 
# Quantum Troopers Return

Episode 2: Free Fall

### Published by Philip Bosshardt at Smashwords

### Copyright 2020 Philip Bosshardt

### Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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

### A few words about this series....

Quantum Troopers Return is a series of 25,000-30,000-word episodes detailing the adventures of Johnny Winger and his experiences as a quantum trooper with the United Nations Quantum Corps. This series continues the original serial stories of Quantum Troopers, Episodes 1-22 (formerly Nanotroopers).

Each episode will be about 40-60 pages, approximately 30,000 words in length.

A new episode will be available and uploaded every 4 weeks.

There will be 10 episodes. The story will be completely serialized in about 12 months.

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

The main plotline: U.N. Quantum Corps must defeat the criminal cartel Red Harmony's efforts to use their nanorobotic ANAD systems for the cartel's own nefarious and illegal purposes.

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

Episode # (*) Title Approximate Upload Date

1 (23) 'Fab Lords' 2-7-20

2 (24) "Free Fall' 3-6-20

3 (25) "Forbidden City" 4-3-20

4 (26) "Deep Encounter" 5-8-20

5 (27) "HAVOC" 6-12-20

6 (28) "The Empty Quarter" 7-10-20

7 (29) "The Hellas Paradox" 8-14-20

8 (30) "Twist Pirates" 9-11-20

9 (31) "The Better Angels" 10-9-20

10 (32) "The Ship of Theseus" 11-13-20

(Note *: Episode numbers start with Episode 1 in this new series but the continuation of episode numbers from Quantum Troopers is also provided)

Chapter 1: "The Copernicus Gambit"

Copernicus City, the Moon

December 2, 2063

2350 hours Earth Universal Time (EUT)

The Moon-farers conference and the treaty to be signed at the UN Pavilion was the biggest thing to hit Copernicus City since Closure Day, nearly fifty years ago, when the surface domes were closed over the city in the crater.

Leaders of all the major Moon-faring nations were there, Presidents, Prime Ministers, monarchs, general secretaries, first lords, everybody who had any kind of interest in occupying, developing or defending something on the lunar surface. The Treaty was to set up ground rules and assign rights and responsibilities for what was to come and avoid a chaotic land rush for prime sites, ice and water holes and mineral deposits that covered much of the Moon's harsh terrain.

The Moon was the ultimate high ground and any player that could put a satellite in orbit wanted to be there.

The American President was there in the person of Dr. LaTonya Kendrick, resplendent in a radiant silver gown, her bone and ivory hairpieces clicking as she glided across the plaza, whirling to greet anyone and everyone.

The Russian President, one beef-faced Vasily Ovchenin in the flesh, pressed hands and slapped backs, reminding all who would listen that the first snapshots of the Moon from close up had indeed been those taken by that venerable Russian craft Luna 1.

The Chinese leader, Hu Jining, seemed positively circumspect by comparison, but held court among a bevy of adoring admirers and press, as he laid out a five-hundred-year plan for China's conquest of near-Earth space.

And there were lesser lights from India, the European Union and Japan, along with the Secretary-General of the UN, one Achmed bin Aswan, all circulating with drinks and hors d'oeuvres in hand, clustering and gesturing and shouting and laughing as the reception got fully underway.

The pre-conference reception was to be held in the main promenade of Copernicus Plaza, the domed surface level of CC, as Copernicus City was known to the locals. Situated nearly dead center in the floor of the crater, the Plaza was the topmost level of a city buried in regolith, some eleven levels deep, and anchored in lunar crust nearly four hundred meters below the surface. From orbit, CC appeared to be a winking eye set among the central peaks of the crater. Inside the dome, with its spectacular views of Mount Rathmore to the west and Mount Prospect to the east, the funiculars arrowing off toward the peaks like spiderwebs, the shopping district known as the Blocks sloped down to the Galileo Fountains, and was jammed with throngs of gawkers and sightseers and press surging forward against the barriers toward the gaiety swirling about the Fountains and pool.

The reception was scheduled to conclude with an address by the Sec-Gen to all delegates, followed by a lavish dinner. The plenary sessions would begin the next day among the lower levels of CC, where the only view would be that of delegates and their ministers, and the beige walls of the conference rooms themselves. The delegates wanted to avail themselves of one last view from the surface before burrowing belowground like moles.

They could not have known, as the reception got underway, that there were others below ground as well, not inside the city at all, but approaching on a stealthy vector, visitors who did not have official invitations from the UN at all.

The first tremors came when the first course had just been served. Delegates and their spouses and ministers were seated at lavishly decorated tables spotted across the Plaza, all of them clustered under the baleful gaze of Galileo himself, who gazed heavenward with a crude tubular telescope in one hand.

"Look!" someone cried out. "Look out\--!"

Galileo himself wobbled and soon toppled backward into a reflecting pool, his head and arms shearing off on impact. Just beyond the statues and fountains, the lifts which would take delegates down into the bowels of CC began listing to one side and one lift tube detached from its moorings and toppled over on top of Galileo himself.

A strong series of tremors and quakes had struck CC.

The waters of Lake Dundee abutting the Apollo Terraces stirred as if a freshening breeze had blown in. Stones from the Rock Citadel above the Lake ran down the terraced hills and splashed into the Lake, as if a giant child had upended one entire end of the Plaza.

Screams and shouts erupted and the dining tables were tossed and kicked as delegates fled the lower promenade and climbed or scrambled through the Blocks, choking Ravine and Cube Streets as they sought the safety of higher ground.

Bin Aswan, the Secretary-General, tried to corral those panicked delegates who sought refuge at the foot of the Slope Houses, on the other side of the Plaza.

"This way...come on! Head up...go up...higher...Triangle Street, the Observatory...head for the Plumes—" he pointed southeast toward the famed Quarter of man-made fumaroles that hissed and belched in musical patterns just below the dome foundations. Like rats fleeing, many delegates followed him, scratching and clawing their way between the Slope Houses, while great sheets of glass and plaster rained down on them.

In all, the tremors seemed to last forever, but later seismic analysis showed the main pulses occurred over a four-minute interval. It was also only in that later analysis that the regularity and constant magnitude of the pulses could be seen for what they were: man-made bursts of energy injected into the surrounding basaltic crust, in effect a sonic lens deployed as a weapon to shake CC to its very foundations and create a maximum level of panic and chaos throughout the huge complex.

It was Vasily Ovchenin, the Russian President, who first saw the two ships appear as if they were huge metal gophers, breaching up through the inlaid tile and stone of the Plaza floor near the Galileo Fountains, their snouts glistening and shedding dust and regolith in great sheets as they came to rest in the shadow of the fallen statue.

"Gospodi! Chto za chert! What the hell...?" The great Russian vozhd stopped his frantic climbing and turned about to look and point. "What kind of monster...they look like geoplanes, no?"

Matteo Bari, head of the European Union, was out of breath, cut from falling glass and nursing scraped hands and arms. He stopped, sat back to look for himself.

"Some kind of craft...si? Underground ship, si?"

Indeed, the two craft resembled huge, fat watermelons albeit of metal and composite. Three rows of treads lined their hulls, equally spaced around the circumference of the ships. A lens-shaped nose glowed a subdued blue-white, surrounded by a shimmering ball of light.

Even as the two men watched in amazement, hatches opened on the sides of both ships. Crewmen in hypersuits emerged, bearing odd-looking weapons, which they trained and fired upon knots of fleeing delegates.

Ovchenin scowled. He knew those weapons. "Suppressors, Bari. Those are suppressors, sound and stun weapons."

Even as he spoke, victims fell before the advancing squads, who circled the Fountains clearing a path for others who poured out of the ships behind them. Neither Bari nor Ovchenin initially saw the small element that had detached from the squad and begun ascending the terraces after them. When the two leaders realized they were the targets, they scrambled as fast as they could further upslope, hiding as well as possible behind planters thick with bougainvillea, behind palm trees and assorted statuary and topiary, as they sought refuge near the dome's inner walls.

But they were no match for the small squad of troops, who climbed steadily after them and when a clear shot was finally available, let fly bursts from their suppressor carbines.

First Bari, then Ovchenin pitched heavily into nearby shrubbery and twitched for a few moments, as their arms and legs seized into paralysis. The last thing the Russian saw before he fell down the black hole of unconsciousness was the helmeted face of one of their pursuers leering down at him, dark eyes clearly visible behind the partially open visor. A final burst from his suppressor was the coup de grace.

The assault was over in ten minutes. Both ships backed out of the Plaza, submerging in a shower of broken tile and dust, disappearing where they had come from. Slowly, urged by platoons of UNIFORCE Security officers who had started combing every recess of the Plaza, the delegates began to come down from their hiding places, from inside the warren of narrow paths known as the Blocks, from gutters and bushes between the Slope Houses, from rafters and beams above the Plumes still hissing their steam columns on schedule, and from pieces of plaster and wall panel floating like rafts out in Lake Dundee.

UNIFORCE Security assembled everyone around the perimeter of the Galileo Fountains, away from any structures that might collapse in subsequent tremors. Delegates from the nations sought the comfort of each other's arms. Knots of conference attendees staggered about in loose gangs, cut and bleeding, covered in dust, some requiring immediate medical attention and the medbots were thick among the litters of injured.

Counts and roll calls were done. Once that information was made available to UNIFORCE Security, headed by a tousle-haired female Major named Oliveira, the purpose of the man-made tremors and the assault became perfectly clear.

It was Major Oliveira who explained it to a bandaged Secretary-General, Achmed bin Aswan.

"Sir, some of our national leaders seem to be missing."

Bin Aswan was sitting on the edge of the fountain pool, wincing as medbots applied salve and sutures to some nasty facial lacerations. "What do you mean missing, Major? Go check with the delegations."

Oliveira tightened her lips and tried to be patient. Dealing with stubbornly incompetent brass had never been her strong point.

"Sir, we've canvassed every delegation. My people are still searching, of course...those ruins over there—" she pointed to some collapsed structures in the Blocks, which had fallen in on themselves like children's toys "—there could be people trapped in the rubble. We've got bots sniffing now. But this list—" she held out a small tablet.

"Let me see that," bin Aswan ordered gruffly. He shooed the medbots away and ran his finger down the screen, his lips silently mouthing what he read. "Is this right...you're not able to account for the safety or whereabouts of these people...President Kendrick, President Ovchenin...Matteo Bari...Miyashi of Japan? Is this right, Major?"

Oliveira nodded her head. "We're looking now, sir, everywhere on this level, every structure, every culvert, every rubble pile. What makes me suspicious is that I have multiple eye-witness reports of several people being taken into those ships by those troops. Like they were kidnapped."

"Kidnapped?"

Oliveira drew in a deep breath. "We have to consider the possibility, sir. Unless we can find these four, the possibility should be considered."

Suddenly, bin Aswan felt about two hundred years old. Maybe it was the difference in gravity levels. He'd been to the Moon enough times but flitting back and forth between Earth and lunar gravity did something to you and bin Aswan was beginning to feel it in his bones. Or maybe it was just the blasted headache that rang like a church bell between his ears.

"Okay, Major. Okay, just keep looking—" He handed the tablet back and got painfully to his feet. "We'd better set up a meeting...my offices on Level 1. I want your top commanders and all the attending delegate chiefs. Two hours. No excuses, either."

"Yes, sir," Oliveira saluted and hustled off.

But before the meeting could start, the first message from Red Harmony came in on LunarNet wideband.

UNIFORCE Headquarters

The Quartier-General, Paris

December 4, 2063

0615 hours

UN Quantum Corps commander-in-chief General Winston Kincade wasn't sure which he detested more: traveling to briefings in Paris by vactrain or traveling by hyperjet. The view from suborbital altitudes was better in a hyperjet, if you didn't mind having your insides scrambled by sudden accelerations and stomach-wrenching corkscrew turns to make final approach into Paris. By vacuum train was faster by several hours, if you didn't mind several hours' view of the inside of a tube, made barely tolerable by ever-changing vids on the 'windows' of pastoral Swiss countryside or Himalayan mountainscapes speeding by like a frantic tourist pics.

The ride up to the Quartier General by autocab from the vactrain terminal took twenty-two minutes.

The QG was located in Paris' 5th arrondisement, near the Luxembourg Gardens and just off the Boulevard St-Michel. The building and complex itself was a 75-story tower of a unique flower petal design. Quantum Corps locals called it 'The Big Spleen.'

In all the years he had been a quantum trooper, Winston Kincade had never enjoyed a single moment of his time in the Quartier-General and, as he climbed out of the taxi at the front entrance to go to his briefing on the sixtieth floor, he knew why. It was like being some kind of specimen on a slide under a microscope. Too many curious eyes peering down at you studying, picking and probing, slicing off pieces of your ass...only bad things happened to microscope specimens.

Better to be out in the field and taking your chances with natural predators. The worst thing they could do was eat you. The ones at Headquarters were worse. They made you suffer through briefings.

General Winston Kincade arrived at the Quartier-General, rode the lift to the sixtieth-floor briefing deck and was scanned in promptly at 0600 hours. He availed himself of coffee and doughnuts in the commissary attached to the briefing center and made his way inside in time for the start of things. Just after 0615 hours, the UN Security Affairs Commissioner entered and all hands snapped to attention.

UNSAC barked out, "Be seated. Let's get started." UNSAC was an ebony-black Cameroonian woman of striking beauty, with fierce warrior eyes and bristly conical hair, adorned by an ivory and bone hairpiece that rattled when she turned her head. Her name was Evelyn Lumumba.

"We have one main piece of business today," UNSAC said. "Finding out what happened at Copernicus City two days ago and figuring out how Red Harmony managed to pull this off. You've all seen the message from the cartel. They've got four leaders—the American President Kendrick, the Russian President Ovchenin, the EU's Matteo Bari and Prime Minister Miyashi of Japan—and they want money."

Indeed, Kincade had been studying nothing less for almost the entire vactrain trip across the ocean from Mesa de Oro.

UNSAC directed her comments toward General Rudolf Skye, Commander in Chief of UN Boundary Patrol. CINCBOP was a short, nearly bald wrestler of a man, Austrian by birth, with the build of a black bear and a growl to match.

"Okay, General, how did Red Harmony manage this?"

Skye consulted some notes and spoke softly with a nearby avatar drifting in the background—apparently a staffer at the Patrol's Balzano, Italy operations center.

"We know from dealing with their fab lords some months ago that the cartel already has geoplane technology. What we didn't know is that they've somehow transplanted this technology to the Moon. They've apparently modified a few geoplanes for underground ops beneath the Moon's surface...sort of a lunaplane, I guess."

UNISPACE commander General Chekwarthy Kuraly agreed. "We've seen the intel too. It should be noted that my own intel shop learned not six months ago that the Chinese are making increasing and extensive use of a previously unknown network of underground lava tubes. Word is the Chinese have been conducting detailed exploration of these tubes, maybe even extending them in some kind of transport network across the Moon. They're calling these tubes Da Yunhe...something like the Grand Canal."

Lumumba was intrigued. "We don't hear a lot from the Chinese these days, do we?"

Kuraly agreed. "Their Yuegong base on Farside is buttoned up pretty tight. There are sensor indications from seismic analysis that the Chinese are sending exploratory teams out from Yuegong through these lava tubes, probably using something like these lunaplanes."

Kincade raised a point. "We've always had strong intel that the Chinese are protecting Red Harmony. Some of the cartel Ruling Council are known ex-PLA officers. Could the cartel be also operating from Yuegong...or nearby, maybe underground?"

Kuraly conceded the possibility. "UNISPACE keeps a pretty close eye on everything that happens on the lunar surface. As to what may be happening below ground—" he turned to Skye –"that's your department, General."

Lumumba displayed the text and pics from the Red Harmony ransom message. "The gist of the communique is 'we've got these guys and we want money. If we don't get it, they die one by one. And formal recognition as a player on the Moon, too.'" Lumumba sniffed indignantly. "Along with everybody else. They're trying to force their way into the gentlemen's club that runs the Moon."

Kincade consulted his own notes. "Was UNIFORCE able to track the course the two lunaplanes took when they left CC?"

Skye and Kuraly both shook their heads, almost in unison. Skye responded. "Not precisely. These lava tubes go all over the place. It's a clever way to travel around the Moon and not be detected."

Kuraly added, "Farside Center at Korolev Crater has been picking up some curious seismic activity on Farside."

"Moonquakes?" UNSAC asked. "Meteor strikes?"

"Possibly. But the patterns are different, not random spikes like you'd expect from meteors. What's curious is that most of the seismic activity can be triangulated back to a fairly small region...von Karman crater and that area."

UNSAC blinked. "The Chinese base?"

"Yes, ma'am. Exactly."

UNSAC checked with Kincade. "We have solid intel that the Chinese and Red Harmony are tight. General, get with your people—all of you, Boundary Patrol and UNISPACE too—and put together a mission. It needs to have three parts. First, we have to locate these politicos before it's too late. Then we have to figure out how to rescue them with minimal casualties. Third, if possible, I want Red Harmony operations on the Moon to be smashed for good. Get me something by 1200 hours tomorrow, something I can take to the UN. The Sec-Gen may be one of the hostages; they won't question anything we recommend. Questions?"

General Skye rubbed his bald head thoughtfully, which he often did when puzzled. "Madame Commissioner, Boundary Patrol has no assets on the Moon. We patrol underground here on Earth."

This comment visibly irritated Lumumba. "Well, I guess your theater of operations has just been expanded, hasn't it? Get with UNISPACE immediately and learn Selenology 101. You may be running some of your geoplanes below the Moon's surface in the near future."

Troubled with this turn of events, Skye just shook his head slowly.

UNSAC was in no mood to stroke sensitive egos. "That'll be all, gentlemen. You are dismissed. Now, I've got to take this cartel message before the Security Council at noon. As my Cameroonian ancestors used to say, 'A grasshopper who runs into a nest of fowls winds up in the land of spirits.' Pray I don't get eaten alive."

Winston Kincade found himself mildly amused at Lumumba's words, as if she were a schoolteacher cracking heads at recess. But all attending nodded assent and no one argued with the Cameroonian woman whom some called the Ibo Tigress behind her back.

"Good. Then, this briefing is adjourned. Dismissed—" Lumumba rose and, accompanied by her escort bots, strode regally out of the briefing deck to her own suite of offices ten floors further up.

Kincade left the QG, after brief chats with Skye and Kuraly, and took a UNIFORCE staff autocar to the vactrain terminal northeast of Paris. Displaying his UNQC ID to the retinal scanner, he was shown to a small compartment in the second car and settled in to map out strategy and tactics during the 4600-kilometer-long underground ride to Mexico City.

Winston Kincade had a hell of a lot of planning and figuring to do in order to meet UNSAC's orders.

UN Quantum Corps

Western Command Base

Mesa de Oro, Yucatan, Mexico

December 4, 2068

1730 hours

The base at Mesa de Oro was still being expanded and facilities updated years after the Corps had vacated its long-time home at Table Top Mountain in '49. Geoplane ops and uncontrollable seismic tremors had made that place unstable and dangerous to occupy for something as critical as Quantum Corps' Western Command base. For over a decade, they had been ensconced in a new home, hard by the Kokul-Gol archeological dig site in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.

Kincade needed to get with 1st Nano's commander, Colonel Johnny Winger, right away and hammer out the table of organization and equipment—TOE to those in the know—for UNSAC's mission. Tasking had already come in from Paris. What made the organization part of the TOE tricky was UNSAC's directive that Boundary Patrol and UNISPACE be made an official part of any special ops detachment. That was likely going to take some serious shouting, table pounding and head-banging before it was all over.

A small special ops team would have to be formed. Officially, the mission was to be known as Operation Selene Hammer. Mulling over possibilities in the back of his mind, Kincade made his way across the quadrangle to the Ops center, looking for Colonel Winger. It was a hot, hazy, humid late-afternoon day in the tropics and Kincade realized he missed the cool mountain air and long-range vistas of the Buffalo Range that had surrounded the base at Table Top.

This is like working in a sauna, he told himself. But there was one redeeming quality about the new base at Mesa de Oro. With geoplanes now a part of the Corps' standard equipment and a new geoplane hangar being built on base, Mesa de Oro's proximity to the Gulf of Mexico was a strategic advantage. Even as he entered Ops, Kincade imagined he could feel the tunneling going on under his feet. A second geoplane access corridor was being burned out of the limestone a hundred meters below the base, a pair of tunnels from Mesa de Oro all the way to the Gulf. Geoplanes modified for subterranean and submarine ops would soon be able to enter and leave the Mesa with little or no chance of being noticed.

That could always come in handy, he realized.

The base at Mesa de Oro was laid out like the fingers of a big hand, situated as it was on top of a small plateau just above the treetops of the steaming jungle of la selva. The fingertips of the hand were the lifter and hyperjet runways, and the north and south lift pads. The palm of the hand contained the hangar, the Ordnance/Mission Prep bunker, barracks and officers' quarters and the PX with its attached commissary. Just below the little finger of the hand were the containment domes and the simulation and training complex. The wrist was another hangar, this one for geoplanes, and the stands and parade ground of Kraft Field.

Several officers inside Ops confirmed that they had seen Colonel Winger headed off to the Sim center. Kincade walked briskly across the quadrangle and entered the welcome cool air of the complex. A large, rather noisy crowd had gathered just inside the SODS tank, spilling out into the hallway. The crowd parted reluctantly as General Kincade pushed his way through.

Johnny Winger was inside the simulator, working his way through some kind of proficiency check.

Kincade rubbed his jaw uneasily as the simulation continued. Johnny Winger had been inside the SODS tank for better than an hour now; that was unheard of and even the sim techs stirred nervously as the veteran atomgrabber barreled on. The last time any officer above O3 had spent more than forty minutes navigating the tank and not crawled out a screaming lunatic had been several years ago and that poor fellow had washed out at the end of Re-quals.

Putting any line officer, or any nog for that matter, into the SODS tank at this point in a normal career path was like giving a snorkel and fins to a ten-year old and telling him to swim the Atlantic. Endurance and tenacity like this just wasn't the norm inside 1st Nano Battalion, even among the cockiest.

Kincade studied the monitor image of Winger's determined face and wondered. Just what the hell have I got on my hands here?

The senior sim tech was a corporal named Givens, short, chunky, with an annoying rapid-fire blink to his eyes. He looked up at Kincade.

"Colonel, you want I should pull him out now...he's already made it to the other side, beat through every obstacle I can throw at him. He's done the standard course...and then some."

"Where's he now?"

Givens checked the grid on his display. The SODS tank was a sphere ten meters in diameter, filled with water, and a host of infinitesimal predators and bogeymen, enough to get any unsuspecting nog's attention when he tried to pilot an ANAD master bot through the medium. An electronic 3-D grid pinpointed the position of the nanoscale assembler as the pilot steered it through the obstacle course.

"—I make him about two point one meters this side of the far wall...he's slogging through the whirlpool...having some trouble keeping on course, looks like. Already transited the carbene forest. Plus, it's not a standard ANAD bot in there, sir."

"What the hell is it?"

Givens blinked. "Colonel just sloughed off some loose bots from his own hand and loaded the tank with them. The bots he's piloting in there are basically...er, him...sir."

"Hmmpphh..." was all Kincade could say. In other words, this is nothing but a circus stunt. The carbene forest was a sleet of reactive radicals and molecule clumps that usually ate up atomgrabbers for lunch...it took some serious stick work and guts to slip through the torrent of molecules that were trying to tear off your effectors left and right. "Carbenes usually do a number on most pilots. What's his trick?"

"I don't know, sir...Colonel's always had a knack for ANAD driving, I guess. I've never seen anything like it. Should I let him go on...or pull the plug?"

Kincade's eyes went from the ANAD image to Winger's face—a tight mask of concentration...hell, the kid had his eyes closed, for God's sake...he was driving the master bot by feel alone, tickling his joysticks and changing config by instinct. It was uncanny—even for an angel.

"No...let him be, Givens...let's see what the man can do." A small crowd of techs and nogs had begun to gather around the control console outside the tank. Glances and murmurs were exchanged...and a few ten-notes as well.

SODS stood for Spatial Orientation and Discrimination Simulator. Colonel Johnny Winger wasn't physically inside the sphere at all, other than nanobotic pieces of his own 'hand.' Instead, he was in an enclosed booth on the other side of the tank, plugged into everything the master was sensing. A sleet of water molecules rushed by the assembler as it cruised on picowatt propulsors back across the water inside the tank. Once in awhile, the sim techs threw a curve at Winger: dropped a few million bacterial spores in front of him, stirred the water into a whirlpool, discharged electron guns, zapped the tank with UV and X-rays...anything their diabolical minds and the simulation protocols could come up with. So far, Winger had fought off every predator and obstacle, even a malfunctioning horde of ANAD replicants that had materialized seemingly out of nowhere right in the middle of the tank. Winger had fought off banzai charges and flanking maneuvers and double envelopment tactics like the seasoned veteran he was, grappling with the herd in close combat and using his own bot's bond disrupters to break the back of the enemy formation.

SODS was a prerequisite for any nog to get out of Basic, and stand for officer status in 1st Nanospace Battalion. It was also used for proficiency checks and re-quals for line officers in the chain of command. The whole world of nanoscale combat was still so new that Kincade and the Corps general staff were making up tactics as they went along. SODS was supposed to measure a prospective atomgrabber's ability to discriminate and manipulate objects via remote control at infinitesimal micron or even smaller scales.

From the beginning, Winston Kincade had to admit, one atomgrabber had always stood above all the rest...Johnny Winger. From the beginning, he'd shown extraordinary skill at the sim, an unusually adept talent at visualizing and manipulating micron or nanometer scale objects in space. Hands down, the kid had always been destined to be the top code and stick man in the whole battalion. You couldn't make raw talent like that. And now that he was a battalion commander and an angel to boot--

And raw is what it still is, Kincade kept reminding himself. Even as he and the others watched with amazement and grudging admiration, Winger powered his way through the 'waterfall' obstacle that Givens had programmed in—dodging loose polypeptides and radicals with aplomb—and Winger's eyes were still closed. He wasn't even watching his readouts. He was letting the stick talk back to him, somehow feeling his bots through the haptic feedback and driving across the course on instinct.

It'd be easier to navigate Manhattan on a tricycle blindfolded, Kincade told himself.

"Let him head for the launch point," Kincade ordered. "I want to see what the Colonel's made of."

"Two big ones say he'll never make it," a voice called from behind.

"Three says he does—"someone countered.

"Warm beer for everyone if he splats at the 'Wall'," another one chimed in.

The wall was a solid chunk of metal dividing the tank in two. The trick was to configure your nanoscale bots for denser medium, change form so you could transit a world of crystalline planes and rigid lattices. All the while fighting off deranged nanobots programmed to chew up your effectors while you dived through. Most nogs would have rather run naked through a pack of lions.

But Winger managed to fend off the attack, whirling his own bots like a mad dervish, ripping the water with jolts of electron discharges, forming a protective bubble just long enough to fold himself for the denser wall. He squeezed the assembler down to barely a core and base, and slid sideways, twisting and turning, one step ahead of the bots nipping at his heels.

In the end, the race got everybody in the sim room cheering him on. A few moments later, the master bot sounded ahead and followed the acoustic returns right to the vacuum tube at the near wall of the tank, letting the containment chamber suck him up. Colonel Winger would re-integrate his little scouts back into his own angel primary config after the sim was over.

Kincade watched Winger's eyes pop open on the monitor...the first time the kid had looked up since the carbene forest. Not a drop of sweat on him, Kincade observed. Can angels even sweat? The barest hint of a smile crossed his young face.

"Bots secured in containment," Winger reported. "I'll be ready for another run at the course as soon as I'm regenerated and stable—"

Kincade leaned forward to the mike. "Uh, that won't be necessary, Colonel Winger. You've made your point. Secure the sim and extract. Debrief in my office in thirty minutes."

Winger nodded at the unseen voice. "Copy that, sir." He started unhooking himself from the booth. Time to get re-attached with the rest of his arm.

"I'll get right to the point," Kincade said, as Winger saluted, entered and sat down. The General noted how quickly Winger had reconfigured himself for 'office' duty. Even his right hand, source of the racing bots inside the SODS tank, had solidly rejoined their brethren. Only a slight fuzziness betrayed the fact that the Colonel was no Normal, but was in fact an angel, officially a Para-Human Entity. The Corps had been trying to integrate PHEs into normal line and staff ops for years. Winger was the highest-ranking angel in the Corps.

Kincade handed a small slate to Winger, who perused the details of UNSAC's tasking.

"You heard what happened at the Moon-farers' conference the other day?"

Winger said, "Yes, sir. It's all over the Mesa. Any news on who did it...and where the hostages are?"

"Oh, it's Red Harmony, all right. The communique and their demands are on that slate too, along with current intel and signals analysis from UNIFORCE. Four heads of state, including President Kendrick—" Kincade shook his head. "UNSAC's given us the job of rescuing them, unharmed."

Winger gave the device back to Kincade. "Sir, we haven't operated angels or PHEs off-Earth yet. There could be radiation effects. Research Division's speculated about gravity effects on configurations. And then there's the dust...on the Moon, it's everywhere."

Kincade leaned forward on his elbows, then rubbed his white moustache vigorously, as if it were some kind of pet. "I'm fully aware of all that, Colonel. This is a new environment for you, for all our angels and PHEs. Look—" he leveled an even gaze at Winger. "I won't sugarcoat the risks. But this is big. UNISPACE has been scouring the Moon's surface with every recon asset they can scare up. There's zero evidence the abducted leaders have been taken off the Moon. They're down there somewhere, we just don't know exactly where, yet. But we do have some intel tidbits from Q2. The cartel's tight with the Chinese. And there's some kind of weird seismic activity over on Farside. Even money says the politicos are somewhere in or near that Chinese base."

"Yuegong, isn't it, sir?"

"Precisely. What you and I have to do is hammer out some kind of basic rescue mission, once we've got decent intel on the leaders' location. The Chinese factor and diplomatic niceties just makes all this that much harder. By the way, the Chinese and Red Harmony are now operating geoplanes on...or I should say, under the Moon. UNIFORCE confirmed that yesterday."

Winger almost whistled in amazement, but quickly realized you didn't do that in a general's office. "How the hell, sir—"

"Don't ask. This Selene Hammer mission will be even more challenging than just operating on the Moon. Because of the geoplane...or lunaplane factor—Boundary Patrol will have to be involved and they're already bitching. Plus, UNISPACE will be the lead agency. You'll be subordinate to General Kuraly's people the whole time. Winger, get with your people in 1st Nano. I'll send Murphy over from Q2. Come up with some ideas and get back to me by 0700 hours tomorrow morning. UNSAC's expecting details by noon; she's got a vid conference with the Security Council then."

Winger rose and snapped off a salute. "We'll be in the bunker, sir. All night, if we have to."

Kincade returned the salute. "This one's going to be tricky, son. Lots of wrong turns and dark corners in this mission. The Chinese, diplomatic matters, treaties, off-Earth ops, cross-unit coordination." Kincade rose shaking his head. "I don't have a good feeling about the outcome. If Red Harmony makes good on their threats and starts off'ing world leaders, all our heads could be in the noose."

"Yes, sir. We'll get the details hammered out and have a basic plan and TOE for you by sunup."

With that, Kincade shook Winger's hand and immediately wished he hadn't. One thing about PHEs and angels: in physical contact, they felt like sticking your hand in a bowl of soggy cornflakes.

Winger left Kincade's office and hurried through a sultry, drizzly night back to the Mission Prep bunker.

Inside the bunker, he went to the squad ready room. Several quantum troopers were inside, cleaning equipment and re-arranging web belts and field packs.

Corporal Angel Barnes was field-stripping a mag carbine on a drop cloth-covered table. "Skipper, welcome to the neighborhood. Scuttlebutt says we're taking a joyride to the Moon." Barnes was nominally one of 1st Nano's Stealth and Defensive Countermeasures specialists (SDC2). "What's up this time, Colonel? Another sightseeing cruise?"

"Join the Corps, travel the stars--" said Stella D'Garza.

"—meet interesting people," added 1st Nano's top sergeant Al Glance "-and disassemble them into atom fluff."

"What can I say?" piped up Sherm Cuddy, interface control leader from the 1st. "It's not just a job...it's a nightmare. Another boring day in paradise."

"Knock it off," Winger said. "This comes from General Kincade himself. And for your information, the problem is on the Moon...that conference and the chiefs of state that were kidnapped."

"Ah, Luna—" dreamed D'Garza. "—Cosmic rays, dust, temperature extremes...plus crooks, claim jumpers, diplomats—what's not to like?"

Winger scowled at them and all the kidding died off. He drifted over, checked out Barnes' work. "Just got tasking from UNSAC. General Kincade and I have been working out the table of organization and equipment and the rules of engagement. UNISPACE needs our help.

"Sir, does this include angels?" That came from Corporal Joseph Vinh, the team's Defense and Protective Systems specialist (DPS2).

Winger nodded. "Our orders are to draw a full combat kit." Vinh was an angel just like Winger and only a blockhead or a blind man would say there hadn't been issues integrating the Para Human Entities—swarm angels—into Quantum Corps operations. Snide comments and less-than-helpful suggestions were only part of the problem. There were continuing issues of trust—"Sir, I don't want to trust my life to a cloud of smoke, sir—and issues of group cohesion and team integrity, this despite the fact that angels and Normals had been working more or less together in Quantum Corps ops for years. Sometimes the differences between a Normal and an angel were just too great. Winger knew that viscerally, being an angel himself, but his command rating and colonel's cross-orbital with stars on his shoulders insulated him from some of the trash talk that went on.

"Full kit..." murmured Master Quantum Sergeant Stella D'Garza, one of 1st Nano's CQEs...communications and quantum engineering. "That mean we take the tin cans too?"

"It does," Winger said. 'Tin cans' referred to the troopers' hypersuits. Uniformly despised, often referred to as garbage cans, the suits were vital pieces of equipment in combat zones. "Full kit means full combat load...suits, HERF, mag, camou-fog, Super Fly...the works. I'm working out the mission plan details for Kincade now"

Al Glance came over, as did most of the rest of the unit. They all gathered in front of Winger by the hypersuit lockers. Glance was the junior command rating, the CC2. "What's the deal, Colonel? Is this Red Harmony or one of their minions?"

Winger shrugged. "Q2 thinks so. We're tasked with a mission of assistance and support. Locate the kidnapped politicos and effect rescue. UNISPACE will be taking the lead on this. And one more thing: it looks like the cartel has somehow transplanted a few geoplanes to the Moon. Q2 thinks they're using underground lava tubes to get around. So, Boundary Patrol will join our detachment."

Faces winced and eyes rolled. Someone said, "Those grade school hall monitors? They couldn't police their way out of a closet."

"Maybe so," Winger didn't disagree, "but they have expertise in underground ops. Marshal Bolivar of UNISPACE Lunar Command is the senior commander on site. We take tactical orders from him. ROE says we don't shoot unless fired upon or given orders to do so by Bolivar."

"If we encounter Red Harmony," Glance asked, "what do the rules of engagement say?"

"If you're fired upon, return fire. We're not tasked to crack heads unnecessarily, just to help locate and effect rescue of the Big Guys. There are diplomatic issues involved too. I'm realistic enough to know that may mean casualties, ours and civilians. And I don't want to hear any bitching and moaning about omelets and breaking eggs, either. Just follow orders and do your job."

"When do we get the full briefing, Colonel?" asked Barnes.

"Soon as I get full orders from Kincade and all the details are worked out. In the meantime, keep doing what you're doing and rest up. By the way, all liberty is cancelled for the duration. I don't want anybody hopping off to Merida to go trotting with the senoritas."

Groans and mutters followed but Winger chose not listen. Mesa de Oro was largely isolated deep in the Yucatan jungle anyway and liberty trips were few and far between.

One trooper, a newbie named Adnan Kelty spoke up. "Sir, you had given me a day's leave for family reasons. I'm meeting someone in Merida...kind of important, sir."

Winger studied the Detachment's newest Interface and Control specialist. IC1 Sergeant Kelty had joined 1st Nano just a few months before, fresh out of nog school and the training battalion. He'd shown himself proficient in quals and tests, done respectably in the SODS tank, but the kid was a loner, private, pensive and quiet. Some of the atomgrabbers called him Reverend behind his back...the kid was always somber, gloomy and morose. Winger had wondered about team integration issues in the future, although any Quantum Corps detachment with angels had integration issues.

"I remember, Sergeant. This can't possibly wait? Someone in your family on their deathbed or something?"

Kelty looked like he was about to cry, with his eyes and nose all scrunched up. "It's pretty serious, sir. I know I could have put in a formal request but I thought—"

Winger interrupted. "Okay, trooper, you've got twelve hours, no more. Be back here at 0600 hours tomorrow. The lifters are leaving for Kourou spaceport at that time. We've got a shuttle launch to make."

Kelty's face relaxed. A faint smile appeared. "Yes, sir. Understood...thank you, sir. Thank you."

Just then, a chime beeped in the back of Winger's head. He had let his config control slide for a few moments, as he explained things to his troopers and his hand slid right through a chair back beside the lockers. Angels had to be careful about things like that. Visual solidity and configuration stability were needed to keep the Normals from focusing on aberrations you could see. You had to stay on top of it or your config could drift and any Normals around would see only that and nothing else. It was a not-so-subtle reminder of the gulf that separated them.

But no one saw the slip-up and Winger left the Mission Prep bunker. The chime was Kincade's signal: final orders from UNSAC.

He headed across the quadrangle through sultry, humid early morning air to the glass cube of the Ops center.

For the next two days, 1st Nano was methodically reshaped into Operation Selene Hammer, Detachment Alpha. Assignments and equipment draws were posted on the crewnet. Gear was cleaned, inspected, stowed and eventually packed aboard two hyperjets, Mercury and Apollo, that had touched down at the Merida terminal a few kilometers from the Mesa. That night, Boundary Patrol lift-jetted in a squad of their own, three males and two females, who would join the atomgrabbers for the ride down to Kourou. Detachment Alpha, though nominally subordinate to UNISPACE for the mission, wouldn't be taking a back seat to anybody. If the Red Harmony cartel was behind the incident at Copernicus City, Johnny Winger aimed to put 1st Nano squarely in the nasties' face and bite off a sizeable chunk.

"So where are you going...all dressed up like a preacher?" asked Angel Barnes.

Kelty was acutely aware the Detachment figured an IC's place was with his unit. But it couldn't be helped--he had to be on time.

"Merida, if you must know. Got an appointment." He winked and headed for the door.

"He's getting drunk and then getting laid...that's the real story," Sherm Cuddy figured. They ribbed him some more until he waved and ducked out into the humid late fall night. If they want to think that, so much the better.

Adnan Kelty had another mission altogether.

The small town of Merida was a short ride from Mesa de Oro and Kelty would have enjoyed the early morning jaunt on the turboscooter--the air was fresh with the scent of jacaranda and a steady breeze was flowing through the tapang and screwpine trees of Yucatan's la selva forest--but the truth was he was nervous, even anxious about the meeting.

He hadn't done exactly as the agreement called for and he knew there would be questions. He just hoped the inquiry stopped with questions. He figured he'd use the ride down to the town to come up with some answers.

Merida was a thirty-minute ride, out the main gate at Kraft Field—the Mesa's parade ground and drill field--down a winding road through the forest to Highway 7. Merida Road itself ran a serpentine course, switching back and forth along the crest of the ridge overlooking the treetops to the north, a narrow two-lane blacktop dark as a black bear, until it peeled off south toward the town itself. The north fork went up Gallegos Road, through a valley and tunnel complex the nogs had long ago called The Notch, to the Test and Wargaming Range several kilometers away, atop a bare mesa lost in wispy wreaths of cloud and mist.

Kelty enjoyed the early morning cruise as best he could, cranking the scooter up to nearly a hundred and twenty, leaning left and right as he steered on through the humid air toward the outskirts of town, and the rustic hotel known as Obrador Inn, where his appointment was undoubtedly waiting impatiently. He was already late and it was dark, save for the bowl of stars overhead, and the faint glow of the base behind him. He was glad the road was mostly deserted.

He didn't want to answer any more questions than necessary.

Obrador Inn was a faintly shabby, plaster and stone lodge of a hotel, nestled in the woody brow of a small valley off the main road, a mile or so before Highway 7 broadened into Main Street, which was lined with gift shops, bait and tackle joints and boating and scuba suppliers. The pale blue glow of a parasailing shop, closed for the evening, threw enough light across the road, so he found the turnoff readily enough. He tried not to let the hologram windsailers circling over the intersection distract him.

He sped down the decline toward a parking lot, parked the scooter in the shadows, somehow feeling comfort in a cloak of anonymity and walked from the autocab stand where he had left the bike, toward a narrow trash-filled street behind, lined with small shops in stucco and peeling plaster. Broken down bots and pieces of bots lined the gutters. Rusting drone carcasses were scattered about. Cats screeched and dogs barked. Puddles of rain water attracted hordes of flies and mosquitos.

Senor Obrador's hotel and tienda was at the end of the street. The place was a fleabag tourist trap, a waypoint for clueless tourists on their way up to the Kokul-gol Mayan ruins.

Shelves of canned goods and sacks of corn meal and flour lined the walls. The cash register was brass, a relic of the mid-20th century. Senor Obrador was inside, short, squat, pallid with a black moustache and a sun hat, which he kept on even inside. The stump of a well-chewed cigar angled from the corner of his mouth, along with a few dribbles of spit.

"Ah, Yanqui, no? Norteno? Como puedo ayurdarle? How can I help you?"

Through the windows inside, the bar and restaurant shone with boozy conviviality, laughter and cantina music spilling out through the front doors.

As instructed, as he had several times before, he went to Registration and secured a room for the rest of the night. Number 127, the Juarez wing and would he be needing any help with his luggage, sir, we do have bellhop service--

Kelty ignored the offer and went looking for the room. He turned up and down several corridors, crossed a breezeway to another building and eventually stumbled upon Room 127. He unlocked it and went inside.

He waited, uneasily, for about half an hour.

As before, the knock, when it came, was soft, almost inaudible.

"Housekeeping--" purred an accented voice.

Kelty let the woman in, shutting the door quickly behind him. The lights were low in the room, only a single lamp over the bed lit. The staff woman was Oriental. Chinese, perhaps, from the look of her.

Kelty hadn't seen her before. She was short, petite, straight black hair tied in a severe bun. Her maid's outfit was impeccable: white skirt and apron, white shoes, black and white blouse and latex gloves.

She glared coldly at Kelty. "You're late."

The Sergeant attempted a shrug, but realized it wasn't visible in the shadows. "Couldn't be helped...the unit's getting ready to deploy...to the Moon. Colonel cancelled all liberty...I had to beg and lie for this."

Her real name was Wei Ming, but Kelty didn't know this. Nor did he ask. It was understood that identities weren't important. Only results were important. That much was understood quite well.

Wei Ming pursed her lips, paced deeper into the black of the room. She drew the shades aside, scanned outside, satisfied, she came back, partially into the light. Her face was a half moon, pale and unblemished as a ceramic figurine. "Why?"

Kelty watched her, hoping to detect something, some inkling of where he stood with them. Maybe a twitch, a clench of her fist, but there was nothing. "It's a rescue mission, this time. Fully covert. We've got recon assets scouring the Moon. Once we know where the--" he hesitated, hunting for the right words, "—where they are being held, we engage. UNISPACE is in charge."

"Mmm." A question or a statement? He wasn't sure.

Kelty found the silences uncomfortable. "They don't have a firm connection yet. Just suspicions."

"That is enough." Wei Ming's face hardened. "What happened at the Mesa? You were supposed to have stopped them--"

Kelty knew that was coming. He'd spent hours, trying out different answers, none of them any good. Quietly, resigned, he explained the mission inside the base, what had happened at the containment center, how Colonel Winger--damnable Winger--had managed somehow to grab a Red Harmony spybot before it could be activated. He tried to put a spin on the story, a certain inevitability, factors beyond my control, I wasn't prepared for\--but she brushed him off and went pacing again, this time more abruptly.

When she came back into the light, her face was no longer a half moon. It had morphed into a hard, impassive mask, a carnival mask, an angry clown. Was it the light...maybe nanoderm patches changing with her mood? He'd heard of the trick--

"This is no good," she told him. The undulations on her cheeks and forehead seemed to settle down, take on a firmness. "If Quantum Corps' got one of our mechs, that's no good at all." She frowned. It was almost a relief to see a normal gesture, something he understood. "With one of our mechs, they'll surely develop countermeasures."

"It will take some time--"

Now she was visibly angry. The skin kneaded itself into a hard fist, making her cheeks bulge slightly like a lioness with fresh kill in her mouth. "They're not stupid, Kelty. Don't make that mistake. You've made enough already." She was thinking, her cheeks returning to normal planes, sleek and alabaster. "The cover story, the maskirovka, must be allowed to play out. The Project depends on it."

Kelty had heard of The Project before. He wanted to ask, but he decided against it. But he was curious.

"Maybe if I knew more about--"

But Wei Ming wasn't listening. She had new instructions from Red Harmony. "You're being paid well for your services, Sergeant. Yet you continue to fail us."

"I can't work miracles."

"Leave the miracles to us. Just do your part." There was an unmistakable menace--had her voice changed timbre? An echo, a frequency shift, multiple tones superimposed. He shook his head. Had Red Harmony mastered that too?

She went on. "You must sabotage any more efforts to rescue our little guests. Winger and ANAD must not be allowed to interfere with the Project. This is a critical time now."

Kelty's throat constricted. No...it was a normal reflex. He told himself that, reassured himself he still controlled his own throat muscles. "That's not the agreement. I agreed only to provide intelligence, not perform sabotage. It's too dangerous."

Wei Ming was stern. Nanoderm rolled across her face, an earthquake of skin, reflecting her emotions. "Your mission is changed. You'll be paid well for your work...if it is successful. We've always paid well, have we not?"

Kelty nodded glumly.

She reached into her apron, withdrew a tiny wafer. She placed it in Kelty's hand. He willed his palm to remain still.

"It is a small bug. Load it into Winger's kernel, in his processor. It will weaken him, subtly, a little at a time. This will make it harder for Quantum Corps to counter us. Install this at the right time--you will be signaled when. And keep sending intelligence back...the usual way."

She vanished from the room almost before Kelty realized she was gone, blending into the shadows. He stayed a few minutes more, breathing rhythmically, testing arms, legs, facial muscles. Making sure he still had control of himself. Red Harmony did that to people.

Then he left the Obrador Inn and sped back to Mesa de Oro.

It was near midnight when he parked the turbo outside Mission Prep. He walked through stiff breezes across the quadrangle to the Barracks, right in the center of the base. Outside his quarters, he ran into Barnes and Stella D'Garza, having a smoke, huddled together to shield themselves from the wind, beneath the overhang.

Barnes was contemptuous. "What happened, Kelty? Bitch wouldn't put out for you?"

The hard drive along Highway 7 had helped Kelty clear his mind. He snorted. "I left her panting...for more. She couldn't get enough of what I have."

"Right," said Barnes. Whatever the hell that is.

Kelty went inside the Barracks. Time was short. The liftjets for Kourou would be leaving in an hour.

Kurabantu Island, the south Pacific

October 27, 2058 (five years earlier)

1100 hours

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone had a halo. It was a personal shield that went wherever you did. Made sure you did what you were supposed to do, so that nothing and no one could interfere.

It was the price of membership in Red Harmony.

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

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

Kelty was, of course, well aware of the existence of UNIFORCE's BioShield nanobots circulating in the lower troposphere of the Earth's atmosphere. He knew as well that BioShield was especially sensitive to the presence of Serengeti Factor 'bots, as the global pandemic of six years ago had brought the protective swarm into being. Knowing that, it was a small matter of concocting a batch of the mechs inside the lab, not enough to warrant concern but sufficient to trigger a reaction from BioShield and bring unwanted attention to what was going on at Kurabantu Island.

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

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

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

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

He'd joined BioShield in 2046 after the Serengeti plague, worked on swarm communications and controls, and had been released in '46 on suspicion of embezzlement and misuse of agency resources (even now, Kelty could hear his own voice rising in anger at the hearing: "this charge of unauthorized tampering with core ANAD BioShield algorithms without approval is patently ridiculous...nothing but a witch hunt—")

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

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

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

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

Chandrigarh told him not to worry.

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

That's when his halo went off.

It was his first experience with cartel discipline and it wasn't pleasant. Kelty began to suspect he had made a mistake joining Hongse hexie, suspecting he had gotten into something he couldn't get out of.

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

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

With conditions worsening and a global crisis brewing, Kelty tried several times to modify and weaken the Amazon Vector swarms, but his halo wouldn't let him. To join Red Harmony, he had given up free will and control of his mind. By early '58, he knew he was effectively a prisoner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A symphony of agony played out on Kelty's contorted face.

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

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

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

But first, he had to 'die.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 2: "Dark Halo"

Somewhere on the Moon

December 9, 2063

1115 hours (Earth Universal Time)

For about the hundredth time, Vasily Ovchenin tried the door. Locked. Worse, the bastards had seen fit to drop a nano barrier over the entrance. Every time he approached the door, a high keening buzz zapped his hands and pushed him back. Burned and stung like hell.

He was a prisoner in this coffin of a room, and there didn't seem to be anything he could do about it. Four walls, bare composite. The door. A grid floor and ceiling. He was somewhere underground, he was sure of that. Below the Moon's surface. But where?

The bastard prestupniki criminal kidnappers would surely pay for this.

Then an idea came to him. Like many top officials in the Russian Federation, Ovchenin wasn't really alone, not even in his own body. He sported a halo, an internal swarm of nanobots circulating inside his brain, just ticking over, just to keep unwelcome visitors from penetrating the skull and mind of the great Russian vozhd.

Maybe there was a way. Even a nanobotic seal on the door might be penetrable by properly programmed halo bots.

But before he could do anything, the door to his little cell opened. The nano barrier dissolved in a spray of light and was gone. A tall swarthy man in white robes came in. It was his handler, the cartel enforcer assigned to keep the politicos in line.

His name was Omdurman Obeid.

Obeid smiled a mirthless smile. "We know what's going on in that little mind of yours, Ovchenin. You can't hide it. We can read the halo, plain as day."

Ovchenin felt his heart sink. How much did they know? What could they know? "You don't know anything. My halo's dead. How about some better food around here? You know my country's already forming a rescue operation."

That made Obeid's smile widen, revealing gleaming white teeth. "Your country, so full of stupid peasants, doesn't even know where you are. You don't know where you are."

Ovchenin conceded the point. "Since you know so much about me, you must know this plan of yours will never work."

"It already has worked. Even as I speak, the nations are falling all over themselves to meet our demands. One side benefit of this Operation is that the results show UNIFORCE for what it is: a toothless tiger."

Ovchenin seethed, for he knew Obeid was being truthful. "You can't fight the whole world."

"We don't have to...since we're not on Earth anyway. This is the Moon. Things are a little different here, in case you hadn't noticed." Now Obeid's face hardened. "Give up this crazy idea of getting away. It's pointless and probably suicidal." He shrugged. "Suppose you manage to get out of here...where are you going to go? Do you see a suit in here? One step outside and your blood boils in thirty seconds. Take my advice. Don't risk it. Don't do something stupid. You may yet live to see your loved ones again."

With that, Obeid left the room. The barrier flashed and went back up again, surrounding the door with a pulsating, shimmering shield.

Ovchenin sank back in his bed, swallowing hard. He was relieved for Obeid clearly couldn't read everything the Russian President's halo was recording. Ovchenin knew perfectly well there was no realistic way he could escape himself.

But what the bastards didn't realize was that he didn't have to. Russian halos were different. His own halo was in part programmable. It was a simple matter of sending the thing the proper instructions. Once that was done, a small squad of bots, barely detectable, would detach itself from the halo and find their way out of his head, through his eyes, his ears, his nose and mouth.

With any luck, they would penetrate the barrier and maneuver outside this prison, into open space. Hard vacuum was no obstacle. With any luck, those loose halo bots would be detected by someone and analyzed for what they really were...halo bots from Vasily Ovchenin, President of the Russian Federation. And after that, rescue and justice for these prestupniki bandits would come swiftly, and harshly.

With any luck.

Ovchenin sank back into the bed and closed his eyes. With effort, he knew he would soon be able to disengage a few halo bots and send them on their way, for he had practiced this technique many times. Soon he felt his nose tickling with an oncoming sneeze.

The bots were on their way.

SpaceGuard Center, Farside Observatory,

Korolev Crater, The Moon

December 10, 2068 (EUT)

Nightfall at Korolev Crater came abruptly, too abruptly, thought Adam Bright. He stared out the porthole of the SpaceGuard Center and watched the shadows drop like a black curtain across the face of the crater wall. Korolev was a massive place, fully four hundred kilometers in diameter, with stairstep rim walls and a small chain of mountains inside. Like a bull's eye on a target, the crater lay dead center in the rugged highlands of Farside, forever banished from the sight of Earth.

Adam Bright watched the black creep down the crater walls and ooze across the crater floor like a spreading stain. Somehow, it seemed depressing...another two weeks of night with only the stars for company. Cosmic grandeur, my ass, he muttered to himself. Give me a beach in the South Pacific and some native girls and I'll tell you a thing or two about cosmic grandeur.

Bright was pulling late shift today...tonight...whatever the hell it was. Tending the radars and telescopes of Farside Array, a key node in the SpaceGuard System that scanned the heavens for anything approaching the Earth-Moon system, was a critical job, especially now that GreenMars had started moving rocks around and tossing them sunward.

That ought to be a spectacle, Bright thought. He'd seen the sims often enough, the ones GreenMars had put out for public consumption, the ones that showed asteroid 2351, better known as Wilks-Lucayo, barreling down the sun's gravity well and smashing the bejeezus out of Mars. Impact was scheduled for less than a year from now and Bright and his fellow techs would have a ringside seat to a great show.

Bright took one last look out the nearest porthole and begrudged the final wisps of daylight before Farside was fully enveloped in the nightfall. At that same moment, he heard a beeping from his console and turned his attention back to the array controls.

What the hell...

Adam Bright looked over his boards, controlling the positioning of the great radars out on the crater floor and the optical and radio telescopes that accompanied them. He quickly pinpointed the source of the beeping...Nodes 20 through 24...the south lateral array...was picking up some anomaly.

He massaged the controls and tried to focus the array better, get better resolution on the target. SpaceGuard didn't beep without reason. Somewhere in its nearly infinite memory were ephemeris data and trajectory details for nearly every detectable piece of space junk in the solar system, out to several billion miles. Like an overprotective mother, SpaceGuard knew where everybody was supposed to be, right down to the nearest centimeter.

She only beeped and chirped when someone was out of position.

A quick perusal made the hairs on the back of Adam Bright's neck stand up. The system displayed a list of likely targets, based on radar imaging and known ephemerides. He scanned the list.

Right at the top was something that made no sense at all. SpaceGuard had detected a small swarm of loose nano, not in the outer reaches of the solar system, but closer to home. Much closer to home.

"Jeez, what the—" he muttered to himself. "This can't be right...can it?" SpaceGuard had detected a diffuse but basically point source, an anomaly near the lunar surface itself. Maybe six hundred kilometers to the south, near von Karman crater. Near the Chinese Yuegong base.

"What the hell's a swarm of bots doing drifting around down there?" Bright tugged at his lower lip, wondering what to do. Then: "This one I gotta phone in."

Immediately, he fired off an alertgram to UNISPACE Copernicus City.

The message from Farside center ignited action inside the UNISPACE command center at Copernicus City like fuel on a fire. Straightaway, the sensor data was sent to UNISPACE Intelligence, the S2 shop on CC's 8th level, where technicians massaged and filtered the raw feed for hours, running all manner of routines and scans and algorithms and analyses, until late on the second day, S2's conclusions were couriered over directly to CINCSPACE's office one level above.

Marshal Bolivar rubbed his eyes wearily and immediately called a briefing in half an hour, in his office. Commander-in-Chief Boundary Patrol (CINCBOP) General Skye would be there. So would the Detachment commander, Johnny Winger.

Bolivar was grim. "It's a halo, for sure. S2's about ninety-nine percent sure of it."

Winger had pressed himself down into a nearby chair—not easy for an angel—but necessary to observe social niceties. "The signature matches?"

"Damn near perfect match," Bolivar massaged his moustache while reams of figures and graphs filled the air over his desk, turning about slowly so that all could study them. "Electromagnetics and thermals are indicative of atom-grabbing and bond-breaking most often associated with halo-style bots. Soon as we knew that, I sent people over to the Japanese, Russian, American and EU offices, with one question: is it one of yours?"

General Skye cleared his throat. "So far as I know, using halos with national leaders isn't common practice among most nations. Too big a chance for mischief, from what I've heard."

Bolivar agreed. "Nothing's totally immune from hacking. But after some pointed questions and realizing we had solid intel, the Russians finally owned up. It's Ovchenin's halo. All their top leaders sport them. It's how they make sure the poor saps follow the party line."

"Sir," Winger asked, "how did personal halo bots wind up on the surface?"

Bolivar shrugged. "Who knows? Maybe Ovchenin was able to disperse a few, thinking they'd be detected. The point is we now have a general idea where the Russian leader is. And probably the others as well."

"Where's the source?" Skye asked.

Bolivar pressed a few buttons on his deskpad. The 3-d display of Farside data collapsed, to be replaced by a spherical map of the Moon, now hovering over them like a disembodied face.

"Farside," Bolivar indicated. "The people at Farside center say their instruments can't place the source precisely, owing to radiation pressure from the Sun, meteor activity, outgassing from the regolith, but the consensus source location is in the vicinity of Yuegong."

Winger whistled, something he had practiced as an angel, and not something you normally did in the presence of a senior officer. Immediately, he wished he hadn't. "Sorry, sir. It's just that this presents some difficult diplomatic issues. If the Chinese—"

Bolivar cut him off. "No, S2 doesn't think the Chinese ran this snatch and grab operation. But they do believe the Chinese are protecting Red Harmony and the cartel has some kind of base in or near Yuegong. How's your training going, Colonel?"

Winger thought about that. "The Selene Hammer detachment's been training ever since we landed a few days ago. We've done covert surface and sub-surface approach tactics, with General Skye's help here—" he nodded in the direction of CINCBOP, "as well as covert penetration and hostage rescue drills, but it's all been pretty general, with no definite target to set up. I'm keeping my people sharp with daily runs in the virtual theater, practicing all kinds of tactics for penetrating all kinds of targets, anything the sims can think of."

"Well, now it seems there is a target, Colonel. Get with my tactical people in Ops and work up a plan for approaching and penetrating Yuegong. Get it to me by 2200 hours tonight."

"Sir, what about the Chinese? Won't there by diplomatic problems? I'm assuming they'll object to UNISPACE breaking in unauthorized into their compound."

Bolivar's face broke into a sly smile. "Colonel, have you ever heard of the Russian word maskirovka?"

Winger had. "Doesn't it mean deception? Denial, camouflage, that sort of thing."

"It does indeed. It means appearing to be something you're not. Get that plan, Winger and leave the diplomatic niceties to me."

The briefing ended as quickly as it had started. Winger left the Marshal's office suite and made his way to the Detachment's virtual training theater, to watch the tail end of yet another practice penetration raid against some kind of generic target. When the drill was over, he gathered his troopers and told them the next set of drills would be posed against a real target, with real consequences.

"For the next day, everything you do will be measured against that Yuegong base. After each run, we'll debrief and adjust as needed."

"Colonel--?" it was Angel Barnes, her dark buzz cut dripping sweat from the last 'engagement' with Red Force adversary bots. "—we going underground? If we are, we need more time to work with the rock jockeys, getting into position, infiltrating, breaching, that sort of thing."

"I don't know yet, Corporal," Winger said truthfully. "Marshal Bolivar's got something up his sleeve. We can't just go blasting into that base like drunken teenagers. It's tricky, with the Chinese. They're a Treaty nation too. I've got a feeling there's going to be some kind of deception involved, but what that might be, the Marshal's not saying yet."

Sherm Cuddy, the unit Interface and Control specialist (IC1) said, "Be simpler to just breach from below like we've been training and wreck the whole place, Colonel."

"That would pretty well wreck our careers, too, Sergeant," Winger told him. "You want to finish out your days shoveling shit in latrines in the middle of some desert."

More bitching and moaning followed and Winger recognized the grumbling for what it was. The atomgrabbers had been training non-stop for four days and they were fatigued, irritable, grumpy and chippy with each other, with the sims, with him, ready to take on a real foe.

It's way past time for this Big Game to start, he told himself. He left the training theater and decided to pay a visit to the UNIFORCE command center. Somewhere in that rat's maze of offices and studios and map rooms and labs, some truly wacky people in the wizard lab were thinking up insane ideas that he knew his own quantum troopers would have to put into action in the field.

Winger figured a little adult supervision from someone with combat experience might just leaven the cockamamie stunts they often came up with and give him a plan that could actually be executed.

Winger decided the Detachment needed to blow off a little steam, so that evening, he arranged for a dinner and a night's entertainment at a swanky dive up on Level 1. Next to the lifts was a small canteen, often frequented by hopper jockeys and lunarcat drivers, all done up to resemble a South Seas beachside bar, complete with miniature palm trees, thatched roofs and a sign reading Fiji Island Lagoon.

It was just dark by CC time but Winger had heard the robotenders made a mean Samoan daiquiri and he figured it would make decent background for the report he still had to file with Bolivar.

As anticipated, the room quickly grew stale, boozy and raucous. It wasn't long before someone noticed that the Cratered Casino was right next door. After seeing the looks on the faces of his troopers, Winger relented.

"Just don't do anything to get written up tomorrow," he warned them. "If you do, I'll personally eat the offenders." As an angel who could disassemble bulk matter at unheard-of speeds, the troopers knew Colonel wasn't kidding.

Inside though, the Cratered Casino was a hopper jockey's heaven. The place was laid out so that a casual stroll was impossible. The unwary visitor was bedeviled at every turn in the plunging, vertiginous corridors of the complex. There were cathouses and tinglerooms, bars and saloons, dingy holes and well-lighted pubs. Games and chases and fights spilled out into the passageways and time after time, Winger was dragged into dark caverns which could change in an instant from cabarets to stadiums to brothels and back again. He made tedious progress toward the center of the place, sucked along by a tide of revelry that wouldn't quit.

The heart was the casino itself, an eerie, half-lit realm of low-gravity where hordes of leaden-eyed bettors followed the trajectories of slowly spinning dice from one cyber-croupier to the next. Winger squeezed through a miasma of foul breath and hallucinogenic smoke and wandered back and forth, looking to see where his troopers had landed. The click of dice and the slow pirouette of roulette balls in their three-dimensional tumble cubes were all that animated the room. Everything else seemed hypnotized, or dead.

He found the two ICs at one of the tables. Sherm Cuddy and Adnan Kelty were busily engaged in some game involving dozens of dice wafting through clear spinning cylinders. Winger came over and stood behind them. Both troopers acknowledged his presence.

"Got to land sixes, Colonel...sixes all the way...my luck has to change...I've blown half a month's pay already on this stinking crap game—"

"Just take it easy, Sherm. These dice aren't your own bots, you know."

Kelty seemed equally entranced by the intricate trajectories the dice followed. "It's got to be rigged, Colonel...has to be...nothing moves like that in one-sixth g."

"Sergeant you know you can't ever beat the house," Winger warned him. He never saw Kelty manipulating a small cylinder in his left hand, extracted from a pocket and swiped against Winger's own leg. The cylinder had been given to him by Wei Ming, his cartel handler back in that hotel room in Merida. The guts of the cylinder were quickly discharged into Winger's leg, stirring a small barely noticeable swirl in the bots that made up an angel like the Colonel. But Winger didn't notice anything and soon moved on to other games, at which his troopers were losing even bigger.

Several hours later, Winger had been working on the mission plan in his quarters on CC's UNISPACE level, when an odd feeling came over him.

It wasn't quite dizziness. It wasn't quite nausea. Those were programmed responses. He could enable or disable them on command. They had been made part of his programming to give him as many lifelike qualities as seemed reasonable for a unit commander in Quantum Corps who was also an angel.

No, this was deeper, more fundamental. His swarm body was reacting to something. With a start, Winger stared in horror at his own hands, now dispersing into fading twinkling bot dust. He saw the same creeping dissolution at his wrist, working its way slowly up toward his right elbow. Same on the left arm. Startled, he pushed back from the desk, and flailed momentarily, when his feet didn't make contact with the floor. He looked down. His feet were diffusing clouds of light dots, drifting apart, disappearing before his very eyes.

"What the hell--?" He fell out of the chair, realizing in that moment that his config controller—for any angel, essentially a heart—was misbehaving, bollixed up, going haywire.

Winger couldn't 'stand up' in the Normal sense. The control he usually had over his body configuration was rapidly vanishing. If this went on—

"If this goes on, I'll be a cloud of smoke." With what was left of his fingers, he punched again and again at his alert pendant, now lying nearly loose on the seat of the chair. Finally, he made some kind of contact. Jeez, I hope a signal went out—he told himself.

He continued 'punching' and slapping at the pendant alert button, frantically trying to make use of his dying config, before his entire swarm configuration melted away into the default state of all para-human entities, an amorphous horde of disorganized bots.

But it seemed hopeless. What the hell was happening to him? Something had jammed his config controller and he was helpless as a herd of dust particles. Indeed, a whirring sound nearby sent a paroxysm of terror into his brain-processor, for the robot-vac had left its dock and started up and was beginning its nightly rounds of sweeping the floor. In a few minutes, his own loose confederation of bots would suffer the same fate as all dust particles...and that's when the latent memories he thought he had gotten rid of came back--

The problem with being a swarm being, Johnny Winger figured, was that you couldn't taste hot dogs being grilled on a campfire. And that sucked.

He really didn't know how he had gotten here. He had a memory—did swarm beings even have memories?—there had been an endless field of waving, undulating plants, like a corn field, only it wasn't corn. When he looked closer, he could see that the corn was actually composed of trillions of tiny bots, a whole field of bots. A whole planet of bots. When he walked through the field, the bot-plants parted like corn stalks, but little poofs of them drifted up and he soon saw he had a rooster tail of dust behind him, identifying the path he had taken through the field.

Then he had come to a small lake, barely a hundred meters across. There was a small white wooden footbridge across the center of the lake. And, not unexpectedly, he saw a small whirlpool churning alongside of the bridge piling, right in the middle of a lake.

What else was there to do but jump into the whirlpool? If this was a dream, that was the logical thing to do, wasn't it? So he jumped...

And wound up here. 'Here' was actually a place of strong, good-feeling memories. 'Here' was one of the good places.

It was the old fishing camp and cabin at Ford's Creek, Colorado. It had to be '35, maybe '36. His Dad, Jamison Winger, had often brought him here for long weekends in the summer and fall. Trout and bass and all that cold running water that burbled down out of the Rockies made Ford's Creek a special place.

He knew this place.

Now he was inside the cabin. It was late, well after midnight. He was supposed to be in bed, in the top bunk, of course, with his brother Brad and neighbor Archie below. There were others in the bedroom too, but he didn't know them and they were sound asleep anyway.

Somehow, like a well-rehearsed routine, he knew what he was going to do before he even did it. Trains ran on tracks and memories followed tracks too.

Johnny shimmied quietly down the ladder from the top bunk and padded across the hard wooden floor to the bedroom door. He cracked it open, crept out into a darkened hall and made his way toward the living room up front. There were voices there and some laughing and chuckling. Cards were being dealt. It was the grownups and their poker game again.

Johnny stopped at the end of the hall and peered around the corner.

A fire guttered in the chimney, mostly smoke, but no one paid any attention. A small rickety table was set up next to the fire. Chairs had been pushed aside to make room for the table. There were cans and paper sacks strewn across the floor.

Someone burped real loud and Johnny had to stifle his own laugh.

Grownups, really\--

Five men were playing poker around the table. One was his Dad, tall, fringe of gray hair around a mostly bald top, red flannel shirt not tucked in, his weathered, rough hands fanning out the cards to study his draw. There were others too: Hugh, Roy and Todd.

The fifth man sat with his back to Johnny. The low lights and the flickering flames of the fire cast deep shadows across a broad set of shoulders. He never turned around, and Johnny took to calling him the Shadow Man. He didn't know the Shadow Man's real name.

"Come on, Roy, you in or out?"

Roy was stocky, white-haired, ruddy-faced, in fact he had a pig's face, Johnny had always thought. His lips tightened and he slapped a few cards down on the table.

"Yeah, I'm in. I'll see your five and raise you five."

Todd tossed a few chips into a growing pile. "I'll call."

Johnny's Dad did the same, but added, with a mischievous wink, "I'll see your five and raise you twenty." He tossed a handful of chips in the pile, which had now become a small hill.

The Shadow Man said nothing at first. Then, with no words, he tossed his own chips in, all of them. In a low, almost inaudible voice, he said, "See...and raise fifty."

That raised eyebrows around the table. It even gave Johnny a chill. Not what the Shadow Man said but the way he said it...like a hiss, almost, like a snarl. The Shadow Man talked like Johnny figured a talking grizzly bear would talk: guttural, menacing, hoarse and deep.

Who was this Shadow Man? Johnny wondered.

Then, almost as if he were answering Johnny's question, the Shadow Man spoke again, just like a grizzly bear playing cards.

"I never bet less than the house." It was a kind of an explanation. The Shadow Man must have had a winning hand; he'd bet everything on that hand. More raised eyebrows.

"Sure, whatever you say," muttered Roy. He didn't look up, but continued fiddling with his own cards.

Johnny had about a million questions. Was this fishing camp real? Did I actually jump into a lake on a planet of bots? Am I dreaming?

"You're not dreaming," the Shadow Man bent forward, toward Jamison Winger. "I saw the look on your face. You're wondering how any hand could be that good. My hand is that good."

No one argued with the Shadow Man and the game went on. As he hung by the corner of the hallway door, Johnny tried to take in everything he saw. He knew it all had some kind of meaning.

He'd been deconstructed, he remembered that. Doc III had done the honors, disassembling him into atoms and molecules, just before the Keeper in that cave on Europa had consumed him...or what was left of him. Now he was an angel, a para-human swarm being just like all those weirdos who followed the Assimilationists.

And he remembered that Doc III had tried to maintain his original identity and memory in a small nondescript file called Configuration Buffer Status Check...a place the Central Entity would hopefully never think to look.

Slowly, piece by piece, even as he watched his Dad play a poker game with Roy, Todd, Hugh and the Shadow Man, the memory of who he was and what he had to do came back.

Thanks, Doc. The little assembler had managed to save enough of his memory to figure all this out....

Johnny remembered being outside the Inuit village of Nanatuvik, in Alaska and seeing a man shuffling through the snow as he approached. The man was short, dark-skinned, enveloped in a heavy qaspeq parka and hood, with bone necklaces rattling around his neck as he approached. Another angel? It was hard to tell.

The man spoke something, though Winger couldn't hear over the whine of the wind. He realized the man was Nanatuvik's angakkuq, the shaman. He was gesturing at something in the sky.

Winger looked back over his shoulder. It was late afternoon, with the sun low, but already he could make out the shimmering veil of the aurora borealis hovering over the distant mountains.

The angakkuq approached Winger and stopped, placing a hand on Winger's shoulder.

"The peril of our existence lies in this fact: we eat souls. Everything we eat has a soul. All things have souls. If we hunt and fail to show respect for the souls of our prey, the spirits will avenge themselves. See in the sky...the Old Woman of the Sea is already disturbed. In the days to come, we must be careful."

With that, the shaman ambled off toward a nearby hill.

Johnny Winger knew he had his work cut out for him. Already he had enough intelligence about the Old Ones to make life difficult. He just had to find a way to get it to UNIFORCE.

Mostly he hoped he could block the Central Entity from executing the Prime Key.

Maybe, somehow, in ways he could now only dimly perceive, he could block the Prime Key himself.

That old shaman was right, he told himself. He would have to be careful in the days and weeks ahead.

It was a new life he was living as an angel. The rules were different here. He'd have to watch his step.

He knew UNIFORCE needed every scrap he could give them if the Normals were to have any chance of resisting the Old Ones. He hated himself for using that term but the truth was he was half angel, half-Normal himself, one foot in each world, pulled in two opposite directions at the same time. He supposed that spies and saboteurs had always dealt with that.

But he had to remind himself of something his son Liam had once said. "Being an angel is so cool. You can be anything, you can go anywhere, you can't die...."

Already he could feel the same pull Liam talked about. But he had to resist. He had to win this battle. Not only was it a battle between Normals and angels, between humans and the Old Ones.

It was a battle with yourself. That was the hardest part. Somehow, he'd have to do what Liam and Dana and millions of others hadn't been able to do. Win that battle and save the small kernel of his own identity, his own memories that Doc III had managed to squirrel away in a small file somewhere in his config manager, to live another day.

The Normal part of him was just a few bytes at the end of that file.

But it was the only human part left. And that was the part that had to survive.

Now it had survived. Doc III had seen to that.

Now it was time to get to work. The Shadow Man had told him, in ways he couldn't really explain, that he had an important mission to perform.

"Colonel Winger, can you see me? Can you hear me?"

He opened his eyes, or thought he did, and a fuzzy image swam into view. Parts of faces. Hair. Eyes. Lips. Several of them.

With effort, he was able to resolve the images. One he didn't know. Probably a medic or a technician. One was adorned with a big black moustache. Marshal Bolivar's face gradually became clearer.

The Marshal loomed over him like a worried mother. "Colonel, how are you feeling?"

Winger couldn't even put that into words very well. "Discombobulated. What's...where am I?"

"You're in the Re-gen Lab. Dr. Falkland's working on your config controller, trying to put you back together."

Winger felt empty. "What happened?"

Now a new face appeared. White moustache. White goatee. Curly white hair. It was Dr. Ryne Falkland.

"Colonel, you developed some kind of infection. Bad bots got into your config controller, really messed things up. I'm doing a full re-generation of your controller."

Winger tried to get up, realized he didn't have enough mass in his arms and hands to do that. Discouraged, he sank back into the pillow. That's when he noticed a slight shimmer above.

"I'm in containment...aren't I?"

Bolivar nodded. "Just a precaution, son. Until the re-gen's done."

"Sir, I've got a detachment to run. Training. Tactics. Sims. Weapons. And you said you had some ideas on covert penetration."

Bolivar held up a hand. "All in good time, Colonel. Falkland says this'll take another day, at least. Just relax." The UNIFORCE Marshal produced a small commandpad from a pocket. "You'll be interested to know we picked up an encrypted transmission from CC...a signal that was detected and triangulated for transmission to the Chinese base at Yuegong."

"A transmission? What kind of transmission?"

Bolivar shrugged. "It was triple-sigma entangled and encrypted, so it'll take some time to crack it. But that's not the most interesting part. The source here at CC turned out to be one of your people...one Sergeant Adnan Kelty. IC2, I believe. UNIFORCE Security's picking him up as we speak."

Winger blinked, or tried to. "I saw him last night...or whenever...in that casino."

Bolivar's face darkened. "He's probably the one who infected you. It seems like the cartel's had a mole inside Quantum Corps for some time. I'm tightening security in all departments for this operation."

Winger spied Dr. Falkland moving briskly about the room. "When will this re-gen be done, Doctor? I've got one hell of a lot of work to get done."

Falkland was unimpressed. "A lot of things have to go right, Colonel, for me to release you. It's all regulations, you understand. There's your controller core for one thing: main and working memory, all your algorithms, buffers, config translator, instruction sets, priming the processor. Then all your actuators. Then we lay in growth triggers and replication templates, all the comm centers, after that—"

Winger held up a hand. "Okay, Doc, I get the picture. Just get on with it, okay."

Bolivar was headed out the door. "Get well, son. Get whole. I'll be watching the detachment train for the next day. I've already met with Glance, your CC2, on my tactical idea. The sims will be set for that scenario."

"Sir, mind letting me in on the secret?"

Bolivar said, "In good time, Colonel. Not here." Then he was gone.

Winger sighed and lay back in the bed. "Come on, Doc, let's get cracking. I've got a President to rescue."

Falkland studied a monitor hanging over the bed and sighed. "Understood, Colonel, but this will go a lot easier if you'll be still and let me handle the details. I'm working with a whole new process here."

Winger groaned silently. Great. Just friggin' great.

Falkland ignored him and went back to work. As he studied configuration patterns on the monitor, he remembered how he'd gotten into this line of work for UNIFORCE to begin with, five years before.

When you dealt with angels and bot swarms, accidents sometimes happened. The accident had been nobody's fault but that didn't make Dr. Ryne Falkland feel any better. Any time you lost a loved one, it hurt like hell. And when the loved one was Mr. Jiggs, twelve-year old hybrid Shih Tzu, lifelong companion, confidant and lab policeman and cleaner-upper of anything that dropped from the table, the loss was even harder to take.

Falkland sighed deeply. Jiggs was just a dog, wheezing, limping, half-blind in one eye with all his cataracts, not long for this world anyway, but still...it was like a hole had opened up in his heart.

Well, at least there was still Simon.

I need someone to talk to. Falkland finished cleaning out the containment chamber and went over to a small capsule on a workbench nearby. Maybe Doc can help me sort things out. He thumbed a control stud on the side of the capsule. Momentarily, a faint vapor began issuing from a port on top. The vapor twinkled and sparkled in the late morning sunlight, thickening as it spread and expanded into a visible mist. Falkland paid no attention to the mist, while it began forming itself into a recognizable, if shadowy outline of a face and shoulders...a reasonable facsimile of Dr. Irwin Frost himself, founder of the Lab. Falkland instead busied himself with prepping the containment chamber for another run, checking the electron guns, the pattern buffer, cycling the interior ports and feedstock reservoirs.

The facial outline of the Doc Frost swarm beamed down at Falkland with a bemused half-smile, still twinkling in the shafts of sunlight as the bots configured themselves into final patterns, grabbing atoms and slamming molecules to form up the image.

***You are preparing the Lab for another run, I see, Dr. Falkland...you're always quite thorough in your work***

Falkland looked up briefly, critically appraising the realism of the swarm image. "I'm not sure what happened, Doc. Christ, I hated to lose Jiggs...maybe it was the pattern buffer. Guess I've got a little tweaking to do."

***Maybe more than a little, Dr. Falkland...there seem to be some anomalies in the drivers...perhaps I could help?***

"I was hoping you'd say that...I'll load up the routines and we can both take a look."

It had long been a dream of Falkland's to find a way to re-assemble deconstructed objects. It ought to be a simple matter of scanning the entire configuration of a living person, then imposing that same configuration, that same pattern of atom bond energies and geometries, on new feedstock and re-assembling the same person.

Falkland had been experimenting with a special kind of configuration pattern emitter that imposed a sort of memory field on the new molecules. A memory field that was supposed to hold the scanned pattern and impress that same pattern on the new molecules. But it was damnably hard to do this with living systems, always had been. Nanobotic assemblers could break down anything they could get to. And the same assemblers could slam atoms and pretty much build anything that had a repeatable pattern, even now, organic material.

But the great question was this: was the re-assembled pattern actually the same as the deconstructed pattern? Was B = A? Or was it just a clever analog, a simulation, an angel swarm entity like the Doc swarm? Philosophers called this conundrum the Ship of Theseus. Was a ship that was maintained by swapping out all of its wooden planks still the same ship, once all the planks had been changed?

So, he had been experimenting on living things the last few weeks, spiders, cockroaches, lab rats, and now one of his two pet Shih Tzus...Mr. Jiggs. He'd finagled with the pattern configs for weeks, trying different approaches. He'd tested the emitters, buffers and injectors with all manner of atomic feedstock, just to be sure. He'd managed to disassemble and reassemble all manner of critters, but you could never really tell with rats and cockroaches. It wasn't like you could ask them questions: Are you really the same thing I just disassembled?

Jiggs had been placed inside the small containment cell, after he'd done his business outside in the bushes, of course. No sense introducing any more organic matter into the experiment than necessary. A small-mass nanobotic swarm had been released into the cell. Jiggs was rapidly disassembled and the resulting atomic debris was held in a special containment field that kept the relevant atoms in close proximity. The pattern buffer also read and maintained a 'memory' of the original configuration. This memory field was a new design of Falkland's, in which all the original atom and molecule configurations and their bond energies and geometries were stored and used to re-construct the original.

The memory field containing the atomic patterns of the original Jiggs was then run through a new config pattern processor and the new config re-imposed on the atoms in the memory field. The result was a ghostly likeness of Jiggs, but the shadowy image wouldn't hold on its own and Falkland, reluctantly, had to let it go, let it disperse. The technique still needed work. And Falkland had only Simon left. He wasn't too keen on donating his only remaining pet to Science just yet.

For nearly an hour, Falkland examined the software loaded into the pattern buffers, debugged the configs and speculated on what might be happening, why the new field didn't hold the originally scanned pattern and thus why the original object could not be properly reconstructed.

It was well after noon, when a loud buzzing at the Lab entrance shook Falkland out of his funk. Someone was at the secured doors outside the Containment Center. Falkland checked...it was Major Lucian Bridges. Oh, crap...he'd forgotten completely. Bridges had been invited to a little demo that afternoon...only Falkland no longer had anything to show the Quantum Corps officer. He let the Major into the containment center anyway.

Bridges was a program manager from Table Top, overseeing several efforts that the Lab was running for the Corps. He was a likeable, if someone prickly administrator...program managers tended to be that way.... Tall with a red hair buzz cut and long delicate fingers like a pianist, which he sometimes was in his spare moments, Bridges came over and peered into the containment cell.

"I don't see anything, Dr. Falkland. You said you had something to show me, some new kind of config generator."

"I did," Falkland admitted. "But the results of my last test weren't worth keeping around." He explained what had happened that morning.

Bridges shrugged. "So where do you go from here?"

Falkland ran a hand through his thinning hair. "Is the Corps still interested? I'm not that far...I'm sure of it."

"Hell, yes, Doctor. The Corps' interested in anything that can counter what the cartel is doing. What I've seen of your work...there's still a lot of promise. What else do you need from me?"

"Well, Doc and I are still working out the kinks in this blasted pattern buffer and emitter. What I'd like to do is this: once we've got the buffer working...I'd like to have the Corps' permission to do some live experiments, with actual people. I want to try this before going on to...you know, Colonel Winger."

Doc's shadowy face made a slight tightening of its lips, at least that's what Bridges thought he had done. It was hard to tell with some angels...it depended on how good the config was.

***Dr. Falkland and I have a slight difference of opinion on this matter, Major...clearly the config buffer needs additional testing...I would not recommend scaling up the experiments quite so fast***

Bridges rubbed at some stubble his razor had missed that morning. "You think this gadget will actually work...didn't you just tell me you couldn't get your dog back? What makes you think it'll work with humans? What evidence do you have that this thing will actually retrieve people who've already been de-constructed? There are a helluva lot of people at Table Top who think that's nonsense...that it violates the laws of physics and so forth."

Falkland took a deep breath. "Call it a hunch, if you want, Major. I can produce just as much evidence the other way. Here, let's look at this logically. Would Quantum Corps be interested in funding more experiments, Major? Experiments with live human volunteers? Maybe, proceeding on directly to Colonel Winger's case?"

Bridges nodded. "I don't know about Quantum Corps. But UNIFORCE might. Tell you what: write up a proposal, explain what you need in funding and equipment, any kind of resources. I've got some contacts in Paris. Plus CINCQUANT himself is there...that's General Remarque. He's an old atomgrabber from way back...I'm sure he'd listen, maybe put in a good word for us."

Ryne Falkland did as Major Bridges requested.

Two weeks later, Project Phoenix had come to a critical juncture. New methods and new configs for retrieving and re-constructing nanobotically disassembled people had been developed. Falkland had worked for days, night and day, to find every bug, fix every flaw, run sim after sim. The subject today: another of Falkland's pets...this one another Shih Tzu, named Simon.

Falkland wanted one last live experiment before advancing the project to human volunteers.

Simon was a black and tan brother to Mr. Jiggs. Falkland fed him a few treats, then hoisted the little bugger up into the containment cell, closing and securing the hatch behind. From the other side of the porthole, Simon munched on the last bits of his treat, then stared morosely out at Falkland, slowly wagging his tail.

"Simon, don't look at me like that. This will only take a few minutes. Doc, how's the buffer looking?"

Doc swirled and sparkled in the late afternoon sunlight. The swarm angel was only a barebones head-likeness of old Doc Frost today...more apparition than real. Doc was devoting most of his processor to managing the config buffer and little to keeping up appearances for Falkland.

***Config patterns are stable, Dr. Falkland. Injector guns are primed and ready to trigger on first alarm...feed valve is closed, but powered up. Memory field at state one, ready to transmit...all parameters within normal tolerances, Doctor...it appears that everything is ready. How do you feel about the experiment today?***

Falkland sniffed. Nice of you to ask, Doc, he thought. He'd programmed that into the angel's core routines just last week...a new sympathy module he'd swiped from the Net. At least, the cloud of bugs had the smarts to know when to invoke it.

"I'm feeling confident, today, Doc...one last check of all systems and we're ready to go."

A quick look around the containment controls assured Falkland that nothing had been overlooked.

"Okay, Doc...here goes--" He pressed a button, opening a port inside the cell. Instantly a swarm of nanobotic disassemblers flooded the compartment, enveloping Simon in a faint mist that flickered with pinpricks of light. The Shih Tzu stared out longingly, tail still wagging. Soon enough, his face was lost in the fog.

***Reading normal activity, Dr. Falkland...solution parameters within tolerance. EM levels normal and in the green range...all configurations holding...***

As before, the swarm filled the containment cell and began disassembling poor Simon, atom by atom, molecule by molecule. Falkland had sometimes wondered what that would feel like...would it hurt, did it happen too fast, what went through your mind? During the earlier runs, he had avoided peering into the compartment...not wanting to see his subject's face half-eaten away or in some unfinished state of disassembly. This time, he couldn't help it and took a look.

Mostly, there wasn't much to see. The mist that was the swarm filled most of the view inside the porthole. He could catch occasional glimpses of a shadow; presumably that was Simon's body. He seemed remarkably calm for Simon, not squirming and fidgeting around like he usually did. Maybe, his neuromuscular functions had already been--

Then he saw the face. It was still recognizably Simon, but grayed out somehow, washed out and devoid of features. He had whiskers, a mouth, a hint of beard and his nose wiggled, but texture was missing...almost as if Simon were an unfinished lump of clay, waiting for final touches. Then the mist covered his face and he was gone.

Falkland shook off a brief shiver and concentrated on the displays, showing the progress of deconstruction. "Memory field stable, we're scanning now, Doc...looks like everything's stable, within range."

***I detect no anomalies in the field emitter, Dr. Falkland...containment field also holding well...disassembly operation now sixty-five per cent complete...structure file buffer overload...I recommend truncating peripheral details until the buffer clears...***

Falkland saw instantly what Doc was talking about. The atom bond energies and geometries that made up Simon were overloading the memory registers of the system. Well, Simon was a complicated guy, Falkland thought. I mean is a complicated guy, he corrected himself.

When deconstruction was over, if all went well, Simon the Shih Tzu would be reduced to a hopefully well-contained field of disassembled atoms and molecules and nothing more. At that point, Falkland's memory field would sweep through the chamber, reading each and every atomic bond, measuring electron-volt energies, analyzing each atom's geometric construction, recording it all and saving it in a massive file that constituted the physical 'essence' of what had once been a wiggling, yapping little dog.

And if all went well, Falkland would write that same memory field over the contained atoms of the now disassembled Simon, instructing the bots to re-build the very same structure, atom by atom, molecule by molecule, according to what was held in the memory field.

When it was all done, if Falkland had done his homework, the new structure would be Simon once again, at least in every physical way that mattered. Whether his mind and thoughts and habits would return as before...well, Dr. Ryne Falkland had long ago decided to leave that to the philosophers.

First things first, he told himself. "Doc, let's see if we can bring Simon back to physicality. We have good structure on the containment?"

***All data seems clean and within expected variations, Dr. Falkland. I have finished all check routines and variations are minimal. There was some dropout in data collected from Zones 41 through 45, but I have activated interpolation routines to make up for the loss...I don't think the subject will be affected***

"Zones 41 through 45--" Falkland consulted a handwritten list he had taped to the console. "We've seen that before...the hind leg muscles...not sure what's happening with that. Hope Simon doesn't come back walking with a limp. Well, here goes--" He stabbed a button and the system monitor beeped and flashed warnings: MEMORY FIELD OPERATING....KEEP CLEAR...

He looked inside the chamber.

For a few moments, the mist continued to swirl, speckling and twinkling and popping like a miniature thunderstorm. Falkland knew the bots were slamming atoms as fast as they could, using the memory field as a blueprint, re-building Simon molecule by molecule. At least, he hoped that's what was happening.

Then, slowly, the swarm mist began to clear. The first shape to appear was a nose, then a mouth. Falkland peered into the chamber closely, checking for texture, patterns, evidence that the memory field had worked.

The mist began to thin out and that's when Falkland's heart sank. It was Simon, all right, at least something recognizable as Simon. All the parts seemed to be there: a face, four legs, a squat little furry body...it was black and tan in coloration, that seemed normal...a tail that wagged.

But Simon was transparent. Structure wasn't filling in properly. Falkland realized he could see right through the structure.

"I'm adjusting the field to compensate--" he announced. Falkland fiddled with some dials on the console, trying to bring a stronger memory field to bear, to override the structure that was being formed. Trying to force the atoms and molecules that made up Simon back into normal position, normal geometry. The overall look seemed right, but there weren't enough molecules.

Simon was little more than a cloud.

In the end, Falkland couldn't get Simon's structure to fill in. The mist that was the swarm rebuilding the little dog stubbornly refused to coalesce into something more substantial. The basic pattern was there but memory field integrity was being lost somewhere in the process.

***Buffer overflow...truncation at all higher registers***

Doc announced a problem with the config generator memory...too much data, too many patterns to reconstruct. The atomic complexity of living organisms had defeated many attempts before. Falkland swore under his breath.

"--not again, not again...."

The only humane thing to do was abort the operation. He'd have to let Simon go, be dispersed. Just like Jiggs before him. Reluctantly, Falkland killed the config generator and the memory field collapsed. Simon, what was left of him, slowly faded from view and was lost, his atoms and molecules scattered throughout the chamber. Soon, only a faint haze clouded the containment cell porthole.

"Simon, you're in there somewhere. Maybe not in a physical sense, but I've got the configs...we can do this. We have to do this." He rubbed at his hairline and worried with a loose strand of hair.

***Major Bridges will not be pleased at the outcome of this run, Doctor Falkland. He had great hopes that your configs and memory field would be strong enough to maintain structure, and bring Simon back***

Falkland shut down the system and the containment cell went dark. He sat down heavily in a nearby chair, sipped half-heartedly at a warm cola drink. "That's not the worst of it, Doc. I've got a demo scheduled at UNIFORCE Paris in less than two weeks. What am I going to show them...a bunch of slides and graphics? Major Bridges wants results...all I've got is theories."

The Doc swarm roiled and drifted over toward the containment cell. ***This technique is not ready for more complex structures, Doctor Falkland. It will months before it can be tried on human volunteers, or anything that complex***

"Thanks, Doc...I figured that out for myself. And I don't have any more pets to donate to Science either. But we'll have to think of something. I've got ten days to put something together for Paris."

He watched as the Doc swarm swirled around the containment cell, almost as if the swarm were 'tasting' or 'feeling' the device.

Maybe the doubters are right and that's what Simon and Jiggs are telling us, he thought. Maybe it's not structure that's important. It's the pattern, the configuration. Maybe that's what makes us truly unique.

The great conundrum that philosophers called the Ship of Theseus kept coming back to bite them again and again.

Ryne Falkland shook himself out of the reverie and forced himself to concentrate on the work of re-building Johnny Winger's config controller. It could be touchy. It could be dicey. Atoms and molecules sometimes had a mind of their own. And Marshal Bolivar had been most insistent: the deadline was day after tomorrow. Winger was heading up a rescue operation. UNIFORCE couldn't wait.

Falkland bit his lips and plunged on. There are only about a million things that can go wrong with this stunt.

Sergeant Adnan Kelty knew it was time, way past time, to get out. His own halo had been telling him that for five years, burning a hole in the middle of his skull. Stoking dopamine fires inside his brain's mesolimbic pathway, flooding his ventral tegmentum with an insatiable desire to do just what the halo said, for that was how the damned thing worked.

Really, there was only one place he could go and that was Yuegong, but from somewhere deep in his mind, in a dark little corner where the scared rat that was his free will had hunkered down whimpering, a different notion began to take hold.

He dared not think of it, just keep the thought tucked away in a corner, so the halo wouldn't notice and jab needles of pain into his head, like it did sometimes. Just a bare whiff of a notion...but if he could act on it without arousing the damned halo, there was a chance he could put an end to this agony once and for all, something he had tried to do many times before.

A very slight chance.

Kelty slipped quietly out of the Detachment enlisted troopers' quarters on CC's ninth level in the dark hours of early morning and took a lift up to the Plaza level, to the hopper bays. The early morning sun was low, just above the distant crater walls and shadows were long. Piles of rubble and debris still dotted the plaza; it would be another month before all that was cleaned up.

Thankfully, there were only a few people strolling around what was left of the Galileo Fountains, along with a few shopkeepers just opening up their stands and stores along Ravine Street.

Kelty climbed the steps to the Regio Promenade and headed toward the hopper/crawler bays. With his Quantum Corps ID, he had no trouble procuring a hopper..."a little recon for the Detachment...training vids," was how he put it to the technician who checked him out on the little rocket-powered ship. He held up a small metal container as 'proof' of his benign intent and the tech never questioned it.

Now alone in the pressurized cockpit, he powered up the hopper, endured the inevitable safety vid on the screen, and waited while the hold was de-pressurized and the conveyor shoved him outside into the hard vacuum. Still secured by holddown clamps to the landing pad, he checked off system after system, cleared all cautions, warnings and prompts and signaled the tower he was 'ready to fly.'

"Hopper Six, you are cleared to launch. Have a nice day, Sergeant. Don't forget to toggle REQUEST LANDING PERMIT when you're coming back and holding at hover altitude. You can't come down here in a hopper without a valid permit...regulations."

"Got it." Adnan Kelty knew all about regulations. What the tech didn't know was that Kelty had a fire in his head that was even now beginning to burn hotter, as the halo sniffed glutamate trails and began putting together bits and pieces of his real intent.

It would be a race to the end.

With that, he lit off the hopper's boost and the platform arced into the sky and pitched over. He checked his instruments. Forty-two kilometers to the rugged slopes of the crater walls.

He poured on the boost until the hopper had reached several thousand meters altitude and headed west past the central peaks of Mount Rathmore and Mount Prospect. The sun was just peaking over the rim of the crater. Once he had made his altitude, with hot knives stabbing in the back of his head, he cut his forward speed, then killed the rocket altogether. If he had calculated right, if his maneuvers were on the money—

The gravitational acceleration on the Moon was 1.62 meters per second squared. With a little last-minute kick from the motor, he expected he'd be able to slam into the crater walls at a final velocity of two hundred meters per second...already his muscles were growing sluggish as the halo commanded reverse contractions to keep him from going forward with his plan.

But the will to end this agony overcame everything the halo tried. The halo had full control of most of his muscles now and he fought hard to keep his fingers from being forced to maneuver the hopper to counter the speeding descent, balling his fists, pounding the sides of his skull, to stop the pain.

But the halo could not counteract the forces of gravity and acceleration.

With warnings and sirens blaring "PULL UP! PROXIMITY WARNING! TERRAIN HAZARD AHEAD!" in his ears, Adnan Kelty screamed at the top of his lungs, then in a final paroxysm of willful disobedience, he sprang the cockpit canopy and let its pressurized bubble of air flash out into space and disperse.

Dead of an embolism even before impact, Sergeant Adnan Kelty's hopper plowed into the upper slopes of Copernicus Crater's west walls at slightly under two hundred and five meters per second.

Vasily Ovchenin startled awake when the door to his cell swung open sharply. The face that came in through the half-light was bearded, stern and grimly determined.

It was Omdurman Obeid.

"Get up."

Ovchenin had been lying in bed. "What's happening?"

Obeid jerked his thumb upward. As if to emphasize his meaning, two guards appeared in the doorway, just behind. "Get up and sit there, on the floor."

Slowly, Ovchenin obeyed, not accustomed to taking orders from anybody. He sat down cross-legged on the floor.

"What's going on?"

Now Obeid's face softened slightly. A hint of a smile crossed his lips. "You're going on a little trip."

"A trip? To where?"

In answer, Obeid produced a small capsule from a jacket pocket. He thumbed a tiny button on top of the capsule. Instantly, a small flickering mist began issuing from the capsule.

Ovchenin froze. He knew what the mist was.

A MOB. The mobility obstruction barrier had been triggered and was now gathering around him, cutting off all escape.

There was no use to squirming or trying to escape the thing.

"I can't...breathe! The Russian President choked out. Slowly, inexorably, the MOB bots formed a tightening noose and forced Ovchenin into a crouch, then a curled-up ball on the floor.

He was soon gasping and clawing for air when more guards showed up. Through the sparkling mesh that had enveloped him, Ovchenin could just make out the distorted faces of three men, all vaguely Chinese from their faces and dress. Their voices were low and muffled.

"Grab them...we'll take them to—" but the rest was garbled as Ovchenin thrashed furiously inside the suffocating prison of the MOB net.

He felt himself hoisted up, then dragged roughly along the floor. The netball bounced and rocked down several flights of stairs. Once or twice, he thought he caught a glimpse of other MOB balls. The prisoners were being moved.

But to where?

Chapter 3: "Vishnu Vendetta"

The Moon, Farside

December 15, 2063

0950 hours (EUT)

On 3 January in the year 2019, the Chinese unmanned spacecraft Chang'e 4 made a successful landing on the far side of the Moon, coming to rest on the rolling plains of Von Karman Crater. Twenty-five years later, the Chinese had completed a small base not far from the historic landing site, a complex they called Yuegong. Plans were made to construct a small memorial around the now defunct lander and its tiny rover Yutu, along with a visitors' center and appropriate signage. By any measure, China had become a major player on the Moon and an original signatory to the Treaty. Some observers saw in the expanding reach of the Yuegong base a scarcely veiled attempt by the Chinese to appropriate most or all of the Moon's far side as Chinese territory, especially its water-ice and ilmenite resources near the South Pole.

This made the Indians especially nervous.

Thus it was that when UNIFORCE commander Marshal Federico Bolivar approached the Indian delegates at the Copernicus City conference about cooperating with UNISPACE in Operation Selene Hammer, attempting a covert penetration of Yuegong and rescuing the kidnapped leaders thought to be held there, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) president, one Kalisava Sivan, was only too happy to say yes.

In Sivan's mind, anything the Indians could do to blunt Chinese influence on the Moon was a profoundly good thing.

The ISRO hopper Vishnu had been cruising some one-thousand meters above the tortured badlands of a region called Van de Graff, ostensibly heading on a southwesterly course for the small Indian base at Schrodinger crater when her pilot, Vihan Singh, looked back at the Detachment CC2, Al Glance, a question in his eyes.

"We're about eight hundred kilometers from Yuegong, Sergeant. If this is going to work, I recommend we make the call now."

Glance patted a small capsule slung on his web belt. Colonel Winger was in there; at least, he hoped the Colonel was in there. Re-generated more or less whole from the malware he'd been infected with. Glance had an open coupler circuit keyed to his lip mike, allowing him to communicate with the Para-Human Entity who was nominally in charge of the Detachment. Winger had authorized Glance to take full charge of penetration ops, at least at a macro level, while Winger and any daughter swarms the Colonel cared to spin off would go hunting for the hostages once they were inside the base.

"Make the call." Glance sat on one side of Vishnu's rear bench, idly staring out the porthole at the sere and desolate terrain sliding by below. Troopers Stella D'Garza, Angel Barnes and Joseph Vinh made up the rest of the rescue team. All were dressed in civilian garb, playing the role of 'Indian scientists' just departing Farside Center at Korolev Crater on a quick hop down to Schrodinger.

Singh opened a comm circuit, a clear frequency used only in dire emergencies.

"Any station, any station, this is Vishnu. ISRO hopper declaring a Level 1 emergency. We have engine and cabin damage...we are losing air fast...this is a depressurization emergency...request immediate assistance...any station...any station, this is Vishnu...."

Singh knew two things about this little charade. Treaty nations with bases on the Moon were bound by law to render assistance to any vehicle, ground or airborne, suffering an in-flight emergency. He also knew that the closest station on this part of the Moon from which rescue was even remotely possible was Yuegong.

As expected, the comm soon crackled with a Chinese-accented voice. "Vishnu, this is Yuegong Approach...state the nature of your emergency."

Singh had practiced this little subterfuge with the Detachment. "Our ship was holed in multiple places...probable meteor strike...I have no engine and minimal control...requesting vector to your location...we are flooding emergency air now, will need life-support asap...."

A slight hesitation, then, "Ah...very well, Vishnu...steer left one five seven degrees...descend to five hundred meters. Is your approach and landing transponder operable?"

"Roger that, Yuegong Approach," Singh responded. "Turning on now."

Seconds later, a dotted approach path appeared on Singh's head-up display. All he had to do now was follow the indicated path.

"We're on approach now, Sergeant," he called back to Glance.

Glance replied, "Copy that. Okay, troops, time to become Indian scientists and dignitaries."

At Glance's words, the troopers began switching outfits, concealing weapons and gear beneath standard-issue Indian lunar suits, affixing emblems and logos, changing face and hair, and in all ways becoming what they emphatically were not: scientists on a research mission gone badly awry.

"Soon as we set down," Singh was saying, "I'll blow the charges. That'll make a believable wreck of the engine bay. I'm venting air now, to drop us down to emergency levels." A hissing squeal from valves in the rear soon made Barnes' ears pop.

"Ouch...okay, that really hurt."

D'Garza studied Glance's face. "Colonel ready in that contraption?"

Glance nodded. "He says he is." He looked over at Joseph Vinh, the Detachment's Defense and Protective Systems tech, himself a para-human swarm entity. "Okay, Joe, get small. Into the capsule. I don't want any questions from our 'rescuers.'"

As planned, Vinh immediately began dispersing his Normal configuration. His body grayed out to a nearly translucent shadow in less than a minute, with the master bot that was Vinh's main processor and a tight, slightly flickering swarm of residual bots arrowing across the compartment to a capsule Barnes held. Once the master was contained, Barnes snapped the capsule shut and slung it on her web belt.

"All secure, Sarge."

For reassurance, Glance patted his own capsule, with the essentials of Colonel Winger inside. They now had two separate swarm master bots deployed and hopefully the Chinese wouldn't ask too many questions. The mission depended on that.

Singh's voice called out. "Okay, brace for a hard landing. I have to make this look good."

As one, the crew tightened their seat harnesses.

Angel Barnes watched as Singh maneuvered Vishnu toward the landing pads, stirring up dust in all directions. Beyond the near horizon, she could see the four domes of Yuegong, poking above distant crater rims, bright morning sunlight casting long shadows across the rolling terrain.

Singh intentionally pancaked the hopper down hard on the surface. At that same moment, he triggered the explosive charge in the engine bay and the little ship rocked from the force of the blast, well-placed and contained to simulate damage from a meteor hit.

"Okay, close your helmets and secure. I'm venting air all the way down to emergency level. Got to make this look good."

A thin squeal and a swirl of dust and loose items proved Singh's point. Only a few moments later, a small crawler had snugged its transfer tube up tight against Vishnu's hatch. Glance did the honors of cycling the airlock. Two Chinese faces appeared on the other side. Efficiently, they helped the crew into the crawler. Once settled, the crawler backed away, pivoted on its wire mesh wheels and began trundling down the crawlerway toward Yuegong base, which came fully into view five minutes later.

The crawler docked at what was called Kunming Wing. The four 'Indian' researchers were shepherded out and escorted through several corridors to another wing—this one was called the Nanking Wing—and into a small, but well-equipped medical station. Two technicians and an obedient medbot drew blood and made a thorough exam of Glance, D'Garza, Barnes and Singh.

Pronounced in good health, the crew of Vishnu was re-dressing when a new face appeared in the doorway to the clinic.

He wore the red and green uniform of a Peoples Liberation Army-Space Force captain and identified himself as Deng Zha Shan, adjutant to the Yuegong base commander. Deng was thin, with a tangle of unruly black hair curling out of control above an oval head.

"Base commander Colonel Jiang Li Quan welcomes you to the People's Lunar Village of Yuegong. So sorry for your difficulties. You are recovering now?"

To keep up appearances, Vihan Singh spoke for the group. "A bit of excitement, sir, when our engine bay was struck. I managed to keep control of Vishnu but it was scary for a few minutes. We were fortunate you were nearby...a Treaty location we could divert to."

Deng smiled humorlessly. "Ah, yes, the Treaty. We are all to help each other here on the Moon, no? His excellency Colonel Jiang would be most pleased if you would join him in a brief reception in Chengdu Wing. 1200 hours. We have a most excellent canteen there."

Singh checked with the troopers and Glance gave him a barely perceptible nod. "Of course, we would be honored. Perhaps we could be allowed a place to clean up, refresh ourselves?"

Deng found this an acceptable request. "Surely. Our habitat wing has an apartment for visitors. This would serve nicely."

Again, the crew was closely escorted to the residential and berthing spaces and shown into a small, sparsely furnished apartment. After Deng had departed, Glance cautioned all to keep their voices down.

"The place is bugged for sure, probably vid too. Angel, it's time to let our invisible friends out." Both of them went into a bathroom, shut the door and extracted their containment capsules, thumbing them open. From each container, a fine mist issued forth, rapidly forming up into recognizable human forms. Inside of three minutes, a shadowy outline of Colonel Johnny Winger had appeared, hovering like a horde of fireflies inside the shower enclosure. Likewise, Joe Vinh appeared over the sink, his own configured body reduced to head and torso, with arms.

Glance and Barnes described what had happened.

Winger gave that some thought. "We have to be careful, Al. If the Chinese suspect or detect Joe and I, our cover's blown. Indian researchers don't go around with capsules of contained swarms like you two."

"No, sir." Glance checked the time. "We're due at this reception in an hour. I'm sure our hosts will be watching us closely."

Winger struggled a bit maintaining his Normal config. Blasted re-gen crap, he told himself. "Joe and I will go small again and keep a tight formation. With any luck, we can move out of this compartment and start reconning the whole base without being detected. Keep your coupler on channel two and enable your Ultra entangler. If the bad guys pick that up, it'll sound like chickens humping."

"By the way, that hatch is probably locked and secured, Colonel. Think you can get around that?"

Winger managed a grin. "Hey, when you're a swarm, you can go anywhere. I laugh at things like seals and locks. Come on, Joe, let's get small—"

Immediately, the two swarms began to disperse, fading like Cheshire cats into twinkling pops of light, then faint dust motes, then nothing. Sloughing off their Normal config bots, the two para-human troopers powered out of the bathroom on picowatt propulsors and set course for the apartment hatch. As expected, the doors were locked, sealed and armed.

"At least, there's no nano-barrier, Joe," Winger called over his own coupler comm circuit.

Vinh's tinny voice came back over the entangler. "Just your average run-of-the-mill molecules of polyacrylic seals. I think I've got a config for that—"

"Should be C-151, Joe. I'm already sliding in between some of these fatso carboxyl groups." Winger had seen the hydrogen and carbon molecules directly ahead and re-configged himself to slide right between them.

In no time, the two combat swarms had eased their way unseen out into the corridor. A current of air flow pushed through the corridor like a river and both master bots found themselves riding whitewater rapids of oxygen and nitrogen molecules.

"Yee-haaa!" yelled Vinh as he grabbed hold of a multi-lobed oxygen.

They rode with the flow for a moment, then Winger's sniffer detected something unusual, dead ahead.

"You smell that, Joe? I'm probing now...some kind of badass bots up ahead."

The two of them jumped off the air molecule train and maneuvered for a closer inspection, sounding ahead cautiously.

"Big-time electromagnetics, Colonel. Thermals too. Something's grabbing atoms like a crazed brick mason out there."

Winger saw it too. "That signature...we've seen that before, Joe. I'm sure of it."

"I thought my sensors had chimed. You want we should get our bond disrupters primed?"

"Do it."

The para-human swarm entities steadily closed on the target and soon found it hiding among tufts of air molecules, like an enemy airplane ducking in and out of clouds. In fact, they found scores of them.

"Colonel, they're halo bots! That's the signature we're seeing. These things came from somebody's halo."

Winger was forced to agree. "The signature matches, doesn't it? If that's true, someone with a leaky halo was here recently...or came through here."

Vinh said, "Ovchenin, maybe?"

"Could be. Or some other Chinese or cartel members equipped with halos. If it came from Ovchenin, that would mean the hostages were moved down this corridor and recently. "Let's check these guys out."

Long-range scan wasn't that helpful. Winger could tell from the acoustics that the halo bots were arrayed as inverted pyramids, joined at their apexes. A ring of effectors and propulsors wrapped around the equator of the bots, like a girdle with a dozen arms and hands. Atom groups hung off the main structure like bunches of grapes, cleaving, folding, extending and retracting at blazing speed.

The swarm had filtered out from its hiding place among air molecules like a malevolent fog and was already turning in their direction. Winger realized that one titanic collision was about to occur.

Halo bots, all right. Hope my guys are ready for the big dance.

The final distance was closed in less than five minutes. Winger and Vinh waded into the fight with bond disrupters sizzling.

Fighting bots in the land of atoms was all about leverage. Kind of like ballroom dancing, with fists, Winger had once remarked to Vinh.

The first bot came up and Winger gave it a taste of his bond disrupters. The electron discharge snapped off a few effectors and sent the thing spinning off into the distance. But no sooner had he done that than a squadron of them fell on him and he found herself engulfed in no time.

Winger had learned a thing or two about good effector technique in the weeks since his last encounter with bad bots. The secret was to keep your propulsors churning, keeping driving forward, keep your energy up. If he did that, he found he could slip out of almost any grapple and brain a bot with whatever effector was free. He particularly liked her carbene grabbers and he had developed a dance step he liked to call the kiss and clobber...he'd let himself be grappled, momentarily shut off his propulsors and almost relax. When the bad guy had retracted and moved in for the kill, he did a quick left-right spin, fired up his propulsors and slashed right across the bot's mid-section—where most of them had fewer effectors—knocking the bejeezus out of the thing and pulling free to pinch and slash some more.

It worked every time. Vinh had in the meantime gone to max replication, at Winger's suggestion, and the melee was underway. All up and down the line of engagement, like a collision of bird flocks, the swarms engaged...twisting, slashing, grabbing, zapping. Slowly, using their new maneuvers, Winger and Vinh were able to push back and contain the enemy swarms.

"It's working, Colonel!" the DPS tech exulted over his coupler link. "It's working! These bozos are getting smacked and spanked like you wouldn't believe!"

Winger's voice was distant but reassuring. "I believe it...I believe it...I told you it would work, Joe. Just keep after 'em...I'm reading mass fluctuations at the margins...that means your guys are holding their own. Try your enzymatic knife when you get in close."

So he did. Everything Vinh tried worked. Maybe the enemy bots were slow. Maybe their configs were wrong. Whatever it was, Joseph Vinh and Johnny Winger found they were winning a battle they never dreamed they would have to fight. This wasn't half bad, this living like an atom. You had to watch your momentum and things stuck to each other like glue. Van der Waals and Brownian motions were a bitch, but it was the same for the enemy.

Leverage and momentum, that was the key.

"Colonel, there are more up ahead, a whole trail of them. Moving away."

"Let's follow 'em," Winger said. "I'm betting these guys are from Ovchenin. Could be Red Harmony bots too."

The two of them gave pursuit, ducking in and out of air molecules, driving their propulsors to full power as they rode the 'river' of air forward. The corridor turned and bent left, a curving hallway that Winger's processor told him was still Chengdu Wing. The pursuit lasted for an hour and the two swarm entities came at last to a massive hatch, where the trail had petered out.

"All stop, Joe. Let's study this."

Unseen by Normals striding quickly up and down the corridor, the hatch was shut and well-secured, this time with a barebones nano-barrier.

"The trail leads here, Joe. Somehow, we have to breach that barrier and then have a go at the hatch."

"What about going into the wall...or the floor."

"Solid-phase? That'll slow us down. We don't have that much time."

Vinh checked his own library of programmed configurations. "I've got C-188, Colonel. Optimized for solid-phase disassembly ops. I don't have a lot of experience with it, but in the Lab, it worked like gangbusters. Plus, if we go into structure, we may not set off any alarms."

"Okay, Joe, good point. Give it a try. Go for the walls around the hatch."

Vinh eased forward on half-propulsor and extended effectors into the right config. He spent a few minutes replicating new probes and enzymatic knives. Once he was ready, he studied the tight molecular lattice ahead of him, probing bonds and geometries to find a good place to start.

"Hmmm. Sodium hydroxide. Bisphenol compounds...this is some kind of ultracarbonate. I'll just tweak a few effectors like this—"

A few minutes later, Vinh was gone, sliding through the dense forest of lattice molecules like a thief in a closet. "It's working, Colonel...I'll send you the config...try it out."

Winger soon joined him. It was a claustrophobic squeeze, sliding through smothering lattices of ultracarbonate molecules. He tried not to think too much about where he was or what he was doing. A stray memory flashed in the back of his processor, a residual trace of a time when his sister had locked him in a coat closet, and he fought hangers and jackets and canes and shoes and scarves and...no, no, don't think about that—

The solid-phase transit around the hatch seemed to last forever and Winger could 'hear' Vinh muttering to himself over the comm channel....

"...pushing through some zone of crystalline cubes--" the voice was almost a whine, an impatient six-year old. "--very thick structure...getting jostled a bit...the atoms here are highly charged--probably covalent bonds...lots of electrons being swapped around--"

Winger opened the voice link. "Joe...can you go any faster? We're behind the mission timeline."

There was a pause, then: "Negative, sir. I'm at twenty percent propulsor...packing too tight here...high specific gravity...got many walls of lattice ahead...have to navigate each one...van der Waals forces are tricky--"

"Okay, Joe, I get the picture."

But in an hour, the two atomgrabbers had penetrated the walls around the hatch and broken through into some kind of void beyond.

Winger called a halt and let enough stray photons trickle in get a sense of where they were.

"It's a tunnel, Joe. We broke through into a tunnel. Beneath Yuegong."

Sergeant Al Glance didn't know whether his bleary eyes came from lack of sleep, stress of the mission or the fourth goblet of huangjiu he had just downed. The reception at the canteen in Nanking Wing seemed to go on forever. He studied his troopers—D'Garza and Barnes and the Indian hopper pilot Singh—and saw the same stone-blank faces.

Yuegong base commander Colonel Jiang was droning on and on about interplanetary solidarity and Treaty matters and cooperation in research when something chimed in the back of Glance's head. At first, he wasn't sure he had heard it. Then it hit him. The coupler. There was a message, entangled and encrypted.

Politely, Glance excused himself and went to the restroom.

The signal was from Colonel Winger.

"You're very faint, Colonel. Boost your signal."

Winger's voice was scratchy, barely audible. "It's faint because Joe Vinh and I are below ground." Winger described the tunnel complex they had stumbled upon, several kilometers from Yuegong. "It's below some kind of mountain," Winger was saying. "There's an extensive grid of tunnels down here. Joe and I detected some faint halo bots and followed the trail here."

Glance consulted a small chart on his wristpad. "The Chinese call that place Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, on their maps."

"Al, we're just outside some kind of pressurized and sealed compartment, a side tunnel. I'm betting this is the cartel's base. It's near Yuegong, but just far enough for the Chinese to deny any connection."

Another man, a Chinese guard, came into the restroom, relieved himself, cleaned up and left, with some wary side glances at the trooper. Glance waited until he was alone again.

"There's a bigger problem, Colonel. The Chinese have been talking with the Indians. After the reception, another hopper's arriving. We're supposed to be on it, maybe an hour from now. Supposedly, the Indians are taking us to their base at Schrodinger."

"That's bad," Winger agreed. He and Vinh were still little more than tiny puffs of bots drifting around the tunnel hatch they had found. For the moment, they seemed to be alone, but both of them had detected below-ground rumblings nearby, probably geoplanes coming and going through the lava tube network the Chinese were developing.

"And nightfall's less than six hours away, sir," Glance added.

Winger thought about the tactical situation. Nightfall could be a bonus, he realized. And they still had to pinpoint the location of the hostages, if they were even inside the sealed tunnel.

"Okay, Al, let's do this. Go on with the Indians. Soon as you get to Schrodinger, contact UNIFORCE. Boundary Patrol was supposed to have shipped two geoplanes to the Moon a few days ago. Get those ships lifted around the Moon and staged at Farside Center up in Korolev Crater. Divide the detachment and equip yourselves for underground assault. Joe and I will attempt to penetrate this tunnel and pinpoint the location of the hostages."

"How will we know where you are?"

"I can set my coupler to emit a unique series of entangled signals. Follow my decoherence wake. That should tell you where we are. The geoplanes should be lifted to within several kilometers of Yuegong. They'll have to synchronize lift with the position of Chinese satellites, to avoid detection. That's why nightfall could be a help. Several kilometers out, on my signal, have the geoplanes blast this tunnel complex with sonic lens pulses. That should shake up the cartel's operations pretty well. After a barrage of sonic, approach underground and breach the tunnel. That'll probably kill the atmosphere inside so bring suits or lifepods for the hostages; Joe and I will be nearby. Joe may even have configs stored in his head for lifepods already."

Glance could visualize the tactical requirements. "You're talking close-quarters action, Colonel. We'll have to be in hypersuits ourselves."

"Agreed. Once you've breached and penetrated, follow my deco wakes to the hostages. Joe and I will try to pinpoint them, maybe even corral them into one spot, where we can drop of sealed MOBnet on them. That should hold 'em until you get there."

"And then we exfiltrate?"

"Exactly. Get the hell out of there as fast as you can. Once you're back aboard the geoplanes, have Boundary Patrol lay down another barrage of sonic pulses. Maybe we can collapse the whole place."

Glance was warming to the idea. "And keep diplomatic cover and denial for the Chinese to boot. Colonel, if you don't mind my saying so, you are one hell of steely-eyed atomgrabber."

"Yeah, well keep that thought in mind. For now, keep up appearances. Joe and I have quite a solid-phase job ahead of us...Joe says this regolith's like concrete, basalt hard as my head. This is going to take awhile to slip through, even for grizzled old atomgrabbers like us. That's it, Al. Get going. Winger, out."

Glance returned to the reception. For once, his eyes were clear and his senses were alive and tingling. Nothing like a hostage rescue op to get the blood pumping. He even allowed himself a few more sips of the huangjiu.

For over a century, hostage rescue missions had been performed under a variety of conditions and in an assortment of settings: buildings, ships at sea, planes parked on runways, like the Entebbe raid. But no one in Quantum Corps or Boundary Patrol could ever remember details of a hostage rescue conducted on the far side of the Moon, below ground, at night.

It would be, as Al Glance told his detachment, a unique tactical training opportunity that would provide the sims and wargamers with material for years to come.

Per agreement and orders from Colonel Winger, Glance, D'Garza and Barnes had been ferried by Indian hopper to India's rapidly-growing Lunar Delhi base complex at Schrodinger crater, some six hundred kilometers southwest of Yuegong. Straight away, the troopers then made their way in a UNIFORCE hopper all the way around to the near side and Copernicus City.

For two days, briefings were held with Marshal Bolivar's staff in the UNIFORCE bunker on CC's Level 9. Four days earlier, two geoplanes had arrived at CC and were being outfitted for their unusual mission on Farside. Now, a flurry of orders flew out of Bolivar's office in rapid-fire order, dealing with organization and equipment, chain of command, rules of engagement, approach and penetration tactics, timing, weapons and munitions loadout, comm details, codes and passwords, who would go where and who would support and assist.

Through all the planning, the necessity of preserving cover and face for the Chinese was kept uppermost in mind, for the People's Republic was a proud nation and an original Treaty signatory. The target was Red Harmony and rescuing the kidnapped national leaders, not infringing on Chinese rights or sovereignty; the Chinese were notoriously touchy and prickly about perceived slights.

The two geoplanes, Badger and Prairie Dog, were lifted around the Moon by hoppers and deposited at a covered encampment within sight of the radio telescopes of Farside Center at Korolev. The lift itself was a precarious operation for the geoplanes themselves were far too heavy for a single hopper to transport, even as a slung payload. Both Badger and Dog required two hoppers each to lift them, each cabled to the geoplane to keep it from swaying too much. To avoid detection, the transport operation was done during the darkest hours of lunar night, at low altitude with each transport flying nap-of-the-Moon profiles up, down and over mountains and craters, to Farside Center. Each ship would, in addition to her nominal crew, convey five to six troopers from the Selene Hammer detachment. As CC2, Al Glance would be in charge of the embedded atomgrabbers.

They rescue force waited and waited, with increasing impatience, at their bivouac inside Korolev Crater, watching the dishes of Farside's huge arrays turn majestically to listen in on ever-more distant radio sources in the farthest reaches of the galaxy.

"Maybe we could get them to tune in to some techjam," muttered Stella D'Garza, stuck with Robbie Acuna and Sherm Cuddy inside her pressurized enclosure, transportable, inevitably known to all troopers as a PETbox. "It's getting a little ripe in here." She was cleaning and re-assembling her HERF carbine for the hundredth time.

"Aw, Stel, you're the only one likes that crap. It sounds like parakeets humping, if you ask me."

"Did I ask you?"

"Give it a rest, you two," growled Acuna, himself engrossed in some kind of shoot-'em-up game on his wristpad. "Or I'll open up this box and watch both your eyeballs pop out of your head."

Several hours before the end of lunar nightfall, Colonel Winger's signal came. Inside every PETbox, Al Glance's gravelly voice crackled over the crewnet.

"Troopers, saddle up now. Bring everything. This is it!"

Energized by movement and the upcoming prospect of some action, the atomgrabbers of 1st Nano, constituted as Operation Selene Hammer, boarded Badger and Prairie Dog and hung on as their hopper transports lifted off the crater floor and scooted forward, flying so low over the rubbly, black terrain that Glance felt he could stick his hypersuit boot out and kick the tops off the mountains.

Man, this is low, he said to no one in particular. I hope these hopper jockeys know what they're doing.

The ride out to Surface Entry took two hours.

The transport hoppers deposited their slung loads precisely at the submergence point, which turned out to be a small, narrow ravine, shotgunned with man-sized craters on top of craters from one end to the other.

As soon as the hoppers left, Al Glance checked his time, and found they were due to head downstairs right away. Glance was aboard Badger. He gave the order to Badger's captain, one Lieutenant Julia Swire, to start digging.

Swire was willowy, short black hair, with a narrow face and the demeanor of a Doberman. She got on the crewnet intercom. "All hands, secure for boring. DSO, let's go digging."

"About time," D'Garza said, buckled into a web seat back on F deck . "Sun's coming up over those hills."

"What are you...a werewolf?" Cuddy needled her. "Afraid of getting a little sun on that pretty face of yours?"

D'Garza growled back. "Right. And when the sun comes, I chew up nasty little boys like you."

With a lurch and a shudder, Badger arrowed down into the regolith, her borer lens burning hot and bright blue-white as the bots chewed their way down. A hundred meters away, Prairie Dog did the same.

The approach phase of Selene Hammer was now underway.

The DSO Robles complied. "Turning left, heading now... one three five degrees. Depth is forty-five meters, five degrees down angle."

"Borer coming on line," Sergeant Li Kejiang reported. Li was the Borer Operator, BOP1 for Badger. She scanned her instrument panel, reading swarm density, alignment and other parameters. "Bots are ready to bite—"

Badger slowed down as a fissure approached, then a high keening wail could be heard throughout the hull, as the borer bit into the rock. The geoplane shuddered as she decelerated. Outside the command deck, unseen by her crew, Badger's nose buried itself in a shimmering blue-white fog as the borer revved up and uncountable trillions of mechs tore at the rock.

Li licked her lips nervously, reading her instruments. "Coming back mostly olivine and pyroxenes, with some iron mixed in. Bots should eat this stuff up."

The geoplane plunged into the tunnel created by the borer, angling nose down as she bit deeper into the side of the fissure.

Badger's instrument panel showed the results of acoustic sounding, displaying rock layers on a graph, with temperature and pressure readings all around the graph. Borer status was displayed as well.

"Looking good," Robles muttered. "Borer configured for pyroxenes...ANAD's chewing through at a rate of two point five kilometers per hour. Treads are functioning fine."

"She's a real hot rod...come left to heading two one zero."

"Aye, sir--" Robles turned the stick to port and Badger initiated a shallow left-hand bank. The command deck listed slightly, then stabilized. For the next few minutes, first Robles, then Swire took turns putting the geoplane through a series of turns, dives and climbs.

The Driver Systems/Operator began to relax his grip on the stick slightly, trying to forget they were now a hundred meters below ground.

"Sounding ahead..." Swire reported. "Depth is now four eight oh meters. Signal distortion coming back...it's probably the shale zone."

Robles shoved the control stick forward. "I'm going a little deeper...see if we can plow through some of that basalt."

Swire was dubious. She studied the sounding profile. "Just don't push her too hard, okay? This isn't green cheese we're plowing through. Let's don't press our luck on this first run. I'm showing discontinuities dead ahead...some kind of boundary layer, maybe."

"Inclusion zone? Maybe it's that mafic plutonic stuff."

Geo Engineering tech (GET1) Rono shook her head. "It looks more like a fault, maybe a transform fault. The geos said there were fracture zones south of Leibnitz' north crater walls."

Badger angled slightly downward and slowed, as the borer swarm bit into denser rock.

"Cabin temps going up," Robles reported.

"Acknowledged. Those mechs are working overtime up front, making us a tunnel. Nav, you got the deco wake yet?"

The geoplane's Sensors and Surveillance tech (SS1) was Michaelis. "Barely, Lieutenant. It's verified as Colonel Winger, but very faint. Badger should come left three degrees more, to center the signal."

"DSO, make it so."

The geoplane heeled slightly left again.

"How's Dog doing, SS1?"

Michaelis' voice was firmer. "Dog's right on our tail, Lieutenant. Two hundred meters dead astern."

Both ships made the final approach waypoint in good order.

Deep inside the tunnel walls at the cartel's Jade Dragon compound, Johnny Winger and Joe Vinh found themselves battered by Brownian motion, squeezed almost to nothing in the tight lattices of the wall.

"I hope you're not claustrophobic, Joe," Winger said. The transit through the wall was slow and hard slogging, fighting uphill against a dense forest of olivine and pyroxene molecules.

"Sir, remind me not to put in for solid-phase training in the future. It's damn hard on my effectors. This is like the SODS tank,"

"Worse than that," Winger decided. "This stuff just never ends. I just love olivine molecules."

They had both collapsed their effectors and actuators down to form as tight a profile as possible, sliding through the crystalline planes like moving against a crowd in an airport. It was a stiff and rigid squeeze and Winger tried not to think about the time his sister had locked him in a laundry room. Don't go there, he told himself. Not going there.

After what seemed like days, Vinh and Winger finally reached the far edge of the tight lattice. Intramolecular distances increased rapidly. They were able to breathe again and straight away, both troopers exercised their effectors and expanded to enjoy their new-found space.

They emerged like errant dust motes into a cavernous multi-level space, a vast open cathedral-like enclosure directly beneath Jade Dragon Mountain.

Winger gathered enough loose photons to form an image he could process. What he saw stunned him almost beyond words. Vinh did the same.

"Mother of—" Vinh would have whistled if he'd had the right config to make the sound. "Would you look at that?"

The place was a single vast cave, hewn right out of the bowels of the mountain, sealed and pressurized. Rows of growth tanks lined the floor, wall to wall, with huge leafy plants suspended in each tank. The scope works, Winger realized. Racks of empty fabricator shells and swarmbot containment chambers lined the walls. The mother lode and Red Harmony's main bank, all in one view. Side chambers and tunnels branched off the main cavern at every level and the walls were draped with scaffolding and ladders from floor to ceiling. At the far end, the nose of a geoplane stuck out of one ground-floor tunnel, end point of a thousand-kilometer lava tube.

"No one ever dreamed the cartel had such a place...on the far side of the Moon."

"And all of two kilometers from the Chinese base at Yuegong. Tell me that's a coincidence."

Winger got a chime from one of his sensors. "Joe, I'm reading a very faint trail of halo bots. Could be Ovchenin. Let's follow."

The two angels, configured as loose swarms, drifted along the trail, little more than dust motes, had anyone cared to look. Both troopers tried to minimize their atom bond-breaking, just enough to hold structure, so as not to reveal themselves.

The trail led up several levels to a side tunnel. Down that tunnel, they found a set of small crypt-like cells, really small caves, with barred doors. The trail led into the first cell.

"I'm not detecting any kind of barrier, Colonel," Vinh said.

"Let's go under," Winger said and the two of them wafted beneath the heavy door and into the small compartment.

Two Normals occupied the cell. With enough photons to form an image in the dim light, Winger realized one was Vasily Ovchenin, the Russian President. Ovchenin was lying prone on a bunk, staring up at the ceiling. Across the cell, sitting with her head in her hands, was Dr. LaTonya Kendrick, American President.

Kendrick spied a small flickering mist issuing from under the door. She perked up. What the hell?

"Vasily, do you smell smoke? Is there a fire?"

But before Ovchenin could answer, both stood up abruptly, backing uneasily into a far corner of the cell.

"Get back, Tonya...squeeze into the corner...hey!" Ovchenin called out. "Hey...there's smoke in here—come...."

But his words were cut off when the smoke thickened and began forming the vague, shadowy outline of a human form. Both leaders watched in stunned amazement as a passable likeness of Johnny Winger materialized right before their eyes.

"Mr. President, Madame President, sorry for the dramatic entrance. We don't have a lot of time."

Dr. Kendrick had her hands over her mouth. "Who in the name of Chukwe are—"

"I'll explain later. I'm Colonel John Winger, UN Quantum Corps. I'm part of a rescue force, here to get you and the other hostages out of here."

Ovchenin began nodding understanding. "Of course, you are angel...one of those—"

Winger cut him off. "I'm sorry, Mr. President. There's no time. My partner here—" he indicated a loose mist of flickering light coiling at the end of one bunk "—will be forming up two PETboxes. Personal enclosures, transportable. You need to climb into them. In about five minutes, when I give the signal, two UNIFORCE geoplanes will execute a sonic attack on this complex. This whole place will be shaking and rattling and rolling and there could be a collapse. At the very least, the pressure seal will go and you'll be directly exposed to vacuum. Ah, Joe's already got one forming up now —"

Indeed, as the two Presidents looked on in amazement, part of the swarm at the end of the bunk had pinched off and a small tent-like bag was forming on the cell floor.

Remembering his experience inside a MOBnet, Ovchenin shook his head. "I'm not getting into that thing again. I'm still sore from the last time."

"Sir," Winger insisted, "it's for your own protection. It'll be pressurized. When the assault begins, I need to get you and the others out of here as fast and as safely as I can. This is the only way."

Now, Dr. Kendrick understand what was happening. "Come on, Vasily, where's that macho demeanor you're always dropping on me? Climb in and be quick about it."

Growling and complaining, Ovchenin climbed in. When her PET was ready, Kendrick did the same. It was tight, but flexible. Her ears clogged momentarily when the pressure seal was secured.

Over an encrypted coupler link, Johnny Winger sent a burst transmission to Al Glance, aboard Prairie Dog, parked two kilometers away.

Commence sonic lens attack in five minutes. Four PETboxes with ripe fruit will be on main floor.

As Winger was doing that, Joe Vinh was penetrating the other cells on the side tunnel, searching for the remaining hostages. In the last cell, he found Matteo Bari, the EU President, and Keno Miyashi, Prime Minister of Japan. With quick explanations, Vinh had formed up two more PET enclosures and stuffed the two leaders inside in just a few minutes.

Just as Vinh was finishing, the first tremors rolled through Jade Dragon. At once, seams and gouts of rock spalled off the tunnel walls and clattered to the floor.

"Joe, let's get out of here. I'll take two and you take two."

Both angels had now configured themselves into Normal form and optimized their hands and arms to pull, drag and kick the enclosures out of the side tunnel, then across some scaffolding and finally, bumping and sliding down a nearby ladder.

Thank goodness for lower grav, Vinh thought as he struggled to keep his PETboxes from crashing to the floor.

Outside the tunnel, the cavern was in chaos.

Prairie Dog and Badger had fired a series of compression and shear waves directly into the heart of Jade Dragon. With an ear-splitting shriek, several levels of scaffolding wrenched free of their wall anchors and fell clattering to the floor, scattering Red Harmony guards and techs who were fleeing in every direction. In the center, rows of scope tanks upended, spilling their milky contents across the ground, now covered with debris. Sections of wall and gouts of rock rained down on the helpless workers as more sonic lens pulses loosened rock strata around Jade Dragon.

The floor rolled in waves of seismic energy like a rock ocean and buckled across seams from one wall to another, opening up pits and craters in random places. Seconds later, a loud boom near the top of the cavern signaled a full rupture of the pressure membrane. Now fully exposed to the hard vacuum at the surface, a cyclone of debris lifted into the air above them and streams of debris and rubble, entrained in the escaping airflow, rose and battered the walls and everything caught in between.

"Where are they?" shouted Vinh, as he tucked his two PETboxes beneath an overturned cabinet.

"There!" shouted Winger. "Right there--!"

Two Boundary Patrol geoplanes had suddenly breached right through the ground floor of the complex, with a third of their hulls showing in the gloom. It was apparent to all the troopers that the tremors and quakes generated by the sonic lens before ingress had done considerable damage. Wall partitions had crumpled into heaps. Furniture and shelves and platforms had collapsed. Equipment and cabling were strewn across the floor of the vast cavern at the very base of Jade Dragon. Chunks of rock and rubble rained down on hypersuited troopers as they de-planed, spread out and reconnoitered the floor.

Amid all the swirling dust and upward-flowing debris, finding Winger and Vinh wasn't easy. It was the Sensor tech from Badger, Michaelis, who spotted the hostages and their rescuers, hunkered down behind a collapsed section of wall.

"There they are! Come on!" Half a dozen troopers bore down on the group and all four PET enclosures were quickly dragged through broken glass, piles of smoking metal and rubble, to the geoplanes. For their part, Winger and Vinh stayed in Normal config, fought their way through panicked hordes of Red Harmony techs and closed on the open hatch of Badger.

Just then, a powerful P wave slammed the compound. Overhead, the entire roof of the cavern groaned, buckled and sagged, then began dropping, first in slow-motion, them with increasing speed, sending a fatal blizzard of rock and stone hurtling down five levels. Meeting lighter-weight debris entrained upward, the result was a collision that showered the entire cavern with shards of wreckage.

"Come on--! Hurry--!" yelled Michaelis. The first PET was hustled aboard the geoplane but the second enclosure, pulled and dragged by Prairie Dog troopers Hughley and Khanis, wasn't quick enough. Huge sections of the roof slammed into the ground, directly on top of the two troopers and their charges. For a brief moment, all nearby watched in disbelief. Nobody moved. The roof debris covered the troopers completely.

Al Glance, with help from Winger and Vinh, pawed and dug frantically through the rubble, until they had uncovered the stricken troopers. Neither moved. The PETboxes seemed inert and lifeless.

"Get 'em aboard! We've got to get out of here!" Winger yelled.

"The whole place is collapsing!" agreed Glance.

The tremors were coming faster now, and more violent. The rest of the ceiling had started to buckle completely and the last spasm of quakes had collapsed part of the cavern's far wall.

"Colonel, let's get the hell out of here. We've done what we came for...this place may go any second."

Winger and Vinh were the last to board Badger. They took positions on the command deck.

Half a dozen troopers had helped pull the motionless atomgrabbers free and littered them off to Badger. Others grabbed the two PETboxes that Kanis and Hughley had been dragging and shoved them aboard Prairie Dog. With everyone accounted for, the two geoplanes reversed treads and disappeared below the breached floor, into rolling and undulating rock strata below the mountain. One after another, the ships came about slowly, burrowed deeper and burned their way bow-on to more oncoming waves.

Julie Swire, Badger's commanding officer, gave the commands. "DSO, keep us heading into the waves. We'll have to try and ride 'em out. The sonic lens has loosened one hell of a lot of rock around here. BOP, borer online?"

BOP1, Lucy Li, replied "Online and cooking at full spread, Lieutenant."

To Robles, Swire gave the order to withdraw. "DSO, engage treads and back us the hell out of this place now."

Badger shuddered and shook like a wet dog as her treads bit into the hard ground. Something heavy banged on the topside hull, just as the geoplane creaked and groaned into motion.

"Treads at fifty percent, Skipper. Backing now—"

Moments later, Badger had submerged into the borehole from which she had come and was gone. Geoplane Prairie Dog followed down her own borehole. Huge boulders and seams of rock cascaded down and the ceiling started to slump further.

It wouldn't be long before Jade Dragon collapsed in on itself completely.

"No more Red Harmony operations from this mountain," Winger said to no one in particular.

Half an hour later, Swire got both good and bad news as she commanded Badger through rolling, pounding waves of transverse and shear pulses still rattling much of the Von Karman and Leibnitz crater zones on Far Side. The sonic lens assault had shaken the Moon to its very core and seismometers all over Luna were ringing like gongs from the energy released. It would take days for Earth's satellite to return to her normal steady-state faint background of grinding, scraping and pings from meteor impact.

Winger had gone aft to see to the hostages' well-being. Oscar Kurasawa, Badger's Defense and Protective Systems (DPS) tech doubled as a medic. All the injured had been crammed into the geoplane's tiny sick bay, which doubled as her galley, on B deck.

"I'm sorry, Colonel. We did what we could...even tried a medbot insert."

The two troopers bearing the PETbox with President Bari and Prime Minister Miyashi, were alive, but severely injured with impact trauma to their heads and necks, despite hypersuit protection.

Kurasawa had already hooked up IVs and tubes. Two medbots purred around one gurney, enfolding Borer Operator Khanis, from Prairie Dog, making last minute adjustments, attaching probes and catheters, drawing blood, scanning. Kurasawa perused the results on a nearby screen. "Mmm...looks like a broken hip...broken right ankle...no obvious internal bleeding, but there's evidence of a concussion—see those EEGs? I'm sure he's in shock, so we'll have to work on building up his fluids. And then there's that...see the shadows around his lower cerebrum?"

Winger saw them. "A tumor?"

"Maybe. More likely, from the signature, it's internal swelling around the skull. One of these bots has a program for hemicraniectomy...we may have to do that pretty soon—"

"What about Hughley?" Winger asked.

Kurasawa nodded. "I don't know how, but Sergeant Hughley came through almost unscathed."

Hughley smiled faintly up at them. "It's my hard head, sir."

Winger patted him on the cheek. "I believe it, son. Just lie still and let Kurasawa treat you. What about our two hostages?"

Kurasawa's face immediately turned grim. He shook his head, indicating two gurneys outside, stashed in a corner of the galley. "I'm sorry, sir. We tried everything. Neither of them made it."

Winger blinked. Angels couldn't have tears unless they had been specifically programmed to do so. But his processor was sophisticated enough with emotional reaction algorithms to create what a Normal would have called a lump in the throat.

President Matteo Bari and Prime Minister Miyashi were both casualties of the sonic lens assault. President Kendrick and President Ovchenin, both now aboard Prairie Dog, had both been pronounced in decent health, with only minor injuries.

Winger went back to the command deck and met Julie Swire's inquiring look with a faint shrug. Nothing needed to be said.

The geoplanes bore on, making for the pre-planned hopper rendezvous point inside Van de Graff Crater, an oblong figure-eight shaped depression, nearly five hundred kilometers northwest of Yuegong. They reached the exfiltration point, called Point Hope in the pre-mission briefings, and after sounding the rock layers above them, cautiously breached the crater floor, itself some four kilometers below the surrounding terrain.

Three UNIFORCE hoppers from Copernicus City were awaiting them.

The deceased hostages were carefully transferred to a memorial detail aboard one of the hoppers. The Russian and American Presidents boarded the second hopper, but not before LaTonya Kendrick personally thanked angels Winger and Vinh and the Quantum Corps troopers.

The American President was a tall and regal ebony-black woman. Even with her forehead and cheeks heavily bandaged and nanodermed, she was a proud and unmistakable presence among the grimy troopers of the Detachment.

"Colonel, I know you're an angel but I wanted to thank you—and all your troopers—for the risks you took to get us out of that hellhole. I know we haven't always treated angels the way we should—we Nigerians know something about mistreatment from our history—but I for one will always room in my heart and in my speeches for what angels like you and Mr. Vinh can do for us. Again, accept my thanks and know that if there's anything I can do for the Detachment or Quantum Corps, just say the word."

They shook hands and Johnny Winger felt an extra squeeze as he let go. Maybe re-build Table Top for our Western Command base, he thought but didn't say.

The troopers of Selene Hammer Detachment, then boarded the last hopper and the little fleet took off on a ballistic hop around the Moon to CC. Soon afterwards, geoplanes Badger and Prairie Dog submerged beneath the crater floor for a three-day journey to the near side and their own berth at CC's Boundary Patrol hangar.

Cruising across the Mare Crisium at five thousand meters' altitude, Johnny Winger still configged as an angel in deference to the hopper crew, was up on the flight deck, thoughtfully studying the preserved remains of several Russian Luna landers littering the mare floor.

He saw the pilot, one black-haired Turkish officer named Lieutenant Erzum, hold his hands close to his earbud, then glance over and nod at his second officer. Erzum then motioned for Winger to come up to the flight control station.

"Just got a call from CC," Erzum was saying. "They picked up a Chinese news broadcast out of Beijing, China...People's Daily, I believe. The report describes a seismic anomaly at their Yuegong base today. 'Some damage but the base is intact and operating okay,' they say."

Winger grinned in spite of himself. "Kind of a polite, diplomatic description of the carnage we saw. Anything else?"

Erzum pointed to a small display on his center console. "The report sent along these images too."

Winger studied the frames as they popped up. "Wow. A smoking crater several kilometers away, and Jade Dragon mountain has collapsed. Hell of an anomaly, if you ask me. At least, we preserved diplomatic cover for the Chinese."

Erzum smiled and agreed. "It seems they don't want to make a public issue of the fact they were hosting the Red Harmony and got caught. Maybe that'll teach the buggers a lesson."

Winger thought about that. "I doubt it, Lieutenant. I don't think Red Harmony will give up so easily. Remember we still haven't found their headquarters. Now, with this—"

Neither of them could know that at that very moment, a new threat from deep inside the cartel would soon engulf Quantum Corps in a desperate race against time, taking Johnny Winger and his quantum troopers deep inside Beijing's Forbidden City itself.

END
About the Author

Philip Bosshardt is a native of Atlanta, Georgia. He recently retired but worked for nearly 25 years 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 28 years. He's also a Georgia Tech graduate in Industrial Engineering. He loves water sports in any form and swims 3 miles a week in anything resembling water. He and his wife have no children. They do, however, have one terribly spoiled Pekingese dog named Chance.

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

To get a peek at Philip Bosshardt's notes and the backstory on how his many series were created, recent reviews, excerpts from upcoming books and general updates on the writing life, visit his blog The Word Shed at: http://thewdshed.blogspot.com.

Download the next exciting episode of Quantum Troopers Return from Smashwords.com and other fine ebook retailers. It's called 'Forbidden City.' Available on April 3, 2020.

