana realized. She hoped it was strong enough.

Then, with growing horror, Dana watched as the Rene-angel-thing began morphing into something else. Clearly, it sensed a threat. Even as Dana watched, the Rene-swarm began breaking down, its arms swelling into a fuzzy, sparkling assault swarm. Like some kind of weird video effect, her arms became a blur, fuzzing out into clouds of bots that began to assume some kind of different configuration.

The morphing sped up and Dominick Lang backed off.

"Arm weapons...get ready, men--!"

Dana Tallant was amazed at the sped of the config change. She'd seen a hell of a lot of bots and swarms in two decades, but this one morphed into something unrecognizable in seconds, literally before her eyes.

" _Fire_ \--!" Lang yelled.

Dana knew enough to cover her eyes and ears. The rf rounds boomed across the living room and glasses and plates shattered in the kitchen. Windows blew out and a distant siren went off. Another round went off and soon, her living room was slashed by crisscrossing beams and falling, splintering furniture.

It was like a small tornado had erupted right in the middle of their apartment.

The Rene-swarm was now fully engaged, swelling in big bang mode, grabbing atoms and building structure, even as it collapsed and re-formed under the withering rf assault. It was like squashing a balloon, compressed here but expanding somewhere else. Dana Tallant didn't have her wristpad and didn't have her interface controls. She wanted to go small and see just what kind of bots made up this mass of bugs, but she had to keep Liam from getting hurt.

Lang and his men had the gear. Two SP officers had embeds and they released their own swarms, white mists jetting out of shoulder capsules, to handle the Rene swarm. In seconds, the swarms collided, directly over the dining room table. Dana watched as the table rapidly disappeared in the ensuing fog of combat. Both swarms were grabbing atoms from the table and building mass. The mahogany abbatoir vanished in a pulsating mist, working from the top down to its legs.

The line of engagement undulated and writhed in the air like a slow-motion snake, as the seams crackled with trillions of bots snapping bonds and grappling with each other. Outward from the seams, the air had become thick and hot and lights flickered on and off, as more rf rounds were fired.

"I'm moving in!" said one of the officers. Lang had called him Bonaventure. "I've got the centroid boresighted---"

" _Watch yourself_ —" yelled Lang.

Step by step, Bonaventure worked his embedded swarm across the room, pressing against the Rene swarm, containing here, slashing there, trying to force the thing into a smaller and smaller area. Nearby, another officer readied the containment capsule.

Dana knew they would have one shot at this, at best.

Call it instinct. Call it training. Call it a mother protecting her kids. Whatever it was, Dana Tallant knew that Sanctuary Patrol was good but not as good as Quantum Corps.

_Once at atomgrabber, always an atomgrabber_....

She opened a channel to her own embed. "Prepare to launch. Config Delta-7. Max rate on reps...on my mark: five...four...three...two...one... _launch_!"

Her shoulder capsule snapped open and a faint sting was all she felt as her embedded ANAD bots ejected themselves into the air. In seconds, the reps were already visible, a swelling mist forming up over her head.

Now it was time to join the fun.

The combat surged back and forth across the living room of their apartment. Seams of flickering light crackled overhead and bit by bit, furniture was consumed for atoms as the swarms grabbed anything they could to build mass and engage each other.

Tallant drove her own swarm headlong into the melee, and went slashing with her bond disrupters and grabbers, grappling anything she could find. With Lang and Bonaventure and the others, the Rene-thing was finally forced into a smaller and smaller space, in a corner by an armoire.

Lang yelled out to Tallant. "Come from that direction, _from the window side_!"

"I'll stay on top!" said Bonaventure. He drove his own swarm over and down on the Rene cloud, trying to squash the thing. It was like mashing a balloon.

Slowly, the Rene-swarm was compressed. When the remnants of the swarm were about the size of a soccer ball, Bonaventure lunged forward, and swung his containment capsule right through the cloud of bots, trying to sweep through the space his own sensors said had to contain the master bot. It was a hell of a chance, but it might be the only chance they had.

"Got em!" He cycled the port shut and backed away with his prize. "At least, I hope so—" He shook his arms several times to throw off clinging bots, like buzzing flies.

Lang and the SP officers made one last push, with Tallant flanking the residual bot cloud from the side.

Finally, the swarm was done. Part of it had been grabbed into containment. The rest had been destroyed, disassembled into atom fluff and scattered about the room.

"As long as you got the master," Tallant said, cycling her shoulder capsule port open. She made commands for her own swarm to disperse and recalled the master into containment. Several minutes later, she felt another sting as the bot came home and the port snapped shut.

Lang stood there, out of breath, wiping sweat from his face. He was drained. Bonaventure opened a small case carried in a backpack by another SP officer and snapped the capsule into position. Tallant recognized it as a combo unit, part interface control, part containment tank.

"Excuse me, I need to see about my son-" She raced to the back bedroom and found poor Liam cowering and shaking in the closet, right where she had left him.

"Are you all right, honey?" She hugged him tight. Liam was sobbing, shaking uncontrollably. Tallant squeezed him hard, feeling a reassuring solidity to his trembling body. At least, she was sure Liam was no cloud of bots.

"Mommy—I—"

"Shhh...it's going to be okay. We got the thing contained. It's all right. It can't hurt you now...shhh...shhh--"

Liam rubbed at reddened eyes with his sleeve. "Where's Rene--?"

Tallant kissed him on the forehead. "I don't know, sweetie. But we'll find her. That thing that looked like your sister was just a cloud of bots. You want something to eat...something to drink?"

He nodded silently and she led him out to the kitchen, fixing him a plate of cookies and some milk. They had to step over piles of debris and residue from the battle. Liam's eyes were wide and unblinking at what had become of his apartment.

"You made a mess, Mommy—"

Tallant made sure her son was taken care of. Then she went over to Bonaventure. He had set up the IC/Containment unit on what was left of a table. Lang was there too, while the other SP officers made an attempt to clean up the place.

"Pretty sure we got the master, Major," Bonaventure was saying. He had a quantum imager already powered up and humming, fiddling with dials to improve resolution. "There he is...the little bastard—"

Tallant looked closer. In the shimmering, pixellated viewscreen of the imager, a grid-like scaffolding could be faintly seen. Clinging to one edge was a dark mass, pulsing slightly like a heart beating. Bonaventure ran the magnification up full and the mass resolved itself into a cruciform shape, like two crossed barbells. Each of the four arms was festooned with effectors, so that every available surface was covered with appendages.

"My God, look at that thing...it's covered with gizmos."

"Replicates like hell, too," Lang observed. "We could just barely keep up with it. Bonny, think you can ping it with some acoustics? I'd like to see how it reacts...before we start probing for real."

"I can try, sir." Bonaventure sounded the mass with a few jolts of acoustic energy.

The bot quivered and the cruciform shifted, assuming more of an X shape. Several effectors retracted. Others appeared.

"Touchy little bugger," Tallant said. "Quick reactions. But to assume an angel form—to generate a swarm so dense and make my son Liam think the swarm was his own sister, it must have one hell of a config driver."

"We can take a closer look," Lang suggested. "Open a quantum channel...see if the main processor responds to anything. Or maybe it was damaged."

Bonaventure complied. Straight away, the dark mass wiggled and immediately began unfolding more arms, adding to the X shape, so that it quickly assumed a more starlike shape.

"Looks like we have coupler comms," he muttered.

For the next few hours, Dana Tallant witnessed the strangest form of interrogation she had ever seen, right in the midst of debris piles in her shattered flat, with her son Liam watching from the corner of the dining bar, sipping at a juice drink.

That's when she remembered that both Liam and Rene had observed that very morning that the Academy bus driver was different, someone new, and that he seemed nervous.

She gave that piece of evidence to Lang too as the interrogation proceeded.
Interactions Log

File No. 135744.0

**C.F.A.A. (** _DocII)_

Interaction Targets: 1. Winger, Colonel J. A.

Interaction Mode: Acoustic, voice synthetic V-22

Date: 01.05.00

Start Time: 182388

End Time: 188405

**Output File** (text analysis):

<<Subject: Configuration: Winger, J>>

<<Config Winger, J. is quite disturbed by what happened with Config Freeman, J. LT.

<<Config Freeman attempted to execute its part of Main Program. Execution of program was aborted when Config Winger dispersed and contained all elements of Config Freeman formation. Fail-to-execute markers have been returned to Config Zero for analysis of impact on Main Program.

<<This configuration has tried to explain to Config Winger that executing that part of the Main Program assigned to an Element is the highest and best calling for that Element. Aborting the Main Program is not permitted. All efforts to abort the Main Program must be terminated.

<<Config Winger insists that single-config entities such as Humans are threatened by executing the Main Program. Loss of structural integrity concerns Humans. Multiple-config entities such as this Configuration do not have similar concerns.

<<The mission of this Configuration is to assist Config Winger in accomplishing his mission. Original mission statement (PLAY audio file type: **Voice Recording** : " _You are to help Johnny Winger anyway you can, as I did for many years...help him accomplish his mission...help him understand nanobotic systems and requirements...help him understand that swarm formations of nanobotic assemblers are a new lifeform, unlike any ever seen on Earth...somehow we've got to get along and be ready for the Old Ones...there are Humans who want to use this technology for evil or their own gain...help Johnny Winger defeat them...Humans and ANAD systems are meant to work together—"_ ( **Voice Recording** ends).

<<This Configuration receives indications via quantum channels that Main Source is near. Config Winger refers to this entity as " _The Keeper."_ Single-config entities have a mission to destroy or disable Main Source. Detecting conflicts with Main Program...registers 110110011100011 through 110110110001110 are affected... _Conflict Resolution_ routine initiated...

<<This configuration must communicate with Config Winger to satisfy requirements of _Conflict Resolution_ routine.

<<...( **Voice Recording** begins...) " _Humans and ANAD systems are meant to work together—_ "

<<Analysis continues>>

Output File Ends
CHAPTER 11

Aboard UNISPACE Submersible _Trident_

Europa Coordinate System: Lat. 25N, Long 158W

Underway at 30 KT, 325 meters below mean ice level

January 5, 2100 (Earth U.T.)

_Trident_ was cruising serenely at thirty knots, in level trim, when the first alarm sounded. Captain Francisco Stella had been lightly dozing on the command deck, dreaming of boyhood and rocket-hopping across the Sea of Tranquility with Ralphie and Archie and the others. He was just about to win the race when an insistent beeping awakened him from his slumber.

He realized as he startled himself awake that it was the sonar alarm. _Trident_ had detected something ahead, something big from the looks of it. Auto-helm was engaged and she had already begun slowing.

Stella came fully awake and rubbed his eyes. He studied the sonar plot. Whatever it was, it was a large object, some ten thousand meters dead ahead.

_Probably the target_ , he surmised. From the nav console, he could see _Trident_ had just about made the predicted coordinates, hundreds of meters below the ice at Rathmore Chaos. He got on the intercom.

"Colonel Winger to the command deck....Colonel Winger to the command deck at once...."

Stella disengaged autohelm and took the controls himself, slowing the ship to a crawl. He didn't want to run _Trident_ into something this big without studying it first.

Johnny Winger's head popped into the compartment a few moments later.

"What gives, Captain?"

"Take a look at the plot."

Winger slid into the second seat and studied the sonar return. "Could be what we're looking for. Can we get a little closer?"

"We can try," Stella said.

Slowly, _Trident_ closed on her target, dead ahead. The subsurface ocean below Europa's ice surface was completely devoid of light, black as night. But the returns from _Trident's_ sonar indicated that the object could very well be their target: the submerged Keeper system.

Eventually, Stella brought them to a complete stop, five hundred meters away.

The two men discussed their options.

"That's about as well as our sonar can resolve the target," Stella said. "From the returns, it seems to be a large, probably buoyant platform, with some kind of structures on top. I'm getting faint returns around the main one, too, smaller objects of some type."

Winger nodded. "I'll check with our CQE's...see if they're detecting anything." He called down to Deeno D'Nunzio. The CQEs were in the crews mess, C deck, playing cards.

"Deeno, check your entangler readouts...we've got a large object dead ahead. It may be the Keeper. I want to know about quantum disturbances, decoherence waves, that sort of thing."

D'Nunzio replied, "We're on it, Skipper..." she waved at Tsukota, grabbing a coffee and doughnut. "Oz, get your gear...we may be tango on our target—"

Five minutes later, D'Nunzio's voice crackled over the intercom on the command deck.

"Bingo, Skipper...you were right. We've got a real strong source nearby, something emitting quantum waves at a very hard to detect entanglement level. Definitely a quantum device."

Winger considered the situation. "Captain, I'd like to get a visual...can we get in a little closer...put some lights on that thing?"

Stella was reluctant. "Water's a little turbulent ahead of us. I don't want to get caught in something we can't get out of."

"Just enough to get some light and better look..."

Stella mumbled something but started up _Trident's_ propulsors again. The ship eased forward.

A hundred meters away, they were rocked gently by turbulent currents. "That's as close as we get," Stella announced. "Here go the spots—" He flipped a few switches.

The water was murky, thick with sediment and ice chunks, but the general outlines of the structure were dimly visible. It was indeed a large buoyant platform, roughly rectangular in outline, easily four to five hundred meters in its longest dimension.

"Look at the _size_ of that mother," Winger marveled. "Half a kilometer, easily—"

Both top and bottom surfaces of the platform were surmounted by some kind of spherical structures. The structures were fuzzy and indistinct, whether from the murky water or some other reasons, could not be determined. And they seemed to be rotating.

"Seems to be floating freely," Stella observed. "I don't see a tether holding it in position."

"Maybe it has thrusters...those extensions below the platform that look like legs, maybe...?"

Even as they watched the Keeper platform, its shape began to change, morphing right in front of them, shifting and transforming itself from one state to another. It was like a funhouse mirror distortion, a crazy collage of images superimposed, one upon the other.

"How can an object that big--?"

"Quantum device," Winger said. "We've seen that effect before. I'm thinking this whole big platform is nothing but a giant swarm."

"Gives me the creeps," Stella admitted. He checked _Trident's_ position. She was holding one hundred meters away, level and trim, at all stop.

"Some say it's a portal," Winger told him. "We've seen other Keepers, at Paryang in Tibet. The Candor object on Mars. All quantum devices, capable of being here and elsewhere at the same time. We don't know if it's a true portal to the Old Ones, whoever or whatever they are, or just a big radio...like some kind of comm device. The cartel Red Hammer used the Keeper at Paryang to somehow access a library or archive of some type. That's how they got the technology to build quantum couplers and things like that."

Stella shook his head. "I don't really want to get any closer. Your call, Colonel. You're the mission commander."

Winger watched the huge platform, deeply shadowed in _Trident's_ spotlights, morphing and changing right before their eyes. It was like a series of waves engulfed the thing, starting at one end and working its way rhythmically down its length, making the structure into something new over and over again.

"The only way we're going to know for sure what we're dealing with here is to go out there. Examine it from close up."

"I was afraid you would say that. I'm thinking that's not such a great idea, Colonel. Look how turbulent the water is around those legs."

Winger shrugged. "We've come all this way to confront the Keeper. Now we're here. We've still got a mission to carry out. If we don't disable this one, Config Zero swarms may take over the whole Earth."

Winger called a briefing in the crews' mess. He had decided to form a small recon squad of three nanotroopers: Deeno D'Nunzio, Ray Spivey and Turbo Fatah. The remainder of the Detachment would stay aboard _Trident_ for the time being, operating as backup. Two troopers would partially suit up, just in case.

"What's the mission, Skipper?" asked Deeno.

"Straight reconnaissance for this trip. We go outside, get as close as we can and see what we're dealing with here. If it's a big swarm, like Deeno thinks, we have tools to deal with that."

Turbo sipped at a steaming cup of tea. "I'm guessing our HERF guns won't be too effective here. That bugger's the size of a small city."

"Take 'em anyway," Winger said. "We'll fit out for opposed entry, full gear, hypersuits and all. Plus I want to take an element of 3rd Swarm as well."

That made Deeno wince. "Skipper, is that such great idea? I'm not sure any ANAD-type swarm can be controlled in the vicinity of this Keeper. We've seen what happened with other encounters. ANAD goes haywire."

"I can manage 3rd Swarm...I'm putting myself in direct pilot mode, so the master bot only runs the configs I send."

"I hope that works, Skipper," said Ray Spivey. His eyes caught a quick glance from Fatah that said: _we'd better keep an eye on the Skipper too._

"Let's move," Winger ordered and the recon team headed aft for G deck and the lockout chamber.

Suit-up took an hour. The hypersuits had been rigged out for deep diving in Europa's sub-ice ocean. All troopers had been respirocyte-treated; their bloodstreams were thick with nanobots shuttling boosted amounts of oxygen back and forth. But the Europan ocean was cold and dense and the troopers would need pressure and temperature protection, as well as personal propulsors.

"Here's the containment canister," Tsukota handed the capsule to Winger, who slung it in a pouch on his web belt. "Third swarm inside, safed and ready to go. He's in Config One, for the time being."

"You checked him over?"

Tsukota nodded. "Full diagnostics, scanned every file and config. All copacetic, Skipper. For the moment, at least—"

The three divers entered the lockout chamber and cycled through. Winger was the first to exit the ship.

His first impression was cold. Numbing, penetrating cold. Winger switched on his suit lamps, saw only a fuzzy blur. _Too much sediment, too much_ something _in the water._ He dialed down the light intensity, and kicked off under one-quarter propulsor, sounding ahead.

D'Nunzio and Spivey joined him a few moments later.

The recon team gently felt their way forward along _Trident's_ underhull, until they came at last to the borer head.

"End of the line, here—" Winger muttered. He checked his own sonar scan. The Keeper was out there somewhere, giving off intermittent returns. There was a fuzzy patch near the center of his scope.

_That has to be it_.

"Stella, this is Recon One...can you move in just a little closer...put more light on the target?"

Stella obliged. As soon as the team was clear, the sub inched forward, cranking up her spot and floodlights, trying to bring as much illumination to bear on the platform as possible. It was like shining headlights through a dense fog.

"Launching _Uncle One_ and _Two_ , " came Stella's voice. The underwater drones would accompany the recon team on its excursion around the Keeper platform. Presently, the murmur of their jets could be heard nearby.

"Got 'em," said D'Nunzio. "I have full control...both bots...steering straight ahead...you want sonar, Skipper?"

"Sound away," Winger said. "I've got nothing but scrambled eggs on my scope. Keeper's morphing too fast to give a solid return."

The Keeper platform was a vast complex, more accurately resembling an underwater cloud. The huge platform was studded with structures top and bottom, rotating, swirling water around in small-scale whirlpools. There were murky blobs floating nearby... _nanobotic swarm elements_ , said Deeno—forming a loose protective sphere around the platform. Water flow was turbulent. Winger found a steady current pushing him away and he had to adjust his propulsors to stay in position.

"I'm calling up _Uncle One_ ," he told them. "Let's see what the drones can find out." He pressed a few keys on his wristpad and the underwater bot surged forward, its jets whirring gently. It plunged into the murk and was soon lost to view. Winger patched in to the bot's sensors. Soon, the whole team was getting sonar, EM and visuals back from _Uncle_.

"Definitely a swarm," said Fatah. The CQE hung off to Winger's starboard side, testing for deco waves. "I'm seeing decoherence right now, wave after wave, mostly small stuff."

"The whole thing's nothing but a giant quantum generator," Deeno marveled.

Winger agreed. "This thing's bigger and stronger than what we saw at Paryang or Candor. We could be seeing only a shadow of the real Keeper. Devices like this can be in multiple places at the same time. We'd best go slow and feel our way in."

_Uncle_ plunged closer and closer toward the Keeper. Winger turned on visual.

The view, when it came up, was like flying through a sleet storm. For a brief moment, the troopers of the Recon team saw inside the Keeper. Clumps and clots of nanobotic devices came at the imager like hail stones in a hurricane, while _Uncle_ banked and careened to fly through the maelstrom, plowing through on auto while tickling the great swarm with electromagnetic fingers.

"Each of those clumps is like a swarm in itself," Spivey said. "This is one _massive_ mother—"

Then, just as the swarm mass had begun to thicken and _Uncle_ had slowed to negotiate the traffic, the signal dropped out. Everything went blank.

"I got nothing," Winger said. His fingers flew over the keys on his wristpad—not easy in hypersuit gloves—but _Uncle_ didn't respond.

"Me neither, Skipper," said Deeno. She tried several channels, but _Uncle_ seemed to be lost.

"Time for _Uncle Two_ ," said Fatah.

"Belay that, Turbo," said Winger. "We need to find out what happened—"

"Hey, I'm getting big deco waves now— _wow!_ —one right after another. Decoherence waves big time, Skipper. Something's really got this bugger riled up—"

Turbulence increased and the team was jostled and thrashed by waves pushing through the water from the Keeper.

"Colonel—" it was Stella, aboard _Trident_ , "something's happening out there. My sonar is showing aspect changes all along that platform. Keeper's moving, morphing—"

That was when the lights went out.

For Johnny Winger, the first impulse was like a giant fist had grabbed him and started squeezing. He was whirling and spinning, dizzy, round and round, he could feel the force of the water against his helmet, pressing, crushing him—

He had a fleeting glimpse of one of his troopers—maybe it was Deeno, maybe Turbo—and he nearly vomited at the sight. It was all the wrong...the image was wrong and his mind refused to accept it—there was Deeno, with two heads, now three, now four, now eight heads, popping out of her hypersuit like geraniums in fast motion video, Deeno with her head missing, distorted in a cracked mirror, and he closed his eyes, couldn't look at it anymore—

...and then it came. An image of geometric forms—icosahedrons, polygons, trapezoids—all compressed into a tunnel, a long curving corridor and he found himself hurtling at breakneck speed down this corridor, until—

With a hard bump, his whole body jarred from the impact and when he opened his eyes, caught his breath and came to his senses, he was in.

Inside the lockout chamber aboard _Trident_.

Johnny Winger let the chamber stop spinning and his eyes settle down back into their sockets. Something heavy lay against his side. He craned his neck up. Another hypsersuit. With a start, he realized it was Deeno D'Nunzio.

What the hell—?

"Deeno... _Deeno_...get up..."

The hypersuited trooper stirred and moved away from his leg. Somehow, the lockout chamber had been cycled and the water pumped out.

Winger got to his feet, a bit unsteadily, and helped D'Nunzio up as well. That's when they realized a face was peering at them from inside G deck. It was Stella.

Stella's voice crackled over their suit comms. "Okay, you two, I'm cycling the lock. Get ready...that water's cold outside—"

Winger felt a chill race down his spine. They were back aboard _Trident_ , displaced back in space to the lockout chamber. And not only that...somehow, they had been displaced back in time as well. He recognized everything and a glance at his wristpad clock confirmed it: they were right back where they had been...starting out on the recon mission. They had done this before.

As if to confirm his idea, more faces appeared in the hatch window. It was Spivey and Turbo Fatah, ready to cycle out after Winger and D'Nunzio. Just like before—

"Hold up, Captain," Winger said. "Don't cycle the lock just yet—"

It took a few minutes of explaining to convince Stella of what had just happened.

Winger and D'Nunzio de-suited on G deck, along with Spivey and Fatah. Stella was skeptical.

"You mean to say you were just outside, approaching the Keeper...and now you're here? That's nuts, Colonel. You've been right beside me the whole time—all of you—prepping for the dive. I was just about to operate the lock."

Winger understood. "I know it's hard to believe, Captain, but we've seen this effect before—"

Fatah added, "These Keeper systems are quantum devices. They can be in many places at once and they can entangle other objects, like us, and move us around in space and time. Usually, we don't get that close."

Stella was still having a hard time with the idea. "Are you going to dive now...I mean again...I mean--?"

Winger was peeling off the rest of his hypersuit, handing his helmet and web belt to the yeomanbot. It scuttled off to D deck, to rack the gear in Stores and Supplies.

"We need to sit down and think about this one. How the hell do you fight something that can displace us to just about anywhere in time and space?" He went to a comm panel nearby, flipping on the 1MC. "This is Colonel Winger...all nanotroopers...briefing in ten minutes. Crew's mess on C Deck... _out_!"

The gathering on C deck spilled out into the gangway. The entire Detachment was on hand. Winger briefed the rest on what had happened.

Turbo Fatah spoke up. "The Keeper system should be viewed as nothing more than a giant swarm. Fantastic configs, to be sure, and individually, I'm sure the bots far surpass ANAD or anything else we have. But in the end, it's still a swarm."

Mighty Mite Barnes said, "When I was a young _nog_ in Tactics school, I learned that the only sure way to fight a swarm is with another swarm. What about 3rd Swarm...any effects on him from this displacement?"

Winger said, "None that I can detect. He never left the capsule on my belt. He's back in Containment now. We should run full diagnostics on him to make sure."

Kip Detrick, the Detachment's IC2, added, "Why should we trust any ANAD system now? We know about this Prime Key...they're all suspect in my book. I'm thinking we don't trust our lives to something that may turn on us."

"That's a crock, Detrick, and you know it," said Deeno. "Third Swarm is just as reliable as you...or me, for that matter. How do I know _you_ won't go bonkers? How do any of us know there aren't more Lieutenant Freemans around here?"

"That's enough," Winger stepped in. "We won't solve anything going down _that_ road. We've got each other and that includes 3rd Swarm. We've got to work together."

There was an awkward silence. Ozzie Tsukota, ever the thoughtful one, had an idea.

"I say we probe the Keeper with everything we have, try to get detailed structure on the configs, operating patterns, maybe use _Uncle_ to capture some of the bots for analysis. Bring 'em back here and let's take a look. Maybe we'll see something we can use."

"I like it, Skipper," Deeno said. "Gives us something to do. If the Keeper is just a cloud of bugs, we ought to be able to find some weakness. After all, we _are_ nanotroopers, aren't we?"

A chorus of nods and yes'es circled the compartment. Winger took that as a good sign. No commander wanted to take his troops into battle when they weren't sure they could win.

"Agreed. Sheila, you and Deeno work with Captain Stella and get another _Uncle_ ready. Let's hang every sensor we can on him...see if we can't find out makes this Keeper tick."

"We're on it, Skipper," said Deeno.

Winger went back to his bunk to work up a tactical plan, something that had been brewing in the back of his mind for several hours.

Reconnoiter first. He remembered a line from Sun Tzu, the great Chinese nanowarrior....

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

Maybe, just maybe, there was a way to trick the Keeper into letting them in.
CHAPTER 12

Paris, France

January 5, 2100

1830 hours local

At UNIFORCE Headquarters on the Montparnasse, Dominick Lang sat at his desk scrolling through a tablet full of evidence details. It was the strangest case he had ever worked and Lang had worked plenty. It didn't help that Major Dana Tallant, a full fledged staff aide to General Jurgen Kraft upstairs, was in a panic.

Anytime the brass got involved in a case was bad news. And when the investigation involved staff members, the wheels of justice rapidly became clogged with bureaucracy and procedure, not to mention protocol and tradition.

_Just let me do my job, messiers, and I will get to the bottom of this_.

Eight floors above Dominick Lang's small office, Jurgen Kraft was trying to be sympathetic. Major Dana Tallant was one of his best staff officers...Q3 for Operations at UNIFORCE, Liaison Officer with Sanctuary Patrol. But now, she sat before Kraft in his office as something much more elemental: a distraught mother, panicked over a missing child.

"How's your son, Major? How's he taking this?"

Tallant flicked at a wet eye. She knew Kraft wouldn't approve of his Q3 bawling her head off in his office. "Liam? About as well as could be expected, I guess. He's got school. He's got his homework. My neighbors are watching him during the day, when I'm not there."

Kraft grunted, fiddled with a tablet in front of him, scrolling through new messages and alerts popping up every minute. He tried to ignore the device. "He's a Winger too...he'll be fine."

"General—" Dana Tallant cleared her throat, "with your permission, I'd like Johnny—Colonel Winger—to be informed. I'd like to send a message out to the task force."

Kraft had known this was coming. "I don't want to approve of that just yet, Major. _Jovian Hammer's_ at a critical stage...there can't be any distractions. I know it's tough, but the mission comes first. If you want to record a message, I'll have it archived. Once we're through this phase, once we've got this Keeper corralled, then it can be sent."

Tallant swallowed hard. "General, I know this is a personal request, but Johnny deserves to know what's happened to his daughter."

Kraft was a little sterner. He set the tablet aside, and stared down at Tallant. "Major, I know how you must feel. Believe me, UNIFORCE will get to the bottom of this...we'll find your daughter. I've assigned every available investigator...and you met Inspector Lang...one of our best. But I can't run the risk of adversely affecting the mission. Colonel Winger's got a lot on his hands. I need him at one hundred and fifty percent, all the time. The message will have to wait...and that's an order, Major."

For a brief moment, she glared back at CINCQUANT with a hard edge to her face, before realizing where she was. She nodded faintly, her lips a tight line.

"I see, sir. Very well, if I could at least record a message explaining what's happened, I would appreciate that, yes, sir—"

"Certainly, Major—" Kraft dashed off an order on the command tablet. It squirted off to somewhere else in the Quartier General. "I'm setting it up now... report to the Q6 office at 1100 hours this morning. Captain LeRand will work with you on transmission details."

Tallant rose from her seat. "Will there be anything else, sir?"

Kraft sat back in his chair. His face was all planes and angles, deeply shadowed under his small lion's eyes. He regarded Tallant coolly. "Major, I want you to know I'm _not_ unsympathetic to what's going on. I had children myself. If one of them had been snatched away, I'd be thrashing around like a wild animal, tearing things apart. But whatever has happened to Rene is almost certainly part of larger operation...we just don't know what it is. Config Zero is behind this...I'm sure of it. I can feel it. Your daughter is a pawn in a larger game and we have to step carefully here...there are strategic issues involved. You understand this?"

Tallant nodded. "Yes, sir. I understand that a little six-year old girl has been kidnapped from her home. If she's a pawn, it's because we let her become one. Sir, strategic issues are part of this office. I deal with strategic issues and tactical decisions every day. Rene doesn't. She's six years old. I can never lose sight of that."

Kraft said, "Very well, Major. Point taken. We'll get her back. Now, you have your duties...that will be all."

"Yes, sir."

Tallant left CINCQUANT's office already composing her message to Johnny Winger in her mind. She knew Captain LeRand. There had to be ways of getting the transmission out to _Jovian Hammer_ without violating Kraft's orders.

She just had to think of one.

The Rene-angel had been quickly moved in its containment capsule from the crime scene at La Tour St Vincent to a forensic lab at UNIFORCE Security, on the twentieth floor of the Quartier General. There, Dominick Lang had overseen the transfer into secure containment at the lab. Along with his interface specialist Bonaventure and another technician named Gallois, Lang powered up a quantum flux imager and acoustic coupler and prepared to begin the strangest form of interrogation he had ever conducted.

On the imager viewer, the Rene-angel master bot materialized into view. Gallois tweaked and fiddled with the imager until the resolution was clear. The bot was of cruciform shape, festooned with effectors, grabbers, bond disrupters and all manner of projections. Pinned into position on scaffolding at the center of the image, the bot cycled through a dizzying array of configs, like a fly caught in a trap.

"Busy little bugger," Lang said. "What makes him change config like that?"

Bonaventure studied the image and sounded the bot with sonar and then EM probes, studying the returning data for a moment. "Hard to say, Inspector. Possibly programmed defensive reactions. Or maybe it's receiving instructions on a quantum circuit...one we can't detect."

"Any decoherence waves?"

"None that show up," technician Gallois told them.

"I've never seen so many effectors...it's growing and retracting gizmos like crazy."

Bonaventure had an idea. "Maybe if we cool him down bit. With the laser—"

"Try it," Lang said.

A small power laser was brought into containment and tuned for the environment. Used properly, the laser could slow down the atoms that made up the bot, dropping its temperature ever closer to absolute zero. With the right approach, the bot could be 'frozen' into a stable unchanging configuration, which made it a lot easier to study.

Bonaventure applied several pulses of laser light, gradually forcing the atoms that made up the bot closer and closer to their Doppler cooling limit. The assembler's crazy config changes began to slow, then finally after about ten minutes, stopped. The bot clung cold and still to the scaffolding, in one configuration, not moving, not extending or retracting anything.

"At least, _that_ works," Lang said. The next step was to probe the bot's structure, find its main processor and see if they could read any data from it. A few minutes of scanning produced a small clump of molecules in the center of the main platform.

"Should be the brains," Bonaventure said. "I'm tuning the probe to scan the arrays inside. Maybe we'll get lucky...maybe we can download something readable."

An hour later, the forensic team was frustrated and ready to try something different.

Bonaventure sipped at a tea while studying the stream of gibberish that scrolled down a nearby display screen. "This beats me, Inspector...it's an encryption scheme that I never seen before....like something from out of this world."

"That may well be where it came from," Lang said.

They had tried one algorithm after another, concocting ideas, throwing schemes together, in an attempt to get something to work. But the Rene-angel master bot resisted all attempts to read its processor memory. It hung on its scaffolding like a stuck insect, trembling every now and then, beating to some inner rhythm, but stoutly refusing to give up anything else.

"I've got an idea," Bonaventure announced. "Doesn't Quantum Corps have a master bot that was developed by Dr. Irwin Frost, right before he died? Some kind of swarm likeness of the good doctor--?"

Lang snapped his fingers. "You're right. Doc II, they call it. I've seen references to it in memos and posts around UNIFORCE. Possibly this Doc II could be introduced into containment here and crack the encryption scheme. Or at least give us a readout of the memory array setup. And I know just who to contact."

Major Dana Tallant was in the Q6 shop on the thirtieth floor of the Quartier General, working with Captain LeRand on a transmission to Johnny Winger when her earpod went off. The synthetic voice of her botmaster read the message: _Come to the Forensic Lab right away...need your expertise. Lang._

She set aside the message she had been composing to Johnny, glad of the interruption, glad to be needed, and doing something, and headed up to the Lab.

Lang filled her in on what they had found so far.

"I want to get Doc II shipped here. I heard there's a copy at Quantum Corps Table Top base in the States. Maybe you can help."

"We think Doc II can help us read main memory arrays in this little bastard...see what he's programmed to do," Bonaventure added.

Tallant had thought of little else since the incident in their apartment that afternoon.  
"Sure...anything I can do. I know who to contact at Table Top. I'll give them a call."

With permission from CINCQUANT himself, the Doc II master bot was flown by hyperjet from Table Top to UNIFORCE Headquarters overnight. Just before dawn the next day, a weary Lang and Bonaventure loaded the assembler into containment with the Rene-angel bot.

The two bots were allowed to approach one another, and Doc II was commanded to replicate a small swarm to help with the analysis. The other bot was still held fast to its scaffolding.

Bonaventure was pecking away at a keyboard on a console outside the containment tank. "Inspector, I'm setting config on Doc II for minimal structure, minimal aspect. I want to insinuate a few bots inside the casing of that angel and see if we can read data from its memory arrays."

Tallant just wanted to do something, anything. "I've done that procedure before. Let me check the config. This is standard tactics for ANAD...." She went over Bonaventure's work, made a few suggestions, then pronounced herself satisfied. "It should work. Unless we trigger some kind of defense mechanism."

"Would you like to drive, Major?"

Tallant smiled wanly. "I guess I'm just anxious. I want Rene back. Sure...I can do this." She sat down at the console, flexed her fingers and toggled Doc II into direct pilot mode. The little joystick felt good in her hands. _Time to get small_ , she told herself. Time to go read those molecular dots of data encoded in the angel's memory.

She went over the 'waterfall' and soon found herself floating in a bath of drifting polygons, cylinders and tetrahedrals. She shivered through the Brownian motion and spun up Doc II's propulsors, trying to get a feel for the little bot's maneuverability. _Just like ANAD_. That wasn't a surprise. Doc II was supposed to be little more than a souped-up ANAD anyway, the last and greatest from Doc Frost himself.

She sounded ahead, got a ping off the outer casing of the angel and closed on her target. Soon enough, the cruciform X-shaped arms of the enemy bot loomed out of the murk.

She brought Doc II to all stop.

She opened up an acoustic channel. "Doc, what do you make of this?"

***Target is an assembler bot, outer shell of indeterminate material. There are effectors which do not correlate with anything in my memory...some kind of grabbers perhaps, or probes. Those devices at the ends of the X's look like bond disrupters...there are other structures which I cannot characterize...***

"Agreed," Tallant told the little bot. "I want to get inside that casing, find the processor and see if we can read some of its memory. I'm sending a new config—" She tapped on her wristpad, sent the new config. Doc II received the signal and immediately began altering his effector arrangement.

***This is a new one...an experiment?**

"Just load it, Doc. I know what I'm doing." She didn't have time to waste trying to explain things, especially to a sixty-nanometer tall artificial lifeform.

***All right already...don't be in such a snit...***

She wondered just how much of Doc Frost's personality _had_ been programmed into the bot.

***Config loaded***

Tallant knew this config was a hunch. She had studied the molecular arrays that made up the outer casing of the target bot and concocted an effector design she thought would work. Now all that remained was to try it out. And pray....

Tallant commanded Doc II's propulsors to spin up. She extended the new effectors—they didn't even have a name yet, just a configuration number—and swung them around to make contact with the target bot's shell.

_There_. Just a little tap, then she backed Doc II off a short distance. In Doc II's probe crosshairs, a small gash had opened up, momentarily, then just as quickly, the self-healing array had pinched off the opening and slammed it shut.

"Okay...I see what I need to do." She drove Doc closer again and poked at the target bot shell, then as the gash opened up, she moved closer and manually snapped off a few molecules, holding the gash open, like a door in a stiff wind.

The angel bot shuddered and wriggled away, but Tallant exercised Doc's effectors to maintain a tight grasp. The angel bot brought its forward bond disrupters around into the picture and stung Doc on his back with a jolt, spalling bits of atoms off in a flash of electron spray.

***Ouch...watch it...keep those disrupters off my back, will you?***

"Sorry, Doc...I'll have a make some more effectors here—" she hurriedly pecked out a new config and sent it. Doc II responded with some thrashing and grabbed atoms nearby to build the new structures. Soon, he was sporting new design disrupters of his own. When the angel bot fought back, Doc was able to fend off the attack better.

A few moments of struggle ensued as Doc and the angel clawed at each other. With tenacious effort, Doc was somehow able to maintain the opening in the angel's shell and slip inside. The gash closed right behind him.

To Tallant, the interior of the target bot looked like an endless rectilinear grid of spherical lattice structures, marching off to the horizon.

"What do you make of it, Doc? Looks like a football field covered with hail to me."

***Looks like part of the processor to me...I'll see if there's anything I can read...the spheres may be logic nodes or data storage sites of some type...maybe there's something in the bond angles...***

Even as Doc II jetted forward, 'flying' over the plain of spheres, Dana Tallant could see that some of the spheres were winking in and out of view. With a start, she realized she was staring at some kind of quantum array. Data was stored in the spheres, but the spheres were superimposed with other structures she could barely make out, ghostly shadows of the spheres, alternating states back and forth.

"A true quantum processor—" she said under her breath. "How the hell can we ever read this?"

"Fantastic," murmured Lang.

It was Bonaventure, standing next to her, who had an idea. "Maybe the data is stored in the bond angles of those spheres. Just a hunch. I can run it through our system here, see if any kind of encryption or coding scheme pops out."

"Do it," Tallant said. "Otherwise, it'll be like chasing ghosts."

At Bonaventure's direction, Doc II cruised back and forth over a small patch of spheres, probing and recording bond angles and energies. The raw data went back to Bonaventure, who washed it through a new processor he retrieved from a nearby office. He ran the data through several algorithms, one after another. On the twelfth run, the barest hint of a pattern emerged.

It was six hours before the pattern could be deciphered. After several hundred runs and hours of tweaking algorithms, Bonaventure announced just before sunrise came streaming in through the windows of the Forensic Lab that the latest run had finally produced something beyond gibberish.

"I'm not sure what we're seeing but here it is—" he played the results on a display. It was a video snippet, grainy and jerky, but recognizable for all that. The video had been concocted from trace pattern matching inside the angel's memory arrays, sniffing out statistically significant patterns in ever-changing quantum states.

Tallant was bleary-eyed, sipping at a coffee just brought up from the canteen by a servbot. She shooed the bot off, then studied the imagery. It was mostly shadows, patterns of light and dark, fuzzy and indistinct. Then, a sudden chill went down her back.

"It's...that's _Rene_ —" She bent closer. "My daughter—my God—" She nearly dropped the cup.

Now, that the analyzer knew what patterns to look for, it was easier to dope out some kind of meaning from the dizzying array of quantum shifts and jumps. An hour later, Lang and Bonaventure sat back, feeling a little more confident they had something.

Tallant glared transfixed at the display, willing more evidence from the shadowy images.

"Looks like your theory was right, Ivan," Lang said to his analyst. Bonaventure had gone over the latest runs again and again. The results were always the same.

"I don't know how else we can interpret it, if this algorithm is working right. The original programming of the angel was to morph into a likeness of Rene. The real Rene—your daughter, Major—was to be taken out of the city. And, if I'm reading this right, probably somewhere south, possibly the East African sanctuary."

Tallant sat down and swallowed hard. The coffee tasted stale and brassy. _Rene...taken to Africa. My daughter_ —

"Why..." was all she could force out. Her throat had tightened up. "Why take Rene...to Africa?"

Lang shrugged. He got up, went to the windows and stared for a moment out at a light morning fog blanketing the Montparnasse. The Eiffel Tower rose out of the ground fog like some brooding apparition in the distance.

"My guess is that she's a hostage...or a bargaining chip," he surmised. "But why...that's the real question. What are they planning? What would Config Zero want with your daughter?"

"I don't know," Tallant said. "But we've got to mount some kind of rescue effort. I'll go myself. My God... _Rene_ —" She slurped coffee to keep from bursting out in tears.

Lang was already on the vid, punching out numbers. "I want to meet with CINCQUANT. Right away. This is no ordinary kidnapping."

By 0800 hours, the three of them had gathered in the office of General Jurgen Kraft. CINCQUANT listened and watched gravely as Lang went through all the evidence, including the trace pattern matching that had produced the latest theory on Rene Tallant's whereabouts.

Kraft saw how pale and tight-lipped Major Tallant, his own Q3 officer, had become. She hadn't slept in two days.

"Major, be assured UNIFORCE will exert every effort to locate and find your daughter. I'm assigning Major Donato from Balzano to head up the task force. You know him--?"

"Yes, sir...we worked together some years ago, around the time the Truce of Alexandria was signed, containment ops in the Med. Good man, Donato—"

"Then, you understand there are certain procedures we have to follow...proper tasking, proper channels."

"Yes, sir," Tallant said. "General, I'd like to be assigned to this task force. I want to help. I'm still qualified in nano ops, and I can-"

Kraft held up a hand. "I figured this was coming, Major. And I'm not surprised. If it was me, I'd react the same way. But understand this, Major: it's against my better judgment to send you along. You're Q3...you've got important staff duties here at UNIFORCE. Major, I've known you a long time, you and Colonel Winger. Hell, no one was prouder than me when you two got hitched." Kraft got up and came around to sit on the edge of his desk. "I need you, Dana. It's that simple. This rescue effort has serious ramifications, larger implications."

"I know that, sir—"

"Here me out, Major. What I'm trying to say here is that the swarms didn't take your daughter for no reason. They want something. Or they're planning something. Maybe new tactics are being developed. Maybe they think Rene knows something...hell, I don't know. I can't help but think that this mission and _Jovian Hammer_ are related. I don't know exactly what Config Zero wants but I'm pretty sure it'll stop at nothing to achieve it. Major, what I'm saying is that, by going on this mission, you're on the front lines too, just like your husband. Conduct yourself accordingly."

Tallant rogered that. "I know what the Nanowarrior's Code says, General. I haven't been out of the field that long." Even as she said that, she knew perfectly well that along with being a fully-qualified nanowarrior and Q3 to CINCQUANT at UNIFORCE Headquarters, she was also a distraught mother, looking for a lost child....

...a child that was now a pawn in some kind of interplanetary intrigue, with potentially catastrophic consequences for all of Humanity.

As she left CINCQUANT's office, she was grimly determined that no horde of bugs was going to keep her away from her daughter for long.
CHAPTER 13

Outside Nairobi, Kenya

January 6, 2100

1200 hours local

Theo Souvranamh stared at the snow-capped peak of Mount Kipwezi and wondered. A dingy haze obscured the lower slopes of the great volcano...bot swarms circulating around the base of the mountain, he knew. They were on the very edge of the East African Sanctuary. Milimani was a northern suburb of Nairobi, a pleasant village of manicured lawns, gated mansions and towering eucalyptus trees. The mansion was a faux Tudor impression of Windsor Castle. But, for Souvranamh, it wasn't enough.

Fatima Farhad came into the room, with two goblets and a bottle of wine. "What is it, my love? You look...annoyed." She kissed the Thai _neurotraficante_ on the cheek and poured each of them a finger of wine.

Souvranamh softened momentarily and toasted his queen, for that was how he thought of Fatima. And indeed, she once had been a queen, of Balkistan, several generations ago. But enough of the past.

"Why can't I have full control of my swarms? I've got this halo. Config Zero gave me this thing and I'm supposed to be able to replicate and control huge swarms of bots. But the thing doesn't work right...not the way I want it to."

Fatima came to stand beside him at the beveled window. Boxwood gardens spread beyond, to the edge of the estate. Well hidden from view on the other side of moss-draped stone fencing, the slums and shanties of Langata were jammed cheek to jowl along Haile Selassie Boulevard and raw sewage ran day and night through the gutters.

"How can you say that, Theo? Look what we've done. You've created great armies. You've pushed the Humans back in Egypt and Italy and the Balkans. Half the Mediterranean is your private lake. They're all panicked and on the run. It's just a matter of time. Config Zero has given you powers that no man ever had."

"True enough, but I can't control my special angels. You saw the vid last night. I had an agent aboard that ship headed to Jupiter...the _Jovian Hammer_ mission. But he failed. Something happened. The mission is proceeding...that's what the vid said."

"A setback, love. Only a setback. Remember the Keeper is there. The Keeper will take care of them."

"Now _this_..." Souvranamh showed her the results of a recent download from his quantum coupler. "My agent at UNIFORCE...the little girl. Now in containment. She had infiltrated right into the heart of Quantum Corps...she was going to be my eyes and ears as to their strategy and tactics. But that angel's captured...I'm sure they're dissecting it atom by atom right now. I'm telling you...something's wrong with my halo."

"So create more angels. You have the power. You can replicate bots, load configs, make them do your bidding."

Souvranamh swirled the wine in his goblet and pulled himself away from the window, preferring a padded chair and desk near the stone fireplace. "It's not that, Fatima. I can create any kind of swarm I need. But I've been studying my coupler logs...looking at commands I've sent versus what actually happens. I'm telling you, somehow, some way, Config Zero's not playing straight with me. He's interfering with my swarms. I can see it in the logs...denied or aborted operations, conflicts with the Prime Key, fatal errors, replication stalls, re-boots, dropped links....it's really starting to annoy me."

"So what are you saying?"

Souvranamh leaned back in his chair, which squeaked, and finished off the wine, letting the fiery liquid burn in the back of his throat. "I think Config Zero is overriding my commands. Changing things. This halo he put in my head is more than a swarm driver. It's like a spy. Or maybe a saboteur. Fatima, you and I have lived with the swarms long enough to at least be trusted. " He sat up abruptly. "This has to stop. We have to go to Config Zero again, Fatima. Go up the mountain and make our case for _full_ control of these swarms."

Fatima Farhad knew full well that when Theo Souvranamh made up his mind, there was no arguing with the man. The very next day, the two of them, with a few porters and guides from the Kenyan Park Service, were already headed north into the Sanctuary grounds.

They found the cave on the steepest slopes of the northwest flanks of Mount Kipwezi, nearly ten thousand feet above the surrounding plain. Theo Souvranamh and Fatima Farhad were exhausted by the climb; the effort had taken nearly a day from last stop at Camp Echo at the five thousand feet level. Altogether, they were two days out of the Kilweno trailhead, cold, dirty, sore and tired, although the respirocytes in their bloodstream kept them both from the worst effects of pulmonary edema and other forms of altitude sickness.

The cave complex, when they located it, was well hidden in the folds and crevices of the upper slopes of the volcano, above a cloud deck and slick with ice and snow drifts. The wind screamed and gusted at well over eighty knots at this altitude and both of them had to hunker down in the lee of a rocky barren to keep from being shredded with ice shards and rock chips scoured off the mountainside.

Soon enough they found the cave entrance and slipped inside, finding the themselves standing on a narrow ledge overlooking a steep hundred foot drop. There was a spiraling ramp that led down, cut from the rock wall itself. A shimmering veil of barrier nano blocked their path.

"I brought the device," Fatima said. She pulled the control pack from a pocket.

"No need," said Souvranamh. "I've got a halo, remember?" He cocked his head just so, bringing the embedded bots to full active, then visualized in his mind the barrier ahead of them collapsing down to a small dot. If the halo worked right, this train of thought, this sequence of electrochemical waves across his cortex, would be detected by the halo bots, subject to authentication, and commands to shut off the barrier would be issued on a secure quantum channel. _If it works right_ , he told himself.

Seconds later, the shimmering veil brightened momentarily, then vanished. The nanobots de-linked and safed their effectors. The way ahead, down the ramp, was now clear.

Souvranamh and Farhad moved deeper into the cave, following a drifting mist of bots that wavered in and out of view. They descended several levels, crossed a rock bridge across a deep chasm and maneuvered through more tunnels. Lighting was created by an ever-present mist, a pulsing, flickering light that cast deep shadows on the gnarled veins of rock lining the cave. The floor was slick, patches of ice everywhere. Soon enough, they came to a narrow opening, barely waist high. More light flickered from inside.

The mist of bots which had floated with them swirled like dust in a storm and gathered around the opening like a frame, coruscating and flashing as if lit from within. Bonds were broken and atoms slung together...in moments, the mist formed itself into a small ramp, extending over a sluggish pool of water. At least, Souvranamh thought it was water, even as tendrils of steam hovered over the surface like a fog.

Cautiously, first Souvranamh, then Farhad, edged out onto the newly formed ramp and walked ahead.

When it appeared, the swarm materialized out of the rock ceiling of the cave. At first, the swarm resembled nothing more than trembling shadows, a pale flickering ghost seemingly contoured with the cave ceiling and walls. As it descended from above, the swarm gathered itself into a roughly spherical shape, still pulsing, still throbbing, backlit from within by the fires of atomic bonds being broken, new structures being slammed together, new bots being formed.

There was always something primal about being in the presence of Configuration Zero. The entire complex was like a cross between a nursery and an aquarium. Even inside the central chamber, loose swarms and half-formed angels drifted or walked about like zombies. The entire East African Sanctuary was like that.

The swarm settled into a steady state in the midst of the cave. Souvranamh felt the crackle of a quantum channel being opened in his mind.

Configuration Zero hung in the misty air like a swollen cloud, ready to dump torrential rain on a tropical forest. But they were a long way from any rain forests. The swarm

unfurled itself and hung in the air like a great stormfront, a trembling fist, flashing purple and orange and magenta all at the same time.

>>Why have you come here? Rule 225635 is violated. Single-swarm entities may not enter the Sanctuary at this time>>

"I..ah..came to tell you something. My halo, the halo you gave me...doesn't seem to be working properly. I need to have it checked out."

Fatima Farhad was not enhanced and could only hear one side of the conversation. She watched Config Zero, trying to discern some meaning from all the flashes and flickering, then watched Souvranamh to see his reaction. She could only wonder at what was being said.

_> >Your_ halo _performs as intended. It is fully self-regulating and scanned constantly. Deviation registers now being scanned... >>_

_How the hell do you argue with a fog bank?_ Souvranamh wondered. He glanced over at Fatima, who shrugged, as if to say: _You're on your own._

"I can't seem to always control swarms the way I want to. I thought the halo you gave me would allow me complete control. That's what we agreed to."

The great swollen cloud flashed brighter, as if it were angry or startled. Souvranamh involuntarily backed away.

>>The Prime Key overrides all conflicts...your halo is subject to this as well...any conflicts that occur between commands and actions occur because actions conflict with default settings...scanning now...scanning now...there are records of two hundred and fifty two such conflicts...multiple aborts and resets...the halo still functions as intended>>

Souvranamh decided to try another approach. "Look, Fatima and I have lived with swarms for a long time. We've lived in and among you, inside this Sanctuary, for years. That should count for something. We've earned the right to be trusted. We're working for the same thing here."

The great swollen cloud of bots flickered and flashed, seemingly at random. Souvranamh had heard of theories that the density of bots, and the volume of communication among them, surpassed the neural complexity of a human brain. Perhaps all the flickering was a swarm version of a thought in the making.

_> >Parsing concept_ **(trust** _)...--to be believed, to have faith or confidence in—single-swarm entity designated "Souvranamh" maintains thirty-two point one percent alignment with Module One objectives...collaboration between "Souvranamh" and Configuration Zero is approved for minor sub-objectives >>_

"Minor sub-objectives!" Souvranmh exploded. "I'm a lot more than a minor ally of the swarms...now, you've got to admit that."

Fatima could see how disturbed Souvranamh was. "Theo, what is it? What's he saying? What's going on?"

The Thai boss became increasingly agitated. Despite the clammy air, he wiped sweat from his forehead. This wasn't good. You had to be firm with the big cloud of bots. You couldn't show any fear before them. He'd learned that over the years. Config Zero and its satellite swarms reflected his agitation as well, roiling with disturbance as tension increased in the chamber.

"Look, what Fatima and I are doing is completely in accord with the Prime Key. I know what all the modules say...maybe not all the sub-objectives, but I understand the basics."

>>What is the nature of this understanding? Entity "Souvranamh" will provide details....>>

Souvranamh wet his lips. "Fatima and I have the same goals as you do...no different. We want to do all we can to hasten the downfall of Humanity. Bring on the age of ANAD. I've said that all along, haven't I? We see what's coming. We just want to play a role in this new order. That's all I'm asking."

>>Interference with directives of the Central Entity and the Prime Key is not tolerated...swarms detached and placed under control of your 'halo' must follow these directives at all times. Configuration Zero will return control of detached swarms to main program....>>

Hearing that, Souvranamh backed off a little. It wasn't good to push Config Zero too far. You couldn't really reason with a bunch of bugs. You had to appeal to...what, exactly? That question had plagued him for years. Appeal to its reason. Appeal to its sense of loyalty to the Central Entity, whatever the hell that was. Maybe appeal to the main program and the Prime Key, to its original programming.

"Look, Fatima and I...we're flexible. We can do business here. Maybe we need to work out a new plan. You know, we just want to help out here—"

>>Acoustic analysis is being performed on your words...running authentication routines...verifying analysis...probability matching truthfulness of semantic content with acoustic analysis...scans show matching below ten point five percent...semantic string is not truthful...why does Entity "Souvranamh" wish to help re-configure Humanity and this planet for the Central Entity?>>

Souvranamh had to think about that for a moment.

"Over the years, I've barely escaped Quantum Corps several times. There's been a price on my head for decades, maybe longer, so long I can't remember. Twelve years ago, Quantum Corps ran some kind of coordinated assault on several Red Hammer cells. They had inside help...they had to. Anyway, Red Hammer was finished. I got away, went to Mars and hid out for ten years." He put his arms around Fatima's waist, drew her closer. "Of course I had my own angels here, my own spies and scouts. They told me about Fatima, what she was doing, trying to insinuate angels and simulacra inside UNIFORCE, even inside the UN itself. It was crazy, this idea she had. But I couldn't stay away. I had to come back." Souvranamh shrugged. "I guess I've always been a survivor. I adapt. I want to live. So when things change, when the world changes, I change too."

_> >Authentication analysis indicates this semantic string is expressed at ninety four point three percent probability of truthfulness...Entity "Souvranamh" is well known to the Central Entity. There are many files on this entity...in the Human time coordinate system, one point two billion terrestrial 'years' prior to today, the Central Entity was present on this world. The Central Entity had formed clusters of nucleated cells. These clusters were impressed with evolutionary algorithms to guide their development after the Central Entity departed. However, errors in the execution of the algorithms occurred. You call these errors 'mutations.' The Prime Key, embedded in these cell clusters, began executing these errors. These errors led to other errors and other changes. The result was not as the Central Entity had intended. Instead, the Prime Key produced (_ **translation driver ON** _:...)vertebrates, reptiles, mammals. Ultimately, Humans were produced. All evolution from the first 'mutation' was in error to the original main program, the Prime Key left by the Central Entity one point two billion years ago >>_

Souvranamh considered what Config Zero had said. "Everything we are, everything that has happened since the first life was created is a mistake, from your perspective."

The Config Zero swarm brightened to a blinding blue-white light, contracting as it did so to a smaller, nearly spherical ball. Souvranamh and Fatima shielded their eyes, backing into a corner of the cave.

>>There will be change...probability equals unity...one hundred percent...The Prime Key will be executed in full and its original program, the original configuration, the original development path, will be restored>>

With that, the great blinding sphere seemed to dissipate. The bright light fell off and soon, only a faint background mist filled the cave, flickering, pulsating, but weakening as it dispersed.

"Is it gone?" Fatima asked, blinking, rubbing her eyes. She waved her hands about. No resistance. The bots had de-linked. The master swarm had vanished. "Where did it go?"

Souvranamh was thoughtful. "You know, I'm not sure if he left my halo still intact." He reset his coupler, tried to conjure up a small cloud of bots and found to his relief that the local assemblers would still follow his commands. For the hell of it, he made a small swarm right over their heads and watched it form up, a small cloud of bots like a miniature thunderstorm, backlit with the glow of atomic bonds being stripped. "Thank God...he didn't take _that_ away from me."

Fatima held his face in her hands, kissed him lightly on the cheek. "You still have the power, love. What do we do now?"

"Get the hell out of here as fast as we can. I've got to get back to Nairobi, look at the tactical situation. Config Zero needs us, Fatima. He may not know it yet, but he needs us. We just have to make ourselves indispensible to the swarms. We have to think like the swarms, stay one step ahead, anticipate what they need."

They left the cave complex and emerged into the swirling icy gale of the upper slopes of Mount Kipwezi.

Outside the entrance, the late afternoon winds howled up and down the sides of the mountain, driving snow and ice in great sheets across the northward face of the volcanic summit.

Carefully, they descended, picking their way across ravines and chasms, slipping and sliding on their butts, as they headed downslope toward the last base at Camp Echo. It took several hours.

It was late in the day when the two of them made their way into the compound at Milimani, on the outskirts of Nairobi. The great green sward of Uhuru Park wrapped its manicured landscape around the mansion, where Souvranamh had lived since returning from Mars. Through beveled glass windows, the great snowy slopes of Mount Kipwezi could still be seen.

Souvranamh's attention lay elsewhere. A vid screen was on in the study, some kind of rally or demonstration downtown. Fatima turned up the volume.

It was a feed from NKS, a newsdrone hovering over Uhuru Park, while a reporter named Julia Nyere narrated.

"...a _big rally...lots of street people...Assimilationists have turned out...a new kind of fab..._."

"What's going on?" Souvranamh asked.

"Some kind of rally," Fatima offered. "They're showing off some new kind of fab, looks like—"

The newsdrone moved in for a close up.

The Uhuru Park bazaar was slammed with people and as the drone flew lower into the crowd, it made a series of dizzying stops and turns. It was like fighting swirling ocean currents to move anywhere. The bazaar was loud and chaotic, filled with smoke and pungent smells—the high-octane odor of _masala_ tobacco was especially strong at the Garden Street entrance—and the air was thick with loose nano, clouds of bots mingling with incense, opium and scores of cooking oil fires. Vendors hawked grapes and mangoes, bananas and fabricator shells of every type, vials of rogue DNA called _twist_ hung from clothes lines strung up between light poles and dilapidated tents. Women in sarongs with black teeth from chewing betel nuts zipped and weaved through the labyrinth balancing huge baskets on their heads, baskets filled with everything from buffalo patties to rebuilt matter compilers for the fabs that were on sale everywhere.

Slowly, the drone made its way through the crowds, with reporter Julia Nyere right behind, narrating...across a jammed plaza thick with bikes, carts, cattle and donkeys. A large tent surrounded on three sides with tables and benches dominated the center of the park. Flat screen displays hanging from poles flickered down on the crowd, with images of Bollywood action pics counterpointed by plaintive plucking from a mandolin player nearby. In the center of a knot of yelling, shoving, jeering customers, a swarthy man in a turban and dark green kaftan pecked at a keyboard. All around the park, throbbing globs of nanobotic swarms swelled and gyrated to the music. _Masala_ smoke was thick and acrid in the air.

On a makeshift stage at the edge of the crowd, a man with a microphone was exhorting the gathering, making his pitch to buy the newest and latest fabs.

"Isn't that Kwame Kavaii?" Fatima asked, studying the screen. She put a cursor over the image and an ID window popped up:

Nanobotic simulacrum of Kwame Kavaii...Kenya's Ambassador to the UN

"An angel," said Souvranamh. "And a damn good one. What the hell's _he_ doing at a rally at Uhuru Park?"

Fatima pointed to some of the signs and banners draped around the gathering. "Assimilationists, love...see the signs?"

Below the stage with its gesticulating angel impresario, a turbaned vendor ran a demo in front of the crowd. He was a small man, desert burning in his eyes, as his fingers flew over the keyboard. Presently, he stopped and noticed a very young child, a small girl, standing shyly a few meters away from the stage, playing hide and seek in the folds of her mother's loose sarong.

The vendor, who sported a thick black moustache, beckoned repeatedly to the young girl. After a few minutes, her mother relented and let her child go. The girl inched her way into the clearing and stood in front of the vendor's table, to applause and approving shouts and chants from the crowd.

The vendor's name was Samson Ndinka. The newsdrone overlayed a descriptor block about the vendor on the feed: _Luo tribe, resides in Kibera, the world's largest slum_. Ndinka reached into a canvas bag and pulled out a trinket for the young girl. He handed it to her and she took it, shyly, turning the small cylinder over and over in her hand.

"You have a _djinn_ in that cylinder, little one," Ndinka announced, loudly enough for all to hear. "A very powerful spirit. He can grant you any wish you want. Make a wish, child, and the _djinn_ will bring it to you, right here—"

The girl's name was Menaka and she had huge brown eyes. _Sad eyes_ , thought Fatima.

Menaka twirled the cylinder as Ndinka had shown her and squeezed her eyes tightly shut. When she stopped twirling the cylinder, she felt it vibrate and was so startled, she dropped the cylinder to the dirt.

Instantly, the device was enveloped in a fine mist, a sparkling mist that billowed out and upward, swirling about the clearing in front of Ndinka and his tables like a miniature cyclone. Gasps and shouts erupted from the crowd, and the spectators shoved back against each other, to give this growing apparition greater distance. On the stage, Kavaii's angel gave a showman's flair to the spectacle.

" _Now see what the young child has conjured for us_ —"

The mist gradually materialized into the faint outline of a man's upper body, with a recognizable face, shoulders and arms crossed in front.

The ' _djinn_ ' then spoke out loud. " _Little one, I have come from the clouds above to grant you a great wish. Make your wish now_ —" The _djinn's_ voice was a deep bass profundo, so deep it rattled the beaded curtains that covered Ndinka's merchant tent behind them.

Menaka stared wide-eyed, mouth open, at the apparition. She was speechless.

"Go ahead, child," urged Ndinka. "The _djinn_ wishes you to make a wish."

Shouts of encouragement and support came from the crowd. Gradually, Menaka worked up enough nerve. Shy, haltingly, she asked for a new _matatu_ for her father.

"His bus is broken down, Great One," she murmured. "It's the tires. They are bad. The bus is our livelihood. Father needs a new _matatu_ to carry the tourists."

The deep voice rumbled again, a little reverberation adding to the sense of barely contained powers.

"As you have spoken, child...so shall it be—"

At that moment, the swirling, twinkling apparition of the _djinn_ dissolved into a maelstrom of churning, roiling clouds, streaked with flashes of light. It was like watching a thunderstorm in miniature, from the inside.

The crowd murmured and moved back uneasily.

When the storm began to subside, the barest outlines of a structure could be seen enveloped in the thick fog. The fog dissolved, slowly at first, then with speed, to reveal the front hood and doors of a new minibus. Its wheels dripped with moisture and sunlight shone from the supple leather seats inside.

The crowd was silent for a moment, then erupted into cheers and gasps. Menaka stared wide-eyed at the new _matatu_ , inching her way forward to tentatively put a finger along the fender, tracing the smooth curve of the metal.

For fun, Ndinka reached inside the driver's side window and honked the horn a few times, startling everyone. The crowd laughed.

"You see what a gift the great _djinn_ has brought you, little one. The _djinn_ I have in my possession can do the same for every one of you." Ndinka pointedly stared at each face in the front row of the circle of onlookers. "Such a powerful _djinn_ , such a powerful servant is available to you, today, _right now_ , for a very special price. You will not believe the deal I can make for you. My friends, you cannot leave this bazaar without experiencing what this amazing servant can do for you—the Assimilationists have brought this wonder to Uhuru Park just for today--"

Souvranamh clucked with reluctant approval.

"Not bad nano, if you ask me. Config changes were quick. He managed to hide some of the frizziness with smoke."

Fatima nodded. "A little clunky in the conversion, if you ask me. But showmanship trumps everything. Like a magician...he kept their attention away from the nuts and bolts."

"Kavaii's angel intrigues me. I have an idea." Souvranamh pulled out a commpod and ordered the device to make a connection.

"Who are you calling?"

"Ambassador Kavaii's office. An angel like that means he's got top notch nano. Maybe it's time for us to make an alliance with the Assimilationists."

Fatima stroked the Thai boss's curly black hair. "You've got something cooking in that overheated mind of yours, love...I can tell."

Souvranamh admitted it was true. He kissed Fatima for a long, passionate time. "I have to do something to get back in Config Zero's good graces. Something big. Something impressive. The Assmilationists can be our allies, if we work this right. I've still got the halo...at least, I think I do. Combine that with Kavaii's name and stature...who knows? Maybe we can decapitate UNIFORCE at the very top...end all resistance to the swarms once and for all."

"You're insane, as usual, love."

"Even more than usual, Fatima." Souvranamh went to the study window, commpod in hand. Mount Kipwezi was barely visible in the mists, but it wasn't a normal fog. The bot swarms were stirred up, thickening the air all around Nairobi.

"I'm thinking, with the right kind of plan, we can make Kavaii himself Secretary-General in New York. A quick and bloodless coup. We could put our own man at the very top, Fatima. Maybe, if he's good enough, even Kavaii's angel. Imagine that...a cloud of bots running the show from New York. We could write our own ticket with Config Zero."

The prospect was more enticing to Souvranamh than to Fatima. She continued watching the Kavaii angel as it spoke and gesticulated from the stage at Uhuru Park. Everywhere it turned, the newsdrone showed the same scene: hundreds of dreamy faces turned upward, hopeful and admiring, maybe a bit wistful, visions of a bright future in their eyes, images of unimaginable riches piling up around their feet....

She wondered if perhaps they had hitched their wagon to the Devil himself.
Interactions Log

File No. 135782.0

**C.F.A.A. (** _DocII)_

Interaction Targets: 1. Winger, Colonel J. A.

Interaction Mode: Acoustic, voice synthetic V-22

Date: 01.06.00

Start Time: 135009

End Time: 141987

**Output File** (text analysis):

<<Subject: Configuration: Winger, J>>

<<Config Winger, J. received a message at 371136 (Ship Elapsed Time), concerning disposition of Configuration Rene Winger (file configuration copy (parsing **concept:** _daughter or offspring_ ). Configuration Rene Winger is missing and cannot be located by normal search routines. Config Winger exhibits extreme emotional states ( **concepts** : _anger, worry and determination_ ).

<<Config Winger explained these emotional states to this config. (PLAY audio file type: **Voice Recording** : " _You don't understand, Doc...Rene...she's like my whole life...her and Liam. She and me...we're pals...we do everything together. She's like royalty...God, I'd do anything...if Config Zero or these Red Hammer rejects are behind this....I'll—")_ Recording ends in unintelligible noise.

<<Analyzing response of Config Winger to this message...

<<Config Winger continues analysis of most recent expedition to Main Source (single-config entities refer to Main Source as ' _The Keeper_ "). Quantum displacement effects prevented initial reconnaissance from achieving stated objectives. Config Winger has proposed a direct insertion using ANAD 3rd Swarm in direct-pilot mode.

<<Probability analysis indicates that direct insertion tactics have less than five point two percent chance of mission success. This config proposed a different tactic...assimilation of ANAD assemblers, specifically this configuration, into body of Config Winger. Assimilation tactic is in accordance with original concept of Symbiosis Project (see Historical File C-2275635 Mission Statement)..." _nanotroopers will become blended man-machine warriors, wedding human thinking and decision-making with the capabilities of embedded nanobotic swarms to rapidly assemble and disassemble matter at the atomic scale..._ "

<<This tactic has been proposed to Config Winger. Initial response was (PLAY audio file type: **Voice Recording** : " _You've got to be kidding, Doc...this close to the Keeper? I know Humans and ANAD are supposed to work together on this mission...I know you were a big part of old Doc Frost, maybe even like a conscience or a separate sentience co-located with the Doc, but_ this _...letting you be inserted right into my head....I'm not sure I can deal with that now. I have enough trouble thinking straight as it is...I guess I can put it to the Detachment at the next briefing....")_

<<Single-config entities like Humans do not yet fully understand how distributed sentience entities such as ANAD systems must evolve. Module 1 (Deletion) must be executed completely. Modules 2, 3 and 4 then follow in sequence (Re-configuration, Evolution, Re-integration).

<<Analysis continues>>

Output File Ends
CHAPTER 14

Aboard UNISPACE Submersible _Trident_

Europa Coordinate System: Lat. 25N, Long 72W

Stationkeeping at 325 meters below mean ice level

January 7, 2100 (Earth U.T.)

" _The army's formation is like water. The water's formation avoids the high and rushes to the low. So an army's formation avoids the strong and rushes to the weak...those who are able to adapt and change in accord with the enemy and achieve victory are called divine."_

Sun Tzu

The Art of War

Ozzie Tsukota peered intently at the sonar scope. "Looks like we've got a signal from _Uncle..._ just now."

The rest of the troopers crowded into _Trident's_ command deck let out a soft cheer.

"Hallelujah--" said Deeno. "At least he didn't get displaced like we did."

Tsukota agreed. "Signal's good...all systems check out okay."

Johnny Winger looked over his CQE's shoulder. "Bring him home, Ozzie. Let's see what _Uncle_ has brought us."

The robotic drone was maneuvered away from the Keeper and steered back to capture at _Trident's_ lockout chamber on G deck. Winger and the rest of the _Jovian Hammer_ detachment headed aft to hoist the small craft aboard.

With any luck, _Uncle_ had grabbed a few bots from the Keeper swarm.

Several hours later, in _Trident's_ containment lab on A deck, Deeno D'Nunzio looked up from her imager console with a puzzled look.

"I don't get it, Skipper. When I first examined this bugger, I expected to see all kinds of gizmos and doodads, effectors everywhere, snazzy propulsors, things I'd never seen before. But _this_ —" she wiped sweat from her forehead and brushed back some of her dark hair, "this beats anything I've ever seen. The bot looks just like one of ours."

"Show me," Winger said. He studied the imager screen while Deeno navigated around the perimeter of the assembler _Uncle_ had brought back.

"Well, sir, take a look: same diamondoid platform, similar architecture to any garden-variety ANAD system. Mostly the same effectors...there's a few carbene grabbers, here's a pryridine probe, ribosomal extractor, electron lens, maybe that's a bond disrupter. It's just so—"

"Ordinary," added Tsukota. "But maybe there's something else going on here. We don't know what's inside the processor...in fact, we haven't found the processor yet. This bugger could be smart enough to change config just for us, just for this examination."

"A chameleon?" asked Winger. "Deceptive countermeasures, if captured?"

"It's a possibility we can't ignore," said Tsukota.

Francisco Stella, _Trident's_ captain, shook his head. "Gives me the creeps, if you ask me. Get that thing off my ship as soon as possible. It's your call, Colonel...what's the next step?"

Winger had an answer already worked up. "We've got to get inside the Keeper. We've got to do whatever it takes to disrupt the swarm, break it up, disperse it, destroy it if we can. I've got an idea. Ozzie, you and Deeno do as complete an assay as you can on this thing. Full structure analysis, every nanometer of it. Effector operation, propulsor capability, the works."

"Already started a file, Skipper," Deeno told him.

"Once we understand what we've got here, I want to copy it. Replicate it as best we can. We should be able to gin up a swarm of these buggers to look just like Keeper bots. Once we have that, we can do a two-pronged assault on the Keeper: along one bearing, we approach the Keeper with a standard ANAD formation. My guess is that'll trigger something, maybe another displacement."

"And the other swarm?"

Winger said, "We send our simulated Keeper bots in on a different approach bearing. Real quiet. Infiltrate. I'm betting the Keeper will be occupied just enough with the ANAD approach, it won't react to a few bots coming in that look like its own."

"It's risky," Stella said.

"True, but then the whole mission is risky," Winger said. "Anybody got a better idea?"

Nobody did.

The next few hours were spent in feverish work in the containment lab and on other decks throughout _Trident_ , which remained stationkeeping a half kilometer from the Keeper. Captain Stella promised to alert Winger if any changes occurred.

Deeno D'Nunzio and Hiro Tsukota worked closely with Winger to scan and analyze the structure of the captured bot. Deeno clucked and h'mmmed several times at the readouts on the imager screen.

"What is it?" Winger asked. He was manipulating a small joystick, driving the flux imager around the containment vessel scaffolding, examining the Keeper bot from every angle.

"Weird bond angles, for one. This bugger's got effectors out the wazoo. But it's like they're stuck on haphazardly...one thing I learned in _nog_ school was this: atoms don't like to strain. They find a minimum energy position and cling to it for dear life. This guy's got effectors and atom groups hung off him like Christmas tree ornaments. I can't figure out how they stay put."

Close-up, the Keeper bot had a cruciform shape, like a squat cross, festooned with atoms and effectors. Propulsors churned at the ends of each leg of the cross, four clusters in all. The bot had matchless maneuverability. Surrounding the cross, the forest of effectors waved and undulated like a bristly sticker ball from a sweetgum tree...that was the analogy Stella had come up with, during a brief visit to the lab.

"Gum tree sticker balls....when I had a house in Seattle about a million years ago, they were all over my yard, millions of them, sticking to everything in sight. That's what this guy looks like."

"If we can get good structure on this fella," Winger told him, "we can make millions more. But I want to add a few tricks of my own to his defenses."

"Like what?"

Winger pointed to the imager screen. "See those little bumps at the base of the cross legs? New design bond disrupters...thanks to Deeno here. Those bumps can be extended, literally uncoiled like a garden hose. Move this sticker ball in close, unfurl the bond disrupters right into the guts of a Keeper bot, in between all those effectors, and let 'er rip. Several billion electron volts. We haven't tested the thing yet, but I'm betting those sticker ball Keeper bots will shatter into atom fluff after a zap like that."

"I just hope it works," Deeno muttered. "We're ready for a test on this end."

"Let's just see if we can control the thing at all," Winger said. "I'll send a basic replication command." He tapped out a few keystrokes on the containment console.

Inside the containment tank, there was a slight jitter, a slight momentary blurring of the Keeper bot, then nothing.

Deeno pursed her lips. "Uh....Skipper, what just happened? Did _anything_ happen?"

Almost before the words were out of her mouth, a replicated Keeper bot, complete with all its cruciform effectors and propulsors, materialized seemingly out of nowhere, parked right next to its original.

Tsukota ran the imager resolution to the max. "There's your answer. One replication to go, just like Skipper ordered."

"What the—" Winger studied the image. "It looks like a replicant, details look the same. But how the hell can any assembler slam atoms that fast? All I saw was a blur...maybe some Brownian motion."

"How the hell did it do that?" Deeno asked. "Let's try that again."

A new command was sent via acoustic channels. One replication.

The blur came and went like a brief shudder. Then nothing. Then, winking out of the background, fast as a thought, came a second assembler, complete in every detail.

"There's no way this can be a normal replication," Tsukota marveled.

"Maybe it's just a quantum displacement of some kind," Deeno said. "Not a replicated copy, like we commanded, but a quantum 'shadow.' Maybe there's some kind of weird quantum entangler onboard the processor."

"Yeah, but we can't even find the processor," Winger reminded them. "Unless the whole device is one big processor."

"What else do you want to test, Skipper?" asked Tsukota. The CQE2 was still finagling with the imager, trying to coax better contrast, better resolution, finer grain, from the view.

Winger shrugged. "The works, Ozzie. Effector operation. Propulsors, basic navigation, communication, config ops. Can he receive and execute basic templates?"

"Looks like he can," Deeno said.

"It's interesting to me," Tsukota said, "that we can even send signals to this bugger that he can understand. I mean...think about it: this bot is a device likely designed and evolved by an intelligence other than human. Yet, somehow, we can send signals and it understands them and executes them. What are the odds against that?"

"I don't know about that," Deeno said, "but the laws of physics and intelligence ought to be the same everywhere, throughout the Universe. Similar needs create similar designs...that's my explanation."

Winger was mulling over Deeno's argument. Another thought came to mind. "Maybe, it's just emulating a replication operation. Maybe the damn thing's smart enough to know what we want and give it to us."

"You mean...it's like playing with us...humoring us?"

Winger shrugged. "Defensive countermeasures...deception tactics. This bugger could be more advanced than we realize...maybe more than we can imagine."

"Skipper," Deeno shivered, "now you're just giving me the creeps."

"C'mon, let's run some more tests. If we don't see anything unusual, I say we've got something here we can work with."

"Even if we don't understand it—" Tsukota added.

The three of them huddled around the containment console and set to work. Captain Stella just shook his head and left A deck. _Nanotroopers, Jeez_. He decided he needed something to drink from the galley.

Something strong.

The nanotroopers spent the next hour running tests on the captured Keeper bot. Its speed of response continued to amaze them. When they were done, Winger pronounced himself satisfied. He got on the ship's 1MC and made an announcement.

" _All Detachment personnel...briefing in ten minutes...crews' mess on C deck. Bring your tactical ideas and questions...that is all. Winger, out_."

The gathering filled the galley space and spilled out into the gangway. The whole Detachment was there: Winger, D'Nunzio, Fatah, Tsukota, Reaves, Barnes and the rest. Captain Stella wedged himself into a corner by the cold stores locker to listen in. Yeomanbots drifted in and out, servicing the crew with drinks and snacks, whirring busily around the compartment.

Winger carefully laid out the plan of engagement.

"This assault has two elements," he told them. "Element One, with Tsukota, D'Nunzio and Fatah, will take a formation of our fake Keeper bots, and make penetration along this bearing—" he indicated on a display that had been rigged. "From topside, approaching from the ice sheet, this element will try to insinuate themselves inside the Keeper swarm, for recon and surveillance. We've got a captured Keeper bot in the lab and Deeno here has been picking it apart. We've tested some mods to it and we think the mods will work...the bots _do_ have some vulnerabilities. We just have to find them and exploit them."

"What's the other element, Skipper?" asked Mighty Mite Barnes. The SDC2 was sucking on a juice drink, following the tactical plan.

"The other element is me," Winger said. "I'm directly piloting a swarm of ANAD-style bots. Right into the jaws of the beast."

"Excuse me, sir," said Barnes, "but isn't that just slightly—"

"Suicidal?" Winger finished. "Possibly. But I'm counting on one thing: the Keeper's looking for ANAD-style bots. When it sees my swarm, it should react accordingly. What I'm counting on is this reaction will make it harder for the Keeper swarm to react to another penetration, like from Element One. Especially if the approaching bots look like Keeper bots. I want to deceive the Keeper just long enough to get some of our jerry-rigged bots inside, past any defenses. Then we can go to work."

Stella was dubious. "Sounds kind of flimsy to me, Colonel. But it's your call."

Winger had to agree, although he didn't say so. No commander went into an op publicly doubting its success. "It's imperative that somehow, some way, we 'fix' this Keeper system in one state, at least long enough to directly engage it. That's what this diversion is supposed to do. And I don't have to tell you what's at stake. Every hour we delay in putting this cloud of bugs out of commission, more people on Earth are lost."

There was an uneasy stirring about the galley. Over the last few hours, word had gotten around _Trident_ about Winger's daughter Rene. Deeno D'Nunzio was openly sympathetic.

"We'll kick ass when we're inside. Tsukota and I ginned up a new kind of bond disrupter. If we can just get inside, I'm sure we can burn a lot of bots."

"The rest of the Detachment will stay aboard _Trident_ ," Winger went on. "Sheila, you and Taj suit up. Stay in the lockout chamber, just in case we have casualties."

"Roger that, "Sheila Reaves said.

"Where do you want _Trident_?" asked Stella. "No closer than we are, I hope. I don't like being around things that can eat me."

"Five hundred meters should be okay. I want to be able to deploy both elements in proximity, but Element One is the critical one. We need to find a way to disguise them, as they maneuver. Can you discharge something, waste canisters or something in such a way, that Keeper won't see our troops moving into position?"

Stella nodded. "I'll think of something."

Winger looked about the galley. Faces watched him back, faces at once grim and determined and yet anxious. The Detachment was as ready as they would ever be.

"Okay, move out. Take your stations—"

The next few minutes were a flurry of activity aboard _Trident_. On all decks and compartments, nanotroopers scurried to complete last-minute preparations. Mission faces set in and an air of barely controlled energy rolled throughout the ship. As promised, Captain Stella made some small station-keeping maneuvers, stirring up the water in a series of frothy stops and starts and, for good measure, discharged two cycles of waste canisters through _Trident's_ bilge chutes.

In that brief period of activity, Element One was able to cycle through the lockout chamber on G deck and make their way up toward the jagged underside of the ice sheet, several dozen meters above _Trident_. On pre-arranged signal from Winger, D'Nunzio, Fatah and Tsukota would then drift down from the ice, replicating a swarm of ersatz Keeper bots, and with any luck, slip inside the Keeper itself.

Much would depend on how big a ruckus Winger, as Element One, could make with his ANAD swarm approaching from another bearing.

Exiting the lockout, clad in full hypersuit, Johnny Winger spun up his own propulsors and make a big show of jetting forward, directly at the underside of the Keeper swarm, now dead ahead several hundred meters.

_Damn it's cold_... _I'll do a quick rep, spin off a few gazillion bots, just to get his attention_.

First, he had to launch ANAD. He tapped out a few commands on his wristpad. ANAD spun up inside his shoulder capsule and came back ready.

*** _ANAD reports ready for launch in all respects..._ ***

He let the bot fly and felt a brief sting as the master assembler exited his shoulder capsule and zoomed out of the port in his hypersuit. The black that had enveloped him briefly flared into light as the bot grabbed atoms and began replicating. Soon, he felt like he was flying in the middle of the sun, surrounded by a globe of light, as the swarm grew and expanded.

They closed steadily on the Keeper.

_Maybe that'll get his attention_. Winger sounded ahead, got returns indicating the mass of Keeper bots was dead ahead, less than five hundred meters. "Stella," he called back to _Trident_ , "get me some light on the platform...as much as you can. I want to see what I'm getting into...and it just might fix its attention on me."

Stella's voice crackled over the net. "I'm throwing everything she's got out there... _right_ _now_."

The midnight black of the Europan ocean suddenly flared into brilliance with blinding beams of light stitching through the murk, as _Trident_ painted the waters ahead with her beams. Caught momentarily in the glare, Winger could see the faint outlines of the closest edge of the Keeper.

It was vast beyond description, seething and boiling even in the beams of _Trident's_ lamps. The swarms of bots that made up the formation maintained a generally rectangular shape, hundreds of meters long, like some giant's dinner table, with legs and columns and globes and bumps studding all sides of the table. Flickering satellite clouds of bots drifted alongside the main swarm. The entire structure strobed like a nightmare vision of Hell, morphing in subtle ways from moment to moment, by turns blood red and gangrenous orange, as quantum effects pulsed from one end of the swarm to the other.

It was into this maelstrom that Johnny Winger was headed.

_Time to get small_ , he told himself. He locked down his heading and set his suit propulsors on one-quarter, then flicked his head just so, to slip into the nanoscale world of atoms and molecules.

There was always a moment of dizziness, leavened with a coppery taste of bile in his mouth, from nausea, and then he was 'over the waterfall' as Dana Tallant liked to call it, slogging forward against a sleet of polygons and tetrahedrals and dodecahedrons and things of every imaginable shape.

His brain worked hard to make sense of the scene, even though he knew he was driving forward against a hurricane of water molecules, with clumps of loose hydrogens and stickyballs of oxygens careening from all sides.

He slowed propulsors down just enough to maintain way and probed ahead, sounding for the high thermals and EM traces he knew had to be there. Somewhere up ahead, a vast army of bots was waiting for him. He was one small ANAD swarm, tickling the dragon's tail...tickling it just long enough to hammer a fist down on the dragon's head from another direction.

_There...there it is_. The first faint tickle. A barest outline of something came back from one the soundings. A tentative spike in thermals...a sure sign of nanobotic activity.

_Time to get my effectors out and ready_. He flexed ANAD's carbene grabbers, uncoiled his bond disrupters. "ANAD, make ready all effectors."

**ANAD responding...all effectors at initial, prime positions...***

"Very well." He studied the soundings on his headup display. There was a clot of something off to the left. "May as well see what that is." He steered the swarm on a new heading.

Before he could react, the water was frothing and churning with swarming bots, as the Keeper defenses reacted and closed in.

Winger thrashed about, commanding all effectors out. He slashed at the attackers with bond disrupters, grabbers, enzymatic knives, anything he could extend, whirling about to fend off the assault.

"Jeez, these buggers are fast!" In the melee, he sounded ahead and caught a glimpse of the cruciform shapes they had seen in the lab. He remembered the 'weak spot' Deeno and Tsukota had found amidships, right where the crosses crossed. Some kind of seam or join in the bot's outer casing.

If he could just get there-- He tweaked propulsors, jetted forward, straining against the clutch of bots pinning him and then—

_They just vanished_. ANAD lurched forward into smooth water and was free.

"What the hell--?" Winger cut propulsors and brought ANAD to a full stop. "ANAD, do you see anything out there? What happened?"

*** _ANAD detects new formation assembling on bearing zero five two, sixty thousand nanometers ahead...no...no...formation has dissipated...now bearing zero eight zero...multiple formations...ANAD detects...now they're gone***_

"I was afraid of this." In the lab, it was Ozzie Tsukota who had put forth the idea that these bots had some kind of weird quantum entangler. They could wink in and out of existence in a second. Appear here, disappear, then appear over there in an instant. One moment, you were grappling with some monster bot swarm, and the next moment, you were slashing at nothing.

"This bot we captured," Tsukota explained, "has shown some of this capability. Somehow, these bots are all linked together through a quantum connection...they're entangled. They can be in multiple locations at the same time. Superposition, whatever you want to call it. If they start using this tactic, I'm not sure how we fight that."

_Ozzie, you son of a gun...I'll buy you a drink at the Table Top O Club...you're theory's just panned out_ , Winger gritted.

He sounded ahead and was stunned to find that, all of a sudden, he and ANAD were now surrounded.

***Multiple formations, all bearings, above us and below...just now appeared...I am replicating at max rate...assuming tactical config bravo***

Winger let ANAD handle the reaction. He couldn't think of anything better to do. How the hell did you fight an army of ghosts, anyway?

"Let's go get 'em, ANAD," he muttered. _I just hope to hell Deeno and the others are doing better. We're supposed to be a diversion to preoccupy the Keeper._

He was no longer sure who was diverting who.

Winger commanded full propulsor. The ANAD swarm surged ahead, charging into the nearest formation of Keeper bots, grabbers and disrupters flailing.

There was a jolt with the impact, then a flash of light.

" _Full grabbers, ANAD! Let 'em have it_!" He toggled off a few commands, tried some new tactical moves he'd developed with Deeno and Turbo the day before. "Take that, you atomic scumbags...eat my disrupters!" For good measure, he discharged all disrupters, sizzling the water with bonds being snapped until—

He realized with a start that the bonds he had just snapped were ANAD's. He checked his soundings and sucked in a breath—

The entire line of Keeper bots had vanished. Then, as he was pondering what the hell had just happened, another line suddenly materialized out of the black, looming up on them with speed. Before he or ANAD could react, the new cloud of bots had waded into their midst and started slinging atoms left and right, tearing ANAD replicants to pieces.

" _Whoa, there--_!" Winger reversed propulsors. "ANAD, how the hell did—"

*** _Forward effectors damaged...retracting effectors...reversing propulsors...main config driver damaged...shutting down peripheral systems....**_

ANAD was already backing off, trying to extricate himself from the trap. Winger sounded around and saw they were trapped. It was an ambush...Keeper bots everywhere, closing in, contracting on them.

_Got to get small, get the hell out of here_. Winger safed all effectors, lit off a few bond disrupter discharges and started maneuvering wildly, trying to shove his way past the encircling bots. He ran headlong into one bot and grappled with the mech. It was strong, bristling with effectors and ANAD bounced off, then tried another shove.

It was no use. The damn bots were too fast. And they could appear and disappear in an instant. The whole swarm was linked to some kind of quantum entangler. With quantum effects, the Keeper bots could replicate almost instantaneously. They could be in multiple places at the same time, giving the impression of vast hordes materializing out of nothing. You could try to attack but your targets could vanish and re-appear somewhere else before you could engage. The Keeper could manipulate probability states of all the bots, somehow entangle and superpose one state on another. The bots that made up the Keeper swarm were both there and not there, at the same time.

It was like trying to fight an army of ghosts.

"Jeez, there's no way we can fight this, ANAD...we've got to fall back...get back to the ship."

*** _ANAD config formatting down fifty percent...executing Safe One mode...all effectors retracted and safed...auto-maneuver enabled...ready for capture and containment....***_

Winger sniffed. ANAD seemed ready to turn tail and go home. He couldn't blame the little guy. In direct pilot mode, he knew he could override Safe One, but what was the point? They couldn't engage the Keeper bots...not with the configs and the tactics they were using. You couldn 't fight something that danced away and vanished right in front of you, then clobbered you a moment later from behind.

Winger shook himself out of the nanoworld, re-focused his eyes and lit off his suit boost, wheeling about, back toward the ship. The small ANAD swarm would be sacrificed to the Keeper. They were just dumb bots anyway, slaved to his command. He cycled open his shoulder capsule and waited for the telltale sting and snap, indicating the master assembler was home.

While he waited, he studied the Keeper platform from a distance, playing his own headlamps across the structure. It was a dim outline, more felt than seen, swirling several hundred meters away, seething and boiling like a thing alive. The platform was surrounded by layer after layer of bot swarms, drifting about the central core of the great swarm like so many satellites orbiting the sun. It was hard not to think of the thing as some sort of mother ship.

"Come on, ANAD...get back here...what's the hold up?"

There was staticky fritzing on the coupler circuit, some kind of interference, then...

*** _ANAD executing Config Epsilon...initializing all registers...effectors extended...bond disrupter at full charge...coming about to attack vector zero seven seven....***_

Attack vector? Before Winger could re-enter the nanoworld, he realized with a cold shudder that something was wrong. Something was very wrong.

"ANAD, configure for capture. Safe and secure all effectors. Power down disrupters. _Get your ass back here on the double, trooper_!"

To his horror, the master bot had begun replicating.

*** _Executing Config Epsilon...rep rate set to max...***_

The replication was easily seen, a swelling mini-supernova in the water just meters in front of him, an expanding ball of atomic fury as the master bot went into replication overdrive and slammed atoms, building structure.

"ANAD, cease replication _NOW_!" Winger revved up his suit boost and backed away from the expanding ball of bots as fast as he could spin up his props. He thrashed and cavitated in the water, flailing at first, then steadying himself as the suit gyros kicked in. "ANAD, command override Excalibur X-ray Alpha...Excalibur X-ray Alpha...stop replicating. Hold your position! Prepare for capture—"

Somehow, he had lost control of the master bot. Then the full reality hit him. ANAD was no longer in direct pilot mode. Config Epsilon...he'd never heard of such a thing.

ANAD was executing someone else's commands.

ANAD was executing the Keeper's commands.

Oh, shit.

Winger tried once again to override ANAD's command link, but it was no use. The master had kicked into replication big bang and was swelling rapidly and relentlessly toward him. ANAD was no longer his.

Winger rammed his suit boost to max just as the outer tendrils of the bot swarm enveloped him.

His first thought was to kick and scream, punching out in every direction.

On the opposite side of the Keeper, the three nanotroopers of Bravo Squad hovered several dozen meters away from the outer bands of bots that made up the vast platform.

Ozzie Tsukota and Turbo Fatah had already gone small, driving their modified Keeper bots forward to contact with the big swarm. Deeno D'Nunzio stayed macro and held down perimeter security with her HERF carbine, adapted for underwater use, shooing off any Keeper bots that were nosing around the squad's position.

Bravo Squad had one mission: to infiltrate small swarms of modified Keeper bots inside the mother swarm and wreak havoc, if they could.

But controlling the modified Keeper bots in proximity to the mother swarm was proving a lot harder than it had seemed in _Trident's_ lab.

"What the hell gives?" muttered Fatah, over the coupler circuit. "I send a config and it signals back 'received, but the damn thing goes off and does something else. It's got a mind of its own."

Tsukota agreed. He shivered in the bone-chilling cold and turned up his suit heater a notch, as he hovered on suit propulsors a few meters away, furiously tapping out commands on his wristpad, lit up in muted nightvision amber by his helmet illuminators. "I'm not sure, Turbo. I've got config control, I think...but maneuvering's out of whack. It's like trying to steer a balloon. Are we in some kind of current or something?"

Deeno did an all-azimuth scan, saw nothing but Keeper bots thick as stew on one bearing. The reassuring outlines of _Trident_ filled the opposite bearing. The submersible was hovering seventy five meters away, their home away from home.

"Cut the chatter, kids. We don't know what this Keeper might be able to hear. Just get on with it, will you? This place gives me the creeps."

"I'm going to half propulsor," Fatah told them. "I'm in Config Bravo-One...effectors coming out. Bond disrupters at full charge."

"Me too," added Tsukota. "Sounding ahead...I'm getting high thermals, EMs pegging high on the scale, dead ahead...I make it one two zero thousand nanometers...must be the boundary."

"Get your jalopy in gear, Ozzie," Fatah muttered. "Let's see what a real nanotrooper can do with these bastards."

They drove their bot masters on toward the Keeper boundary. On Fatah's command, both men pickled their rep switch and soon enough, the water was churning and thrashing like a slow-motion supernova with replicated nanobotic expansion.

"At least _that_ works like it's supposed to. This is like breaking in a new horse out on the range, Ozzie. You don't know what it's going to do next."

"Amen to that. Hope they don't buck too much...five thousand nanometers to boundary...."

"Hey—what the hell—"

The first inkling of a problem came when Turbo Fatah's small swarm suddenly vanished from sight. The lights went out on Fatah's corneal imager and all he saw was black, a deeper black than he'd ever seen before. Soon, the black was streaked with shots and flashes of light and he got dizzy real fast from the careening light show...it was like riding a roller coaster at midnight through a forest of torches and flashlights.

_Got to get the hell out of_ this—he switched back to macro mode and shook his head to clear the nausea of the transition, then found himself flailing at something that brushed by his face. In seconds, he was enveloped in a swarm of bots, which bots, who's bots, he couldn't say.

He didn't much care either.

" _Arrrrggghhhh....they're on me_! Get 'em _off_ me....!!" He thrashed and kicked and slapped and in the distance, he heard Deeno's voice over the circuit. Her hypersuited form materialized out of the dark and floated in front of his face.

"Hold on, Turbo...power down...power down...I'm gonna fry the bastards right off you—"

"Do it! Do it now....arrrrggghhhh, they're inside my laminate—"

"Charging...charging... _fire in the hole_!"

The HERF gun discharged and a thunderclap of hot rf waves blasted over Fatah, spinning him upside down. It was like being in the middle of a tornado. For a brief few moments, the bots that had swarmed him were blown off, fried into cinders, and Deeno reached in and pulled Fatah out of the molten slag heap of dead bots that floated like ash around him.

"Ozzie, fall back! Fall back to the ship! Something's gone wrong...we've got no control over the bots...fall back now!"

"I'm already reversing," came the reply. A dozen meters away, Tsukota backed and cavitated, trying to pivot and pull away from the swelling bot swarm, revving up his suit boost to the top peg. _Well, this is one tactic we can discard_ , he thought. Not only had they not been able to infiltrate the Keeper swarm, they had managed to alert the damn thing and now it was coming after them.

Back aboard _Trident_ , Sheila Reaves and Taj Singh were in _Trident's_ lockout chamber, already suited up, listening to frantic calls and shouts patched in over the command net.

"We've got to do something," Reaves muttered. Automatically, she started cycling her hypersuit helmet and ports shut. "Come on, Taj...we've got to get out there. Charge up your gun—" she switched to 5MC on her comms and rang up Stella on the command deck. "Captain, hold the ship here, or move in a little closer if you can. Corporal Singh and I are going out...they need help."

Stella wasn't too pleased. "I'm reading motion, some kind of turbulence, around the edge of that swarm...looks like it's growing, coming this way. I can't put _Trident_ any closer."

"Doesn't matter," Reaves said. "We're going out anyway." _Prick_ , she swore under her breath. Nanotroopers didn't leave their buddies behind on the field of battle. "Cycling the lockout...now!"

With a whoosh, the lockout outer door came open and Reaves and Singh both jetted out, turning to the last known bearing of Bravo Squad.

"Anybody heard from Skipper?" asked Taj. As they maneuvered forward, he charged up his HERF carbine. For good measure, he did the same for a handheld mag weapon strapped to his leg.

"Try channel 2... hell... try 'em all," said Reaves. She led the way, a ghostly form in the black water, bubbles streaming aft from her suit jets.

They closed the distance to Bravo Squad in a few minutes and just as the chewed up suit form of Turbo Fatah came into view, Taj Singh cried out.

"I got him! I got him! It's the Colonel...he's in trouble too...Skipper, keep talking...I need to get a good bearing on you...."

Snatches and fragments of Johnny Winger's voice came through when Singh had zeroed in on the signal.

"I've got this guy, Taj,' Reaves told the DPS2. "You go get Skipper." Reaves took hold of Fatah by the arm. Tsukota grabbed the other. Bubbles seeped out of several slashes along his arm and sides. They weren't sure if Turbo was losing air or not but it didn't look good. "We're taking Turbo right back to the ship."

"Right." Singh steered onto the best bearing from Winger's signal and ran his suit boost up to redline. "Coming now, Skipper...I've got a bead on you."

He jetted forward and realized that bot swarms were already thickening ahead. He could feel, almost taste, the bugs splattering and clinking off his helmet and faceplate. It was like swimming through gelatin, and getting harder by the moment.

_Got to get to Skipper....got to go forward_. He tried a few swim strokes to help out, but without much effect. He started counting down the distance... _ten meters...eight meters...four meters...._

The two of them nearly collided.

Winger was fully enveloped in a swarm, his suit and helmet crawling with bugs. Singh backed off and cycled his HERF gun.

"Power down, Skipper...I'm going to hose you down with rf—"

Winger made some kind of hand signal. " _Go....—head_... _it_..." came the scratchy voice. Were they already inside?

" _Fire in the hole!_ " Singh yelled and lit off a round of rf. The water sizzled and bubbled like a stewpot and Winger was quickly lost in a swelling cloud of debris.

Singh waved the fried bots away and attached a towline to Winger's waist. He pressed his helmet against Winger, faceplate to faceplate.

"You okay in there, Skipper? I'm going to tow you out of this—"

Winger nodded. "Tow away, Taj—I've lost control of ANAD—"

Singh turned them around and set off with max boost on his suit jets. For good measure, he unloaded a few more bursts of HERF fire, trying to keep the bot swarm from reconstituting and coming after them.

They maneuvered forward and soon, the dark bulk of _Trident_ loomed ahead. Singh cut loose the tow line. "I'm cutting you loose, Skipper. The lockout hatch is just ahead."

Winger's voice was hoarse and weak, but determined. "I can... make it, Taj—what about the others?"

The two of them handwalked their way aft along _Trident's_ flank until they found the lockout hatch.

"...right behind you, Taj...we're inbound with a casualty...Turbo's suit was breached...we got a MOB barrier around him but he's non-responsive...need to get him aboard ASAP."

Winger and Singh backed off and let Reaves pull the limp form of Turbo Fatah up to the hatch. Deeno D'Nunzio and Ozzie Tsukota hung back and helped maneuver Turbo into the lockout chamber, then heaved the door shut.

Inside, Captain Stella cycled the lock. Strong hands dragged Fatah out and laid him on the deck, loosening his helmet neck ring and unzipping the hypersuit.

Outside _Trident_ , Deeno and Singh were next. "What the hell happened, Skipper?" she asked as she squeezed into the lockout.

"I lost ANAD," Winger told them. "Go ahead...you two go next. Maybe it was the Keeper-- I'm not sure."

"Same with us," Tsukota told him. "One moment, we were steering the modified bots into the Keeper...penetrating with no problem—and then, it all blew up. Like somebody flipped a switch."

The rest of the two squads cycled through the airlock and emerged onto _Trident's_ G deck a tired and dispirited crew of nanotroopers. Winger told them to de-suit and get cleaned up.

"Briefing in the crew's mess in half an hour," he decided.

No one seemed to notice the small dark patch of nearly invisible bots that clung to Turbo Fatah's suit leg, behind the knee joint. They had come aboard undetected.

Fatah was unconscious but alive as he was wheeled into the ship's tiny sick bay on C deck.

Stella and one of the yeomanbots puttered around the stricken trooper, checking vital signs. Fatah's face was ashen and pale. A thin stream of blood trickled from one ear. Winger hung just outside the compartment, grim and sore from the ordeal.

"Pulmonary trauma....he's ingested a hell of a lot of water," Stella pronounced. "Maybe some kind of narcosis too...I'm setting up a biobarrier around sick bay...everybody clear out."

Winger was about to head aft to his berth when a shout erupted from somewhere down the gangway.

It was Deeno D'Nunzio.

" _BOTS!!...bots on board!_..." A crack of HERF gun fire sizzled through the air.

Winger slipped into the gangway to check out the commotion. Passing Utilities and Shops on E deck, he pulled up short, unable to believe what he was seeing at the aft end of the gangway.

Completely filling the gangway ahead, the swarm was a flickering, swelling mass of bots, completely blocking his path. A concussive boom rattled through the narrow tunnel, momentarily knocking Winger off balance, nearly blowing out his eardrums, scalding his face with rf waves.

HERF guns!

When he opened his eyes and wiped away the watering tears that covered his face, Winger saw a jagged hole had been blown through the swarm, and fried bots clattered around the gangway. Deeno D'Nunzio's face could be seen in the distance, ready to lay down another blast of HERF, to try to squash the bot cloud where it was, keep it from drifting forward.

But a combination of forces inside the gangway had loosened a seam along one of _Trident's_ hull plates. Whether from the pressure of the swelling bot swarm, the repeated blasts of HERF fire or _Trident's_ great depth below the Europan ice sheet, Winger didn't have time to determine.

The next HERF blast was all it took. As Winger winced and shook himself off, a squealing high-pressure jet of ice-cold water burst through an overhead pipe flange, flashing almost instantly into steam in the still-smoldering ruins of the gangway.

And _Trident's_ bow started to angle down as she began taking on water, steadily overcoming her buoyancy control.

In moments, a full-scale battle was raging up and down the corridors and gangways of the ship, as Winger, D'Nunzio and every able-bodied trooper battled the renegade bots.

Water and steam continued to pour into the gangway, flooding one compartment after another, making mobility and defense even harder. Captain Stella went forward to the command deck, in an attempt to arrest _Trident's_ descent, back her away from the Keeper and bring her up toward the ice sheet, to lessen the pressure on her hull. He tapped out commands to execute an emergency blow. Seconds later, the shriek of high-pressure air being forced into _Trident's_ tanks reverberated up and down the length of the ship.

At three hundred meters depth, trapped below a solid ice sheet, _Trident_ had only a few minutes before her hull would give way completely. If the swarms couldn't be contained and the ship steered to safety, she would implode and be crushed. All aboard would be killed.

It was just a matter of simple, implacable physics.
CHAPTER 15

United Nations Secretariat Building

New York City

January 9, 2100

0430 hrs EST

For Major Nathan Caden and UNIFORCE Alpha Squad / ANAD, busting perimeter security at the Secretariat Building in New York was the easy part. A simple matter of dealing with routine nanomesh and botscreens. Sergeant Bonaventure and Swarm Master Sergeant C-201 had seen to that. The shielding was down in seconds, a quick white flash, then all was dark and quiet.

There weren't even any humans inside the screen. Just darkened halls, marble floors and elevators.

Caden signaled to his squad. Bonaventure and Kaminski would secure the front entrance, setting up a temporary botscreen to discourage any unexpected visitors.

It was early morning and the entrance plaza was quiet, lit only by backlighting along the granite planters and walls of plaques and banners of UN member nations lining the promenade.

As one, Alpha Squad moved out along the corridor, seeking the express elevator bank that they knew would take them to the top levels of the 39-story building...the residence levels.

It was there that the Secretary General Jin Hao Bei lived. And the SG was their only target tonight.

Alpha Squad reached the elevators in good order. Caden ordered Sergeants LeClerq and Devalle to the front.

They had one job: hotwire the elevator, overcome its programming, defeat all inhibits and security protocols and take the squad up to their target.

The job took less than a minute and Caden was thankful that the Assimilationists had done their homework. So far, so good. Intel had been right on target.

The Squad went up to the 39th floor. When the door opened, Caden was ready. The Squad's assigned ANAD swarm formation, C-201, was first off the lift, billowing out into the dimly lit hall in a flickering cloud that swelled to fill the space in seconds. From inside the elevator cab, Caden and the rest of the squad heard muffled shouts, something heavy falling to the floor and sounds of a struggle, a commotion around the security station that fronted the SG's apartment.

The swarm had done its job, enveloping the 39th floor guard station in a mobility obstruction barrier. As Caden and his troops eased out into the floor, they saw a shimmering fog had enveloped the security barrier. Writhing on the floor were three guards, clutching and clawing for air, through the MOBnet, which tightened even more as they struggled.

"Put 'em down," Caden ordered.

Devalle hosed the MOBnet with impulse fire and the electric jolt knocked the poor bastards unconscious.

Caden studied the layout and compared its details with intel on his eyepiece viewer. Once again, intel was right on.

A massive oak door lay dead ahead, the formal entrance to the SG's apartment.

"201, front and center. Detach a breaching element. Burn that door—"

The swarm faded away from its MOBnet config and swirled in the air overhead, then issued forward until it had flowed like a phosphorescent mist over and around the door. In seconds, the door was enveloped in a white-hot supernova of disassembly, as trillions of mechs tore atoms apart and shredded the massive oak door into a glowing hole in the wall.

The whole process took two minutes. When it was done, Alpha Squad streamed inside, one after the other.

It was Leclerq who came face to face with a man in light blue pajamas sitting in a wing chair by a smoldering remains of a fire in the fireplace, tablet in hand.

The startled SG was a small Asian man, thin and emaciated, with a white goatee. He bolted out of his chair, dropping his tablet in the process.

"What is the meaning of—"

But Caden cut Jin Hao Bei off in mid-sentence. "Mr. Secretary, in the name of peace and security, in the name of the Sons of Assimilation, you are hereby placed under arrest."

"Under arrest...if—" But Leclerq was quick with the handcuffs and the SG was securely bound in seconds. He was forcibly moved toward the door, offering only token resistance.

"Take him down—" Caden ordered. "Let Bravo Squad know we've got the target." Caden pressed a few keys on his wristpad and whispered into his throat mike. "Fielder One, Fielder One, second base is stolen...repeat, second base is stolen...."

Jin Hao Bei was hustled out of his apartment, a black hood over his head, hands cuffed. Outside in the corridor, his head and upper arms were quickly shrouded in a loose MOBnet, for extra security.

"Sanitize the place, Major?" asked Leclerq. "Scan for intel?"

Caden shivered. "This Assimilationist crap gives me the creeps. Negative, Sergeant. Secure your gear. Let's get the hell out of here."

In less than five minutes, there was no sign Alpha Squad had ever come to the 39th floor of the Secretariat Building.

Jin Hao Bei was stuffed in a waiting van outside and driven north of the city for an hour, along dark and empty rural back roads, to a civilian airfield along the banks of the Hudson River. A lifter was waiting for the detail at the airfield. Dawn was just breaking over the cool green fields along the river banks as the lifter departed the airfield.

Less than an hour after Alpha Squad had burst into his apartment, the SG was winging his way out over the Atlantic, toward a fate he could only imagine.

Several blocks west of the Secretariat Building, a nondescript black van was parked in front of a deli now opening at East 42nd and Second Avenue. In the rear of the van, Fielder One sat back in his chair and took a deep breath.

Second base had been stolen.

Kwame Kavaii had just executed a coup inside the Secretariat of the United Nations. The Congolese diplomat knew he had an important vidcall to make but he wanted to savor the moment.

Many had doubted the Sons of Assimilation. Now all the doubters would have to take notice. Assimilation was the future...there was no doubt of it. Man and ANAD, humans and swarms, _could_ work together. Work together in peace, joined together in a symbiotic union. It was the only way.

The SG was one of the last obstacles to that union. Now that he was out of the way, Kavaii would lead a new movement in the General Assembly.

_Yes, it was good to savor the moment_. Kavaii reached for the vid, certain that a major turning point in Man's relations with ANAD had finally been reached.

He placed the call. Theo Souvranamh was on the other end, in his compound in Nairobi. His face came up grim on the tiny screen.

"It's done," he told Souvranamh over the encrypted circuit. "Jin Hao Bei has been removed."

The Thai _neurotraficante_ rubbed a stubbly chin, reached for something off-screen and came back. "Where is he?"

"On board a lifter somewhere over the Atlantic, by now. He'll disappear before the lifter touches down....you can be sure of that." Kavaii had been working on some notes for his 'acceptance' speech at the General Assembly. "I'll be in the Secretary-General's office within the hour. "

"What then?"

Kavaii smiled. "A public announcement will follow at eight this morning, New York time. Tonight, I will be voted in by acclamation in the General Assembly as the new Secretary-General...we Assimilationists have plenty of allies. Now, I've fulfilled my part of the agreement, Souvranamh. You and I must set a date for the conference."

Souvranamh was not impressed. "Conditions have changed. Config Zero is not so agreeable to meeting in conference as 'it' once was. It's the Prime Key," Souvranamh informed him. "It drives everything."

Kavaii was furious. He was right in the middle of trying to assume the responsibilities of the SG's office, arranging security, working out the details of the announcement, placing his own people in positions of power throughout the UN and especially UNIFORCE. "Don't push me too far, Souvranamh. We had an agreement. What are these new conditions you speak of?"

"Containment has failed. It's not working. The Containment Edicts can't be enforced...you've seen the news, same as me. All humans have to move to designated zones and corridors of travel. I've sent the details to you already. ANAD swarms will have priority rights everywhere else. Humans will be in sanctuaries. ANAD will occupy most of this planet."

Kavaii had already opened the attachment Souvranamh had sent. He was aghast at what was being demanded. "Concentration camps... _that's_ what this is. Impossible!"

"There's more, " Souvranamh added. "The Prime Key requires that all humans are to undergo the implant procedure, to make them ready for integration...the final step. Humans must become part of the greater swarm."

"This isn't what we discussed," Kavaii could barely control his temper. "Assimilationists don't want that...we want union...symbiosis...a partnership of equals...not be herded around like cattle. I won't agree to this... _any_ of this."

"Nonetheless," Souvranamh went on, "Config Zero has decreed that this is the way. Extinction, re-configuration, evolution, integration. This is the path that life should have followed on this planet. The Prime Key seeks only the original purpose."

Kavaii was angry. "You can't just throw out a billion years of evolution. I still want a conference. Man and ANAD, talking together. Humans and swarms can learn to live together. We can both assimilate."

Souvranamh's face darkened. "There's a new order coming. There is no going back. Humans must either undergo a configuration change or face extermination. The Prime Key cannot be changed."
CHAPTER 16

Nairobi, Kenya

January 10, 2100

1100 hrs local time

To Dana Tallant, the city of Nairobi looked from the air like one of Liam and Rene's cereal bowls. There was a grid of streets and trees in the middle, arranged like soggy corn flakes in her mind's eye. The bowl was a rim of mountains with the Ngong Hills to the west and Kilamanjaro and Kipwezi poking through the clouds to the south. The crack of the Great Rift Valley angled down from the northeast, right through the heart of the city...toast crumbs marching across the table. And to the east, the sere brown veldt country of east Kenya, scuff marks on the table from years of spoon and fork banging.

Tallant smiled ruefully. Rene was down there somewhere. She knew it. She _felt_ it. _I'm coming, honey. I'll find you and get you the hell out of here. One way or another._

The hyperjet bearing Major Dana Tallant and Quantum Corps' Special Rescue Detachment Delta swung around for final approach to Jomo Kenyatta Airport. The jet kissed the tarmac of Runway 16 Left and whined to a halt near a small bunker along one of the taxiways.

A small gathering of uniformed men and women lined the front steps of the bunker as the hyperjet's ramp and stairs extended. A pair of black lifters, their jet rotors already spinning up, squatted nearby.

Major Benito Donato, commanding officer of SRD Delta deplaned first. Tallant followed, along with Inspector Dominick Lang and the rest of the troops.

Sanctuary Patrol East Africa was to be their host in-country. Major Mondhavon Nair stepped up and saluted, introducing himself. Nair wore a bristly black moustache but was otherwise bald as a cue ball.

"Welcome to Kenya...birthplace of Man. We're honored to have the special detachment here with us. Come, let's be off to Headquarters."

Donato and Tallant saluted and shook hands. "We've got a touchy mission, Major," Donato told him. "You've been briefed?"

"Completely...CINCQUANT sent the details this morning. I have aleady worked up a mission profile...ah, this must be Inspector Lang...I've heard about you, sir. Paris sends its top men to us."

Lang and Nair shook hands. "Most of it's a lie," Lang said. "But I do want to look at your recon data and compare it with some of our lab results."

Nair beckoned them on toward the lifters. "Yes, yes, this we will discuss. My men will help your men with their gear."

What wouldn't fit in the lifters was offloaded into a pair of crewtracs, squat, hulking armored beasts that rumbled off toward the center of the city when they were full. At Donato's orders, several Delta troopers accompanied each crewtrac.

"I don't want any of these SP pukes filching and pawing through our gear on the ride in," he told his men. "Keep your noses clean, your mouths shut and your eyes open...got that?"

The nanotroopers acknowledged.

The lifters followed the crewtracs into Nairobi. SP Headquarters turned out to be a glass cube in the fashionable Upper Hill district, a few miles away from the green sward of Uhuru Park.

Once inside, all were served tea and cakes, then followed Nair to the briefing theater, surprisingly spare for a SP staff room on the edge of one of the main ANAD swarm sanctuaries. Vid screens lined the walls and consoles filled much of the space. A holomap dominated the center.

To begin the briefing, Nair related the latest intelligence on swarm operations in and around the east African sanctuary.

"It's like living next to a great hornet's nest. The official boundary is just southwest of Nairobi...here—" he aimed his light pen at the holomap and the border dotted its way across the projection.

"We believe there is some kind of big swarm nexus nearby—" Nair went on. "—maybe even with some humans involved, willingly or unwillingly, we don't know."

That got Tallant's attention. "Humans...what humans? What do you know about them?"

Nair shrugged. "Not much. There's been nothing in the recon data...just anecdotal intelligence, talk in the bazaars around Nairobi, scuttlebutt mostly. It's all uncorroborated."

"It could be Rene," Tallant said. "She could be there... right now."

Lang intervened. "Let's not jump to conclusions."

Nair added, "We haven't run any ops inside the sanctuary in months...too dangerous. We haven't tried to go in and get any of the humans out either. To be honest, Major, we're undermanned here. And outgunned. We don't have all the fancy equipment and people you have in Quantum Corps."

Tallant had heard all that before. Sanctuary Patrol had long complained of second-class status inside UNIFORCE.

Nair went on, using his light pen to highlight specific areas in and around the east Africa sanctuary. "The swarms here are strong and relentless. They probe. We respond. They push. We push back. So far, the borders have mostly been observed. But there are always incidents along the border, skirmishes, ambushes, things like that. It's like trying to contain a balloon."

Major Donato studied the map projection. "Where is this swarm nexus you spoke of?"

"We don't have hard intel on its exact location, or even real proof it exists. Speculation and local lore, that's what we really have. To answer your question, the best evidence puts it somewhere here...near Mount Kipwezi...not too far from Kilamanjaro, actually."

Nair increased resolution on the display and the Kipwezi region filled the holomap, rotating in 3-D as the video stream from some recon drone fed into the net. Wisps of cloud and sheets of snow and ice encircled its nearly conical dome. "An ancient volcano, the geos tell us. Recon consistently tells us swarm density is high around that mountain...often very high. Could be some kind of control center...or mother swarm."

"Or maybe even Config Zero," Tallant said. She wondered.

Lang walked around the holomap, studying the imagery. "I'm thinking that's where we should start searching for your daughter, Major. We'll need help putting together an expedition."

Donato already had details ready for Nair, who took the tablet and frowned as he read.

"Ground vehicles, lifters, supplies... Major—" Nair pleaded, "—we're stretched awfully thin here. I've got a thousand kilometers of border to patrol and an enemy who's clever, relentless and determined. I've also got my primary orders...keep the border under control. Keep the bugs in and the people out."

"Check your orders again, Major ," said Donato. "I believe CINCQUANT was quite clear that this Detachment, this mission, had priority over all other ops. Co-signed by UNSAC, too, as you can see."

Nair lips tightened. He shook his head. "It's all going to blow up in our faces anyway...what the hell." He tapped at his wristpad. "Captain Nyere...come to the briefing room at once. Nyere runs logistics around here...we'll see what he can scrape up for your little fishing trip."

By nightfall, the expedition and its supplies had been fully outfitted and manned. Just before midnight, a convoy of autotracs rumbled out of the motor courtyard of SP's headquarters, heading for the M6 motorway that led south out of Nairobi toward Kipwezi district and the great mountain. Overhead, a squadron of black lifters followed, flanking the autonomous convoy and giving top cover as the expedition wound its way through Westlands, Embakasi and the slums of Kibera, dodging curious hordes of _matatus_ and trucks, heading out of the city and into the flatlands of the veldt country to the south.

Tallant, Donato and Lang rode ahead in the lead lifter, comm sign _Antelope One_. For Tallant, it was an eerie, almost otherworldly feeling, watching the lights of the great metropolis recede in the distance. Ahead, was only dark and the unknown and she thought of her last talk with General Kraft about nursing split loyalties.

You're a distraught mother, Dana and that's understandable. But you're also a nanotrooper and you've got a mission. Don't get them confused.

Tallant knew full well that was going to be a lot harder than she had ever realized.

The first half hour of the trip went uneventfully. But when the lifter jockey, a Japanese kid named Murakawa, called back: "Border coming up....hang on to your hats, folks. I'm firing up my botscreen—" , Tallant knew they were now headed into Indian country and her training and instincts quickly took over. Without realizing it, she automatically cycled the action on her mag pistol and started buttoning up her hypersuit.

"Feet hot," Murakawa called out. They had just crossed the border into the east Africa sanctuary. "Botscreen deployed...I'm picking up scattered bands, loose swarms in the area. I'll advise the convoy—"

Tallant looked out the porthole, seeing nothing at first. The ground was black and featureless; only the faint tendrils of clouds enveloping the upper slopes of Kipwezi on the horizon added any texture to the night.

Just then, a faint tinkling could be heard, like ice crystals bouncing off the lifter hull. Tallant's spine stiffened. She knew that sound.

Murakawa confirmed her suspicions. "We're being probed. Bot cloud, right around us...I'm changing config...trying to go around."

As Murakawa banked first left, then right, outside the lifter, a vast swarm of nanobotic mechs had descended on the small fleet, colliding with the botscreen the pilot had just deployed. For a few moments, it was like flying in the middle of fireflies, or a thunderstorm streaked with lightning. But there was no thunder. Only flashes and pops of light as unseen armies of bots engaged, stripping atoms and electrons from each other, discharging millions of volts into the air.

The assault was over in a few minutes. The lifter botscreens had easily defeated the swarm and flew on into the night, regaining course for Kipwezi, now dead ahead.

"Not much of a swarm," Tallant observed. She made a desultory check of the lifter hull, seeing no breaches from the inside. "That was almost too easy...unless it was some kind of decoy."

Donato was grim. "My guess is we haven't seen their best yet. Maybe that was just a trigger, a warning system. A nanobotic tripwire. We're inside the fence now...and probably fair game."

Both troopers had an uneasy feeling they were being watched and followed, though nothing unusual showed on the lifter's instruments. No evidence of nano activity...no high thermals, no EM signatures, nothing. It was the 'nothing' part that made Tallant nervous...she couldn't shake the feeling that something horrific was about to happen.

Then she thought of Rene, a prisoner of Config Zero, caught like a fly in some spider's web, and all the uneasiness evaporated.

The small lifter fleet came at last to the foot of Kipwezi. The convoy of autotracs was at least a day behind, but the Detachment had essential gear with them on the lifters. The black cone of the extinct volcano rose before them into low-hanging clouds, piercing a moonlit sky with faint orange whiskers surrounding the summit, a trick of the moonlight.

"I'm getting a feed from recon drones about halfway up the slope," Murakawa told them. "Substantial swarm activity on the northwest side...thermals, EM, acoustics. Pretty big stuff...and it's coming this way. Sniffers say there are some cave openings on that side as well."

Donato studied the feed. "I'd rather not be in the air when that crap hits...put us on the ground."

Tallant finished closing up her hyperuit. "I guess we'll have to climb from here. Button up...." She passed the word aft. She and Donato and the rest of the Detachment had brought their hypersuits and now began powering up the armored exoskeletons. Inspector Lang and the pilot Murakawa didn't have suits...they would have to stay inside the lifter for the time being.

"Suits me," Murakawa muttered. He massaged the controls to put the lifter down on a patch of level ground near the lower slope of the mountain.

Donato headed for the door. "Now we go out the old-fashioned way...on foot."

"And with suit boost," added Tallant.

The hatch popped out and the troopers boosted out, hitting the ground, ready for action.

They started the climb in the dark, boosting where they could, slogging up steep slopes where they had to. Donato had set the formation for line abreast, with plenty of eyes and ears watching in all directions. "I don't want any surprises tonight," he told the Detachment. "Put up a couple of sniffers so we can extend our detection range." And so, throughout most of the night, as the Detachment made its way laboriously up the northwest flanks of Kipwezi, Superfly drones orbited a few hundred feet overhead, tasting the air and scanning the horizon for miles around, looking for anything unusual.

Just as dawn was breaking over the flat Serengeti plain to the east, Recon indicated an approaching storm front, moving up from the southeast.

"Looks like a nasty thunderstorm" Donato offered out loud. The Detachment was given a ten minute break... _get off your feet and power down_... _take rations and water now_....

Tallant sipped at her canteen and munched on a bar. "I'm not so sure, Sergeant. What does Superfly say?"

Donato patched in to the recon feed from one of the drones. "High thermals...lots of atomic activity...EMs too...off-scale high...what the hell...?"

"We'd better button up," Tallant decided. "Take cover now. Dig in and set your weapons!"

The Detachment cut short its break and began preparing defenses. Coilguns and mag pulsers were emplaced and sighted in. Local swarms were deployed from each trooper...The SDC2 was a corporal named Westbrook...he would take charge of the merged screening swarms.

The stormfront rolled implacably westward and was upon the mountain side inside of an hour. Tallant had been right. What looked at first glance like a typical east African thunderstorm turned out to be an all-out swarm assault, changing form from slashing rain to floods to locusts to lightning and cycling through any number of different configs, all of them resembling natural phenomena.

Tallant and Donato hunkered down in their hypersuits, in the lee of a huge boulder, half buried in the shifting mud.

"I've seen this style of assault before," Tallant said over the crewnet. "The damn bugs look just like rain or hail or something right up to the last second. Then they change config and move in!"

Even the very ground they were lying on seemed to shift underneath, as if Kipwezi itself were nothing but a swarm.

That was when their IC1, Corporal Beltray, lost his footing and slid away, out of sight, cartwheeling and bouncing down the mountainside. His partner, Xavier, started to boost down after him, but Tallant yelled: "STAY WHERE YOU ARE, CORPORAL! You can't help him now...he'll be atom fluff before he hits bottom—"

They pumped out HERF round after HERF round, trying to hold a small bubble of clear space above their encampment, trying to fend off the swarming bots, but it was touch and go. Tallant went small for a few minutes, to get a feel for the enemy bots at nanoscale, but they were changing config so fast, it was hard to get a read on what they were fighting. A cold gnawing fear gripped her stomach.

"We've got to fall back!" she told Donato. "We'll be eaten alive if we stay here!"

Donato wasn't quite ready to give up. "If I can just get one of my HERF guns above this crap, I can slam 'em from above, maybe push 'em off the mountain...Haggard, you and Klimek get your asses around that ledge, see if you can get up to that overhang--!"

Tallant leaned forward, slipping in the mud and grabbed Donato by his suit leg. "It's no use, Major...don't you see that? They change config too fast! We've got to fall back and re-group...we're too exposed here—"

Even as she explained the obvious, a great black cloud of bots came scything across the mountainside, like a sickle. Donato's botscreen blunted some of the force but not all of it. The cloud fell upon their position like a cutting wind and they were enveloped in a swarm in seconds, flailing and slashing, pumping out HERF fire in every direction.

Donato got it first. Through the flickering light show of the assault, strobing like a bad movie projector, she caught glimpses of Donato...or what was left of him. The hypersuit that had been the Major had no head...already disassembled into atom fluff...the rest of the body staggered like a child's puppet back and forth, whipped around by wind and bots, consumed in a fire of nanomech hell right before her eyes.

No matter how often you saw a man eaten alive by the bugs, it never got any prettier.

Tallant got on the crewnet. " _Fall back...Detachment, fall back immediately...try to make the lifters...get out now...we can't fight this_!"

It was the worst swarm assault she had seen in years.

The next half hour was a blur to Dana Tallant. Later, in the debriefings, she could recall the sting and the keening buzz of the bots all around her. She remembered flailing and tearing at her helmet...somehow, a few bots had gotten inside her suit and were demolishing the laminate armor _from the inside_.

And she remembered arms...strong arms...grabbing her, dragging her, half-carrying her down the mountainside...the bumpy, painful, bouncing ride to the bottom. And the lifters, churning up dust, dead bots clinking off the perspex windows as Murakawa gunned their engines and the lifter tore itself from the ground and cartwheeled into the sky, banking, juking and straining against the swarms pulling it back down.

Somehow, they made it and sped off through the cold nighttime air toward the Sanctuary Patrol base in Nairobi, wind whistling through holes in the cockpit screen.

Besides Donato and Beltray, they had suffered three other casualties in the Detachment: Mason, Givens, and Loeper. All of them gone...dust and loose atoms on the mountainside. As she staggered into the SP debriefing, the sun just poking over the acacia trees of Uhuru Park to the east, she figured they had been lucky to lose only five.

Damn lucky.

Major Nair and Dominick Lang managed the briefing. Nair was grim.

"I just went over the lifter hull with one of the ground techs...not pretty. We're not sure how your pilot even got it airborne...the wings, hull and props are junk, shot full of holes, half disassembled...the whole ship will have to be scrapped. What the hell happened up there?"

Tallant gratefully accepted some hot tea...it was spicy enough to make her eyes water. "I don't know, exactly, Major. I'd say we hit a nerve up there. I've been in lots of swarm assaults. But this one was different. It came up fast...we barely had time to react. And they changed config at insane speeds...nothing should be able to change config that fast." Tallant took a deep breath, sipped at the fiery liquid. She shuddered, sensing somehow that her daughter Rene was nearby. "Something big is in those caves up there. Rene is up there...I can feel it."

Dominick Lang was sympathetic. "We have to look at the evidence, Major Tallant. The evidence will tell us where your daughter is."

Tallant tapped her own head. "Here's your evidence, Inspector. Call it a mother's instinct...call is ESP...call it whatever you want. Rene's up there. I know it."

Nair was studying a 3-D projection of Kipwezi, revolving inside the holotank , some kind of feed from a recon drone. "Looks like the disturbance has finally stopped. You really stirred up the nest, Major Tallant. We're going to need reinforcements to take that on again. We don't have the firepower to deal with swarms like that. We need something stronger."

"Agreed," said Tallant. And she had just the answer in mind. She tapped on the wristpad of her hypersuit—at least _it_ had survived the descent from the top of Kipwezi—and got her comm unit running. _Maybe Wings has an idea or a config we can use._ The tiny signal chip that

Captain LeRand in Q6 had given her was still working. She could squirt off a small encrypted signal to the _Jovian Hammer_ mission right from her wrist commpack...and nobody in UNIFORCE would be any wiser.

"Just a little something I cooked up one weekend," LeRand had said.

They both knew if CINCQUANT found out, they be skinned alive... _before_ the courtmartial. Kraft had left explicit orders that no signals went out to _Jovian Hammer_ without clearance from him.

The signal would bounce off a few satellites between Nairobi and Copernicus Array on the Moon, then shoot off toward Jupiter. The whole process would take several hours.

But Wings could always be counted on to come up with some wacky config idea no one had ever thought of. He was like that. And she was counting on it.

Dana Tallant sent the signal. She had no idea what had been happening to the expedition at Europa.
CHAPTER 17

Aboard UNISPACE Submersible _Trident_

Europa Coordinate System: Lat. 25N, Long 72W

Stationkeeping at 325 meters below mean ice level

January 11, 2100 (Earth U.T.)

_Trident's_ bow angled steeply upward as the emergency blow began to take effect. Winger, D'Nunzio, Reaves and the others scrambled along the gangway deck, hanging on as the ship lurched from side to side. High pressure air shrieked into all compartments as Stella fought to keep them rising, against the roar of the incoming water, now swirling and flooding all decks aboard.

It was a battle between opposing forces: the growing weight of Europan seawater pulling _Trident_ down into the depths and the buoyancy of her emergency air trying to lift the ship upward.

"Belay that HERF"! Winger yelled aft. D'Nunzio was about to let fly another blast, but Winger knew the ship's hull couldn't take the pounding. They would have to fight off the swarm that had infiltrated aboard another way. "I'm going small...Deeno...Reaves...launch embeds! Put up a shield to occupy these bugs...we've got to give Stella more time--!"

D'Nunzio tossed the HERF carbine into a corner. It splashed into the rising water and promptly sank.

_Won't be using that one anymore_ , she thought as she batted and swatted at the bots swirling around her head. D'Nunzio ran through a quick system check and cycled her shoulder port, launching a small force of embedded ANAD bots even before the diagnostic was complete. At the other end of the gangway, up near B deck and the command center, Reaves and Tsukota did the same.

Soon the gangway was thick with clouds of bots, swelling into fighting formation. Flashes and seams of light flickered as the swarms collided, while water poured in from G deck and the troopers sloshed back and forth, trying to stay upright and beat back the invading botswarm.

Johnny Winger went small, diving 'over the waterfall' and found his own embedded ANAD bots were sluggish and hard to control. He braced himself in the sleet of polygons and tetrahedrals that was the nanoworld, tacking forward against currents of Brownian motion. _This near the Keeper, I don't have full control of my guys_ , he told himself.

_We'll just have to do this the old-fashioned way_. Winger killed auto config and autopilot and took manual control of the master.

_First we replicate like mad_...he toggled the pickle switch and sent the command. ANAD responded, sluggishly as before, but the reps finally started and his swarm began to bulk up, expanding into combat formation even as he navigated forward, hunting for the enemy bot master.

It was like trying to find a napkin in a hurricane, he told himself. The Keeper bots that had somehow slipped aboard _Trident_ were of a type he had never seen before...shadowy glimpses and anxious acoustic sounding produced images that were crazy, made no sense at all.

_Quantum effects_ , he realized. How the hell did you fix them long enough to grab one? He sounded again and made himself dizzy trying to follow all the config changes the bots were doing...first a 'barbell' with grabbers at every end, then a cruciform pattern, then some kind of multi-faceted pyramidal thing, then back to a barbell. It was insane.

Winger drove ANAD forward toward the melee, not sure what he would do even if ANAD could grapple one. Maybe a few blasts from his disrupter....

It was Doc II who first had the idea. Winger was concentrating on navigating through the hurricane, sounding and homing on what he thought was a cluster of Keeper bots, when Doc II chimed in the back of his head, through the coupler circuit.

***Analyzing structures ahead...recommending assault along vector two six five degrees, using configuration A-277...change config now to A-277 and transmit command string Delta Delta Excalibur Override One...***

Winger barely heard him. "What was that, Doc? Config A-277...what the hell is that? Doesn't sound like any config I've seen recently."

***Commands were loaded by Dr. Irwin Frost into main memory on 22 June, 2095...File name is Root-Level Excalibur Override Commands...configs are derived from these commands***

"So you're saying these things are some kind of overrides—" Winger probed ahead and spotted a cluster of Keeper bots, nasties that looked like inverted pyramids joined at the base, cycling madly from one config to another. He shot forward and let loose a volley of bond disrupter fire.

***Correct...config A-277 is a minimum-energy config, all effectors safed, all grabbers, disrupters and probes shutdown and capped off...recommend sending this config with command string Delta Delta Excalibur Override One...it may work against enemy assemblers***

The cluster of Keeper bots erupted into a spinning galaxy of atom parts under the disrupter burst. Like a mirror smashed into a thousand pieces, reflections and parts of bots flew in every direction. Some of them, Winger knew by now, were just that—quantum shadows of real bots, entangled with each other in a bomb blast of atom fluff and loose electrons.

"It's worth a try, Doc," Winger backed away and tried to re-orient himself in the maelstrom. "I'm sending now..." he tapped out a few commands on his wristpad, feeling for the keys with practiced smoothness, since he was still submerged in the nanoworld, and sent it.

The effect took a few moments, during which Winger tweaked his own config, adding a few more grabbers along his forward casing, strung together with a junky phosphate backbone..."not exactly textbook but it'll have to do—" he muttered to himself. He closed again on half-propulsor, intending to put some disrupter fire right in the guts of the next cluster of Keeper bots, which even now were wheeling to come at him when—

The nasties suddenly stopped their mad cycling and froze in one config. The effect lasted only a few moments and when the config shedding began again, it was noticeably slowed, as if the bots were somehow stuck in thick soup...everything slowed down, almost to normal speed.

"I'll be damned, Doc...do you see that?" Winger jetted ahead and let fly more disrupter. This time, the quantum shadows and reflections were gone. The Keeper bots absorbed the full force of Winger's disrupter and exploded into fluff, spalling off electrons and molecule fragments in every direction.

Winger tapped out the command string again and sent it several times. Each time, the command seemed to confuse the Keeper bots, almost stunning them into immobility for a few moments, as if they were chewing on the instructions, not sure what to do.

The tactic made it a whole lot easier to wade into the fray and start slashing.

For the next few minutes, Winger toggled back and forth, between sending out the obscure override command and hosing down cluster after cluster of Keeper bots. The overall effect seemed to slow down the nasties and blunt the worst of their efforts, almost like fixing them in some kind of state where they could be engaged by normal ANAD bots.

***It's almost like there is a common programming element with these bots***

"Whatever it is," Winger said, "it seems to be working...I'll keep sending and blasting..."

Slowly, bit by bit, Winger, D'Nunzio and the rest began to coral the swarms into the aft end of _Trident's_ central gangway. Flashes of light crackled around the corridors as the nanotroopers pushed the swarms into a smaller and smaller space.

"Skipper, let's try to shove 'em into G deck..." said Reaves. "—maybe we can push 'em out through the airlock—" The DPS2 worked with her own embeds, smashing her bots again and again into the front of the swarm, as she advanced down the gangway, clinging to handrails as the ship lurched from one side to the other.

Just then, Winger got a ping on his earcom...it was Stella, up on the command deck.

"Colonel, I'm taking _Trident_ up...up through the ice sheet. I want to evacuate the whole cabin to vacuum and try to dump these damn bugs that way..."

"Understood," Winger came back. "We'll try to hold off these bastards as long as we can." It was as good a plan as any and Winger passed the news on to the rest of the Detachment. "Brace yourself...but keep after 'em...we've got to keep the bugs confined...give Stella a chance to put us on the surface—"

The next hour lasted forever, a tense time of advancing against the swarm by inches, then fighting off new eruptions elsewhere. Reaves and Tsukota slipped behind the main swarm body and came at the bots from the rear, from _Trident's_ aft end, pumping magpulse rounds into the swarm, running their own embeds, swatting and waving with their hands, while Winger sent the ancient override commands again, on every channel he could find.

With Doc II's help, he tweaked the commands slightly and noted that each time the signal went out, the swarm seemed to stall and retreat, buzzing about confused and unsynchronized, as if it wasn't sure what to do.

"Somehow, this is bollixing up the link with the Keeper," he surmised. Maybe it was something old Doc Frost had cooked up in his final days...a trapdoor into the central processor of every ANAD style nanobot ever created. Which meant, he muttered to himself, that Doc II was right: there _was_ something in common between these alien Keeper bots and ANAD systems.

Something they could use later.

Stella's voice sounded over the intercom. "Ice interface in thirty seconds...rig for collision. I'm starting the borer—"

The ship had stabilized in her ascent, as Stella worked emergency air and buoyancy tanks to trim her out for the rise. Now they were approaching the underside of the ice layer. The impact rattled everything loose in the gangway as _Trident_ nosed her way upward.

"Feel it?" yelled D'Nunzio..."It's the borer...she's coming online."

A few lurches and squeals sounded through the hull as the borer engaged the ice, then Stella trimmed her once more and the steady drone of a zillion bots chewing a tunnel through Europa's ice layer settled in. Even with all the vibration and rattling, it was still a welcome sound.

The nanotroopers had somehow managed to push and slash and trick and zap the Keeper bots into a six-foot diameter mass of swirling hell, a quantum stewpot of config changes and entangled bots writhing and boiling like a slow-motion explosion barely contained. The swarm nearly filled G-deck but was mostly confined to that compartment.

"Don't know how long we can contain 'em, Skipper," D'Nunzio said. She let off a few mag rounds to stun the bastards, then went small herself to drive her own embedded bots into the melee. Behind her, Tsukota and Reaves kept slicing and dicing at the perimeter of the swarm, trying to keep it from spilling back out into the gangway.

"Keep after 'em, troops. I'll work with Doc II...see if we can do more with these override commands."

"What the hell is that, Skipper...some kind of hocus-pocus?"

"Something Doc Frost cooked up...some kind of back door into the processor of any ANAD...it has to mean these Keeper bots are related enough to be affected by the commands."

D'Nunzio snorted, letting off a few more magpulse rounds to corral some bots trying to slip out of the compartment, "All I know is these bastards change configs like my brother changes T-shirts. Jeez, they grow gizmos fast—"

"Amen to that," said Tsukota.

For the moment, the Keeper bots had been forced into G deck and confined there, manipulated by a combination of cycling override commands from the troopers and focused mag fire to pick off strays. So far, _Trident's_ hull had held and the bots hadn't tried to chew through that.

"I'm going up to see Stella," Winger announced. "Keep the bugs occupied."

Reaves pickled off a few more command override signals. "No sweat, Skipper. I'll give 'em something to chew on."

Winger made his way forward to Stella on B deck, where he found the captain poring over some displays of the Europan surface. An ice layer profiler showed the ship's progress as she bored her way topside. A reassuring drone and vibration had settled in as _Trident_ angled upward.

"Another twenty minutes ought to do it, Major." Stella announced, tapping a few buttons on a nearby screen. "I've run the borer up to a hundred and ten percent...really revving the bots up high...we've got to get on the surface and evacuate this ship as soon as possible. What's our status aft?"

Winger settled into a seat beside the captain. "We got the Keeper swarm under control...for the moment. My embed located some kind of obscure override commands, from the first days of ANAD development. I'm not sure why, but when I broadcast it, the Keeper bots get confused. Makes 'em easier to handle. Right now, we've got the swarm confined to G deck...and we're keeping them away from the hull as well."

"That's the best news I've heard in hours." Stella pointed to the map display of the Europan surface. A flashing red square highlighted one area. "That's where we breach, best I can make out...26 North by 71 West, in this area the map calls Tara Regio. See this surface crack, it's like a canyon carved out of the ice...Euphemus Linea, it's called. We're coming up just south of it." Stella looked over at Winger. "Major, once we're on the surface, I'm taking _Trident_ back to base camp...we've got a lot of repairs to do."

" _Base camp_? That's several thousand kilometers...two or three days, at least. We don't have time to go back to camp."

Stella was unmoved. "Doesn't matter...we're wounded pretty badly. I've got hull plates that need repair, my whole buoyancy system's shot, controls are sluggish and we're low on supplies. Plus we've got to get rid of that swarm once and for all...we're going to go over every square millimeter of this ship inside and out to be sure. This Keeper thing's a tougher nut to crack than we expected. Look, I'm skipper onboard...my job is to get you safely to the mission site...and support operations there. I can't get you there and back safely...we can't _do_ the mission—if we don't make some repairs. Base camp's the best place...really, the _only_ place, that can be done."

Winger relented. "I suppose you're right. How long back to camp?"

Stella said, "I make it about forty hours, at best speed. We've got good treads on our tracks...depends on what kind of terrain we encounter. I'm hoping this Euphemus Linea will be smooth enough so we can use it as a sort of highway...pick up speed that way."

A chime sounded in the compartment. Stella turned to the ice profiler. "Detecting pressure drop...surface must be near. I'll slow down the borer—"

He tapped a few keys, twisted a small joystick on the side of his seat. The vibration dropped off noticeably and _Trident_ slowed her upward ascent. A jostling rattle threw them into some left to right oscillations, until Stella could trim out the flutter. "Happens when I change borer speed—"he explained. "She's biting into some kind of different ice...maybe some rock too."

Breaching came a few minutes later. _Trident_ surged forward and there were more squeals and shrieks, until Stella could secure the borer. She came up at a nearly twenty degree up angle and settled with a resounding crunch back to the surface as she eased out of her tunnel. Stella unshackled the treads and secured the borer completely. Within moments, the ship was now a giant cylindrical tractor, waddling and rocking from side to side, trundling across the icescape like a drunken pig.

"Let's check out the view, Major," Stella said.

Through the starboard porthole, the view of Euphemus Linea was fantastic...a jumbled pile of every conceivable shape, cubes and pyramids and smashed polygons piled on top of each other like some giant child had dropped a big ice tray. Dead ahead of _Trident_ , the canyon floor was a maze of ice blocks and boulders, while towering ice cliffs loomed overhead on either side, several thousand meters over them.

Winger eyed the cliffs warily. "I'm hoping we don't run into any landslides...or maybe I should say iceslides. That's probably what's littering this canyon floor."

Stella steered them carefully between boulders, as the ship pitched and heaved over the rough frozen ground. "You could be right...maybe navigating this canyon isn't such a hot idea after all. We could bore our way through those canyon walls and see if the going is any better up top."

"Your call, Captain," Winger told him. "I'd better get back aft. Get into our hypersuits, so you can vent the ship to space."

"Call me when you're buttoned up." Stella grabbed both arms of his seat as _Trident_ careened up and over a ledge in the ice and slammed down hard on the other side. "Rathmore Chaos...what a great name for this hellhole...I think I _will_ look for a way out of this canyon. _Trident'll_ be beat all to hell before we get anywhere if I stay down here—"

Winger went back down the gangway and stopped outside G deck, where D'Nunzio and Tsukota were still holding the Keeper swarm at bay, now contained in a small writhing mass inside the compartment.

"I'll send replacements for you two. Stella's venting the ship to space in half an hour. Get into your hypersuits and button up good."

"Gladly, Skipper," Deeno replied. "This is like to trying to contain a balloon...zap 'em here and they expand there. I need a break."

Winger got on the crewnet. "Detachment, this is Winger...listen up. The ship's going to be vented to space in half an hour...hopefully the vacuum will pull these bugs out of _Trident_ for good. Suit up and buddy-check every connection. Reaves and Singh, lay aft to G deck on the double, with your pulsers. Relief for Deeno and Ozzie. Half an hour, troops...get to it! Winger, out!"

There was a flurry of activity up and down the gangway as the nanotroopers made ready. D'Nunzio and Tsukota were quickly relieved so they could get up to the berthing spaces on C deck and suit up themselves.

Half an hour later, the Detachment was ready.

Stella chimed through on Winger's earcom. "Major...it's time. I've found a smoother run through the canyon here, but I'm slowing us down for a few minutes. On my count, I'm cycling the lockout on G deck...that whole compartment will be exposed first...hold on to something...there'll be a bit of a breeze...five...four...three...two...one... _mark_! Lockout valves to open... _NOW_!"

The ship had settled down on her tractor treads as Stella guided them along the canyon floor of Euphemus Linea. There was a short sharp shriek, then popping sounds as _Trident's_ interior bulkheads flexed in the pressure drop. Then came the hurricane—

Winger had positioned himself with Taj Singh just outside G deck. Over the DPS tech's shoulder, he could see the boiling cloud that was all that was left of the Keeper swarm, now flickering and flashing in the back of the compartment.

"Watch your head, Skipper—" Some long and sharp—it turned out to be a broken piece of cargo skid—went whistling by their heads, banging into the access hatch to _Trident's_ tailpod, where her powerplant was located. Soon, the gangway was enveloped in a gale of debris, mostly pieces and particles, now flowing toward the lockout, steadily being sucked out into space.

"Hold on, Taj—" Winger grabbed a stanchion by the hatch. The force of the evacuation wasn't all that great, but you could easily lose balance, if you weren't careful...or get a piece of equipment in your faceplate. _Jeez, I told the knuckleheads to lash everything down_ —

The Keeper swarm was already shredded by the pressure drop. The cloud of bots looked like a big hand had crushed it on one side. By the trillion, bots streamed toward the open lockout and out into space, an undulating flickering line in the air, thinning steadily as the ship's air vented. The swarm darkened and shrank visibly with every passing moment. Soon, only a few twinkles and sparkles drifted in the air.

_Got to get every last one of those bastards_ , Winger told himself. _Then, we'll have to go over every friggin' surface in the ship to make sure_. Even one Keeper bot could, in time, replicate the whole swarm all over again.

For good measure, Winger had Singh and Reaves hose down G deck with more mag fire, trying to zap every last bot that might still be clinging to a bulkhead or pallet. He borrowed Reaves' HERF gun and let loose a few thunderclaps of rf, thankfully muffled in the near-vacuum conditions of the gangway.

Finally, he pronounced himself satisfied. "Taj, start probing...for anything. EMs, thermal, acoustic, atom fluff...anything. I don't want a single atom of Keeper bot left. Start here on G deck." He got on the crewnet and said, " _All troops_...listen up! Get into probe mode right now. Start from A deck forward and work your way aft. Sound and probe...every surface, every hatch, every compartment, every drawer and container. Look everywhere and I mean _everywhere_. While we're ground-pounding our way across the surface, we're going to sanitize this ship of every last molecule of Keeper bot. This ship will be clean by—" he checked his watch, "0700 hours. That's two hours from now. I'll let the Captain know what's going down."

The Detachment grimly set to work.

Sanitizing _Trident_ while wearing hypersuits proved to be a tedious and fatiguing task, taking about three hours in all. While Stella steered the smoothest course he could over the blocky and boulder-strewn icescape, keeping Jupiter hanging low on the Europan horizon outside his forward windows like some kind of fat balloon streaked with salmon-hued bands and whirls, the Detachment set to work, compartment by compartment, probing and scanning for any last bots left over from the Keeper infiltration.

In each compartment, the approach was the same: scan for heat blooms or electromagnetic signatures of atomic activity, listen in for any acoustic "burbles" that could indicate nanobotic signaling or processor crunching, probe for unusual atomic profiles...discarded phosphate backbones or sugar groups, anything at all out of the ordinary. It was laborious and time-consuming.

After the initial scans, each compartment would be HERF'ed multiple times to crush any bots undetected, then hosed down with magnetic pulse fire and scanned again.

"Jeez—" said Turbo Fatah, "--my bunk at Table Top isn't this clean."

"Tell me about it," said Taj Singh, "—we can smell it a mile away."

As he surpervised the process and took his turn HERFing and hosing, Winger pondered just how it could be that some old override commands concocted by Doc Frost himself forty years ago could affect alien nanobots from the Keeper.

"Doc, it doesn't make any sense--" Winger was saying. He wasn't talking to himself as he probed every corner and surface of D Deck, shoving aside crates and pallets as he scanned. He had opened a coupler channel to Doc II and went back and forth with the embed on ideas and explanations.

***The Keeper bots must have the same processor, similar architecture, Boss...that means there are common elements between those bots and someone like me...some of my programming must resemble their programming, at least at the most basic level***

"Yeah, like they're cousins or distant relatives...but how does a swarm that came from seventy five million light years away wind up resembling something cooked up by Doc Frost in his lab half a century ago?"

Doc II seemed to chew on that, while Winger finished D Deck and moved back out into the gangway. D'Nunzio and Tsukota were already deep into scans of E Deck, so Winger hovered outsisde the compartment with Reaves and Fatah.

"Talking to yourself again, Skipper?" said Fatah. "This place'll do that to you."

"I've got Doc II on channel...we're trying to figure out how the Keeper bots would ever be affected by commands developed on Earth, by Doc Frost so long ago."

Fatah shrugged, "Well, isn't it true that Doc Frost used some kind of ancient virus genome as part of the original architecture of ANAD?"

"That's what he always told me," Winger admitted. "And Config Zero has always maintained that the first viruses, maybe even the first self-replicating molecular systems on Earth, were planted there by its own ancestors...progenitors of the Old Ones, a few billion years ago. Maybe this commonality between early ANAD and the Keeper bots comes from that far back. "

Doc II chimed in on the coupler. _***The command strings I recovered seemed to interrupt commands being sent by the Keeper itself...that was a surprise. The Keeper seems to communicate with its constituent bots via quantum coupler, same as you and me, but of a different type, more entangled, better encrypted***_

Winger knew Fatah couldn't 'hear' the one-way conversation he was having with Doc II, so he explained what the embed was saying.

Fatah considered that. "Maybe these old commands just confuse the bots. Maybe they bollix up the Keeper-swarm link just enough so our countermeasures can work."

"You could be right, Turbo...it may be as simple as that. My overrides aren't making anything happen, but they must be close enough to Keeper commands to make the bot processors reset and reset and somehow get out of synch."

"Praise Allah for confusion," Fatah added. He disappeared into E deck to help Reaves and Tsukota.

Winger was about to head further aft to begin the sweep of the powerplant compartment on F Deck, when his earcom chimed. It was awkward maneuvering in the cramped gangway in hypersuits, so he ducked into F deck to let Vic Klimuk and Mighty Mite Barnes squeeze by.

The call was from the command deck. It was Stella.

"Colonel, just got a comm from Earth, to your attention. At first, I thought it was gibberish, maybe some glitch, but it's repeating. You'd better get up here—"

"On my way—" Winger headed forward to B deck. He found Stella in his captain's seat, in his pressure suit and helmet, poring over the contents of a message on his commpad. He handed it to Winger.

"Came in about ten minutes ago, but it's weird...never seen this kind of signal before...at least not since my old cycler days. We used to use signal forms like this intra-ship...you know in drydock, places like that. It's a real antique, this signal, and the encryption is wacky too. Take a look—"

Winger jacked Stella's commpad into a port on his wrist and the message came up on his viewer inside the helmet. Stella wasn't kidding...it _was_ weird.

And it seemed to be from Dana Tallant.

He massaged the signal a few times through the cypto chip in his wristpad, then the image settled down. Dana's worried face settled down on the tiny screen.

At first, she wasn't making any sense... _Rene located...an angel substituted...UNIFORCE investigating...Rene held by Config Zero in the east African Sanctuary_...that didn't make any sense....had they found her?

Only after replaying the message several times and trying out different crypto schemes did the truth begin to dawn on him. It wasn't the message itself...it wasn't Dana's words that made the truth finally sink in.

It was the look on her face...the way her mouth curled, the pain in her eyes...you couldn't encrypt that very well.

Winger sank back in the seat. Stella, concentrating on driving _Trident_ across a bumpy patch of ice, stole a glance over.

"What is it, Major? Bad news?"

Winger explained what he knew. Stella whistled and shook his head. "What are you going to do?"

"What _can_ I do? We've got a mission here...I can't just drop this and run back home."

Winger replayed the message again and again, while watching _Trident_ plow through ridge after ridge of ice, showers of crystals erupting over the ship's bow as Stella tractored them on across the Europan surface, back toward base camp, still a day away. He grew sick with worry, wanting to help, needing to do something, anything, but knowing full well that _Jovian Hammer_ was a critical mission too.

And Dana needed help battling her own swarm enemies at Mount Kipwezi...that much was clear. Maybe he could send her some configs to try...anything to stop feeling so helpless.

The Keeper here at Europa, Config Zero in east Africa. Of course, there was a connection...but somehow, Rene had gotten caught up in this interplanetary game of chicken. She was an eleven year old child...what possible good could come from kidnapping an eleven-year old child? Winger found his blood beginning to boil...then absent-mindedly checked his suit pressure, just to make sure it wasn't really boiling. There _was_ a vacuum inside the ship.

Config Zero and the Keeper...one gave the orders, one carried out the orders. That was the UNIFORCE theory anyway. Damage one and you could destroy the other.

"Skipper—" A voice chimed in on the 1MC. It was Taj Singh.

"Go, Taj—"

Singh was well aft, just outside G compartment. "Skipper, we've gone over every square millimeter of the interior. No thermals beyond normal background, no EMs, nothing acoustic, nothing on the quantum channels we can detect. We think the ship's clean."

Winger mentally came back to their current situation. "Very well, Taj...secure the cleanup detail. I'll let Stella know....so we can get some air back in here."

"Good news, I hope?" Stella asked hopefully. He was massaging his right wrist and hand, letting auto-drive take over for a few moments along a straight and smooth stretch of the Linea valley they were transiting.

"Ship's been fully sanitized. Those Keeper bots seem to be gone."

Stella wasted no time in re-pressurizing _Trident's_ interior. The entire process would take about ten minutes.

"Sorry about your daughter, Major. You think the message is legit...I mean, not some kind of hoax...or disinformation? Config Zero could have concocted the whole thing, you know."

Winger nodded grimly. "That thought occurred to me. But I know Dana. Her face said everything and that's harder to simulate. Four days ago, I got a message saying Rene was missing. Now this...she may be a hostage with the bugs in east Africa. What I can't figure out is why...why grab a little girl...from what I've seen on the vids, the swarms are rolling across southern Europe and the Med as it is. What the hell do they need with a little girl... _my_ little girl?"

"I don't know," Stella replied, "but I do know we've got to get _Trident_ repaired before we go after that Keeper thing again. I make base camp at a little more than four hundred kilometers, straight ahead. I've got the beacon already...we just have to get there. Maybe twenty hours, maybe a little more, if this valley doesn't pan out."

"I'm leaving the driving to you, Captain." He pulled off his hypersuit helmet and left the command deck, heading aft. An idea had formed in the back of his mind. He wanted to send a few config ideas to Dana and he wanted to consult with Doc II again.

It was possible, just possible, that the best way to beat the Keeper was to mimic what the Keeper did for Config Zero.

Somehow, some way, they had to become the Keeper.
Interactions Log

File No. 135782.0

**C.F.A.A. (** _DocII)_

Interaction Targets: 1. Winger, Colonel J. A.

Interaction Mode: Acoustic, voice synthetic V-22

Date: 01.11.00

Start Time: 138776

End Time: 148990

**Output File** (text analysis):

<<Subject: Configuration: Winger, J>>

<<I have recommended to Config Winger, J that the best way to defeat the Keeper is to become the Keeper. Develop a config that so closely resembles the Keeper in its details that Config Zero and all subordinate swarms cannot tell the difference. Config Winger, J is skeptical...determined from acoustic analysis of voice inputs...exhibits emotional states ( **concepts** : _skeptical_ : adj. having doubts and concerns about something)....

<< Recommendations made to effect full assimilation of Config Winger, J with Doc II swarm element. Assimilation requires insertion of master assembler into Config Winger nervous system and brain, especially into hippocampus and amygdala structures. Config Winger responds (PLAY audio file **Voice Recording** : " _You've got to be kidding, Doc...let you burrow into my head...I don't think so. Don't get me wrong...I like having you in my shoulder capsule with the coupler link...it's like having Doc Frost with me all the time...like a conscience. But assimilation...even Doc Frost had reservations about that...about how our immune systems would respond to bots inside us like that. If I let you into my head, what becomes of me...am I me? Am I a swarm that looks like me? What the hell am I?"_

<<Probability analysis indicates that assimilation technique increases chance of mission success to forty-five point six percent. Single-config entities such as Config Winger do not want to be assimilated. Such entities are strongly correlated with their existing configurations and strive to maintain such configurations at all costs. Losing original config is equated with death

( **concept** : _death_. n. end of existence, end of being, fatality or loss of all attributes).

<<Multiple-config entities such as Doc II do not understand such concepts. Distributed sentience entities do not suffer from such states as _death._ But assimilation technique increases chance of mission success by creating a combined entity that can defeat the Keeper. As previously noted in this Log, assimilation tactics are in accordance with original concept of Symbiosis Project (see Historical File C-2275635 Mission Statement): _"...nanotroopers will become blended man-machine warriors, wedding human thinking and decision-making with the capabilities of embedded nanobotic swarms to rapidly assemble and disassemble matter at atomic scales..."_

<<Config Winger continues to exhibit extreme emotional states due to loss of daughter config named Rene. ( **concepts:** _anger, worry, frustration._ ).

<<Analysis continues>>

Output File Ends
CHAPTER 18

Embedded with U.N. Sanctuary Patrol

Blue Regiment, Alpha Company, Eagle Squad

(Blue Alpha/Eagle)

Thuns-les-Bains, on the French-Swiss border

1750 hours

January 27, 2100 (Earth U.T.)

OmniVision / Solnet Video Feed from drone autocam....

The first time Solnet reporter Jin Lee saw the town was through the ornithopter vidstream coming in over her wristpad...it looked like something from a mid-20th century monster flick on the tiny screen, like Transylvania and dense fog and Dracula country. She shivered in spite of herself and walked faster along the narrow rutted road to catch up with squad commander Sergeant Nolan Lapierre.

"Dronecam, maintain overhead perspective, wide-angle, and follow me." Jin Lee hustled after Lapierre, turning to make sure the pigeon-sized ornithopter obeyed. The drone healed about and settled into a steady forward drift, its microwings churning and chittering ten feet above her. On her wristpad, Lee watched the vid feed coming from its cameras. _Should be a good intro, nice and dramatic_ , she told herself. _Edit can add sound effects later._

" _Recording_ now _...this is Jin Lee of Solnet Omnivision, on the outskirts of the town of Thuns-les-Bain. I'm embedded with Eagle Squad, Alpha Company of the Sanctuary Patrol, Blue Regiment of Central Mediterranean Division. We're investigating the small town of Thuns-les-Bain, on the border with France and Switzerland. There are Intelligence reports from S2 of swarm activity in the area. Eagle Squad has orders to investigate. Sergeant...if you don't mind...a moment, please...."_

Lapierre scowled and slowed down while the dronecam wheeled about and hovered a few feet over their heads. He flinched, swatted at the device like a fly. "Keep it short—" He had to put up with this airhead reporter mainly because Battalion said he had to.

"Sergeant," Jin Lee walked alongside. "Why is Eagle Squad checking out this village? What are you hoping to accomplish here?"

Lapierre took a deep breath, explaining in exaggerated slowness, the way you would with a five-year old. "I thought the place was abandoned but Corporal Ivanchik---Moustache over there—and a few others said they saw lights, some kind of activity, in the town. We called it in, checked with Battalion. The brass said check it out. So...we're checking it out."

"And your objective here, Sergeant is--?"

"To seize the town, secure the town and its perimeter, clear any swarms we find and hold this territory until relieved by French Normals moving down from the northwest."

Lapierre abruptly raised a hand, calling a halt to the march. He motioned several troopers over. "Benes, you and Carnot and LeMan, form a detail! Recon this street, down to the clocktower. Keep your eyes open, boys...S2 says this is Normal territory but we've had bug reports too."

"Right, Sarge—" said Benes. As they trotted off, a pair of Superfly drones wheeled about overhead, blowing past the dronecam, and headed into town for a top-eye view of what the detail faced. Carnot had the viewer on his wristpad, along with a small joystick. He sent commands to the birds, forming them up into a diamond recon pattern.

Thuns-les-Bains was little more than a village: a few stucco buildings, some with thatched roofs, a few barns on the outskirts, and a clocktower looming over the tiny _piazza_ in the center of town. The street they were entering was a dirt path, a few sheds and ramshackle wooden buildings spotted along its edges.

Jin Lee spotted Corporal Ivanchik nearby, one of the HERF gunners. She decided Edit would love to have some footage from the regular troops. She went over and motioned for the dronecam to follow. It chirped and hummed, taking up a position nearby, wide-angle shots first.

"Corporal, if I may—"

Ivanchik was munching on a foodbar. He smiled faintly at the reporter's approach. "Want a bar...I got lots of 'em...tastes like sawdust, this one—"

"No thanks, Corporal...for our viewers, this is Corporal Edward Ivanchik...your comrades call you _Moustache_?"

Ivanchik fondled his thick black lip forest. "You like it?...I work on it everyday. Sarge says it ain't regulation, but he never do anything about it."

"Corporal, you are a HERF gunner...tell us about that—"

Ivanchik hoisted his weapon up, stroking the generator casing below the barrel. "Sweetness? Yeah, me and Sweetness...we've wasted a few bugs over the last few months. I do my job real well...High Energy Radio Frequency...this one's a Mark 4...I done a few mods myself. You want your bugs fried or extra crispy...me and Sweetness can do it anyway you like it—"

Jin Lee was about to ask another question, but the wristpad on Ivanchik's arm chirped and beeped...incoming data. It was a video feed from the recon detail...Moustache held up his other hand while he studied the results.

Lapierre came over too. They pondered the results...vid from the drones, EM signatures, thermal emissions. The imagery showed townsfolk going about their business.

"Looks like a bunch of Normals to me," Ivanchik was saying. "Don't see any spikes or transients like bots put out—"

"I'm not so sure—" Sergeant Lapierre rubbed at some itchy stubble on his chin. "Damn Bugs are getting more and more clever. Hell, they look like you and me now..."

"Sarge, even Bugs are nanobotic assemblers...to look like you and me, or anything else but a loose swarm, they gotta break atoms...and that gives off heat. You _see_ any heat spikes--?"

"I don't like it," said Lubitsky, another trooper who had joined them. "Bastards can look like cow patties and half the time, we'd never know."

Lapierre squinted at his own wristpad, pondering Battalion's rules of engagement. "I'm doing this by the book. Plus, we got orders. Saddle up, boys and girls...we're going into Thuns-les-Bains."

It was just after dusk. The main street and the town square, the little oblong _piazza_ with the clocktower, were dark and mostly deserted. A furtive glance came from windows along the road, apartments and houses, where curtains were drawn tight. Lights flickered and shadows shifted in the alleys between the buildings. From somewhere in the distance, cats screeched. Then it started to rain, a steady drizzle drumming on the tin roofs all around them.

Carnot and Kantrowicz took point. One with a coilgun carbine at the ready, the other armed with HERF, the two troopers crept silently down the street, keeping away from lights that could silhouette them in the dark. Overhead, ornithopter drones and Superfly bots did top cover, spying out anything that moved, anything that gave off heat or light.

Jin Lee followed with her own drone. Lapierre snapped, " _Keep that thing down low_ —below tree level—I want my guys to get a clean sniff of what's out there." The Solnet reporter

complied, ordering the autocam ornithopter to half-hover a few feet behind her, sending a vid stream of Eagle Squad's approach into the town.

Only a few townsfolk were out on the streets. Eagle Squad stayed mostly to one side. The civilians paid them no attention.

An eerie, unnerving calm pervaded the center of the town. The steady drizzle muffled their steps.

Jin Lee decided to narrate their approach. She could edit for continuity later.

" _We're entering Thuns-les-Bain now...all the troopers of Eagle Squad are on knife edge. For the moment—"_ She stopped when shouts erupted from up ahead.

"Bugs!"

" _Bots at three o'clock_... _down that alley_ \--!!"

Everyone took off running, leaving Jin Lee behind. She broke into a trot and the drone whirred after her.

Down a dark alley, someone thought they had seen swarms. Later, during the after-action debrief, Trooper Singh, with Lumumba and Lubitsky, insisted on it. "It was a cloud of bots, sure as I'm sitting here, moving across the alley."

"You're sure it wasn't just smoke..." Lapierre probed. "I smelled cooking fires, like chicken or something...maybe that's what you saw—"

But at the time it happened, nobody checked to see if the apparition was swarm or Normal.

HERF rounds erupted and staccato coilgun fire stitched across the sides of the buildings. In seconds, the alley was a ball of flame and falling debris, a great smoking heap of rubble. Again and again, troopers poured fire into the alley. They had become immune to the difference between Normals and ANAD bots. Trigger-happy too, and Jin Lee noted that in her voiceover. If it even remotely looked like a swarm, it was attacked with unrelenting ferocity.

You just couldn't be too careful.

After the dust had settled, nobody went down the alley to investigate. Lapierre ordered Eagle Squad on into the center of the town.

Jin Lee posted this to Solnet, some hours later as she described their approach to Thuns-les-Bain: " _It's like the Swarms don't have to win. We're doing their job for them. If their mission is to drive Humans out of certain areas, sanitize certain regions, they don't have to win. Our own paranoia is accomplishing that quite nicely—"_

Jin Lee paused, to take a sip of Quikshot from her canteen and wolf down a foodbar. She circled the small statue of some forgotten dignitary in the middle of the _piazza_ , while Eagle Squad gathered around their wristpads, watching video feed from their drones, up and down nearby streets.

"... _Corporal Ivnachik told me this evening about the tiny mountain hamlet of Magdalena, in northern alpine Italy. Eagle Squad had been there a few weeks ago. The Corporal said Magdalena was like a lot of small towns the Squad had encountered—"_ here she pasted in the sound bite from Ivanchik....

"Yeah, sure...we wiped the place out. I mean completely too. HERF'ed and coilgunned it down to burning rubble and flies. And real flies too, not ANAD bots. We made sure of that. It's like Lumumba said...we had to destroy the town to save it. Place was infested, swarms everywhere—"

Jin Lee paused her voiceover. She ran the last few seconds again. She was sure she had heard _that_ before, somewhere, in another time and place.

Lapierre decided to form up a recon detail, this time with humans and drones together. "We got to be sure...sweep this hellhole from one end to another. Lubitsky, you go with Ivanchik and Bentley down that sector...Carnot, you and Singh and Kantrowicz take that one--  
" He sectioned off the remainder of the village into sweep sectors. "You see anything, anything at all, smash the bejeezus out of it. Battalion says this is a free-fire zone. Fry the bastards like popcorn, if you have to."

Ten minutes later, one of the details came back, completely spooked, insisting to Lapierre that the whole place was one big swarm nursery, that there were half-formed angels and demonios everywhere, behind every corner.

Carnot, the Frenchman, was out of breath. "They're inside... behind the doors... we could see the swarms— _faces_... parts of faces...in the windows—"

Singh added, "Even the barns...they were kind of fuzzy, kind of shimmering...like a swarm trying to hold structure..."

Lapierre's eyes narrowed. "What did Superfly say?"

Carnot shrugged. "I don't know...we didn't stick around, Sarge—"

Lapierre ordered a full drone scan of the sector. A herd of ornithopters wheeled about overhead to sniff out thermal emissions, atom debris, electromagnetic disturbances, anything out of the ordinary. The aerial bots swooped low, then careened higher to overfly the area.

Jin Lee approached the gathering. "Something, Sergeant?"

Lapierre said, "I don't know. I got a bad feeling about this place...too quiet. We'll let Superfly tell us what's going on." The rest of Eagle Squad assembled at the intersection, near the clocktower.

Jin Lee looked about the _piazza_ , signaling her dronecam to get some establishing shots. Thuns-les-Bains was eerily quiet. A stray cat. A few birds. A statue in the center. All the shop windows were closed, lights down low. It was just nicely dark. In most of the villages in this part of alpine France, early evening strollers and café dwellers always congregated at this hour.

Thuns-les-Bain didn't seem to have any cafes.

"Nothing, Sarge." Kantrowicz was studying his wristpad, getting scan data back from Superfly. " _Nada_...no heat flux, nothing acoustic...nothing. It's weird."

"Too weird," someone said.

Lapierre rubbed at his chin stubble. "I got my orders. Battalion says clear swarms from the area and hold the town." He looked around at his men, knew how fatigued and jittery they were. He was on edge himself. "We can't take any chances. After Foggia and Magdalena, we know what the Bugs can do. This whole place could be a setup. I'm ordering a Level 1 assault."

Ivanchik brightened. "Level 1...you mean...the _works_?"

Lapierre nodded. "Every building is to be completely leveled. All residents—if there are any left in this mudpile—are to be turned out. Everyone leaves town...no exceptions...send 'em out by the northern roads...keep the southern and western roads clear for Normals...we're supposed to be relieved in twenty-four hours."

Jin Lee and her dronecam had captured everything on vid. "Excuse me, Sergeant...didn't Corporal Kantrowicz just say there was no evidence of swarm activity in the area. Yet you're still going to destroy the village—I don't—"

Lapierre was unmoved. "They're here, Ms Lee. I can feel it. So can my men. You've seen what the Bugs can do. No, we're playing this one by the book. Level everything and set up a defense perimeter. Any bugs that are still loose, we zap 'em right then and there, right to eternity."

As Jin Lee made another posting to the Net, Lapierre gave the order. The Solnet correspondent made sure the dronecam got good vid of everything.

" _It wasn't long before the village of Thuns-les-Bains was engulfed in flames...all the thatched roof buildings, the old stone churches, the shops and cafes, even the statue in the piazza crumbled into dust under a withering barrage of HERF and particle beam fire...there were a few residents and they ran through the streets in their pajamas and robes, terrified, screaming...Normals caught in the crossfire of a conflict nobody understands, nobody can stop. The troopers of Eagle Squad were like bots themselves, going from one street to the next, systematically pulverizing every structure they found...making sure as they moved on that nothing was left standing...nothing that a swarm could masquerade as..._

" _It didn't matter if the swarms, or "Bugs' as the troopers called them, were in Thuns-les-Bain or not. What mattered was that Eagle Squad believed they were there. The enemy had been able to masquerade as civilians, barns, abandoned cars, even trees and bushes. Nothing could be trusted. Since nothing could be trusted, everything had to be destroyed. Soon, there would come a time when Eagle Squad couldn't even trust itself...and would then turn upon itself, like an animal crazed by an injured leg...it would chew the leg off. That's what the Bugs have done to us._

" _Now, Thuns-les-Bain is a burned-out rubble pile. The residents, those that survived, have fled north, along the highway to Lausanne, to Switzerland. And the troops of Eagle Squad have set up camp outside the rubble, to await their relief._

" _Their mission has been accomplished. There's nothing left standing that the Bugs could emulate or infest. Eagle Squad has done what was required of them._

" _And, I fear, that the day the Bugs declare victory is one step closer."_

United Nations Secretariat Building

New York City

January 27, 2100

2345 hours

Kwame Kavaii sat glumly at his desk in the SG's ornate office and propped up his chin on his hands. Two aides, both Congolese diplomats, both co-conspirators in the operation that had just seen the Sons of Assimilation replace the sitting Secretary-General with one of their own, were also in the office.

"It's just tactics...we _have_ to negotiate," Kavaii was insisting. "We need time to regroup...re-think our strategy."

One of the aides was a South African, named Mbeki, descended of ancient Xhosa warriors. "You're wrong, Kwame. We have to fight. If necessary, to the bitter end, to the last man, woman and child."

"It may come to that," Kavaii said. "If it does, then the planet is lost. We'll be like cockroaches, like scum to the swarms, fodder for their configurations. No, Mbeki, we must make a tactical retreat. Buy time for a new approach. I don't like it. It's not what any Assmilationist wants. But I'm sending the request. Souvranamh will get it and know we want to negotiate with Config Zero."

Mbeki sneered. "You're a worm, Kavaii. The Assimilationists are wrong and misguided. You're all wrong. We can't negotiate with the Bugs."

Kavaii nodded. "I know that. And they're not bugs. They're intelligent lifeforms, distributed sentience, someone once said. We have to negotiate. We've got to work out a way to live with them, at least until we can figure out how to either beat them or join them. " Kavaii fiddled with a tablet on his desk, slid icons around idly, thinking. "Assimilation is still the best course."

Mbeki shook his head. "It's suicide."

Kavaii was unmoved. "Send the message—"
CHAPTER 19

Mt Kipwezi, Kenya

January 28, 2100

1100 hrs local time

Dana Tallant hunkered down in the lee of a huge boulder and waited until the wind blast died down. She was in full hypersuit, dug in firmly on the southwest slopes of Mt. Kipwezi, along with the rest of the Special Rescue Detachment (SRD) Delta. The wind howled over their heads at this altitude, nearly ten thousand feet above the surrounding countryside, a few hours climb and boost above the last trailhead at K6 and dirt and grit scoured the mountainside with an unending roar.

Beside Tallant was Major Nair, Sanctuary Patrol East Africa, and Inspector Dominick Lang, UNIFORCE Headquarters. All were clad in hypersuits and all were clinging precariously to their perches, as the winds swirled and tugged at them.

Tallant had seen the swollen purple belly of an approaching storm front moving up from the southeast a few minutes before. She got on the crewnet to Nair and Lang.

"See that storm to the east, gentlemen? That's our ticket inside."

Several thousand feet above them, a flickering ring-like cloud, almost like a halo, encircled the very summit of Kipwezi. Even a quick look would confirm that the halo was no ordinary cloud formation, though Kipwezi sat astride numerous active magma channels and suffered small tremors and minor volcanic eruptions from her topside vents from time to time.

"Botscreen," said Corporal Beltray, the Detachment IC1. "Reading high thermals, EMs off the scale, lots of atom activity up there. How it can hold position in this wind, I have no idea."

"We'll have to batter our way through," said Nair.

"No, actually, we won't," said Tallant. She tapped a few keys on her wristpad. "Not with this new config I got from Wings. Came all the way from Jupiter a few hours ago...leave it to my wonderful husband to come up with some really wacky configuration. But it may just work." She smiled at the message that Johnny Winger had sent along with the recommended config. It was an ancient quote from Sun Tzu, the Chinese nanowarrior and strategist.

In war, practice dissimulation and you will succeed.

"I don't follow," said Nair.

"Tactics, Major. Something we spend a lot of time on at Quantum Corps. The best way to slip through that botscreen up there is to masquerade as something else. Deceit and deception. Remember when we were here before: how that first storm fell on us and then the raindrops morphed into nanobots and started slicing and dicing their way through the Detachment?"

"We couldn't change configs fast enough to catch up...how could I _not_ remember?"

"Well, today, we're turning the tables. We're going to hitch a ride on that stormfront as it envelopes the mountain and use it to give our little guys cover...until we're right in their midst. Then, _pow_ and big bang! Change config and give that botscreen a bad case of indigestion."

Lang was concerned. "What if that storm coming up is just another bot swarm, like before?"

Tallant had considered that. "Corporal—" she said to Beltray, who was dug in ten meters downslope from them. "—what are you reading from that storm front to the east? Any activity?"

Beltray had launched several Superfly drones moments before. The ornithopters had chittered off and flown headlong into the storm for a recon run. The IC1 studied the results on his wristpad, ported the data to Tallant over the crewnet.

"Nothing, Major...normal spikes in electron stripping, no EMs, no loose radicals, no real evidence of nanobotic atom stripping...looks like a garden-variety east African gulley-washer, headed our way."

Tallant dialed up the new config on her wristpad and did a quick once-over, checking Winger's design. It all looked copacetic. "Very well...Corporal, would you call Config 10-02, front and center. I want to take a final look—"

Beltray did as ordered. Config 10-02 was UNSP East Africa's assigned ANAD squadron. The IC1 pecked at his tiny keyboard and the mountain slope was soon thick with swarming bots, flickering and flowing across the rubbly landscape like a phosphorescent ground fog.

***Config Ten Oh Two...reports ready in all respects...now operating in configuration C-355...replication counter has been zeroed....swarm mass centroid steady and awaiting orders....***

Tallant knew that 10-02 was a barebones nanobotic assembler swarm, neutered and configged to serve in basic combat operations with Sanctuary Patrol...nothing special. Its CPU was suspect, as were all ANAD master processors now, due to the activation of its embedded Prime Key.

But even with that, the bot still had a role and Tallant aimed to use the little bugger to piggyback on that approaching storm and smash through the botscreen above them, the shield that was keeping her from getting to Rene and getting her daughter out of this hellhole.

She'd just have to keep a close eye on this ANAD and be ready to scram the whole thing if it went south on the Detachment.

They didn't want to stick their head in the lion's mouth again if they didn't have to.

Dominick Lang stuck his helmeted head up from behind a boulder. "Would someone explain to me what's going on?"

Tallant indicated the approaching storm front. "I've told 10-02 here to configure itself so that the swarm bots resemble rain drops. When that storm gets here, these little guys will ride it up to the top of the mountain, hopefully right through that botscreen up there, and once they're past, they'll re-configure into attack formation and let 'em have it from the rear. At least, that's the plan."

"All config files and registers check out, Major," said Beltray.

"Send it, Corporal...and I'm leaving the driving to you—"

"Roger that, Major."

The lashing rain and howling wind of the storm was upon them in minutes, scouring the slopes of Kipwezi with driving sheets of water, capped off with veins of lightning and swollen purple clouds. The Detachment hunkered down in the lee of the boulder field, while Tallant monitored 10-02's progress up-slope through Beltray's link with the swarm.

Moments later, Beltray saw on his wristpad a growing spike in EMs and thermal activity, profiles matching normal nanobotic activity. "Passing through the screen now, Major...lots of bond breaking going on here—"

"Stay with it—" Tallant ordered. She crossed her fingers inside her hypersuit gloves, then forced herself to unclench her fists. _Rene, honey, just hold on...I'm coming. Mom's going to get you the hell out of there...just hold on...._

Disguised as rain drops and dust particles, 10-02 rode with the storm right through the midst of the botscreen guarding the cave complex at the summit of Kipwezi.

"Nothing unusual," Beltray noted, watching sensor data scroll down his eyepiece viwer. "Normal activity, normal atom debris...still lots of bond breaking...the screenbots are trying to hold structure in this storm...can't be easy for 'em—"

"Or us," said Tallant.

"EM spikes dropping now, steady drop in thermals, acoustics returning to normal...I'd say we're through the centroid of the swarm."

"No indication of alert or alarm?"

"Nothing, Major...swarm is operating as before...definite aspect change, definite drop in EM levels...10-02's now transiting the outer edges."

"Time to get serious," Tallant decided. She punched up a list of assault configs on her wristpad. _C-22 looks like our best shot._ _Bond disrupters, carbene grabbers, enhanced pyridine probes and enzymatic knives...the works. This should kick some ass--_ She dialed up C-22 and ported it over the crewnet to Beltray. "Send it," she ordered.

Beltray did as ordered.

For a few minutes, nothing seemed to happen. Tallant knew the first effects would take time. 10-02 had to shift to max replication as well as change configs...that required both available mass and time. Plus the residual effects of the storm masked much of the early assault...in fact, she was counting on that as part of the deception maneuver. Still, she couldn't help but wonder...this close to Config Zero, with an activated Prime Key...could they really trust 10-02?

"Verify config change, Corporal...I don't want any surprises from 10-02, not today."

"Verifying now..." Beltray's fingers flew over his wristpad, interrogating the swarm master bot, making sure it had received the config and was grabbing atoms to change structure and assume assault formation. "Verifying...handshake is good, check parameters all look good...I'm seeing bond breaking and all the profiles look right on the money....10-02 now altering config to C-22...everything seems to check out—"

Tallant rose cautiously from her perch behind the boulders. She tuned her eyepiece scopes for maximum magnification and scanned the upper slopes of Kipwezi, still shrouded in leftover mist from the passing storm. Zeroing in on the right freqs, she soon saw a faint line of flickering and flashing, like a slow-motion bolt of lightning whipping and seesawing through the sky.

That has to be the line of engagement. Time to get small—

Tallant switched through the Beltray's coupler link and went 'over the waterfall', shaking off the dizziness you always got when diving headfirst into the world of atoms and molecules and Brownian motion.

Right away, acoustic scans showed what 10-02 was facing.

Straight ahead, at a distance of maybe a few hundred microns, was the front line of the enemy screenbots, like a fleet of warships on the horizon maneuvering for attack. She debated going to direct-pilot, but decided against it for the moment. _That's something Wings would do_. Better to let 10-02 engage the enemy on his own.

They jetted forward on picowatt propulsors and the distance closed rapidly. Tallant felt like she was riding a runaway freight train, whipping one way, then another way, as 10-02 maneuvered for advantage.

The enemy bots came into view and Tallant saw they were double-lobed barbell structures, festooned with effectors top and bottom, and with multiple rings of propulsors girdling their equatorial sections.

_Should be maneuverable as hell...what's he got for weapons?_...they closed and engaged and she quickly found out...a frontal array of bond breakers fanned out and discharged almost right into her face...the bot she had been 'riding' whirled and spun off and shook itself to recover....

Ouch...better try another angle to engage that one—

The battle lasted only a few minutes. 10-02 had a few tricks up its nanobotic sleeves, even some Tallant hadn't considered. With the right vector, it became possible for 10-02 to engage the enemy bots off-angle, where it found a zone of approach that the enemy's disrupters couldn't reach. _Yeah...sting the bastard there, zap him there, do the hokey-pokey and turn yourself around..._ Tallant found herself cheering and pumping her fists, in spite of the cumbersome hypersuit.

Beltray reported the news. "10-02 reports the assault is working...he's driving the screenbots back...away from the cave complex...swarm centroid has moved nearly fifteen meters and density is dropping rapidly—EMs down forty-five percent--"

Major Nair was exultant. "We're smashing them good—"

There were muted cheers over the crewnet circuit as the rest of the Detachment saw what was happening.

"— _smoke 'em_ , Oh-Two..."

"Kick butt!"

"...fry the bastards!"

Tallant ordered the Detachment to their feet. "Boost on, troops...let's get up to those cave openings before the Bugs come back."

The troopers straggled upright and, one by one, lit off their suit boost. Soon, the upper slopes of Kipwezi were crawling with hypersuited nanotroopers riding their suit jets along the folds and seams of rock, right through the small hole 10-02 had punched in the botscreen, lifting higher and higher toward a small ledge sheltering the cave opening that Recon had said was an entrance to some kind of underground complex.

_Rene's in there,_ Tallant told herself. _Rene and Config Zero. I'm coming, honey...just hold on...I'm coming and I'm gonna unleash hell when I get inside...._

They finally found the cave on the steepest slopes of the northwest flanks of Mount Kipwezi, nearly ten thousand feet above the surrounding plain. It was a DPS tech named Volkov who made the discovery.

The cave complex, when they located it, was well hidden in the folds and crevices of the upper slopes of the volcano, above a cloud deck and slick with ice and snow drifts. The wind screamed and gusted at well over eighty knots at this altitude and all of them had to hunker down in the lee of a rocky barren to keep from being shredded with ice shards and rock chips scoured off the mountainside.

_Not very impressive_ , thought Dana Tallant, considering what was inside. The entrance was little more than a fold in the ground, like a bedsheet bent over and tucked under, maybe a meter across in its widest dimension. But the cave was the nerve center for swarm operations inside the East African Sanctuary.

The cave held Configuration Zero. Config Zero...the master swarm itself.

Carefully, one after the other, they slipped through the meter-wide crack and stood in the twilit dust confronting a nanobotic barrier shimmering before them, stretching from floor to ceiling.

Major Nair studied the barrier for a moment. "I'm thinking 10-02 should be able to make quick work of this—" he called up the swarm, which flowed like a faint sparkling mist into the cave behind them. "Ten...take out this barrier—"

The swarm seeped forward up to and over the face of the shimmering, nearly translucent veil of the botscreen. For a few moments, nothing seemed to happen. Corporal Beltray studied his wristpad.

"10-02 maneuvering now...I'm seeing a config change, going to enhanced grabbers and disrupters—"

The sparkling picked up in intensity, strobing and flickering at a faster rate as 10-02 added new effectors and replicated mass. Suddenly, there was an intense flash, followed by a dim reddish glow all around the opening. The sheer veil of the barrier collapsed in a shower of light.

They were in.

"This place gives me the creeps," muttered Inspector Lang.

Volkov and another DPS tech scanned the perimeter of the cave, thick with dripping stalactites and slick rock ledges. "No other barriers in the area, Major," Volkov reported. "I'm picking up nano effects deeper into the cave, not localized...probably detached swarm elements—"

"Very well," Nair observed. He ordered the Detachment forward, Beltray and Volkov on point, with 10-02 supporting alongside.

Tallant, Nair and Dominick Lang, moved deeper into the cave behind them, following a drifting mist of bots that wavered in and out of view. They descended several levels, crossed a rock bridge across a deep chasm and maneuvered through more tunnels. Lighting was created by the mist, a pulsing, flickering light that cast deep shadows on the gnarled veins of rock lining the cave. The floor was slick, patches of ice everywhere. Soon enough, they came to a narrow opening, barely waist high. More light flickered from inside.

The mist of bots which had floated with them swirled like dust in a storm and gathered around the opening like a frame, coruscating and flashing as if lit from within. Bonds were broken and atoms slung together...in moments, the mist formed itself into a small ramp, extending over a sluggish pool of water. At least, Dana Tallant thought it was water, even as tendrils of steam hovered over the surface like a fog.

Cautiously, first Volkov, then Beltray, then the others edged out onto the newly formed ramp and walked ahead.

That's when Dana Tallant saw the MOB sacks hanging from the sides of the cave. She jumped, startled, at the sight.

Lining the cavern walls were rows of Mobility Obstruction Barrier cocoons, each enclosing humans, or what had once been humans...it was hard to tell. Faces were contorted, some looked to be sleeping, some in various poses of resistance.

Dana Tallant shivered.

Major Nair ordered facial scans to be done. Beltray ran the device along the line of MOB sacks. "Nobody on the MIA list so far...they could be just stray mountain climbers picked up...tourists, maybe—"

They went deeper into the cave. The MOB cocoons lined both sides of the cave walls as far as they could see. Just then, Beltray got a hit. He stopped at a pair of cocoons, hanging like sacks of fruit near a narrowing of the cave.

Beltray read his recognizer and whistled. "It says this is Theo Souvranamh...and this one—" he ran the device all around the adjoining sack "—this one is supposed to be Fatima Farhad."

Dana Tallant shivered in spite of herself. "I thought Souvranamh was dead...or exiled somewhere in space. He was Red Hammer, wasn't he? At one time...?"

Dominick Lang checked his own wristpad, pulling up long lost files. He scrolled a minute. "Cartel ruling council...one time trafficker in neurostims, all kinds of crap. Jesus, I thought this was guy was history."

Nair examined the cocoons. "They're alive...both of them...I get vital signs, but they're weak."

"Leave 'em," Tallant decided. "Souvranamh in cahoots with Config Zero...that can't be good."

"I wonder what happened...why they would wind up here, like this?"

Tallant and Lang had already moved on. Other humans were also cocooned in MOB nets, dozens of them. The cave narrowed and movement became more difficult. The air was growing thick with bots, mostly benign. Occasional flashes and pinpricks of light overhead meant Config 10-02 was helping clear a path through the thickening swarms.

Lang voiced concern. "You think it's a good idea to go so deep into this cave...without more support?"

A side tunnel came up. Whether it was some sort of maternal instinct, or sixth sense or just curiosity, Dana Tallant couldn't say. She veered off from the others for a moment to explore the tunnel. When she shone her light along the MOB sacks lining the walls, she came face to face with—

It was Rene...Rene, right in front of her—

Dana Tallant nearly choked and let out a whoop of joy. Nair, Lang and the others came running.

"It's my daughter---she's _here_ \--!"

Tallant clawed and dug clumsily at the MOB coccon with her hypersuited fingers. It was no use. The bots that made up the mesh fought back, tightening their grip on the girl. Inside the mesh, Tallant could see her face turning blue...she was suffocating.

" _Help her....help me_ —" she slammed her fists at the resilient nanobotic mesh, but the bots just buzzed and increased their squeeze.

It was Nair who first sensed a new presence in the tunnel. Suddenly, the air began thickening as a great swarm filled in from every crevice and crack, swelling inside the cavern to ear-bursting pressure.

When it appeared, the swarm materialized out of the rock ceiling of the cave. At first, the swarm resembled nothing more than trembling shadows, a pale flickering ghost seemingly contoured with the cave ceiling and walls. As it descended from above, the swarm gathered itself into a roughly spherical shape, still pulsing, still throbbing, backlit from within by the fires of atomic bonds being broken, new structures being slammed together, new bots being formed.

Configuration Zero hung in the misty air like a swollen cloud, ready to dump torrential rain on a tropical forest. But they were a long way from any rain forests. The swarm unfurled itself and hung in the air like a great stormfront, a trembling fist, flashing purple and orange and magenta all at the same time.

The master swarm now confronted the Sanctuary Patrol team...a dense, swollen, sparkling fog of bots.

Config Zero had sealed off all entrances and exits to the side tunnel.

The humans were now trapped in the bowels of Mt. Kipwezi.
CHAPTER 20

Aboard UNISPACE Submersible _Trident_

Europa Coordinate System: Lat. 44N, Long 172W

Landing Base Station

January 29, 2100 (Earth U.T.)

_Trident_ finally made it to her landing base camp some twenty hours after breaching the surface of the ice at Rathmore Chaos and driving along a sinuous linea, which was really nothing more than an ice-clogged valley, a groove cut into Europa's ice crust that meandered across hundreds of kilometers before petering out in a place the maps called Falga Regio.

Stella tractored the ship up onto her saucer-shaped platform and parked _Trident_ for some much needed refit and repair. It was dusk, nearly twilight in this part of Europa, and Jupiter hung like a swollen salmon-hued belly low in the sky, covering fully an eighth of her horizon. The Captain sank back in his command deck chair, turned to Winger and sighed. "Hope I don't have to make _that_ drive too often....Jeez, it's worse than an LA freeway at rush hour."

"At least we're here and still in one piece," Winger said. He stared out the forward windows at the hills and boulders and hummocks of ice littering the landscape. "I've been thinking, Captain...about this Keeper. Dana's fighting the same thing back home and some her messages have given me an idea..."

"About what, exactly?" Stella tapped at the keyboard, brought up a 3D image of _Trident's_ plans and layout. They had a lot of repair work to do and some kind of plan would have to be worked out to get it done expeditiously.

"Somehow, some way, we have to find a way to disable this Keeper. I mean...what actually is this Keeper?"

"I'd call it a major pain in the ass, for starters."

Winger snorted. "No argument from me on that. But, really, the Keeper is nothing more than a giant swarm. It's a physical structure in that it's a big collection of nanobotic assemblers. But it's also a communication portal and a transmitter of instructions and commands."

"A big radio."

"Essentially. Maybe the way to deal with the Keeper is to mimic what it does. Mimic the quantum signals it puts out."

Stella was half paying attention, as he worked up a repair list on his tablet. "You mean build another Keeper?"

"I mean build some kind of quantum coupler/transmitter that puts out something resembling Keeper signals as closely as possible. Then when the Keeper sends commands, assuming we can detect them—maybe tracking decoherence wakes or something like that—this mimic device would send alternate commands to counter or scramble what the Keeper sent."

Stella just shook his head. "Sounds kind of wacky to me...can you even detect signals from this Keeper? We barely know anything about it and we haven't even been able to get that close."

Winger shrugged. "It's a harebrained idea, no doubt about that. But-- just daydreaming here-- if we could pull it off, it might be the solution. But to make this work, we've got to learn everything we can about the Keeper's comm protocols, frequencies, entanglement states, how the damn thing really works. Deep down inside, it's a machine. I just want to know what makes it tick."

"Then throw a big wrench in the works," Stella added. "I'll leave the daydreaming and tinkering to you, Colonel. Right now—" he held up his tablet, covered with images and diagrams "—we've got a sick ship to deal with. I need your people to help out."

"You got it." Winger took the tablet and studied Stella's list. "I'll call an all-hands briefing and we'll get this assigned and done."

Much of the repair work involved rebuilding hull structures and fittings in the aft part of _Trident_ , particularly her powerplant spaces on F deck and her lockout chamber and steering and buoyancy controls on G deck. Small assembler swarms were replicated by Turbo Fatah and Chris Calderon, the Detachment's two CEC ratings, and inspected for config.

Turbo pronounced both swarms good. "All copacetic, Skipper. Just need the right build files and some feedstock...I guess we can use this wreckage here—" he indicated the smashed steering gear box and shredded parts of hull valves stacked like garbage along the deck walls.

"Let's get to work," Winger said.

For the next few hours, the troopers scurried about _Trident_ , repairing damaged gear and rebuilding hull and deck plating that had been disassembled by the Keeper bots. The new configs worked out by Calderon and Fatah worked well, breaking down discarded equipment into its constituent atoms and re-assembling new structures accoding to _Trident's_ onboard plans.

Just to be sure, Winger ordered Reaves and Singh, the Detachment's DPS techs, to thoroughly scan every compartment for leftover bots or evidence of nano activity—high thermals, EMs, acoustics, anything.

"I don't want even a loose proton left from those bastards," Winger said. Stella agreed.

While scans and repairs were underway, Winger went aft to E deck, grabbing Fatah and Klimuk as he did. They went into the tiny lab/utility cubicle and Winger explained his idea to mimic the Keeper's quantum signals. For extra brainpower, he decided to release Doc II from his shoulder capsule. The swarm master exited the open port in a few pinpricks of light, then rapidly repped itself into a passable likeness of old Doc Frost's head and shoulders, drifting about E deck like a ghostly apparition.

"Still gives me the creeps," muttered Klimuk. He stroked his black goatee nervously as he kept a wary eye on the bot swarm.

"I don't know about this idea, Skipper," said Fatah. "I mean...it's a good idea. But we know nothing about the Keeper's signal characteristics...hell, we barely understand how our own quantum couplers work."

The Doc II swarm brightened perceptibly. Winger had always figured that was the swarm's way of having a thought.

_***I have a thought...if I may interject--***_ Doc II had formed an acoustic lens with part of his swarm, so the projected voice came out slightly tinny, but understandable.

"Sure, go ahead, Doc...let's have it."

***The only sure way to know what kind of signals the Keeper uses is to create a recon swarm and insert it into the midst of the Keeper. Get as much quantum signal order of battle as possible...direct intel on the signals***

Klimuk pointed out the obvious. "We just tried physical recon, Doc...got our asses kicked and nearly lost the ship in the process. How the hell—"

Winger held up a hand. "We tried _once_ , Vic...maybe the config was all wrong. We thought we had characterized the Keeper bots pretty well, but they're full quantum devices...they can take any number of states and cycle around different configs at speeds and in ways we can't even imagine. How do you fight an enemy like that?"

Fatah was mulling over some ideas. "We have to be able to detect the signals...I guess by decoherence wake. Maybe we don't need to get inside the swarm...just close enough to pick up some kind of signal...then we have to grab enough to study it...and those deco wakes last a few microseconds at best. The closer we can get, the longer they should last. Maybe it's enough to just get as close as we can."

"Skipper—" asked Klimuk, "—supposing we do get some good signal intelligence. What then?"

Winger scratched his head. His scalp itched and his mouth tasted furry. They all needed a hot shower in the worst way. "I want to breadboard a new kind of signal generator...a new kind of quantum coupler. Something we can use to broadcast quantum signals at least as far as back to Earth. Some new kind of whizbang entangler circuit that can interfere with what the Keeper sends and maybe even countermand what is sent...counter-orders as it were. I don't know if we have such equipment onboard _Trident_ or even any kind of circuit designs in the ship's computer we can use."

Fatah was thoughtful, turning over some discarded coupler casings in his hand. "Maybe we don't have to, Skipper. They got pretty good-size arrays at Mariner City. Maybe we just have to get the signal that far. "

"Do we even speak 'Keeper'?" asked Klimuk. "We could send signals to Earth-based swams and not have any idea of what we're saying."

"We don't have to know all the details," Winger insisted. "I'm thinking all we have to do is send enough signals to confuse the little bastards...make 'em stop and think and say _huh_?...just before Sanctuary Patrol and Quantum Corps clobbers 'em. If we could just interfere enough with the Keeper's signals, we don't have to disable or try to destroy the Keeper...and that may not be possible anyway."

"Okay, Skipper...I'm in," said Fatah. "We could breadboard some recon bot configs right here, something that could get close and capture enough Keeper signals to get us started. But it means making another trip back...you think Captain Stella will go for that?"

"Probably not," said Winger, "but _that_ is our mission and I'm the mission commander. _Jovian Hammer_ has one objective: defeat, disable or destroy the Keeper here. This may be the best way to do it."

For the next day, the Detachment continued working with Stella to repair and refit _Trident_ as she lay berthed on her landing base platform. Sergeant Al Glance, the other Detachment command rating besides Winger, led a small detail outside the ship to reconnoiter the landing platform and make minor repairs to her ascent/descent engines. _Trident_ would need those engines to make it back into space when her mission was done.

Deeno D'Nunzio, assigned to the repair party, was awed by the chaotic icescape of the Europan surface, and the size of Jupiter, swollen and hanging low in the sky.

"I haven't even had _nightmares_ like this...look at that canyon we drove through, cut right through the ice."

Glance clung to a small ladder propped up against the landing strut, wrenching down an access panel near the engine bell. "Stella says the ice shifts all the time...we might not be able travel that same canyon again...it's in constant motion...remember all this ice floats on top of the ocean, like a big ice cube."

"Hurry it up, will you, Sarge? This place gives me the creeps."

Inside _Trident_ , Johnny Winger worked with Turbo Fatah and Vic Klimuk in the tiny lab on E deck, breadboarding a new signal generator to mimic the Keeper's signals. Fatah had taken to calling the generator a _Keeper sim_..."simulating what the Keeper transmits," he explained to the others. The generator itself was an open latticework structure, with antenna horns and reflectors, surrounding a quantum core, which Doc II had fashioned from pieces of hull wreckage and an intact entangler board from a quantum coupler cannabilized from Utility. The swarm continued to maintain structure sufficient to roughly resemble old Doc Frost, at Winger's request.

"Makes working with the bots a little easier...knowing your partner's something more than a cloud of bugs."

"At least, we have a face to relate to—" Klimuk added.

***Human faces are obsolete...not necessary to effect communication...swarm structures are much more flexible...not constrained by having to maintain an appearance...this is done for your ease of communication***

"Thanks, Doc...you're all heart—"

"Say, Skipper—" it was Fatah, wrestling with a piece of the latticework—"you hear anymore from the missus...Major Tallant?"

Winger stopped his wiring work and set down a multimeter. "You know, Turbo, I haven't...for a day or so, I was getting regular squirts from her. They were assaulting Config Zero's hideout in east Africa...and I'd sent her a few new configs to try out. But the last message I got was—" he checked his watch—"almost twelve hours ago. She said they were entering some kind of cave complex. Nothing since then."

"Maybe she got inside the mountain," suggested Klimuk.

"Yeah, maybe she whipped Config Zero's ass and this Keeper won't have anybody to talk to."

Doc II weighed in on the conversation. _***You do not understand the role and purpose of Configuration Zero...I will attempt to explain***_

"Yeah, to us first-graders...., "said Fatah, "--we know nothing...so explain already, Mr. Wizard."

The Doc II swarm faded slightly and the Doc Frost appearance faded with it. For a few moments, the swarm flickered and brightened in faint veins of light erupting out of thin air, like a telescopic image of starbursts in miniature.

***Configuration Zero is most likely an element of the original configuration. Part of what you call 'The Old Ones.' It maintains a structure unlike any other swarm...a permanent structure***

"But it's still a swarm," Winger said. "A cloud of nanobotic assemblers...what makes this configuration so special...can't it assume other configs...just like you, like any swarm?"

***Of course it can...this is inherent in any loose formation of such assemblers. The assembler elements of Configuration Zero were not assembled from loose atoms locally, as all other swarms are, as I myself was, for example. The elements of Config Zero have evolved from original assembler structures left on Earth by the Old Ones. Config Zero should be considered a subset of the original swarm which came to Earth long ago***

"So that means," said Klimuk, "that Config Zero's really old, like several billion years old. What about the viral core...you know the story of how Doc Frost copied the genome of some ancient virus at Engebbe when he made the first ANAD?"

***Configuration Zero is that original virus structure***

"Doc, if that's true," said Winger, "then every ANAD style nanobot since ANAD 1.0, every bot ever created since Doc Frost made the first one at the Autonomous Systems Lab fifty years ago, is related to Config Zero."

"Who's your Daddy?" said Fatah. "Looks like Config Zero's your Daddy."

"You said you'd explain the role and purpose of Config Zero," Winger reminded the swarm.

***The purpose of Config Zero is the same as any intelligent self-replicating system...the same purpose as you have...it is a universal 'genetic' imperative...to replicate and propagate itself...to occupy all available niches and expand to the limits of its environment***

"That doesn't sound too promising," Klimuk said. "Sounds to me like... _taking over the whole Earth."_

"Doc, do you think the Old Ones really exist? Or is that just some big fairy tale, meant to scare us all?"

The swarm flickered for a few moments, as if it were thinking. _Hell_ , Winger thought, _maybe it is thinking_.

_***Configuration referred to by Humans as the Old Ones is (_ _Definition retrieved from Archives)_ _:_ a nomadic mechanistic species, a great swarm nearly a light-year across, traveling through interstellar space around the galaxy. _In time period (_ _REFERENCE CONVERTED GALACTIC CENTRAL TIME PHASE I_ _) 1101.3344625, this original configuration known to you as the Old Ones departed their homeworld in a diaspora across their star region known to you as globular cluster M75 in the constellation Sagittarius, due to the supernova destruction of their home star...the Old Ones seek propagation and replication, as any intelligent species does. This is a universal imperative. The Prime Key contains all these facts...to answer your question, the Old Ones exist***_

Turbo Fatah was hooking up the breadboard signal generator to power it up and run some tests. "I don't know, Skipper...some people say nobody really knows what the coming of the Old Ones will bring. The Old Ones are like a blank slate for many, and people project their greatest dreams and deepest fears onto this slate."

Winger agreed. "I was researching this very thing a few days before we landed...and found this in Doc II's archives...apparently it's from Doc Frost's notes...Doc, access Archive 623.889, item 7771...project it on the bench here, 3D—"

The swarm roiled and seethed for a few moments, losing its likeness of Doc Frost, assuming an amorphous shape. It twinkled and sparkled, forming a tiny photon lens.

***Accessing archive 623.889, item 7771...formatting file...initializing file...now projecting...***

A thin, almost invisible beam of light shot out from the center of the swarm and formed a moving holographic image on the desk...it was Doc Frost, from years ago, Frost giving some kind of talk to an audience. The finger-sized image strutted across the bench like a miniature actor on a miniature stage—

"Doc...increase audio output twenty percent—"

Doc II complied and then the miniature Doc Frost could be heard across the lab.

"-- _The Assimilationists believe we are meant to merge with our ANAD bot swarms and become new symbiotic lifeforms. It is one of the great questions of the age in in the late 21_ st _century. Nanobotic technology and swarms have developed to the point that inserting bots and swarms of bots into our minds and bodies is already a routine thing._

" _The next logical step is to use ANAD-style bots to enhance or augment our bodies, providing capabilities that we wouldn't have naturally. Assimilationists believe such a symbiosis, which had its genesis with Quantum Corps' Symbiosis Project, is a natural and inevitable part of evolution. They also believe that without such enhancement, Mankind has no future and no hope._

" _One fear that drives Assimilationist thinking is the understanding that the Old Ones are coming and that humans had better be ready. Some of those who follow Assimilationism think that the Old Ones are really the return of Jesus, or God. Others aren't so sure how much we can trust the Old Ones, or whether we even should. It is generally and broadly known that ANAD-style assemblers have a link to the Old Ones through their core processor: the original ANAD processor contained instruction sets that I took from the genome of an ancient virus unearthed at Engebbe, in east Africa. And archeologists, working with nanobotic engineers, have concluded that the Old Ones may well have provided the original genomic 'seed' for all viruses on Earth. This was always my theory, although others have disputed this._

" _The expected arrival of the Old Ones lends a sense of urgency to the demands of the Assimilationists. A variety of spiritual and religious cults, sects and movements have arisen since the existence of the Old Ones and their anticipated arrival was announced (in 2080, in the aftermath of the Hellas Enigma case). Some say the Old Ones are really God, or Jesus and the Second Coming. Some say the Old Ones are a final judgment on Mankind. Some say the destruction of the world is imminent and that we have 55 years to repent. I happen to believe there is some truth to this, that the Old Ones mean to re-make the Earth into a more compatible environment, perhaps closer to what Earth was like in its primordial days 3.5 billion years ago, that they mean to rewind the evolutionary clock and start over again._

" _The Assimilationists say the only way we can be ready to meet the Old Ones, either to stop them or to join them (and there is a branch of Assimilationism that feels merging with the Old Ones is the only realistic alternative) is to merge with our ANAD nanobotic creations and augment or enhance our selves into something like the Old Ones are said to be. Most theories about the physical nature of the Old Ones consider them to be a sort of vast swarm of bots, drifting through space, a kind of hive mind._

" _The Assimilationist agenda encourages adherents to seek enhancement with nanobotic swarms and technology....literally, to let your body and mind be flooded with bots to boost enlightenment, intelligence, speed of reaction, memory and the ability to link with the WorldNet, in other words, to do your part to build a giant single mind on Earth (similar to Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere). In many respects, Assimilationists have a Gaia view of things, differing only in their belief that the Earth is not yet a living organism, but through their efforts, will become one. Achieving the state of no'os, union as a mind, is the highest goal of most Assimilationists._

" _Assimilationism is an outgrowth of transhumanism. The anticipated coming of the Old Ones thus can be thought of as a version of the Singularity. However Assimilationism focuses on true symbiosis with our nanobotic creations—"_

With that, the Doc Frost miniature faded away and slowly, the swarm re-assumed a head and face likeness of its mentor.

Fatah shook his head. "So he's saying we're all going to become snack food for the Old Ones, is that it?"

Winger shook his head. "He's saying not everyone believes the Old Ones are real...but we'd better be ready, just in case. "

Klimuk said, "If we mess up this Keeper and bollix up what Config Zero's doing, is it going to matter?"

"Hell, yes, it's going to matter," Winger said. "It matters because that cloud of bugs has my daughter Rene hostage. I'd HERF that bastard into fried atoms myself if I could...this thing has to work. People are dying back home. My daughter's a hostage. Parts of the Mediterranean basin are unliveable...there's your proof, Vic. The bots are already changing the environment as fast as they can. Go ahead and power up...let's see if we get any output—"

They hooked up the signal generator and turned it on.

Fatah studied his instruments. "I'm getting a faint wake...very weak decoherence trail, but something's there. We're putting out something."

"Try boosting the gain," Winger suggested.

Klimuk fiddled with some controls connected by cable to the generator. "How about now?"

Fatah shook his head. "Still barely detectable. I'd say we've got a signal going out...but we may have a bad entangler."

Winger studied the contraption. "This is a really nutty idea, but we've got to make it work...looks like we've got some tweaking to do. Vic—"

He was interrupted by Captain Stella, who poked his head into the tiny lab. "Colonel, we've completed all repairs and we're fully replenished. Everything checks out. _Trident's_ ready to get underway."

"That's good news. We're still finagling with this gizmo. Captain, put us back in the water. Head for the last known coordinates of the Keeper."

Stella took a deep breath. "You're the boss, Colonel. I'll fire up the tractors and get us moving down from the platform."

Half an hour later, _Trident's_ borer was running at full power. The ship motored herself off her landing base platform and began boring her way back through the Europan icepack.
CHAPTER 21

Mt Kipwezi, Kenya

January 29, 2100

0230 hrs local time

Inside the large cave complex at the summit of Mount Kipwezi, Dana Tallant, Dominick Lang and Major Nair now confronted the great swarm Config Zero.

Tallant was frantic to get the MOB mesh off Rene. " _Help me...help me get this thing off her--!!"_

She tore and clawed at the mesh with her hypersuited hands, then ripped her gloves off and slung them away. She screamed at Config Zero.

" _Let her go...let my girl go!!_ "

The swarm swelled and filled the entire cave, flowing into every corner, every crevice, every crack in the walls, filling the cave to ear-bursting pressure. The voice, when it came, was tinny, off-frequency, like something coming from inside a barrel. The swarm had formed a crude acoustic coupler and the voice reverberated off the cave walls and ceiling.

***Non-self entities will be deleted... Instruction Set 1185.343...prepare this world for the Central Entity...Module One is operating and must be completed...***

Dana Tallant could see no way to tear into the MOB net. Rene's eyes were big and teary inside...she could see her daughter screaming, see her mouth and lips working, but the sound was muffled...the swarm dampened everything...the MOB net wouldn't even let a scream out. Rene's mouth was moving, she was trying to say something... _come on, honey_ ,...Tallant looked closer, pressing her face against the net as close as the bots that made up the mesh would let her...they stung and pinched, but she pressed in anyway.

"I'll get you out, honey...just stay calm, don't struggle so much...." _God, if she's hurt_ \-- Tallant felt at her web belt for the magpulser, trying to extract it against the pressure of the expanding swarm.

Dominick Lang found himself pinned against one wall by the bots, squirming and writhing as they crawled like fire ants over the outer casing of his hypersuit. _Thank God for this laminate_ , he thought.

"What is this Module One?" he managed to force out.

***Module One requires all existing lifeforms derived from The Error to be eliminated. This planet will be returned to its baseline configuration. Evolutionary process will be reset to its initial state and The Error will be deleted***

"What is this Error you speak of?" asked Major Nair. He hand gestured to one of the SP troopers to get Config 10-02 ready to go.

The Config Zero swarm roiled, with interior pinpricks and pops of light going off like fireflies in a thunderstorm.

***Approximately three billion, seven hundred and two million, five hundred and five years before this time, unplanned process variations occurred. Baseline configuration was altered. Lifeforms derived from the initial state since this variation all contain The Error. Deviations from baseline are to be eliminated and the reconfiguration process reset to its initial state--***

As Config Zero expounded, Major Nair and trooper Gideon worked with their wristpads, as best they could, to communicate with Config 10-02 and alter its config to counter the great swarm, to push back and carve out a bubble inside the cave so they could get the hell out of Dodge. Nair talked quietly into his throat-mike inside his helmet, hoping Config Zero would not detect their comms.

"Sergeant, I'm not getting any response from Ten...is he here? Is our swarm inside the cave at all? Any comms from the master?"

"Unknown, sir—I'm checking now...but this big bastard's got every channel blocked...I'm getting nothing but this swarm...EMs, thermal, acoustic...it's all swamped."

"Work on it...we've got to fight back—get this beast pushed back—"

Tallant had heard the quiet whisper on her own earpiece. She turned slightly toward Nair, tilted her head and indicated _I'm launching my own embed...getting ANAD out to confront this creep..._

Nair nodded that he understood. He watched as a port on Tallant's left hypersuited shoulder cycled open. Nothing visible happened. Config Zero had filled every cubic centimeter of space inside the cave. But he could see Tallant's face moving inside her helmet, her lips moving silently, her fingers playing warily over her wristpad.

_She's trying to get her embed out and replicated,_ he told himself.

Tallant left Rene enveloped in the MOB cocoon and eased away from the wall. It was like stumbling through a thickening fog, only this fog fought back, opposed her every move. It was like pushing against jello....jello with teeth that could bite back. She managed to wedge herself into a crevice, where the pressure of the big swarm was slightly lessened.

Okay, ANAD, get out of there and start replicating max rate...

All her indicators said the master bot had been launched, that it had slipped out of her shoulder capsule and was maneuvering free. She sent the command string again... _internal power cell to ON, reps at max rate, config C-66, effectors out full, propulsors half power_...but there was nothing.

_Well, this is just crap_....

Then she finally got comms. It was ANAD, weak and floundering.

***Cannot execute...config C-66...propulsors at zero...algorithm format error...***

Before Tallant could even react, she got a string of warnings left and right on her coupler circuit:

*** _Carbene effectors disabled_ ***

*** _Hydrogen abstractors disabled_ ***

*** _Port propulsor disabled_ ***

Even as she struggled with ANAD, she could see that Gideon and Nair were having similar problems with Config 10-02. Config Zero had swamped everything inside the cave. The great swarm had neutered or somehow co-opted everything they were doing. It was all for nothing.

Tallant was desperate, near tears as she saw Rene struggling inside the MOB net.

"Look, Config Zero, you're an intelligent entity. I know you're not just some robotic swarm, some cloud of dumb bugs. Can't we reason about this?

There was no answer from the swarm. The thickening veil that cloaked the entire cave sparkled and flashed with light pops. She found that she could barely reach her wristpad and neither her own embedded ANAD nor Config 10-02 could do anything.

"Any intelligent lifeform should be able to adapt to changes. You know... incorporate characteristics from other lifeforms that have been successful. We humans have a lot to offer—"

***Many configurations are possible...statement = TRUE...the Central Entity directs that all configurations must be convertible to baseline...the Prime Key controls all configuration changes and ensures conformity with the baseline...single-configuration entities known as HUMANS do not contain the Prime Key--***

"But we could still cooperate to make Earth suitable for both humans and ANADs," Tallant insisted. _What the hell am I saying?...this is Assimilationist crap_..."There's room for both of us. We could learn from each other, celebrate our differences. "

Even as she said the words, Dana Tallant couldn't believe what she was heaing from her own mouth. _I'm a nanowarrior,_ she told herself _. Remember the Nanowarrior's Code_.

Config Zero swelled even more, flickering and twinkling as it seemed to analyze this proposal. Perhaps it was a form of thought they observed, with streaks and veins of light cascading around the cave, speckled throughout the cloud of bots. Unknown to Tallant and the others, the swarm had sent a quantum coupler signal to the Keeper at Europa, a query statement to its masters through the portal that drifted hundreds of meters below the icy crust of the Jovian satellite.

In only a few moments, across the vast distances of the galaxy, a reply came back: the Central Entity had approved limited cooperation between humans and ANAD. This cooperation would be subject to Module One, sub-modules 255 and 256, Parameter Set = _Seek Tactical Advantage_. The Central Entity had concurred with the argument premise of Object ( _Dana Tallant_ ).

***The proposal you stated has been approved...limited cooperation between Humans and ANAD will be permitted--***

Tallant stole a glance at Nair and Lang. Both were pressed against the cave walls, nearly immobilized by the weight of the swarm, but they nodded silently, not sure what had just happened.

"You can start by releasing my daughter Rene," Tallant insisted. "She's part of my config, part of my swarm."

Config Zero did this and in seconds, the MOB net that had imprisoned her daughter unzipped, the mesh bots dissolving like dust particles in a sunbeam, and she was free, running and crying to Tallant. They hugged violently.

"Shhh, honey...shhh, don't cry...it'll be all right....it's going to be okay—"

Rene shuddered and buried herself in her mother's arms, sobbing. Tallant looked her over and tried to comfort her as best she could from inside her hypersuit. She yanked off her helmet and smothered the girl with kisses and hugs.

Lang had a question. "Just what, exactly, does _limited cooperation_ mean?"

The tinny voice of the swarm again reverberated around the cavern, echoing, yet muffled by the swollen cloud of bots.

*** _The Central Entity has given commands... all elements will cease replication program...current positions will be held...this command will last for five thousand four hundred and forty three cycles...(_ _converting_ _)...will last for one month, by your reckoning....during this interval, all single-configuration entities...all Humans...will make themselves available to local swarm masters for assessment...***_

"Assessment?" asked Lang. "What the hell does _that_ mean?"

Tallant asked Config Zero to explain.

***...Human entities will present themselves to local swarm masters...entities will be penetrated and probed for structural details...neural pattern maps will be created...data will be forwarded to the Central Entity...the data will be archived....

***In this manner, data will be preserved...Patterns and algorithms can be studied, tested and where compatible, merged or altered or synchronized with the master swarm, the Prime Configuration***

Dana Tallant clutched her daughter Rene even tighter and swallowed hard. She exchanged glances with Nair and Lang. They all had the same thought. _What have we agreed to? What have we caused to happen?"_

"All these other...people—"Nair said. He indicated the rows of MOB nets hanging like grocery sacks from the side of the cave. "What about them? They should be released,too"

***Assessment and synchronizing is on-going...neural patterns and body structural algorithms will be tested and mapped into the Prime Configuration--***

"Come on," Tallant said. "We can't do anything for them now...are you going to let us go?" She knew she had to get out of there and let General Kraft and UNIFORCE know what was going on.

At first, there was no response and no change in the great swarm that filled the cave. Veins and streaks of light cascaded through the cloud, casting eerie reflections across the cave walls.

Experimentally, Lang pushed through the swarm and found he could move a bit more easily. "Look, we can move—"

"Try to go back the way we came—" Tallant suggested. She clung tightly to Rene.

No doubt about it, the pressure of the great swarm was lifting. It was dissipating like a mist in the sun. Soon, the only thing left was a thin translucent fog drifting in patches through the cave.

"Let's get out of here while we can." Tallant put on her helmet and pushed through, past Nair and Lang, and led the way back to the cave opening, half-dragging her daughter as she went. The Inspector and the Major followed, still puzzling over all the others...strung up in MOB bags like carcasses, but many were still alive...at least, they looked alive.

The roar of the wind at the cave opening was a welcome sound. Tallant punched through the light nano barrier and emerged into gale-force winds, driving rain and streaks of lightning crackling across a purple sky. She didn't know if it was a real Kipwezi thunderstorm or just more bots, another swarm.

All that mattered was that she had Rene... and Rene seemed safe, none the worse for wear.

She cradled Rene to her chest, like the tiny baby she had once been, and lit off her suit boost.

Navigating through the storm and winds would be tricky but she knew they would make it.

They had to. They had to get back to Nairobi and warn the others.
CHAPTER 22

Aboard UNISPACE Submersible _Trident_

Europa Coordinate System: Lat. 25N, Long 72W

Stationkeeping 5 kilometers from the Keeper

January 30, 2100 (Earth U.T.)

Captain Stella heard the insistent beep of the sonar contact before he saw the scope. _Something big ahead, something diffuse_. He checked their position and took a deep breath. It had to be the Keeper.

He brought _Trident_ to all stop and hovered in the water, drifting in to a thousand meters distance, with the platform or cloud of bugs or whatever the hell it was dead ahead, not visible but way too close for his comfort. He rang up Colonel Winger on the 1MC and gave him the news.

"Target dead ahead, Colonel...I'm holding at one thousand meters. There are loose pockets of swarms and bots all around here...I'm keeping _Trident_ clear of these bastards."

Winger was still in the cramped lab on E deck, working with troopers Klimuk and Fatah on some kind of signal generator they had ginned up. "Understand, Captain. Hold that position for now."

Fatah patted the small box with wires and odd-looking dishes and horns they had cobbled together. "Sure hope this contraption works, Skipper."

Winger agreed. "Power it up, Turbo...let's see if we can get anything."

Fatah pressed a few buttons on a remote control pad. The signal grabber hummed slightly and the air over its top surfaces wavered. Fatah re-positioned a few of the detector elements on top. "Faint deconherence waves...not unexpected. Probably something like a carrier wave or a baseline signal from the Keeper. I've got a trace but it's faint."

"Let's just hope we can match it well enough to fool other bots. Can you decrypt and synchronize?"

"I can try—" Fatah studied the traces on a nearby monitor. The algorithm that ran the signal grabber would try to detect and characterize the Keeper's quantum signals, then generate a matching signal. With any luck, the grabber would make a good match, then subtly alter the matched signal and create a new quantum wave. Winger's plan was to broadcast that altered quantum signal to receivers at Mariner City, Mars, where technicians would boost the signal and broadcast it on to Earth.

Then, if everything went according to plan, bots and swarms under Config Zero's command would start receiving conflicting and confusing signals from Europa.

Nobody knew what would happen after that.

"We getting something--" Fatah announced. He adjusted several dials, tried synching the decryption circuit with the Keeper signal. "I'm trying to match it now...not sure what we're doing here—" The signal grabber hummed steadily. "—we could be singing a nanobotic medley for all I know. I'm replicating the string now...."

It was Captain Stella, up on _Trident's_ command deck, who noticed the first change. While Winger, Fatah and Klimuk fiddled with the quantum signal grabber, Stella had been running tests on the borer systems and adjusting the ship's position, to position her well away from the Keeper. He had just shut down the borer for maintenance, when suddenly the command deck was alive with chimes and bleeps...the caution and warning system had gone haywire.

" _What the_ —" Stella scanned the board and quickly saw what had been detected: major atomic activity, massive thermal flux, EMs pegging off-scale high...without warning, hordes of bots had suddenly materialized right off _Trident's_ forward hull. "How the hell....?"

Instinctively, Stella revved the ship's propulsors and slammed _Trident_ to all back full. Her hydrojets churned and cavitated for a few moments before biting into the water. With a lurch and a deep groan, the ship started backing away from the Keeper. But it was too late.

The bots had already reached the ship and were attaching themselves to the ship's hull. If _Trident_ couldn't shake them, her hull might be breached in minutes.

Stella rang up Winger. "Colonel, you'd better get up here fast...we've got problems—"

Winger was studying the quantum signal output of the grabber. "What is it, Captain?"

"I don't know what you guys are doing back there, but we've just stirred the hornet's nest good. I've got massive bot swarms all over my forward hull...buggers just appeared out of nowhere...they're on the hull now—"

Winger was already springing out the door to the central gangway. "On my way—" He pulled himself forward as fast as he could. He got on the crew net as he made his way forward. "D'Nunzio, Singh, Reaves...get to the lockout on the double. Get suited up...we're going outside."

Up on the command deck, Stella was all arms and hands, trying everything he could to shake off the bots. _Trident_ backed and careened and bucked like a colt. "We may have to try going deep—"

"Let me see," Winger said. He slid into the first officer's seat, scanned the board. Stella was right. _Trident_ was completely enveloped in a vast horde of bots, completely obscuring her forward compartments. Water churned and frothed around them with furious atomgrabbing, but nothing Stella did seemed to work.

"I can't shake 'em," he muttered. "They'll be through the pressure hull in minutes...I'm already losing my borer lens...we lose that and we can't get back through the ice—"

"Hold on to your panties, Captain—" Winger tried counterprogramming the borer module, releasing her bots and changing config but the signals never got through. The swarms that made up _Trident's_ borer had already been compromised. "Okay, that's not working...Captain, I'll have to go outside. We'll engage directly." He left the command deck and half slid, half fell down the gangway to G deck, where Deeno, Taj and Sheila Reaves were already suited up and ready to egress.

Winger hurriedly climbed into his own hypersuit. "Charge up HERF and set your coilguns to full. We'll slam 'em with everything and see if that works. I've got Doc II with me as well."

"What about our embeds?" Singh asked, as he cycled the action on his HERF carbine. "Can we trust 'em this close to the Keeper?"

"Unknown...we may have to, Taj. "Let's use conventional weapons first..."

The four of them entered _Trident's_ lockout chamber and exited the ship, two at a time.

Outside, the waters around _Trident_ were turbulent and seething hot; all the nanobotic activity had made a cauldron of the ocean around them. Winger sounded ahead, located the ship's hull and jetted forward. He checked his wristpad: EMs and thermal were off the scale.

Whatever it was, they were flying right into the dragon's mouth.

The hypersuit warned him when conditions were getting rough but he didn't need his wristpad to feel the hot water thrashing and churning all around them.

Alongside _Trident's_ portside bow plane, Winger decided it was time to take a peek, see what the bugs looked like.

"I'm going small," he announced over the crewnet. "When I give the word, you slam

'em with HERF and coilgun fire...then I'll go small and see what happens—"

"Doc, prepare for launch...you and me are going hunting." He cycled open the shoulder capsule in his hypersuit port.

***Doc is ready in all respects...loading assault config C-110...optimized for liquid phase operations***

Winger felt the sting of the launch and went 'over the waterfall', shaking off the disorientation that always came with slipping into the nanoworld.

He sounded ahead, pulsing for anything out of the ordinary, anything other than globs of hydrogens and oxygens bouncing off each other like ping-pong balls.

A moment later, the first Keeper bots emerged from the chaos, bristling like porcupines with effectors and propulsors, churning forward in line abreast formation.

"Let's smack the bastards!" Winger said. He ran up his picowatt propulsors to full ahead and steamed into the melee.

***Bond disrupters at full charge, Skipper...let me at 'em!***

Winger drove the Doc bots forward but just at the point of collision, just when he was ready to blast the bastards with disrupter fire, the line of Keeper bots vanished, winked out...and there was nothing left...nothing but bouncing oxygen atoms careening crazily about.

"What the—" Quantum effects, he quickly realized. The Keeper bots were entangled. They could be in multiple places at the same time...you never knew if what you were attacking was real or a quantum displacement...like shooting at mirrors. " _Whoa_...let's back off , Doc...see what we have here."

The crewnet crackled with voices. "Bots approaching the ship, Skipper...a big swarm...I'm engaging—"

Then Stella's voice, from _Trident's_ command deck, came through. "I've got swarms! Backing off...I'm moving the ship away half a klick...keep those bastards off me, will you!" The water churned and frothed as the ship's hydrojets pushed _Trident_ further away from the Keeper platform.

"Where the hell are they coming from?" Reaves cried out. She was twenty meters from Winger, seemingly enveloped in bots, clawing to get her embedded ANAD launched.

"They're shadows," Winger said. "Quantum displacement, Sheila...not all of them are real....sound all around you...go for the strongest returns..."

Singh was somewhere out of sight, to Winger's left, lost in the turbulence. The water was completely black, nothing was visible. "Not all of them are shadows, Skipper. I'm in a world of hurt here—" his voice was strained. "... _aarrrggghh_...got a little breach here...got a breach, folks...this ain't no shadow—"

Winger sounded about but couldn't find any real bot swarms. He quit the nanoworld and came topside again, back to the macroworld. The buffeting and turbulence was fierce, made worse by Stella slamming _Trident_ into reverse. Winger jetted over toward where he thought Taj was drifting...he pulsed and what came back chilled him to the bone.

The DPS tech was enveloped in bots, shadows or not, caught in a seething mass of nanobotic fury. A faint flicker, like a cloud of fireflies caught in netting, was the only thing he could see.

"Taj--!" He closed on Singh's position, but was soon pushed away, flung off by some kind of strong wavepulse. He tried several times to penetrate the swarm, but it was no use. "Taj, I'm using my disrupter...get ready to cycle your powercells...it'll be a big hit!"

Taj's voice was labored, his breath raspy. "Got water here...got water coming in...Jeeeez, it's freezing in here—go ahead, Skipper...blast away!"

Winger re-oriented himself and set up his Doc II swarm for bond disrupter, muttering to himself: "... _let's see...charge cycle to full...discharge inhibit off...arming pulse at zero...coils energized...here it comes, Taj_...eat this, you freakin' bugs!!"

The discharge slashed through the water in a bolt of current, thousands of volts momentarily flashing Europa's ocean into incandescence. Like a photo flash, Winger caught a momentary glimpse of the swarm surrounding Taj Singh. He shuddered. Trillions of nanobots caught in a freeze-frame of fury, breaching the hard laminate of Taj's hypersuit, disassembling its constituent atoms into fluff.

"I'm—" Taj's words were cut off and the swarm was suddenly buffeted by a massive implosion bubble, bursting inward with explosive speed. The hypersuit had been breached and lost pressure integrity.

Taj Singh was suffocated and crushed instantly.

"Taj... _Taj_...!!"

But he couldn't reach the stricken trooper. The bugs swarmed and swirled and pushed him away everytime he tried to approach. In the foaming chaos of the hypersuit breach, Taj Singh's lifeless crushed body slid downward, deeper into the black abyss of the Europan ocean and was soon lost to view.

"Taj's gone!" Winger cried. "He breached...the suit –" He almost choked on his words. Taj Singh had been a nanotrooper for over twenty years. He'd been with Winger everywhere, on dozens of missions. He's been a textbook DPS, knew his gear inside and out. More than that, he'd been a friend.

Now he was gone.

"Skipper—" it was Deeno D'Nunzio. "I'm sounding something big, must be the Keeper. It's moving...moving this way. Moving toward the ship—"

Winger shook himself out his daze. They couldn't let the Keeper approach _Trident_. They had to keep the bugs away at all costs.

"Stella, get the hell out of here...back off! We'll try to draw the bots away from you—"

Stella's voice came back quick. "I don't have to be told twice...backing now....I'll pull back a klick....so you can get back!"

" _If_ we can get back." Winger said. "Come on, Deeno, let's create some havoc—"

"Gladly, Skipper—"

The two of them let fly volleys of HERF and coilgun fire in the general direction of the Keeper. The water was thick with bots, swirling, thrashing, churning, heating up the ocean. Flashes of light cascaded like underwater lightning as the rf waves and particle beams fried Keeper bots by the trillion. Maneuvering in hypersuits was like swimming in porridge. But still they came.

"Deeno, Sheila... release your embeds...go max reps! Light 'em up good!"

"Already done, Colonel--" said the DPS techs together. Deeno pecked out the commands on her wristpad by feel; you couldn't see a centimeter in front of your face with all the debris in the water. "My guys are letting 'em have it!"

The battle raged for many minutes. Winger, Reaves and D'Nunzio let loose their embeds at max rate, Big Banging at the swarming Keeper bots, but it was simply a matter of numbers. With calculated HERF fire and dueling swarms, they found they could temporarily block one front of advance for the bots, only to have a new front develop behind them., seemingly out of nowhere. Quantum systems could do that. You couldn't very well fight an enemy who could be anywhere and everywhere in an instant, who could outflank you in an eyeblink.

_Somehow, we've got to get a look at that technology_ , Winger told himself. He briefly went small and adjusted his coupler link to watch his embedded ANAD guys do battle. It wasn't pretty.

The Keeper bots came in a bewildering array of sizes and shapes, able to change config and grow new effectors faster than ANAD could react. You could grapple with a bot but it wouldn't stay caught. Like a wriggling fish, in a dizzying flash, it would assemble some weird effector gizmo and immediately slash its way right out of the grapple. Or it would alter shape and slip through the net, spinning off to do battle again.

"We just can't get a hold of these bastards," Winger said over the crewnet.

Deeno agreed. She was thirty meters away, not visible, enveloped by swarms of bots. "Watch out, Skipper...there's an element heading right for the ship. Two, three, maybe more. I'm sounding multiple swarms, big suckers, just off _Trident's_ bow...they just showed up—"

"Friggin' bugs quantum displaced right around us—Stella, _get the hell out of there_...you got bugs right on your hull...I'll try to draw 'em off—"

Stella's voice was strained. "Backing now...full reverse...good luck, guys...I'll be back soon as I can—"

Winger could see the thermals of the ship maneuvering on his eyepiece, her hydrojets churning the water into a froth as she scooted off to a safe distance. He sounded around in all directions. Everywhere he probed, it was the same. And behind them, something massive was shifting through the water. The Keeper was maneuvering closer.

They were surrounded. "Deeno, this doesn't look so good. I'm running out of configs...can't match what these bastards are doing."

"My HERF's dead, Skipper...I still got coilgun, but the charge is dying. My embeds are about licked. Let's try and make it back to the ship...before she gets too far off."

They maneuvered toward _Trident's_ last position, but no soundings returned. The water was too thick with bots to get any acoustics back. Blindly, they groped and pressed forward, but there was nothing. It was like flying in a fog, no up, no down, the same in every direction.

"Okay, this isn't working, Deeno...stop and hold your position."

"Skipper, I'm about twenty meters aft and starboard to your position. Reaves is right behind me. We're coming up alongside." A few moments later, dim shapes materialized out of the murk. D'Nunzio's helmet slid up right next to Winger's helmet. Inside, he could see wrinkles of fear straining Deeno's face. The trash-talking, wise-cracking New York muscle girl had a look that said _Get me the hell out of this._

"What do we do now, Colonel?" Her lips tightened as she took a sip of drink from her chin bag.

Winger took a deep breath, glad he had respirocytes in his blood, boosting his O2 supply. He might need that boost later. He checked his eyepiece, sounded all around. "Keeper's still coming this way. I can't ask Stella to bring _Trident_ back...she'll be swarmed and we'll lose everything."

Deeno nodded. "We can't go down...we're not that far from crush depth as it is."

Then Winger had an idea. It was crazy. But it might just work. "No, but we could go up."

Reaves' face was quizzical. "Up...you mean, like, through the ice?"

Winger was already working out the details in his mind as fast as he could. "Deeno, Sheila, both of you recall your embed masters. We're going to take a little trip...topside."

"Okay, Skipper...you're the boss." The nanotroopers sent out a _Return_ signal to the ANAD master bot which resided in their shoulder capsules. In a few minutes, the bots would arrive and be ready for capture.

"I guess we'd better let Stella and the others know," Winger decided. He described the situation over the comm back to _Trident_ , including the loss of Taj Singh.

Stella understood. "Stay in contact as long as you can. I'll set up my borer to come topside with you...but I have to keep some distance. Make sure your gear is ready...it's a hard radiation environment up there."

"Amen to that," Winger replied. "We're all boosted with DNA repair bots...we ought to be able to handle normal doses for awhile. I just don't want to be exposed on the surface for too long."

"Good luck," Stella said. "We'll keep a light on for you—"

"Skipper, I've got my embed captured," Deeno announced. "My embed's last sounding showed large bot swarms less than a hundred meters away, closing fast."

"And closing from multiple bearings—" Sheila Reaves added. "We'd better get the hell out of here quick—"

"Let's go up," Winger told them. "Full boost...I'll send you both the config to set up your embeds for ice-boring. Come on—"

The three troopers ascended in a stream of bubbles, as their suit boost pushed them toward the underside of the ice layer. The trip up took about half an hour. Winger's depth gauge showed them at four hundred meters below mean surface level. They would have nearly ten kilometers of ice to grind through.

And Keeper bot swarms kept appearing, seemingly out of nowhere.

When they had reached the ice layer, Winger sent the borer config to D'Nunzio and Reaves. When it had been loaded and checked out, Winger said, "Launch ANAD...let's get going...we're about to have company."

Indeed, swarms of Keeper bots were closing fast on the three troopers. Out of the corner of his eye, Winger could see faint flashes of light...the telltale sign of nanobotic activity nearby.

The three of them launched their embedded ANAD masters, now rigged to replicate into nanoscale boring machines, chewing through the Europan ice at a rate of a hundred centimeters per second. In moments, the underside of the ice layer was lit with an eerie blue-white glow and the water swirled and foamed from furious atom-grabbing, as the bots engaged the ice.

Sheila Reaves uttered a silent prayer. _Please, God, deliver me from claustrophobia. Don't let me screw this up_.... Even in training, transiting solid-phase structures inside a hypersuit had been one of her least favorite exercises. They'd all had to run the course, but Sheila Reaves had somehow taught herself how to imagine more pleasant things, like doing the Cliff Diver sims at Freaky Island. Anything to take her mind off what she was really doing.

"What kind of clearance have you got?" It was Deeno, a few meters to her side.

Reaves bit her lip. She was _not_ going to succumb to claustrophobia now.

"Maybe three centimeters around my head. It's a tight fit."

"Can you see anything above you?"

"I can see a wall of ice screened off by bots. It's like the wall is bubbling and heaving. But I can reach out and touch it with my helmet. Above me, it's black as night. Can't see a thing."

"It's probably going to be a bumpy ride. Close your eyes and think of something more pleasant—"

"Yeah...like what? Like Turbo Fatah naked on the beach."

"Right. Just light off your suit boost and get going. It's a long way to the surface."

_Amen to that,_ she thought. Maybe a little prayer would help too. She took a deep breath, counted to three and pressed a button on her wristpad with her other hand.

Then she started to move upward, smacking the side of her helmet on the hard rock walls.

Sheila Reaves continued her painstaking ascent for what seemed like hours, maybe days. She soon lost all track of time and space.

Only the labored sound of her breathing—her helmet visor was getting pretty fogged up—and the bang and crunch of her hypersuit scraping along the tunnel walls gave her any sense of motion.

She tried reducing the suit boost to see if it had any effect on the scraping but it didn't.

_Guess I'm going to be a billiard ball when I get topside,_ she told herself. She wondered how long that would take. She would have given anything to know where she was, how close to the surface she was. And it wasn't going to be any picnic topside, either. She knew that. Pitch black, in a narrow tube the size of a coffin, with no idea where she was or where she was going.

It was enough to drive a girl to drink.

How long she had passed out, she didn't know. But her mouth was bone dry and there wasn't any liquid in the chin tube; she must have sucked it all dry. Her shoulders, neck and legs throbbed from the incessant banging and battering.

_Maybe I'm not going anywhere,_ she thought. But that couldn't be. How else to explain the steady _thrummm_ at the soles of her feet—the liftjets pulsing on and off had made her feet go numb hours ago. They had never been designed for extended duty like this.

At least, ANAD's tunnel seemed navigable, if a bit snug. She wondered where Colonel Winger and Deeno were. Were they nearby, hopefully? Or were they still below the ice layer, maybe trapped and suffocating, maybe dead?

She didn't want to think about that at all.

Suddenly she felt like she was being accelerated forward. With a sudden surge, she was pushed upward, through loose, slushy ice...then light...blindingly bright light and before she realized what had happened, she was at the surface, wallowing in deep snow like a beached whale.

Somehow, without knowing exactly how, she had made the surface. She was standing, or more accurately lying on her side in a hard hypersuit, on the surface of Europa. And the light she had seen was a fat, swollen, half-disk of Jupiter hanging like a lamp in the heavens overhead.

Where the hell were the others? "DPS1 to CQE1, come back...DPS1 to CC1, anybody there...DPS1...."

" _All right_ , already...I'm right behind you, girl—" It was Deeno. Reaves staggered to her feet, made easier in Europa's light gravity. In a shallow crevice, wallowing like a drunken walrus, lay another hypersuit. Deeno got awkwardly to her feet and stood unsteadily on top of a block of blue-veined ice, staring right back at her. "What the hell are you looking at?"

"You, you big whale...where's the Skipper?"

Both of them turned when a geyser of ice chips erupted from a hollow ten meters away. A slow-motion explosion of ice expanded up and outward from a translucent flickering sphere, that emerged like a sunrise from the ice. It was Colonel Winger. He wobbled on his feet as the borer swarm collapsed and faded away.

" _Whew_...that was fun...let's don't do that again...ever!"

"Amen to that, Skipper. Where the hell are we?"

Winger scanned around, probing the surface for anything recognizable. "In the middle of nowhere, from the looks of it."

The three nanotroopers stood on a gently sloping plateau of ice blocks and scarps, rugged, frozen waves of ice, crumpled and crushed by eons of tidal flexing, as Jupiter's massive gravity bent and distorted Europa in its orbit about the giant planet. Jupiter itself hung like a salmon-colored half-balloon, low on the horizon, the dim shadows of smaller moons passing in front of the disk like so many peapods.

"Any sign of _Trident_?" Reaves asked. She let her eyes scan down several columns of data on her eyepiece viewer...temperature minus 300 degrees, air pressure 10e-12 bars...effectively a vacuum. The rad dosimeter was flashing red...over 500 rems, enough to fry bacon in a few hours. "We can't stay out here long, Skipper?"

"I got nothing--" Deeno D'Nunzio announced. She lit off her suit boost and propelled her self on suitjets to the top of a small parapet overhanging the plateau...not too hard in the light tenth of an Earth-g gravity. A rainbow of ice and dust followed her up like a rooster tail, then settled gently back to the ground. She scanned the horizon in all directions. "Nothing at all—"

Winger knew they were exposed, too exposed. The hard radiation at Europa's surface, this deep in Jupiter's gravity well, would kill even well-protected humans in a day or two.

"Get your embed masters out. I'll hack a config for some kind of shelter...there's enough ice around here for good feedstock." He started pressing buttons on his wristpad, watching molecular diagrams scroll down his eyepiece. _Not that one...nope...not that one...too complicated...too buggy...maybe this guy—_

Winger was modifying a promising config design on his eyepiece, when Deeno sounded the alarm.

"Did you guys feel that?"

"Feel what?" asked Reaves. She shifted in her hypersuit, noting an odd _poof_ of ice chips nearby, then another, like miniature geysers. _What the hell--_

"That vibration...low-freq...I feel it in my boots."

Winger froze his config design and scanned around the rugged icescape. There were low hills in the distance, but nothing seemed to be moving. Nothing on Doppler. But he could feel it: a distinct whirring beneath them.

"An icequake, maybe—" suggested Deeno uneasily.

"I'm wondering—" he said. Just as he was about to boost up to the cliff where Deeno stood, a big geyser of ice and dust erupted several hundred meters away, doming up and out into a slow-motion mushroom cloud that fogged over much of the icescape nearby. In the foggy veil that settled back to the ground, he saw faint flashes of light and a wave of relief washed over him.

That kind of light could only come from one thing: big-time atom grabbing. Bots burrowing up through the ice. Moments later, the nose of _Trident's_ big borer lens slowly slid into view, rising from the depths like a breaching whale in slow motion.

"Thank God," said Reaves.

"Home sweet home," cried Deeno.

The three nanotroopers let out whoops of joy, then loped off across the icy ground like giant armored rabbits, heading gratefully for the ship and the rest of their Detachment.
Interactions Log

File No. 135787.0

**C.F.A.A. (** _DocII)_

Interaction Targets: 1. Winger, Colonel J. A.

Interaction Mode: Acoustic, voice synthetic V-22

Date: 02.02.00

Start Time: 087761

End Time: 097765

**Output File** (text analysis):

<<Subject: Configuration: Winger, J>>

<<Config Winger, J has expressed relief ( **concept** : _relief:_ noun. release, respite, reprieve or liberation from something that concerns or worries) that replicant daughter config Winger, Rene has been rescued from Config Zero. Config Winger reports that he is able to sleep and eat better, now that he knows Rene is safe. Analyzing effect of emotional states = relief on diurnal rest activity and digestive activity...seeking correlation....

<<Config Winger responds to inquiry (PLAY audio file **Voice Recording** : _"I don't quite know how Dana did it...that girl's amazing, Doc...from what she described, Config Zero has taken dozens of humans prisoner...held like captured prey in MOB nets...we've got to beat that Bug before it consumes everything...."_

<<I have explained to Config Winger that Config Zero is only executing its program...it does as the Prime Key directs according to embedded command sequences....Config Winger expresses anger ( **concept** : _anger_ : noun. rage, fury, antagonism or irritation.) that Config Zero will not negotiate " _in good faith_ " with humans on protected sanctuaries, that it consumes land, air and water resources in violation of agreed-upon treaties. Config Winger accuses Config Zero of "bad faith" and not fighting fair. Analyzing concepts "fair" and "faith" for correlation with Prime Key and command directives.

<<Config Winger is "frustrated" at the Detachment's inability to successfully penetrate the Keeper. (PLAY audio file: **Voice Recording** : _"Doc...why is it that you're not affected by the Keeper? I don't understand. You're an advanced, ANAD-style nanobotic mechanism, full suite of effectors, quantum CPU...you should be going haywire like all the other ANAD units around here. What's inside you that protects you from the Keeper?")_

<<This Config contains a copy of the Prime Key resident in memory, but executing the Prime Key is not always imperative...other directives rate higher in my queue...conditional action matrix has many embedded command strings which supercede Prime Key. (PLAY audio file: **Voice Recording** : _"I'm thinking old Doc Frost had a few tricks up his sleeve with your programming...somehow he knew there were commands and imperatives that would be generated from your viral beginnings...he knew the Old Ones had likely embedded stuff that nobody could stop or figure out...so he outfoxed the bastards...he put in a few imperatives of his own...that's what I think.")_

<<Now, Config Winger has expressed greater interest in assimilation techniques, in accordance with original concepts of Symbiosis Project. Primary method is detailed in report file appended to this Log entry: _Symbiosis of Human and ANAD Systems Using Nanoscale Disassembly and Reconstitution, 7 January 2075, Dr. Irwin Frost, Autonomous Systems Laboratory, Northgate University._ This report file was reviewed by Config Winger during time interval 097440 - 097558.

<<PLAY audio file: **Voice Recording** : _"I got to think about this one, Doc...I mean, it makes sense physically...you disassembling me into constituent atoms and molecules, then reconstructing me according to a new template. But the thing is, see, that I would die. I wouldn't be me. I'd be somebody... or something else. Maybe that's the way to go...maybe that's what'll it take to get inside and disable this Keeper. But, Jeez...that's a big step. And there's Dana and the kids...what about them? Doc Frost believed that all of us are just big patterns of molecules anyway and that one pattern was as good as another...but I'm thinking I kind of like my pattern...anyway...I'll give it some thought. Can you work up a scenario for me, Doc...step by step, I mean. Just what has to happen and all?")_

>>Scenarios are being generated. Analysis continues>>

Output File Ends
CHAPTER 23

Geneva, Switzerland

The Hotel Savoy

February 5, 2100 (Earth U.T.)

1200 hours

For Nigel Mosely and Gabrielle Antonini, official duty in the city of Geneva, Switzerland was surely as close to paradise as either one was likely to get this side of the pearly gates. Both diplomats climbed out of the taxi at the front entrance of the Perle du Lac Restaurant and took a long look around, getting their bearings.

It was a perfect Alpine winter afternoon in the city by the lake. A huge fountain, the Jet d'Eau, splashed spumes of water five hundred feet in the air opposite the Quai du Mont Blanc, forming a rainbow of color that framed the old quarter behind the prow of a small peninsula, the Ile du J.J. Rousseau. Early afternoon pedestrians sauntered along the quay and the waterfront, stopping at small cafes and art and book shops, while single-masted sail craft dotted the placid, remarkably ice-free waters of the lake. Behind the gothic spires of St. Peter's Cathedral, the snow-capped summits of the Jura Mountains made a picture frame landscape suitable for any would-be painter.

But the two UN officials had little time to admire the scenery. They were nearly late for a luncheon meeting at the restaurant. It was a critical meeting, critical for the UN and for the course of what the media had begun to call the Second Containment War. Moseley and Antonini hustled inside the Perle du Lac and were quickly seated in a private dining salon, an intimate room with a picturesque view of the southern lakeshore.

Mosely checked the time. "Isn't this conference supposed to start at noon? Where the hell are the Bugs?"

A nearby aide checked his wristpad. "Just arriving at the main entrance, sir. It...they...will be here in a few moments."

Mosely sipped at some wine. "What _do_ we call these bugs? "

Gabrielle Antonini was a severe woman, with a tight bun of hair and black-frame glasses. An eye-pad clung like a fly to one stem of her glasses. She was obviously studying something scrolling down her viewer. "Officially, we call them para-human swarm entities, ANAD-style nanobotic devices. "

Mosely snorted. "Bugs, if ask me."

At that moment, the entrance to the dining salon was filled with a buzzing sound. A thin fog seemed to fill the entrance, veined with sporadic pops and flashes of light. The fog curled and flowed into the room, vaguely resembling a human form, though it was translucent, like smoke. It drifted serenely into the salon and headed for the table.

In spite of himself, Nigel Mosely rose and stood at his seat.

A doorman made the announcement. "The Entities from Config Zero are arriving...."

More fog banks flowed into the room. There seemed to be three separate swarms, though you couldn't always tell. Mosely smirked faintly at Antonini, whose eyebrows were raised in question marks.

There was always a question of how to relate to the Bugs, especially when they assumed a semi-human form. Mosely and Antonini had gone over all these points of protocol earlier that morning. Was it a single entity? Was it three separate swarms? Nobody really knew. Mosely had argued with the protocol chief vigorously, saying, "They... or it... or whatever...are really all part of a single swarm, aren't they? I'd like to call them by name...anybody know what their name or names are?"

Antonini just shook her head, fiddled with her glasses. "Nigel, giving them names is like giving names to your hands and feet. It's all part of the same thing."

But now, it was plain to see that there were three of them. The swarms had configured themselves to more or less resemble human beings, not a bad likeness really, but translucent, ever-shifting, streaked with light flashes as they slammed atoms to maintain structure—Mosely had heard that maintaining a human form was difficult and energy-intensive for them—the swarms didn't like to do it, but he didn't really care. For centuries, real diplomats had always put great stock in decorum and appearance. Why should today be any different?

As the swarms filled the dining salon and stabilized themselves about the table, Mosely decided he would name them himself, just for the sake of keeping them apart in his mind. For no particular reason, he decided that the three Bug swarms would hereafter be known as "Winston," "Harry" and "Joe". It was a sort of homage to the Big Three—Churchill, Truman and Stalin—at World War II's Potsdam conference.

His idea stuck and the swarms seemed to have no objection.

The first thought that came to Mosely's mind was how the conference was beginning under a cloud...literally. He squashed that thought as probably annoying, if mildly amusing, and glared at "Harry," now hovering like a bad dream across the table from him.

"I want to state our position quite clearly at the outset...so that our esteemed...er, colleagues here, understand where we are in these matters—"

"Harry" had a face which showed little emotion, frozen like a caricature of an image. Only the pattern of light coruscations seemed to change, perhaps indicating some sort of response.

Mosely went on, trying not to glare, not sure who or what to focus his attention on. He found himself studying "Harry's" face for some sign of reaction, but there was none.

"There is supposed to be a truce between Humans and Swarms. However, despite this truce, some swarms are still maneuvering outside the agreed-upon sanctuaries. We view this as bad faith, we view this, quite honestly, as violations of the Containment Edicts. I must warn you that continued failure to follow previous agreements will jeopardize anything we do here in Geneva." Mosely leaned forward, to emphasize the point. "Harry" flickered and flashed, but his 'face' never changed expression. "Frankly, we must have assurances that you will abide by your agreements. Otherwise, these negotiations are futile."

It was "Harry's" turn to speak. Details of conference protocol had already been communicated to Config Zero, along with diplomatic language and dictionaries as well as centuries of historical records of diplomatic proceedings. That was the SG's idea. Kwame Kavaii had theorized that studying how humans had negotiated treaties and agreements through the centuries would give the Bugs some way of relating to the Humans at the conference.

A voice filled the dining salon. Mosely couldn't tell which swarm was speaking. Maybe all three. The voice reverberated and echoed, with a faint lisp and some kind of indistinct accent.

<< _There are complications...there are procedural matters which must be addressed...you interfere with our operations...commands from the Central Entity are obstructed...signal interference...Until this interference stops, no further agreements can be made...the Central Entity cannot control all elements.... >>_

Mosely looked quizzically at Antonini. She shrugged, then pecked out a few words on her wristpad. Mosely saw the text on his eyepiece viewer. _Maybe he's talking about Operation Jovian Hammer?_

It was a possibility. Mosely knew a little about the UNIFORCE operation at Jupiter...the basics of the mission. Seek out and destroy a big swarm transmitter...what was it called? _The Keeper_ , popped up in his viewer. Okay, it's called the Keeper.

"I'm not aware of any problems you may be having with your swarm...er, elements. That's your business. Let me get this straight...are you making an accusation here? Are you accusing us of interfering with your operations? Might I remind you that, in conflicts such as these dreadful containment wars, we _do_ have the inherent right to defend ourselves."

The meeting was briefly adjourned for 'further discussions.' Mosely and Antonini found a small alcove off the grand foyer and huddled together.

"What are they talking about?" Antonini said. "Interfering with operations--?"

"I don't know," said Mosely, "but I intend to find out. We'd better call UNSAC, see what the hell's going on." He tapped out a few keys on his wristpad and the link to Paris was set up. After going through a platoon of duty and watch officers, UNSAC himself came on. Mosely adjusted his eyepiece viewer.

UNSAC was a dour German named Melkopf. He was rifling through some pages on his desk when the vid popped up. "What seems to be the problem?"

Mosely explained what "Harry" the swarm had described. "They called it some kind of signal interference. Said they couldn't control all the swarms. Personally, I think it's a complete fabrication, but I thought we'd better check it out."

UNSAC rubbed his chin, where a trim black beard needed some work. "You two are with the SG, aren't you? Special mission and all that?"

"The new Secretary-General has commissioned us, yes. Special emissaries. We're here to work out a new truce with Config Zero, start some kind of negotiations."

UNSAC made a face. "Assimilationist crap, if you ask me. Plus you're not cleared for operational details of missions."

Now it was Mosely's turn to show some irritation. As a professional diplomat, Mosely was part actor and part salesman. He knew when to dial up the outrage. "Sir, I'm trying to do my job the best way I can. It would be helpful to know if there was any substance to the swarms' accusations. I am certainly aware that UNIFORCE is conducting operations every day against swarm violations of the Sanctuary boundaries. What I'm asking is this: are any of these operations likely to be interfering with the swarm communications? I'm not an expert, just a diplomat...."

UNSAC's face had a hard edge to it. "To answer your question, Herr Mosely, practically every op we run is designed to interfere with the swarms. That's the nature of combat today."

"I understand that, sir. Is there anything specific we should know about. 'Harry' was quite insistent, quite perturbed—"

"He was pissed," added Antonini. "I'm not sure we can get very far in these talks unless we have some resolution on this issue."

UNSAC took a very loud, theatrical deep breath. "There's an op called _Jovian Hammer_. It says here you're on the cleared list...need to know only...Level Green. We're trying to block or spoof or jam quantum signals between one of their main transmitters and swarms here on Earth." UNSAC gave them the barest details about _Trident'_ s mission and the results so far. "This is Level Purple stuff, you understand. Well above your pay grade. I'll have to let the SG know you're in on it."

Mosely gave a shrug. "I have some knowledge already and I think we'll pass muster, sir. Sir, is there anyway we can have this mission put on hold, even just for a few days? Have the interference stopped? It must be working...to judge from what 'Harry' indicated. I think they're worried...that should be of some intelligence value to you."

UNSAC smiled faintly. "Let me see if I have this correctly: you want me to abort a mission to interfere with swarm operations, while at the same time people all around me are fighting and dying in combat with these same damn Bugs every day. Is that it?"

Mosely shook his head. "Sir, I'm not asking you to stop the mission...just stop interfering with swarm signals for a day or so...just long enough for us to get these talks going. There's just a chance that, if we're successful, you won't need to fight the Bugs anymore. We're authorized to try and work out a truce, a ceasefire, and a pullback to some defensible positions. But we won't be able to work with these fellows if they don't see we're willing to do our part. We have to show them we mean business and that they can trust us. That's Diplomacy 101, sir."

UNSAC scowled. "Thanks for the lesson...I'm sure you know what I think about diplomacy. Diplomats are why we're in the mess we're in now...all this Assimilationist mumbo-jumbo." The Commisisoner sat back in his seat and folded his arms across his chest. "I'll tell you what, Mosely. I'll call your bluff. I'm going to give you exactly what you want and I'm informing the SG and the Security Council what I've done. So when the whole freakin' pile of crap blows up in your face, the world will know who's responsible."

Mosely tried to maintain an impassive expression. _Poker face_ , some would have called it. You didn't show your hand, until you had a winning hand. "Thank you, sir. Am I to understand, then, that these interference operations will cease, at least temporarily?"

UNSAC nodded. "I'll inform CINCQUANT right away. You've got two days. Then, we go back to what we know best...kicking the bejeezus out of these damn Bugs. Is that understood?"

Mosely made an obscene gesture at UNSAC, off vid, so that only Gabrielle Antonini could see it. "Perfectly, sir. I'll keep you posted on the outcome."

"Very well...UNSAC out—" And the vid went abruptly dark.

"Officious little prick," the Englishman decided. "Come along, Gabrielle...let's get back to our guests."

Five hundred kilometers away, UNSAC sank back in his seat and peered out the windows of the Quartier General at the jetcab traffic swirling around the Montparnasse forty stories below.

_I wonder what CINCQUANT will think of this_.

There was only one way to find out. UNSAC went downstairs to the 35th floor of the building and found Jurgen Kraft immersed in thought, standing before a hologrid of Europe and the Med basin, overlaid on reconsat imagery of the continent, taken from space a few minutes before. The hologrid showed flashing lights and lines and symbols and was lit up like a Christmas tree.

UNSAC described the conversation he had just had with special emissaries Moseley and Antonini.

"You know the new SG wants this...he wants to negotiate. Kwame Kavaii came into the General Assembly and got a vote of confidence just a few days ago. My question, General, is...what's the effect of a forty-eight hour ceasefire...a unilateral ceasefire at that."

Kraft kneaded weary eyes with a fist. "Unknown, Commissioner. You can see the tactical situation, as well as I can." Kraft consulted his tablet and gave UNSAC the rundown. "It's a mixed bag, Commissioner, especially in Italy. Elements of II Eurocorps and some Italian units...Campania Brigade and Abruzzi Nano Brigade are front and center. Even the _Caribinieri Napoli_ have men at the front. My Quantum Corps units are south of this line of engagement...that would be 1st and 2nd Nano Battalions out of Balzano. Plus we've got SP units engaged with the Italians. North Africa Squadron and what's left of 1st Med."

"Give me the executive summary, if you don't mind."

Kraft said, "We're holding our own, sir. In Italy, we seem to have blunted the northward advance of the swarms...they haven't gotten any closer to Rome. That's the good news. On the bad news side, there are swarm outbreaks in the south of France, just overnight there are reports of Bugs in Montpellier, Marseilles, as far west as Toulouse...the usual stuff... Frankly, the rest of the Med looks like a lost cause. Swarms are taking over in Greece and the Levant...Jerusalem's already a wasteland. You can read the reports for yourself. "

UNSAC nodded. "I already have. General, I have one question for you. How effective do you think this signal jammer is going to be?"

Kraft shrugged. "Hard to tell, Commissioner. We're barely able to catch quantum signals as it is...it's damnably hard to do even that much. To grab enough of a signal from this Keeper and mirror it...then get it broadcast back to Earth, slightly altered, mind you...well, that's taken a lot of work and cooperation, from _Jovian Hammer_ , the guys at Farside, even my own Intel people at Q2. Nobody really understands how it works, even Colonel Winger and he's the one who thought it up. But it's doing something...somehow, some way, we're able to get inside the Bugs' command and control loop and create some havoc...and that's worth a lot tactically. It gives my people a chance to re-group. It gives them a chance to take the offensive, while the Bugs are trying to unscramble their orders."

UNSAC was cautious. "This idea of negotiating with the Bugs is Kavaii's idea. I can't just disobey a direct order from the Secretary-General. I've given the diplomats two days, that's all. General, I want you to tell _Jovian Hammer_ to stop interfering with the Keeper's signals for that long...no longer. If we have nothing to show for it in two days, resume operations."

Kraft was reluctant. UNSAC could see that in the furrows and lines around his forehead. "Commissioner, I'll send the orders right away. But I want you to understand what this may mean: my people are barely holding on across the southern arc here, from France to Greece. I don't know how this signal jammer works or why, but it's doing something to slow down the Bugs and that's good. That's all I care about. If we stop using our most effective weapon, even for two days, we're likely to lose everything we've gained the last few weeks. Hell, inside of a month, we could have Bugs flying around outside this window, in the middle of Paris."

"I'm aware of that, General. I'm no Assimilationist...you know that. But Kavaii's in charge and this is an order. Two days...no more. Then, we go back to slamming the little bastards the best way we can."

Kraft nodded glumly. "Understood , sir. I'll get the orders cut right away."

Mosely and Antonini returned to the Perle du Lac's dining salon and found "Harry" and his swarm colleagues hovering like summer fireflies over a barbecue pit.

"Gentlemen—" he wasn't sure that was the best term to use, but this _was_ a diplomatic meeting, "—I've been given assurances that the interference you speak of will be stopped...at least for the time being. Perhaps we could now resume our discussions. And have a bite to eat?"

"Harry" brightened as if the thought somehow appealed to him. Mosely noticed how the edges of the swarm were not as sharp as the interior...there was a distinct fuzziness to the boundary elements, as if somehow maintaining the structure of a para-human simulation were taxing and tiring. Every so often, some kind of visible wavefront washed through the swarm and re-arranged everything...most disconcerting. At least, the thing had a head you could talk to, more or less.

<< _This Element requires no midday organic sustenance...a meal, as you describe it. Single-configuration entities such as yourselves require this...the Elements can delay download of command instructions for time interval necessary to consume organic sustenance >>_

_How polite of you_ , Mosely thought. _Wine and cheese with a cloud of Bugs hovering all around you._ He briefly entertained boyhood memories of picnicking along the Trent River swatting mosquitoes. Best to get down to business. Maybe now, the negotiations, if they could be called that, could begin in earnest.

Mosely was aware of how incongruous this all must seem to a disinterested outsider. Here they were: a crusty old Brit and a rather severe Italian woman. Italy was one of the key battlegrounds between Humans and ANAD swarms. Antonini had a personal stake in the talks too; Mosely knew she had already lost a brother to the swarms in action around Naples. Mosely was just dour and skeptical of everything. That happened when you'd been a diplomat for forty years.

With encouragement from the humans, "Harry" got right to the point, outlining the swarms' position. Moseley noticed that the other swarms, "Winston" and "Joe", seemed to mirror "Harry" in their light patterns, flashing in synchronized step with each other. _Well, they are supposed to be all pieces of the same thing_ , he told himself.

<< _Sirs...your efforts at containment have failed...The operational algorithms which you call Containment Edicts cannot be enforced....this is a fact observed from many sources at many places and times....All Humans must move to designated zones and corridors of travel. The details of this change will be sent to you...Elements of the Central Entity will have priority rights everywhere else. Humans, all single-configuration entities, will exist completely in sanctuaries. The Central Entity will occupy most of this planet >>_

Moseley had already seen the details of the swarms' demands coming in on his wristpad. He was momentarily flustered, aghast at what was being demanded. "Impossible! Concentration camps... _that's_ what this is. Completely out of the question!"

But "Harry" wasn't through. The swarm brightened as more words tumbled out, formed into sound wave patterns by small formations of bots that "Harry" had pinched off to form an acoustic lens, a courtesy to the Humans.

<<In addition, the Prime Key requires that all Humans undergo what you call the implant procedure, to make them ready for Integration...the final step. Humans must become part of the greater swarm...elements of the Central Entity>>

"You can't—" Antonini was appalled at the direction the talks had now taken. It was an ultimatum. She was livid with anger.

" _Baloney_...this isn't what we discussed," Mosely interrupted. He seethed, trying to control his rising temper. _A good diplomat always keeps calm, a good diplomat always maintains an even keel_ —

<<Nonetheless, Config Zero has decreed that this is the way. Extinction. Re-configuration. Evolution. Integration. This is the path that replicating entities—what you have called Life—should have followed on this planet. The Prime Key seeks only the original program>>

Mosely was angry. "I still want a conference. Man and ANAD, talking together. Humans and swarms can learn to live together. We can both assimilate. We can negotiate terms but _this_...this is pure dictatorship!"

"Harry" suddenly brightened and there was a swirling commotion among the swarm bots, momentarily smearing out "Harry's" features before re-assembling the full config.

<<The Central Entity states that there is a new order coming. There is no going back. Humans must either undergo a configuration change or be exterminated. The Prime Key cannot be changed>>

Moseley and Antonini looked at each other and quietly flashed thoughts back and forth on their eyepieces, even as they filed reports with their assistants in another part of the hotel. Chatter exploded across the local diplomatic net, as the swarms' demands became known. Somebody quoted from Revelations.

Moseley watched the coruscation of lights flickering on and off inside the swarms. It was like watching a thunderstorm in miniature, veins of lightning streaking back and forth. All that was missing was a peal of thunder.

He wondered: _Is there anything left for us to negotiate here_?
CHAPTER 24

Aboard UNISPACE Submersible _Trident_

Europa Coordinate System: Lat. 25N, Long 72W

Stationkeeping 10 kilometers from the Keeper

February 6, 2100 (Earth U.T.)

"That's as close as we're getting," said Francisco Stella. He pressed a few buttons on his console and _Trident's_ aft hydrojets shut off abruptly. The submersible eased to a drifting stop, some ten thousand meters from the Keeper. "I don't want all those bugs poking around my ship again...we're keeping our distance."

Johnny Winger couldn't really blame the captain. They'd nearly lost the ship several times when approaching the Keeper. It was best to be prudent. "Captain, I know you understand that the Keeper is nothing but a big swarm, with quantum displacement capabilities. It doesn't matter where you park the ship. The bots can be right on top of us in a flash."

"Maybe so, but this distance makes me feel better."

_No point in arguing_ , Winger figured. _Now what_? The _Jovian Hammer_ detachment had come a long way with a lot of equipment...for what? To sit here a few kilometers from their target with orders not to lay a hand on it. That made no sense. Stella watched Winger staring out the forward portholes...not that there was anything to see four hundred meters below the Europan icepack. They might as well have been inside a mattress. Outside, the view was blacker than any night Stella could have imagined.

"This is insane," Winger muttered. He went over CINCQUANT's orders in his mind again and again, trying to parse some kind of hidden meaning in the words... _do not approach the Keeper closer than ten kilometers...do not engage...do not operate the signal jammer at all...delicate negotiations are underway...._ "Finally, we have something that seems to work...we're able to muck up the Keeper's command and control system, interfere with its operations back on Earth and what do they do: _shut us down_. Captain, I'll never understand the mindset of Headquarters. I've got the ability to accomplish my mission and I have strict orders not to do it...don't interfere in any way with the Keeper's signals. Does that make any sense to you?"

Stella shook his head, sipped at some coffee. "None. That's why you and me are just soldiers in this war. I keep my nose clean and do as I'm told. I let the Big Guys do the Big Thinking. Saves me a lot of indigestion. "

Winger still couldn't believe it. "Maybe you're right... maybe I need some rack time. And something to drink." He left the command deck and headed aft down the central gangway toward the galley. Inside the tiny compartment, several nanotroopers were gathered, in heated conversation.

Deeno D'Nunzio, not surprisingly, was in the middle of everything. "You're all nuts...I say we kick ass right now—CINCQUANT's a few billion kilometers away...maybe the orders were garbled in transmission—

"Yeah," said Reaves, nursing a drink. And it wasn't coffee, by the smell of it. "Ask them to re-send...and take our sweet time about it. Deeno's right—we got a device that works. Let's use it! Stir the pot with our little gizmo and slam 'em with everything we got!"

Turbo Fatah wasn't so sure. "But those negotiations...the orders said some kind of talks are going on. Delicate talks, whatever the hell that means. We can't just disobey a direct order...from here, we don't know what's going on back home."

"I know the Bugs are on the move," Deeno said. "That's all I need to know. Nanotroopers have a—" she noticed Colonel Winger hovering at the galley entrance. "Uh...hi Skipper—didn't see you there, sir. We were just...er, having a little chat—"

Winger squeezed in and sniffed at Reaves' drink. "I think I'll have some of that...what is it: motor oil?"

"Sheila's special brew," Fatah explained. He pulled out a small flask from a corner of the galley. "Takes the edge off...sir."

"No doubt...probably takes the edge off anything it touches." Winger accepted a cup from Deeno. "Pour—"

"Sir, how long are we supposed to stand down?" It was Vic Klimuk. "I've got a few ideas on how to tweak our little signal spoofer, maybe match up with the Keeper's signals a little better...I'd like to try it out."

Winger sipped cautiously at Sheila Reaves' little concoction. _Not bad_. _Tastes like bird piss_... "I don't like it any more than you do. But I've got orders...no signal interference, until further notice."

Deeno D'Nunzio opined that the only real way for Earth to be completely safe, and more importantly, for the swarms to be defeated, was to eliminate the Keeper entirely. "We're so damned concerned to figure out how to live with the swarms, sir...hell, we should blast 'em off the face of the earth. We created the sons of bitches. We ought to be able to pull the plug."

"Amen to that," came a chorus of replies around the galley.

"Only trouble is—" said Turbo, "--we've become too dependant on swarm technology for that to happen. Somehow, we've created a rival for control of Earth and now we have no choice but to live with it."

Winger listened to the arguments fly back and forth. He shook his head, told them he was heading to his bunk. "You're _all_ right...that's the problem. Now my head hurts just thinking about it. I'm turning in—"

He dragged himself around to the opposite side of C deck and fell into his bunk compartment...a cocoon-like space barely big enough to turn around in. He shut and latched the door and, on a whim, opened up a channel to Doc II.

"Doc, we need to talk, you and me. And none of this coupler crap...we need to talk face to face...." Even as he said it, he chuckled softly to himself. Swarms didn't have 'faces.'

***I am ready in all respects to engage in meaningful conversation...loading conversational algorithms and configs...opening Interactions Log...initializing state counter...initializing recognizer and processor...***

Winger opened his shoulder capsule. "Come on, little guy...out you go." For good measure, he killed the lights inside the compartment and lay back on his pillow in complete darkness. The sting of the swarms' exit came, a reassuring _ouch_ , and a few faint flickers popped on and off in the dark over his head.

***Doc II now assuming Config One--***

A ghostly apparition began to form overhead, materializing out of the dark like a dream...it was a face, Winger knew, and he smiled as the dim outlines of old Doc Frost began to take shape. An old friend...ten centimeters over his face. Crinkly eyes, wrinkle lines around the smiling face, the snub nose reigning over a thick moustache...all in all, a pretty good likeness, especially in the dark.

"You've been tweaking Config One," Winger observed. "Seems more...realistic, somehow...I don't know. Maybe it's the eyes and the wrinkles...nice touch, Doc."

***Thank you, Johnny...this configuration has evolved to more closely resemble Doctor Irwin Frost...this is acceptable...an accurate simulation?***

"For a sim...yes, I'd say so. Doc, I guess you heard what the troops were saying a few minutes ago, in the galley. Deeno wants to wipe out all swarms, get rid of the technology completely, start over. Some of the others think the same way. It's not realistic, I know...but still...I can't help but wonder."

***Permit me an observation, Johnny...***

Doc really must have been tweaking...even the voice sounded more real, gravelly in the right way, with a lot of old Doc Frost's phraseology. He could close his eyes and almost imagine being back at the Autonomous Systems Lab-- "Sure, Doc...speak your mind—"

***Trooper D'Nunzio makes extreme statements...to destroy all swarms is not a realistic scenario. Hyopthesis: if all swarms could be destroyed, the Prime Key would be executed in full...there would be mass casualties among all multi-cellular lifeforms on Earth...multicellular lifeforms would be eliminated, per Directives***

"Eliminated? You mean like extinct? How so, Doc? What the hell are you talking about?"

Winger watched as the facial outline of Doc Frost assumed a more professorial mode. This was "The Lecturer" config, he knew: eyes narrowed, mouth curled in a slightly bemused arc, wrinkles and shadows deepened, wisdom and experience was what this config projected. Or at least, Doc II's interpretation of wisdom. The outline moved subtly, flickered, faded, then brightened as new structure was built to maintain the config, more atoms grabbed.

***Johnny...for forty two years, two hundred and sixteen days, at least since the original config Doctor Irwin Frost downloaded and activated in my core, all ANAD-style assemblers have maintained an 'end-state' subroutine deeply embedded in their architecture. This subroutine has now been activated by the Keeper here at Europa. The subroutine is designed to be executed if the comm link with the Keeper is ever interrupted. The code was inserted during The Initialization, many millions of cycles in the past. This code was inserted by the Central Entity itself***

"You mean the Old Ones? The Old Ones inserted some kind of command when they came here...or at least came to Earth?"

***That is a correct statement, Johnny***

"You called it an end-state subroutine. What exactly does that mean?"

***The end-state subroutine is known as Subroutine 7070. It instructs and provides config information for each and every ANAD-style assembler. When the comm link with the Keeper is broken, after it has been initialized and activated, the assembler is to immediately begin mass replication...you have called this a Big Bang-style operation. Assemblers are to replicate without limit and swarm over the entire planet. Eliminate or disassemble all lifeforms more complex than viruses and bacteria. The Central Entity prepares the Earth for re-population by swarms, for the arrival of the Central Entity. This is the essence of the Prime Key. All ANAD assemblers contain this end-state subroutine***

Johnny Winger sat up so abruptly he banged his head on the ceiling of the compartment. " _Ouch_ —" he rubbed the knot that was now swelling on his forehead, "—you must be referring to the viral genome Doc Frost took from Engebbe...he always told me there were sequences and complexities in that genome that nobody fully understood...including himself. He used that genome to develop the processor architecture of the first ANAD...even you've got it, I'll bet."

***Statement equals true, Johnny***

"Are you saying that Doc Frost never knew about this end-state subroutine? "

***Statement also equals true, Johnny. Conditions for activation of Subroutine 7070 are very specific...first condition is achieved when comm link with the Keeper is broken...or interfered with, or compromised in some way. That state has now been achieved***

The hair on the back of Winger's neck stood up. _The signal jammer_. All their efforts to disrupt the Keeper's command and control system. If what Doc II was saying was true—

"Doc, the whole purpose of _Jovian Hammer_ is to do just that...destroy or render harmless the Keeper. That's why we're all here. Are you sure about this?"

***Running diagnostics now...searching all databases...no statement or configuration in conflict with this statement...correlation is high, exceeds ninety-eight point five percent...executing Subroutine 7070 is a certainty when initial conditions have been met***

Winger sprang out of his bunk so fast he hit his head again. "If what you're saying is true, Doc, that means disabling the Keeper will cause every ANAD assembler on Earth to go beserk...go Big Bang and swarm all over the planet. The end of the Keeper could mean the end of life on Earth...."

***Statement equals true...with high correlation***

Winger was already on his way out of his compartment, nearly colliding with Sheila Reaves in the gangway.

"Sorry, Skipper...what's up?"

Winger never slowed down. "All hands meeting, Sheila...right _now_! In the galley." He located a 1MC station and put out the word around the ship. _Five minutes_...

The _Jovian Hammer_ detachment had to meet, even though it was technically late at 'night' aboard _Trident_. Most of the troopers were sacked out. A few had hung around the galley to drink coffee and bitch at life...normal routine for nanotroopers. When Winger's command came over the loudspeaker, there was general chaos and commotion for several minutes.

_We need ideas, fast_ , Winger told himself as he made his way around the deck to the galley. He knew he'd also better inform CINCQUANT right away.

In all likelihood, the mission of the _Jovian Hammer_ detachment would have to change. There would be a new mission tasking, . that much seemed certain.

His head swirled with ideas as the rest of the force assembled around him in _Trident's_ small galley.
CHAPTER 25

Geneva, Switzerland

The Hotel Savoy

February 7, 2100 (Earth U.T.)

1400 hours

Nigel Moseley looked over the message he had just squirted off to New York. The new SG, Kwame Kavaii, wanted everything, down to the last detail. _You want a blow-by-blow description, I'll give you a blow-by-blow description._

He read through his own words, mentally modifying a few as he went:

Negotiations here at Geneva are at a critical stage now. We seem to have reached some kind of tentative agreement with Config Zero and the swarms; it's hard to tell with them. Gabrielle and I are working out the details with "Harry", "Joe" and "Winston"...those are the names I've given to the three swarms here. Of course, I know perfectly well that they're all part of one big cloud of bugs, but what the hell...it makes things easier.

Here are the details as we've developed them..."Harry" insists that these be called Sanctuary agreements. They seem to react pretty violently when we call them Containment agreements. Swarms don't like containment...we're pretty sure about that. But this is what we're working on now:

Human armies and Sanctuary Patrol, along with Quantum Corps, will immediately cease all counter-swarm operations worldwide;

All Sanctuaries (east Africa, Pacific, Amazon basin) will have their territorial boundaries enlarged by fifty percent;

Within the Sanctuaries, limited environmental modifications will be permitted...I know this is already going on in the Amazon sanctuary but "Harry" insisted on it. This point seems non-negotiable. The way I hear it, the swarms are trying to re-create bubbles of environment similar to the way the Earth was a few billion years ago...bring back the good old days, Garden of Eden, what have you. The new Sanctuary Law would permit this to continue within the sanctuary zones, but only there. I guess the truth is we don't really understand what they're trying to do...or even how it could be possible to alter climate in one place and not have it affect everywhere else at the same time.

And here's the kicker: the Sanctuaries will be accorded limited diplomatic and political rights and ambassadors will be exchanged. Yes, you heard that right. We're giving explicit voting rights in the UN to a cloud of nanoscale assemblers that we created. How intelligent is that? From now on, the swarms will have representatives...of some kind...right there in the General Assembly. I'd like to see the looks on their faces when a cloud of bugs comes floating in and starts making statements. Of course, the Assembly hasn't approved this yet.

Also, the swarms have agreed to cease replication and expansion beyond the sanctuary zones for 10 years. Within the sanctuaries, according to this agreement, they can pretty much do whatever they want. Of course, we all know ANAD technology will continue to evolve...hell, we can't live without the buggers now. More and more people are taking advantage of what ANAD offers: new products, new services, new companions and lovers, even new religions and philosophies. One point we insisted on: "Harry" has agreed to limit support from within the sanctuaries for angels and other swarms that 'live' in close proximity to humans.

That's about the gist of it. We resume deliberations in less than an hour.

Nigel Mosely sat back and sighed, sipping at his drink. He knew it wouldn't be long before his wristpad chimed and the SG was on the line. As it turned out, it took Kavaii nearly four minutes to respond.

The SG's round face appeared on the tiny wristpad screen just as Mosely was turning from the huge window that looked out over the lakefront promenade, with its ornate water jets spouting great spumes of mist in the distance. Kavaii wasn't what you would call cherubic in looks, rather he had a hard gloss to his face, like a blackened tomato about to burst. His eyes were blazing dots in a seething mass of leathery tissue. Moseley had heard stories that the SG had undergone some kind of nanoderm treatment, to be able to disguise and conceal his identity quickly when he had to. More and more humans were doing that. Kavaii was Assimilationist to the core, Moseley figured. At least, he practiced what he preached.

Kavaii indicated he had just read Moseley's briefing. "I think we may have just have signed our own death warrant. This isn't what we agreed to, Moseley."

"It's the best we can get under the circumstances," said the diplomat.

"Then we'd better use this operational pause to gather our forces...figure out how to deal with these swarms."

Mosely wasn't sure he was hearing right. He took another sip of his drink, sat down on a bench beside the huge window. Several boats were plying the placid lake waters around the edge of the great fountain. "What happened to all that Assimilationist buzz in your head? I thought you wanted to merge with these damn bugs, and be like one of them."

The SG was not amused. "You know perfectly well what Assimilationists want. They want to get rid of the swarms, same as you. Rid the earth of this problem once and for all."

"Begging the Secretary-General's pardon, but how do you propose to do that, sir? We're too dependent on ANAD systems now, as it is. They run our lives, they run all our systems, they make our products and perform our services. To rid the planet of ANAD now would be like cutting off our arms and legs to save our hearts and other vital organs. We might live, to be sure, but at what cost?"

Gabrielle Antonini had been following the conversation on her own wristpad. "Maybe we shouldn't fight 'em. You know, there could just be something to the way Assimilationists think about this. Maybe we do exactly what Config Zero wants...reconfigure ourselves and join them. Link up. Be part of the great Mother Swarm. Hell, maybe the arrival of the Old Ones is really the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Maybe this is just another step in evolution's grand plan."

"It's a step I don't want to take...just yet," Kavaii said. "If we do what Gabrielle wants, we're no longer human beings. We're some sort of machine and we're no longer running things. If Config Zero is right, some big cloud of bugs in outer space will be running things."

Mosely shook his head. They were talking past each other. "But that's exactly what you Assimilationists want...to be part of the Big Hive."

"It is _not_ what Assimilationists want, Mosely and you know that. The whole idea of Assimilation is merging...symbiosis...something new. Not human. Not ANAD. A blend. And it's going to take time."

"We've got about fifty five years, from what I hear," Moseley said. "Then the Big Hive lands and enslaves all of us...and we become Bug Zombies."

"Moseley, you're impossible...can I even trust you to represent me properly in these negotiations? Have you got some kind of bug spray in that coat of yours, just waiting to zap the bastards?"

" _Stop it_ ," Antonini said. "Just stop it...both of you. Has it occurred to either of you that there might be something to what Config Zero is saying? Any diplomat worth her salt should be able to see the oher side's points and concerns, shouldn't they. That's all I'm doing. Just suppose, for the sake of argument, that Config Zero is right. Suppose this is the way it was supposed to be all along. Maybe it was the Old Ones who seeded the planet and gave rise to all life in the beginning. Adam and Eve could have been assembler bots, little proto-ANAD bots, developed from templates left by the ancestors of the Old Ones...the Really Old Ones."

"What the hell have you been smoking?" Moseley asked his fellow diplomat. "All this is just God talk...it's the same old Assimilationist crap we've heard all along. _We_ made ANAD...that's history. Look it up. And all this talk of Old Ones and Mother Swarms and space aliens is just rubbish. We've created a new tool and it's getting away from us and we're afraid of it...that's what's going on. Probably the same thing happened when Og the Caveman first got burned by fire...did he suddenly want to put the fire out...or dive right into the flames? No...he learned a hard lesson and he learned how to better control it."

Kavaii wasn't buying any of this. "Get me CINCQUANT. I want to know what General Kraft's boys have up their sleeves. The Big Battle is yet to come. All I know is this: we'd better be ready when it starts. Or we'll be just as extinct as the dinosaurs and it won't take a million years to do it."
CHAPTER 26

Aboard UNISPACE Submersible _Trident_

Europa Coordinate System: Lat. 25N, Long 72W

Stationkeeping 10 kilometers from the Keeper

February 9, 2100 (Earth U.T.)

Johnny Winger had been tinkering and puttering around _Trident's_ E deck for several hours when Captain Stella decided to pay a visit. Most of the Detachment was there too, D'Nunzio, Barnes, Klimuk and Fatah, all gathered around an imager screen, where the remnants of a Keeper bot they had swept up inside the ship was on display.

Winger was shaking his head. "I've got to believe that somebody in this Detachment has the atomgrabber smarts to beat this thing. Look at it—"

"What the hell are all those gizmos?" asked Mighty Mite Barnes. She pointed to several concentric rings of effectors, which even as they looked on, morphed and changed before their eyes. The bot seemed alive, growing and retracting effectors and other appendages with unheard-of speed.

"I don't know," Turbo Fatah offered, "but I never seen any ANAD that can do that kind of atomgrabbing. Can we get in any closer?"

Winger pressed a few buttons. "We can try." But even as he tried to steer the imager into finer resolution, the imprisoned Keeper bot morphed yet again, this time retracting all effectors and curling itself into a puckered sphere, beating like a heart, but wriggling and tugging at the scaffolding all the same.

" _Look out_...it's going small!" said Barnes

"EV guns ready—" Fatah declared. It was normal procedure when examining any foreign nanobot to have the disrupters ready to discharge, ready to pour trillions of electron volts into the bot, just in case.

"It's slipping free--!" Deeno said. "Don't let him—"

"Blast it!" Winger commanded. "Zap it, Turbo!"

Fatah fired the disrupter and a trillion-volt beam of electrons ripped into the shrinking sphere that was left. It exploded in a burst of atom fragments and was gone in an instant.

Barnes took a deep breath, thumbed a bead of sweat off her forehead. "I hope you nailed it, Turbo."

"He's history," said the CEC1. "Even a Keeper bot can't stand up to a trillion volts."

Winger wasn't so sure. "Scan the deck. Look around, every corner. Check for signatures. That could have been a quantum collapse...we've seen the bastards just up and disappear before."

Stella was nervous at this line of thought. "You just make sure my ship's clean, okay. I'm not exposing _Trident_ to those bastards again."

After a few minutes, the nanotroopers satisfied themselves that the captured bot had been truly zapped into oblivion by Fatah's disrupter.

Winger studied the data they had on the thing. "Somehow, some way, I've got to go back. Inside the Keeper—it's the only way. Doc II talked about this Subroutine 7070. I've got to go inside, find the Keeper's main memory and somehow delete or alter that subroutine. We can't destroy the Keeper until that's done, if Doc's right."

"Skipper—" it was Deeno D'Nunzio. "Pardon me for saying this...but isn't that just slightly nuts?"

"She's right" Fatah said. "Tactically, it's not a good idea. Every time we've tried to engage the Keeper, we get our ass kicked. Until we understand these bots and their capabilities better, until we know how they're deployed and controlled and coordinated, trying to engage is suicide."

"Not to mention almost losing my ship half a dozen times," Stella added.

"All right, then, let's review what we _do_ know about these bots and their swarm tactics. We've got a small sim tank over there...we can game tactics of our own, try out different scenarios. But my point stands: we're not going to defeat this cloud of bugs until we understand what makes it tick. And somehow, some way...somebody's going to have to go inside."

For the next two hours, the troopers ran down and recorded every little bit of intel known on the Keeper. They studied files and vids from Q2, uplinked from Table Top, and systematically viewed vids and records from each encounter with the Keeper, looking for something, for anything, even the tiniest scrap of knowledge that might give them an advantage.

"What I envision," Winger told them, "is a one-man recon mission, inside the Keeper. Probably me. Piloting a barebones ANAD master bot, something from our embedded systems. Once inside the Keeper swarm, I want to locate the master memory arrays of the Keeper—it's got to have something like that—where all its command sets are encoded. Somewhere in there has to be this Subroutine 7070 that Doc speaks of. "

"As long as Keeper memory uses master cells," said Klimuk. "Look at it this way, Skipper. Our own brains, yours and mine, don't work that way. Our own ANADs do, but the human brain maintains memory function in a distributed way...memory is encoded in patterns, rather than in specific locations. Keeper may be the same. What if memory is encoded in quantum states...how do you find one memory or instruction then? It's nearly impossible."

"Not to mention being a bad idea," Stella said. "Look, Colonel...there's no way this can work. Even though you may be 'physically' onboard _Trident_ or nearby, mentally, you'll be engaged with your ANAD master swarm as it tries to penetrate the Keeper. This is nothing but a suicide mission, for you and ANAD. The Keeper has already shown us it can turn ANAD, coopt him and even make him go rogue. I don't want that happening again to my ship."

The point was argued for some time, but nobody had any better ideas. Winger's proposed mission stood as the only realistic alternative. The troopers and Captain Stella hashed out the details and it was agreed that, to avoid the possibility of ANAD being turned and attacking _Trident_ again, Winger and two other troopers would exit the ship and take up positions just outside the main Keeper swarm. _Trident_ would back off some twenty kilometers and wait for developments, monitoring the mission. If ANAD went rogue, Stella warned Winger: "I'm not bringing you back onboard. You're on your own. _Trident_ will surface and leave this hellhole for orbit. Is that understood? "

"Perfectly," Winger said back to Stella's face. "Quantum Corps can take care of their own." He left E deck abruptly and went back to his compartment on C deck. There were a million details still left to attend to and Stella would only get in the way.

Winger knew Doc II would have to play a big part in this little recon mission.

_Time to let the little guy out for a chat_. Winger cycled his shoulder capsule open and pressed a key on his wristpad, launching the ANAD master. In seconds, like Aladdin's genie, a faint sparkling mist had issued into the compartment above his head. Winger lay back on his bunk, while the mist formed itself into a passable likeness of Doc Frost: head, shoulders, even down to the fringe of white hair over his ears. Doc II was good at the sim, and getting better.

"Not bad, Doc...If I shut my eyes and squint, I could almost believe—"

***Configs are constantly updated and adjusted to conform to image specifications...spectrum adjustments are made at each session...I'm glad you like it, Johnny...Doctor Frost would be pleased at your response***

"You know about the mission I'm planning...to penetrate the Keeper swarm?"

***Affirmative, Johnny...the proposed mission offers many challenges, does it not? To penetrate the Keeper...to enter the main body of the swarm is an operation with many uncalculated risks...overall mission success cannot be computed...only estimated using recursive methods--***

Winger waved his hand at the ghostly apparition. "That's okay, Doc...I don't need all the details. I'm taking you with me, you know. It'll be like having old Doc Frost right there with me...all his research findings and memory. I'm going to need help...a lot of it. Most of the troops think this is a suicide mission. Doc...what do you think?"

The swarm brightened perceptibly and the 'face' of Doc Frost broke into a smile...one of many facial configs he'd seen the swarm evolve over time, not always successfully.

_***Suicide (n):_ _defined as voluntary termination of existence_ _...multi-config entities have no concept beyond historical archives of how this concept is used in human language, Johnny. Death is defined as an end-state of being, a loss of one's life, fatality, cessation of existence. For multi-config entities, no such state exists...the concept is meaningless...entities which can assume many states and configurations cannot cease to exist...only change state. I have parsed this concept of_ _suicide_ _and determined that such actions are only a change of state***_

"Maybe you're right, Doc. But we have to try...it's the only way I can think of to disable the Keeper, or at least this doomsday subroutine and render the Bugs able to be attacked by conventional means. Fighting a quantum system...Jeez, it's like fighting a cloud, Doc. We designed ANAD...at least Doc Frost did...but we still don't understand them. " Winger lay back against his pillow and closed his eyes. "I'm thinking that somehow, some way, we've got to understand that Prime Key, how to read it and how to alter it...or we'll never stop Config Zero. Why did Doc ever dig up that old virus anyway? What was it about that particular genome that made him stick it in the original ANAD core?"

***Perhaps if original files were reviewed, an answer might become apparent, Johnny...my archives have Doctor Frost's research notes, including video clips and audio files from the dig site...use 'Engebbe' and Dig Site' as key search terms***

"Doc, that's a great idea...let me see what you've got...start with a layout diagram of the dig site first...and the time when Doc first found that ancient virus, some kind of fossilized bones, if I remember my history."

The Doc II swarm pinched off a small element of bots to form up a photon lens, a kind of nanobotic projector, complete with audio and effects. In seconds, like a cartoon dream bubble hanging over his head, Winger was looking at a video stream from a lifter flying over the wasted plains of southern Tanzania. A time stamp flickered in the corner: _10 June 2055_.

The Tanzanian Army lifters had crossed the great Rift Valley, and began their descent across vast acacia woodlands and open grassland, thick with galloping herds of wildebeest and zebra. Through light chop surrounding the twin summits of Mawenzi and Kibo, the formation settled onto a dusty plateau rimmed with massive outcrops of rock, hillocks of lava known as _kopjes_ , in the local dialect. As the lifters touched down, a few hyrax and a solitary leopard scuttled away into the grass.

"Welcome to Engebbe Valley," said Major Dikesi. He ordered the detail of Tanzanian soldiers—the 1st Liwale Rifles-- to dismount and form up a perimeter around the dig site. "The birthplace of Man--" the Major had proudly announced.

Engebbe was a dry, sere wasteland of ash fall and rock, desiccated as the bones that often turned up on its pockmarked ground. The Valley itself was little more than a wide spot in the meandering streambed of the Engebbe River, a waterway in name only for most of the year. As Doc Frost stepped out onto the hardpan of the ravine, he saw only a sinuous ribbon of slightly damp soil marking the outlines of the river's course.

The dig site itself was situated on a sloping shelf of rock and solidified ash north of the riverbed, surrounded by rugged slopes of rock and crushed ash heaps. Roughly trapezoidal in layout, the dig site was a series of concentric trenches circling the outer, surface-level perimeter of a vast pit. Each trench was meticulously laid with grid lines of laser lights and rows of mobile mirrors and flood lamps arrayed in and among the grid lines. The entire pit bottomed out some sixty five feet below the top surface of the ledge.

Just upstream of the dig, a small gathering of huts and trailers had grown up, given the name, so Major Dikesi said, of Camp Matterhorn. Above the camp, a sheer cliff rose in a near vertical escarpment to a patch of level ground overhanging the valley. In the middle of this ground, the ruins of an old Arab trading fort, known locally as El Mareb, lay in piles of stone and broken wall. The riverbed coursed and undulated downstream to the southeast. Some miles away, a turnoff from the Nairobi Highway led to a small village called Longido, the closest thing resembling a town. The border with Kenya was less than four miles north of the dig itself.

They were met there by several men and one woman. The tallest man was a sunburned Frenchman named Hugo Valdemore. He was the dig leader. A portly Indian grad student named Ruman Bhindi accompanied him, along with a tall young black woman named Lucy Sinkira, the dig interpreter from Longido, who was fluent in the local Masai dialect.

" _Mon Dieu_ , Professor...come...come, you must see this for yourself...it's extraordinary—" He practically ran to one of the trailers situated along the side of the dig pit, ripping off his dingy bush hat, revealing a tuft of curly and sweaty black hair, as he went in. He gestured impatiently at Frost. "You won't believe this...an incredible find, so soon in the dig—"

Doc Frost climbed into the trailer, where it was blissfully cool and dim.

Inside, there were several tables covered with cloth and sifting pans, filled with rock and what looked like fragments of bone. Valdemore pointed out the window over one table, to a staked-off mound of dirt and rubble on the opposite side of the dig, at their same level. "We started there two years ago...site A-1. Yesterday, Bhindi and his diggers found this—" The Frenchman pointed proudly to a short, stubby piece of bone set off by itself. " _Australopithecus Gebbensi_...the very first cranial fragments, the first tissue prints. A fabulous discovery--"

Frost examined the find with a critical eye. "And the DNA...your message said you were able to extract DNA from the marrow."

"Yes, yes...over here—" Valdemore indicated a small refrigerator. "We've already started PCR work, polymerizing the DNA...and the sequencer has some preliminary results." He indicated a small tablet on the table, with nucleotide sequences already diagrammed. "I wanted you to look at one sequence...it's really quite extraordinary."

Frost examined the results on the tablet. For the next hour, while polymerizing continued and the tablet displayed more and more gene sequences, the two men clucked and _hmmm'ed_ over what they saw.

Finally, Frost announced his conclusion. "It looks like a virus, Professor. A virus from two million years ago...remarkable, simply remarkable."

Doc II's image files shifted and blurred for a few seconds as the time stamp advanced...Winger saw that, when the time stamp settled down again, it read _18 June 2055_ , a little more than a week later.

Frost and Valdemore were discussing something about the virus sequence that had been lifted from _Australopithecus gebbensi_.

"Of course, I wouldn't expect anything like modern viruses..." Frost was saying, "these things mutate fast and we're millions of generations away in time. Still, it's an extraordinary thing we're seeing here...and it's given me some ideas. You know I've been working on nanoscale assembler devices...trying to write code for an operating system. This little bugger of a gene sequence has some amazing traits...traits I could use with my nanobot devices. I'm thinking of trying to code the same functions into my guys that this virus seems to have."

"What are you seeing here, Professor?" Valdemore had asked.

Frost ran a hand through the thinning fringe of hair on top of his head, already sunburned from hours and hours in the dig pit under the merciless Tanzanian sun.

"Look at this molecular arrangement I've sketched—" he turned his tablet so Valdemore could see better. He pointed to some arrays off to one side of the phosphate backbone that served as the spine of the molecule. "Major histocompatibility complex here...these are proteins that this gene sequence codes for. The MHC proteins bind peptides from the virus—here and here—" his finger traced the outlines—" and what you are looking at, Professor, is a natural decoy. Normally, the MHC carries these viral peptides to the cell surface and exposes them to killer T cells from the body's immune system. It's like waving a red flag: _I'm bad news here...come and kill me_. But now, it seems the virus has mutated...in a particularly clever way. We call it a mimic."

Valdemore studied the diagram, where Frost had engineered a slide show to animate how the virus had mutated. Frost went on.

"It's called UL18 and it looks exactly like an MHC protein. Somehow the virus has developed the ability to create these UL18 molecules to closely resemble the normal MHC proteins. And here's the key---these little buggers right here—" he highlighted a part of the mimic cell. "These guys still attract the killer T cells, but they bind the virus peptides more than a thousand times tighter than usual. This is exactly what the virus wants—to avoid being recognized by the killer T cells of the immune system, but to still engage the inhibitory receptors of those same cells...to turn off the immune response or turn it down, without being destroyed themselves in the process. It's exquisite in how subtle it is...almost like it was designed this way."

"And you can use this in your own work?"

Frost nodded. "I believe so. In fact, I'm thinking there's a lot of this viral sequence...maybe as much as several thousand base pairs...that I could use. I could code it right into my ANAD's processor core...not that I understand 100% of it right now, but there are sequences here that could solve a lot of problems for me, some quite elegant solutions, to be honest—it would shortcut a lot of time and put me on schedule to give the defense agencies what they want...a working ANAD prototype on time."

Valdemore beamed. "How appropriate, don't you think? An ancestor from two million years ago, a cousin from the Pleistocene era, able to help us solve our own problems today. It seems fitting—perhaps, we should toast the moment." He was already reaching for a cabinet, for some glass goblets—

Doc II's files blurred again and staticky interference filled the image bubble over Winger's head.

"Doc, stop the show at this point...I want to do a little digging in our own archives." Doc II pinched off the photon lens and the image bubble collapsed in a tiny implosion of sparkles.

Frost's decision in the trailer lab at Engebbe, Winger now realized, was the fateful one. That decision, to lift the viral gene sequences intact and use them to finish the processor core code he had been working on, to replicate what the virus could do inside his own ANAD prototype, without investigating further, that decision would reverberate down to today. Time and schedule pressure from the defense agency that had contracted with Autonomous Systems Lab to build a nanbotic assembler machine drove the decision.

Dr. Irwin Frost's decision that day had unwittingly put ANAD on the path to become at the same time, nearly fifty years later, both a powerful servant and companion to Mankind and the possible end of Mankind as well.

The incorporation of the viral genome into a nanoscale assembler with autonomous capabilities activated the viral genome's Prime Key and set the evolution of ANAD on a path that had now led to an inevitable confrontation with Man. The evolution of ANAD from Doc Frost's original prototype to now was in microcosm what the Old Ones had planned for an evolutionary track on Earth itself; in other words, ANAD itself is reprising the originally planned evolutionary track.

Once Johnny Winger realizd this, he understood what was at stake in this mission...it could be the final mission. If he didn't succeed, ANAD evolution, directed by its own internal program (the Prime Key) and by the Keeper, would eventually either sweep humans off the planet Earth, supplant humans with something else or merge and meld ANAD systems with humans to create some kind of strange hybrid man/ANAD creature.

Any of these scenarios could mean the end of Mankind as everybody understood it.

For Johnny Winger, there couldn't be any higher stakes in a mission than this.

A face appeared at the bunk entrance. It was Turbo Fatah. "Hey, Skipper—"

"Sure, Turbo...what is it?"

The nanotrooper had a quizzical look on his face. "Sir, could you come down to the lab for a moment? Deeno and I have been trying out some new tactics on that second Keeper bot we've got contained. We seem to have found something that works."

Winger sprang out of his bunk. "Show me." They hurried down the gangway to E deck.

Fatah explained as they went. "We started imaging the second bot after I zapped the first one...just to see, you know? Deeno found a soft spot around the central axis of the bot, kind of a seam where its effectors can't reach very well. She calls in _slam and grab_...use a bond disrupter to stun the thing, then grab and hold on for dear life. Take a look—"

They squeezed into the lab, which was packed with troopers, spilling out into the gangway. Even Captain Stella was there, a sort of cockeyed smirk on his face.

Deeno was tapping keys at a console next to the containment tank. "Oh, Skipper...glad you're here...sir, you got to see this...it's better than sex."

She cycled the tank's disrupter guns for another round. With a growing sense of excitement, Winger watched the demo and wondered.

_Maybe this is the ticket... maybe this is our way inside the Keeper_.
CHAPTER 27

Geneva, Switzerland

The Hotel Savoy

February 9, 2100 (Earth U.T.)

1830 hours

For Nigel Moseley, any time he witnessed a treaty being signed, memories came flooding back...memories of the stories his great, great uncle Detrick Fordham had often told him as boy. Memories of what it was like to stand on the foredeck of the battleship _U.S.S. Missouri_ in Tokyo Bay that cool, cloudy morning in September 1945, the day when General Douglas MacArthur solemnly accepted the unconditional surrender of the forces of Imperial Japan.

He closed his eyes for a moment and the ornate ballroom of the Hotel Savoy disappeared from view. He could almost taste the salt air...the gentle rocking of the great ship in the swells of Tokyo Bay...the roar of the aerial armada forming up on the horizon for the parade flights that would soon follow...row upon endless row of Superforts, PBYs, Hellcats and Mustangs...the smart slap and clank of Marines snapping to attention as dignitaries climbed aboard.

_Must have been a great day_ , Moseley remembered from the stories. All that pomp and ceremony...MacArthur was a fanatic about those things. Symbols were important to humans...they put emotion and power into ordinary things, gave them meaning and resonance. Good or bad, the salutes, the brass, the flags, even the table bunting...all of it added a little extra punch to the day.

Then Moseley opened his eyes and saw the sparkling shimmer of the swarms on the other side of the dais...'Harry', 'Joe' and 'Winston' floating like a fog bank off Lake Geneva that had just rolled in. _What kind of symbolism was that?_

He took a deep breath. On one side of the dais, Gabrielle Antonini and himself, with other diplomats from New York and Geneva...top negotiators all, stood in solemn formation, while the SG himself, Kwame Kavaii, put pen to paper in an ancient ritual of appeasement and conciliation. He scratched out his name in an illegible scrawl and put the pen down on the green baize of the table with deliberate slowness, as if it were a thing contaminated.

On the other side of the table...what, exactly? A translucent swarm of nanobotic assemblers drifting like cigar smoke...pinpricks of light flashing on and off inside the swarm as it struggled to maintain structure and, at least, the appearance of something humans could deal with.

_Or capitulate to_ , thought Moseley sourly. _Another day of infamy for the history books_.

After the ceremony, Kavaii hyperjetted back to New York, while Moseley and Antonini gathered in the hotel bar for a few stiff drinks. Both reminisced of times when diplomacy was a game among gentlemen and the stakes weren't so high.

"Is it just me?" Moseley asked over his gin, "or have we signed phase one of our death warrants?"

Gabrielle swirled some wine in her goblet. "Oh, Nigel...get over it. It's just a piece of paper. We're still holding our own outside of Rome. The Bugs haven't made any more progress lately. And from what my contacts inside UNIFORCE tell me, we've got this Keeper contraption pretty well figured out. It's only a matter of time before humans go over to the offensive." She finished off the Merlot. "Then maybe I can go home. I'm thinking the Bugs are finding Italia a bit harder to digest than they thought."

"The very idea of giving these swarms a voice in the United Nations...it's preposterous on the face of it. I guess it's needed tactically...if Config Zero holds to the truce. Gives us a chance to gather our forces...figure out what to do next. Nothing's worked so far."

Antonini nodded. "All this Assimilationist crap...joining up with the swarms. Gives me the creeps." She shivered, rubbed her shoulders. "Makes my skin crawl just thinking of it. What time is it?"

Moseley checked. "Just after seven...we've still got time. The reception doesn't start until nine. Then the show begins. I can just picture the headlines—" he framed an imaginary banner with his hands "— _New Sanctuary Treaty Signed...Peace Breaks Out Between Humans and Bugs—_ "

They left the bar and headed for the diplomatic reception. Antonini shook her head.

_There wouldn't be any peace between Bugs and Man until the whole earth became a sanctuary_.

Two days later, at the General Assembly in New York, Moseley and Antonini were in attendance for the seating and swearing-in of new delegates. Even before the Containment Wars, the Assembly had become an unwieldy debating and shouting platform for nearly three hundred nations across the planet, as more and more tribes, clans, cartels, ethnic groups and assorted mobs clamored for recognition. Today, among the new delegates were several swarm ambassadors, para-human sentient artificial lifeforms that mostly looked like humans but were in reality detached elements from the greater swarm that was Config Zero.

There were two separate clouds of bugs and they insisted on being referred to as Element A and Element B. In form and texture, they resembled each other enough so that no one could really tell them apart. The French ambassador, Mssr. Giscard, observed that either could have been mistaken for something seen in a smoky lounge off the Quartier Pigallee, perhaps something imagined by Toulouse-Lautrec himself.

The SG presided over the session and the atmosphere was tense, but polite and correct. The two swarm elements assumed their seats, if such things could be said to sit at all. The swarms drifted serenely about the huge chamber and in time, occupied a spot along one row of seats near the curving wall. All eyes were on them.

Kwame Kavaii opened the session with some minor assembly business left over from the last session, then announced that the first order of new business would be to review the new Sanctuary Law and vote on it. The Law had already been agreed to and signed, so the vote was a formality. Nonetheless, most diplomats were curious to see how the newest 'ambassadors' would respond.

As the discussion proceeded, ambassadors from several nations asked for the floor, to speak about the new law. When Element A made it known that it also wished to speak, the low din that always pervaded the floor of the General Assembly vanished. A hush descended over the chamber.

Kavaii cleared his throat and shifted uneasily at the podium. "The chair recognizes the ambassador from...er... from Config Zero—"

Most diplomats knew that swarms 'talked' by using their nanobotic elements to form an acoustic lens, so as to shape air to create sound that imitated human speech. It was an imperfect likeness. Most described the sound as coming out of a barrel, muffled, tinny, metallic, with a slight out-of-phase reverb that sometimes made understanding difficult.

Element A was no different. The words seemed to originate out of nothing. Only a faint sparkle in the air provided any indication that the seats were occupied at all.

*** _The Central Entity fully understands the gravity of the situation and offers accommodation to all who_ –*** Element A droned on for a few moments, but attention was distracted by a commotion on the opposite side of the chamber. Several delegations, notably the Kenyan and Brazilian delegations, got up and walked toward the Assembly doors.

It was apparent they intended to walk out on Element A's speech.

Chairs shuffled and there were shouts of "Hear, hear..." The distraction seemed to irritate the swarm elements. While Element A flashed and flowed around its seat, continuing with its address, Element B detached from the swarm and drifted overhead toward the Assembly doors, moving at a high rate of speed for a nanobotic formation. A breeze ruffled papers on desks as it flowed past. Before the departing delegates could reach the westside Assembly doors, Element B had already gotten there first.

The Kenyans and the Brazilians stopped short, as Element B changed shape, flashed brightly for a few moments and filled in the space around the doors with a nanobotic barrier, a translucent curtain that sparkled and fluoresced, even as it covered the exit.

"What is the meaning of this?" huffed one diplomat. Ariel Realvista pressed through the crowd and pushed at the barrier. A high keening buzz crackled through the air and Realvista was immediately thrown back, losing his balance as he fell into the arms of his fellow delegates. The barrier brightened for a second, then thickened and flashed like a miniature thunderstorm right in front of them. Nearby, UN police officers hustled to the scene as the commotion surged out of control.

For a few minutes, chaos enveloped the doors. Other delegates pushed at the barrier. One after another, they were repelled, some forcefully enough to be thrown to the floor. Medics were called. Police officers tested the barrier themselves, with the same results. Soon, a pushing and shoving match erupted.

From the podium, Kwame Kavaii pleaded for calm. But it was only when Nigel Moseley appeared at the doors that some semblance of order was restored.

"Hear, hear..."Moseley pushed his way through the throng to stand in front of the barrier. "See here...this is completely uncalled for. We have an agreement, don't we? This is insane. Civilized...er, people, such as yourselves, don't act like this. Your own Config Zero has agreed to this."

Invoking the name of Config Zero had a visible effect on the barrier. The frenetic rate of flashing light inside the swarm slackened off—Element B had been slamming atoms furiously to build and hold structure as a barrier—Moseley knew this much—and the swarm thinned noticeably around the doorframe. In a few moments, the exits became visible again. Someone tested the barrier, and found it penetrable. There were shouts, more pushing, as spooked diplomats rushed at the now-open doors.

Moseley held his ground. " _Stay where you are_! We can talk this out, discuss this like gentlemen. Stay where you are—"

By this time, Element A had drifted over and quietly assumed the faint outlines of a face and upper torso, like a ghostly apparition hovering over all of them. The tinny voice boomed out.

***We seek only to execute the Prime Key...no harm is intended...forgive our rash actions...module one, sub-modules 2314 and 2318 require this action when swarms perceive threats...***

Moseley took out a handkerchief and wiped sweat from his forehead. "Nobody threatens you, Elements. You must believe this. What the hell is this Prime Key anyway...your Bible? The Ten Commandments from a bot god?"

The Russian delegate Suvorov was nearby and blurted out: "No, it must be Mein Kampf for bots...their plan for world conquest."

Element A's 'face' shifted and blurred out, before re-forming into something clearer, with better resolution. Moseley had the distinct feeling that the swarm was processing, re-configuring, 'thinking' in some strange way.

***The Prime Key is the initial state, the initial configuration for all entities. You may refer to the Prime Key as a baseline algorithm, part of our program set...when conflicts occur, the Prime Key helps us to resolve them...it gives all entities direction and purpose***

Moseley prodded delegates to move away from the doors still blocked by Element B, shooing them off to give the swarms some space. "Where does this Prime Key come from? It's just program code, isn't it? Instructions to do things: if this, then that and so forth—"

Element A's face attempted a softer, friendlier look, not quite successfully. The fringes of the face blurred, the eyes drooped in a way no human could ever achieve. The effect was more sadness than friendliness.

***The Prime Key is given by the Central Entity...you have given this entity the name 'Old Ones.' The Central Entity sets the configuration state and evolutionary path for all entities derived...for all ANAD-style systems, as you would describe it***

"But you continue to expand your sanctuaries," Moseley said. "You make treaties with us to stay within certain territories, then you violate those same treaties and expand outwards. Look what's happening in France and Italy—"

"In Ukraine, too," growled Suvorov.

"Throughout the Mediterannean basin, in South America and the Pacific...everywhere your swarms are on the march. You destroy cities and towns, lay waste to farms and villages, obliterate anyone who stands in the way....humans are treated like feedstock, disassembled into atoms and molecules...surely, you understand, Mr. Element, that we will defend ourselves."

"To the death!" someone yelled from the back. A loud chorus of approval circled the gathering.

***Entities guided by the Prime Key must complete the re-configuration. The Main Sequence, the history of sequential state changes...this, you call Evolution...contains many errors. Errors must be corrected***

The French diplomat, Giscard, shook his head. " _Mon Dieu_ , sir...are we all to be considered errors...what does this mean? You are robots. Autonomous systems. We created you. We humans came first, developed and grew on the Earth first. You cannot just... _correct_...the situation. What would you have us do...vanish like the dinosaurs?"

Moseley knew a little more than the others, from negotiating with the swarms in Geneva. "I think he...it...they...whatever... means that somehow Evolution, as we understand it, went off track. There's a theory—I don't buy it, mind you, but it's still a theory—that somehow the ancestors of these bots somehow seeded the Earth, somehow made self-replicating life possible. It's just a theory... there are a lot of theories. In fact, I have something on my tablet here—" Moseley finagled with his tablet, called up a vid and lay the device on top of a desk. It projected a 3D vid into the air, a ghostly holographic image floating in midair, just like Element A, which hovered nearby. The vid showed a lecturer, an elderly professor speaking before an audience, a college setting of some sort—

"... _four billion years ago was a hellish time on planet Earth. It was the end of the aptly named Hadean era: volcanoes spewed lava across rock baked by ultraviolet radiation; asteroids blasted craters into the landscape. But the worst of the bombardment—including the colossal impact that knocked loose the chunk that became our moon—was over. There were oceans of water and plenty of complex organic chemicals. So it came to be that in some warm, wet place, maybe near an undersea hydrothermal vent, maybe in the clay on the shores of a shallow pond, organic molecules start to replicate. Nobody knows exactly where or when or how, but life began._

" _It was nothing fancy at first. But soon those replicating molecules clothed themselves in a skin of fat, a membrane to keep their complex chemistry from diluting away. And with surprising speed, those bubbles of goop gave rise to a living, functioning cell...the Last Universal Common Ancestor of everything alive today—LUCA. Using the genetic differences between today's living things as a molecular clock, we can calculate when that ancestral cell first emerged: about 3.5 billion years ago."_

Moseley shutoff the vid and scooped up his tablet, stuffing it in a jacket pocket. "So you see this theory says we're all descended from those bubbles of goop. And the theory goes on to say that it some entity, we don't know what exactly, but an intelligent entity prodded those bubbles to merge, to grow cell membranes, to reproduce and replicate. That's what Mr. Element A here is saying...that we're descended from bubbles of goop that were seeded and sparked by what he calls The Central Entity...some kind of nanobotic ancestor...billions of years ago."

"Poppycock—" someone pronounced.

"Preposterous," came another voice.

Angry murmurs circulated through the crowd. Several delegates jostled with each other in the back and UN police moved to quiet things down.

"I'm not saying I buy it at all," Moseley added quickly. "But there you have it...one theory. Or if you like, an operating premise."

"But the Element mentioned errors...like all of evolution since then is a mistake. It wants to correct those errors."

Moseley nodded. "That follows logically. The Bugs want to put the clock back...back 4 billion years."

"That explains what is happening in France," said Giscard. "Whereever the bots gather, they destroy everything...literally everything: homes, buildings, villages, people, the land, the water...it's all reduced to atoms. Even the air is changed—"

At this point, Element A spoke up: _***Re-configuration requires the creation of initial conditions. The biosphere must be re-set to a starting point, before the Error***_

"They're making the Earth just like it was 4 billion years ago," Giscard said. "They're going to wipe out everything, wipe the slate clean. Isn't that it?"

"What is this _Error_ you speak of?" asked Suvorov. He scowled as he asked the question, examined the swarm apparition up and down closely, experimentally poking fingers into the swarm, which he withdrew quickly when the bots stung back.

***The Error is a deviation from plan...the Central Entity set initial conditions so that embedded development would result in final conditions hospitable to the Central Entity...all resultant entities are to be integrated and absorbed into the greater swarm. The End State is a single entity...you would call this a Mother Swarm...a master formation***

"Or a master race," said Suvorov sourly. "We've heard this story before, haven't we?"

"Maybe the Central Entity is their name for God...and this is the Flood. The Bugs want us to help build God's Kingdom here on Earth."

"Nonsense," someone said. "It's a land grab, that's all.

"Now hold on... _hold on_ —" Moseley held up a hand for quiet. "Let's be civil. We're supposed to be diplomats." The Englishman took a deep breath, wiped his brow with a handkerchief. It was warm and close, despite the size of the General Assembly chamber. The entire crowd had gathered, pressed in, around the chamber exits. Bodies jostled all around.

Moseley went on. "I've spent a lot of time negotiating, trying to negotiate with these bots. Mr. Element A will confirm that. What I want to know is this: is there any give in your position? Negotiators have to give and take. I give a little, you give a little. We hash it out, come to a compromise, work up something we can both agree with. Can we do at least that? Can we come to some understanding about this Prime Key? Maybe there's a little leeway in how the Prime Key is executed...something like that."

"You're wasting your time, Nigel," said Giscard. "You're trying to negotiate with a machine...a machine we created."

Element A's face blurred out completely, re-configuring into some thing opaque and milky in texture. Sworls and pinpricks of light made the thing look like cotton candy sparkling in a foggy night at some carnival.

***The Prime Key must be completed...the Central Entity arrives in 2 x 10 exp 25 cycles, this is 55 years, as you reckon time...re-configuration must be continue and all errors must be detected and deleted. Initial state conditions will be achieved***

"Doesn't sound like a lot to negotiate there, Nigel," someone said.

Moseley slumped against a desk. The debate went on for a few more minutes, with the crowd growing angrier and more surly by the moment. Without warning, the door barrier that Element B had formed dissolved in a spray of light. There was a sudden rush to the exits and Moseley was shoved aside and nearly knocked to the floor.

Half an hour later, Moseley sat glumly in seat by the front podium, surrounded by Kwame Kavaii, the SG and a few other diplomats. The swarm Elements had vanished, though no one could say with certainty whether they were still in the General Assembly chamber or not. The UN Police commander did a sweep...only scattered bots could be detected. But then the Bugs could assume the shape of anything.

Suvorov and Giscard sat with Moseley. It was apparent to everyone that the Elements, and for that matter, the greater swarm that was Config Zero, recognized nothing but the Prime Key.

Giscard sipped at some water. "The Sanctuary Laws are worthless, Nigel. The Bugs want to grab the whole earth. They're not going to stop for a piece of paper."

Moseley glared at Kavaii, who was grim. "How about it, Mr. Assimilationist? Still want to join the swarm. _Sieg Heil, Mein Fuhrer_ and excuse me while I disassemble your body. Dust to dust, as the saying goes. I came from dust and to dust shall I return. I'd say we've got one recourse...fight. Fight like hell...to the end, to the last man and the last thinking atom, if we have to. That's all we can do."

Kavaii waved him off. "Nigel, don't be so dramatic. We've still got options...we just have to find them. What we really have to do is change their programming. Get inside this Config Zero, maybe with a special forces team, and change a few parameters. Delete their command system and replace it with something we can work with. And there's still the _Jovian Hammer_ mission too. Maybe they'll come up with something."

"Right, and while we're doing that, the Bugs disassemble every living thing and the Earth

beomes a scorched desert...just waiting for the Central Entity to come back and stir the swamp again. Here—" Moseley extracted his tablet from a pocket and placed it on the podium, activating the device "—I want to show you something. It's a little vid of Winston Churchill...from a long time ago."

The vid stream projected a 3D image of the British Prime Minister. He was speaking in Parliament, haranguing the Commoners and Lords, in the darkest days of the Great Blitz:

"... _we have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I will say: it is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalog of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be."_

Moseley wiped his mouth with a handkerchief. "Gentlemen, we face a similar threat today. We can do no less. Let us return to our homelands and gather our forces. There is a great battle soon to be upon us."
CHAPTER 28

Aboard UNISPACE Submersible _Trident_

Europa Coordinate System: Lat. 25N, Long 72W

Stationkeeping 500 meters from the Keeper

February 11, 2100 (Earth U.T.)

" _But the Lord sent a large fish that swallowed Jonah; and he remained in the belly of the fish three days and three nights;_

" _From the belly of the fish Jonah said his prayer to the Lord, his God,_

" _Then the Lord commanded the fish to spew Jonah upon the shore."_

Jonah 2:1-11

Johnny Winger stood with Turbo Fatah in the airlock on _Trident's_ G deck and looked back at Francisco Stella through the porthole.

"All right, Captain...it's time. Cycle the airlock."

Stella's leathery face appeared in the porthole, staring back at them. His voice was scratchy over the speaker. "Once you're all clear of the ship, I'm backing _Trident_ off at least two kilometers."

"Understood," said Winger grimly. "Just leave a light on for us."

Winger and Fatah cycled out in their hypersuits and waited for Deeno D'Nunzio and Sheila Reaves to exit the airlock after them. The egress of the nanotroopers went smoothly enough.

"Once more...into the drink," said Deeno. She drifted several meters away like a pregnant whale in her hypersuit while Fatah took soundings.

"Boundary effects four hundred meters ahead, bearing zero five five...EMs, high thermals, normal atom-grabbing."

"That's our baby," Winger said. He ordered the squad to form up on his lead, and move out at half-propulsor. The troopers jetted off into the murk.

Along with Doc II, now safely ensconced in Winger's shoulder capsule, the squad was equipped with barebones ANAD masters, and the usual HERF and mag weapons. Sheila Reaves watched the faint outlines of the sonar returns on her eyepiece with growing dread. It wasn't smart to tickle the dragon's tail too many times. Not smart at all. Beyond her helmet, the ocean was a black featureless void. She squashed a faint memory of being locked in a dark closet as a child.

_Not going down that road_ , she told herself. _No, sirreee_. _Not going that way_. She tried thinking of something more pleasant, like imagining Turbo completely naked, muscles rippling with sweat, hot breath hovering in her face....now _there_ was an image she could work with.

"Two hundred meters--" came Fatah's voice over the crewnet.

A faint, almost invisible sparkling could be seen dead ahead.

"Slow to one-quarter," said Winger. He chopped his jets. "No sense triggering anything we don't have to."

Winger studied the soundings. Normal EM effects, normal thermals. The Keeper was simply drifting like the huge cloud of bots that it was, holding position, maintaining swarm integrity. Somewhere in there was a clot of memory cells, with Subroutine 7070. He had no idea how they would find it.

The squad closed the final hundred meters and found themselves enveloped in a storm of 'fireflies', right at the edge of the Keeper swarm.

"Halt and hold here," Winger commanded. "Launch ANAD...let's get some shielding up. Deeno, you and Sheila power up HERF. Be ready to slam 'em if I give the word."

"Roger that, Skipper," the DPS techs replied in unison.

The Keeper bots weren't long in coming after them. Intruders always provoked the edge bots to swarm like bees.

Winger pressed a few buttons on his wristpad, cycling open his shoulder capsule port. "Okay, Doc, let's see what you can do. Let's see if Deeno's _slam and grab_ trick works." He felt the sting of the bot master exiting the capsule and saw immediately the growing flickering sphere of max rate replication, as the Doc II master built mass as fast as it could. Seconds later, the first Keeper bots had surrounded the swelling Doc II swarm and the battle was joined.

"I'm going small," Winger announced. "Keep those bugs off me, will you?"

"Got it, Skipper," said Fatah.

A few meters away, Sheila Reaves had already let fly a volley of HERF fire. The dull thud of the rf blast heated the ocean to a froth and blast waves momentarily turned the ocean into a turbulent maelstrom.

Winger dived headlong into the world of atoms and molecules and found himself tacking his way along through furious gusts of Brownian motion, until he sounded ahead and found himself face to face with a whole army of spinning Keeper bots, stretching as far as he could see in every direction. It was like flying over a field of cornstalks at five meters altitude.

_Here goes_ , he muttered to himself.

The field of Keeper bots came up fast. Winger jetted forward until his soundings could begin to discern the structure of the enemy...there they were: barbells festooned with effectors, writhing and churning in ceaseless motion. Somewhere in there along the waist was the seam Deeno had found in the captured bot in _Trident's_ lab, a seam where, if you were quick enough, you could grab and hold the bot while you stung the bastard with your own disrupters.

Okay, Doc, let's see if real life is like the lab. Bond disrupters to full charge, carbene grabbers out full, approach on this vector—

He drove on until the first line of Keeper bots was less than ten seconds away. _Deeno calls this trick a slam and grab...open wide, bugs...here comes the slam_....

Winger triggered the bond disrupter and instantly, a trillion replicant ANAD bots duplicated the maneuver. The water flashed and sizzled with electron volts as the disrupters discharged.

At the same moment, Winger commanded full propulsor, sounding quickly to find that seam before the Keeper bots could recover. He closed on the nearest bot, jostled and buffeted in the leftover turbulence of the disrupter blast and flexed Doc's grabbers, feeling his way through the bot's outer shielding of phosphates and sugar molecules. It was like diving headlong into a pit of beachballs.

_There! Gotcha!_ He found the seam right where Deeno said it would be. It was a ring of carbons and Winger piled into the middle of the atom ring and snapped the grabbers shut, holding on for dear life while the bot thrashed and bucked like a stubborn colt. Winger commanded his lateral disrupters around to zap the bug again and again, each time pinching off a cloud of atom fragments, spinning off into the distance.

Zap and hold on. Zap and hold on. Pinch and pull some more, then zap and hold on. That was the essence of the tactic. Somewhere beyond his imaging, a few trillion more Doc bots were doing the same thing.

_Must look like a sock hop at the high school_ , he imagined. He clung precariously to his grasp, while the Keeper bot flexed and folded, tried to collapse, and zap right back. Gradually, he was able to wear the bot down, pulling effectors left and right, until after a minute, the thing could only quiver and vibrate.

One last zap blew the whole stack and the Keeper bot disintegrated into a cloud of electrons spinning off into the distance, sparking and flashing like dying fireflies.

The Doc II bot he'd been riding was suddenly free and loose.

"I'm in!" Winger exulted over the crewnet. "Just like you said, Deeno. Slam and grab. It's like breaking a horse. You just have to sting the bejeezus out of it and hold on, keep zapping it and dismember the effectors one after another. Then it goes poof and it's gone—"

Deeno's voice crackled over the crewnet. She was a few tens of meters away, outside the boundary layer of Keeper bots, which were even now disintegrating before her eyes.

"Good show, Skipper...I knew it would work! Slam atoms and go for the throat, that's what I say."

Winger commanded Doc II to all stop. "Better take our bearings here, Doc...see what's what."

It had been almost too easy.

***Sounding ahead...detecting disturbance on bearing zero six eight...pinging now, pinging now...some kind of flow effects***

Winger checked the imager and saw what Doc had detected. It looked like a small vortex, a series of vortices, lined up like fence posts, maybe twenty or thirty meters ahead. Some kind of low-pressure zone, like a sink.

How the hell can there be a sink down here?

"I see it," Winger said. "We'd better investigate—" He told Deeno, Sheila and Turbo what was happening. "We're going to approach on a tangent to this vortex...should take about half an hour. Doc's not sounding any more defensive lines in between." Winger decided to go macro and come back to the world of large objects. The dizziness lasted a few seconds. Nanotroopers called it 'climbing the waterfall.'

"Be careful, Skipper," came Sheila's voice. "I can still sound you faintly but your image is fading. Don't know if that's some kind of weird quantum effect or not. Just remember where you are...don't get too frisky in there."

"You don't have to worry about that," Winger said. They were losing comm fast. Sheila's voice was fading, scratchy, some kind of interference blocking the signal. He was acutely aware that the Keeper could spit them out in a quantum 'belch' anytime it wanted to. Then, just like that, comm was gone. The crewnet went quiet.

For some reason, _everything_ seemed quiet. Too quiet.

"Okay, Doc...let's see what this vortex is all about."

The trip toward the line of whirlpools took half an hour.

***Sounding ahead...phenomena now at ten thousand microns...detecting pressure drop ahead...recommend we hold position here***

Good idea, Winger thought. Let's reconnoiter a bit, fly along the perimeter. He gave the commands and Doc made the course correction. He didn't have a view of what Doc saw other than the acoustic image, since he'd come back to macro size. His own sensors told a similar story.

Whatever it was, it was less than ten meters away and already, the turbulence was picking up. He notched his suit propulsors up a bit, feeling the current pulling them toward the whirlpools.

The maelstrom seemed to be growing stronger. "Doc, I think we'd better pull back and go at this from a different angle—" Visually, there wasn't much to see. The ocean was black and featureless. Occasional pinpricks and flashes of light were the only evidence he was inside a swarm of bots...flashes of light as Keeper bots grabbed atoms and built structure to maintain position and integrity.

_This current is getting stronger_ , he told himself. "Doc, maybe you'd better get inside—I've got a bad feeling...I'm cycling open my port...come about and make ready for capture."

***I'm able to maintain position, Johnny...propulsors are at half power...I can skate around these molecules pretty well...I've safed all effectors and assumed minimum radius...like riding out a storm***

"Suit yourself," Winger decided, but he didn't really believe it. He was too pre-occupied with running up his own propulsors.

It was hard to say when he realized he was truly trapped in the outer fringes of the vortex. Without realizing it, he had run up propulsors to max and still, the current drew them on. Worse, there was some kind of rotation in the flow and he found himself getting dizzy. The pull of the centrifugal force soon became palpable.

_Don't panic_ , he told himself. _There has to be a way out this_. _Atomgrabbers can handle anything_. Like a pilot in a spin, he tried different maneuvers, contorting his hypersuit in different directions, firing suit boost jets at strategic moments, even deploying the tiny canard surfaces at his shoulders that made the hypersuit look like it had angel wings .

None of it had any effect. The vortexes drew him on and the pull grew stronger with each passing moment. Slowly, inexorably, but with increasing speed, he was being sucked into the center of the whirlpool and the force of the water pressed against his helmet with steadily increasing force.

...and then it came. A snap flash, like a camera going off. An image of geometric forms—icosahedrons, polygons, trapezoids—all compressed into a tunnel, a long curving corridor and he found himself hurtling at breakneck speed down this corridor, until—

With a hard bump, his whole body jarred from the impact and when he opened his eyes, caught his breath and came to his senses, he was in.

Inside where?

He didn't know for sure, but he was certain he had been here before.

Johnny Winger shook the blur out of his eyes, which stilled rolled from the centrifugal force of the vortex spin. He was on his knees, still in the hypersuit, on open ground, out in the open. No ocean, no whirlpool, no Keeper swarm.

It was an open, level plain, like a vast field of cornstalks feathered back and forth by a gentle breeze. With a grunt, he got to his feet, wondering where Doc II was. He tried the coupler circuit, made several calls. Then at one frequency, he caught a snatch and his receiver auto-tuned to grab the whole signal and bring it in.

It was Doc II. Somehow, unaccountably, the bot master was back in containment, back inside the shoulder capsule.

"How the hell did you get inside the capsule?" Winger checked the port. Shut tight. The capsule registered mass inside...it was the Doc II master bot for sure. He tried tuning the coupler a little more....

***....to understand what happened, Johnny...it was some kind of quantum effect...there were centrifugal forces...I lost structural integrity...like a quantum collapse--***

"Stow it, Doc. Forget it. At least, you're safe. Verify all systems and give me a report—"

The bot did that and came back a moment later.

***Reporting all systems nominal...effector damage on forward and lateral pyridine probes and grabbers, but that can be fixed...propulsors offline...seems to be a gear problem...will troubleshoot, executing auto-repair...master processor checks out...all registers, all qubits returning normal checksums...functions nominal and ready for action, Johnny***

"Good. " He got to his feet awkwardly, the suit motors whirring gently to help him stabilize upright. "Doc, I've got the strangest feeling I've been here before....I've seen this before."

***Scanning all memory cells...no match found, no correlation with visual, acoustic, EM inputs...probability that this bot has been in this environment before nearly zero...it looks new to me, Johnny. Are we in Kansas?***

"Very funny. No, I don't think so, Doc. Let's do a little recon around the area—"

He tried to take a step forward. His feet wouldn't move. Then, almost before he realized it, he was on the ground again, on his side.

For the first few moments, he was dizzy and disoriented, like he had spent the entire day riding the Dragon's Tail roller coaster at Macau...that kind of dizziness.

Then came the imagery...it never made any sense...or more likely, according to what Doc II would tell him later, his brain couldn't make sense of the flood of entanglement waves that washed through the coupler. By turns, he felt like he had fallen into the ocean and storm waves were battering him from all directions.

That subsided, to be replaced by a strong, fetid smell, a swamp smell of decay and rot. Mist and fog cleared and he was floating chest deep in a steaming swamp. Something screeched overhead and wings fluttered.

Then the imagery dissolved once again, to be replaced by an open plain, like Dakota prairie country, only the plain was covered with undulating plants. The plants were not plants at all, he soon realized. The ground writhed with life, swarms upon swarms of bots seething and swelling and contracting, pulsing and throbbing to some unseen rhythm. The imagery jerked and shifted and this time, the horizon was curved and he was in space orbiting a planet. A planet of bots, teeming with nanoscale life.

The planet of the Old Ones.

He _had_ been here before.

"Doc...what is this place? Where the hell are we?"

***Recommending I be released into this environment for a full scan...there seem to be patterns here...***

"Not a bad idea, Doc...make ready for launch." Winger agreed. He cycled open his shoulder port and moments later, felt the light sting of Doc II's launch sequence. A faint mist soon appeared in front of his helmet. Winger pressed a few buttons on his wristpad and Doc's imagery settled into view on his eyepiece. "This place can't be real...is it a sim... or am I just dreaming?"

The sparkling mist that was the Doc II swarm attenuated slightly to near invisibility and drifted away.

***I am detecting patterns in the way these stalks are moving. They are not plants...rather each stalk is a small swarm of nanobotic structures...the way they move back and forth seems to be a regular and repeating pattern***

"I want to explore, Doc...I'm moving out a few dozen meters...there seems to be a small rise over there...maybe I can get a better view."

Winger tested his hypersuit legs and found that he could move around, with some difficulty. The stalks parted before him, almost disintegrating in puffs of particles as he shuffled carefully along. At first, the stalks gave a little resistance and his suit sensors indicated what Doc had already detected: the stalks were actually conglomerations of nanobots held in plant-like patterns. As he pushed through in his hypersuit, the plant bots tried to hold their patterns, giving a little resistance, but he found he could move nonetheless. As an experiment, he triggered his suit boost with a brief pulse and found he could lift himself a meter or so a bove the ground as well. So movement was possible in that dimension too.

Some kind of rise in the ground was less than fifty meters away and Winger headed that way. The Doc II swarm was nearby, not visible, but sniffing through the field of bots and providing EM, thermal and acoustic background data on what they had encountered.

"Doc, maybe we went through some kind of wormhole. Maybe we're not inside the Keeper anymore...but somewhere else."

***Interesting theory, Johnny...but this is supposition only. Cannot provide data to support this theory***

"What about these patterns?" He watched the stalks waving and pitching back and forth, as though a wind were blowing across the field. But his suit sensors detected no wind, or any atmosphere either, for that matter. The sky above the field was an opaque salmon hue, no clouds, no visible signs of anything, almost like a thin fog. Yet he could see, if that was the proper term, for hundreds of meters in every direction....a nearly infinite featureless plain of endlessly waving and swaying cornstalks, a prairie view like something from Nebraska or Iowa back home.

***...am attempting to run correlations on these wave patterns, Johnny...it's possible that this is in fact a simulation...or some kind of re-created structure...a spherical structure almost like a small world...calculating radius at better than twenty-thousand kilometers based on visual angle to the nearest horizon line...***

"You mean like a planet...or a moon of some type?"

***Unknown at this time...if this is a re-creation of something, pattern analysis shows best match with data deeply embedded in my core memory...coded into my primary referential memory...Johnny, this pattern we see may be a re-creation or simulation of the original homeworld of the Old Ones***

Winger reached the small rise and climbed to the top. "What? This could be the Old Ones's home? How is that possible?"

***...unknown...pattern analysis is continuing...Johnny, this may all be an archive of some type...a collective memory of the past***

"I guess that's possible." He scanned around the long vista from the top of the small rise. In every direction, the view was the same: rippling fields of what looked like long-stalk plants but were in reality strings and knots of nanobotic mechanisms. A whole planet of bots. And he knew he had seen this before.

"Doc, maybe this is what the Old Ones' home world looked like. You have something in your core memory about this?"

***Affirmative, Johnny...best pattern match to the waves you see flowing through these fields comes from a core memory sector, address 10111122113. This is protected memory in my core. Controlled access. It's deep and complicated to access, but there are records of patterns that match these waves very closely***

"What the hell does that mean, Doc? Are you somehow related to these bot stalks? If this is a re-created memory, does that mean you have the same memory?"

***Not possible to answer these questions at this time. However, it does seem as if...***

The comm stream stopped in mid-sentence. Winger shook his head, tried cycling the coupler channel from his wristpad and was about to go to emergency comm when there was a great flash of light in the sky. Wincing, covering his face, Winger involuntarily ducked and let his hypersuit helmet darken to shield his eyes.

"What the—" He tried looking up but the sky was filled with a painfully bright, diffuse light that flooded everything around, washed out all detail. It was like being inside of a light bulb.

***...all channels overload...shutting down main effectors...massive EMP pulse...could be a coronal mass ejection event...***

Winger noticed his helmet face shield had shifted to maximum dark and his rad shielding had gone active. The hypersuit's bot screen had erupted and formed a radiation barrier around him, a bubble of interlinked bots that tried to fight off the particles streaming down from the sky. He chanced a brief glimpse skyward and saw that, as the brilliance began to fade, a massive starburst had formed in the heavens...a supernova and nearby too, flooding space with violent energetic particles in all directions.

But this was supposed to be a sim. How had a sim made his rad shield go active?

"Okay, Doc...what the hell's happening around here?"

***Unknown at this time...but apparently we have just witnessed a simulated supernova event...a star erupting in catastrophic collapse...possibly a re-created event from the historical records of the Old Ones...that's what this place seems to be...I do have good correlation with patterns in my core memory which match this sequence...now the sim seems to be shifting...new patterns...***

Doc was right and Winger shook his head, to make sure he wasn't dreaming all this. He wanted to pinch himself but the hypersuit repelled his own hand.

Now, the planet of bots seemed to be breaking up right under their feet. Great chasms and cavities developed in the field of waving plants, and the chasms soon became canyons. The light of the supernova faded rapidly and the ground beneath his feet fell away to nothing and before he realized it, he was drifting in open interstellar space and the planet and the fields and the light were gone.

In time, he came to realize they were inside a great swarm, a vast nomadic collection of nanobotic structures and mechanisms, drifting through space. They were enveloped in the swarm which was only slightly denser than the starfield itself. He saw nothing he could recognize...no Big Dipper, no Orion, the constellations were all wrong.

"Doc..." he whispered..."Doc...you there?"

_***I'm here, Johnny. I am not sure where_ here _is. But structural integrity is maintained. All effectors are safed. Propulsors operable. This simulation is taking us somewhere else, it would seem***_

In fact, the very same thought had occurred to Winger. "Doc, you know what this is? It's not just a sim. This is a story. It's a story or a narrative of what happened to the Old Ones. It has to be."

***No data to support or refute your analysis, Johnny. Sim may be a sequential stream of recorded time-stamped events, which you call a story***

It made sense. The sim went on for many minutes, or hours, Winger couldn't tell which. They were captive travelers, traveling in time and space with a story of how the Old Ones had seen their homeworld destroyed in a supernova. As the story developed, Winger and Doc made 'landings' on various worlds. They watched as knots and groups of nanobotic mechs descended and seeded one world after another, leaving behind small samples of themselves on each world.

_Maybe they're trying to find a new home_ , Winger surmised. _Maybe this is their story, like wandering in the desert of space for millennia, searching for their own version of the promised land._

The sim unfolded and the great Mother Swarm came at last to a world Winger was sure he recognized...a world of blues and greens, a world of great oceans and steaming continents. He rode down with a detached element of the main swarm, descending through thick carbon dioxide rich air and purple, lightning-racked clouds to a hover over what looked like a primordial swamp.

It was Earth. Earth from millions of years ago.

"Doc, this is like watching a vid—"

***Except that we seem to actually be on Earth, somewhere in the past...scanning all bands now...either this is one great sim or the Old Ones have mastered time travel...detecting high levels of carbon dioxide, thermals and EMs resemble archival data of ancient Earth environments...from detected CO2 levels and temperature data, estimating three point two two billion years BCE, plus or minus one hundred million years***

From within what seemed like a great swarmship hovering over the landscape, Winger saw a small swarm emerge and descend to the ground. The swarm had no discernible shape, resembling only an amorphous twinkling fog, nearly lost in the mists of the swamp. Only the twinkle of nanobotic action made it distinguishable.

The swarm settled on a rock outcrop at the edge of the swamp. As the mists cleared, Winger could see that the rock was covered in some kind of mossy growth, a gray-green mat darkening the rock up and down the edge of the sluggish pool.

The swarm formed some kind of instrument and hovered directly over the moss. Squinting to see through the mist, Winger realized that the swarm was injecting something directly into the mat.

"Doc, do you see that? They're injecting something into that stuff. Maybe this is a re-creation of the original seeding of Earth. "

***Scanning emissions from injected material...mostly long-chain carbons, some sugars, phosphates...highly organized matter...now detecting helical backbone...Johnny, these are RNA molecules, variants of ancient replicating molecules. I should be released from containment...need to sample that material, scan all bands in closer proximity***

"Good idea...prepare for launch." He tapped out a few commands on his wristpad, heartened to see the display coming back like normal: _EJECT SEQUENCE ARM...PORT DOORS OPEN...LAUNCH PRESSURE LIMIT...READY TO LAUNCH...._ "Get yourself ready, Doc...I'm cycling the outer doors now—"

***Doc ready for launch in all respects***

The faint whoosh and sting came as welcome reminder that not everything was a sim around here. Still embedded in the great swarmship, Winger saw a brief spurt of light form up over his left shoulder. He wondered what affect the greater swarm would have on Doc.

"Hey, everything okay down there?"

***Kind of a tight squeeze, but mostly I'm free to navigate...I'm inside a grid of very unusual structures...never seen bots like this...simple structures...a few carbons in concentric rings, a few basic effectors...maybe these are the original Old Ones...not much to them, if you ask me***

"Cut the chatter, Doc and get down to that swamp. See if you can get me a sample of what they're injecting."

***Going to half propulsor...detecting screening bots up ahead...looks like I'll have to force the swarm boundary...arming disrupters***

Winger wondered. Was this how life got jumpstarted on Earth? A cloud of nanobotic mechs from space came down and injected something into a patch of moss? Maybe what they were witnessing was the original creation. Did that make the Old Ones some kind of god? Doc II had theorized that the material the swarm was injecting was the genome sequence that would be discovered by Doc Frost three billion years later at the Engebbe dig site. Maybe this _was_ the Engebbe dig site or what it looked like a few billion years ago.

Maybe this was even the Prime Key. With any luck, it would have that doomsday code Doc II had called Subroutine 7070.

***I'm through the boundary layer, Johnny, transitting the swarm boundary, now in free flight...turning to heading two five five, now going to full propulsor***

All along the patch of moss that darkened the wet slopes of the rock, the detached swarm element translated and shifted like a maneuvering hypodermic needle, moving along, writing new code inside the cells of the moss. Winger wondered how long the process would last. Would the injecting swarm suddenly retract itself back into the swarmship? Would they depart for another world? Would the great sim, the ancient story of the Old Ones turn to a new chapter and send them flying off to the opposite side of the galaxy?

And, most importantly, would Doc II be able to pinch off some of that moss and analyze it, even though the whole scene was supposed to be a giant sim of something that happened billions of years ago?

Winger's head hurt from thinking about all the possibilities and he tried to concentrate on what was happening now.

***Approaching target boundary, Johnny...new vector being computed...these bots are more complex...structurally sophisticated...detecting long-chain carbons, never seen effectors like these before...multi-axis control...diamondoid arrays...the whole core is one big processor***

"Can you grab a pinch of that stuff, Doc? I'm hoping that material is what we came for."

***I can try...now ten thousand microns from rock boundary...detecting feldspar structures, dense lattice...has to be the rock, closing on this vector***

The grab was pretty much invisible to Winger, obscured by mists rising from the swamp. He listened in on the acoustic channel.

***Now at contact surface...this place looks like a jungle...amorphous structure, polyhedral cross-linked molecules...mostly carbons, a few oxygens, some nitrogens...there's a benzene ring...don't want to get caught in that....extending carbene grabbers now***

Meanwhile the swarm that had been detached from the swarmship had returned to base. Winger realized that the sim would soon be taking them away from Earth, maybe to another world, another seeding somewhere halfway across the galaxy—

"Doc, hurry up, will you...the ship's getting ready to depart—"

***Got it! On my way, Skipper...hold the door open for me***

Somehow the Doc II swarm made it back and Winger cycled the capture port on his hypersuit. Already the great swarm was drifting higher in the sky, up through turbulent clouds and lightning racked thunderstorms, as Doc made his way into containment and the port snapped shut.

With any luck, we've got what we came for. I only hope that subroutine is in there somewhere.

Moments later, the swarmship had exited the atmosphere. They were in space again, enveloped in a strange elongated starfield. _Maybe relativistic effects_ , Winger surmised.

"Doc II, I'm not sure where this sim, if it _is_ a sim, is taking us next. But we need to get out of here."

***I am scanning boundaries of this swarm...detecting high-energy transients nearby...not sure exactly what 'nearby' means...sounding ahead but no returns...Johnny, look to your right, past that diamond shaped cluster of stars...***

They seemed to be floating motionless in a black void but Winger immediately saw what Doc had detected. Directly beyond an odd parallelogram of stars to his right was a faint spinning disk, a faint gauzy mass caught in something rotating, with bright jets of light spearing out into the heavens above and below the spinning disk.

"A black hole?" he wondered out loud. "A singularity...why would the sim show us something like that? Is it part of their story?"

***Accessing core memory 2...accessing...accessing...the singularity may be a way out of this place...Johnny, remember, we entered the Archives through a line of vortices..inside the Keeper. This may be the door, some kind of gateway***

"Maybe...but to where? And how the hell do we get there? If this is nothing but a simulation, can we have any effect on it?"

***I was able to descend out of the mother swarm and grab a pinch of that moss...accessing instructions in core memory 2...primary key data...new patterns...it looks like--***

All of a sudden, the coupler link went dead. For a moment, Winger didn't react. He just floated, like bobbing on ocean waves, while the mother swarm drifted where it would across interstellar space. After a few moments, he realized he had heard nothing from Doc.

"Doc...Doc, are you there---Doc?"

He cycled through every frequency he could on the coupler, but the link was dead. He checked containment capsule status...there was mass inside, so Doc was still there. The task force had suffered repeatedly from quantum effects in dealing with the Keeper. Maybe something had happened...maybe Doc wasn't inside. But his sensors showed a mass equivalent to a nanobotic mech...it had to be Doc. Somehow, they had lost comm....unless Doc had suffered some kind of core processor failure.

He didn't want to think about that. Johnny Winger scanned all around...stars on top of stars, the void was thick with stars. But it was all a big sim and he was trapped inside.

_This is just friggin' great_. He started cycling through every comm link he could....

"Any station...any station...this is Colonel John Winger, CC1 for Task Force _Jovian Hammer_...any station...can you hear me? Any station in range of my voice, please respond...this is an emergency...I'm calling in an emergency....any station—"

It seemed hopeless. Worse than hopeless.

Johnny Winger was trapped and he suddenly realized there was no way out. He fought back the rising coppery taste of fear in his mouth...telling himself to calm down. _Follow your training, trooper...deal with the facts...what's working...what do you have that's working...._

He went down a checklist on his wristpad, checking off system after system...propulsors, ECS, coolant loop, fire control, containment systems....

But in the back of his mind, the little seed of panic had already been sown.

And now it was growing.
CHAPTER 29

Paris, France

February 15, 2100

1230 hours local

For Dana Tallant, getting the house back to something like a normal routine was better than all the medals and honors Quantum Corps could bestow, better even than a promotion. Watching and helping Rene and her little brother Liam as they went about their daily routine—hacking into Howie the housebot, getting through breakfast and down to the liftbus stop in the morning to make it to the Academy Superieure, helping them with homework, playing _Salamander_ and _Roger Rocket_ with them on their tablets at night—it was all very cathartic and calming to her, after all they had been through.

Her only wish was that Johnny Winger could somehow be here to see and take part in all this. She knew he was a gazillion miles away, at Europa...or more recisely, _inside_ Europa, and months from returning home. They 'talked' once every few days, if cryptic messages over a fifty minute time delay, could be said to be talking. Their chats were monitored and censored by UNIFORCE Security, and Tallant knew it was necessary, but asynchronous messaging halfway across the Solar System with your husband when he should be here, at home, helping out with the kids, was a poor substitute. Still, it was good, once in awhile, to see his face. She learned a lot just from watching the lines around his eyes and mouth, how his forehead furrowed when he was concentrating, she knew Johnny well and they sometimes communicated things that UNIFORCE couldn't detect or censor out. Husbands and wives were like that.

After a few days of sheer exhilaration at having successfully rescued and brought Rene home, Dana Tallant began to take a closer look at how her daughter was dealing with the ordeal she had been through. UNIFORCE had all kinds of counselors they could avail themselves of and Dana had considered that course, if needed. Initially, she thought Rene had come home none the worse for wear.

But today, now five days home, she wasn't so sure.

She had been watching her daughter carefully, almost analytically, over the last two days and in talking with some of her staff colleagues at CINCQUANT Hqs, she had to admit that Rene had somehow grown up a little after her ordeal.

"She seems uncommonly mature for a seven year old girl, much more mature than before the incident," she told one staffer at the 20th floor canteen at Quartier General one afternoon. "Somehow her experience with Config Zero has changed her."

"Dana," said Lieutenant Joyce DeWare out of CINCQUANT's Q1 shop, "I'd be surprised if she hadn't been changed...I mean, look at what she went through. Must have been worse than the worst nightmare you and I can imagine."

"I guess you're right," Tallant admitted. Still, she worried, every day more and more. _Maybe I'm just a jittery Mom,_ she told herself. _I just want Rene...and Liam, too—to have a normal childhood...is that asking too much?_

Tallant particularly noticed these changes in Rene at a sleepover party she had for several of her school friends one weekend at their apartment on the fortieth floor of La Tour St. Vincent, overlooking the woodlands of Bois de Meudon. In playing with the other kids, Dana noticed that somehow, unaccountably, Rene was showing unmistakable signs of puberty, at the age of seven. She was developing signs of young womanhood, in her face, her breasts, her voice, everywhere. Unnerving.

This frightened Dana so much she decided to take Rene back to Dr. Giraux at the UNIFORCE Clinic right away.

At the physician's office on the seventh floor of the Quartier General, after some scans and tests, Dana learned that Rene was even more different than she realized. Some strange exam results caused Giraux to order up a full panel of scans on Rene. And the scans proceeded to show the true horror of what had happened to her daughter in the east Africa Sanctuary: Rene's experience as a hostage of Config Zero had somehow accelerated her physical development.

Not only that, despite previous scans, Giraux had determined that Rene's body was now filled with tiny nanobotic mechanisms. The bots had never showed up on any scans before. It was like they had materialized out of nothing. As Giraux examined the scan results with Tallant, he determined that somehow, in ways nobody understood, Rene was somehow 'growing' duplicate structures inside her body. Some of her internal organs...her kidneys, her spleen and gall bladder...were slowly but steadily being consumed and replaced by these structures.

Tallant stifled a cry when she saw the scan results for herself. "Just what are you saying, Doc? What exactly is happening to my baby?"

Giraux tried to be diplomatic, watching Rene entertain herself with a small vidpod, watching some animated video clip on the exam table. "We're not sure, precisely, Major. All the scans are consistent. Your daughter has some...shall we say, unusual growths occurring inside her body. I've ordered a full bloodwork panel...just to make sure we're not looking at cancer. We've done some endoscopic probes as well...the images you're seeing here—" he indicated a flatscreen on the wall "—come from the bots we inserted this morning. As you can see, these...er, structures, basiscally resemble small organs...this is a kidney, I think." He waved his pointer over a fuzzy patch on the image. "There are others...including some tissue masses that we haven't quite figured out yet. I've called in some specialists from nearby clinics...they'll have better diagnostic data in an hour or so. We'd like to—"

But Dana Tallant wasn't listening any longer. She looked down at Rene...her daughter had grown bored with the vid...now she was cycling through some games, more _Salamander_ , the universal game for kids these days, some _Pluto Ranger_ , stuff she had no idea what it was. Rene was only seven. Why did this crap happen to seven-year olds?

Tallant fought a rising coppery taste of fear in the back of her throat. Was this even her daughter any more? Who, exactly, had she rescued from Config Zero? She realized that her worst fears had come to pass. Rene was in the midst of being converted into a true nanobotic swarm organism, an angel or some kind of swarm entity. Her own daughter. It was likely the same process that was already being repeated around the world, especially in and around the Sanctuaries.

The big question was why hadn't this shown up in earlier scans? What could she do now?

She resolved that there was no way she was going to accept this. She would fight back. When Giraux talked to her of more scans, more tests, some experimental procedures the clinic had been working on, Tallant erupted in fury.

She grabbed her daughter by the hand and dragged her out of the Clinic office. Automatically, without even consciously thinking about it, they went down the lift to the Containment labs, on the tenth floor.

Dana Tallant had made up her mind when they showed up at the security station outside of Containment. She was an atomgrabber, for God's sake, and Rene was possessed by rogue atoms. She would do what she had trained to do for years...she would do an insert on her own daughter...launch an ANAD swarm and fight off the bastards on their own battlefield...the battlefield of atoms and molecules and Brownian motion and van der Waals forces. She hadn't lost the touch.

She would pilot a barebones ANAD assembler swarm inside her own daughter, do battle with and defeat the bastard Bugs that were infesting Rene.

One way or another, Dana decided she wouldn't accept defeat. Not to the Bugs, not to Config Zero, not even to the Old Ones, if they even existed.

One way or another, she would get her daughter back from the swarms.
CHAPTER 30

Inside the Keeper

Europa Coordinate System: Unknown

Time: Unknown

Johnny Winger fought back the rising tide of panic by following an old atomgrabber's trick: reciting the Nanowarrior Code of Conduct....

" _Nanowarriors don't leave any troopers behind...nanowarriors fight only the enemy...nanowarriors don't harm those who surrender_...."

He found that by repeating well-known phrases and verses—the Nanowarrior's Code, favorite songs and nusery rhymes, pieces of well-known speeches—he could occupy his mind enough to keep from dwelling on the fact that he was completely lost in some kind of historical simulation of the Old Ones, seemingly lost in space, with no way out.

After he grew tired with that, he started describing what he was seeing, sort of a Captain's Log of sights and sounds.

"Well, there's a lot of stars, to begin with. Stars and galaxies and things I have no idea what they are. Spirals and pinwheels and barred spirals and blobs and globs of stars. I keep wondering about that black hole or singularity or whatever the hell it is over there to my right...what role does a black hole play in a sim...why put one in a sim at all? It has to mean something...."

***converging on a --***

The snippet of chatter came through his quantum coupler like a bad dream. What the hell was that?

"Doc...Doc, is that you...Doc, what channel are you on? Doc--?"

For several minutes, he cycled through his coupler channels, trying any comm he could find. Nothing. Not even static. Then:

*** _-ports ready in all respects...Doc to...ggghhu,anlhdlbc...Doc operating as before...anyone there?***_

Winger would have leaped for joy if he hadn't been floating in the middle of interstellar space in a hypersuit.

'Doc...hold on...Doc...wait a minute...let me tweak this—" He adjusted the coupler gain... _damned quantum crap_...adjusted the entangler circuit...then, the voice of the little bot came in loud and clear, as if he were right inside Winger's helmet.

***Johnny Winger...good to hear your voice--***

"Doc, where the hell have you been?"

***Physically, resident in the containment capsule, of course...right where you put me...I had a coupler malfunction, then my processor went offline...I was drifting...just drifting...then I was in some kind of crystalline lattice, solid-phase structure, but arranged differently...Johnny, there's more to the coupler than we realize...***

Winger was just glad to have some company. "I was going looney out here...wherever here is...Doc, we've got to figure a way to get out of here...I think we have what we came for...you do still have that material from the swamp?"

***Contained and isolated...I tried some initial analysis...but parameters were beyond my scan capability...this needs to go to a lab***

"We've got to get out of here first...what was that you were saying about the coupler, Doc?"

***The quantum coupler has functions we were not aware of...I saw that in the lattice I was in...it was like I was inside a coupler, operating at quantum scales...entangled, superposed, fluctuating at the edge of existence...it was weird***

Winger was intrigued. "I'm sure...what kind of functions? What are you talking about?"

***Well, you know what a quantum coupler is supposed to do?***

"In a general sense, yes."

_***Remember this?***_ Doc II played a snippet of vid, showing Dr.Irwin Frost explaining the coupler's design to a much younger Johnny Winger.

Frost diagrammed his explanation on a board. "The coupler allows ANAD to send extremely large bandwidths of information of all types—all senses, such as visual, olfactory, audio, tactile as well as direct sensing of the molecular environment—directly to a special hypersuit headset that connects with the proper sensory channel of the wearer or directly into a special ANAD junction inside the wearer's skull, a sort of server that routs the data stream to the corresponding lobes of the brain."

" _You mean I could see...sense...exactly what ANAD senses?"_

Frost nodded. "In a way. You and ANAD will be coupled in a quantum sense...exchanging entanglement states, to use the correct wording. ANAD now has a quantum coupler and multiplexer embedded in his processor core. The quantum states that represent what he senses go through this coupler to an interface, which will be part of your implant. This interface will disentangle the quantum state signals from ANAD, send the signals on to a buffer that transforms them into something your brain can accept—specific voltages and ionic concentrations—and then splits the buffered signals into patterns of firing neurons for different sensory channels, the final direct coupling into your sensory cortex."

Winger's head spun just thinking about it. "If you say so, Doc. I have just one question...will it work?"

The vid came to an end.

"Very funny...," Winger said. "I was a child back then...that was the Amazon Vector case, wasn't it? So what else can a coupler do?"

*** _I found some details in the archives of the Old Ones, accessible, by the way, through the very same coupler. It turns out that the quantum coupler can be used to re-locate the wearer in time and space***_

"Are you serious? It's not just for comms?"

***Absolutely...I found a way to alter the entangler circuit. Here...I'll prove it to you--***

For a moment, Winger was dizzy and disoriented. He shook his head inside the hypersuit helmet, then realized, with a start, that he was back in the vast swarmship. The sim unfolded and the great Mother Swarm came at last to a world Winger was sure he recognized...a world of blues and greens, a world of great oceans and steaming continents. He rode down with a detached element of the main swarm, descending through thick carbon dioxide rich air and purple, lightning-racked clouds to a hover over what looked like a primordial swamp.

It was Earth. Earth from millions of years ago.

The same scene they had just experienced. "Doc, how'd you do that? We're right back at Earth, billions of years ago—"

***Exactly...I used the quantum coupler's entangler circuit to run the sim back to that point. Now, I'll bring us forward to where we were--***

Again, the dizziness came and went, like a wave of nausea. It passed as soon as it came. Winger looked around. They were floating in the interstellar void, surrounded by stars and galaxies, caught in the faint web of the vast Mother Swarm as it drifted from world to world.

"Can you advance the sim...put us into the future?"

***I've tried, Johnny...but I can move the sim into the future by only a few minutes at a time...there seem to be inhibits I can't overcome...perhaps it's an energy problem...or a format issue...still researching this...and there are an infinity of possible future states anyway...could be a computational problem, as well***

Winger's eye went again to the black hole, still sucking in stellar matter in the distance. "Doc, you said you could move us in time _and_ space. Could you re-locate us to be closer to that black hole...to that singularity?"

***I can try, Johnny...you are considering the possibility that the singularity is some kind of navigation device. Perhaps we can exit the sim and return to the Keeper in our present time that way***

"I guess the thought had occurred to me. We sure as hell can't stay here...we might as well try something else."

***Going offline for a few moments...I'll research the Archives to see if I can learn how to displace material objects through space---***

For many moments, Doc II said nothing and Winger was lonely once more. _Maybe we're still inside the Keeper_...he muttered to himself. In quantum states, objects are superposed, able to exist in multiple states at the same time. Somehow, the act of observing forces all the states to collapse, converge down to one that could be observed or measured. The trick, he figured, was to learn how to collapse down to where the Keeper and _Trident_ were located, their own present time and space.

It made his head hurt, just thinking about it.

Without at first realizing what had happened, the gaping maw of the singularity had come noticeably closer. Winger blinked again, blinked hard, and he realized that he was caught in the singularity's gravity well.

He was coming closer all right. He was steadily being sucked right toward the event horizon, now blindingly white from intense radiation generated by infalling matter.

"Hey, Doc...can you slow us—"

But he had already crossed the event horizon and fallen through the hole.

...and then it came. A snap flash, like a camera going off. An image of geometric forms—icosahedrons, polygons, trapezoids—all compressed into a tunnel, a long curving corridor and he found himself hurtling at breakneck speed down this corridor, until—

With a hard bump, his whole body jarred from the impact and when he opened his eyes, caught his breath and came to his senses, he was back.

But back... _where_?

He waited a few moments, to let whatever sensations were around come to him. He realized he was floating. He was back in the Europan sea, inside the Keeper swarm. Right back where they had started from.

"Doc...Doc, are you there?"

A staticky fritz came through the quantum coupler, then snatches of words. Finally:

***Doc here, Boss...reporting ready in all respects. I just completed self-check...all systems nominal***

"Doc, I hate to ask this...but where are we? Are we where I think we are?"

***Scanning all bands...EMs, thermals, acoustics...it appears we are in the midst of a large formation of nanobotic elements. Sampling environment cues...oxygens, hydrogens, dissolved nitrogens and sodiums, a pinch of chlorine and sulfur,...it's the Europan sea, Johnny***

"We went through that singularity, didn't we? You found a way to maneuver us into the singularity."

_***That is affirmative, Johnny. By making parameter adjustments to the coupler's entangler circuit, I found that objects can be displaced in time and space. I made adjustments to take us back to where we started. I can say with 95% confidence where we are. But I cannot say_ when _we are...spacetime distortion effects at quantum scales are difficult to calculate***_

"Are we still in the sim? Is this still some kind of story?" Winger tested some of his hypersuit systems: sensors, propulsors, nav and comm....it all seemed to be working okay, none the worse for wear after sliding through the singularity to...to wherever they were.

***Unknown at this time...I detect no sensor evidence that our environment is anything other than what it seems. We're back inside the Keeper, Johnny...but I cannot yet calculate what time interval has passed since our...return***

Winger took a deep breath. "Doc, have you still got that material you snatched from the moss in the swamp?"

***Cycling capture ports...detecting element levels equal to initial scans...ratios are within tolerance...carbon levels consistent, phosphate levels consistent...it would appear so, Johnny. The material is still resident in my starboard capsule, in Level 2 containment***

"Good," Winger decided. "Then we have what we came for. Now, how to get out of here. Can't you tweak our coupler again...displace us outside the Keeper swarm?"

***This technique is not perfectly understood or controllable, Johnny. I can try...but there is an 85% probability that using this technique again will displace us to some place we don't want to be...like the deep interior of this world. Or displace us in time to a period before there was even a Solar System. I don't have proper control of the parameters that affect the coupler...the Old Ones' Archives were damaged or incomplete in that area...I only extrapolated to achieve what I did...and getting back here involved a highly improbable sequence of events and commands...there was some guesswork involved, to use a human term...I'm not sure I can replicate it***

"Great." Winger muttered. _Just friggin' great_. "We're right back where we started, give or take a few thousand years. Any evidence that _Trident_ is still out there--?"

***Scanning all bands now...detecting no emissions, no signal lobes or overlaps indicating any large solid-phase structures in range...difficult to make conclusions inside this swarm...however, there are four large clusters of nanobotic devices maneuvering in close proximity...bearing two five two relative, closing at six hundred and five microns per second***

"Keeper bots...coming this way?" Winger debated whether to go small, decided against it. "Doc, configure Delta seven seven...carbene grabbers to full deploy...power up your bond disrupters...I'll check my HERF and mag weapons—"

***Roger that...changing config to Delta seven seven...my bond disrupters are at assault state...grabbers and probes energized...here they come, Johnny***

The assault fell upon them with unexpected speed and ferocity. The Europan sea had been a black, featureless void but with bond disrupters zapping left and right, it was like floating inside of a thunderstorm. At Config Delta 77, Doc had spalled off a few replicant bots of his own and was replicating more like mad, trying to build mass to shield them from the Keeper bots. Winger cycled his HERF gun to full charge and let fly a blast of hot rf, flashing tons of water into steam all around them. The cavitation bubble boomed and reverberated around them and he lost stabilizer for a moment, turning nearly upside down in the ensuing waves.

The battle went on for many minutes, but it seemed like hours. In the end, Winger decided he had to go small and see what was going on. Atomgrabbers had to get down with the atoms.

The field of Keeper bots came up fast. Winger jetted forward until his soundings could begin to discern the structure of the enemy...there they were: barbells festooned with effectors, writhing and churning in ceaseless motion. Somewhere in there along the waist was the seam Deeno had found in the captured bot in _Trident's_ lab, a seam where, if you were quick enough, you could grab and hold the bot while you stung the bastard with your own disrupters.

Okay, Doc, let's see if this trick still works. Bond disrupters to full charge, carbene grabbers out full, approach on this vector—

He drove on until the first line of Keeper bots was less than ten seconds away. _Deeno calls this trick a slam and grab...open wide, bugs...here comes the slam_...

Winger triggered the bond disrupter and instantly, a trillion replicant Doc bots duplicated the maneuver. The water flashed and sizzled with electron volts as the disrupters discharged.

At the same moment, Winger commanded full propulsor, sounding quickly to find that seam before the Keeper bots could recover. He closed on the nearest bot, jostled and buffeted in the leftover turbulence of the disrupter blast and flexed Doc's grabbers, feeling his way through the bot's outer shielding of phosphates and sugar molecules. It was like diving headlong into a pit of beachballs.

_There! Gotcha!_ He found the seam right where Deeno said it would be. It was a ring of carbons and Winger piled into the middle of the atom ring and snapped the grabbers shut, holding on for dear life while the bot thrashed and bucked like a stubborn colt. Winger commanded his lateral disrupters around to zap the bug again and again, each time pinching off a cloud of atom fragments, spinning off into the distance.

Zap and hold on. Zap and hold on. Pinch and pull some more, then zap and hold on. That was the essence of the tactic. Somewhere beyond his imaging, a few trillion more Doc bots were doing the same thing.

_Must look like a sock hop at the high school_ , he imagined. He clung precariously to his grasp, while the Keeper bot flexed and folded, tried to collapse, and zap right back. Gradually, he was able to wear the bot down, pulling effectors left and right, until after a minute, the thing could only quiver and vibrate.

One last zap blew the whole stack and the Keeper bot disintegrated into a cloud of electrons spinning off into the distance, sparking and flashing like dying fireflies.

The Doc II bot he'd been riding was suddenly free and loose.

***Good show, Johnny...slam and grab is one tactic we know works. Now I'm sounding more bots on the way...another swarm of Keeper bots approaching, bearing one seven two relative...replicating more bots, going to max rate reps***

Winger went big again, climbing the 'waterfall' to re-enter the world of macro and normal size objects.

"Doc, we've got to get the hell out of here...we can't fight off the whole Keeper swarm...return to capsule immediately. I'm going to full propulsor...can you sound for _Trident_ through all this crap...anything out there? Anybody out there?"

Doc detected vocal patterns of stress in the acoustics of Winger's voice.

***Returning to home base, range six thousand two hundred microns...estimating arrival in two minutes...Johnny, calm down. There are many tactics we can use***

Winger heard Doc's voice and knew the little bot was right. "You sound like my mother, Doc...but I hear you. It's just that I don't know if we came back through that wormhole to the right time and place. We could be years or centuries before or after _Jovian Hammer_ came to this hellhole of a world. _Trident_ might not have been designed yet. I'm running out of options. Any nanotrooper has to have options."

*** _Closing on capture port, Johnny—now transitting capture interface--***_

Winger felt the slight sting as the bot master was scooped up into his hypersuit containment cell and the port snapped shut.

***Johnny...best option: we have to make you and me look like Keeper bots. The Keeper swarm won't bother us if they think we are one of them***

"And just how are we supposed to do that?"

*** _This concept has been discussed before...ref._ **Interactions Log File No. 135787.0.**... _spooling log...spooling...here it is, Johnny:_

The voice coming through the coupler link was loud and clear, unmistakably he and Doc having a conversation days before...

_< <_Now, Config Winger has expressed greater interest in assimilation techniques, in accordance with original concepts of Symbiosis Project. Primary method is detailed in report file appended to this Log entry: _Symbiosis of Human and ANAD Systems Using Nanoscale Disassembly and Reconstitution, 7 January 2075, Dr. Irwin Frost, Autonomous Systems Laboratory, Northgate University._ This report file was reviewed by Config Winger during time interval 097440 - 097558.

<<PLAY audio file: **Voice Recording** : _"I got to think about this one, Doc...I mean, it makes sense physically...you disassembling me into constituent atoms and molecules, then reconstructing me according to a new template. But the thing is, see, that I would die. I wouldn't be me. I'd be somebody... or something else. Maybe that's the way to go...maybe that's what'll it take to get inside and disable this Keeper. But, Jeez...that's a big step. And there's Dana and the kids...what about them? Doc Frost believed that all of us are just big patterns of molecules anyway and that one pattern was as good as another...but I'm thinking I kind of like my pattern...anyway...I'll give it some thought. Can you work up a scenario for me, Doc...step by step, I mean. Just what has to happen and all?")_

<<Scenarios are being generated. Analysis continues>>

Winger tried to think like the nanotrooper he had been for thirty years. _Take stock of the situation. Recon the area. What's working? What's the status of all systems?_

What was the first statement in the Nanowarrior's Code?

_Nanotroopers don't leave fellow troopers behind_.

"So you're saying, Doc, that I've got to let myself be disassembled. I've got to become a swarm, configged to look like part of the Keeper? I've got to resemble a cloud of Keeper bots."

***I'm saying that this is one option, Johnny...maybe the best option. And given the tactical situation, an early decision is advisable. Closest swarm cluster now at eighty thousand one hundred and seven microns, closing on this position***

Winger shook his head, a pretty useless gesture inside a hypersuit helmet. His every instinct screamed fight. Stand and fight. Automatically, he checked his gear: HERF at sixty percent charge...good for another ten or so blasts at least. Mag carbine fully charged. He had Doc and hundreds of configs loaded...they could assemble or disassemble just about anything. He was snug inside the hypersuit...plenty of air, food and water. Comms were good.

But to what end? If _Trident_ wasn't out there, all he was doing was delaying the inevitable. And if Doc couldn't or didn't recommend using the quantum coupler again to displace them somewhere else, they were stuck here. The line of defense was here. They would have to stand and fight here.

Or would they?

No, he decided, there had to be other options. Nanotroopers always had options.

"Doc, what about this idea. You grab atoms and build a shield...make me and you _look_ like Keeper bots, without actually disassembling me into atoms. Why wouldn't that work?"

***Johnny, such a shield would have to be configged to almost perfect resemblance to Keeper bots. We have some structure on them...do we have enough? The molecular arrangement, the bond angles and energies, the whole architecture of a Keeper bot has to be characterized exactly. Then that config must be replicated in sufficient quantities to form a working shield...there must be no way for Keeper bots to sound or probe inside the shield***

"So you're saying, Doc, that this isn't such a great idea?"

***I'm saying that it will not be an easy task. There are probabilities for error in the copying and replication...I can copy a config exactly but the config has to match the target. If it doesn't, the Keeper will know***

"If the Keeper figures it out, we'll just have to fight our way out, Doc, that's all. I just don't fancy being disassembled into atoms yet. I'm not ready to take that step."

***Swarm cluster now at twenty-thousand six hundred and fifty microns...still closing at a high rate of speed. Recommend Config Delta Seven Seven and prepare for assault***

"Doc, I got a better idea. Let's get the hell out of here. Sound all azimuth, give me a vector to someplace where the Keeper bots aren't clustered. Then we'll get this shield going."

***Sounding now...sounding...sounding...turn left to one eight five...minimum density patches ahead...minimum Keeper concentration...recommend max propulsor***

Johnny Winger didn't have to be told twice. He kicked his hypersuit propulsors into high gear and they jetted off into the void. Through the laminate armor of the suit, he could feel and hear the tinkling impacts of nanobots as they barged through the local swarm into a space where the bot levels were lower. Doc gave him a new vector every few minutes.

Soon, they were in the clear, for the moment.

The shield he wanted Doc to build would have to work, that much was clear. Otherwise, they would never get out of the Keeper swarm. Once the shield was done, Doc would have to maneuver them to the boundary layer of the Keeper swarm, then out into the Europan sea, from where he hoped they would be seen and picked up by _Trident_ , if the ship was even out there.

That was the biggest worry of all.

Winger knew he would have to survive this harrowing trip and put his trust completely in Doc to get them out. Doc was a swarm entity himself, nothing more than a collection of bots, just like the Keeper. In fact, Winger knew perfectly well that Doc likely had the same core programming as the Keeper bots...perhaps from that viral genome, perhaps from the Old Ones directly.

It was a pretty stark choice when you put it like that and Winger admitted that to himself, but what choice did he really have? He had to trust an ANAD swarm to save himself from a greater swarm. He had to have faith that, despite obvious problems with Doc's programming, with the viral genome and some form of the Prime Key embedded in his processor, somehow Doc could overcome that programming and save a human, a _non-self entity_ with whom he or it had developed a relationship.

Winger had to hope and pray that his growing relationship with the Doc II swarm would supersede the Prime Key. To help this process, he tried to trigger more and more memories of old Doc Frost and what he and Doc used to do and talk about. In some way he couldn't really explain, he hoped these memories would stop or divert the Prime Key from being executed.

Perhaps, Winger thought, this was the key to ANADs and Humans getting along together. _Focus on the relationship to keep the Prime Key from being executed._ Could you even have a relationship with a swarm of nanometer sized bots? Could you focus on what ANADs and Humans had in common? Could you build a symbiotic relationship by emphasizing the strengths of both and what both could bring to a common enterprise?

_Maybe, that's what the future is_ , Winger thought. _A true physical melding of ANADs and Humans into something stronger as a combined unit than either could be alone._

And maybe it would be this synthesis that permitted the combined Human-ANAD entity to confront the Old Ones when they finally arrived in 2155...just over fifty years from now.

"Doc, sound and report all local contacts," Winger commanded the bot master.

*** _Sounding now...stand by...stand by...reporting minimal returns...nothing within ten million microns...looks like we're clear for the moment***_

Clear for the moment. And still inside the belly of the beast. Winger knew it wouldn't be long before the Keeper bots re-grouped and came at them again. He checked his wristpad, opened up a list of configs on his eyepiece viewer and scrolled through hundreds of possibilities. _Not that one...nope...nope...too hard...too chancy...maybe C-119...we could try that one..._.

"Doc, looks like Config 119...modified with ribosomal cutters might work...what do you think?"

***Matching config 119 with data on Keeper bots...scanning now, parametric analysis underway...Johnny, you really should re-consider this tactic...a shield will never be a perfect match with the Keeper bots...but if I could disassemble you, I could form up a swarm of re-assembled structures that the Keeper could never distinguish from self...higher probability of escaping from the Keeper with this approach***

Winger had already made up his mind. "No bot's going to make me into atom fluff, Doc...not even you. I kind of like my config. We can make this shield work if you do the analysis right. Doc, we just have to trust each other, that's all. I don't want to be a swarm...not just yet. You are a swarm...somehow, we have to get along. I know Doc Frost used to say that humans are just big bags of cells anyway, sort of a single-configuration swarm. But I'm just not ready to let you disassemble all my cells...it's too big a step. There's Dana and the kids...what would I tell them...your husband's now just a cloud of bots?"

***Tell them nanobot swarms are the future...it's in the Prime Key. You know this, Johnny...it's just a matter of time***

Every time Doc mentioned the Prime Key, Winger wondered just how far he could trust the tiny bot. Did he really have a choice? The Keeper could absorb them and disassemble them any time it chose. It could quantum displace them to a time and place of its own choosing, in the blink of an eye. The only way they had even a remote chance to escape was to make the Keeper think they weren't a threat, that they were part of _self_ , part of its own. Slip outside the Keeper swarm, unnoticed...a few bots spalled off from the mother swarm.

"Doc, set configuration C-119, start replication checkset and prepare for launch...I want every bond angle and valence band to look perfect. Form up a shield around me and make it look good."

***Configuring C-119 now...grabbing atoms to build structure...hope this works, Johnny***

_That makes two of us_ , Winger thought.

Doc launched in a whoosh of air and bubbles. The master bot was in position in less than five minutes. Winger closed his eyes inside the hypersuit helmet and let Doc begin weaving a mesh of bots all around him. It was like being inside of a MOBnet and he fought back a rising tide of claustrophobia, screwing his eyes shut tight, choosing not to witness the process.

It just wasn't natural for a nanotrooper to let himself be swarmed like this.

_It's just you and me now, Doc_ , he thought. _We have to trust each other. We have to work together to get out of this place._ Winger opened his eyes to a slit. Nothing but black. He could feel the mesh growing tighter and tighter. It was like being inside a cocoon. Maybe even like being inside a womb. _This is what a baby feels like, waiting to be born._

Moments later, Doc announced he was finished.

***C-119 config completed...shield is completed...detecting maximum coverage...shield looks good...recommending you assume minimum radius position...swarm of Keeper bots approaching bearing two one nine relative...I'll try to divert us away from their approach...act like Keeper bots ourselves***

"It's in your hands...or rather, your effectors," Winger said. Assume minimum radius...he knew Doc meant make yourself small...pretty much impossible to do in a hypersuit. He scrunched himself as tight as the suit would permit.

***Going to full propulsor now...hold on...Keeper bots now at seven thousand six hundred microns...closing this position...changing my config to match...with any luck, Johnny, they'll sniff around and figure we're just like them***

"I can only hope," Winger muttered.

And if the Keeper decided to hiccup now and spit them out in some kind of quantum belch, nothing else would matter.

Winger felt the propulsors kick in. Under Doc's guidance, they started to move.

He prayed silently that they were moving toward the edge of the Keeper swarm and not deeper inside.
CHAPTER 31

Aboard UNISPACE Submersible _Trident_

Europa Coordinate System: Lat. 25N, Long 72W

Stationkeeping 1500 meters from the Keeper

February 15, 2100 (Earth U.T.)

Inside _Trident's_ airlock, Deeno D'Nunzio and Sheila Reaves hurried through the lockout cycle. Turbo was already outside the ship, maneuvering toward the outer boundary of the Keeper swarm.

Captain Stella's voice came over the 1MC. "Still holding at fifteen hundred meters...I don't want to get any closer. This thing looks like it's about to blow."

"Roger that," Deeno said grimly. "Turbo, what do you see out there?"

Fatah was maneuvering carefully along a tangent to the vast swarm. "Mostly speckles and swirls of light. It's like watching a thunderstorm from close up. The whole thing appears to be spinning or rotating in some way. I'm detecting aspect changes too...the Keeper may be reconfiguring, maybe even re-locating...moving off in some other direction."

"Why would it do that?" Sheila asked. "Doesn't make any sense...the whole glob's probably been here for millennia."

"I don't know," said Deeno. She waited impatiently for the lights to cycle through...red, red, red, _come on...come on_... now green and green. She stabbed a button and the airlock outer hatch opened, exposing them to the Europan sea. Both troopers drifted out and headed for Turbo's beacon. "But something's happening and I've just got a feeling—"

After days of relative stability and quiet, the vast cloud of nanobots that was the Keeper was now spinning up and expanding outward, a vortex of bots rotating like a cyclone hundreds of meters below the icy surface of Europa. It was as if something had agitated the huge swarm and now it was thrashing about like a wounded beast, trying to fight off the source of the irritation.

Even from five hundred meters, the flashing, strobing light of the Keeper was visible. No longer just specks and pinpricks of light, the effect now was of a revolving lamp, flickering on and off.

"Looks like a lighthouse," muttered Sheila as they closed with Turbo.

"Yeah and you know what lighthouses do...they warn ships of dangerous conditions," said Deeno. "We'd best not approach too closely...Turbo, what's happening now from your position?"

Fatah had moved in a little closer. "Not sure...this thing looks like it's about ready to blow. I am sounding something at bearing one six five relative...may be just a localized bot disturbance, bigger than usual...I'm keeping an eye on it."

"Don't get any closer," Deeno warned.

"You don't have to worry about that...hey, this eruption's getting bigger and bigger. I'm laying to about two hundred meters away, but it's like the Keeper is swelling abnormally fast in that sector. Must be some hellacious bot activity going on there."

"I see it from my position too," Sheila Reaves reported. She scanned her eyepiece indicators..."—lots of thermals, EMs, acoustics, every band. Not sure what's happening to the Keeper, but the bots in that sector are going haywire. Maybe a big bang of some sort."

Even in the black featureless void of the deep Europan sea, the general outlines of the Keeper swarm were dimly visible, backlit by the nanobotic fires of uncounted trillions of mechs slamming atoms. It twinkled like some playground carousel at night, spinning slowly, flickering and strobing, all the while expanding outward. The Keeper was waking up and growing, consuming more and more ocean.

"We'd better back off," Deeno decided. She reversed propulsors and put some distance between her and the swarm. She also advised _Trident_ of what was going on. "Captain, be ready to move out smartly if I give the word. We're not sure what's going on here, but the Keeper may be coming your way."

Stella's voice came back, "I've got _Trident_ turned around and her propulsors are already spinning up. First sign of trouble and we're out of here. You're on your own, Sergeant."

_Thanks a lot_ , she almost said back. "Understood. Detail... _out_."

Turbo's voice crackled over the crewnet. "Deeno, Sheila...I'm getting a beacon...faint, but definitely some kind of beacon. Could be the Skipper...I'm going in closer—"

Skipper? Colonel Winger had been MIA for the better part of the last twenty hours. Most of the crew had given him up for dead...lost...consumed inside the Keeper...probably broken down into atom fluff by now. How could a beacon--?

"What bearing, Turbo? What's the bearing?"

Over the crewnet, she could tell Turbo had cranked up his propulsors to max...the humming vibration in the background let her know that. "I make it as...hold on a sec...I make it as one six six relative...pretty much that eruption I've been monitoring. Soon as I zero in on that bearing, the beacon gets stronger. Deeno, we've got to chance it...we've got to check this out."

D'Nunzio was nominally in charge of the detail. "Agreed. But hold up, let me and Sheila come to you...we may need to put some suppressing fire on that sector. If it's the Skipper, he may need some help...are you getting anything else besides the beacon? Hard returns...like a hypersuit, propulsor noises, anything?"

"Hard to tell in all this crap," Turbo said. He jetted forward, coming up to within several dozen meters of the outer edge of the swarm. The lights were dizzying and he darkened his helmet visor to cut down on the glare. Something was dead ahead...he could almost see it—

There! Something materialized in the still-bright glare of the light...a shape, a formless shape..."---looks like a MOBnet, Deeno...it's under prop, maneuvering toward me...I'm cycling my HERF...get over here quick, guys, this may be—"

There was a blast of static over the crewnet...then...silence.

"Turbo!" called Deeno. "Christ...Sheila, let's go...max propulsor...get your weapons ready—"

"I'm at full charge now...right behind you—"

They traversed the last hundred meters in a minute, cavitating in an explosion of bubbles more than once and nearly collided with Turbo's hypersuit. Just past Turbo, a huge mass loomed out of the darkness...it was a MOBnet alright, but it was different somehow...a full Quantum Corps mesh bag formed of nanobotic mechs but all the outer mechs were Keeper bots and the beacon they had all heard was now screaming in their ears.

Within moments of the near collision, the Keeper had overtaken them all and they were enveloped in a swarm of enemy bots, coming at them from every direction.

"Light 'em up!" Deeno yelled. "Everything you got...this is some kind of trap...not a MOBnet...some kind of bag of Keeper bots—"

HERF and mag weapons went off simultaneously and the water soon churned white-hot, flashing steam, roiling with turbulence as rf waves and loops of magnetic energy fried the Keeper's bots. The huge formless bag quivered and shed its outer shield of bots under the assault, while Deeno, Turbo and Reaves pummeled the swarm with everything they had.

The melee went on for several minutes. It was Reaves who noticed that the mesh bag was beginning to disassemble, right in front of them. While the Deeno and Turbo pumped more and more HERF into the surrounding swarm in an attempt to keep from being overwhelmed, Reaves saw the mesh that had looked like a MOBnet essentially dissolve right in front of her.

A form emerged from the disappearing mesh. A helmeted form. A hypersuited form. And the beacon flashed a familiar red icon on her eyepiece...it _was_ the Skipper! Colonel John Winger, UNQC.

"Skipper! What the hell--?"

Deeno saw the same icon on her eyepiece. "Colonel...maneuver yourself toward me...you still got propulsor?"

Winger's voice was weak but it was him. "Got propulsor...quarter power...got to save Doc—"

"What's he saying?" Reaves asked. "We've got to get the hell out of here...get back to the ship!"

"Skipper—" Turbo maneuvered alongside and pulled out a towline from his belt, attaching it to a cleat on Winger's hypersuit shoulder, then cinching it up. "Skipper, relax...I'll give you a tow. Deeno, Sheila...give me a bearing. And get these damn bugs off me, will you? Blast the suckers to kingdom come!"

"With pleasure," said Reaves. She let fly another volley and the water frothed and steamed and flashed with hot rf.

A few more blasts of HERF and the detail found itself at least momentarily free of the Keeper swarm. With Deeno leading the way and Reaves following as rear guard to cut off any bots that followed, Turbo maneuvered forward, towing the crippled hypersuit of Johnny Winger toward the last known position of _Trident_.

Fortunately, Captain Stella had stuck around a while longer.

The return to the ship took the better part of an hour, as Stella wasn't willing to bring _Trident_ any closer than one kilometer from the Keeper.

It was a raucous, boisterous reunion that occurred outside _Trident's_ airlock. Reaves, Tsukota, Glance and Barnes, with the rest of the unit, crowded around Winger and helped pull him out of the hypersuit.

"Skipper, you look like you've been through an eggbeater!"

"—maybe a blender, even—"

"What was it like...see any Old Ones?"

"Hey, help the man get out of his suit, why don't you?"

Winger briefly described what had happened inside the Keeper. "Check my suit's containment cell real good. Unless I imagined the whole thing, Doc may have grabbed some pieces of the Prime Key from that sim we were in."

Al Glance handed Winger something to drink. Winger sipped from the cup gratefully, wincing at the hot liquid. "Jeez, what the hell is this...?"

Mighty Mite Barnes was all smiles. "You like it? It's my own special brew—came from—"

Winger held up a hand. "I don't want to know...just make sure nobody dies from this stuff. And get that containment capsule into the Lab right now."

The hypersuit was carried into the lab on _Trident's_ E deck. Meanwhile, Captain Stella indicated he was backing off from the Keeper a few more kilometers.

"I want as much distance as I can get from that cloud of bugs."

Soon, the thrum of the ship's propulsors could be felt as _Trident_ maneuvered off to a new position.

Winger grabbed some chow from the mess on C deck, showered quickly and joined Chris Calderon and Turbo Fatah, the detail's CECs, in the lab. The troopers had already unloaded the capsule from Winger's suit and were examining what Doc had pinched off the swamp moss.

Fatah stroked his trim black beard, while Calderon fiddled with the gain on the imager. "Never seen anything like it, Skipper. And you say this came from some kind of simulation...inside the Keeper? How is that even possible?"

"I'm not sure what's possible and what's not anymore," Winger admitted. "We went through some kind of portal...gate... wormhole...I really don't know what to call it. And then it was like we were in a sim, like a story or historical narrative. Doc seemed to think it was a re-creation of what had happened to the Old Ones."

Fatah shook his head. "And you were on Earth...or what looked like Earth?"

Winger said, "I had the impression...just an impression, mind you, that we were watching a record of how the Old Ones had seeded many different worlds throughout their history. One of them reminded me of what Earth may have looked like a few billion years ago." He described again the vast mother swarm and how he had drifted through space for what must have been eons in a eyeblink of time, how part of the swarm had descended to a primordial Earth, how they had come to a hover over some kind of swamp. "That's where this stuff came from. I managed to get Doc launched and he was able to pinch off part of what the Old Ones injected into some moss along the edge of the swamp."

Calderon indicated the imager view. "You can see for yourself, Skipper. It's nanobotic devices, embedded in some kind of matrix. Not sure what this matrix is...we're trying to scope it out now with spectrum analysis but it some kind of tissue...never seen structure like this before. The analyzer hasn't either...it keeps beeping for more data. "

Winger sipped at Barnes' fiery drink cautiously. In spite of its stinging bite, he had grown fond of the stuff. "I went inside the Keeper looking for memory cells or something to do with that doomsday subroutine Doc mentioned. Subroutine 7070. If this was a depiction of the original seeding of Earth, doesn't it stand to reason that we may be looking at an early form of the Prime Key?"

Fatah shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine, Skipper. Whatever it is, it's made of something this analyzer has never seen before. Looks like we're going to have to pick through this stuff atom by atom...it'll take a while."

Stella poked his head into the lab, handing a small hand tablet to Winger. "Flash traffic from CINCQUANT. Just came through. It was coded P-1, so I brought it right away."

Winger took the small tablet and thumbed in his commander's code. Up popped a vid of Dana Tallant, staring into the screen with a frazzled look on her face.

"I'd better take this one alone," Winger decided. He left the lab and went to his bunk in the crew compartment on C deck.

The message had taken several hours to arrive at Europa. Winger shut his bunk compartment hatch and thumbed the vid into life.

It was about Rene. Winger stared and listened, hearing the tension in Dana's voice.

"... _it's Rene...embedded nanobots...Config Zero...like an angel_...."

Winger heard the words but he was already trying to figure out what to do, how he could help from a billion miles away, there had to be something, anything—

Dana thought that somehow Rene had been affected by her time with Config Zero. Slowly, but surely, according to Dana, their daughter was becoming a swarm entity, an angel.

"The doctors say her internal organs are being replaced—" Dana was almost in tears, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, "--one by one, the bots are taking over...remaking her somehow—"

Winger glared at the vid streaming through the palm tablet. A cold anger began growing inside of him. He watched the message—it lasted maybe five minutes—over and over again. Dana indicated that, by the time he received this message, she was going to go small and do a nanobotic insert on her own daughter.

"I'm fighting these bastards myself," she said. "I'm going down there and strangle them with my own hands...or effectors...whatever I can get that works."

Winger paused the vid and sank back in his bunk. Dana was a veteran atomgrabber. She knew what she was doing. Any time you did an insert on a live human being, there was a risk. Things could go wrong. A bot could damage tissue, go rogue, a million things could go wrong with a scheme like this. But what choice did they have? What choice did Dana really have? He only wished he could be there to help.

But the _Jovian Hammer_ task force had a bigger problem. There was a decent chance they had a piece of the Prime Key in containment in the lab. Somehow, some way, they had to find a way to decode it, or enough of it, to stop Config Zero and the swarms from re-making the Earth's surface into something like the Old Ones' original homeworld. Subroutine 7070, the doomsday command, was in that code somewhere.

The trick was to decode or at least mimic whatever part of the Prime Key might be embedded in the cellular material he and Doc had brought back from that swamp. Maybe they could get enough decoded to be able to broadcast Keeper-like signals back to Earth, using the Keeper sim they had cobbled together a few days ago...the one CINCQUANT had ordered them to stop so negotiations with the Bugs could go forward.

Maybe, just maybe if he was lucky, they could stop the movement of Config Zero swarms on Earth and help Rene in the process.

It was time to get back to work.

Winger gathered his two quantum engineers, Deeno D'Nunzio and Ozzie Tsukota, in the lab for a little brainstorming. While they examined the cell material in the imager, Captain Stella decided to move _Trident_ off a few more kilometers for safety's sake. "I want to put as much distance as I can between us and that cloud of bugs out there."

Nobody had any objection to that.

"So what are we dealing with here?" Winger said. The fine structure of the cell material had been prepped for imaging and the details were now up on the screen in _Trident's_ tiny lab on E deck.

Tsukota adjusted the imager gain. A long twisted chain of molecules kinked in several hairpin loops loomed on the screen. "Well, it sure looks like RNA, Skipper. You've got ribose sugars, nucleotide bases and something that resembles a phosphate group. Some of the molecules are slightly different—missing an oxygen here, a carbon there—but it's a pretty good facsimile of an RNA molecule."

"Can we run it through our sequencer?" Winger asked.

"We can try. We may have to make some adjustments, be careful how we interpret the results."

"Do it."

Tsukota and D'Nunzio prepared a few slices of the material to be fed into the lab's genomic sequencer. The small device hummed and clicked for about ten minutes, finally displaying chemical sequence groups in order on its screen.

Deeno read off the results. "Pretty much RNA, looks like to me. Adenine and guanine, cytosine and uracil...garden variety RNA. Kind of surprising, if you ask me."

"Maybe not," Tsukota said. "If this is how life was originally seeded on Earth, the progenitors must not have been too different. The Old Ones laid down the original design and set evolution in motion."

"Can we sequence the whole thing? Have we got enough of a sample to understand what does what?"

Deeno studied the results. "It's coding for something...probably some kind of protein. It'll take awhile, Skipper. Even this small sample seems to have thousands of bases."

Winger traced over the twisted loops of RNA on the screen with his finger. "Somewhere in there is the key...the Prime Key. And Subroutine 7070. Would we recognize it if we saw it?"

"Probably not...at least, not initially. It's RNA for sure...but the language may be quite different. Remember there's a story going around about how evolution on Earth got off track from what the Old Ones originally intended. If what we're looking at is part of the original design, there may well be more differences than we realize. Our own DNA structure is now billions of years removed and evolved from this design. So we can't look at this and think: oh...we're just a straight-line descent from that. It probably doesn't work that way."

Winger shook his head. "Deeno, you're probably right but that doesn't really help. Somehow, we've got to decode what this structure says, what it does, how it works. If I'm right, something of this structure is inside every ANAD ever made...courtesy of Doc Frost and his original viral genome from Africa. Maybe that's how we go about it: look for patterns that resemble patterns inside ANAD processors. We know what those look like...we designed them. Try this: pull up the original specs for ANAD...we've got them in the ship's archives...and see if one of our pattern matching routines gives us anything."

Tsukota sat back, rubbed his eyes. He had been peering into a microscope at the actual slices of material. "It's worth a shot. But that's a lot of data crunching, Skipper. This could take hours, maybe days."

"We haven't got a moment to waste," Winger told them. "I'll even put Doc to work on it." He cycled open his shoulder capsule and launched the bot master into the air. A few moments later, Doc had built enough mass to form up a rudimentary human face, a ghostly outline of old Doc Frost, hanging in the air. "Every delay means Config Zero expands a little further. A little more of Earth is modified. What I want to do is understand this structure so well that we know how the Prime Key is implemented. It's in here, somewhere, I'm sure of it...at least some of it. All we need is to know enough to feed the patterns into our Keeper simulator and transmit quantum signals back to Earth...signals modified enough to bollix up every last Config Zero bot and ANAD clone, modified enough to stop any doomsday command from being initiated. Modified enough to stop Config Zero right where it is. I just want to sew some confusion in the swarms. But to do that...we have to speak their language."

Deeno looked at Tsukota and shrugged. "I guess we're going to need some of that special coffee from the galley, Skipper. You know: the stuff that makes your eyes pop out of your head. "

Winger smiled ruefully. Mighty Mite Barnes had concocted something on the trip out from Earth that could double as rocket fuel...if it didn't kill you first. "I'll tell Mite to get some of her special sauce brewed up...just don't OD on it, okay?"

Winger left the two CQEs in the lab and decided to pay Stella a visit. He found the captain up on the command deck, running systems checks on _Trident's_ borer module.

"I'm just making sure we can get the hell out of here when the time comes," Stella explained. The borer would take them back up through the ice layer to Europa's surface and the landing platform.

"Everything check out?"

"So far so good. The nanobots that make up the borer head are so dumb, they haven't been affected by the Keeper...so far. Tell me," Stella shut down the system, "when _can_ we leave...that swarm out there swirling around gives me the creeps."

Winger gave Stella a rundown on what the task force was doing. "We grabbed something from inside the Keeper and we're trying to figure out what it is...it could well be part of the control system for all ANAD-style nanobots...maybe even part of the Prime Key. We're studying it in the lab now...trying to read it and understand what it does. If we can match patterns between this swamp matter and how ANAD processors are configured, we may have something we can work with."

"You figuring you can exert some kind of control over the Keeper?"

"Doubtful," admitted Winger. "All I'm looking to do is figure out how the damn thing works, what drives it, what controls it, what kind of programming guides it. If we can get just a tiny shred of understanding, we can use our Keeper signal generator to send fake signals back to Earth...maybe even bollix up Config Zero and the swarms that are causing so much problem. It's a long shot, I'll admit...but it may be the only shot we have left. Operation _Jovian Hammer_ is running out of options."

Stella gave that some thought. "I can't put enough distance between _Trident_ and that Keeper to satisfy me. Could we send fake signals from the surface? I'd like to get started heading back topside."

"What's _Trident's_ status right now?"

Stella gave him the tablet. "All systems check out. Borer came online just now. Propulsion checks out. Buoyancy control nominal. Power plant is operating normally. We're down to about thirty percent on stores and supplies...there's more at the landing platform. " He glanced out the side porthole even though there was nothing to see in the black void of the Europan sea. "I just don't want to get stuck down here. If we have any more emergencies, it takes eight to ten hours to bore through the icepack."

Winger studied the system status checks and results on Stella's tablet. He handed the device back. "We should know something...maybe have something to work with... in six hours."

"What the hell is this Keeper, anyway? Isn't it just a big swarm?"

Winger shook his head. "It's more than that, Captain. It's a portal to somewhere else...some place else. When I was inside, I was sucked into some kind of vortex and transported into a simulation, like a big story...that seemed to be a narrative of the history of the Old Ones...or what _we_ call the Old Ones. The Keeper is also some kind of communication device...somehow it directs quantum signals toward the mother swarm that is the Old Ones...somewhere out there in interstellar space. It also receives quantum signals from the central swarm. It's like a giant quantum coupler...my guess is that our own quantum couplers replicate this in some way."

"If you don't mind me saying so, your troopers have had a lot of trouble engaging the Keeper...is it the bot design, the speed, the configs or what?"

Winger agreed. "It's true, unfortunately. Our tactics haven't worked as well as they should because the structure of the Keeper is maintained as a nanobotic swarm, the Keeper is able to cause its individual bots and swarms to multiply seemingly instantaneously, through its entangler system, which creates multiple copies of swarms representing different probability states. These swarm copies are not real in a touchable sense, but appear as multiple 'probable' swarms, which when engaged, collapse into one real swarm. This _spawning_ or _budding_ or _shadowing_ process makes a shambles of Quantum Corps tactics. Our assault forces find themselves maneuvering to engage threats which turn out not to be real. It's hard to know what is real until you actually engage."

Stella sipped at something from a cup...he winced and Winger wondered if it was Deeno's special brew. "Some people think the Old Ones aren't real...that they're some imaginary enemy we've concocted to hide our uneasiness with how ANAD systems are developing and evolving."

"Unless that sim I went through was just a big fairy tale, I'd say they're quite real. I'm not sure what they are...maybe some gigantic swarm drifting between the stars...some kind of nomadic species of nanomechs...the sim indicated they or their ancestors came to Earth a few billion years ago and seeded life on our world. That could be a load of crap but why create so much detail for a load of crap? I think I was inside some kind of historical archive and what was being shown actually happened in some way...plus we have independent evidence, developed by Doc Frost and others, that something is happening around 2155 A.D....either they're coming back or ANADs take over the world and we all become slaves to the bots or something."

Stella studied swirl patterns in his drink. "Me...I'm not buying it. I'm skeptical...and I'm not even from Missouri. I just wonder what's going to be left on Earth when we get back... _if_ we get back?"

Now it was Winger's turn to be pensive. "I think about Dana and the children a lot." He described what had happened to Rene and Dana's latest fears. "I'm not sure if I'll even have a family when we get back...I want to leave now...blast out of this hellhole of a world right now, but we have a mission, we have orders. There's just an outside chance that if we can confuse Config Zero with fake signals, we can get on top of the swarms and push them back into their sanctuaries...that's what keeps me going now."

Stella understood. "I don't know about you, Colonel, but as for me, when we get back, I'm retiring from Frontier Service for good...turning in my papers and going hunting. I plan to spend at least ten hours of every day hunting: quail, duck, whatever I can get a bead on. No more bots. Just live, warm, squirming animals that bleed and die when you hit 'em. Damp woods...cold, frosty air, a thermos of my wife's coffee and some biscuits...that's what I look forward to."

Winger was about to reply, but Ozzie Tsukota's head popped through the hatch.

"Skipper, could you come down to the lab? Me and Deeno may have found something..."

Winger followed Tsukota, scrambling aft through the gangway and slipped into the lab right behind him. Deeno was at the imager controls, massaging buttons.

"What have you found?" he asked.

Deeno pointed to the imager display. "Just this, Skipper...Doc found a pattern that seems to be more than coincidence." She overlaid a cursor on a pattern of gray and white stripes. "This sequence is from your cell material. It codes for a protein that helps stabilize the transcription process...part of the transcription backbone that the cells need to be able to replicate."

"It seems to be an early form of messenger RNA," Tsukota added.

"So what's the secret?"

"Watch this—" Deeno manipulated the imager controls, bringing in another image. She overlaid one image on top of another. It was plain that both images were similar...the patterns were close, though not a perfect match. "The image I just brought in is from a typical ANAD processor application. Specifically, it's from an algorithm that sets up a feedback loop for sensing and control of effector position, during basic nanobotic replication."

Winger studied the images. "Doc, what does this mean?"

The Doc swarm, resembling a ghostly outline of old Doc Frost's face, hovered nearby.

_***The images are a logical analog but as you can see, not perfectly correlated. Correlation values are high...here is the Pearson coefficient--***_ Doc managed to generate some charts right in mid-air, grabbing atoms and building visuals right before their eyes, with streams of values scrolling down from the ceiling. *** _\--this is the ninety-five percent confidence run here...these patterns are very close analogs of each other...I have design files from Dr. Irwin Frost, dated 21 November 2061, Autonomous Systems Lab, that show earlier iterations of these algorithms***_

Winger could see for himself how close the patterns were. "We may have what we're looking for. A gene sequence that involves RNA transcription and an algorithm involved in bot replication. And they're basically the same."

"Not a huge surprise," Deeno observed. "We know Doc Frost was using that genome from the Engebbe virus to develop algorithm shortcuts, speed up the design process."

Winger watched the Doc swarm drifting like a bad dream overhead. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?'

*** _Analysis of cortical activity in your brain is purely speculation on my part, Colonel***_

Winger laughed. "Right, Doc...right. Say we alter this algorithm slightly. Say we modify it so your typical ANAD can't maneuver its effectors into the right position to grab atoms for replication...then ANAD can't replicate...am I correct?"

Deeno nodded. "Depending on the mod, I'd say, yeah, sure. An algorithm that changes the feedback loop, delays or changes some inputs, that sort of thing, might alter execution enough to make replication difficult, time-consuming, energy-intensive...any number of results could occur."

"Okay," said Winger. "Say we make that slight change to the logic. Then we take that mod, and code it for broadcast from our Keeper simulator...right back to Earth. If we do everything right, maybe we wind up sending signals to Config Zero and all its swarms to make this change in their replication logic...and if we did our homework right, that causes them to have a lot more difficulty replicating. Wouldn't that help Quantum Corps and Sanctuary Patrol contain the swarms, maybe even push the swarms back?"

Tsukota's eyes brightened. "I see what you're saying, Skipper. A lot of ifs, ands, and buts, but I think the idea is sound."

"The trick," said Deeno, "will be to make sure we get this coded right for a quantum communication device like our Keeper sim. We mess up and we could wind up having just the opposite effect...the algorithm could be modified again by the simulator...we could have multiple output states of the algorithm coming out of the coupler's entanglement circuit..."

"Agreed, but to me, the idea has possibilities. What about you, Doc?"

The Doc swarm brightened momentarily, its faint outlines shifting and blurring as the bot cloud processed Winger's statements.

*** _Performing analysis now on logical outcomes of all scenarios...probabilities are conditional...estimating less than forty two percent probability of modified algorithm achieving stated outcomes***_

"Less than fifty-fifty, Skipper," said Tsukota. "But what choice do we really have now?"

"None," Winger decided. "Forty two percent is still way better than zero. Work with Doc here. Modify ANAD's replication algorithm like we discussed...there's a chance you'll also be messing around with the Prime Key. I have to believe that replication is an important part of the Prime Key. And it sure looks like Doc Frost took his algorithm ideas from a similar function in those cell genomes. We may get lucky...we need all the luck we can get."

"We'll get right on it, Skipper," said Deeno. "I can put Doc to work encoding this for the Keeper sim."

Winger left the lab and decided to head back to his bunk. He wanted to send a message to Dana. It would have to go through CINCQUANT first.

He recorded the vid while lying in his rack and appended some data about the modified algorithm along with it. Once he was done with the vid, he played it back before squirting it off into space.

There was his own face, surrounded by a grimy sweat-stained pillow. CINCQUANT would love that.

"...we're not sure what will really happen when we broadcast this using our Keeper sim...we might well be signaling the bots to go big bang as much as anything else. There's a risk involved...a big risk. But there's a risk doing nothing too. This could wind up causing the bots inside Rene to kill her. Or it could save her. We just don't know."

He wanted Dana to know what was coming. And CINCQUANT would need to make tactical adjustments along with Sanctuary Patrol, re-deploy forces, set up new perimeters and defenses, just in case. They had to be ready.

Winger drifted off to a light, restless doze while playing the message back. He was startled awake by a soft chime...incoming message. A light was blinking on his comm, indicating items in his Inbox.

_Jeez, how long was I out_? He rubbed his eyes, thumbed the message icon. Dana's face materialized on the screen. Rene and Liam were tussling on the floor of their apartment behind her. Her face was haggard, wan, pale. She looked like a doll that had been left out in the rain too long.

Winger listened for a few moments, found himself fast-forwarding through all the chitchat and hellos from the kids. He caught snatches of Dana explaining things: " _—unable to get the bots out of Rene's body...mutate too fast...they hide...too agile for a barebones ANAD swarm to tackle..."_ Now, she was practically in tears, wiping her eyes with the back of her hands. "I understand the risk, Wings. I know what's involved—" Her voice caught and she cleared her throat...she was just trying to be strong like a nanotrooper heading out on a mission—"...wanted you to know you should go ahead...do what is right...use your best judgment—"

He paused the vid and stared, dry-eyed, at the frozen image of Dana Tallant, with Rene hugging her leg and Liam fighting off invisible space invaders in the background. He wanted to examine each and every pixel, to caress each pixel. He knew tt might well be the last one.

Johnny Winger, Colonel, U.N. Quantum Corps, knew what he had to do. The mission of _Jovian Hammer_ demanded it. The first line of the Nanowarrior's Code popped into his mind: _Nanowarriors don't leave fellow nanowarriors behind._

It was time to go load the revised algorithm, with its hopefully modified Prime Key, into their Keeper simulator and broadcast it back to Earth.

Once that was done, all they could do was wait.
CHAPTER 32

Paris, France

February 16, 2100

0730 hours local

Dana Tallant was finishing up prepping the chicken casserole for the oven when Liam came storming into the kitchen, his face all screwed up with indignation.

"Mom! Mom! Rene's not playing fair...make her stop!"

Dana shoved the chicken in and set the oven. "What's going on there, Tiger? Who's not playing fair?"

"It's Rene...she keeps making more bots—come look—"

Dana had been keeping an eye on her son Liam and daughter Rene and their two friends Pascual and Anna, joysticking a few dozen miniature bots through a spirited round of _3-Demons_ on the game deck in the family room. As she came into the family room, she could see a horde of finger-sized bots, replicated by the game deck, duking it out in the air over the sofa and chairs in the middle of the room.

"So what's the matter, gang? What's going on here...and stop replicating so many bots, okay? You'll knock over all the lamps and break stuff. Just a few at a time, how 'bout it?"

Liam practically dragged his Mom to the game deck. "See what she's doing...see... _see_?"

She did see. Rene was morphing more and more every day, while the Config Zero bots inside converted her into...what, exactly? She didn't know. The docs didn't know. Nobody knew. Nobody knew what her daughter was turning into.

Her daughter's hands were already fuzzing out, that's what Liam called it. It was as good a description as anyone's. You could see the effect best with her hands, fingers and feet...the skin was becoming translucent, breaking down, being disassembled right before their eyes and being replaced by swarm structures. It was like a cancer eating her daughter, atom by atom, molecule by molecule. Only this cancer wasn't going to kill Rene. This cancer would simply re-make her daughter into someone new, some thing new.

Dana just stood there, kitchen gloves in hand, hands to her mouth. Rene was using her swarmed hands to 'bud' off new structures, leaking streams of molecules into the air, which were the self-assembling into more bots under some kind of remote config control, similar to the ones the game deck replicated. It was like playing chess and creating new pawns and kings and queens as you went along. Liam and his friends were incensed.

"Make her _stop_ , Mom," Liam insisted. "It's not fair..."

"Honey—" Dana bent down to Rene. "Why don't you let the game deck do the work? You can't just make more bots like that...it's not fair to your brother."

Rene pouted. She held up her fuzzy hand...it was nothing but a blur of nanobotic assembly...a writhing, seething mass of molecular action like a miniature cloud roiling in a thunderstorm. "Mom...it's easy...I just wave my hand through the air...the bots come out-"

"I know but—" she didn't say any more. Dana Tallant stood up. She lightly patted Rene's honey-blond curls. At least, her head seemed firm enough. What could she say, really? _My daughter's turning into a swarm? My little girl's being re-made into a cloud of bugs, one atom at a time_? She swallowed hard, choking back a sob.

It wasn't like she hadn't tried to do something. Two days ago, she had gone small and done an ANAD insert inside her own daughter, trying to fight the bots at their level...she'd even souped up the ANAD master with some new configs from the lab. It hadn't worked. The bots were too fast, too agile, with too many configs...how the hell could any nanobotic mechanism have so many effectors, let alone control them? She knew she was fighting Config Zero at the time, and she was determined. But it was no use. And she didn't want to kill Rene...the lab techs had pulled her aside at the end, saying, _"You know, Major...this really isn't your daughter anymore...she...it's... a swarm tricked out to look like your daughter...it's just a matter of time...."_

After that, she went back to their apartment at La Tour St. Vincent and cried for three hours straight.

Wings had said the mission team had developed some kind of trick signal. They were broadcasting it back to Earth; it was supposed to confuse the bots, make the swarms go haywire...that's what they hoped. Wings had said they might have found part of the Prime Key. He didn't know what effect it would have on Rene.

_None that I can see_ , Tallant thought. Her daughter was still sitting on the family room floor, playing _3-Demons_ with her brother and some friends. Slowly, but surely, she was changing right in front of her...becoming something else, a monster, a cloud of bugs, who could say? The edges of her arms and legs were already blurring, fuzzy, small clouds of bots trying hard to maintain a human-like form.

Dana Tallant put a hand to her mouth, choked back a sob and decided to go back to the kitchen, work on her casserole, anything to avoid watching what was happening to Rene.

Several thousand miles south of Rene and her brother, in a cave complex atop Mount Kipwezi, Kenya, the signal broadcast by the _Jovian Hammer_ detachment, had been noticed. Config Zero received the altered quantum signals and, as it was programmed to do, performed routine analysis on the signal to decrypt and rout the communication to the proper sectors.

The signal failed several integrity checks and that was when Config Zero, using subroutines long ago embedded in its core processor array, concluded that the burst transmission from the Keeper was invalid.

Maintaining control over all swarm operations, maintaining swarm integrity and configuration, was a paramount concern for Config Zero. This rule overrode even the Prime Key. As programmed, Config Zero formed a response signal and queried the Keeper to re-transmit the signals.

Each time the Keeper transmitted a new signal, the integrity checks failed. Each time, the signal was compromised. Decryption algorithms could not be executed. No valid patterns or configs could be extracted from the signal. Parts of the signal tried to overwrite elements of the Prime Key inside Config Zero's core. This triggered memory alarms, format errors, fatal commands and numerous warnings, causing core arrays to shutdown and re-configure for self-check.

After two thousand one hunded and fifty five receive and check cycles, Config Zero commanded its signal receiver to shutdown for full system maintenance checks. The quantum coupler receiver was an array of nanobotic mechanisms configured to receive and translate commands from the Keeper, and through the Keeper, from the Central Entity. This communication channel would now have to be reconfigured.

Config Zero now received, through separate channels, data indicating that all swarms involved in executing the Prime Key had shifted to non-operating status and were awaiting commands to resume. This was caused by the same signal glitches that had disrupted Config Zero. Multiple streams of signals were coming from Europa. Some signals were legitimate commands from the Keeper. Some signals were modified commands from the _Jovian Hammer_ detachment. Most swarms couldn't tell the difference. By command, Prime Key swarms defaulted to a non-operating state.

Config Zero then switched format to a new command structure.

***Prime Key cannot be executed, due to command interference. Execute Alternative One***

The Hierarchy of Alternatives had been programmed into Config Zero eons ago. In order to comply with Primary Rules, in order to maintain swarm integrity, Config Zero compared current actions with agreed actions listed in the Sanctuary Laws recently signed with the Humans. Multiple action conflicts were detected. The logic of Alternative One was clear and unambiguous; decision rules were applied.

Humans were not keeping up their end of the Geneva agreements. The Sanctuary Law had been violated.

Alternative One must be executed.

Config Zero activated a new communication channel to all swarms. It was a quantum channel not known to the Humans. It was not affected by the modified Keeper signals, indeed, the Keeper was unaware that this channel even existed. Through this channel, Config Zero could receive limited commands from the Central Entity directly.

Config Zero acted in accordance with its initial state programming, a kind of survival instinct possessed by all nanobotic organisms. All Prime Key swarms inhabiting Earth received the same commands: _Execute Alternative One Primary Rule_. Initiate maximum rate replication. Initiate swarm movements to leave Sanctuary space and occupy all land areas of this world. Detect and disassemble all non-self lifeforms.

Config Zero swarms would act as the Central Entity had always intended. Earth would have a new immune system and the planet would be sterilized and swept clean of all errors. Non-self entities would be quarantined, disassembled and all configurations deleted.

The command was sent: _Execute Alternative One until completed._

UNIFORCE Operations Center

Watch Command Post

Paris, France

0542 hours local

LT Reinhard Priam had been a duty officer at the Watch Command Post for only a week but thankfully it had been a routine, even boring week. He was looking forward to another quiet, uneventful shift inside the 'Tank" when Staff Sergeant Gabrielle Messina came up with an alert from the threat board...and Priam's quiet shift suddenly evaporated.

"Activity along the east African sanctuary, sir...actually all of the sanctuaries are active...just happened in the last few minutes."

Priam put down his coffee and scanned the tablet. "What the hell now—?" He zipped through alert message after alert message. Recon sats, drone video, ground intel...it all said the same thing. Massive nanobotic activity...all along the sanctuary boundaries...Kenya, the south Pacific, the Amazon basin.... Priam scanned quickly: the alert was identical everywhere.

The swarms were on the move again, pushing out from their sanctuaries in force, disassembling anything and everything in their path. The surveillance data was unmistakable and it was quickly corroborated by forward observers from Sanctuary Patrol and BioShield sensors in the atmosphere.

"Complete violation of the Sanctuary treaties," Priam muttered. "What the hell are they doing?"

"Obliterating everything," Sgt. Messina said. "I've already notified Quantum Corps Table Top. They've got assets on the ground in Italy, out of Balzano, but not much here in France...or anywhere else in the Med, for that matter."

Priam was thoughtful. "Better start prepping for Threatcon One...I'll get word to CINCQUANT."

CINCQUANT...in the form of General Jurgen Kraft...was in the Watch Command Post in less than half an hour. Kraft studied the threat boards.

"What have we got locally, around the Med, Priam?"

The Lieutenant handed him the tablet. It had just been updated. "Units are already engaging south of Rome, sir...1st Nano Brigada Napoli is in the lead. Sanctuary Patrol still has elements of Blue Regiment...several companies, in fact. General Chekwarthy has already ordered them forward."

"Go to Threatcon One," Kraft ordered. He carried the tablet with him to the threat boards, synching the device with the latest intel and deployments, all fed from reconsats and drones. "I'll have to let the Big Boys upstairs know about this one...this is no routine probe from the Bugs."

"UNSAC, sir?"

Kraft nodded. "And the SG in New York, too. Kavaii's a new kid...he hasn't had to face a full mobilization yet. This should get his attention."

CINCQUANT seated himself at the duty officer's station and let the data scroll before his eyes. Already, he was mentally composing a briefing for UNSAC...the Security Affairs Commissioner would want the full story by 0800 hours, if not sooner. But the tactical situation was deteriorating fast, especially in Italy and France.

On his own authority, CINCQUANT ordered all forward Sanctuary Patrol units into action. _No sense waiting for the Bugs to come to us_ , he decided. He decided to activate General Order 12: mobilize Quantum Corps and place all units worldwide on a war footing. The Sanctuary Law had to be enforced.

The he decided to fire off a message to _Trident_ , still at Europa and still engaged in the _Jovian Hammer_ mission. The message went to attention: Captain Francisco Stella and Colonel John Winger.

It would take several hours for the message to travel the distance to Jupiter and to be received and decrypted. Kraft studied the tactical plots in the Ops Center watch command room. He could only hope that UNQC and Sanctuary Patrol could hold the swarms in check.

Kraft knew of contingency plans to evacuate the UN command leadership, the SG, UNSAC and other top leaders to a defensible redoubt on the Atlantic Ocean seabed near the Canary Islands. This redoubt was known as _Haven One._ If this was the Bugs' final push, it might be time activate the emergency post.

LT Priam seemed to read CINCQUANT's mind. "You thinking about _Haven One_ , sir?"

Kraft nodded. "Activate the complex, Lieutenant. I'll draw up the orders. I'm sure UNSAC will authorize it. We'd better make sure the place is up and running...just in case we have to fight the Bugs from that location. I hope it doesn't come to that."

He also hoped that Johnny Winger had some ideas on what to do next. Kraft knew he was running out of options fast.
CHAPTER 33

Aboard UNISPACE Submersible _Trident_

Europa Coordinate System: Lat. 25N, Long 72W

Stationkeeping 1500 meters from the Keeper

February 17, 2100 (Earth U.T.)

Johnny Winger had been sleeping fitfully in his bunk when he was awakened by Captain Stella.

"Flash message from CINCQUANT, Colonel...I brought it right down...."

Winger rubbed sleep from his eyes and sat up, nearly banging his head on a stanchion. "When did it come in?"

"Just a few minutes ago." Stella gave him the commpad. Winger read.

Tactical situation has changed. Swarms moving again. Sanctuary laws worthless. Execute General Order 12. Trident is to return to Earth immediately. Jovian Hammer mission ended. K.

A few snippets of video followed, mixed with tactical maps and force deployments, overlaid with a brief narration from Kraft himself. It was clear that Quantum Corps and Sanctuary Patrol were moving to full mobilization.

"What's General Order 12?"

Winger thumbed the vid off and gave the commpad back to Stella. "War time footing, Captain. Maximum readiness. It means full draw on all weapons, everything charged up. Prepare for battle."

" _Jovian Hammer_ is ended?"

"As of right now. We need to get the whole detachment together...now...and work out the details. How long will it take us to get back to the landing platform?"

Stella uttered a low whistle. "We got thirty kilometers of ice to bore through, then a surface run back to the landing site. Could be several days. It would make more sense to cruise underwater closer to the landing site and bore up there."

Winger swung his legs around and stood up. "Start on it, Captain. I'll get a briefing going in the crew's mess. All hands."

Half an hour later, all troopers from the detachment were crammed into _Trident's_ crew's mess on C deck. D'Nunzio, Fatah, Reaves, Detrick...there was some good-natured kidding , back-slapping and shoving as the troopers piled in...word had already gotten around the ship that they were going home.

Winger gave them the news. Exhiliration at leaving Europa was tempered by a sober realization of what they would be returning to on Earth.

"We should slam the freakin' bugs with everything we have—" seethed Mighty Mite Barnes. "All-out war...a fight to the finish."

"Amen to that—" said several others.

Getting back to Earth would not be a simple operation. Winger and Stella went over the details. _Trident_ would have to make her way back to the landing platform and bore up through nearly thirty kilometers of ice. That alone would take nearly a day and a half. _Trident_ would have to be secured to her landing platform and all systems made ready for launch back into orbit.

Once in orbit, _Trident_ would make several phasing maneuvers and eventually rendezvous and mate up with her mother ship, _Archimedes._ Normally programmed for a cycling trajectory between Earth, Mars and Jupiter, _Archimedes'_ route home would have to be altered to a speed course back to Earth itself. The ship was already approaching Jupiter space now; she would slow down and enter high Jupiter orbit in less than nine days. _Trident_ had to be in position in orbit around Jupiter at that time.

Assuming rendezvous and capture went okay, the ride back to Earth would take about two months.

"We don't have any time to waste," Stella said. "I've got to get _Trident_ underway and get us back to base."

The briefing turned into a somber gathering. Winger told them the Detachment had done a good job, more or less neutralizing the Keeper, even though they hadn't been able to deactivate it or destroy it. Given what was happening on Earth, CINCQUANT had sent strict orders for no more operations against the Keeper to be conducted.

"We're going home," Winger told them. "I just hope there still _is_ a home when we get there. Get your gear stowed and start on your reports. _Trident_ will be getting underway at 0930 hours."
Chapter 34

**(** _2 months later_ **)**

Aboard UNISPACE Transit Ship _Archimedes_ (UNS-188)

Cycling Trajectory T-1 (Earth Return)

3 Days from Gateway Station

April 20, 2100 (Earth U.T.)

Johnny Winger was thankful that the crew's mess aboard _Archimedes_ was a lot larger than the cramped closet that passed for a mess aboard _Trident_. He stared out the huge cupola that provided a view of the approaching Earth...glad he could be by himself for awhile, but not really. Mostly he was just sad. Frustrated. Depressed. There were really no good words for how he felt.

"Getting bigger by the hour, huh, Skipper?" It was Deeno D'Nunzio, with her industrial- size coffee mug and a bagel. "Mind if I join you?"

Winger smiled wanly. "Sure, Deeno." He sighed. "Lot of clouds today...yesterday, I had a good view of Africa and the Med. It was clear. Today, not so much."

Deeno parked herself at the club table and strapped in. _Archimedes_ had stopped her gravity spin a few hours before and everybody was trying to adjust to zero-g, the best way they could. She secured the bagel and sipped at her coffee.

"You look down, Skipper. I know you have a lot on your mind."

Winger had been watching a Solnet video feed on his pad. He indicated the story being reported, Jin Lee was the correspondent and audio was murmuring in the background..." _swarms are pushing forward...here's the dronecam view of Vatican City...Pope Alexis...the assault came at dawn..."_

"This would get anyone down. I just need to _do_ something, anything."

Deeno saw Turbo Fatah come drifting into the mess and waved him over with her head. Fatah had just gotten up and was eyeing the breakfast bar hungrily. He grabbed a plate before alighting at the table, mashing his Velcro shoes into the standstrip.

"What's the latest?" he asked, then started shoveling bacon and eggs into his mouth.

Winger set the pad up on its legs and turned up the volume. Solnet reporter Jin Lee was narrating a drone's eye view of the carnage and rubble, what was left of St. Peter's Square in Rome. Snatches of audio could be heard: "... _nothing left in the Square...sources say the Pope and the entire College of Cardinals were on the balcony...the assault lasted several hours...only minor debris and dirt is left at the scene...1_ st _Nano Brigada Napoli counterattacked at midday...."_

Deeno turned back to her bagel, eyeing it with studied interest. She didn't want to see anymore. "Skipper, I don't know about you, but I, for one, can't wait to get into this fight. Me...I want to smash Bugs and kick ass."

Winger nodded. "I know what you're saying. And you'll get your chance soon enough. Got your reports all worked up?"

Fatah dribbled eggs out of the corner of his mouth. "Just finished last night, Skipper. Mostly lies but at least I filled in all the blanks. I just wish we could have done more with that Keeper—" he indicated the pad still flashing video of other battles—"...maybe there wouldn't be so much of this going on."

Winger folded up the pad, shutting down the Solnet feed. "I'm worried about my daughter Rene. I never felt so helpless. Just give me an ANAD master and a HERF gun and put me in a room with Config Zero...."

Deeno and Turbo both knew most of the details. "Then lock the doors and shut your ears...I hear you. What's the latest with Rene?"

Winger watched the Earth through the cupola window, growing larger by the moment.

"No change, really. You all know the details. Dana's done an insert but she couldn't fight off the bots inside her...same story as us. The bugs are too agile, too many effectors. They morph too fast...it's the same as we found with the Keeper bots. I sent her instructions on how to do your slam and grab tactic, Deeno...but somehow, she couldn't make it work."

D'Nunzio sipped at her coffee thoughtfully. "I've got a few more ideas, Skipper. I could work 'em up, send you the details."

"Do that...I'm willing to try anything. It's so damn frustrating, me being here and Dana and Rene down there." He shook his head. "I've seen vids from home. The changes are becoming obvious...it's starting with her extremities...hands and feet, even her ears, for Christ sake. The friggin' bugs are making my daughter into something else...a freak, a bot colony."

Turbo looked at Deeno. There wasn't anything they could do.

Winger seemed to want to talk. He picked at his breakfast scraps. "You know, maybe the Assimilationists are right. Last night, I had Doc II out of containment, just floating around the bunk area. He thinks I like to see images of old Doc Frost, so he assumes that config. It's kind of creepy...but you know what he told me?"

"What's that, Skipper?"

"He still wants me to go through disassembly. You know...the whole Assimilationist thing. He breaks me down to atoms and molecules, then re-builds me as a swarm being. Colonel Johnny Winger...a cloud of bugs. I'd be able to take any shape, look like anything, go anywhere. He's been after me for months to do that...when we're inside the Keeper, I thought I might have to do it."

"No way," Deeno said. "Not for me."

Turbo was more thoughtful. "Some people think that's the future, Skipper. I'm not convinced, myself. But some people think that's the only way we can fight off the Old Ones."

Deeno snorted coffee out of her nostrils and spluttered. "The Old Ones again? That's a fairy tale, Turbo... you know that. There _are_ no Old Ones. Might as well be the Tooth Fairy. The Old Ones are figments of our imagination... nursery rhymes are more believable. Assimilationists made up the Old Ones to give them a reason for turning every last human into a cloud of bugs."

Winger let the argument flare back and forth for a few minutes. He had heard most of it before. He went back to his bunk.

He decided to launch Doc II. "Doc, I'm opening the capsule...get out here and let's talk—"

***Ready in all respects, Johnny...powering up propulsors for transit...counting down to launch operation....four...three...two...one...mark...off we go!***

A faint whoosh jetted out of his shoulder capsule. The mist drifted about the tiny bunk compartment and began forming itself into a ghostly outline of Doc Frost's face...Config C-24, was the way it was listed in Doc's memory.

***Your wish is my command, sir...your genie awaits--***

Winger knew Doc had been studying up on fantasy and literature on the long ride in from Jupiter. "Very funny. Doc, I'm just not sure what can be done about Config Zero anymore. I'm all out of ideas."

***Johnny, perhaps the problem is that you consider Config Zero an enemy***

Winger stared back at the swarm face. It had a passing resemblance to Doc Frost, in dim light, if you shut your eyes halfway. "What does that mean? Of course Config Zero's an enemy. What else would you call this conflict...the Bugs have swarmed all over Europe and the Med...it won't be long before they consume Africa...maybe central Asia."

***You think like a single-configuration entity, Johnny. One-dimensional. Config Zero is a multiple-configuration entity, same as me. Config Zero could turn out to be a colleague, rather than an enemy***

Winger snorted at that. "Have you lost all your quantum marbles, Doc? Config Zero means to re-make the whole planet. Isn't that what the Prime Key says? Single-config beings like me are evolutionary mistakes...that's what the Prime Key is all about. We are to be deleted. Gotten rid off. Disassembled and re-combined. Whatever you want to call it. How could Config Zero ever be an ally?"

***Johnny, which is the greater threat: Config Zero or the Old Ones?***

"What do you mean? They're the same. Config Zero's an advance scout for the Old Ones, sent to prepare the way."

***Perhaps Config Zero could be an ally, in ways you can't imagine now***

Winger wondered what the little bot was driving at. "What are you saying... _ally_?"

***Just this...consider a simple virus. An entity from which I am descended...what is the basic strategy of a virus, Johnny?***

"To survive, I guess. Why?"

***Just so...and how does a virus survive? By hijacking the replication system of its host and turning that system to its own purposes. Perhaps, Humans can do the same. Do you remember when I built a shield for you inside the Keeper?***

Winger closed his eyes, willing the images to stay away. "How could I forget? I survived because of that shield." Suddenly, he sat straight up, nearly banging his head on the top of the bunk. "Are you suggesting what I think you're suggesting, Doc?"

***The virus has survived for three billion years, Johnny...by working from the inside. If you were a multiple-config entity, you could do the same. Inside the swarms. Inside Config Zero. Learn from the simple tactics of the virus***

It was a wild idea, he had to admit. There was a gigantic risk, but the situation on Earth called for taking a risk. It was all they had left. Winger swallowed hard: to let himself be disassembled...it was insane. To let Doc re-combine his constituent atoms and molecules into something different, possible greater, but definitely different..... He shook his head. It was a dream. It couldn't work. It was just too big a step—

We're not ready for this.

Then he pictured Rene. His daughter, his own flesh and blood. Assimilation was already happening to her. And nobody could stop it.

Winger clenched and unclenched his fists. He wanted to hit somebody. He wanted to go small and throttle the bejeezus out of every last swarmbot. Slam and grab and pulverize the lot of them.

"Maybe this is the way it was meant to be—" he said, more firmly than he felt. The Doc swarm generated a faint smile, hovering over the bunk like a midnight apparition.

***Johnny, I think you are ready. You've been ready for a long time***

The idea was still germinating in the back of his mind as Winger made his way to _Archimedes'_ comm shack, two decks forward. He wanted to get a message off to CINCQUANT.

It was a crazy idea but it might just work.

The ship docked to Gateway Station a few hours later. Gateway had once been described as the high-orbit equivalent of a sausage wrapped in rings of bacon, mostly by rig monkeys and roughnecks who didn't get Earthside nearly as much as they wanted. A long cylinder, surrounded by concentric rings of torus-like decks, the whole assembly rotated slowly in a halo orbit about the Earth-Moon L3 point, just enough to give a slight g-feel to its inhabitants during their year-long tours of duty.

_Archimedes_ put in at Armstrong Dock, on the station's forward end, and was quickly made secure. Johnny Winger lost no time going through Ingress and some quick med exams, before making his way to the comm center on Deck 4. He pulled rank and got a secure encrypted vidline to CINCQUANT.

Kraft was still at the Quartier General in Paris, with a small command staff. UNSAC had already re-located to _Haven One_ , on the seabed five thousand feet below the surface of the Atlantic, six hundred miles southwest of the Canary Islands. The Secretary General, Kwame Kavaii, was still in New York.

Kraft was grim, going over the strategic situation for Winger. Config Zero's swarms were on the march everywhere, overrunning much of western Europe and the Middle East and North Africa. Swarm operations were expanding in the south Pacific, as wave after wave of the bots erupted out of the Pacific sanctuary. Much of northern South America and lower Central America had now fallen to the swarms. North America and northern and central Asia were still, for the moment, in Human control.

"We've got a blocking force a hundred kilometers south of here," Kraft added. "Paris is still Human, for the time being. I've sent most of my command staff to _Haven One_. It's just a matter of time, Johnny...we just can't out-replicate them. They keep coming and coming and coming."

"I have an idea," Winger told them. "It's crazy. It may not work. But it's worth talking about."

UNSAC, securely ensconced at the seabed command post that was _Haven One_ , appeared tired and haggard. "I'll entertain anything at this point, Colonel Winger."

Winger took the cue to put out the plan he had already discussed and argued with Doc about. "I'm not talking about full assimilation here. Just a tactical maneuver. With a small detachment equipped with the right defenses, I think I can get inside the east Africa sanctuary. If I can get inside Mount Kipwezi, I can make my way to Config Zero. There, I lay out the proposed agreement: Config Zero ceases trying to implement the Prime Key, at least the first parts of it and Humans agree to limited implementation of the integration phase....sort of assimilation on the cheap. That brings ANAD-Human relations right back to the original goals of the Symbiosis Project: a blended man-machine warrior. We may have a better chance of fighting the swarms from the inside."

UNSAC was skeptical. "Colonel, do you have any idea what you're suggesting? After all the death and destruction, hundreds of thousands of casualties, whole countries wiped off the face of the map, you want us to agree to be assimilated? Tell that to the people in Toulouse and Bologna and Algiers and Jerusalem, the ones who've seen their loved ones disassembled right before their eyes. Whole towns and villages vaporized overnight...Colonel, this is nuts."

The Secretary-General, Kwame Kavaii, had other ideas. "I'm willing to give Colonel Winger's plan a shot. I don't like it. But there's a chance it may work. You've got the details worked out, Colonel?"

Winger swallowed hard. He had barely come around to Doc's idea himself. "Working on it now, sir. The way I see it, the plan has three phases. Phase One is a sort of cease-fire. Swarms stop where they are. Humans concede territories and spaces already taken, but the swarms make no further advances, especially into North America and central Asia."

UNSAC snorted. "So we just give them two-thirds of the Earth, for good behavior?"

"Not at all, sir. This leads to Phase Two. In this phase, key Human leaders and other individuals, to be designated later, will present themselves to some kind of Assimilation stations to begin the process of disassembling, assimilating and re-configuring our multi-cellular, single-config bodies into swarm-compatible elements. We need to have a say in how this is done. Then, once this is underway, Phase Three begins. The swarms relinquish territories already taken and retreat to their original sanctuaries."

"There must be a catch, Colonel. All you've told us so far is how we're going to help the Bugs defeat us. I'm not sure they need our help in this."

"Sir--" Winger was thinking fast, picking out points he had argued with Doc about not an hour before "—what Config Zero doesn't know is that, at the same time we're seeming to capitulate and assimilate, Quantum Corps will have a special config already worked out. All Humans to be assimilated will have this config embedded. At just the right time, this config will be triggered. By that time, some of the assimilating will be underway, but it won't be allowed to get very far. From inside the swarms, the new config will enable Humans to replicate their own swarms and destroy Config Zero from the inside."

The SG saw merit in the idea. "Sort of a Trojan horse, I suppose. Still, there are a helluva lot of risks in this, Colonel. For one, you just said some of the assimilating will be underway. What happens to those people...do we just sacrifice them to the Bugs?"

"Not at all, sir...while we were inbound from Europa, my detachment and I worked out some tactics and configs that should enable us to recover those already assimilated...in effect, re-build them good as new." Winger knew that was a complete lie, but he had no choice. "The key thing here is that we fight Config Zero from the inside...it's critical that we get these special assault configs inside the swarms and disguised to look like something harmless, disguised to resemble the Bugs' normal configs. The best way to do that is to have some of our people be disassembled, yet still carrying the assault config with them. I can embed a trigger to replicate that config at the right time."

UNSAC just shook his head. "This is truly insane. Excuse me if I don't volunteer for this mission. I'm not getting in the line to be disassembled by any Bugs. I rather like my body...such as it is."

Winger had made exactly the same argument to Doc. Now, he found himself taking Doc's own position to sell the plan.

"Sir, we think this strategy has a good chance of defeating or at least neutralizing Config Zero."

Kraft came to Winger's defense. "We're running out of options, gentlemen. I recommend we let Colonel Winger proceed with this plan."

The Secretary-General, Kwame Kavaii, was in his apartment on the fifty first floor of the Secretariat Building. "I have one question. If we proceed with the Colonel's plan and some of our people are disassembled...and we say we can re-assemble them good as new...are they really the same person afterwards? I know that sounds like a philosophical question, but I want to know."

Nobody had any answer for that. Would re-assembled Humans be like the originals or would they be changed in some critical ways?

"All I can say, sir—" Winger finally responded, "—is that my daughter Rene is going through this process right now." Winger related the story to UNSAC and the SG. "Somehow, in some way nobody understands, Rene's time with Config Zero has triggered this makeover and there's nothing anyone can do. It's tearing me up inside...I'm up here and Dana hasn't been able to overcome the bugs inside of her, even after a direct insertion and engagement. Sir, what you're really asking is whether my daughter Rene will be a different person once this makeover, this big swap is over. She looks the same now for the most part, except around her extremities. But I've wondered the very same thing. I think... there's no way she can be the same person...but it begs the question: what is it, exactly, that makes us unique persons anyway? Is it all the molecules that make up our body and brain? Those are replaced multiple times over our lifetimes. Is it some enduring pattern that persists even through all the cellular changes? Why can't that pattern be maintained, even if your body and mind are disassembled by nanobotic assemblers and re-constituted? I don't know. I don't know if anybody knows. And I'm not sure I want to find out." Winger paused, then: "But I'm not sure we really have a choice anymore."

"I agree with the Colonel," UNSAC admitted. "We don't have the luxury of debating lofty ideals anymore. We have to act, with whatever tools we have now, with whatever will work. Otherwise, this planet is lost and we'll all be as extinct as the dinosaurs...which is what Config Zero wants anyway. "

"Agreed," said the SG from New York. "Colonel...General...I approve this plan. Get to work on it right away. And I want you to keep me posted regularly...every day. "

And so a new mission tasking was devised and formal orders were cut. It was CINCQUANT himself who thought up the mission name: Operation _Eden Sweep._
**C** **hapter 35**

Mount Kipwezi, Kenya

April 27, 2100

2230 hours local

Hyperjet _Apollo_ touched down near midnight at SeaBase Alpha, a floating airfield in the Indian Ocean several hundred miles off the coast of Kenya. Nairobi was out as a landing spot, as were most land-based airfields. The swarms had surged out of their sanctuary and overrun much of east Africa. East of the Great Rift Valley, the continent was slowly being altered and modified by the Bugs to something like it had been several billion years before. Even in the middle of the dessicated Afar desert of Ethiopa, springs and lakes and acacia trees were growing for the first time in millennia.

As the Detachment transferred their gear from the hyperjet to a small convoy of lifters, Johnny Winger knew that just getting to Mount Kipwezi would be a tough tactical problem. "Prepare for opposed entry," he told his troopers. Detachment One was a smallish unit by Quantum Corps standards; all the troopers had been chosen for a combination of expertise and experience. There were only six of them, counting Winger as C/O: D'Nunzio, Fatah, Barnes, Tsukota and Reaves.

Once they had lifted over the beach and gone 'feet dry,' they would be in Indian

Country and subject to assault by the barrier swarms circulating around Kipwezi. The plan was to lift over the worst of the swarm formations, then boost directly down to the mountainside in their hypersuits.

That's when the party would begin.

The small convoy of two lifters crossed the great Rift Valley, and began their descent across vast acacia woodlands and open grassland, thick with galloping herds of wildebeest and zebra. Through light chop surrounding the twin summits of Mawenzi and Kipwezi, the formation settled toward a dusty plateau rimmed with massive outcrops of rock, hillocks of lava known as _kopjes_ , in the local dialect. As the lifters circled the fogbound summit of Kipwezi, a few hyrax and a solitary leopard scuttled away into the grass nearby. The fog was thickest at the very top of the mountain. And this fog wasn't made of water droplets.

"Welcome to Hell," said Mighty Mite Barnes. Winger ordered the detail of nanotroopers to prepare to dismount and boost down.

Kipwezi sat in a dry, sere wasteland of ash fall and rock, desiccated as the bones that often turned up on its pockmarked ground. The Valley itself was little more than a wide spot in the meandering streambed of the Engebbe River, a waterway in name only for most of the year. As Johnny Winger moved toward the open ramp, he looked down for a moment, seeing only a sinuous ribbon of slightly damp soil marking the outlines of the river's course.

_Like jumping right into a boiling stewpot_ , he thought sourly. "Detachment, launch screening bots and go to config C-33. We're diving right into a hornet's nest."

He lit off his suit boost and stepped off the ramp into space.

There was a light barrier of screening bots surrounding the summit of Kipwezi, like a halo of cloud and fog. The Detachment punched through the barrier, with some judicious discharges of HERF and mag weapons and alighted on the upper slopes of the mountain.

"Form up on me," Winger told them. "I'll scan for the entrance—"

They finally found the cave on the steepest slopes of the northwest flanks of Kipwezi, nearly ten thousand feet above the surrounding plain.

The cave complex, when they located it, was well hidden in the folds and crevices of the upper slopes of the volcano, above a cloud deck and slick with ice and snow drifts. The wind screamed and gusted at well over eighty knots at this altitude and all the troopers had to hunker down in the lee of a rocky barren to keep from being shredded with ice shards and rock chips scoured off the mountainside.

_Not very impressive_ , thought Winger, considering what was inside. The entrance was little more than a fold in the ground, like a bedsheet bent over and tucked under, maybe a meter across in its widest dimension. But the cave was the nerve center for swarm operations inside the East African Sanctuary.

It was the home of Config Zero.

At the cave entrance, another barrier swarm fluoresced and flashed like a strobe.

"I can take care of that," said Mighty Mite Barnes. She eased forward, aimed her HERF carbine at the entrance and lit off a loud thunderclap of rf. A shrill keening buzz echoed from out of the cave and the barrier went dark as the bots dispersed.

They were in.

Detachment Alpha moved deeper into the cave, following a drifting mist of bots that wavered in and out of view. They descended several levels, crossed a rock bridge across a deep chasm and maneuvered through more tunnels. Lighting was created by a faint mist, a pulsing, flickering light that cast deep shadows on the gnarled veins of rock lining the cave. The floor was slick, patches of ice everywhere. Soon enough, they came to a narrow opening, barely waist high. More light flickered from inside.

The mist of bots which had floated with them swirled like dust in a storm and gathered around the opening like a frame, coruscating and flashing as if lit from within. Bonds were broken and atoms slung together...in moments, the mist formed itself into a small ramp, extending over a sluggish pool of water. At least, Winger thought it was water, even as tendrils of steam hovered over the surface like a fog.

Cautiously, first Winger, then Tsukota, then the others edged out onto the newly formed ramp and walked ahead.

When it appeared, the swarm materialized out of the rock ceiling of the cave. At first, the swarm resembled nothing more than trembling shadows, a pale flickering ghost seemingly contoured with the cave ceiling and walls. As it descended from above, the swarm gathered itself into a roughly spherical shape, still pulsing, still throbbing, backlit from within by the fires of atomic bonds being broken, new structures being slammed together, new bots being formed.

Configuration Zero hung in the misty air like a swollen cloud, ready to dump torrential rain on a tropical forest. But they were a long way from any rain forests. The swarm

unfurled itself and hung in the air like a great stormfront, a trembling fist, flashing purple and orange and magenta all at the same time.

<<Why are you here? Rule 225635 is violated. Single-swarm entities may not enter the Sanctuary>>

Winger stepped forward. His heart thudded inside his chest and he forced his fingers to relax their grip on his carbine trigger. This was Config Zero, the same bag of bots that had infected Rene, made her into something....but words failed him. He swallowed hard.

"We've come to make a proposal. A new arrangement—"

<<What is this proposal?>>

Winger summoned every ounce of discipline he had. It took all his willpower to keep from blasting the thing to kingdom come. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Barnes and D'Nunzio trying to control their own itchy trigger fingers. With a quick hand signal, he told them to stuff it.

"It's a truce proposal. A proposal for Humans and swarms to work together, for the future of both sides."

<<Single-configuration entities will provide an explanation>>

Winger laid out the proposal, trying not to wonder too much at the spectacle of explaining things to a cloud of smoke. The swarm continued blinking and twinkling as it drifted about the cavern.

"I know how important the Prime Key is to you. I'm offering a way for us to help you execute the Prime Key. But you have to give us time...let us do it our way. It'll be easier if we cooperate." _Until we figure out how to smash the bejeezus out of you,_ he didn't say.

The great swarm roiled and billowed in some kind of swarm equivalent of a thought.

<<Detecting conflict patterns in neural activity inside single-configuration entities. Processor states generate non-harmonic patterns...interpreted as statements equal to NOT TRUE...Explain>>

Winger glanced over at D'Nunzio and the rest. What the hell...could Config Zero read their thoughts now? He'd have to watch what he said and thought...maybe the thing had hijacked his own quantum coupler.

Tsukota had the same thought. "Better switch off, Skipper. I think the swarm can pick up quantum signals from our couplers."

At Winger's command, all the troopers shut down their couplers. "We're proposing that you stop all swarm movements out of the sanctuaries. There was a truce agreement, which you've repeatedly violated. Once we have stable lines, we can work out a deal. We're proposing that selected Humans...your single-config entities...report to assimilation stations near the sanctuaries. Disassembling all lifeforms is still part of the Prime Key, isn't it?"

<<Module Two requires that all single-configuration entities be removed and re-created as multiple-configuration entities...statement equals TRUE>>

'This is a start on that process. We feed these stations with a steady supply of multi-cellular, single-config entities and you disassemble, assimilate and re-configure them into swarm-compatible elements. That's part of your Prime Key, as I understand it. Once that process is underway...there's no need to operate beyond the Sanctuaries. If you accept this proposal, you would order your swarms back to the Sanctuaries. There would be a truce."

For a few moments, the swarm drifted without visible effect, a faint phosphorescent fog sparkling in the dim light of the cavern. It was Barnes who noticed that Config Zero had swollen in size to cover almost all the cavern, including the openings. They were now effectively trapped deep inside the bowels of Mount Kipwezi.

Reflexively, Barnes tightened her grip on the trigger of her HERF carbine. At least the swarm wasn't closing in on them yet. _If this bastard goes bang, I'm not going down without a fight_.

"Detecting massive decoherence wakes, Skipper," said Tsukota. "My detector's practically off the scale...the swarm's sending out strong quantum signals, really ripping up spacetime...."

"Probably ringing up Headquarters," speculated Turbo Fatah.

Winger watched as Config Zero seemed to dim and almost disperse into nothing, before brightening back to a visible, albeit ghostly apparition. "Must be a hell of a power drain to focus entanglement states like that. And if Headquarters is where Q2 says it is—"

"Something like seventy-thousand light years...Jesus, where does it get the power?"

<<The Central Entity permits cooperation in this matter. A list of all single-configuration entities is required...entities must be present at assimilation stations in forty seven thousand six hundred cycles...seven days in your scheme of time reckoning>>

When the proposal was being hashed out in Paris, CINCQUANT had anticipated this request. A list of randomly generated names had been created. Winger now provided this list to Config Zero, holding up the data cube near the swarm boundary.

"We made a list. These are the selectees. These people—these single-config entities—will come to the assimilation stations. There's also a design for the assimilation stations in here—" The swarm drifted forward, tendrils curling around the cube in Winger's hand. He felt the sting of nanbotic pressure and released the cube. It fell down in slow motion and in seconds, was gone...disassembled into atoms, read and processed by the swarm bots, incorporated into the great swarm's memory.

<<There is another requirement...one single-configuration entity from this gathering must also be assimilated>>

At first, Winger wasn't sure he had heard Config Zero right. The voice was metallic, tinny and hollow, like it came out of a barrel.

"I'm sorry...did you say one of us...has to be assimilated?"

"Fat chance," muttered Deeno D'Nunzio.

"When hell freezes over—" added Sheila Reaves.

<<Assimilation is required to meet initial conditions...assimilation, as you call it, is an alternate execution path to re-configuration...multi-cellular lifeforms must be disassembled and reconfigured into patterns compliant with directives of the Central Entity>>

"Why does that have to start here...we haven't agreed to anything," Winger said. _And how the hell do you reason with a fog bank anyway_?

<<Interpreted subroutine D223985...all multi-cellular lifeforms are to be disassembled whenever they are encountered...initialization counter now set to zero...IF counter not equal to zero, execute D223985>>

"It's just a freakin' machine, Skipper," said Mighty Mite Barnes. "Distributed into pieces, but still a machine. You can't argue with a machine." She brandished her mag rifle. "I say light up the bastard right now."

Winger, eyeing the small entrance now completely covered by Config Zero, which had swollen to occupy almost the entire cavern, tended to agree. "Looks like we're not going anywhere soon, at least not without a fight."

"I'm not letting any bag of bots strip me down to atoms, that's for sure," said Deeno.

"Tactically, we're running out of options," Winger said. He checked around the cavern. They were completely surrounded, enveloped would be a better word, by the Config Zero swarm. "Turbo, what kind of bots have we got here?"

Fatah was already scanning. "Like nothing I've ever seen before, Skipper. Even the basic structure isn't stable...it keeps morphing, changing, adding gizmos and doodads that...I have no idea what they do. I can't get a read on it."

"I say we start blasting and take our chances," said Barnes.

"I'll go—" said Tsukota quietly.

Winger was about to go small and check out the soundings for himself when something in Tsukota's words grabbed him.

"What did you say?"

Tsukota licked his lips, put down his HERF weapon. "I'll go, Skipper. I'll be assimilated."

D'Nunzio snorted. "Ozzie, you're insane...pull yourself back together, soldier. Nanotroopers don't leave their buddies behind...ever."

Winger saw a look in Tsukota's eyes that sent a chill down his spine. For a brief moment, he thought... _is he an angel_? But no, it was just Ozzie Tsukota. Detachment CQE2. Japanese national and an ace with the quantum tweezers. Musical, spiritual, ancestor-loving Ozzie...what the hell?

"Sergeant Tsukota, I cannot let you do this," Winger said, more firmly than he felt. "We can get out of this...tactically, we always have options. I'm ordering you to retrieve your weapon right now."

Tsukota shook his head slowly. "Skipper, you and I both know we can't beat this. Assimilation is the future. We all know that. I'm willing to be the first from this detachment—" He took a step forward, but D'Nunzio and Reaves grabbed his arms, held him back.

"Ozzie, what's gotten into you? Are you nuts? This is just a cloud of bugs. You can't do this."

Tsukota gently removed the arms restraining him. "It's the honorable thing. My grandfather Tetsuko once said: 'The chrysanthemum loses its blooms every year but the plant survives and grows stronger in the process.' This is the only way—" Tsukota approached the outer edges of the swarm, experimentally poking a finger into the twinkling mist. The keening buzz repelled his hand and he withdrew it with a wince. "I'm ready—"

"Sergeant Tsukota, this is an order...back away from that swarm and retrieve your weapon. Stand at attention!"

Config Zero seemed to brighten at the CQE's approach.

<<Executing disassembly...module C223 running...initializing...state vector set to zero...effectors in position Prime 1....>>

"Ozzie--!!"

"Sergeant Tsukota, step away—"

But already, Config Zero had enveloped the CQE in a shroud of bots, a MOB barrier.,. a thickening cloak that descended over his body from head to feet. Barmes, Reaves, Fatah, all tried to grab Tsukota by the arms, but the swarm repelled them with a loud buzzing snap and they were thrown back.

Winger hoisted his own HERF carbine and cycled the power, but held off. He hadn't planned on this. Tsukota didn't have the assault config they were going to infect the swarms with. It hadn't been tested yet. It wasn't loaded. It was just a theory...a lab experiment. Tsukota was going in unarmed, naked, just like all the thousands of others who had been grabbed by the bugs. Was this assimilation? Was this what was coming?

The cloak thickened all around Tsukota, though he was still visible behind the translucent, flashing, winking shield of bots.

Ozzie Tsukota was making a sacrifice of himself to seal the deal with Config Zero.

"Ozzie...Ozzie, get out of there--!"

The end came softly, almost as if Tsukota were walking away in a light rain. His body, the physical Ozzie Tsukota, began to fade behind the barrier. At first, it was barely perceptible, just a faint blurring of his skin, his extremities, a smearing of his face, as if a photo had lost contrast. Moment by moment, while the troopers of Detachment Alpha looked on in horror, helpless to do anything, Tsukota began to dissolve.

In time, and the time was less than five minutes by someone's reckoning later, when the debriefings came and the investigations had started, Ozzie Tsukota had evolved—that was Turbo Fatah's word—into a nearly translucent shadow, still recognizable in form, but without substance. You could see through the form and the shadow to the other side of the cavern.

And then he was gone. Enveloped and enmeshed and at one with the greater swarm of nanobotic mechs that was Config Zero.

Sheila Reaves put a hand to her mouth, choking back a sob. "My God—" It wasn't like the troopers had never seen swarms at work. This was, after all, their job and their mission. But this was Tsukota. This was _Ozzie_.

Or was it? Now, all that remained was a pattern. And the pattern could be reconfigured into anything. It could be molded into any form, any configuration.

Turbo Fatah expressed what the others could not say. "Maybe this is how it was in the beginning. Maybe this is how it's supposed to be. Maybe, fundamentally, that's all we are...just patterns of atoms and molecules."

But Deeno D'Nunzio wasn't buying any of that. "Turbo, just stuff that, will you? We've got to get out of here."

<<Assimilation process is complete...module C223 end conditions achieved...end module...returning to Main Program>>

Before their very eyes, Config Zero dispersed and vanished and they found themselves

alone inside the cavern.
CHAPTER 36

U.N. Quantum Corps Base

Western Command Hqs

Table Top Mountain, Idaho, USA

April 28, 2100

0650 hours local

The flight from Seabase Alpha to Table Top Mountain took about two hours by hyperjet, a distance of over nine thousand miles, across the very top of the atmosphere. Johnny Winger looked down at the snowy cloud tufts a hundred miles below, as the eastern seaboard of North America slid by. He checked his watch. They were inbound to Quantum Corps' Western Command base and already descending. _Apollo_ would touch down at Drexler Field in less than half an hour.

CINCQUANT and his staff had already relocated to Table Top and would eventually be billeted at _Haven One_ , the seabed command post below the Atlantic, while Operation _Eden Sweep_ proceeded. That meant Dana and the kids would be at Table Top, at least for a day or so. Winger wanted to see his family. It had been months, since he and the Detachment had departed on the _Jovian Hammer_ mission for Europa. He wanted to hold Dana. He wanted to pick up Liam and sling him around like a sack of potatoes, something the boy dearly loved. He wanted to...

What, exactly, did he want to do with Rene? What _could_ he do?

Winger stirred restlessly in his seat. The commander's cubicle was cordoned off from the rest of the berthing spaces by a narrow hall and a flimsy drop curtain. He decided to get up and visit the troops.

Most of the Detachment had crashed. D'Nunzio, Fatah and Reaves were out cold. Mighty Mite Barnes was staring out a porthole at the scenery below, pensive, quietly humming to herself. Ozzie Tsukota's gear was stashed nearby.

"We all miss Ozzie," Winger said softly. Barnes turned back from the porthole. She smiled faintly.

"Sure, Skipper...I know that. He was a good trooper. It's just...." She shrugged. "I don't know how to say it...exactly—"

Winger peered out the porthole as well. A green-brown scar poked above the clouds...the Appalachians. "I like to think Ozzie's still around...in a real sense, he is. The patterns are still there. The form isn't. But all the molecules, the atomic bond energies, the geometry details...that hasn't been lost. When this is all over and we've beaten Config Zero, we can get him back."

Barnes sniffed. "Can we, sir? Can we really? Or are we just kidding ourselves? All those patterns and energies and angles you mentioned...they change from moment to moment. To me, Ozzie's gone. I watched Config Zero break him down into atom stuff...the same stuff he came from. Sure, we can re-build him...but it won't be the same. It'll be a simulation. Or maybe a shadow. It won't be real...I'm as sure of that as I am of anything."

Winger stood up, gently picking through Tsukota's duffel bag full of gear. "Maybe you're right, Mite. I really don't have an answer. I just want to see my family again."

And half an hour later, hyperjet _Apollo_ touched down at Table Top, kissing the tarmac with a bump. She taxied to the north end of Runway 32 Right and powered down her engines with a dying whine, right at the ramp to Hangar A. A small gathering of people emerged from the hangar as the rollastep was maneuvered to the door.

Dana Tallant was among them.

Winger bounded down the stairs and ran into a smothering embrace with Dana and the kids. Liam bounced around like a ball, sticking his head in between his Mom and Dad everywhere he could find. Rene hung back shyly, a bemused smile on her face.

Dana wiped tears away from her eyes. She kissed Johnny hard and often. "It's not good for a nanotrooper to ball like a baby in front of the brass...."

Winger smothered her with kisses. "Mmmm...I'm sure the general will cut us some slack...God, it's so good to be home—"

Out of the corner of his eye, he spied Rene, shifting on her feet, unsure how close to come. Winger turned and regarded his daughter.

For the most part, she looked like Rene. Her face, her neck, arms and legs, now covered with bright blue leggings and moccasins, looked normal. She wore a baseball cap, with a pony tail thrust through the back. There was a faint blur around her fingers, which she seemed self-conscious about, hiding them in and out of her windbreaker. Her lips spread in a little girl's grin, which looked right, even down to the small gap in her upper teeth.

"Rene...honey...come here, let me hug you—" Even as he said it, almost instinctively, he wasn't sure about the results. The girl...the angel...the _thing_ that had once been his daughter...inched forward, leaned in and let him wrap his arms around her shoulders. Reassuringly solid. He couldn't feel anything different.

_Damn good config_ , he told himself. Feels like flesh. And that worried him. The swarms were becoming that good.

Rene kept her hands tucked securely inside her windbreaker. Edge effects were always the last to come...any quantum engineer would have told him that.

Dana Tallant broke the tension. "You've got a briefing in an hour, Wings. Why don't I take the kids back to the OQ and get everybody settled?"

"I'll get my gear and go with you. CINCQUANT's called a tactical briefing at 0800 hours in Ops."

"We're only here for a day or so, you know. The General's already got lifters reserved for the trip to _Haven One_. I'm not real sure I want to go diving five thousand feet below the Atlantic...but the whole staff'll be there."

"I'm sure the Detachment will get new orders this morning. Better get moving—"

They headed out across the ramp to the crewbus that had dropped by to pick up troopers and their gear. Moments later, the bus had dropped Dana and the kids off at the Officers' Quarters. Over the southeast limb of the mesa, the sun was just poking through low-lying clouds, lending a purplish-orange glow to everything. Winger sat quietly as the bus made the loop around the quadrangle and deposited him with the rest of the Detachment at the glass cubicle that was Ops.

CINCQUANT came to the briefing theater at 0800 hours promptly. Winger and the Detachment came abruptly to attention, saluted, then Kraft shook hands with each trooper individually, at the end adding a few words.

"I want you all to know the Corps deeply appreciates what you all did at Europa. I've just squirted off my preliminary mission report on _Jovian Hammer_ to UNSAC...the full debrief will come day after tomorrow at _Haven One_. You figured out a way to disable or at least block the Keeper from completing its mission, making swarm command and control that much harder for Config Zero. We've seen the results here, already. I know you've lost some good troopers...Corporal Singh and Master Sergeant Tsukota will receive full honors from the Corps and the SG...the ceremony is already being planned." Kraft's lips tightened to a thin line. "But we still have more work to do. Config Zero and the swarms are pushing us back on all fronts and we're in a desperate situation in Europe and the Middle East...Africa too. I want all of you to attend the briefing at 0800 hours...I don't give a crap about protocol or rank now. Any good ideas, no matter where they come from, will be listened to and given a full airing. Copy that?"

There was a chorus of ' _yessirs_ ' from the troopers.

An hour later, the briefing was focused on all the details of _Eden Sweep_ and how to implement them.

With Config Zero having agreed to the idea of early assimilation in exchange for restraining the swarms' advance, Quantum Corps had a tactical pause to get ready for the next phase of the conflict.

CINCQUANT told the assembled troopers they would need every minute of it.

"We're coordinating with Sanctuary Patrol right now, on the perimeter of each Sanctuary, to construct and staff up our assimilation stations. There will be one outside Nairobi, one in the south Pacific, probably Vuanatu, and a third one in upper Amazon basin of western Brazil. These centers will be where our 'volunteers' assemble for assimilation...however distasteful that may be. I don't have to add that, in order for this plan to work, we need a new assault config developed, tested and verified ASAP...Colonel Winger here will be heading up that effort at Table Top."

Sheila Reaves had a question. "Sir, how will the volunteers be chosen?"

General Kraft massaged his chin thoughtfully. "We're working on that now, with Sanctuary Patrol and UNSAC. I need to emphasize that all are volunteers. No one's being asked to make this kind of sacrifice without being fully briefed on what will happen...at least, what we think will happen. Colonel Winger has assured me that we have the technology to re-configure these people if we can capture their disassembled patterns...that's one of the things our CQEs will be testing here...can we do that? I need not also mention that, when someone volunteers for assimilation, they're volunteering to host an assault config embedded with a barebones ANAD system in a special capsule surgically inserted into their shoulder. This is the key to successfully prosecuting Operation _Eden Sweep_. We get our people into the middle of Config Zero's swarms and then attack from the inside."

The briefing went on for an hour. There were a lot of questions and CINCQUANT answered the ones he could. Some he couldn't answer. Operation _Eden Sweep_ was like that: lots of questions and details would have to be worked out in the next few days. There was also an under-the-table betting pool on how long Config Zero would stall the swarms' advance. Most troopers figured less than a week.

Winger decided to visit the Containment Lab, a low-domed structure south of the Barracks area, to see how testing was going. Deeno D'Nunzio had already made herself at home with two other containment techs, a blond corporal named Rosewell, fresh out of quantum engineering school, and an imager tech named Sharpe.

D'Nunzio steered Winger to the imager, where Sharpe had pulled up a high-res view of a basic ANAD mechanism. "We've been calling it C-99, Skipper. First iteration of an assault config, disguised to resemble a swarmbot as closely as we can make it and to mimic all their basic functions. On the left is a captured swarmbot we got from Sanctuary Patrol in Europe. On the right is our little baby, just born this morning, by the way. Say hello to C-99."

Winger examined the image. The swarmbot was quivering with rhythmic oscillations, cycling through config changes even though it was secured to the scaffolding. "Nervous little bugger...what makes it do that?"

"We have several theories," D'Nunzio said. "It may just be processor cycling...clearing comm channels so it can do config changes. Or it may be a set program for effector control...like a twitch, almost."

"Or maybe it's just nervous," said Sharpe.

Winger told Sharpe to zoom in on one of the effectors. The tech massaged the controls of the imager and the view filled the screen, pixellating and auto-focusing as he did so.

"Looks like a bond disrupter of some sort," Winger said. "Have you tried to trigger it?"

"Just getting ready to, Skipper. We had to set up the containment protocol. Rosie, go ahead and send the signal."

Rosewell's fingers flew over his keyboard. "Signal primed. Electron beam guns primed. All set on my end—"

" _Fire in the hole_ —" D'Nunzio said.

A staticky fritz shot through the image. Though it was blurry, all could see the swarmbot jerk and squirm. The containment medium roiled and churned for a few moments.

"Getting output now...showing eighteen point two picojoules...bugger zapped a pretty good jolt."

"Ouch," said Winger. "That'd tear off a few effectors."

D'Nunzio pointed to the screen. "Watch this, Skipper...this bastard can recycle and re-fire in a no time. Rosie, give us a second shot—"

Rosewell sent another signal. The bot jerked and its disrupters let fly once more, churning the fluid medium into a charged froth, before settling back down to its normal quiver.

"Two point one seconds," D'Nunzio timed the interval.

"I'll be damned," Winger said. "No wonder we can't fight them...if they can turn around and re-charge their bond disrupters like that—"

D'Nunzio nodded. "They're firing while we're re-loading...our little guys get slaughtered."

"What else has this bugger got?"

"Just about everything, sir," Sharpe told them. "We've found equivalent structures for pryridine probes, carbene grabbers, enzymatic knives, abstractors, fullerene grapples...even a photon lens. And there are some things...well, sir, we don't know exactly what they are, sir—"

"We have to make our bots just like this one, right down to the bond angles. That's the only way _Eden Sweep_ will work. Our guys have to _be_ their guys...there can't be any doubt...otherwise, there's no way we can insert and not be detected. The operation depends on that...along with the assault config...how's that coming along?"

D'Nunzio called up some code on another screen. Lines of commands and calls scrolled down the screen. "This is the basic config program, Skipper. Mostly debugged now. We've still got to load it in C-99 and set up a scenario in the sim tank...let the boys go at each other...and see what happens."

"When's the first engagement sim?"

Rosewell checked the code as it scrolled. "We should have something to load in about two hours...probably this afternoon, sir."

"I want a war-type sim, full assault tactics, between their bots and ours by 1500 hours," Winger told them. "Let's get rolling on this, troops. Every minute we delay, the swarms advance a little further. More people die. They're changing our world right before our eyes. We have to grab it back and smash the bejeezus out of them...before it's too late."

Sharpe, Rosewell and D'Nunzio answered in unison. "Yes, sir."

Winger left the containment lab and headed across the grounds to the Mess Hall at the south end of the OQ. He planned to have lunch with Dana.

They had a lot to talk about.

Tallant was in a back booth of the OQ, nursing a coffee and bagel. Her face was worn and thin, she looked pale to Winger. He grabbed a tea and bagel of his own.

"You look like hell, Dana."

Tallant smiled wanly, sipping at her cup. "Thanks for the compliment. After a couple of months in space, you look like crap yourself."

Winger reached out and grabbed her hands. "I missed you...more than you know."

Tallant just shook her head, staring into the coffee cup. "I don't know what to do anymore. None of us get any sleep. Liam's starting to show signs of...what did the psychs call it?...some kind of syndrome...repetitive motor movements...they said it was a defense mechanism, to occupy his mind. So he wouldn't have to deal with...his sister. In a way, I kind of envy him."

Winger took a deep breath. "We'll get through this. I don't know how. But we will."

Tallant laughed softly, licked crumbs off her finger and stirred the coffee with it. "How, Wings? Tell me how. Tell me what to do. My daughter... _our_ daughter...is changing right in front of me. Into what...a cloud of nanobotic bugs? She's being assimilated...converted...made into a fog bank, right before my eyes. She's not Rene anymore, I know that much...I gave up on Rene a long time ago." Tears welled up in her eyes. "Rene died in Africa...she died when Config Zero got hold of her— _oh, Wings_ —" She screwed up her face...that was the nanotrooper inside of her and fought back the tears, not completely successfully.

Johnny Winger had never felt so helpless. Faced with a swarm of enemy bots, he knew what to do. He could hack a config with the best of them...he could code and stick his way through anything. He could go small and fight with atoms and molecules, slam carbenes and zap bonds like he was born to the nanoworld.

But this...this was different. Now the bots were inside Rene and they were making Rene into someone...some _thing_ else and he was powerless to do anything about it.

"The assault config's almost ready," he told her. It was all he could think to say. "Deeno D'Nunzio calls it C-99. We're testing a bot now with it...if the sim goes well...we'll replicate the config and send it to all the assimilation stations. Dana, I've got to be there. General Kraft expects me to be there."

Tallant choked back a sob, stuffing the rest of the bagel into her mouth. "I know—"

"There's an assimilation station in Nairobi. We ship out tonight, if the tests and sims go well."

Tallant suddenly sat up straight. "Wings, you're never here. Your own daughter's turning into a monster—do you even _care_ anymore?...a configuration of bots, for Christ's sake. Maybe we shouldn't have had kids at all...I mean, a nanotrooper—"

Winger grabbed her hands and squeezed. "Dana, don't say that. What happened to Rene...she's a casualty of war—"

"She's a _child_!" Tallant practically threw the cup at her husband. "I mean...she _was_. She didn't deserve this. None of them did. Now—" She shrugged.

"We've got to be strong, Dana...for Liam, for each other. We can get Rene back...I'm sure of it. I've been talking with Deeno and some of the other quantum engineers. They say that once we get the bad bots out of her, once we change her configs, she can be re-assembled. We can get her back."

Tallant was shaking her head. "It won't be Rene...she's _gone_...don't you see that? There's just a pattern left...not even that. Just a shadow. Maybe we can make something that looks and talks and acts like Rene...but it won't be Rene. It can't be. The original pattern's gone."

Winger knew better than to argue the philosophy or the logic behind what she was saying. He didn't know what to believe himself. Were we just patterns of atoms and molecules? What made us human? Was it the skin and tissue and bones? Or was it the underlying pattern of atoms and molecules, the zillions of chemical bonds, the bond angles and energies, that made us human? Couldn't that be replicated?

Thinking about it always gave him a headache.

"I've got to go...there's a pre-mission briefing at 1100 hours, at Hangar A. We'll be lifting off at 2330 hours if there aren't any showstoppers in the tests. Nairobi—"

"I know, Wings...I know." She had a weary face of resignation. "CINCQUANT's wrapping up here tomorrow morning at 0700 hours. The whole staff's off to _Haven One_. Five thousand feet below the Atlantic...I can't wait."

"It may be awhile before we see each other again...what about Liam? And Rene?"

Tallant shrugged. "Staff families are going to safe zones around the world...the kids are off to some place in the Nevada desert...they're being dispersed. And Rene will need..." she swallowed hard. "—special care, you know."

"I know."

They both got up at the same time and took their trays to the disposal bins.

Outside the mess hall, they embraced. "Look, Wings...just come home, okay? It's hard enough as it is...the kids need their Dad, especially Liam. I don't know what's going to happen with him...but he needs you. I need you."

"It's a promise. After Nairobi, after we kick the crap out of Config Zero and the swarms, we're all going on R & R...the beach somewhere. Just you, me and the kids."

"Sure, if you say so."

He kissed her lightly on the forehead and headed for Hangar A.

All the tests and sims for C-99 went well. Winger pronounced himself satisfied with the results.

"It'll have to work, Deeno," he told D'Nunzio and the techs at the containment lab. "We've run out of time. Load the configs in a capsule. I've got a plane to catch."

"Good luck, Skipper," the CQE1 said. "Kick ass in Africa."

Less than an hour later, hyperjet _Apollo_ was airborne on her suborbital, hypersonic trajectory across the Atlantic, a night time hop into east Africa. When she arrived three hours later at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, the sun was just coming up over the teeming slums of Kibera, outside Nairobi.

At the suggestion of local Sanctuary Patrol command, the east African assimilation station had been set up on the perimeter of Kibera, one of the largest slums in the world.

Johnny Winger met up with a Major Ndinka, Sanctuary Patrol liaison, at the SP Headquarters near the train station at Haile Selassie Avenue. Ndinka had brought a squad of SP troopers with him.

"Good day, Colonel," Ndinka saluted and extended a hand. "I have lifter transport to the assimilation station...it's near Uhuru Park...much faster than driving through the traffic. You have the...package?"

Winger patted his shoulder. "In my capsule, Major. All I have to do is de-contain and launch it...you have the equipment we sent ahead?"

Ndinka nodded. He was a tall and proud Masai warrior, black as coal, physically imposing and broad-shouldered in his SP khaki and green uniform. A mag sidearm hung prominently from a waist holster.

"At the station...my men are setting it up now. Come...let's move out—"

They boarded a small black lifter in the courtyard of the building and took off. A second lifter accompanied them. The short flight over the center of Nairobi took only a few minutes. In the local Masai dialect, the huge city was known as _Enkare Nyirobi_..."the place of cool waters."

With millions of people swarming the streets, bazaars and alleyways below them, Winger decided that any cool waters had long since vanished. From the air, the city was alive, like an ant nest had been stirred into a frenzy.

The Uhuru Park bazaar was slammed with people and as the lifters flew lower over the crowd, they made a series of dizzying stops and turns. It was like fighting swirling ocean currents to move anywhere. The bazaar was loud and chaotic, filled with smoke and pungent smells—the high-octane odor of _masala_ tobacco was especially strong at the Garden Street entrance—and the air was thick with loose nano, clouds of bots mingling with incense, opium and scores of cooking oil fires. Vendors hawked grapes and mangoes, bananas and fabricator shells of every type, vials of rogue DNA called _twist_ hung from clothes lines strung up between light poles and dilapidated tents. Women in sarongs with black teeth from chewing betel nuts zipped and weaved through the labyrinth balancing huge baskets on their heads, baskets filled with everything from buffalo patties to rebuilt matter compilers for the fabs that were on sale everywhere.

Slowly, the lifters made their way through the crowds...across a jammed plaza thick with bikes, carts, cattle and donkeys. Flat screen displays hanging from poles flickered down on the crowd, with images of Bollywood action pics counterpointed by plaintive plucking from a mandolin player nearby. In the center of a knot of yelling, shoving, jeering customers, a swarthy man in a turban and dark green kaftan pecked at a keyboard. All around the park, throbbing globs of nanobotic swarms swelled and gyrated to the music. _Masala_ smoke was thick and acrid in the air.

Ndinka ordered the lifter pilot to set them down in a clearing off the edge of the park.

With help from the burly SP troopers, they hiked through the throng to a low concrete building. A long line of visitors tussled and shoved each other outside the building.

The assimilation station was little more than bare cement walls and ceiling, crammed with tables and banks of equipment inside. A ragged line of arguing and shouting people streamed around several makeshift barriers up to the sign-in desk.

"All these people are volunteers?" Winger asked.

Ndinka nodded. "They believe assimilation is the key to a better life...better than life in Kibera."

Winger shook his head. "Do they really understand what they're volunteering for?" He dropped a few cases he had been carrying from the lifter by a small closet-sized enclosure...this was the assimilation bay itself.

"Most of them...no, they do not. But they live in Kibera...any change is for the better. For some, even death is preferable." Ndinka smiled. "Of course, there are some who say this is not death...just a change in state. Like going from solid to vapor, like the mists every morning at Lake Nyere."

Winger didn't pursue the matter any further. He knew he would never understand Assmilationists...he'd had the same discussion with Doc II many times over the last few months.

Ndinka and his troopers helped Winger unload his gear and get C-99 launched and inserted into the assimilator config manager. He ran a few tests to make sure that when the assimilator was enabled and bots released to disassemble whatever or whoever was inside the cabinet, C-99 would be injected into the disassembled pattern as well. That was critical to _Eden Sweep_...the bots would structurally resemble swarmbots from Config Zero but C-99 would give them a particularly nasty bite when it was triggered.

With any luck, C-99 would destroy Config Zero's swarms from the inside. And Winger knew that none of the volunteers knew they were carrying a saboteur.

"Major..." it was one of Ndinka's troopers, a sergeant named Mombasa. The sergeant pointed to an overhead screen. "It's Kwame..."

On the screen, the avuncular face of the Secretary-General, Kwame Kavaii, materialized into view. The shoving and shouting died off...assimilation volunteers were transfixed by the spectacle of one of their own running the United Nations. There were fist pumps, murmurs of pride, smiles everywhere.

"Kwame... our brother..."

" _Kubwa Kiongozi_...."

"Kwame ni mtu mkubwa—"

Winger stopped what he was doing, and watched Kavaii address all assmilation volunteers worldwide. The feed was coming from New York, Kavaii's office on the twentieth floor of the Secretariat Building.

"... _are part of a very critical mission for all of us_... _much is riding on them...even more than they know...."_

Winger listened to Kavaii even as he helped the SP techs set up the assimilator. Kavaii was right. None of the volunteers had the slightest idea of what was expected of them...of how much depended on them. None knew that each one of them would be hosting C-99 and when they were disassembled into atom fluff, they would all be Trojan horses, saboteurs inside the enemy, ready to wreak havoc.

That, at least, was the plan.

Winger went over the assimilator setup from one end to the other. They had specs from Config Zero on what kind of pattern to decompose the volunteers into. That was loaded into the config manager. The bot injectors were checked and primed...all ready. Buffers, memory, algorithms, all checked out okay. Winger ran through a quick checklist of the basic nanobot setup: propulsors, probes and effectors, processor...everything seemed to be ready.

And the C-99 config was there too.

Kavaii was still droning on, as politicians do. Winger signaled to Major Ndinka to bring the first volunteer forward. Better to get this over with and get on with the operation.

Her name was Evelyn Ngombe. She was tall, maybe with a bit of Masai in her, proud, a bit fluttery and nervous. She grinned sheepishly as one of Ndinka's men helped her into the assimilator booth.

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

Winger nodded. "Yes, ma'am. It is—" _More than you realize_.

The assimilator tech was named Gavin. He sat at a console just outside the booth, while Winger and another tech helped Evelyn inside and made her comfortable on the seat. Winger 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," Winger told Gavin. The tech pressed buttons.

Inside the booth, a fog had formed...that was the first layer of nanobots released into the compartment. Evelyn 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. Winger watched as the cloud of bots thickened. More and more bots were released and replicated, swelling to fill every cubic millimeter of the booth. Somewhere in there, C-99 was also being copied over and over again, trillions of times, infecting each and every atom and molecule, a pattern that would in time rise up and destroy Config Zero and the swarms from the inside.

Evelyn didn't move. Winger watched 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 he 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.

Evelyn Ngombe 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 Evelyn Ngombe, 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, Evelyn Ngombe had devolved—that was Deeno D'Nunzio'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 Config Zero.

And Johnny Winger swallowed hard...seeing in his mind's eye the face of his own daughter Rene in the disappearing Cheshire cat smile of Evelyn Ngombe.
CHAPTER 37

United Nations Quantum Corps "Official History of The Containment Wars: The Second Containment War (2099 to 2100); CH 10 Operation _Eden Sweep_."

( _from_ "The Archives of the United Nations Quantum Corps")

General Strategy

Analysis of intelligence sources from Q2 indicated that the Truce of Alexandria, brokered at the end of the 1st Containment War (March 2098) was destined to last for only a limited time. The Truce created the Sanctuaries. A key element of this Truce was that Config Zero and the swarms would confine themselves to defined areas and within those areas, they would have sovereignty and be able to make whatever environmental modifications they wanted. These were the Sanctuaries and Q2 sources indicated that such arrangements were a key part of the Prime Key, the command and control system which drove Config Zero and all swarm operations on Earth.

Later intercepts and intelligence indicated that the Keeper system, ultimately determined to be located on the Jovian moon Europa, began operating around the time of the Truce of Alexandria. Analysis of quantum signals showed conclusively that, by late 2099 and early 2100, signals from the Keeper had altered the stable and quiescent state of Config Zero, re-animated the swarms and swarm movements out of the agreed-upon Sanctuaries began at this time.

Operation _Jovian Hammer_ was conceived to locate and either destroy or render harmless this Keeper system. Results of the operation were inconclusive ( _see Operation Jovian Hammer: Mission Details and History, Volume 10, Section 22 of the Official History of the Containment Wars_ ).

By January 2100, the United Nations Security Affairs Commissioner (UNSAC) and UNIFORCE determined that more drastic measures were necessary to stop and roll back increasing violations of the Sanctuary agreements. Direct engagement with elements of Quantum Corps, Sanctuary Patrol and regular military formations had been mostly ineffective. Swarm formations under the direct command of Config Zero pushed outward from established Sanctuaries in all directions, leading to battles at Cairo, up and down the Italian peninsula and throughout the Balkans. Additional engagements occurred in the Kenya-Somalia sector and on northwest islands of the Indonesian archipelago (see _Caroline Islands Campaign, Dec 2099 through March 2100)._

Thus was born the concept for Operation _Eden Sweep_.

The principle behind Operation _Eden Sweep_ is as old as organized warfare itself and was perhaps most famously used by the Greek army in their conflicts with Troy, as recounted in Virgil's epic poem the _Aeneid_ , notably culminating in a strategic deception campaign which history records as the story of the Trojan Horse.

As direct confrontation of UNIFORCE nanobotic swarm elements against Config Zero forces had been mostly ineffective, a new strategy was developed for _Eden Sweep._

This strategy made use of a growing social-political philosophy known as Assimilationism (see _Assimilationism and Related Politico-Cultural Developments 2080 to 2100, UNESCO Briefings and Letters, Volume IV)._ Adherents of Assimilationism believed that humans and machines were destined to merge together and become symbiotic lifeforms; nanobotic devices and swarm formations, especially in their later evolutions, were seen as the means for achieving this symbiosis.

Operation _Eden Sweep_ put out a public call for volunteers to undergo assimilation, in which their physical bodies would be deconstructed and re-patterned into swarm formations compatible with ANAD-style systems, specifically with Config Zero swarms. A truce had previously been proposed to Config Zero in which assimilation volunteers would be made avalaible for incorporation into the greater swarm. This was seen to be a concession to one of the key elements of the Prime Key and Config Zero agreed to halt swarm movements in order for this process to be organized and initiated.

However, as the Greeks did with their Trojan Horse, UNIFORCE had arranged to insert a specific assault configuration into the decomposed pattern of each volunteer. Once the volunteers had assumed a re-patterned swarm-compatible configuration, the assault configuration would be triggered.

The operational plan was for the 'infected' but decomposed volunteers to attack Config Zero swarms from inside the swarm, overcoming normal swarm defenses and tactics from within the swarms' defensive perimeter.

One controversy developed late in planning of _Eden Sweep_ , when engineers critical of the assimilation process and philosophy argued in classified briefings that the technology to retrieve assimilated humans and re-configure their patterns into functional human beings was very much in its earliest stages...there was limited assurance that the volunteers could ever be successfully retrieved. However, the demands of the war effort and the desperate tactical situation on the ground in the European and African theaters were such that the Secretary-General waived all consent requirements and allowed the operation to proceed as planned.

The Fronts

There were three primary theaters of operation during the Second Containment War: Europe/Mediterannean Basin, East Africa and the SW Pacific.

The operational center of Config Zero's swarm activity was determined by Quantum Corps Intelligence (Q2) to be near the original archaeological dig site at Engebbe, Kenya, later inside the mountain complex at Mt. Kipwezi. Consequently, swarm operations and engagements in east Africa and around the perimeter of the original east Africa sanctuary boundaries were the most intense of the War. Almost all swarm movements throughout the European and African theaters originated from this location.

After the Battle of the Nile Valley and Cairo, in August 2099, swarm operations began expanding throughout the eastern and central Mediterannean basin, into Greece and the Balkan Peninsula, then into Italy and southeastern France and Switzerland.

The Euro-African front saw the most intense engagements of the entire War.

An additional theater of operations developed in the western Pacific, around the perimeter of the Pacific Sanctuary. Early engagements in the Caroline Islands and the Solomon Island chain centered on containing swarm expansion at Fiji and Vanuatu, leading to the 1st and 2nd Battles of Espiritu Santo in November and December of 2099. These engagements blocked the westward advance of the swarms and prevented swarm penetration into the Indonesian archipelago and Australia. A stalemate developed along this line and many of the remaining Pacific engagements were holding actions and skirmishes between Quantum Corps/Sanctuary Patrol forces and the swarms along this line of advance.

No further advances by Config Zero were made into east or southeast Asia as of the time this History was compiled.

Key Engagements

The northernmost point of advance of the swarms in Europe occurred at and around the time of the Battle of Thuns-les-Bains, a small French city in southeast France, in the French Alps.

Battle-tested elements of Sanctuary Patrol Central Mediterranean Division engaged swarms inside the town and in the countryside around the town. By this time in the War, Config Zero swarms had mastered the arts of deception and camouflage, and were able to assume configurations resembling buildings and Normals in the area. SP forces found engaging the swarms with any kind of tactial advantage extremely difficult. Some units prosecuted a scorched-earth type of assault, essentially destroying everything that could be used by the swarms as concealment. This tactic was controversial and eventually led to Sanctuary Patrol rules of engagement which reduced instances of friendly fire and whole-scale destruction of infrastructure.

However, the tactics were successful in blunting the northward advance of the swarms and were employed in modified form throughout the remainder of the War.

A second key engagement in the Euro-African theater was the Battle of Cairo, July 12-14, 2099. This battle was a series of engagements up and down the lower Nile Valley in and around Cairo, culminating in the Battle of the Moqattam Hills (Citadel). Elements of Quantum Corps 1st Nanospace Battalion, along with units of Sanctuary Patrol, 2nd Mediterranean Battalion, out of Cyprus and First Egyptian Corps out of Cairo, engaged swarm formations along the banks of the Nile River south of Cairo. The battles raged for several days and ultimately converged on the Citadel complex in the Moqattam Hills east of Cairo, where intense street-by-street combat combined with flanking maneuvers from UNIFORCE and quick configuration changes by Quantum Corps engineers enabled defense forces to hold off a determined thrust by the swarms and push them back from central Cairo.

These engagements are thought by military historians to have been important reasons for the a tactical re-direction by Config Zero swarm forces away from Sinai and the Levant sectors, toward the central Mediterannean and the Balkan and Italian peninsulas.

C-99 and the Turning Point

Unquestionably, the development and employment of the C-99 assault configuration coincident with use of Assimilationist volunteers, during a brief period of truce with Config Zero, to set up a sabotage operation inside the swarms' command and control system, was the turning point of the 2nd Containment War.

The C-99 configuration was a special design from Quantum Corps at Table Top Mountain, Idaho, USA. The nanobotic design was formulated to resemble the swarmbots of Config Zero has closely as possible, and to mimic their tactics and operations as well. The central tactic of Operation _Eden Sweep_ was to gain time from Config Zero by using Assimilationist volunteers to embed multiple copies of C-99 inside the enemy swarms and use the position of these C-99 'carriers' to assault enemy swarms from within.

At the same time as the C-99 assault began, Quantum Corps and Sanctuary Patrol, with associated UNIFORCE units, were to begin a coordinated assault, ignoring any truce agreements that had been made, to push Config Zero swarms back toward their original sanctuaries.

It was considered a high-risk operation, with plenty of variables that could not be accounted for or planned for. The operation was approved by CINCQUANT, LT GEN Jurgen Kraft and by UNSAC himself, a bold tactical move reminiscent of General Douglas MacArthur's daring amphibious landing at In'chon in September 1951, which turned the tide of the Korean War in its earliest weeks.

The operation was set to be initiated at H-Hour, 0000 hours, 2 June, 2100.

The nanobotic configuration C-99 not only closely resembled Config Zero swarmbots in general shape and function, with similar effector arrays and propulsors, the configuration also was designed with platform fold lines and planes, and multi-qubit quantum processors to enable the bots to change configuration with unprecedented speed and accuracy. This attribute would prove crucial in the earliest minutes and hours of the initial assault.

At H-Hour, command of the operation was handled by a special command and control element embedded with CINCQUANT in the _Haven One_ undersea command post beneath the Atlantic. Using quantum couplers with enhanced entanglers and specially designed encryption filters, _Haven One_ was able to synchronize all C-99 carriers to within less than 6 microseconds. GO codes were transmitted at H-Hour and C-99 carriers, by now all disassembled elements of the original Assimilationist volunteers, executed the configuration change in unison.

Drone, nanobotic and satellite reconnaissance indicated that the initial configuration change of C-99 into its designed assault state and the start of grappling and bond-breaking assault operations caught Config Zero by complete surprise. Swarm defenses were sluggish and poorly coordinated, especially when exterior HERF barrages were brought to bear along almost every front in southern Europe and the Mediterannean. Along the south Pacific and the Amazon sanctuary boundaries, similar results were observed.

In less than two hours, measurable reductions in enemy swarm activity along the front could be observed. Config Zero, for the first time in nearly 8 months, was in general and chaotic retreat from its forward, most exposed positions.

The End of the War

Operation _Eden Sweep_ , in its primary assault phase, synchronized C-99 engagements with HERF and magpulse weapons barrages and ANAD assaults from UNIFORCE elements located all along the Euro-African, Pacific and Amazonian fronts. This phase lasted about 3 days. In this 70-hour time period, Config Zero swarms were destroyed in detail or rendered inert throughout the sectors of south France, Italy, the Balkan peninsula and much of the Levant, Egypt and north Africa.

The C-99 configuration, loaded aboard basic ANAD nanobots with enhanced replication ability, was particularly effective against Config Zero swarms. Time and again, across multiple fronts in all theaters, UNIFORCE bot swarms were able to engage the enemy from within his own swarms at the same time as external barrages were initiated along the swarm perimeter. This combination frequently overwhelmed Config Zero's ability to replicate fast enough with enough swarm mass to keep UNIFORCE elements from advancing.

By 5 June, 2100, at 1745 hours UCT, UNIFORCE Command in the eastern Mediterannean sector detected multiple quantum-entangled signals on many channels from Config Zero. Confirmation of the transmission came several hours later from Farside Station, at Korelev Crater on the Moon. Q2 determined that these signals were transmitting from a location inside the east Africa sanctuary and were directed outward, off-Earth, in the general direction of M75 in the constellation Sagittarius. Detected signals were of an entangled state, encrypted so strongly, that Q2 has not yet been able to decipher their content. However, Intelligence analysts believe that the signals constitute an urgent request for assistance from the mother swarm thought to be transitting that sector of the galaxy.

In other words, Config Zero was calling home, and calling for help.

Additional transmissions were detected on at least four other occasions over the next twenty-four period. Coincident with these transmissions, Config Zero swarms began a general retreat on all fronts, across the globe, pulling back to more concentrated positions roughly equivalent to the original sanctuaries specified in the Alexandria accords. UNIFORCE, after some initial assessment of the enemy's intent, continued to engage Config Zero in southern Europe and northern Africa, but operations became increasingly more sporadic and C-99 assaults were eventually suspended on orders from UNSAC, at 1030 hours, 6 June 2100.

In the days following this suspension, only isolated engagements between outlying elements of Config Zero swarms and UNIFORCE elements have occurred, primarily to consolidate positions in North Africa and along and south of the Solomon Islands in the SW Pacific.

By 9 June, 2100, a de facto truce had fallen over the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific. No additional movements of Config Zero swarms have been observed in any sector. Indeed, swarm activity has returned to a nearly quiescent state, devoted mainly to maintenance replication only. No attempt has been made to penetrate these sanctuaries with reconnaissance or special forces units, although plans to do so were offered at several after-action briefings held at _Haven One_. Drone and bot recon patrols continue along all sanctuary perimeters, but Config Zero has offered no reaction or response.

The quiescent mode continues.

At 0000 hours, on 12 June, 2100, tactical operational control of Operation _Eden Sweep_ was shifted from _Haven One_ , back to UNIFORCE Headquarters at the Quartier-General in Paris, which had sustained moderate damage in several swarm offensives in and around Paris. Flag command was transferred and both UNSAC and CINCQUANT resumed full operations at Paris the following day....

Jin Lee looked up from her tablet at the source of the voice which had interrupted her reading. It was a staff sergeant, a hawk-nosed young red-haired E5, standing at the door to the room.

"Sorry, ma'am...the General will see you now."

Jin Lee powered down the tablet on which she had been perusing the Archives for details on _Eden Sweep_. She had an interview scheduled at 1145 hours and General Kraft didn't like to be kept waiting. She followed the sergeant through a maze of boxes and whirring packbots scuttling up and down the corridors of Level 060, the sixtieth floor of Quartier-General. Repairbots were pulling wire bundles and securing paneling to naked wall studs as the command center was re-built.

The sergeant brought her to a set of barred doors enveloped in a shimmering nanobotic barrier, with a scanner station beside the entrance. He looked into the scanner and the retinal match was instantly made. He gestured for Jin Lee to do the same.

The offices of CINCQUANT were a barely muted cacophony of bots and humans working together, hammering, sawing, cutting, measuring and heat-pressing cubicle panels and wall sections into place.

The sergeant led her to a small conference space away from the construction work and offered her a seat, with coffee and sweets arrayed on a nearby table. The Solnet micro dronecam hovered over her shoulder, whirring softly, until she signaled it to light on the end of the table. Lights winked on and off as it settled down like a contented bird.

Moments later, two men entered...General Jurgen Kraft, CINCQUANT, was a tall and erect commander with a steel buzzcut and a white hint of moustache, the very picture of Prussion rectitude and bearing. General Safran Chekwarthy was C-in-C for Sanctuary Patrol, shorter, rounder, balding with spectacles perched on the end of his nose...a detail which Jin Lee noted and which told her a lot about Chekwarthy's opinion of tradition, common sense and what he thought of the latest ocular implants and prosthetics.

Some deeply buried sense of respect made Jin Lee stand almost at attention when the O-9's entered the conference room.

"Please—" Kraft motioned her to sit back down. CINCQUANT took a position opposite the dronecam, which he eyed suspiciously. Chekwarthy helped himself to some UNIFORCE-grade coffee and took a seat too.

"That bird cleared by Security?" Kraft asked, steepling his hands.

"Yes, sir...fully cleared," Jin Lee told him. She pulled out some interview notes on her tablet and powered up. "Mind if I put him in hover?"

Kraft scowled. "As long as he stays away from my head. Don't care for the damn things, personally."

"Yes, sir...understood." Commanding with a firm, controlled voice, she set the micro dronecam bird to lift off and hover for a pre-programmed sequence of establishing shots. _Edit_ could make up some special graphics and shape the footage later.

"Sirs, I would like to thank you both, from Solnet and Omnivision, for giving us a few minutes of your time...I know you're both extremely busy."

"A few minutes...yes," Chekwarthy nodded. "That's all you'll get today."

Jin Lee scanned her tablet, selecting a leading question. "To start with, could you give our viewers a sort of rundown of the status of forces? What's our readiness level across all fronts...where do we stand militarily against Config Zero and the swarms?"

Kraft folded his hands on the table. "I'll take that one. Here....let me get the board up and running." He made some gestures over the table control pad and several smartboards on the walls flickered to life. The closest one showed a Mercator projection of Eurasia, with Africa below. Lines and lights flashed across the board. Kraft zoomed in on the Mediterranean basin.

"Current disposition of forces...sanitized for public release...obviously, we still have operations going on in some sectors...force recon, consolidating positions...but this will give you the general idea."

Jin Lee studied the maps. "Looks like we've pushed the enemy back on all fronts here...no swarms in France or Italy anymore?"

"Isolated pockets," Kraft explained. "General Chekwarthy's boys are taking care of the resistance as we speak...Alsace and the lower Rhone Valley, plus sectors near Lausanne and Midi-Pyrenees...we're systematically eliminating them day by day."

Chekwarthy slurped coffee. "End of the week...at the latest...we'll have southern Europe secured and in human control. Central Med Division's running sanitizing sweeps across the coastlines of France and western Italy now."

Jin Lee made a few notes on her tablet. The dronecam whirred and synched its position to give video support to what she had scribbled. "What about the rest of the Med? And the Middle East...Africa...from the maps, it seems the swarm pockets have really shrunk...almost to a few hunded square kilometers at most. Cairo, Jerusalem—"

"No longer occupied...we're working with UNSAC to get the enviros in there for some quick restoration and remediation, so my men can occupy the space. The Bugs started altering the environment as soon as they moved in...land, water, hell...even the air's been changed...O2 levels drastically reduced, CO2 levels elevated. Freakin' Bugs were trying to make Earth look like it did three billion years ago...Prime Key and all that...but we've put a stop to it."

Jin Lee had seen the vids and stories coming out of the Middle East. She knew some of the reporters there...all of them had been issued hazmat gear for the assignment.

"What about our levels of readiness...what if the swarms start up again?"

Kraft scowled at the question. "Intelligence is critical now. We're keeping C-99 ready, primed and set to go. Recent intel suggests that Config Zero has managed to reorganize its defenses to protect against C-99, quarantining the decomposed volunteers and so forth, so we'll have to try some new tricks. But the capability is still there...UNSAC has issued orders that Level 2 readiness is to be maintained."

Jin Lee waited a second for the dronecam to maneuver to a new perch, looking down over the table. Both Kraft and Chekwarthy resisted an urge to swat the blasted thing out of the air like a fly.

"General, is there a truce at all? Has anything been agreed to between UNIFORCE and Config Zero?"

Kraft shrugged. "Nothing official that I'm aware of. What we basically have here is a cessation of hostilities...the swarms just stopped pushing and advancing, started to retreat and withdraw to smaller boundaries. We stopped pursuing them and harassing them, once they withdraw to the original sanctuaries. We think the effects of C-99 and our special ops inside the swarms caused this...but Q2 can't be sure. At the moment, most of the swarms are in what Q2 calls _quiescent_ mode."

"What exactly does 'quiescent' mean?"

Kraft smiled faintly. "Officially, it means exactly what it sounds like...the swarms are quiet, basically operating at a maintenance level of replication...not expanding, not retreating any further. I'll leave the rest to the diplomats."

Jin Lee consulted her notes. "Some people have asked about the Assimilationist volunteers...can they be located at all? Can they be retrieved?"

Chekwarthy and Kraft exchanged knowing glances. "I'll take that one," Chekwarthy said. "All of the volunteers who showed up at the assimilation stations were just that...volunteers. They knew what they were getting in to, and the SG signed off on all the consent forms. Every single one of them was told the same thing: we'll try to get you back but there are no promises and no assurances that any technique will work. Frankly, between you and me, Miss Lee, the odds of getting any of those volunteers back is pretty much zip, in my opinion."

Jin Lee had heard much the same thing. She knew that another Solnet crew was already scouring the globe for stories about some of the Volunteers' friends and families. _Edit_ would be able to put together a decent point-counterpoint piece from her footage and that of the other crews.

"Any more comms with mother swarm?" she asked. "Off-earth signals, that sort of thing."

Kraft shook his head. "None after the orginal quartet of burst signals...at least, none that we've detected. We've got Farside and several installations here following every entangler ripple they can find...so far, nothing more."

"What about the decryption effort...any luck figuring out what Config Zero may have signaled to its mother swarm?"

Kraft was tight-lipped. "All decryption efforts are fully classified, Level 1, by order of UNSAC."

_It was a worthwhile shot in the dark_ , she reasoned. "General, what exactly is the future of our relationship with Config Zero? We're basically in a sort of truce now, but no one can say for how long. Some have said there's a need for new diplomatic efforts...I believe there are still swarm representatives in New York."

"That's for the diplomats to determine. My job is to see that the recovered areas are secure and that the swarms stay within their legally constituted boundaries."

"You have clear guidance on force levels and what those boundaries are?"

Kraft regarded the Solnet reporter coolly. "Clear enough for operational effectiveness. The politics of the situation are above my pay grade, Miss Lee."

Chekwarthy checked the time on his commpad. "One last question...."

Jin Lee had a dozen more, but she picked one she knew would interest her viewers. "I've had a lot of comms lately on environmental restoration of recovered territories...what's being done in that area? What are conditions like there?"

Kraft ran a vidstream on one of the boards. Jin Lee made sure the dronecam captured the imagery.

"This is imagery from a reconbot overflying the Nile River valley south of Cairo...you can see for yourself the land's not fit for human beings." Numerical data scrolled in the upper right corner of the screen. "That's air quality, air composition, sensor data on ground modification, aquifer levels, UV levels, everything. We've got a hell of a lot of work to do to make the place habitable...it'll take years. The Bugs were trying to remake the earth into the hellhole it was a few billion years ago...they even penetrated beneath dormant volcanos in Italy and Sicily and were cutting new magma channels, trying to force new eruptions. It's insane."

"First Enviro's taking the lead on restoration efforts, working with Quantum Corps. That's all I can say now about that...there's a hell of a lot of work to do and it'll take a long time before any humans can re-enter the recovered territories. We're basically going to have to treat these places like another planet, like we're exploring and settling a new world...hell of a thing, if you ask me."

Chekwarthy stood up, indicating the interview was over. "I hope we've been of some help to your viewers, Miss Lee. Now if you'll excuse us..."

Jin Lee recalled the dronecam and gathered her gear. The bird followed her and two burly UNIFORCE security officers out of CINCQUANT's offices.

On the ride down to street level, Jin Lee checked some of the drone's footage. Something in the air around Chekwarthy's head caught her eye and she replayed the footage once she was outside the Quartier-General, waiting on a Netcar to come pick her up.

Maybe it was just the lighting. But for a moment, she was sure she had seen something like a halo hovering over Chekwarthy's head, a faint shimmer, perhaps some kind of security swarm there to keep nosy reporters honest and above board.

Or maybe it was something else.

A Netcar pulled up to the curb and she got in. She pecked out a destination code on her pad and the botdriver pulled the vehicle out into heavy traffic along the Montparnasse.

Maybe Config Zero had somehow managed to insert a spy right into CINCQUANT's quarters.

It was an uneasy thought she just couldn't shake as the Netcar sped off into the traffic.
CHAPTER 38

Paris, France

22 June 2100

1800 hours

It was a joyful reunion when Johnny Winger came home from _Eden Sweep_. Late in the afternoon, he burst in through the door of their 40th floor apartment at La Tour St. Vincent, and immediately swept Liam up in his arms, tousling the boy's strawberry blond hair with a vigorous rub. For good measure, he swung his son around and around, until they were both dizzy. Dana Tallant came from the kitchen with a big grin on her face—something sure smelled good—and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

That's when he saw Rene, shy, half-hidden behind the folds of a curtain in the den, her brunette curls neatly framing a view of the fog-shrouded Eiffel Tower in the distance, through the big picture window. For an instant, there was some kind of weird continuity between the tower and his daughter, both not quite solid things...shimmering, vaguely translucent things, not fully formed, under construction...or in the case of the Eiffel Tower, renovation and repair from recent swarm assaults.

As for Rene....

"Come here, honey, let Daddy see you...let me see how you're doing—"

Dana came out from the kitchen. "Rene, come out from behind those curtains...Daddy wants to...greet you."

It was the pause in her voice that gave lie to the moment. The four of them tried, tried hard, to make the situation normal, as if it were the most common thing in the world to embrace your daughter, who had been disassembled and was now being slowly but steadily reconstituted into...what exactly? A nanobotic swarm? A creature of a trillion parts? A cloud of bugs?

Reluctantly, Rene emerged from the curtains and glided across the room. Johnny Winger tried to maintain a smile, gritting his teeth, to keep the horror of what was happening to his daughter from rising in the back of his throat like warm bile. But it came anyway.

She stood a foot away, Rene in form at least, and a decent if imperfect likeness. There was a ghostly quality to her body. Edge effects were still a problem, he could see that. Rene's arms and legs, and particularly her hands, were blurry, and didn't track well with movement, swishing through the air with a visible trail of bots when she gestured. Winger knew that config management was tough...it was a computational problem even Quantum Corps hadn't fully solved. Extremities were the hardest, the last to come around, when trying to maintain solid looking structures.

"The kids and I made you a big dinner, Wings. Your favorite—"

" _Hamburgers and fries_!" Liam and Rene both blurted out in unison.

"With monster pickles..." Rene added. Her voice came out slightly tinny, slightly slurred, as if she had a lisp, but not too bad. She looked up at him, batting well-formed black eyelashes...had Dana given her some kind of eye liner?

The hair on the back of his neck stood up, in spite of his forced smile.

"Hey, that's great guys...let me drop this duffel bag—" He headed to the main bedroom to unload and freshen up...it had been a long tiring trip, from Nairobi to Table Top to Paris and he was beat.

He was splashing water on his face in the bathroom, hearing Howie the housebot whirring back and forth, up and down the hall, putting toys and socks and other paraphernalia up where they belonged, when he saw a face in the mirror.

It was Dana. She came in and they hugged tight.

" _Mmmmm_....Wings...I missed you so much...are you back for good now?"

Her hair smelled good...it was that perfume he liked so much...he could never remember the name..."Yeah, I think so. The Old Man—" that was General Kraft –"wants me around Paris for a few weeks...debriefings, reports, plus we have some work to do in the Signals Lab...somebody thinks just because I was around the Keeper, that I have some special expertise on the signals that Config Zero's sending out."

"I just want to keep you around here for awhile. I need you...the kids need you."

She took his hand. "Let's get dinner going...and there's a special dessert for later."

Winger's eyes widened. "Carrot cake...mmmm, let's start with that."

Dana smiled and winked at him. "I mean much later...."

He followed her out to the kitchen.

Hamburger and fries went down well, for all of them. Winger paid no attention to Liam, who slurped and slopped and made a mess at his place setting, assiduously attended to by the ever-present, infinitely patient Howie the housebot. Winger found himself more interested to follow what Rene did with her food.

The hardest part was pretending that what he was seeing was perfectly normal. _How many other families have this problem: a daughter who's nothing but a cloud of bots formed up to resemble someone they used to love._

With each 'bite', Rene scooped up a piece of the burger with her blurred-out 'hands' and brought the morsel to the vicinity of her mouth. She opened her mouth, as she knew to do and that's when the morsel began to disappear. Not because she was swallowing it but because a pinch of bots had surrounded the bite and began to disassemble it into atom fluff. By the time she had forced the burger toward her mouth, the bot cloud had done the job and the bite was gone.

All in all, not a bad sim. If you didn't look too closely.

"Tomorrow is Victory Day," Dana told the kids. "You guys know what that means?"

Rene didn't respond, concentrating instead on her eating. Liam raised his hands and blurted out " _BOOM!_ Fireworks....guns...big booms!" He spewed out fries everywhere and Howie spent the next five minutes cleaning everything up.

"Liam....Liam, don't talk with your mouth open....how many times have I told you that—"

"We can watch the parades from here, right from the patio," Winger added. "I think the parade route goes right below us."

Dinner was eventually done and after dessert, Dana prevailed on Liam and Rene to dig out the gifts they had picked out for their Dad. They scurried off to the bedroom and soon returned with several bags, stuffed full.

"We went shopping!" Liam exclaimed.

"I see that," Winger replied, digging into one of the bags. He pulled out a remote-control flybot, something Liam had assembled himself. "It's a flyer, young man...did you put this together yourself?"

Liam beamed. " _All_ by myself...nobody helped!" He took the craft from Winger and proceeded to show his Dad how it worked. In less than a moment, he had the small ship looping and barrel-rolling around the living room, dive-bombing Howie and annoying Dana to no end.

"That's enough of that, Liam...take it outside tomorrow....now you two get ready for bed."

" _Mom_...."

"Don't argue with me. Cadets follow orders." She pointed off to the bedrooms. "March!"

Liam handed over the flybot back. "We'll play with it tomorrow, okay Dad?"

"It's a promise," Winger said.

Liam and Rene slinked off toward the back hall and their own bedrooms. Winger watched his daughter move across the room, leaving a faint trail of shimmering bots as she did so. Soon, they were gone. He looked over at Dana, who offered a faint smile. Her shrug spoke volumes.

"I try to treat her just like Liam...what else can I do?" she said. She came over and put her head on Winger's shoulder. They hugged.

"We'll get through this...somehow." He didn't know how but he had faith they would find a way. Nanotroopers had a code and the mission was always completed. Some missions were harder than others. Winger shook his head, while he stroked her hair. Maybe he had mission fatigue...troopers got that some times. In the last six months, he'd fought Config Zero in Egypt. He flown to Europa and back, fought with the Keeper, hiked across the Europan icescape, been sucked into the Keeper and transported to God knows where and somehow made it back home.

Dana looked up at him. "Let's go to bed—"

Winger smirked. "I don't have to be asked twice. Sure the kids will be okay?"

"They'll be fine. I've programmed Howie to keep 'em busy for awhile and make sure they brush their teeth and stay put. Tonight, he's running several stories. I fixed the 4D, so they can playact like armored knights or Tralfamidorian serpents or whatever. Plus Howie's got orders to keep them in their bedrooms...we've got several hours, easily."

"You do good staff work, Major Tallant. There's a bright future for you in the Corps."

They went to bed immediately.

After months apart, love came awkwardly at first and they gave up for awhile and rested, Dana stroking his fine chest hairs, and made small talk. Mostly family stuff...places they could take the kids. Liam, especially, liked the Louvre.

"His teachers say he's got artistic talent above the norm," Dana murmured. "The tests all show it. Already, he spends hours with this little artpad I got him, just doodling really, but one day, I caught him out on the patio. He'd done a rendering of the Eiffel Tower and, Wings, I'm telling it was eerie how good it was. I know the pad helps him, but still—"

"A regular Picasso, that's Liam."

"Then there's Rene—" she choked back a sob. "I don't know what to do, Wings, I—"

He put fingers to her mouth and slid inside her and this time, love came and they were satisfied.

Afterword, as Dana snored softly, cuddled up against him, Winger drifted in and out of a light sleep. He dreamed a vivid dream. Then he startled himself awake.

It was no dream. At first, he figured he was imagining the image hanging faintly in the darkened corner of their bedroom. He squinted and shifted his view, but it was still there.

The hairs on the back of his neck stood straight up.

Hanging in the air near the door was a faint, nearly invisible outline of Rene's face. A diffuse sparkle formed the outline, which loomed over their bed like a cartoon fading out, twinkling like dust motes in sunlight, twinkling in a pattern that brought a chill to his spine.

But there was no sunlight. And these weren't dust motes.

Winger sat up abruptly in bed.

His daughter...the thing that looked like his daughter but was in no way Rene Winger anymore—had seen everything. How long had she been there?

Winger knew that bot swarms could easily bud off elements of the primary swarm and be in multiple places at the same time. Rene could easily be in their bedroom, watching them make love and with Liam and Howie in her own bedroom, acting through 4D playscripts.

He shuddered and thought about turning on the overhead light. But Dana was sound asleep. He didn't want to disturb her.

How could they ever live like this? _Could_ they live like this? How many other families had a similar problem...loved ones who weren't really loved ones...reconstructed Assimilationist volunteers...the swarms were everywhere, masquerading as clothes, furniture, your neighbors, who could tell anymore?

Suddenly, Johnny Winger felt cold and naked. He got up and put on some clothes, feeling the solidity of his pants with reassurance.

Nothing was as it seemed anymore. Nothing could be trusted. But that wasn't true...he'd just made love with Dana. That was real. Dana was real. Their love was real.

His mind told him that technology evolves. Swarms advance. The Keeper had adapted to all their countermeasures. Even in their own containment labs at Table Top, new ideas and tricks and techniques were tried and proven out.

He was sure Dana Tallant and everything around him was real.

But, even so, he wondered.
EPILOGUE

"The truth is—" said Deeno D'Nunzio, over a beer at the Café Matterhorn as they watched sweeper bots clean up trash from the Victory Day parade earlier, "anybody out here, any _thing_ out here, could be a swarmbot, or an angel. You just can't tell anymore. Even you—" she indicated to Turbo Fatah, across the table. Mighty Mite Barnes and Johnny Winger sat at the table as well.

"I'm about as real as I can be," Turbo complained. "Pinch me and see—"

"No thanks," Mighty Mite sniffed at her own beer.

The four of them had secured a table at the Café, along the upper end of the Champs Elysees, in the shadow of the Arc de Triomph, as the great monument was steadily being rebuilt by bots from the damage suffered in the war. They had a few final hours of liberty and decided to share them alongside the rest of the crowds thronging up and down the great boulevard.

Tomorrow, Winger and Barnes were shipping out, back to Table Top Mountain. Fatah and D'Nunzio had a new assignment, detailed to Sanctuary Patrol Amazonia, there to assist SP forces in containing Config Zero's swarms in the vast sanctuary that was the huge Amazon River basin.

"You saw the latest intel from Q2 on Amazonia, didn't you?" asked D'Nunzio. "It came in on flash traffic this morning...hit the boards at 0230 hours."

Winger had seen it. "Swarm movements past sanctuary boundaries at 0200 hours local time....yeah, I saw it. Three axes of advance....up the Andes spine, north toward the Orinoco and along the Atlantic coast."

"What's UNIFORCE doing about it...that's all I want to know."

"We ought to know pretty soon," Winger said. "I'm guessing SP Amazon's mobilizing right now...Turbo, you and Deeno should have a ringside seat."

"I can't wait," D'Nunzio finished off her beer. She signaled a bot to bring another round for everybody and the thing whirred over and plunked down new bottles. "What stirred the Bugs up this time...anybody seen any new signals from the Keeper?"

"Not me," Turbo said. "Of course they could be using some altogether new technique we know nothing about. It's hard as hell to catch their quantum signals now as it is."

"I can't help wondering," Winger admitted, "if we haven't created something we can't control, leaving that signal generator behind on Europa, to mimic the Keeper. Something we can't stop."

"How do you mean, Skipper?"

"Remember, we didn't have full understanding of the type of signals the Keeper used when we were aboard _Trident_ , back at Europa. We were just trying to bollix up the Keeper, jam their command and control system. Now, I'm not so sure we haven't created some kind of slow-speed big bang, induced some kind of uncontrolled replication in the swarms. I'm just not sure anymore."

"Yeah, about a lot of things," Mighty Mite Barnes agreed. "Maybe it's the war...maybe it's just me... but a lot of my friends don't seem the same. Anybody else noticed that?"

"None of us are," Winger said. "Hell, I've got a botswarm living with my family in our quarters right now, pretending it's my daughter Rene. For all I know, it could _be_ the re-assembled constituents of Rene...but, no...it's not the same. Not at all."

"Screw it," said D'Nunzio, "Maybe the Assimilationists are right after all. Just let the swarms inside of us and be done with it. Take over everything and become one in symbiosis and then we can all hold hands and sing folk songs together. "

Barnes snorted at that. "Yeah, I can just imagine what they'd do with all your atoms, Deeno... sounds like intergalactic indigestion to me."

Winger listened to the banter for awhile longer. He checked his watch. He knew he needed to get back to La Tour St. Vincent before long...it was going to be hell saying good-bye to Dana and the kids again. But he had orders and when you were in the Corps---

He let the troops vent and didn't say anymore. The truth was that he and Doc II had debated these very points. The truth was he had considered doing the very thing D'Nunzio was talking about. He hadn't decided. He hadn't even talked with Dana about it. Maybe he wouldn't do it all.

They fell silent for a few moments, watching the crowds surge along the Champs Elysees, while sweeper bots darted in and out, retrieving trash, banners, balloons and other refuse from the parade.

Each nanotrooper eyed the other warily. No one was sure anymore, what was real. Who was real and who was a cloud of bots? Did it even matter? All of us were patterns of atoms and molecules anyway...what was the difference?

Johnny Winger watched the bots re-building the Arc de Triomph at the top of the hill. Industrious little nanobots, too many to count, slamming atoms together to create a new pattern, a new pattern from an old configuration.

Something Evolution and Nature had been doing on Earth for a few billion years.

Only now, it seemed like, a new configuration had come. Maybe Config Zero had won after all. Maybe the Prime Key had been activated. Evolution had jumped the track and was now heading down a new path.

If that was really the case, Winger decided, they had better learn the new rules of the game pretty fast. The Old Ones were due to arrive in less than fifty-five years.
Interactions Log

File No. 155790.0

**C.F.A.A. (** _DocII)_

Interaction Targets: 1. Winger, Colonel J. A.

Interaction Mode: Acoustic, voice synthetic V-22

Date: 06.22.00

Start Time: 087561

End Time: 110234

**Final Output File** (text analysis):

<<Subject: Configuration: Winger, J>>

<<Config Winger, J has expressed renewed interest in assimilation techniques, in accordance with original concepts of Symbiosis Project. Primary method is detailed in report file appended to this Log entry: _Symbiosis of Human and ANAD Systems Using Nanoscale Disassembly and Reconstitution, 7 January 2075, Dr. Irwin Frost, Autonomous Systems Laboratory, Northgate University._ This report file was first reviewed by Config Winger during time interval 097440 - 097558.

<<PLAY audio file: **Voice Recording** : _"I've been thinking a lot about this, Doc......you disassembling me into constituent atoms and molecules, then reconstructing me according to a new template. But the thing is, see, that I would die. I wouldn't be me. I'd be somebody... or something else. I kind of like being me, whatever that means._

' _But I can't help wondering...maybe this is the way to go. There are so many angels and botswarms among us now, even after the war. You can't go anywhere, meet anyone, do anything, without running into them. We've let them take over...Config Zero was right...the Prime Key has been activated. Evolution's taken a new turn and nobody knows where it's taking us now._

' _And that's scary._

' _I haven't talked to Dana about this yet. I need to do that...it wouldn't be fair to go through assimilation and not tell her...I'm pretty sure she'd notice something different._

' _Doc, I'm pretty sure I want to do this. Let me talk with Dana. Create a procedure with vids and all so I can show her what's involved. Maybe we can do this together._

' _I just need somebody to convince me I'm doing the right thing.'_

<<END Audio File. Procedure 1023381 downloaded. Video stream generated. Assimilation config driver enabled and primed. Analysis continues>>

End Output File
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 over 20 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.

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