 
# Johnny Winger and the Europa Quandary

### Published by Philip Bosshardt at Smashwords

### Copyright 2015 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.
Prologue

It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell.

Buddha

Europa

September 1, 2120

On Europa, there is only ice...to the naked eye. Ice cliffs and ice valleys. Ice ravines and ice canyons. Ice bergs, buttes, badlands. Ice continents. Above the ice is the vacuum of space. Below the ice is a vast ocean, black as night. Normally, the two don't mix.

In the late summer of 2120, as people on Earth reckon time, a small channel of sluggish, slightly warmer ice surged upward through the badlands of Conamara Chaos, embedded in a column known to geologists as a diapir, and burst through the surface crust. A geyser erupted into space, not in itself an unusual occurrence on Europa. However, this geyser extended over several square kilometers, flinging tons of ice and steam into the heavens.

This geyser caught the attention of observers on Earth and at Korolev Crater's Farside Observatory, on the Moon.

After the Jovian Hammer mission some years before, an orbiting detection network had been put into place around Europa. Known as Europa-Eye, it was designed to provide intelligence on what the Keeper, still thought to be buried in the Europan sea, was doing. The network contained numerous instruments: visual cameras, mass spectrometers, neutron flux devices, radiometers.

On the first day of September, Europa-Eye detected evidence of some kind of vast swarm movement under the ice. Increased thermals, spikes in electromagnetic activity, even acoustic signals well above baseline were detected and processed through SpaceGuard Center at Farside.

There was no consensus on what the signals meant, just a growing suspicion that the Keeper, a colossal swarm of nanobotic devices, seemed to be stirring after more than a decade of quiescence. Analysts at SpaceGuard Center, vidconferencing with their colleagues at the UNISPACE Watch Command Center in Paris, concurred that something was happening on the surface of Europa, something different, something unexpected.

Visual analysis from Europa-Eye was inconclusive. But it was plain to see from the imagery streaming back from Jupiter's huge satellite, that a newly formed geyser had just erupted on the surface. After some discussion, UNISPACE analysts finally decided to log the event as an icequake, a shifting of ice plates and ice continents, that had opened up a channel to pressurized water beneath. That water, rising through the newly formed channel from the Europan ocean, was now sublimating into space, in a series of spectacular geysers. The phenomenon seemed to be mainly centered along a series of ice grooves, known as linea, starting in the Conamara Chaos and ending at the southern end of Radamanthys Linea, longitude 192 degrees, latitude 12 degrees north.

Or so they thought. The report issued to CINCSPACE made the conclusion that the geyser field was nothing more than an unusual series of ice plates shifting about, despite growing evidence of massive swarm movements in the ocean below. Europa-Eye would continue to observe and record the event, providing thesis material for astronomers and geologists and glaciologists for years to come. Farside and UNISPACE would continue to monitor the activity that had roiled the surface of Europa.

But the report was firm in its principal conclusion: natural forces were responsible for a series of new ice geysers erupting on the surface of Europa. It was more violent and spectacular than before, but nothing the investigators hadn't seen before on countless worlds, even on Europa itself.

What Europa-Eye could not see, however, was what was actually embedded in the main geyser, hidden from view, obscured by the violence of tons of ice sublimating into space every second. The Keeper swarm itself, once a target of Quantum Corps investigation from close range during the Golden Horde case, was no longer submerged in Europa's ocean of night. Instead, the Keeper had bored through more than thirty kilometers of ice and arisen to the surface of the satellite. Now residing in a steep ice ravine, surrounded by towering ice cliffs, hidden by geysering spouts of water, the vast swarm boiled away like a festering sore, slamming atoms to maintain itself and expand in the maelstrom of erupting ice and water.

As it settled onto the icy surface, the Keeper had begun to bud off trillions of replicant bots from its main structure. The Keeper was shedding parts of itself.

These bots sloughed off and drifted upward, some riding on droplets of water, particles of ice sublimating into the vacuum. Most of the bots managed to achieve escape velocity through infinitesimal nano-scale thrusters, using the available water as propellant. Orienting themselves toward the Sun, the swelling swarm of nanobots soon entered a steep, elliptical heliocentric orbit, an orbit which would intersect the orbit of Earth in less than six months.

Disguised by the geysers, the swarm escaped Europa and the Jupiter system completely. They now drifted sunward...and Earthward.
Chapter 1

Haleyville, Idaho USA

December 23, 2120

8:30 p.m.

Johnny Winger spotted Liam just as he came off the jetway. Boise Airport was busy two days before Christmas, as busy as the terminal ever became. Winger spied his son straight away, lugging a shoulder bag.

He's taller than I remember, Winger thought. He waved and Liam came over. They shook hands and, after a moment's hesitation, hugged briefly.

"Professor," he smiled at the boy, "so glad you could make it."

Liam Winger had become a newly minted professor of computational neuroscience at Cambridge University in the last year. Winger and Dana Tallant were as proud as parents could be.

"Dad...please. It's just me."

"Let's get the rest of your bags. Come on...your mom's got a special dinner waiting for you."

They retrieved the rest of Liam's luggage and headed out, toward Haleyville, a two hour drive northeast, from Boise. Highway 21 was moderately busy, but Winger let auto-drive do the job and sat back to regard his son with a mixture of pride and curiosity.

He watched as the snow-capped peaks of the Sawtooth Range drew closer. Somewhere up there, past the front range, was Table Top Mountain and a lifetime of Quantum Corps memories. "The Brits are treating you well?"

Liam seemed lost in thought. "I'm up for tenure, Dad. You knew that. Committee's supposed to make a decision in February."

"You have a big teaching load? The kids driving you nuts yet?" Winger chuckled at that; Liam was in his mid-twenties, still a kid himself to he and Dana.

"Not so bad. I teach two classes this Winter semester, both fourth level: Neurosynch 310 and a Special Projects course. I'm spending a lot more time in the lab now...which I like."

"I'll bet. I read your paper from the Geneva conference. 'ANAD Applications in Cortical Cognitive Enhancements'," he recited from memory. "Seems like it was well received...what I understood of it."

Liam shrugged, but he was secretly proud. "The Q&A went on so long, the Conference referees had to turn out the lights, it's true."

They were quiet for awhile. It was Monday afternoon, snowing lightly, and Johnny Winger was looking forward to the special dinner Dana had promised. Christmas eve was tomorrow night. Having Liam home for the holidays was the best present they could ever have gotten.

"How about you, Dad? Still itching to get back into the field...fight those bots and slam some atoms?"

Winger snorted. He'd been retired for several years now. "Maybe. Hey, I stay busy. The Corps calls me in for consultations on things. I've still got my clearances." He refused to admit the truth, even to Liam, perhaps even to himself, though it surfaced often enough, usually when he least expected it. He did miss atom-grabbing, chewing the fat with Quantum Corps troopers, hot-rodding ANAD bots into and out of every crack in the universe of atoms and molecules. "I have a lot going on."

"Yeah," Liam chuckled softly, "we both know just how much you love that gardening."

The car's autodrive led them unerringly to the Winger household, nestled in the brow of a low wooded hill, just outside Haleyville. It was a two-story ranch house, surrounded by over a hundred acres of pasture and woodland. There was a barn nearby, silver with age, where Winger kept a quartet of Arabians. Snow was everywhere and more was falling, but Liam and Johnny Winger bantered and lied to each other good-naturedly, swapping jokes as they hustled Liam's luggage inside, dropping the bags off the with the housebot.

Dana Tallant came out from the kitchen. She gave Liam a light hug and clucked and fussed over her son...how are you feeling?...are you eating enough?...you look a little thin to me...why do you wear your hair that way?...it's so good to have you home...why don't you come home more often?....

Pleasantries aside, Liam worked with the housebots to get his luggage to an upstairs bedroom. Truth was, he felt a little uneasy about being home; he hadn't kept in regular communication with his parents and he didn't really want to. He'd had enough of the Corps growing up with his sister Rene and his Dad and Mom never home. With Johnny Winger and Dana Tallant both giving their lives to the Corps, and slamming atoms halfway around the world and the other side of the solar system, Liam had left for college and never looked back. Now a professor at Cambridge, he just wanted to live his own life and forget the Corps.

Hell, he'd spent more time with Howie the housebot than he had with either General John Winger or Trooper Dana Tallant. Living in the shadow of the Corps and having a normal family life were oil and water...they didn't mix well and if they did mix, it didn't taste right.

Liam was finishing up stowing his gear when he heard a soft knock at the door. His Dad nudged the door open, bearing a couple of beers.

"Her Majesty wants us down for snacks and drinks in half an hour. I thought you might like a starter."

Liam took the beer and chugged down a deep pull. He winced at the taste. "Sorry, Dad...I've gone native...you know, stout and that sort of thing. Too much time in the pubs, I guess."

Winger sat down on an old footlocker in the corner, rubbing his chin with the cold lip of the bottle. "Your mother and I are both glad you could make it this year, Liam. How long's it been—"

Liam shrugged, propping himself up in the bed with some pillows. "I'm not sure...hey, you know Howie would cut off my legs if I did this, a long time ago. No feet with shoes on the bed, Master Liam. House rules. And no drinking in bed..."

"Yeah, but bots are different now. Take Curly there—" he indicated the housebot whirring softly at the door, an expectant 'smile' on its animatronic face—"now Curly's got the latest modules...Empathy 2.0, a neat little forgiveness utility you can select settings for, neural processor...right up your alley, son. Curly enforces house rules, but with a grandmother's touch...a little candy along with the stick. You'd have loved it."

Liam had to laugh. "I probably did some of the programming, if it's a Servodyne product. The Lab consulted on their earliest models."

Winger's smile slowly faded. "Liam, I came by to give you a little heads-up...about your mother. Before dinner, I mean."

"What kind of heads-up? What's wrong?"

Winger sort of half-shrugged. He downed the rest of his beer. "She's changed. In the last few months, maybe longer, I can't put my finger on it exactly, but she's seems a little distant. Maybe the last few years, actually."

"Changed. How?"

"Little things, really. She seems more distant. When we're in the family room, I'm watching some vid and she's creating something on her tablet...she's loves that tablet...I'll see her staring off into space. You know your mother always was a chatterbox...but now, she seems—I don't know—lost, far away, her mind a million light-years away. When I try to talk to her, I get just these real bland, almost canned answers...like you'd hear from Curly over there. Actually, I get more feeling from Curly than I do from her."

Liam shook his head. "She hugged me downstairs like she was going to crush me."

"Oh, she does things like that...on special occasions. But most of the time...there's no real feeling. It's like she's running on auto, just input and output. And her skin feels funny. Maybe we're getting old, but we've both had all the treatments. She's got the same cytes and bots inside as me. But something's not quite right." Winger smiled a little sheepishly. "Plus the sex is gone too. I miss that."

Liam held up a hand. "Okay, I get the picture, Dad. I don't need to know more. Maybe some bots are malfunctioning. She felt okay when we hugged."

Winger debated saying more, his face a battlefield of conflicting thoughts, then he set his lips and made up his mind. "Liam, I don't know quite know how to say this, but I think you're mother 's an angel."

Liam blinked. "I'm sorry, Dad...what did you say? Mom's an angel?"

Winger gave his empty bottle to Curly, who trundled off to dispose of it. Now they were alone.

"I don't have to tell you how good angels are now. I mean, I can walk into the bar at the Custer Inn now and look around and know that half the people there are clouds of bots, and the hell of it is I can't tell. Nobody can. And I'm not sure how much any of them care either. I mean they're all over."

Liam swallowed hard. "Dad, this is nuts. This is insane." He looked at his bottle. "What the hell is in this stuff anyway?"

"I'm serious. Go down to the kitchen right now, if you don't believe me. Grab hold of your Mom...give her a big hug. Feel her skin. Better yet, just watch her hands. I'm telling you: there are edge effects. I know it sounds crazy. But somehow, some way, Dana Tallant has become a cloud of bots, an angel. And I don't know when it happened."

Liam regarded his Dad with a quizzical stare. "I think retirement's done something to your head. I realize angels are almost like Normals now...it's hard for me to tell them apart. But Mom...my Mom? Come on—"

Winger held up a hand. "You know what they say about angels: edge effects, blurry fingers, they walk through furniture, don't bleed right. I can prove it...it's not just my imagination."

Liam was skeptical. "How?"

"The way she bleeds. I've seen cuts, scrapes, that sort of thing. The 'blood' doesn't look right. It doesn't flow right. Sometimes it's a subtle thing, but hell—I've got forty years as an atomgrabber. I know what nanobots look like. How they operate. I just don't have the gear here to prove it."

Liam rubbed a control stud along the side of his glasses. "Maybe I do."

Winger went on. "I've been trying to get her over to Table Top, tried to concoct some kind of reason to have the medics take a look. You know we both have PX privileges. Medical coverage from the Corps. But she won't go. A month ago, she had some kind of bad cough. Wouldn't even talk about seeing a doctor. That's not like your Mom."

"Dad, don't you think this is just age—" When Winger looked annoyed, Liam held up a hand. "What I mean is that you two aren't kids anymore. I know you've had treatments and you've got all kinds of bots and cytes inside of you. That's probably what you're seeing. She just needs a few adjustments, maybe a re-load, that's all."

Winger considered that. "Of course, you may be right, Liam, but I'd like you to take a closer look yourself."

"What do you mean, exactly?"

Winger was already ducking out the door. "Just an idea I've had for some time. You've got those fancy glasses, I see."

Liam pulled off his SuperQuarks. "Just got 'em. The Lab coughed up enough money for all the staff to have them. Hyper-imaging, nano-scale resolution, bioscan on a hundred different channels. I could send you a live signal of my cortical EEG right now."

"That's okay. Just make sure you bring them to dinner..." he checked an old-fashioned watch on his wrist. "Which if this is accurate, should be in about half an hour."

"Where'd you get that thing...the museum?"

Winger smiled. "Grabbed it off a dinosaur, Liam." He ducked out the door and Liam dropped his now-finished beer onto a tray Curley held out. The bot had returned and now took the empty and whirred off happily down the hall.

Dinner was to be a pot roast, with enough trimmings to make a battalion happy. Dana bustled about the kitchen cheerily, not saying much, but with a pleasant half-smile to her face. Winger helped with the salads and the drinks, while Curley finished setting the table, laying out silverware and festive napkins with robotic accuracy and aplomb.

A huge crock pot simmered on a burner nearby. A beef stew bubbled inside, tomorrow's lunch being made at the same time. Winger caught Liam's eye as he peered inside the pot to take in the aroma. Something about the crock pot. Liam studied the top edge, while Dana was busying herself getting the roast out of the oven. He felt gingerly around the edge, felt the sharp points under the grip. Somehow, the grip had been—

"Careful, honey...that's hot." Dana Tallant came over to stir the stew, took a deep breath herself and pronounced herself satisfied. She started to lift the lid completely off.

"Want me to do it?" Liam asked.

Dana shook her head. "No, of course not. I'm not that feeble yet." She pulled the lid back and immediately yanked her hand away. "Ouch! Ow...that hurts---I'm cut a little—" She started to raise her fingers to her mouth, to suck at the blood just beginning to flow.

"Let me see," Liam offered. He saw the slight nod Winger made and in that moment, Liam knew his Dad had somehow arranged this little accident. While he was examining Dana's cut with one hand, he tapped a quick sequence on the control studs of his eyepiece with his other hand. The pictures were snapped instantly, four in all, all-bands, all-channels, full effects. Then he clucked sympathetically. "Maybe we out to wash that off and get it bandaged."

Dana pulled her hand away. "Don't be silly...it's just a little cut. I'll do it. Go help your father with the salad and the plates." She jerked her hand away like she had been stung and vanished from the kitchen, heading toward a nearby bathroom, shutting the door behind her.

Dinner was a quiet affair. Mostly Liam answered questions about his work, his research.

"Enhancement is the long-term goal," he was saying. "Trying to develop nano-scale bots that can live inside the tissues of our brains, cohabit as it were, and make neural operations more efficient. Make axon and dendritic linkages stronger, better self-repair mechanisms. We've got one project going now to double synaptic capacity, really soup up the serotonin cascade, improve yield on re-uptake, boost the whole process. It won't be long before you can swallow a capsule and have it dump a few gazillion bots into your head and start thinking like an Einstein the next day...we're seeing orders of magnitude gains in signal flow and connection density. That's what it's all about...the more connections the better."

Dana picked at a few scraps of beef on her plate. "I don't know, Liam. I'm not sure I can handle an enhanced Johnny Winger thinking like an Einstein."

Winger sniffed. "I don't think we'll have to worry about that. Hey, I'm up for dessert."

Curly took the orders and was soon rolling around the table with a tray of assorted chocolates and finger cakes, buzzing about like a metallic maître-d.

When dinner was done and Curley was cleaning off the table, bearing plates and glasses to the dishwasher, Dana excused herself for a few moments, to freshen up in a nearby powder room. She patted Liam on the cheek.

"I want to hear all about life at Cambridge. Just give me a few minutes, okay? Your Dad can tell you about all the horses and the grounds and all his landscaping ideas." She padded off.

Winger caught Liam's eye.

Upstairs. In the study.

Liam followed.

Winger closed the door behind Liam and they went to the big cherry wood desk in the center. "Let's see that gadget," he said.

Liam took off his glasses. "Just press this button here. Make sure the imager is on the right channel. You'll have to select display properties on your device."

The two of them finagled with the SuperQuark glasses for a few moments. Finally, the first images of Dana's finger cut materialized into view.

Liam adjusted the view. Extreme resolution was selected. Liam's eyes widened as the view settled down.

"I know you both have all kind of bots and cytes inside of you. Isn't that what we're looking at?"

Winger studied the images from several angles. "I don't think so. Liam, at this resolution, I should be seeing a hell of a lot of blood cells with a few bots drifting around, doing repairs and things. Look for yourself—" He stood aside.

Right away, Liam could see a small army of bots...studded with effectors, propulsors, grabbers. There were no blood cells. Nothing but bots, as far as they could see. Odd multi-lobe structures festooned with gadgets and whirling like miniature cyclones.

"Let me see if I can go to max on this thing," Winger said. He fiddled with the imager controls. "Those pics you took should have skin cells in the background. There—"

Liam studied the images with growing unease. "All bots. That should be tissue, dermal cells, fibroblasts, macrophages, adipocytes. All I'm seeing is bots...and more bots."

For Johnny Winger, the view on the imager was a sobering experience. Here was the proof of what he had long suspected. Even down to the level of her blood and skin, Dana was a cloud of nanobotic devices. The density, the level of coordination, the tissue response was stunning. A cloud of bots, an angel as they had been known for years, configured to resemble a human being so closely as to be nearly indistinguishable from the real thing.

Winger swallowed so hard it was audible. "Just like Rene," he muttered. "How it happened...when it happened...." He shook his head.

Liam had a different take. "I don't know, Dad...I think it's kind of cool."

"Cool?" Winger was incredulous. "Are you nuts? This is your mother we're looking at. You've already lost a sister."

"I know, I know...I mean...I didn't know. But you know Assimilationists and angels are everywhere now."

Winger was drumming his fingers on the desk, looking from the imager view to his son and back, trying to figure out which was harder to take. "I need to talk with Doc."

"You've still got that old swarm?"

"He's not that old," Winger was saying. He extracted a small oval pod from his sweater pocket, a tiny containment device. He activated it by pressing a button on the top, then set the pod on the desk.

Instantly, the pod was enveloped in a fine, sparkling mist, as the embedded swarm was released from containment. While Winger and Liam watched, the mist thickened as the bots gradually formed up into a floating, faintly phosphorescent image of the head and shoulders of Doc Frost. The config developed like an old film emulsion, slowly but surely filling out structure. In less than three minutes, a reasonable facsimile of the original developer of ANAD hovered over the desk, an avuncular smile beaming down at both of them.

***It is so nice to be with you again, Johnny. And this gentleman must be your son Liam. From Cambridge, if my memory is accurate***

Winger turned the imager so Doc III, his name for this configuration, could 'see' the screen.

"I need your analysis, Doc." He explained how the images came to be. "That's not real blood we're looking at here. It's not even real blood enhanced with bots. If it was real, I'd expect to see oxygens and hemoglobins and leukocytes and thrombocytes and so forth. Tell me I'm not imagining things."

The Doc III swarm faded out and its config morphed to capture the view better, funneling photons inside to run the analysis. The swarm sparkled and flashed, as it strove to maintain structure.

***General Winger, the pixels I have been analyzing appear to show large-scale formations of nanoscale robotic elements at work. They exhibit an unusual configuration, attempting to resemble human blood and skin cells. I am endeavoring to run correlations with my database, to match these configurations and identify underlying bot structures***

"Dad, don't get all bent out of shape. Angelizing is going on everywhere. Personally, I think the Assimilationists are on the right side of history. I've even thought of going through the process myself. It would be so cool to be able to go anywhere, be or do anything, just by changing config. Look at your Doc swarm. He looks like Doc Frost, he can scoop up photons and analyze photos. He could look like that desk, or that credenza."

***I currently maintain over two hundred thousand separate configurations in my database*** The Doc swarm flickered with what Liam figured was something like pride.

But to Winger, this was something new and disturbing in Liam. He was appalled.

"How can you say that? I'm against everything Assimilationists stand for. We can't give in to Config Zero...or the Old Ones."

"The Old Ones?" Liam smirked. "That's a myth, Dad. It's a fairy tale, made up by Quantum Corps and UNIFORCE to scare people. To justify themselves."

Winger was getting annoyed by the way this conversation was going. "Liam, I spent forty years in the Corps. I've been all over the world, been inside atoms from here to Jupiter and back. You don't have any idea of what you're saying. You haven't seen it."

"I see it all the time on the Net, on vids. I deal with these bots in my work. I'm not afraid of them. I'm just saying: Assimilationists are the future. Dad, it's evolution. Survival of the fittest. We're not the fittest anymore. Garden-variety, unenhanced, single-configuration people like you and me...we're history. Multi-config is the way to go. Much more adaptable. How can you not see that?"

"I know what I've seen, Liam. I'm not saying some of what you're saying isn't right. But Assimilationism? That's suicide. Murder even. Listen to what they say: 'Let us de-construct you. Be absorbed into the mother swarm. Join the cosmic All'. That's bullshit, Liam. We're just helping Config Zero de-populate the earth. It's what they want. It's what the Old Ones want."

Liam was getting exasperated. He put down his drink and went to the door. "The Old Ones are a fantasy, Dad. You know that. The Old Ones are just us, our own paranoia about the future, reflected back to us. Bogeymen to project our fears onto."

"Yeah? Then what about the Keeper on Europa? What about Sedna and Pluto and the loss of Michelangelo years ago? Did I imagine that? Was that fantasy?"

"It was an accident...even the Board said as much. There never was any believable evidence of extraterrestrial races coming here. Human error. Somebody screwed up. That's what happened, Dad. And that Keeper you ran into on Europa...come on. I mean, I'm sure places like Europa have all kind of phenomena we can't explain yet. But a portal to the Old Ones--?" Liam chuckled. "Hansel and Gretel for the 22nd century...that's all that was."

Winger couldn't believe what he was hearing. "Liam, what the hell's gotten into you? University life has fried your brain. Maybe you're an angel too. A bag of bugs, masquerading as my son...."

"Maybe I should be. I think I need some air—" He left the study, went downstairs and left the house. It was dark out, snowing harder, but Liam didn't care. He stalked off toward the woods behind the house, opened the gate and disappeared into the trees.

Winger stood there, frozen in disbelief at what had just happened. The Doc swarm gathered itself into a simulation of old Doc Frost. It shaped its 'face' with wrinkles of grandfatherly concern.

***General, you seem upset and distraught at the direction of the conversation with Master Liam. May I be of assistance? Perhaps, I could offer a semantic analysis of his words, parsed with contextual frameworks and etymological links to highly correlated word groupings from my previous encounters with Liam...would that help?***

Winger watched Liam through parted blinds at the window. He soon disappeared into the swirling snow and was gone. Winger swore and swirled his Scotch around the glass, sitting down heavily behind the desk. "No, Doc, I don't think so. It's just a little father-son argument, that's all. It happens." He hoped Doc couldn't see inside him, see his stomach churning. The swarm did have algorithms for measuring facial stress, as well as skin conductance and micro-muscular contractions in his neck. He'd loaded the stuff himself a few months ago...now he wondered why.

He would never have admitted it to Doc, but the truth was he felt bereft, alone, depressed. How was that for semantic analysis? They had lost Rene years before, lost her to Config Zero. Now here was proof that Dana wasn't what she had once been...an angel for Christ's sake! He'd suspected it for months, but tried to ignore it. Old married couples were good at that, good at ignoring things about each other they didn't want to admit. But how many men could say they were married to a cloud of bots?

Winger shook his head ruefully, downed the rest of the Scotch. Maybe more men could say that now than he realized.

And the worst thing was that he seemed to be losing Liam too. Maybe the boy was right. Maybe Assimilationism and swarms and multi-config was the way to go. Doc had even said that. Winger looked up at the avuncular 'face' beaming down at him.

I wonder what Doc Frost himself would have said about all this. He created ANAD 1.0 in the first place. Did he know all this was going to happen?

It all seemed so hopeless. He'd fought off Config Zero. He'd fought off the Keeper. He'd fought off Red Hammer, years ago.

But this...this seemed implacable, relentless. Evolution, Liam had said. How the hell do you fight that?

Maybe the time had come to join the Assimilationists after all.

Winger went looking for that decanter of Glenlivet again.
Chapter 2

Farside Observatory, SpaceGuard Center

Korolev Crater, the Moon

December 31, 2120

"It's Europa Eye again." Gil Gomes had heard the SpaceGuard alert chime on and off several times during his shift. It was starting to annoy the hell out of him, especially since he'd lost the lottery and had to pull the New Year's Eve shift.

Darlene Van Horn was the other analyst on duty at the watch command center that day. She sighed, turned back to a console behind her station and checked status on the south and north lateral arrays. "I see it. VLF and Submillimeter are tracking in. Same coordinates?"

"Looks like it. Northern hemisphere...longitude one ninety two, latitude twelve north. East of Conamara Chaos. Same as before. Eye's seeing geysers all over the place. Jeez, Europa's bubbling like a club soda at the Lagoon." The Lagoon was the Fiji Island Lagoon, Farside's attempt to make its rather spartan canteen down in Kepler Wing a bit homier and cozier.

"I'm sending another dispatch to UNISPACE," Van Horn advised. "Third one this shift. What the hell's causing all this fizzing?"

Gomes studied the visuals Europa Eye was sending back. An orbital detection network, the Eye kept a close watch on the surface of the moon, watching for any sign of activity from the Keeper. Optical, neutron flux, radiometers, spectrometers, the Eye was designed to provide early alert for any kind of unusual surface or immediate subsurface activity on the frozen billiard ball that was Europa. Nobody wanted the Keeper doing things even four billion miles away without being warned.

"Maybe Europa's got indigestion," Van Horn suggested. "Any high thermals? Unusual EMs down there?"

Gomes nodded. "Radiometer's showing some kind of mass moving just below the surface. Probably ice. Maybe one of those diapirs. Whatever it is, it's poking holes in the surface like it was a balloon."

"Hey, anything else on that dust stream we saw the other day? "

Gomes shook his head. "Interferometers backtracked the origin to somewhere in the Jupiter system. Probably one of Io's burps. Volcanic crap with enough speed to get ejected out of the gravity well. It's happened before. ISAAC's still crunching and chewing on it. I'll see what he's got today." Gomes pecked at some keys, called up the diagrams the Farside master computer system had generated. Only two days before, SpaceGuard had detected an unusual stream of dust or debris drifting from Jupiter orbit toward the inner solar system. Interferometric observations couldn't pin down a source. No known object could have produced a dust cloud with the signatures SpaceGuard was seeing. By default, Io and its volcanic surface was the chief suspect, but there were anomalies that ISAAC couldn't explain. Nobody else could either.

Van Horn peeled a banana as she studied Eye's visuals on the Europan surface, scrolling by while the satellite net orbited that world. Cracked billiard ball was an apt description of its battered, icy surface. "There's something else about that dust stream that bothers me, Gil. Did you see the WorldNet reports last night on those meteor showers? All over the world, north and south, east and west. And the astros can't find a source for that either. Earth's not crossing any known cometary debris fields. The Geminids have come and gone. Unless some rogue asteroid's come whizzing by and broken up, something SpaceGuard hasn't catalogued."

"Unlikely...maybe it's part of this dust stream."

"Gil, when's that vidcon supposed to be?"

Gomes checked the time. "Crap...about two minutes from now. You got all the reports and files ready?"

"Right here." Van Horn 's fingers flew over the keyboard, and visuals of Europa's surface were quickly replaced by charts and diagrams and graphs. A UNISPACE vidcon had been scheduled for 0900 hours and rumor had it that CINCSPACE himself would be on the circuit. Van Horn quickly checked her face and hair reflection in a nearby screen. Campground couture...that's what we call this look, she thought ruefully. Have to do something about that skin tone...maybe more hours under the lamps.

The vidcon was made with connections to UNISPACE Paris, Farside Observatory and Gateway Station, orbiting at the Earth Moon L2 point. Right away, Gomes and Van Horn knew this 'con' was going to be different. Not only was CINCSPACE running the show, in the person of General Ravi Ramachandran...and that almost never happened. The Great Atomgrabber himself, General John Winger, had linked in as well, from some cubbyhole at Table Top Mountain, in the USA.

Gomes and Van Horn looked at each other when Winger's chiseled face materialized on the screen. It was like looking at Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. Winger had written the book on everything 'quantum corps' for decades. What on earth (or elsewhere, for that matter) would bring one of the founding fathers to a lowly UNISPACE vidcon?

They soon found out.

Ramachandran had his school-teacher specs on and looked especially professorial on the screen.

"Okay, folks, everybody's online. Let's dive right in." CINCSPACE went off-screen for a moment, calling up more displays. "I've asked General Winger to make himself available for us during this con since he's had some experience with the Keeper. Farside, I've studied your latest downloads and data. The consensus here is that what we're seeing on Europa is something more than normal geyser activity, despite the public pronouncements. The signatures are all there: electromagnetics, high heat levels, increased atomic activity...General Winger: would you concur? This is nanobotic in origin. The only swarm of bots we know about on Europa is the Keeper."

Winger wasn't one to mince words. "No doubt in my mind, General. We first encountered the Keeper years ago under the ice, submerged in the ocean at a depth of two hundred meters. We have to keep in mind one thing though. It's true that the Keeper is a swarm of bots, but it's also a quantum system, with some rather unusual capabilities. Proximity or contact with the swarm can create extraordinary displacement events, displacement in time and space. Although it's conceivable that what Eye is detecting is just a displaced piece of the Keeper, my read of the data is that this is the 'mother ship', so to speak. The full swarm has somehow bored through the ice and is at or near the surface. That may account for a lot of the increased geyser activity. The specialists can speak better to that."

For a few moments, Gomes and Van Horn went over the data they had downlinked to Paris, fielding questions from CINCSPACE, Winger and the two analysts at Gateway...Nordeen and Samachar. When he was done, Gomes added:

"The biggest unknown at this time is this dust stream we're seeing." He drew everybody's attention to the charts. "For the moment, we're calling it MARTOP. That's Mars Transiting Optical Phenomenon, since the leading detectable edge was just passing Mars orbit when ISAAC beeped us. ISAAC's chewed on the optical and radiometric data for hours and so far, he can't pinpoint a source, other than to say somewhere in the Jupiter system. It's just too diffuse. It's possible that there are parts of MARTOP even around the Earth-Moon system, given reports of unusual meteoric activity coming from isolated points on Earth. Gateway, have you seen anything like this from your end?"

Nordeen and Samachar admitted their own limited systems had detected an uptick in the local dust environment.

"We figured it was the tail end of the Geminids," Nordeen told them. "So we didn't log it at first. Now that we know what to look for, we're seeing some of the same signatures. I'd say MARTOP's well past Mars orbit now...we've got our whole array of radiometers and spectrometers watching this field go by. If I didn't know better, I'd say it resembles debris more than dust. But we don't have the resolution to see down to particle size. You know, Gateway's just a garage in space. We don't have the gear to do serious analysis. "

CINCSPACE cut in. "Okay, we'll deal with MARTOP later. The big question is Europa. What, if anything, should be done about this apparent surfacing of the Keeper? Can anything be done?"

Winger spoke up. "Doesn't Europa Eye have some kind of weapons capabilities?"

"I can answer that, sir." It was Van Horn. "I was with Frontier Corps when that system was designed and deployed. Eye has limited HERF capability. The emitters and magazines are all pretty standard, but targeting and control was always an issue. The distance is so great, we had to set up a special AI system called ERIC...Europa Reconnaissance and Integrated something or other, just for targeting and engaging any surface or orbiting targets. ERIC controls the firing, based on parameters we loaded. He's a self-contained gunner. He has to get final approval from UNISPACE, but the engagement is pretty much on auto after permissions are received. To be honest, sir, nobody really thought the thing would be that effective. It was cobbled together to get something on-site after you departed Europa."

Winger well remembered. "We were ordered back to Earth...I wanted to stay and take on the Keeper with everything we had. But we had our orders."

"Europa Eye was designed as a tripwire, nothing more," CINCSPACE said. "But I would like to get authorization from UNSAC to use ERIC if the Keeper has actually surfaced. We may need it."

Nordeen chimed in from Gateway. "Has anybody looked to see if there are correlations between the surface activity on Europa and this MARTOP thing?"

CINCSPACE nodded. "We've had analysts and our branch of ISAAC checking that. Not enough data to make any conclusions yet... but it should be looked at. Farside, have you seen the boards on that unusual brightening around the Pluto-Charon system? Mauna Kea and Atacama both called that in just about 0400 hours our time this morning."

"We did have a SPACEGUARD alert, sir...just about the same time. ISAAC's given us no conclusions yet. We're thinking it's a surface effect, maybe even something like Europa. Pluto's heading out into the most distant part of her orbit...could be some kind of ice avalanche, mass sublimation, that sort of thing."

"Or some kind of probe by the Old Ones," said CINCSPACE. A hint of a smirk crossed his face, saying in effect nobody with half a brain believes that. "Remember what happened with the Michelangelo. While I'm asking, any changes in that Delta-P anomaly lately?"

Delta-P had been detected ten years before, something that had everyone scratching their heads. Opinions grew like mushrooms: it was a micro black hole, it was a rift in the space-time continuum, it was the mother swarm of the Old Ones, it was a cosmic tooth fairy. Passing by and through the 51 Pegasi star system, the phenomenon was too distant to get much resolution on its structure.

"No significant changes in the last six months, sir," Gomes told them. "The thing's still 25 to 30 light years away. We still can't resolve that much."

"And no one really knows what happened to Michelangelo either," Winger said. "Human error, a system failure, sabotage, her plasma torch engines blew up...scuttlebutt's all over the place."

"That's one accident we'll never solve," agreed CINCSPACE. "Despite what the Board concluded. The Old Ones are a myth, I'm certain of that. What Michelangelo encountered out there in deep space is something well within human understanding...hell, probably somebody just pressed the wrong button. Screw-ups happen all the time."

Winger was about to say something, but thought better of it. In his own mind, the existence or lack thereof of the Old Ones was something he hadn't had time to ponder. Liam didn't buy it; they'd argued that point just a week before. There were all kinds of causes and theories about what had happened to Big Mike, but the truth was that more information was needed. The Board did the best it could with what it had.

"We've got to keep Europa under close surveillance," CINCSPACE was saying. "And we've got to find out what this MARTOP thing is, get some eyes on it. I've been checking the ship schedule the last few minutes. Looks like Francis Bacon could make an intercept in a few weeks...she's on the EMV-1 route, heading by Earth."

Winger's eyebrows went up, a reaction noticed by everyone but CINCSPACE. Cycler ships weren't diverted from their scheduled routes without good cause. "Maybe she could take some samples too," he suggested. "Get us better information, so we'll know what we're dealing with here."

CINCSPACE liked the idea. "Trajectory plot I got this morning from Traffic Control shows the Bacon could make intercept in less than a month, maybe a few weeks if she makes an emergency burn. Of course, that eats into her reserves. We don't allow that except in extraordinary circumstances."

"This one may qualify, sir," said Nordeen, from Gateway. "But does anyone really think the 'particles' or whatever they are in this debris cloud are big enough to cause damage on Earth?"

Gomes piped up. "We can't take that chance, Gateway. There's too much traffic between Earth and L2 and the Moon to let anything disrupt normal shipping schedules. Schedules and trajectories can accommodate Geminids and Perseids and known dust clouds. It's the unknown ones that make people nervous."

"I don't want another Michelangelo on my watch," CINCSPACE decided. "I'm authorizing the diversion of the Bacon. Orders will be cut within the hour."

Winger could sense the unease among the vidcon participants. The MARTOP anomaly, the Keeper's movements on Europa, the unusual brightening on Pluto that very morning, all of it made stomachs churn. He felt for Ramachandran. CINCSPACE had to make the best of a bad situation. Winger had been there himself...and a large part of him was glad he wasn't there anymore.

"Maybe this Delta P thing isn't what we think it is., "Winger told them. "I mean, think about it. What do we really know about this phenomenon? The best Farside can offer is that it seems to be some kind of enormous dust cloud, drifting through the 51 Pegasi system. It's too far away to be resolved any better."

Gomes checked a nearby plot of the anomaly and sent the latest updates to everybody. "It still seems to be moving generally in our direction. Or more specifically on an intercept course, crossing our path sometime in the next 25 to 30 years. That's what's so hard to figure about this. Dust clouds don't usually change course. Or travel at nearly light speed. But we just don't know for sure. Old Ones or dust cloud, whatever it is, it's coming our way."

Winger wasn't so sure. "I'm thinking the Old Ones are already here. Among us." He still couldn't get rid of the image of his son Liam stalking off through the snow and into the woods.

CINCSPACE cleared his throat. "I'm sure we all appreciate your input, General Winger. But that's a philosophical question and I have to deal in facts today. Francis Bacon will receive her new orders this morning. With any luck, we should have some better imagery and samples of MARTOP in a few weeks. Meanwhile, I'm meeting with UNSAC this afternoon at 1430 hours. The Secretary-General wants ideas on how to deal with these continuing meteor showers...they've got millions of people spooked. If it's MARTOP or something like that, we'll have to come up with options to satisfy the politicos...options and countermeasures. They love options."

Johnny Winger listened to the vidcon politely but he just couldn't get Liam and Dana out of his mind. How could a nearly tenured professor at Cambridge fall for all that Assimilationist crap? How could his own wife turn into a cloud of bugs, right under his nose? Angels and Assimilationists...what a combination. Meteor showers and MARTOP. Delta P and the Keeper. It was enough to make an atomgrabber's head spin...or worse. Winger flexed his fingers. He was itchy. Anxious. And he knew the symptoms. Retirement hadn't dulled that. He needed to get small, slam some atoms. Trouble was he didn't have the right clearances to get into Table Top's containment lab. All he had was Doc III. He could slap new configs on that swarm left and right but to what purpose? It was like changing leashes on your dog. It might look nice but your dog didn't really care.

CINCSPACE ended the vidcon, but left a channel open to Table Top. He wanted to speak privately with Winger.

"General, what do you make of all this?"

Winger shook himself out his funk and snapped back to reality. "I don't know what to make of it, Ravi. The Keeper is what worries me most...I've faced that thing before. I guess I'd be most interested in seeing what the Francis Bacon can come up with when they intercept MARTOP."

"You think there's something to all this Old Ones crap." It wasn't a question.

Winger shrugged. "I've learned to keep my options open. After horsing around with the Keeper out there on that icy slagheap of a world Europa, I learned that what I thought was solid isn't necessarily so solid. Quantum systems are like that. People are like that too. One minute, you think you know them. The next minute, they're all different. People change. They're not always what they seem to be. Same with the Keeper. You want my tactical advice?"

"I do."

"Assume the worst. Imagine the craziest thing you can think of. You'll be in the ballpark of the truth if you do that. I don't know what to think about the Old Ones. But the Keeper...that was as real as five fingers on my hand." He held up a hand and wiggled fingers. "The Keeper came to the surface of Europa for a reason. It's a machine, even if it is a quantum system made up of a gazillion nanobots. It's programmed. By someone. To do something. We just don't know what. I don't think we can afford to discount the possibility that the Old Ones are very real. And, like I said, given what I've seen the Keeper do...it can't be impossible for the Old Ones to already be here among us. As a commander, I'd make damn good and sure I've got some kind of tactical plan to deal with that, if it turns out to be true."

"Config Zero," Ramachandran said, as if the thought had just erupted.

"Exactly," Winger said. "There's a connection somewhere, between all these things. I'm betting if we dig deep enough, we'll find that bag of bugs right down at the bottom of the hole."
Chapter 3

Queensgate Hospital

Singapore

January 5, 2121

2330 hours

Major Batu was uneasy with all the arrangements but there really wasn't a whole lot he could do about it. The Secretary-General was sick and had been taken to a nearby hospital that evening, cutting short the address he had been about to make to the Lions of Commerce Association on his new vision for the upcoming General Assembly session. He had a fever and it was rising. The physician detail that always accompanied the S-G prescribed some pills and sent him off to Queensgate, with orders to go to bed and get some rest. More pills and fluids were taken. Dr. Li, lead physician of the detail, had just told Batu he wanted to do a medbot insert the next day, to investigate the malady.

That's when Batu started having heartburn.

Jaime Aquino, the S-G, was okay with the idea of an insert, even though he'd be incapacitated for several hours. As head of the S-G's security detail, Major Batu had little choice but to reluctantly agree. The insert was planned for early tomorrow morning. Aquino had dismissed Batu and turned in for the night.

Batu went downstairs to the security command post that had been set up in a first floor waiting room. He chain-smoked. He chugged gallons of coffee and tea. He watched street traffic through the window, mindlessly counting pedestrians, vehicles, rikshas and made up stories about the working girls inhabiting every corner. Sleep was the last thing on his mind.

He couldn't shake the feeling that something was up.

Upstairs in the SG's suite, Jaime Aquino couldn't sleep either.

As he lay awake tossing about in his bed, he noticed a faint light outside the window. The suite was on the fifth floor of the Queensgate, a special suite reserved for heads of state, dignitaries and celebrities. Aquino watched the light for a few minutes. It was diffuse, almost blue-white in color. And it was getting brighter.

He got up to investigate.

As he approached the window, he knew right away what the light was. Already he could hear the keening buzz of nanobotic conflict; the bots of the security barrier were already engaging something outside the window. Aquino inched closer.

Almost immediately, the light flared into blinding brilliance and a sharp hiss could be heard. Aquino staggered back and lost his balance, falling heavily to the floor, completely blinded by the light flooding in. A wave of heat washed over him as he scrambled away from the window. Then as he squinted at the battle now joined outside the windowpane, the buzz reached a shrill peak and cool air began drifting in. The window vanished in a flash and Aquino quickly found himself enveloped in a cloud of bots.

He flailed, tried screaming but found the pressure of the cloud was too great. He was being smothered, suffocated, fighting and kicking and scratching and clawing there was no air and slowly, but surely the tunnel yawned wide and he tumbled headlong down the black corridor at breakneck speed, spinning spinning spinning until at the end....

There was nothing and he lost consciousness.

The flickering cloud descended over the prostrate body of the SG, fully engulfing him in a small supernova of incandescent brilliance.

Half an hour later, the ball of light began to dim and in a few minutes, the light died off and the cloud dispersed. The body of Jaime Aquino, Secretary-General of the United Nations, had vanished...seemingly consumed by the cloud.

The room was dark and only the tattered, smoking shreds of curtains remained, flapping in a gentle early morning breeze wafting up from the harbor two kilometers away.

Major Batu had drifted off to a fitful sleep but startled himself awake, nearly falling to the floor of the command post. A nearby door clicked shut and Batu found himself staring up through bleary eyes at a lieutenant from the security detail, pecking out something on a nearby keypad.

"What time is it, Yang?"

The lieutenant saw that Batu was awake. "Almost four a.m., sir. You asked me to wake you at this hour. I was about to—"

Batu waved him away. "Never mind." He shook his head to clear the last vestiges of a bad dream. Maybe he had imagined that insistent buzzing sound. "I'd better go hunt down Dr. Li. He wanted to get the SG prepped early for the insert. Fix me some of that tea."

He scanned the board quickly, noting that the security barrier around Aquino's suite was fluctuating in intensity. "Have you dropped the barrier, Lieutenant? The integrity signal's blinking."

"No, sir...I just noticed that myself."

Instantly, Batu was fully awake. "Take Jurong and Bukrit and get up there. Make sure the barrier's intact. I'll find Dr. Li and get him started. I don't like it. This place has too many gaps."

They found the suite seemingly undisturbed. When Batu showed up moments later, with Dr. Li and several nurses, Jaime Aquino was asleep, under light covers in bed. Li bent over and gently awakened the SG.

Aquino yawned and stretched and meekly submitted to a quick exam by the doctor and his nurses. Batu scanned the room. The window was open and the curtains were flapping in a stiff morning breeze but otherwise he could detect nothing out of sort. A fine ash lined the floor around the foot of the bed. Batu stooped to finger it, putting it experimentally to his nose. Probably blew in from the harbor or the Esplanade, he figured. Some container ship cranking up its diesels. Still, it ought to be checked out.

Li was fussing over his patient. "He'll need something for that fever. Seems to have gotten worse since last night. Do you feel well, sir? Do you have any aches or pains, joint discomfort, that sort of thing? You're still running a low-grade fever."

Aquino sat up in bed. "A little washed out...that's all."

"Doctor—" one of the nurses showed Li a reading from her scanner. "His skin's pretty warm, too. Almost like an infection...it's all over. I don't see any rashes or anything...maybe it's below the epidermis—"

"Let me see," Li clucked and hmmed at the scanner display. He bent over and felt along Aquino's arm and chest, pursing his lips as he did so. "Most peculiar. I'm not sure what to make of this. Sir, I think we'd better get you into exam room. Can you walk? Or do you want us to wheel you in?"

"I can walk," Aquino said weakly. He smiled faintly at Batu and told his security chief to go back downstairs. "I'll be okay, Major. Go get some sleep. You look like hell."

Reluctantly, Batu complied and disappeared out into the hall. He headed for the lift.

Ten minutes later, the SG was strapped down on the exam table in the medbot containment chamber. A bioweb field flickered faintly in a dim halo around the bed.

"Okay, Doctor." One nurse, whose name tag read Simag, patted down the pinprick incision she had just made in the side of Aquino's skull. "Subject's prepped and ready."

Dr. Li manipulated the inserter tube, attached by hose to the containment chamber. "Steady even suction, Simag. AMAD ready to fly?"

The nurse came back, "Ready in all respects, Doctor."

"Vascular grid?"

"Tracking now. We'll be able to follow the master just fine. You'll be able to replicate once we're through the blood-brain barrier."

"Watch for capillary flow," said another nurse. Her name tag said Dibruk. "When his capillaries narrow, your speed will increase. And viscosity will stay up."

"Like slogging through molasses. AMAD's inerted and stable...ready for insertion."

But the insertion went south almost immediately. A slug of plasma forced the replicant master into Aquino's capillary network at high pressure. Li got an acoustic pulse seconds later and selected Fly-by-Stick to navigate the system. A few minutes' run on its propulsors brought the medbot master to a dense fibrous mat of capillary tissues. The image soon appeared on Li's panel.

"What the—" Li adjusted the display. "This is nothing like—"

That's when both nurses realized what they were dealing with.

"It's an angel!"

Straight away, AMAD was overwhelmed by the swarm that was Jaime Aquino.

The imager screen was at first murky, crowded with the spikes and cubes of dissolved molecules. Lumpy, multi-lobed sodium molecules darted across their view like shadowy ping-pong balls. Li studied readouts from AMAD's sounder...something was there, hidden in the data traces on the scope. He fiddled with the gain on the imager, tweaking it, subtracting foreground clutter.

Something approximately sixty nanometers in one dimension, narrow with a globe structure at one end...and scores of probes, effectors, cilia, whatever. Incredible mobility...triple propulsors beat an idling rhythm as AMAD closed in....

"Here they come, Doctor..."

The Secretary-General's body was no body, but a dense collection of nanobotic elements, woven together so completely that, even on close inspection, they couldn't tell the difference. It took the medbot sounder to prove the truth.

"I'm pulling out!" Li manipulated the controller but it was already too late. As AMAD sped forward, the bots that were Aquino grew and retracted appendages and surface structure with blazing speed. The outer membrane of the mechs seethed with motion, as atoms and clusters of atoms twisted, bonded, twisted again, rebonded, broke apart, recombined, straightened, undulated and whirled.

The gap between them vanished and AMAD grappled with the nearest mech. Other mechs swarmed to the battlefield.

Standing beside Aquino's bed, Simag's voice rose and fell, repeating incantations in a low tongue. She squeezed and twisted rosary beads like they were going to fly off into space.

Li was stunned by the speed of the assault. A battalion of swarmbots soon engulfed AMAD. No time to replicate now...got to get free...signal daughters....Li fired off a burst of instructions to gather all the daughters AMAD had replicated going in. It might be too late.

The imager screen shook with the collision, then careened sideways.

Several minutes passed. The imager view vibrated with the ferocity of the attack. Chains of oxygen molecules, pressed into service as makeshift weapons, whipped across the screen. The water was soon choked with cellular debris. The swarmbots replicated several times, adding new molecule strings. It stripped off electrons to make an armor shield of highly reactive chlorine atoms. In seconds, Li's medbot was immobilized by the chlorine sheath.

"I can't hold structure!" Li yelled. "I'm reconfiguring...shutting down peripheral systems!"

Nurse Dibruk had taken a place beside Li at the interface controls. "Got to disengage, Doctor...emergency truncation. Everything not critical. We've got to get AMAD out of there before we lose him!"

"I'm trying...but the damn mech's penetrated the signal path...if he cuts the link...."

"I know, I know...just keep trying...internal bonds on main body structure weakening...you're losing all grappling capability...."

As they watched, the swarm that was Aquino systematically dismantled AMAD, molecule by molecule. Nobody had expected this. With ruthless efficiency, Aquino, or what had once been Aquino, whirred and chopped every device the medbot could generate. Li and Dibruk tried to counter, replicating probes, inserters, jaws, cilia, pumps, blowers--but it was no use.

AMAD was quickly attacked and immediately disassembled, shredded into atom fluff inside the body of the S-G.

For a few moments, Li and his nurses stared down at the prostrate body of Jaime Aquino. Outwardly normal, sedated and snoring lightly, the SG was to all outward appearances a fifty-ish, slightly balding man of slender build, prepped on an examining table in the middle of Queensgate Hospital's Medbotic Containment Lab. Li withdrew the inserter tube and carefully placed his gloved fingers against the skin of Aquino's neck.

It feels real. It gives, it rebounds. I can pinch it like skin. And yet, at the nanoscale level, Jaime Aquino was no bag of bones and blood vessels, but rather a collection of nanobotic devices.

An angel.

Li wiped perspiration from his eyes. "Bring me another container. Another medbot...we've got a pod in that cabinet over there."

"Doctor—" Simag started to protest, her eyes wide and unblinking at the full horror of what lay on the table. "Doctor Li, I don't—"

"Just do it!"

Simag hustled over to a nearby cabinet and selected a small capsule from the shelf. She scanned the label: Autonomous Medical Assembler/Disassembler (AMAD) V3.1. Observe All Safety Procedures When Using This Device. Flustered, nearly fumbling the thing to the floor, she gingerly handed the capsule to Li.

Li fastened the capsule to the outer port of the inserter. "Now, let's try this again...must have been something in the insert. AMAD replicated early and started executing on its own...I'll turn on all inhibits this time. AMAD won't be able to do anything until I give the signal." He checked the capsule connection for any loose ends and fingered a few control studs on the side, priming the device inside. "Okay, prepare to launch—"

Dibruk signaled her readiness. Simag covered her mouth, tasting her rosary beads.

"Okay, let's do it. Launch AMAD."

As before, an audible whoosh followed, as the slug of plasma forced the AMAD master into Aquino's capillary network at high pressure. But this time no signal came back.

This time, right before their eyes, the Secretary-General himself began disassembling on the exam table.

Li jerked the inserter away from Aquino's head. "Get back! The thing's dissolving—" He flung the control pad down and made for the hatch, but it was already too late.

Simag was the first to go. While Li lunged for the containment controls, trying to jab at the beam injector, the prostrate body of Jaime Aquino disappeared in a blazing orb of light, engulfing the exam table, the console, Simag and Dibruk, everything nearby in a big bang of nanobotic overdrive. The botcloud swelled outward like a slow-motion explosion in miniature.

Simag screamed, clawing at her face, her hands flailing in terror. "Get it off me! Get it off....arrrrrggghhhh!" She went down hard to the floor and in seconds, only her hands and feet twitching were all that was left. Dibruk dashed over to the outer hatch, trying to spin the door handle open, but tendrils of bots snaked out and she was on her face, slapping and kicking and shrieking at the top of her lungs.

Li managed to reach the electron beam controls and stabbed the button. Instantly, the examining room was bathed in a blue-white light as trillions of electron volts slashed through the air, ripping electrons from atoms, frying molecules into atom fluff.

But the defense system had no discernible effect. When it had first appeared, the swarm that had once been Jaime Aquino had erupted billowing from the examining table. At first, the swarm resembled nothing more than trembling shadows, a pale flickering cloud of dust motes in a shaft of sunlight streaming into the chamber. As it ascended from the table, the swarm thickened and gathered itself into a roughly spherical shape, still pulsing, still throbbing, backlit from within by the fires of atomic bonds being broken, new structures being slammed together, new bots being formed.

The Aquino-angel hung in the smoky air like a swollen cloud, ready to dump torrential rains on a tropical forest. But they were a long way from any rain forests. The swarm unfurled itself and hung in the air like a great storm front, a trembling fist, flashing purple and orange and magenta all at the same time.

Dr. Chen Li, lead physician of the Secretary-General's medical detail, lasted less than five minutes. When it was all done, only a faint residue was left, small nearly invisible piles scattered across the floor tiles. That and the alarm which sounded in the first-floor security command post...that was the result of electron beam injectors going off. In seconds, alarms, klaxons and sirens were going off throughout Queensgate Hospital on all floors.

Hospital security joined Major Batu and his detail, racing up flights of stairs four at a time, up to the third floor Medbot Lab.

"Come on! Something's triggered a flash!" someone yelled. RF guns were drawn and security officers approached the outer hatch of the Lab cautiously, creeping along the walls, scanning floor and ceiling for traces of bots in the corridor.

Batu gestured at the hatch controls. "Get that thing open now!"

Hospital staff frantically worked the keypad, cycling through biometrics and ID verification as fast as they could. Finally, the hatch spun open and Batu shoved his way into the exam room.

Inside, he found....nothing...seemingly nothing out of the ordinary. The SG lay on the table under light covers. He blinked back at the assembled force.

"Is there a problem? I'd like to get this procedure over as soon as possible--"

Batu and the security officers stared in open-mouthed amazement. "We heard the beam alarms going off. Are you all right, sir? Anything wrong...and where is Dr. Li anyway?"

Aquino yawned. Batu didn't notice that the SG's lips didn't quite track with the gesture...like something interfering with a TV signal, a shadowing effect that was subtle and gone before anyone noticed it.

But one officer had noticed it. Sergeant Bedok Jurang's eyes narrowed, even as the SG moved to sit up in bed, propping himself up on one elbow.

"I really would like to get this procedure over with...my schedule is jammed today. I haven't got a moment to waste. I don't know where Dr. Li is...he's just vanished."

"Check the whole room," Batu ordered. The security detail went over every square centimeter. His eyes narrowed at the window; something definitely didn't look right there. "Sir, I think we'd better get you out of here."

Aquino waved that off. "I'm okay, Major...I just want to feel better...get this probe done and get back to work. I have a big speech coming up, you know."

"Yes, sir."

It was Sergeant Jurang who saw what nobody else saw. Next to the bed, a monitor stand displayed vital signs from the bed scanners. A separate console on wheels was for the probe itself. Containment controls, imager screen, acoustic and effector controls...a full panoply for medbot insertion and operation. There was no probe underway, no inserter connected to the SG.

Yet the medbot panel was active, showing swarms in the area, nanobotic swarms in operation. Jurang kept his eyes on the SG and inched his way closer to the side of the bed, to take a better look.

It couldn't have been any clearer. Jurang studied the readouts out of the corner of his eyes: elevated thermal emissions, electromagnetic activity, acoustic returns...something was driving the display. And there were edge effects too. When Aquino moved his hands and fingers...something was wrong. His fingers were blurred momentarily. They didn't rest naturally against his chest, but disappeared partly below the skin--

Jurang tapped Batu on the shoulder. "Major--?"

"What is it, Sergeant? Found something?"

Jurang subtly motioned the Major to step outside of the exam room. The remainder of the detail continued checking and scanning the room.

Jurang related what he had seen. "That isn't the Secretary-General in there, sir. I'm sure of it."

"What are you talking about, Jurang. Of course, it's the SG."

"This patient isn't what he seems to be. Check the medbot monitors. It's an angel. I'm sure of it. All the monitors show it. High thermals, the works. I'm telling you that thing in there is an angel."

Another officer scoffed. "That's nonsense...I'd know if that was an angel. That's the Secretary-General of the United Nations in there...maybe feeling a little poorly, but still—"

Major Batu was skeptical but knew he couldn't rule anything out. There had been a beam alarm. Something had happened up here. And with what the Assimilationists had been up to lately, it was getting harder to tell Normals from angels. You just couldn't be too careful.

But the Secretary-General?

Batu withdrew his weapon. It was an rf pulse pistol. He thumbed the setting to maximum and went back into the exam room.

U.S. Cyber Corps Headquarters

National Threat and Intelligence Fusion Center

January 5, 2121

Herndon, Virginia

1215 hours

Captain Anson Leeds took the stairs down to NTIFC's Watch Center three at a time. This better not be another false alarm, he told himself. There had been enough of those the last week to last a lifetime. He checked his wristpad and grunted as he nearly twisted an ankle on the stairs landing. Another Level 1 alert and more threatcons to follow. Something had stirred up WorldNet like a stick in a bees' nest.

The Watch Center was a semi-circular mission control room with screens and displays on every available surface. The Big Board showed an outline of North America, the eastern seaboard to be exact. Red, green, blue and white lights blinked on and off, strobing in synch with key node and server farm activity levels, as the Net breathed and pulsed zettabytes of data every second around the earth and into near-earth space.

Leeds spotted the Current Status desk and headed for it. He recognized the two duty officers right away: Lieutenant Linda Tracey and Sergeant Will Vogt.

Good techs, both of them. Leeds knew they'd be on top of anything that came up.

"What have you got for me guys?" Leeds landed next to their station and studied the Big Board. The entire east coast was flickering with lights and data blocks.

Tracey was harried, shaking her head, swearing under her breath. "It's ECSO, sir...East Coast System Operator. We've got a Level 1 cascade going down right now...multiple flashovers in key junctions...transients up and down the network...race conditions at two control centers...."

"And threatcons coming in from WorldNet like a tsunami, sir," added Vogt. "High risk gradients on all of them. Look at this—" he pointed to a display on his console, scrolling system status from multiple nodes. "Server firewalls breached at every location. Rootkit exploits popping up everywhere like mushrooms. Tricky stuff too, sir. Runtime environment's contaminated at over a hundred nodes. They're re-directing, but this baby's spreading fast. Jamestown's already down. I've got twenty others on the edge." Vogt threw up his hands. "There goes Watkinsville and Cliff Valley...that whole sector's toast. I haven't seen anything like this in months, maybe years. We may be looking at kernel-level rootkits here...maybe even some zero-day stuff."

Leeds could see it was serious. A growing power blackout was rippling up and down the U.S. eastern seaboard. Along with the blackout and its cascading effects radiating outward like cracks in a sidewalk, WorldNet alarms were going off, lending a circus-like atmosphere to the Watch Center. Techs scurried from one station to another. People gestured. Voices were raised. Fingers were pointed.

Something was attacking key nodes and server centers around the world, something big and coordinated. Was it a drill? Another exercise ordered by General Pacer? Leeds hadn't seen anything on the boards lately about an upcoming exercise. The bi-annual Com-Ex games weren't due for another four months. Not that the USCINCCYBER needed an excuse to run a drill...or an ORI visit. Operational Readiness Inspections made everyone's breakfast taste like brass fillings.

"What does COHEN have to say?" The AI that ran the Watch Center had been given the nickname months ago, coming online after years of testing and debugging. The Cyber Operations and Heuristic Algorithmic Network could digest yottabytes of data every second and spit out analyses and conclusions like a university professor on steroids. Plus some wise guy had adorned the voice response system with a faint Yiddish accent. Jokes, puns and wisecracks abounded in the weeks after COHEN went live.

"COHEN thinks this is a Sandstorm variant, Captain," Tracey said. "It's seeing some of the same kinds of exploits, some of the same techniques, digital certificates, grabbing protected memory and buffer-overflow tricks. This one may be an updated variant of earlier Russian or Chinese versions...Sandstorm with some new tools."

Leeds bent down to study the code scrolling on Tracey's screen. COHEN was filtering and comparing and running correlations at high speed, too fast for any human to follow. All you could do was trust the system and try to get out of the way.

"I'm seeing bits and pieces of Sandstorm here," Leeds admitted. "Kernel-mode stuff. Lots of .dll calls. But something's different...look, even COHEN thinks so." Even as Leeds watched, the AI was flagging code blocks and lines that it didn't understand, or couldn't find any compares to list. "Analysis, guys? I've got to give something to CINCCYBER in about ten minutes. Anytime a Level One sounds, Pacer wants the gritty details on his desk immediately, if not sooner."

"Sir, I think we should deal with this as an updated, maybe altered or souped-up version of Sandstorm, until we learn differently. There are differences and things COHEN can't figure out. I've seen a few gotchas and Easter eggs myself, just in the last hour. But treating this like Sandstorm gives us a place to start."

"How about attribution? Or are we dealing with a botnet here or a cutout network?"

"Even COHEN can't keep up with all the proxies, Captain," said Vogt. "They're exploding like mushrooms."

Or like nanobots in big bang overdrive, thought Leeds. But he didn't say that. "Okay, boys and girls, I'm headed upstairs. Give me the latest and I'll put it before Pacer as a probable Sandstorm attack."

Vogt synched COHEN's emitter at their station and the analytics went straight to Leeds' wristpad. The captain checked the results, pronounced himself satisfied and headed out of the Watch Center.

CINCYBER's office suite was seven stories up, the penthouse view of snow-covered rolling hills and Virginia horse country. Leeds rode the secure lift and found himself face to face with General Wesley Pacer, who frowned and chewed the end of toothpick as he scowled at his own display.

"COHEN's got his hands full today, Captain. Sit, sit. You're saying this is Sandstorm we're facing? What about the power outages?"

Leeds sat down. Pacer was mid-fifties, not enhanced, so far as anyone knew. Steel gray crew-cut, hard cheeks and facial planes, like a shovel blade with eyes. Big ears that stuck out and absolutely no one made any wisecracks about them, if they wanted to live. Pacer was a doer. He got things done.

"ECSO is at the center of this, General. It's a cascading failure and all the telemetry shows the same thing. We've got multiple surges, overvolt and undervolt events and none of the system controllers can balance the load...it's like something's infected all of them. They're sluggish, when they operate at all. There's a two-hundred gigawatt load sloshing around out there like a runaway freight train...wreaking havoc everywhere it lands. None of the generators can account for it. It just appeared. This Sandstorm event's caused server and alarm failures up and down the line. Multiple voltage and power spikes and we're completely blind to what's happening."

Pacer snapped the toothpick clean in two with his clenched teeth. "I've already sent a PURPLE message to the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House. I've also activated CyberFence but all these countermeasures are like taking this toothpick here and poking an elephant. Net result has been zero. Hell, we may have actually made things worse. The friggin' blackout's spreading into Canada and west to the Great Lakes. Even places in western Europe are going offline. I expect POTUS will be making a call here any minute."

"Sir, the consensus from COHEN is that Sandstorm's responsible, but we don't know who. Maybe the Russians. Maybe the Chinese. Maybe some Bulgarian teen-ager. Maybe the Old Ones from outer space. But there are some significant differences, things we can't ignore."

"Like what, Leeds?"

"The rate this thing is spreading, for one thing, sir. Even in all the past exploits and assaults, even in the COM-EX exercises, no virus or worm or Trojan or logic bomb or any kind of malware has spread this far, this fast. It essentially erupted everywhere at once, like a global instantaneous assault at every WorldNet server center and node at the same time. It's like there are ghosts inside the Net, inside PHAROAH itself. Something at the very heart of WorldNet's operating system that mirrors every action, every command and link, and every execution, then when the right word or condition comes, pow!... it puts a hand over PHAROAH's mouth and starts running the whole show. I'm wondering if we've got some kind of malware right in PHAROAH'S main memory, right in the very kernel of the system."

Pacer was about to respond, but the Crystal vidcon chirped, indicating encrypted traffic coming in. The Seal of the Presidency flashed up on the screen.

"Here he is, Leeds...right on cue. Good day, Mr. President."

On screen was Samuel L. Kenley, President of the United States. POTUS was white-haired, ruddy-cheeked from a recent ski trip to Vail, Colorado, where the Leader of the Free World had hung out for the last week in a borrowed mansion the size of a small country.

Leeds started to get up but Pacer waved him back to his seat. "Stick around," he told Leeds. "I may need you. Sir, I just flashed the latest from COHEN to your inbox. We think it's Sandstorm again, maybe a newer version."

Kenley's face was a map of conflicting emotions, all boundaries and crags and wrinkles, fighting each other. He blinked at the screen. "Attribution's all I care about, General, at this point. Is this Russia? Is this China? I need somebody to blame. The public'll have my head in a noose if I can't blame somebody. This—" he stopped when he realized they had a new participant on the line.

The vidcon had chirped and another window opened up on the screen. It was the UN Security Affairs Commissioner, Evelyn Lumumba. 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. She conned in from UNSAC's offices at the Quartier-General in Paris.

"Good afternoon, Evelyn," POTUS said. "I was just asking General Pacer here if it's Russia or China again.'

CINCCYBER was unequivocal in his answer. "Without a doubt, Mr. President. Couldn't be anybody else. The forensics all point that way."

Not all of them, Leeds thought to himself. But he said nothing.

Lumumba sat back and thought. Her hairpiece rattled again. "I'd say maybe, Mr. President. We've seen the analyses your COHEN system has sent over. But our own people think there could be other explanations. Already, we've detected quantum state fluctuations around the perimeter of Kipwezia...indicating Config Zero's up to something again. He's been quiet for over a decade, so we don't know what's up, but a team has already been formed to track down these disturbances and make sure Config Zero stays in quarantine."

UNSAC words galvanized Leeds. The moment seemed opportune. He raised a hand to flag CINCCYBER's attention. "General, if I may--?"

Pacer waved him on. "Go ahead, Major."

"Sir, I guess I have something of a contrary view. There are network indicators we should be considering here...the speed of the infection, if that's what it is. The nature of the assault...we're looking at kernel-rootkit assault, right at the very core of PHAROAH, the Net operating system. The fact that there appears to be a series of very serious, very subtle zero-day backdoors going on here, even inside Russia and China. This thing has appeared out of nowhere and appeared everywhere almost instantly. That tells me this is a foundational attack, something fundamental to the very protocols that operate WorldNet and Solnet. Even Gateway Station and Farside are reporting malware on their systems."

POTUS was unconvinced. "So the Russians and the Chinese are also infected...that means nothing. At the end of World War II, Stalin shot his own repatriated POWs and soldiers. Couldn't let the Perfect Society be contaminated by exposure to the Nazis or the other Allies. This proves nothing."

"There is one other indicator we should consider," Leeds went on. "We've all seen the same reports about unusual meteor showers in the skies over the last few weeks. I checked with Solnet News before I came up here. Just yesterday, before all this started happening, there was an enormous spike in meteoric activity and so far, no known astronomical source can account for it. Yeah, there are dust clouds flitting around the Solar System, usually cometary or asteroidal debris...the Geminids, the Perseids, things like that. But these showers last a few days at most, as the Earth plows through some dust stream and they're over. That hasn't been happening. Somewhere off Earth, there' s a source of dust that's producing these showers. The fact that they spiked in volume just a day or so before a big malware attack on the Net and a Level 1 power outage up and down our eastern seaboard may well be a coincidence. But I don't think we can discount the possibility of unknown interference effects on our digital systems. Solar activity plays havoc with comms all across the Solar System...that's a known effect. Maybe, the Net has finally become so complex, so sensitive, that effects like these meteors can cause cascading failures on a scale we've never seen before. Sir," he faced POTUS directly on the vidcon, "we shouldn't discount the possibility."

POTUS, UNSAC and CINCCYBER all nodded in unison. POTUS cleared his throat and ran a hand through an unruly lock of white hair. The man was starting to resemble Einstein on a bad hair day. "Major, your concerns and analysis are duly noted. However, I'm going with the preponderance of the evidence. I've seen enough. It's Russia. Or China. It has to be. And once and for all, it's high time for us to retaliate. I am going to authorize CyberSword. General, make all necessary preparations and load up your guns. Then come back to me for authority to proceed. I'll clear it with our friends at the UN and with State and Defense."

Pacer nodded. "At once, sir. Mr. President, you are fully aware of what authorizing CyberSword means...we did a run-through during the last Com-Ex."

POTUS took a deep breath. "I do, General. A massive pre-planned offensive cyber response to this Sandstorm attack, taking out trunk lines and key nodes and major server installations inside Russia and China. I fully expect we'll cripple large sectors of both nations' economy and industry. It's well past time to teach these jokers a lesson they won't forget. We can play the same game as them."

Anson Leeds swallowed hard. What President Kenley has just authorized was a massive 'nuclear' response. A killing response. He couldn't help shake the feeling. CyberSword wasn't what was needed. It would cause more problems than it solved. It was like taking a howitzer to a gnat. Not only that, Leeds was more and more convinced the gnat wasn't the problem. While Kenley and Pacer and Lumumba were chasing gnats, other bugs had somehow crawled into the Net from a different direction. Leeds was sure of it.

He just couldn't prove it yet.

The President and UNSAC discussed coordination between the U.S. and UNIFORCE for a few minutes.

"Well, I've got a press conference in an hour," Kenley said. "I suppose I'll get hammered by all the reporters over what we're doing. But damn it...the Russians and the Chinese can't just slam our infrastructure with viruses and worms and expect to get away with it. Sooner or later, somebody's got to pay. And now's the time."

Lumumba agreed. "It's past time to take the initiative, Mr. President. I'll advise the Security Council and the SG of your plans. And we'll need to make sure there are good communication links between Quantum Corps and your Cyber Corps people."

Pacer chimed in. "I've got just the liaison in mind, Mr. President. Major Leeds here has worked with Table Top and other Quantum Corps sites for several years now. They participate in our Com-Ex exercises every year, sometime as a Red Force, sometimes with us as part of Blue."

"Perfect," Kenley decided. "Now if you'll excuse me—" The vidcon link to the White House went dark, to be replaced by the Presidential Seal.

"I'll talk with CINCQUANT myself," Lumumba was saying. "General Argo will want to keep his forces on full alert when CyberSword goes down. The Russians and the Chinese will surely respond in kind after we drop a few logic bombs on them. I'm authorizing ThreatCon One. Argo will have to keep his botshields humming at every site. There's no telling where the enemy will strike."

"Agreed," Pacer said. UNSAC signed off and the vidcon was over. The General turned to Leeds.

"Leeds, have you lost your cotton-pickin' mind? What's all this crap about 'lights in the sky' and men from Mars? This is full-scale cyberwar and we know who did it. I don't want to hear any more fairy tales about space dust and alien invasions. We've got a war on. The President has just authorized CyberSword and we've got a job to do... you've got a job to do."

Leeds was already wishing he had kept his big mouth shut. With POTUS' orders, Pacer was like a retriever on the hunt...he smelled blood and nothing would dissuade him. "Sir, I just happen to think CyberSword is not necessary. It'll do more harm than good, for all of us. It's an over-response."

"I suppose we should just let all these worms and viruses run wild around the Net, destroying our power plants and water supplies...Major Leeds, I know you better than that. You and I both took an oath of office. After Sandstorm or whatever the hell this is, if we didn't respond and return fire, we should both be tried for treason and shot."

Leeds shook his head. "That's not it, sir. There's more going on inside WorldNet than just Russian or Chinese cyber-mischief."

Pacer scoffed. "What proof do you have, son?"

"Ever heard of the ADAM Project, General? James Tsu's in charge of that effort."

Pacer thought for a moment, then recognition came to him. "Isn't he that egghead down at the Wizard Works?"

"CyberLab, sir...that's the official name. The ADAM Project is a research effort that's looking into whether or not the Net could be exhibiting evidence of sentience, even intelligence. It's become complex enough and there's a school of thought that says once a system becomes that complex, it can achieve something like intelligence. You personally approved the effort, sir."

Pacer frowned. "I must have been out of my mind. It doesn't matter anyway. The Commander-in-Chief has given us our orders. It's our job to obey and carry them out. Keep monitoring and analyzing the situation...keep feeding stuff to COHEN and see what he comes up with. As for me, I've got a war to run."

Major Anson Leeds was dismissed and returned to the Watch Center downstairs. Cyber-hell was about to be let loose across WorldNet and Leeds had a bad feeling about what would happen. If James Tsu was even half right, the Net or whatever had infected the Net was about to get a big kick in the pants. CyberSword would soon send insane quantities of worms, viruses, logic bombs, Trojans and other malware flying across the Net. The Russians and the Chinese would do the same.

A cat fight was a certainty and nobody could say who would get scratched worse after it got started.
Chapter 4

Solnet/Omnivision Video Post

@anika.radovich.solnetworldview

January 10, 2121

1750 hours U.T.

SOLNET Special Report:

An Epidemic of Angels?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"To what do you attribute this growth?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What is that, Dr. Gaylord?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It was my pleasure, Anika."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Which is--?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"FREE SYMBORG NOW! FREE SYMBORG NOW!"

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

"FREE SYMBORG NOW!"

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

"It's...um, it's...yeah, that's right Free Symborg...it's Jane...Jane Nyquist."

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

"We want Symborg freed. Now. He's in custody somewhere in the U.S. and he's our hero."

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

"He has to be. They took him into custody and we want him released."

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

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

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

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

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

Sparrow One captured it all on vid.

Solnet Special Report Ends
Chapter 5

United Nations Headquarters

New York City

January 11, 2121

2100 hours

Dr. Jaime Aquino had been Secretary-General for a little over three years and in all that time, he had never gotten accustomed to dealing with Evelyn Lumumba. The Security Affairs Commissioner, known as UNSAC, was hard to figure. She was Cameroonian by birth, a long time security specialist and celebrated author of many papers on security and law enforcement matters. She was also a warrior princess by background. Her own tribe was the fierce highlander Bamileke and Lumumba was reportedly descended from tribal royalty, from a long line of fong, or chiefs.

She was well over two meters in height, with a lean hard face and blazing eyes which bored right through you. She could bury an ukwambe spear in the flanks of a tiger at fifty meters and drink any male diplomat under the table in less than an hour.

She was hardline, hard-nosed and a real pain in the ass.

The vidcon had been set for 2100 hours and Aquino took it in his apartment on the thirty-fifth floor of the Secretariat building, overlooking the murk of New York's East River. Aquino was clad in light blue pajamas sitting by a roaring fire with a goblet of wine in one hand and his tablet in the other. Lumumba's face popped up in a window on the tablet right on time.

As usual, UNSAC didn't waste words.

"I suppose you've seen the reports I sent you...all those riots and disturbances across Europe and Asia. Free Symborg. Dr. Aquino, there's no way we can ever let that happen. Symborg's a menace to everyone."

Another window had just opened on Aquino's tablet, another participant. It was General Jake Argo, CINCQUANT, patched in from Quantum Corps' base at Table Top, Idaho, USA. Argo scowled like a bear just awakened from a long nap.

"I heard that, Mr. Secretary. I agree with the menace part. If we let Symborg loose now, he'll just become a rallying point for Assimilationists all over the world."

Aquino sipped at the wine. It tasted bitter. At least, his sensory bots returned a sensation response indicating "bitter." The response was logged in Aquino's main processor and, in less than forty milliseconds, facial actuator bots received a series of commands to form a new expression, which Normals would interpret as an expression of disgust. Aquino's lips formed a faint frown, which worked in coordination with cheek and eye muscles to amplify the visual response.

Aquino was an angel but this was not known to Lumumba and Argo. Resolution through the tablet's camera wasn't quite good enough and Aquino was careful to position himself so that the illusion was well-maintained.

"I've just been in conference with Kwan Keyser. You both know who he is?"

"The Bug Man," sniffed Argo.

"Exactly," said Aquino. "Official Representative for Sanctuary-bound swarms in the General Assembly. There's going to be a push for an up or down vote tomorrow, two days from now at the latest. Release Symborg from containment or keep him in a bottle. It's my decision after that."

Lumumba looked like a warrior princess. She had a way of angling her face so that she looked like a shovel blade with eyes. The braided tresses wound tightly on top of her head added to the effect.

"Symborg rallies are a threat to public order, Mr. Secretary and that's all there is to it. He's a threat to the political order in countries around the world."

Argo agreed. "Even worse than that is the fact that's he basically an angel. He can be in many places at the same time, destabilizing countries and cities everywhere. Pardon my French, Mr. Secretary, but this is loco. Insane. We have to keep the bastard bottled up, forever. Even better, we should just zap the SOB and be done with it."

"And make him a martyr for all time?" Aquino got up and took the tablet with him to a large picture window, overlooking the river. Queens and Brooklyn blazed in nighttime glory across the water, while lifters and jets circling for approach into La Guardia filled the skies. "That's just what I need. If the General Assembly votes to release, I'd better have a damn good reason not to."

"Look," said Lumumba, "it's a public safety issue, plain and simple. There are reasonable people in the Assembly. They'll understand it if you use that angle. Symborg and his Assimilationist sympathizers all want to tear down existing power structures. They don't even try to hide it. The poorer countries are especially vulnerable: the Kenyas and the Tanzanias, the Bolivias and the Valencias. Anyplace that borders one of the Sanctuaries. Kwan Keyser knows this too. Oh, Symborg never calls for overthrowing governments explicitly in his speeches; he doesn't have to. His followers will do it for him."

Aquino considered that. Angels were the future of this world. He wanted to say that to these dinosaurs, to grab them by the throat, right through the tablet, and scream that in their faces. But there were appearances to maintain.

"You know, there's something else to be debated here. If I order Symborg to be kept in containment, he'll be treated by his followers as a sort of political prisoner, maybe even a martyr. Even absent from any stage, he's a rallying point. A hell of a lot of atrocities are being done right now in his name. You want that on your consciences?"

Lumumba scoffed. "It's like Pilate and Jesus Christ. We can't get rid of him and we can't let him go."

"I've got a better idea," Argo interrupted. "A third way. Why can't we just obliterate the bastard once and for all? Zap the dirtbag into atomic oblivion and be done with it. Turn that little quantum processor ticking away inside the master bot into atom fluff. Why can't we do that?"

Aquino sometimes felt like he was talking to a sandbox full of three-year olds, trying to keep the dirt from flying. "Because he's an angel. No one could be sure there isn't a copy stored somewhere else, something that could easily replicate the original. That's what angels do." And thank goodness for that, he didn't say.

"We tried to discredit him a decade ago," Lumumba said. "We even tried to quarantine him with Config Zero when Kipwezia was formed. Didn't work. I like the General's idea."

The argument went on for half an hour, but Jaime Aquino had already made up his mind. Kwan Keyser was right. Symborg and angels had as much right to exist as anybody. The original ANAD was surely a creation of human beings, particularly of Dr. Irwin Frost. But Rudolf Volk had already dug up fossil evidence that humans were descended, like all life forms more complex than a virus, from ancient robots a few billion years ago. So who created who? No, Aquino was sure, Symborg would be freed. It was just a matter of timing.

"I've made up my mind," Aquino told them. "Let Symborg out of containment, General. I'll issue the orders tomorrow morning and they'll be uploaded to your commandnet by noon. I just need some time with the General Assembly...to get them ready."

Before the arguments could erupt again, Aquino shut off debate and closed down the vid. He went back to his wing chair and set the tablet aside. Where was that decanter? By the fireplace. The Secretary-General poured himself a few fingers of the vodka.

I may not have a Normal's taste buds, but Christ, this is good stuff. Maybe something in the config program....

Aquino sat back to admire the view out the picture window. Overhead, the moon was a sliver. Lifters continued circling La Guardia and Flushing Bay. And above all of it, the meteors kept coming, streaking like fiery lances across the nighttime sky.

After Aquino abruptly shut down the vidcon, Argo and Lumumba continued the conversation.

"I want a special surveillance team set up," UNSAC was saying. "Call it Quantum Mirror. You set up this team and follow the Symborg master bot wherever he or it or they go. Stick to him like glue, General."

Argo dispatched details of a surveillance plan he already worked up to Paris. Lumumba studied the TOE and pronounced herself satisfied. "Good work. I want to be able to obliterate that bastard the instant he crosses the line. Which I don't think will be long. Sabotage, treason, espionage, suborning the violent overthrow of lawfully elected governments, assisting in mass suicide...we've got a long list we can hang around his little nanobotic neck."

"This has to be kept from the S-G," Argo warned her. "I don't trust him. We're both grownups here...to go behind the Secretary-General's back and deliberately undercut stated policy decisions...that's insubordination at the very least. Under the Uniform Code, we could be shot for this."

"It's worth it," Lumumba said, "if we save Humanity from itself in the process."

United Nations Quantum Corps

Western Command Base

Table Top Mountain, Idaho

January 12, 2121

0230 hours

Inside the Level 1 Containment chamber, Symborg was already being prepped for release. Jake Argo watched the imager as something that looked like a bunch of grapes hanging from a trellis quivered with the slightest motion, like an infinitesimally tiny heart was beating inside. In a very real sense, that was true.

"That's it?" Argo asked.

The tech operating the containment controls was Sergeant Kurt Karst. Karst wore a standard Quantum Corps buzzcut and the sour look of a CCE rating who didn't much care for brass looking down his neck.

"That's it, sir. He was sort of hibernating the last few days, but we woke him about 0000 hours...just a little zap from the electron gun was all it took. We're running diagnostics right now, making sure everything's in working order, just like you ordered."

Argo sniffed. "I ordered it, Sergeant, but that doesn't mean I like it. All the roads and highways around the Hill are jammed with people. You can even hear it from the edge of the mesa, all the way back to Haleyville and Buffalo Ridge: FREE SYMBORG NOW! They're all about to get their wish. I hope they choke on it."

"Pressure equalizing now, General," said another tech, Sergeant Gaborik, working the system controls. "We're feeding him this morning...new feedstock atoms hot off the griddle. Oxygens, calciums, phosphorus, nitrogen soufflé. He should be lapping it up like my neighbor's dog."

"Go through the final checklist for me," Argo ordered.

"Yes, sir," said Karst. He pulled up a display. "We've already done diagnostics on the core: main memory, algorithm libraries, buffers, config translator, processor...the works."

"Just like a check-up," Argo muttered. "What about power cells, actuators, that sort of thing?"

Gaborik chimed in. "Done, sir. Main mast structural integrity verified. Power cells primed and powered up. All effectors cycled and checked: pyridine probes, carbene grabbers, enzymatic knife, bond disrupters. Plus Symborg's got gizmos and doodads we have no idea what they do...I think they'll power up okay. Like these things—" He pointed to some leaf-shaped effectors around the bot core's midsection. "—could be grapplers, abstractors, who knows what they are."

Argo shook his head. "My orders are to get the damn thing up and working and let it go. And that's all I'm doing. Activation sequence?"

"Started five minutes before you came in, sir. We've laid in all triggers. Seeded the growth medium. Exercised a basic replication cycle. I'm not sure what else we can do. From what I can see, Symborg's hale and hearty and ready to launch."

"I'd like to zap the bejeezus out of the bastard right here and now," Argo admitted. "But I've got my orders. Containment ready? Electron beam guns?"

"All ready, sir," Karst told CINCQUANT.

"Very well. Execute the launch."

Karst's fingers flew over his keyboard. A gentle hiss could be heard in the chamber, as pressures were equalized across the boundary of the containment vault. Valves cycled open.

For the first few minutes, nothing happened. The imager showed the grapes wriggling and sliding off their trellis inside the tank. Nanometer by nanometer, the core of the master bot that was Symborg slid out of view and was gone.

"Outer doors coming open, General. We should be seeing something in a few moments."

Seconds later, a faint shimmer could be seen in the air, like steam from a tea kettle, issuing out of the vault and into the air.

"Reading EMs going up. Acoustic returns now. Something's coming out—"

As they watched, the faint shimmer grew slightly more solid, becoming by turns a mist, then a thicker fog, coruscating and flickering with pinpricks of light as the bot master core executed its basic replication algorithm and steadily built structure.

It was Gaborik who noticed the first outlines of a face.

Hovering like a djinn from Arabian Nights, the face materialized slowly, becoming at first eyes, then a nose, then lips and cheeks and ears, a ghostly radiance pulsating and swelling into view.

Argo checked the status of the electron beam guns just in case. One wrong move, mister and you're atom fluff. Karst's fingers hovered over the gun trigger on his console.

The transformation took only a few minutes, but when it was over, a ghostly half-formed face and shoulders leered down at them from the ceiling of the chamber. It was Symborg, a familiar public config...this time a light-skinned African warrior, with streaks of face 'paint' and bone jewelry in its ears and nose.

The face smiled down at them with bemused indifference.

Argo bent down right behind Gaborik and whispered in his ear. "Anything from our guest?"

Gaborik checked a small window on his display. "We're talking right now, General. Got good quantum comms. OSCAR's up and running."

The Operational Surveillance Configuration Autonomous Robot had been seeded into the growth medium inside containment during the checkout. As anticipated, Symborg had taken up the bot as it replicated structure. Now, the tiny spy was part of the swarm that comprised Symborg.

Even as they watched, Symborg's configs cycled through a dizzying variety of looks and shapes, as if the bot were exercising itself, trying on different images, something that Symborg had long been a master of.

The African warrior morphed slowly into a more primitive look, shifting and flowing and fluctuating into a near Paleolithic face, complete with heavy, bushy eyebrows, a pronounced forehead and massive jaw...a Neandertal appearance that Symborg occasionally used to drive home his ancient roots as a presumed ancestor of all humans.

The Neandertal was followed in steady succession by a sort of biblical prophet look, then an Islamic warrior and imam from the time of Muhammad, even a Buddha-like image came into view, as the bot cycled through all facial actuator configurations one after another.

"Creepy, if you ask me," said Karst, who seemed mesmerized by the show.

"It's what the scumbag uses to intimidate and awe his crowds," Argo said. "He's the perfect politician. The perfect celebrity. He can literally be all things to all people."

Slowly, but steadily, the Symborg swarm drifted toward the hatch doors of the chamber. The doors were still shut and secured, but Argo snapped his fingers. Gaborik stabbed a button and the hatch swung open slowly on silent bearings.

The face, now back to its African warrior visage, paused at the hatch, hovering like a bad dream and leering down at the technicians, a faint smirk now unmistakable. The voice that issued from the swarm, focused acoustic signals generated by actuator motions commanded by the config driver, was tinny, hollow, multi-toned, like three people speaking at the same time, but slightly out of phase.

"I am all men," came the whisper, barely audible, but all the more menacing for its hoarse timbre. "I am Everyman. And I will bring all who follow me back to the first days, back to the Beginning...the Central Entity will gather all into the mother swarm...."

The swarm began to slowly fade, disappearing into the air like smoke dispersing. The swarm was disassembling. The bot and its replicants dissipated and were quickly gone.

But not before OSCAR made his first report.

Karst snapped his fingers in appreciation. "Swarm centroid no longer inside containment. I'm reading fading EMs, fading spikes in all bands. Symborg has left the building. I've got just a faint trace now...."

"How about OSCAR?" asked Argo, moving to the hatch to see into the outer corridor.

Gaborik pumped a fist triumphantly. "Chatting away, sir. Jabbering on the command frequency, just like my mother-in-law."

Argo saw nothing in the corridor but security staff, which had already moved to the sides of the hall, letting the now nearly invisible presence of the swarm in loose config pass by.

"Lieutenant, I'll bet your mother-in-law never took a ride like this one."

Operation Quantum Mirror was now officially underway.
Chapter 6

Hong Kong Exchange

Hong Kong, Special Autonomous Region

People's Republic of China

January 12, 2121

1815 hours

At the Hong Kong Exchange on Kowloon Street, Nathaniel Lee watched with growing apprehension as a panic market selloff unfolded right before his eyes. The panic, and that was all you could really call it, had been underway for most of the last hour, rippling around the world in seconds, causing chaos from New York to London, Tokyo to Hong Kong, Frankfurt to Beirut.

Lee had heard of recent virus attacks and decided that had to be the explanation. He'd studied the Sandstorm attacks in great detail, attacks that had infected much of the Net in recent days and cringed when the American President Kenley had announced that he was putting a CyberSword response into operation. For days, the Americans and the Russians and the Chinese had traded viruses, worms, Trojans, backdoors and other malware insults and, as a result, the entire Net was roiled and reeling like ocean waves before a cyclone.

The ruckus now slamming his exchange and sending traders and brokers into paroxysms of frenzied yelling and waving had to be residual effect of that nonsense. That was all it could be. For the past hour, at nearly the speed of light, trillions in value had vaporized like dew on hot asphalt and his own IT people were saying the worst was yet to come. Trades were erased, cancelled, stalled, overwritten and otherwise gummed up on every network the Exchange maintained and Lee felt powerless to do anything about it.

If this keeps up much longer, he told himself, we'll have to pull the plug and implement emergency cyber-fence measures, severing and air-gapping HKEx from the world, to try and save something. And the worst of it was that WorldNet and other media outlets had already gotten wind of the story and it was flashing around the world, lighting up tickers and alert boards from Toronto to Timbuktu.

Such was life in the stock and commodities trading business.

A full trading tsunami had erupted when news of the virus hit the airwaves. Panicked stockholders were screaming and messaging 'sell at any price' orders faster than the servers could process them, clogging HKEx's comms and network with millions of requests and orders. Already some banks across Kowloon Street, and in Shanghai and Tokyo and London and New York were talking about shutting down, to squash the panic. A full-scale run on lending institutions around the world was underway. And in Geneva, UNFAD...the UN's Financial Organizations Directorate...was already meeting in emergency session, pondering what to do next.

Nathaniel Lee sipped at lukewarm green tea and shook his head. He decided to head back to his third floor office. Momentarily an image came to his mind...the gun in the desk drawer, pulling the trigger, HK police discovering his blood-spattered body that afternoon. The headlines tomorrow in the South China Morning Post: "Exchange Director Kills Self; Wife and Two Children Distraught."

No, it wouldn't come to that. Nathaniel Lee shut his office door behind him and sat down heavily in the desk chair. It squeaked. He'd have to fix that someday. Outside the window, the bejeweled panoply of night time Hong Kong lay before him...Victoria Peak lit up like a Christmas tree, massive, half-hidden in harbor fog, lined with lights from the mansions and estates crowning the top and below, the ancient Star Ferry plying the harbor like some glittering sea serpent. In the reflection of his computer monitor on the window glass, he saw some kind of newsfeed crawling across...he tried reading it backwards, then with a start, he turned around.

Something about U.S. Cyber Corps again...? What the hell was this?

U.S. Cyber Corps Headquarters

National Threat and Intelligence Fusion Center

January 12, 2121

Herndon, Virginia

1430 hours

CINCCYBER had called a briefing for all department heads and Captain Anson Leeds didn't want to be late. There was no telling what General Pacer would get his fingers into if saner and cooler heads weren't around to hold him back.

The White House wanted answers, fast. Was this another Sandstorm attack? POTUS wanted to initiate another CyberSword response. But Leeds felt in the pit of his stomach that the evidence suggested otherwise.

CINCCYBER held the briefing in his office, a semi-circle arranged around the end of his desk. Pacer had turned his hologram pedestal around so everybody could see. He ran down what was known at the moment.

"It's banks and financial institutions this time. I've already drawn up a threatcon to go out, but I want everybody to have their say here. We've already done some damage to the Russians and the Chinese; we shut down Beijing Airport for a day late last week. The ruble's pretty much trash, but that's nothing new. We're taking our licks too," Pacer added. "Here's a list of infrastructure hits we've taken—"he waved the display to start scrolling so the assembled department heads could see "—Morgantown Power and Light in West Virginia...down to a tenth capacity. The Solex plant in Arizona off grid for a day. Train collisions in New Jersey...a dozen fatalities. But I think we're hurting them more...POTUS wants an upgraded CyberSword ready by 1600 hours today...we've got more zero-day stuff we can pull out of the drawer. Comments?" Pacer looked around the room.

Leeds spoke first. "Sir, it's not Russia. It's not China."

Pacer was accustomed to contrarian views from Leeds. He decided to humor the captain. "Okay, Leeds, I'll bite. What is it? Little green men from Neptune?"

"Sir," Leeds ignored the jibe, "there's growing evidence from our people down in CyberLab that this is a self-initiated anomaly. Whatever's happening, it's coming from within the Net. C2 can't get a good IP trace on anything. All the seekers come back to us, like the packet routing's been compromised. Plus they can't find any evidence of worms, viruses, botnets, or anything especially ominous coming from outside the Net. There's still the usual crap: probes and denial-of-service attacks, but that's like dust in the air. It's always there. The big stuff is not leaving any signatures we can trace. Whatever is happening seems to be emerging from the Net itself."

Pacer was skeptical. He lit up a pipe and puffed. "You mean to say we've got nothing in the library that can match the footprint of any of this stuff? I can't believe that. Malware always leaves a trace...a rogue packet here or there, some weird configuration or setting, executable files nobody's seen before. Our sniffers and seekers should be smoking by now, getting hits left and right on this stuff."

Leeds shook his head. "Sir, if I didn't know better, I'd say whatever is happening isn't some 'bug' inside the Net...not in the usual sense. General, it's the Net itself, as if some kind of sentient entity has emerged, is waking up and flexing some muscles."

Pacer looked like he had just swallowed an elephant. "Leeds, you've dropped this crap in my lap before and I've tried to humor you. This is beyond preposterous. Nobody thinks the Net's alive and kicking, like some puppy just popped into the litter."

"Where's your evidence?" asked Threat Analysis, in the person of Major Ryne, sitting right next to Leeds. "What kind of footprints are showing up?"

"That's what I'm saying," Leeds explained. "There are no exploit traces we can find. No vulnerability signals. No sniffers, keystroke loggers, vid pirates, none of any of that. Every runtime, every rootkit we examine...they're all clean. ScanKing looks inside every packet we think is suspicious...mostly we see normal stuff: addressing protocol, packet make-up, hop length, payloads, error detection, error correction...normal plain vanilla, white bread stuff."

"I heard you couldn't crack some of the payloads," said Network Defense. That was Captain Henning. "Prefixes, IDs, some of the headers...I heard there was some pretty weird encryption going on."

Leeds admitted that. "Hashes we haven't seen before, that's true." He looked at Pacer. "Sir, if I may, I'd like to conference in Dr. Tsu. CyberLab. He can explain this better than I can."

Pacer looked pained again. Great. Nothing like another egghead to bollix up the works. He knew POTUS wanted answers, not crackpot theories. "Very well...but no long dissertations, Leeds. Keep this to first-grade schoolyard level."

The hookup was made. James Tsu's boyish face popped up on the holo pedestal mounted on Pacer's desk. Tsu was thin to the point of starvation, pasty white, with a few unruly locks of black hair forever dropping into his eyes, which he perpetually brushed back. Pacer watched for a moment, willing his hands to keep from offering up a comb to the 3-d image.

"It's from the ADAM Project, sir," Tsu was saying. "We've uncovered some rather startling discoveries in our test cells."

"ADAM Project?" Pacer tried out the words. "Sounds like a kindergarten, Tsu. What the hell kind of lab are you running down there?"

"You're not far off, sir. You approved ADAM yourself last November, if you remember, sir."

"I don't, but go on."

Tsu warmed to his topic. His eyes, once sleepy little slits, had now widened to bright dark brown orbs, intense and focused.

"Sir, this is just a working hypothesis. It comes out of artificial intelligence. It doesn't matter so much that we're all made out of neurons and bones and muscles. Obviously, if we lose neurons in a stroke or in a degenerative disease like Alzheimer's, we lose consciousness. But in principle, what matters for consciousness is the fact that we have these incredibly complicated little machines, these little switching devices called nerve cells and synapses, and they're wired together in pretty complicated ways. The Worldnet now already has trillions of nodes. Each node is a computer. Each one of these computers contains a couple of billion transistors, so it is in principle possible that the complexity of the Net is such that it feels like something to be conscious. I mean, that's what it would be if the Net as a whole had consciousness. Depending on the exact state of the transistors in the Net, it might feel sad one day and happy another day, or whatever the equivalent is in Net space."

Pacer almost swallowed his pipe. "You're serious about this, Tsu? The Net could feel sad? It could feel happy? It could get mad, like my mother-in-law, and start throwing things?"

Tsu's face brightened with the possibilities. Pacer thought he looked like a child seeing his first birthday cake. "What I'm serious about is that the Net, in principle, could have conscious states. Now, do these conscious states express happiness? Do they express pain? Pleasure? Anger? Red? Blue? That really depends on the exact kind of relationship between the transistors, the nodes, the computers. It's more difficult to ascertain what exactly it feels. But there's no question that in principle it could feel something."

Pacer just wasn't buying it. "Just for argument's sake, let's say you're right. Personally, I think you're a loon, but just for argument's sake. So the Net is alive and thinking. And it's mad. What do we do about it? How do we quarantine it or take back control? Or can we just spank it and send it off to its room?"

It was plain that James Tsu had given this very point some thought. "Sir, I recommend we do what we would do with any newly discovered life form...study it. Examine it. Maybe we start disconnecting the Net from critical infrastructure to do this."

"Oh, yeah...wouldn't that be great?" said Henning, of Network Defense. "ANAD bots and the Net are more a part of life today than my own testicles...pardon my French, sir. To do what you're suggesting is like giving myself a lobotomy...it can't be done. Even if it could, I'm thinking the outcome wouldn't be pretty."

"Agreed," Pacer said. "We need countermeasures, not lab studies. POTUS wants our recommendations. POTUS wants to implement CyberSword, round two. If we don't think that's a good idea, it's our job to give the man some alternatives."

"We simmed these very scenarios recently," Tsu told them. His face disappeared for a moment, to be replaced and paired with some charts and graphs. "The last Com-Ex games, in fact. Look here—" his avatar hand underlined something titled in bold All Caps: Adam and Eve: The Eden Response. Detailed paragraphs, equations and graphs filled the air around the display.

Pacer shook his head. "First-grade, Tsu. First grade. Give me the executive summary."

"I'm sorry, sir...our best response comes from this scenario. We develop and insert some kind of entity into the Net, some kind of entity we can control and we confront this sentience. Maybe some version of an ANAD bot or swarm, a nanoscale entity that could physically engage this sentience and render it harmless, even capture it."

The trouble was, as Pacer could plainly see, that nobody had the slightest idea how to do this.

The briefing went on for a minute, then Pacer's newsfeed chimed in. It came from WorldNet...some kind of breaking news. The General waved the sound and video up full, haptic sensors converting his gestures into the right command. An announcer's voice could be heard detailing the incident.

"...reporting from London...we have word just in the last several minutes, directly from TrackSat Control, that two airliners have collided mid-air over the North Atlantic, about seventy nautical miles southwest of Keflavik, Iceland. One was en-route to New York, the other to London Heathrow. Both went down. Rescue forces are flooding into the area as we speak, but at first look, satellite is showing few if any survivors. TrackSat has reported some glitches and anomalies this evening in its air traffic control systems...coincident with other problems the Net has been having lately...we have more reporters on the scene...airline operations people are looking into....

Anson Leeds looked up from the newsfeed. CINCCYBER's face had gone deathly pale. And the image of James Tsu had frozen in place, while the newsfeed played out next to him on the same hologram stage, a strange juxtaposition of 3-d images, mixed and meshed together...CyberLab researcher, WorldNet news anchor and images of broken aircraft wings and smashed fuselage parts floating among drift ice in the North Atlantic....
Chapter 7

Aboard the Francis Bacon (UNS-225)

Cycling Trajectory C-77

Heliocentric Orbit Beyond Mars

January 25, 2121

0950 Hours (ship time)

Captain Oscar Amirante always hated it when anyone labeled his ship "Porky," especially if it was a crewmember. He got the bacon part all right, but all the same, the Francis Bacon was a dedicated, worthy and decorated veteran of Frontier Corps' cycler squadron, faithfully carving her way through inner solar system space like the rattling old bus that she was. The Bacon had served the Corps with distinction for years and Amirante like to think of her as an old horse, perhaps a little past her prime but still with strong legs, a good kick and enough sense to know when and where to go, which was generally where Sir Isaac Newton determined she would go.

Cyclers never veered from their course, not without good reason and not without a lot of thrust from their engines.

Amirante had been ordered by Frontier Corps to make just such a course change. The order had come from CINCSPACE himself and Amirante knew he couldn't question that. Farside had seen something they were calling MARTOP and the Bacon had been ordered to divert from the well-worn tracks of trajectory C-77 to investigate. He was none too happy about the change in plans and neither were the crew.

Amirante knew his crew had been looking forward to their next pass by Gateway Station, due in less than a month, where a shuttle would drop by the huge cycler for a crew exchange. The crew of the Bacon was tired and had been looking forward to going home. Now they had a new mission: investigate a dust cloud.

Swell.

Ship's Engineer Sergei Simonets was the first to react to the contact alarm. An insistent beeping announced that something was ahead of them, on a direct intercept course.

"Long range scan, Captain," he announced. "Diffuse mass...probably MARTOP."

Amirante studied the return. "Can you increase resolution?"

Simonets pecked at a few keys. "I can try. But we're at the limits of our sensors here. All I can say for sure is that it's not a solid object. It's a lot of objects, small dimensions. Maybe a dust cloud, like Farside suspects."

Amirante sniffed. "Farside doesn't know a dust cloud from a diamond ring. Smithers, do we need a course adjustment? I don't want Bacon plowing into something without knowing what it is."

Lieutenant Winston Smithers manned the nav console on the command deck. Smithers was an angel. A damn good one too, Amirante like to brag. The ship's executive officer was a swarm formation of nanobotic elements. It was long-standing Frontier Corps practice to staff cyclers with angels where possible. They were loyal. They were smart, having constantly upgraded quantum processors. They were flexible, driven by their config engines...angels could morph into anything they had a config for. Perfect crew members, reasoned the Corps in its wisdom.

They're a bag of bugs, said some of the crew. They're all smoke and no substance, said others. Amirante had to lay down the law on Corps regulations at least once a week, if not more often.

"Angels are here to stay. Get used to it. Think of them as a new type of equipment. Nobody likes change. Nobody likes to be knocked out of their comfort zone. And nobody likes people who are different. But its Corps policy and that's that."

Which didn't stop the grumbling.

Winston Smithers studied Bacon's course plot for a moment. "Current course will bring us alongside the main arm of the formation in forty two minutes," he announced. "We're on a tangential approach at the moment. Recommending maintain this course and slow to one-third."

Amirante ordered the slowdown. Simonets confirmed the signal back from Propulsion. Bacon's plasma torch engines banked thrust and her forward thrusters fired in response to the Captain's orders. "Answering one third, Captain."

"Very well."

"Matching velocity nicely," Smithers' reported.

"Bring us alongside," Amirante said, "but not too close. Maintain ten kilometers distance. I don't want Bacon poking her head into that cloud until we know what the hell we're dealing with. Anything on radar? Anything on spectrum...or ranging?"

Smithers made some adjustments to the ship's scan systems, cycling between different instruments: visual cameras, mass spectrometers, neutron flux devices, radiometers.

"Optical seems to be showing regular structure and pattern inside MARTOP, Captain. Whatever it is, it's not dust. Dust particles would be more random in size, shape, and major dimensions."

Amirante ran over CINCSPACE's orders in his mind for the hundredth time: approach phenomenon as closely as safe and practical...resolve structure and report...take samples and return to base C-77 trajectory...bring the samples home....

"Match course and speed," he told Simonets. "Lieutenant Smithers, lay aft to C deck. Get Frankie ready for a little side trip."

Smithers slaved his instruments to ISAAC, the ship's computer and headed for the aft gangway. "Aye, sir. What about crew?"

Amirante thought. "I want you to drive Frankie. Take Gurstenss and Pham too...they're good with the shuttle and they've done away missions before. But don't do anything stupid. My orders are to pinch a sample of that mess and get the hell out of here."

Smithers sported a thin, goateed look in his regulation config. Jet black "hair." Long, almost feminine fingers. Fine facial features. An artist look, maybe a pianist. Amirante wondered just who had approved that config. Maybe CINCSPACE himself. It was a bit unnerving to realize that Smithers could completely change appearance in a few minutes. Under Corps policy, angels serving as crew members had to maintain a primary config and it couldn't be altered without approval of the commanding officer. Crew members tended not to be too comfortable with crew mates who could like pianists one moment and a sack of potatoes the next.

"Understood, sir." Smithers vanished into the gangway and was gone.

Amirante heard ISAAC chiming and took a look. The analysis Smithers had been doing was still underway and the ship's computer had reached some conclusions about their target.

"What do you have now, ISAAC?"

The AI's voice was calm and soothing, almost like a therapist. Some crewmembers had taken to calling the AI Sigmund instead of ISAAC.

"Target resolution has improved sixty four hundred times in the last five minutes, Captain. The best fit with scan data supports a conclusion that individual elements of the MARTOP phenomenon are nanoscale in dimension, regular in structure and form, and likely are programmable entities. Element maneuvers and signatures correlate well with archived nanobotic signatures from Jovian Hammer expedition undertaken in September through December 2099."

"Mechs?" Amirante shook his head. "Jovian Hammer...wasn't that the Keeper system that Quantum Corps went after?"

"That is affirmative, sir. The Keeper system was a swarm of nanobotic elements that was found to be submerged in the ocean of Europa. Quantum Corps conducted a mission to reconnoiter and neutralize the swarm...intelligence suggested that the Keeper was coordinating operations of Config Zero on Earth."

"That was General Winger, if I remember right," Amirante thought. Jovian Hammer had ended before the Keeper could be neutralized. The crew had been recalled to Earth to continue the fight against Config Zero there. "MARTOP looks like the same thing, is that right, ISAAC?"

"Affirmative, sir. There are similarities in electromagnetic signature to Keeper elements."

Amirante passed the word on to Smithers and his crew aboard Frankie. They had just undocked from Bacon and were setting course to intercept the dust cloud.

"It's not dust, Smithers," Amirante told them. "ISAAC says it's like that Keeper at Europa...nanobots... lots of them."

"Understood, sir," Smithers' voice came back. "We will take appropriate precautions while obtaining samples."

"You do that, Lieutenant. No heroics today."

Frankie soon was visible out Bacon's forward portholes on the command deck, a smaller version of the cycler ship itself, with her twin spheres strung on a long latticework truss. Aft thrusters flared brightly as Smithers swung the shuttle onto an intercept course. Twenty kilometers away, a faint smudge could be seen drifting among the stars, the MARTOP cloud heading in its heliocentric orbit toward the inner solar system. Bacon had matched speed and course and was now station-keeping twenty kilometers away.

Frankie closed the distance in less than an hour.

Sergeant Nina Pham was Frankie's pilot, while Will Gurstenss ran ship systems and handled nav chores. Gurstenss studied the plot.

"Coming up on two kilometers now..." Gurstenss' fingers played over his console, calling up different displays. "Mass centroid on heading two five five, come left ten degrees, Nina—"

"Roger that," said Pham. She swung Frankie's nose onto the new course.

Smithers, in command of the sampling mission, studied his own displays: radiometers, mass spectrometers, radar, EM activity. "Hold this position, Sergeant Pham...I want to run this analysis first before we get any closer."

"What is it, sir?" asked Gurstenss, taking a peek out the forward porthole.

"Doesn't look like any dust cloud I've ever seen," added Pham. She halted Frankie's forward motion and the shuttle hung off half a klick, co-orbiting with MARTOP while Smithers took a closer look.

"Individual elements are in motion...that's what is causing all that speckling you're seeing," Smithers announced. "Long range scan is confirmed. These are not dust particles...they're almost like tiny spaceships. Each one is a self-contained element...they can maneuver, they can replicate, they have effectors I've never seen before—"

"Bots," said Pham. "It's a swarm, out here in the middle of nowhere—"

"In formation and heading toward Earth," Smithers agreed. "Now, we need to get our samplers ready and make a scooping run. Corporal Gurstenss, deploy samplers now."

Gurstenss pressed a few buttons. Outside the cabin, Frankie's sampling tubes swung out and into position, their containment capsules opening up in the process. The plan was to drive Frankie on a tangential course, barely skirting the outer perimeter of the swarm and pinch off a few samples on the pass. They would make multiple passes to ensure the samplers had a good handful of the bots. Then Frankie would turn about and head back to the mother ship.

"Tubes coming open, Lieutenant. Full deploy and capture enabled. Filters and containment in Prime One."

Smithers uttered a string of expletives...neither Pham nor Gurstenss could quite make out what the Lieutenant had said.

"Excuse me, sir, did you—"

Smithers quickly stabbed several buttons. "The swarm is coming apart...there's a sub-element breaking off from the main swarm—Pham, break off the run. Put us on—" Smithers checked his instruments "—a new heading...come left to one six eight degrees...increase speed to flank...I want to intercept that batch. Unless I'm mistaken—"

Pham had already laid in the new course. Frankie healed hard to port and her aft and quarter thrusters fired in staccato bursts. The shuttle shimmied like a wet dog, then surged forward.

"Lieutenant, what is it?"

Smithers was frantically working his instruments. "A sub-element of the MARTOP formation has broken off from the main swarm. It's taken up a new course...right now, it's on an intercept course for the Bacon...I'll advise the Captain—" Smithers put through the call and got Amirante on the line, explaining what they were seeing. 'Captain, we're trying to get between you and the swarm...recommend you pull Bacon back ten kilometers, quickly, sir. These bots have tremendous maneuverability."

Amirante's voice was strained. His rapid-fire orders to Maneuvering could be heard in the background. "Understood, Lieutenant. Get yourself away from there. Get back to the ship if you can....no heroics, is that understood?"

Smithers acknowledged. "We're trying to intercept the element, sir. But they've got quite a head start...I'm not sure—"

It was a simple matter of mechanics. The MARTOP swarm was over fifty kilometers in length, several dozen more in breadth. A small batch of the swarm had detached itself, peeling off and turning about, streaming off like a cloud sheared apart in high winds, heading directly for the Francis Bacon. The separation had occurred behind Frankie. Smithers was trying to get the shuttle turned around and headed back to block the swarm's approach, but the shuttle's momentum was in the opposite direction. Maneuvering took time and the laws of orbital mechanics had to be observed.

Smithers' own internal processor had already given him the bad news, even before Nina Pham had announced it. There was no way Frankie could get there in time.

"Estimating contact in less than a minute," the pilot said. "That cloud of bugs will be on top of the Bacon in no time."

"Come on...come on..." muttered Gurstenss. "Come on, Bacon, move, damn you, move!"

The laws of physics dictated that the swarm element would intercept and envelop Bacon while Frankie was still a quarter klick away, though they were closing fast. Smithers studied the tactical geometry and made a decision.

"Pham, Gurstenss, take over up here—" Smithers moved toward the aft hatch.

"Sir, where are you going?"

"To the airlock, Sergeant. You've got the conn." The angel disappeared down the gangway.

Smithers reached the airlock and slipped inside, starting the de-press cycle. As air was being vented to space, he began disassembling himself. By the time the cycle was done and the outer door swung open, Winston Smithers was an amorphous cloud of twinkling, sparkling bots.

***Full propulsors...coming to intercept heading*** he announced. The swarm wafted out of the airlock and turned to meet the oncoming cloud that was moving inexorably toward the Francis Bacon.

Aboard the Bacon's command deck, Captain Amirante realized what had happened. He didn't have time to order Smithers back inside; Bacon was about to be engulfed. It was about to become a very bad day for cycler ship UNS-225.

"Simonets, all back full...get us out of here!"

Ship's Engineer Simonets was already stoking ship's thrusters, trying to wheel the great kebab skewer with onions that was the Francis Bacon about. "Full thrusters now, Captain...she just can't turn about fast enough—"

"Range to swarm--?"

Simonets checked Ranging. "Less than five hundred meters...we're coming about, but they're still closing...now four hundred eighty."

"Jeez, what kind of propulsors have they got?"

"We've got Lieutenant Smithers on scope...he's two hundred and fifty meters from swarm centroid...outer elements may be in range. Detecting no engagement yet...no EM spikes, nothing—"

Amirante had the impression that the whole attack was taking place in slow motion, that somehow he had stepped outside of himself and was looking down on his own body barking our orders on the command deck. It was a pleasant, almost intellectual illusion.

He shook himself out of the daze.

"Sound collision. Activate EAB...get all the pressure doors closed and sealed now! The bastards are going to be on us in a minute—"

The first effects took less time than that.

Suddenly, alarm warnings and sirens sounded throughout the ship. Hull breach.

"It's aft, Captain! C deck, looks like one of the Stores lockers...outer hull breach...pressure drop increasing!"

"Deploy patch bots!" At Amirante's order, swarms of onboard nanobots configured to quickly patch and seal small hull breaches were released. White fog was already forming around the gangway entrance and Amirante felt his ears popping as air rushed aft to the breach. "Get that hole sealed!"

Simonets could barely hear the Captain over the roar of the air. Pens, cups, loose papers swirled in the entrained hurricane. "More breaches! C Deck...it's the lifepod docking ring...and now B deck, the mast tunnel...multiple breaches...we're losing pressure fast--!"

"All hands, lay aft to the lifepods...prepare to abandon ship...get those pods up and operating—"

"Already underway, Captain—" Simonets gritted his teeth, trying to equalize pressure. His eyeballs were about to burst, his ears already had. A thin stream of blood was quickly sucked out and joined the cyclone building around them.

Three hundred meters away, the Smithers angel swarm was closely rapidly on the enemy.

***Approaching outer bands now...I have my propulsors on max...effectors out...bond disrupters primed...closing now...less than twenty meters to first contact--***

The first sign of engagement was a bright line snaking through space just off Bacon's portside truss, up by A deck, the command deck. A flashing ribbon danced around the edges of the ship as uncounted trillions of mechs collided.

***Engaging now...closing on first wave...will arm bond disrupters....***

Unseen by human eyes, the battle was joined. Simonets fought back the shrieking airstream, blood seeping out of his ears, distended eyeballs...all to study what Smithers was sending back...the barest outlines of the enemy mechs were visible in radar wavelengths, forming a shadowy image on his display. Even with the fuzzy shapes flitting across the screen, and the pops and flashes of bond disrupters going off left and right, he could just make out the multi-lobed structure of the MARTOP bots...effectors and grabbers festooning every patch of surface, propulsors at either end, of a type he had never seen before. Even ISAAC couldn't find a match in its archives. Whatever they were, wherever they had come from, the MARTOP swarm was a different beast and Simonets would tell that Smithers was having a hell of time in the battle.

A hundred meters behind A deck, Captain Amirante and several other crewmen were trying their best to patch the hull breaches threatening Bacon.

Amirante had planted himself alongside the entrance to the mast tunnel that went back to C deck. Entrained debris and loose gear swirled around the breach; already a white fog had formed and was thickening. Emergency air blasted into the compartment and the shriek pierced ears and made orders and commands impossible.

"Suttles! Chin! Get back up to B deck!" Amirante yelled. "I've got ISAAC releasing more bots...I can patch this one! Just make sure the pressure doors are shut upstream! We gotta keep pressure up in B deck...it's the hab spaces, the galley...get up there and cycle the hatch!!"

The two crewmen crawled up the tunnel , clawing against the on-rushing air, grabbing EAB masks as they went. Once the hatch was secure, Amirante went to work, guiding the patchbot swarm toward the breach.

Flickering lights could barely be made out through the cold fog. ISAAC was running the swarm master, commanding configs and replication cycles to keep the swarm from disintegrating in the maelstrom. Slowly, gradually, revving propulsors to max, ISAAC and Amirante worked together to lay the swarm against the hull inner bulkhead plates and close over the pinhole breach. To make matters worse, MARTOP bots had already infiltrated inside the compartment and ISAAC had to pinch off a small element, change their config and send them off like a posse to hunt down and disable the intruder bots.

All around Amirante's head, shrieking air and pelting debris slammed into the breached area.

It's slackening. It's lessening. He told himself that was true, even if it wasn't. He chanced a peek, having to duck and cover himself to keep from being clobbered, and saw it wasn't his imagination. The white fog had dimmed, dispersed a little. No. He hadn't imagined it. The shriek was dying off. A bubbling mass foamed and percolated around the breach hole as ISAAC drove more and more bots into the patch, bit by bit, slowly but surely thickening the mass like stirring soup in a pot. After a few moments, the shriek had fallen to a whistle, then a fainter rustle.

The patch was working.

And behind Amirante's head, ISAAC was still trying to corral the MARTOP bots that had infiltrated the ship.

***Captain, recommending all personnel evacuate the mast tunnel and isolate themselves on B or A decks. I will endeavor to replicate max density swarm...force intruder bots into a confined space***

Amirante understood what the AI was saying. "A clampdown? We don't have Frankie back yet, ISAAC. Gurstens, Pham, even Smithers are still off-ship."

***Understood, Captain...intruder bots can be more easily defeated when contained and isolated...these bots operate with effectors of an unknown type...I have no effective defense against their bond disrupters...one on one, we are no match...tactics must evolve....***

"Okay, I get the picture." Amirante found a comm station and got on the 1MC. "All hands, listen up. ISAAC's executing a clampdown inside the mast tunnel. Isolate yourselves on one of the decks. Button up all decks immediately."

Amirante slipped into the gangway and made his way up to A deck, the ship's command center. Simonets was running the ship from there.

"Okay, ISAAC...proceed."

Well aft of them, the ship's AI executed the clampdown. It was a brute force tactic. Instead of engaging the MARTOP bots individually, ISAAC would slam the enemy with mass, overwhelm the bots with maximum replication, Big Bang the bastards into submission. Inside the mast tunnel between C and B decks, the air soon burned supernova hot as uncountable trillions of mechs replicated, driving MARTOP into every corner and niche. With all decks up and down the gangway sealed, the intruder fought back savagely, but the effect of sheer mass would be felt soon enough. Amirante knew there was a limit to what Bacon could take; the trick was to slam and squeeze and throttle the enemy before the ship's structure gave way. Up on the command deck, the Captain and Simonets watched sensors and strain gauges closely.

"As soon as ISAAC has the bastards under control, and we get Frankie and Smithers back onboard, get us the hell away from that swarm.," Amirante told Simonets.

The engineer checked on Frankie. "Shuttle is still a kilometer away and stationkeeping, Captain. Gurstens and Pham report they're just waiting for the all-clear."

Just then, ISAAC reported more bad news.

***Receiving multiple system failure signals from swarm Winston Smithers...Smithers currently engaged with MARTOP but primary propulsors are now off-line***

"Do we still have comms, ISAAC?" Somewhere out there, Smithers was in a cat fight with MARTOP and getting his whiskers waxed. "What have you got?"

***Distress and overload signals on all bands, Captain...effectors down to ten percent...bond disrupters off line...I will display the current readings from Smithers master bot...***

A console display in front of Amirante blinked into life. The story it told wasn't pleasant:

***Pyridine probes...FAIL***

***Carbene Grabbers...FAIL***

***Enzymatic Knife...FAIL***

***Photon Lens...FAIL***

***Ribosomal Systems...20%***

"Jeez, Smithers' is dying—" Simonets could hardly believe his own eyes. "Captain--?"

Amirante was already on comms to Frankie. "Gurstens...Pham...Smithers is in a world of hurt...I'll give you a vector. Steer that way and try to grab him...what's left of him."

Pham's voice crackled over the comm. "Aye, sir...we see the point of engagement...it's about half a kilometer from here. I don't want to bring Frankie up too close. We'll have to do this by hand—"

Amirante knew what that meant. "Copy that. Be careful out there."

Gurstens and Pham would drive Frankie as close to MARTOP as they dared. Then they would don suits and take a walk.

For the next few minutes, Amirante hardly breathed.

It was always going to be a ticklish operation. Nina Pham drove Frankie closer and closer to the MARTOP swarm, probing, sniffing, trying not to get too close to the bots, while hunting for any kind of signal, any kind of signature, from the Smithers bot master. She knew every bot had a unique fingerprint, a special array of electromagnetic, acoustic, and atomic characteristics that distinguished them.

The trick would be for Gurstens to go EVA and grab the failing bot without also grabbing a fistful of MARTOP.

"Got it," she muttered into her lip mic. "It's Smithers...everything matches up. You ready in there?"

Gurstens had already zipped up his hypersuit and squeezed into the airlock. "Ready as I'll ever be." He thumbed control studs of the side of the containment capsule, checking action. Lights cycled on and off, red, yellow and green.

"I make the target at thirty meters off Frankie's port side bow...I'll give you a vector as soon as you're out."

Gurstens exited the ship and oriented himself toward the faint flicker of the MARTOP swarm. A dim snaking line of light flashed on and off, like Christmas lights draped around shrubbery, as MARTOP drifted Earthward, slamming what few atoms it could find to maintain structure. Pham dared not bring Frankie any closer; every swarm sought feedstock to grab atoms and keep itself going. Swarms were like flies...always seeking something sweet to grab onto and grow on.

Pham ported the vector right to Gurstens's hypersuit and he soon felt his jets pulsing, driving him toward the target. He couldn't see anything; it was coal black in space, with only the distant Sun for company. That and the lights of the swarm. He took a deep breath, swallowed hard and forced himself to relax.

He felt like a circus entertainer sticking his head in a lion's mouth.

"Less than ten meters," he muttered. "I'm going manual." He stopped the approach and studied the scene for a moment. Trillions of bots were slamming atoms and the edge of the swarm resembled a distant thunderstorm, backlit by lightning. "I've got him in my crosshairs, Nina. Closing slowly...capsule coming open." He thumbed the control studs. Slung in a web belt on his suit, the containment vessel came alive, ticking over, readying itself to receive its tiny guest. Whatever was left of Winston Smithers would need a few weeks of TLC to survive and be regenerated. But that was a problem for Gateway engineers. First, he had to grab Smithers and skedaddle before MARTOP took a liking to all his atoms and made dinner out of him.

Centimeter by centimeter, Gurstens closed on the target, centering the signature return on his sighting scope. It was like to trying to grab a piece of candy out of a whirling fan blade.

"Got it! I got him, Nina!"

Gurstens had extracted the capsule and turned himself to make a glancing sweep along the visible, detectable edge of MARTOP. For a brief second, there was a stuttering vibration along his hypersuited arm—that was MARTOP trying to get a bite—then the capsule lit up green...it had sucked in the remains of the Winston Smithers bot master and shut itself tight. Lights cycled green and red. Gurstens's head-up display told the story: TARGET ACQUIRED. CONTAINMENT SECURED.

Smithers was home. If you could call a glorified coffee can with a quantum processor brain home.

"On my way back...no signatures on me that I can detect. Sweep me good when I'm in range, Nina."

"Don't worry about that. I'll lick you up one side and down the other like a dog, to make sure you're not bringing anything aboard my ship."

Gurstens checked out clean. He made his way back to the shuttle and squeezed inside, palming the Re-Press button after he had dogged the hatch. A few minutes later, he stepped out of the airlock, handed the containment capsule to Pham and laboriously extracted himself from the hypersuit.

"Let's get the hell out of here and go home."

Twenty minutes later, Frankie had nosed into her docking station alongside the Francis Bacon and disgorged her passengers.

Amirante was down on C deck outside the airlock. He took the capsule from Gurstens and turned it over end for end, squinting at its tiny display, recording vitals from what was left of Winston Smithers inside. "Hell of a way to come home," he said. "We'll have to run diagnostics pretty soon, let Gateway know what happened."

Nina Pham was trying to straighten out her kinky black hair, after hours in a hypersuit, kneading the braids with long, practiced fingers. "Will he make it, Captain? Can Smithers be regenerated?"

Amirante shrugged. "If there's enough of the processor left. That's up to the engineers."

Gurstens handed the Captain another capsule. "That's our samples, Captain. MARTOP, up close and personal. Handle with care."

Amirante just shook his head. "If I had my way, I'd toss the damn thing overboard and be done with it. But the Corps wanted samples. So I'll give them samples. We nearly got our butts chewed off getting them."

For the next few hours, Bacon co-orbited with the MARTOP formation as it drifted steadily Earthward. Fortunately, MARTOP made no further moves toward the ship. The swarm seemed content to plow through space, munching on stray atoms like a contented cow, as it dropped down the Sun's gravity well, heading...so the astros at Farside said...for a likely intercept with Earth in less than two months.

Amirante knew he had a crippled ship. Francis Bacon had suffered multiple hull breaches when MARTOP came after them, a full-bore decompression casualty and she had lost two crewmembers: Systems Techs Klieg and Disrud. The crew was mustered for a farewell service and the deceased techs were given a memorial sendoff and their bodies discharged to space in pressurized coffin pods, complete with beacons and running lights.

"On eternal patrol," Amirante pronounced, then dismissed the crew from the service, held on C deck.

Now, there was the matter of getting Bacon turned around and maneuvered onto course for return to Gateway Station, with her precious swarm samples. UNISPACE had sent orders for UNS-225 to depart from her normal cycler run and come home.

Amirante climbed the gangway to A deck, where Simonets and ISAAC were monitoring the burn as they departed the vicinity of MARTOP.

About damn time, he thought. I believe we're due a little extra liberty for making this little side trip. Whether the brass hats at UNISPACE saw it that way would be another matter.

Gateway Station

Earth-Moon L2 Point

Two Weeks Later....

General Ravi Ramachandran had been CINCSPACE for all of two years now and in that time, he had never particularly liked rocketing off into space like some heroic astronaut from olden days. Oh, sure, shuttles were smooth and their crew well practiced in making the half-day hop up to Gateway Station; you couldn't ask for a better ride. Hell, the Paris Metro that he used to take to the Quartier General was a bone-rattling teeth-clencher compared to the shuttle trips. It was just something about zooming off into the heavens at twenty-five times the speed of sound, zipping into and out of zero-g, accelerating, decelerating, all the bangs and pops and annoying booms and barrel rolls...his stomach had long since given up trying to deal with that and it was only the yellow pills, lots of yellow pills and some strategically placed biobots in his inner ear that allowed him to keep breakfast down at all.

Still, this trip was surely necessary, he told himself. CINCSPACE wanted to see for himself the exact nature of the thing that had nearly cost him a cycler ship and her crew out beyond Mars orbit.

"Doesn't look like much," he had said to the lab techs in the containment chamber on Gateway's B Module. "Propulsors, effectors, could be a garden-variety ANAD bot from anywhere."

The lab tech had a nameplate. It read Munoz. "True enough, General, but it's what you don't see that makes this bugger so special."

"Explain."

"Well, sir, it's the whole architecture that's so interesting. We've run analyses up one side and down the other on this mother and every analytic we do comes up the same...these are Keeper bots, sure as I sitting here staring at a flux imager. Everything we've measured points that way: from the compound tetrahedral casing to the grabbers and disrupters, from the flagellar thrusters to the power cells, from picowatt propulsors to the actuator mast...it is an ANAD clone, to be sure, but more importantly, it's a damn close match to what we have in archives. It's like someone took our Keeper files from the Jovian Hammer mission and banged out an exact copy."

"That's what worries me the most." The voice was familiar but as CINCSPACE turned around, there was no body attached to the voice. "Maybe somebody did."

It was Johnny Winger, with CINCQUANT in the person of General Jake Argo, vidconned in from Table Top Mountain, on the surface.

Ramachandran was momentarily startled but he was glad Winger was there, if only virtually. "You've looked at this thing, General?"

"Like the back of my hand," Winger said. He and Argo seemed to be in an office setting, probably CINCQUANT's office suite at Table Top. "If these are Keeper bots, that's officially bad news." He recounted a little of what had happened in the Jovian Hammer mission, years before.

"There are some people who think the Keeper's a portal to the Old Ones, maybe an archive of their knowledge, even a gateway to the 'mother swarm.' I don't know about that. But what I do know is this: the Keeper is a swarm, a big one, comprised of bots of unbelievable speed, flexibility and intelligence. It's like a giant quantum coupler. And because it's a swarm, it can disperse and re-assemble just about anywhere. On Jovian Hammer, we encountered it below the surface of the ocean. Now—" Winger shrugged, "who knows? Maybe it's on the Europan surface. Maybe somewhere else."

CINCSPACE introduced Winger to Major Evan Metcalf, from UNIFORCE Special Investigation Branch, who had come to Gateway to see the MARTOP sample for himself. Metcalf had never met Winger before but the legendary atomgrabber's exploits were well known around UNIFORCE.

"General," Metcalf asked, "I've heard about this Keeper...it had some kind of displacement ability, didn't it?"

"It did. Because the Keeper is a nanobotic swarm, the damn thing can make its individual bots multiply instantaneously, through some kind of entangler system. Multiple copies of swarms and bots representing different probability states. That's what the eggheads call it. I don't pretend to understand it, but it was a bad-ass system to encounter. All these copies and copies of copies aren't real, not in a touchable sense. They just appear real. Multiple probabilities...gives you a real headache. When you engage them, they all collapse into one real swarm. This spawning or shadowing process made a shambles of our tactics. We were constantly engaging targets that weren't real. You could never know what was real until you engaged. And if you engaged the wrong thing—" Winger just shook his head. "It didn't help that sometimes you engaged and the Keeper just displaced you to another time and space, just like that."

Metcalf watched the MARTOP sample, wriggling in the imager view under containment, beating to some unknown inner rhythm. "And now we may have elements of this same Keeper in near-Earth space."

CINCSPACE had a bad feeling about this. "There's only one conclusion we can make, gentlemen: what Europa-Eye saw as ice geysers on Europa wasn't ice at all. It was the Keeper, all or part of it, now up on the surface. And somehow, if General Winger is right, it must be dividing, replicating, maybe spalling off elements of its basic assembler swarm and sending them our way."

"My question is why?" Metcalf asked. "What triggered this? If these bots have been coming our way for a few months, that might explain all these meteor showers we've been having. The damn things are falling to Earth. No telling how long this has been going on."

Winger pointed out that Config Zero had once been in contact with the Keeper. "But we severed that link ten years ago when we quarantined Config Zero on Kipwezia. It's been more or less contained ever since. Major, I'm supposed to be retired now. I'm not in the loop anymore. Anything from Q2 on that?"

Metcalf shook his head. "Nada. UNIFORCE hasn't detected any quantum signals at all coming to or from Config Zero. The disentanglers seem to be still working. Unless the Bugs have figured something out we don't know of. What the hell has stirred the Keeper into activity again after all these years?"

The thought was there for all to say, but nobody wanted to say it. Finally, Winger spoke up. "Delta P...the 51 Pegasi anomaly. Or Devils' Eye, out beyond Pluto. Maybe they're even the same thing."

CINCSPACE was skeptical. "That theory has been floating around for years. You're talking Old Ones again, General. You're saying the Old Ones have somehow commanded the Keeper to make all these moves."

"I'm saying it's a theory. And it fits a lot of facts, Ravi. We can't just discount the Old Ones as some kind of mass hallucination, like a lot of people do."

"Some people like me," CINCSPACE countered. "If you're theory's correct, General, and all these bots are falling out of the sky like meteors, what effect are they having? Wouldn't you expect quantum nanoscale bots with the smarts of the Keeper to have some impact here on Earth?"

Before Winger could answer that, Metcalf cut in. "Sir, all we have to do is watch the news lately. What's on the vids? Increased meteor showers. Problems and glitches inside WorldNet and Solnet. The UN frees Symborg after years of containment. Angels are spreading everywhere. Assimilationists are sprouting like mushrooms after a rain. Huge spikes in angelizing. These things can't all be unrelated coincidences."

Nobody had an answer for Metcalf. Ramachandran turned to regard the MARTOP sample again. It was a tiny thing, no more than fifty billionths of a meter in any one direction. Yet it had incredible capability, incredible intelligence. One technician had termed it almost god-like, with the computational resources of a world packed into something the size of a virus. A god virus, able to replicate with blazing speed, into a near infinite array of configurations, able to entangle matter and manipulate time and space, appearing in multiple places at the same time.

Left unsaid was the uneasy conclusion that no one who gazed on the MARTOP sample wanted to voice: that maybe the Old Ones were very real. Maybe they were looking at one right now.
Chapter 8

UNIFORCE Headquarters

The Quartier-General, Paris

February 4, 2121

1130 hours

In all the years she had been a UNIFORCE Inspector, Valerie Patrice had never been to the Quartier-General and, as she climbed out of the taxi at the front entrance to go to her briefing on the sixtieth floor, she 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.

Inspector Valerie Patrice was mad, as she took the lift up to UNSAC's suite of offices. Maybe not mad. She was sad. How about depressed? Maybe all three. She was just coming off bereavement leave and had just finished putting her Mom in the ground two days before after a long battle with cancer. She could still hear the doctors talking...we tried the latest...oncobots couldn't save her...tissue re-gen didn't work...the pancreas was too far deteriorated...there was nothing....

Patrice liked to think of herself as a professional. UNIFORCE officers completed the mission, no matter what. Obstacles were just chances for greater glory. But it was hard and Patrice was enough of a realist to understand that the grieving had just begun.

And why, exactly, had the oncobots failed to seek out and destroy the cancer cells? Something about unusual configs, aggressive responses, effector malfunctions, blah, blah, blah. Wasn't UNIFORCE the parent of Quantum Corps? And wasn't Quantum Corps like a magician with nanoscale robotic mechanisms?

It didn't make any sense. As she reached the sixtieth floor and had herself scanned in through Security to UNSAC's quarters, Valerie Patrice realized that what she wanted more than anything else, more than lame excuses and explanations laced with jargon, was just to have her own Mom back. Didn't the Assimilationists promise such things?

The briefing was scheduled to be held in a small situation room that was part of UNSAC's suite of offices. Patrice stuck her head in and immediately saw more brass than she'd seen in months. Whatever this was about, it was big enough for field-grade to show up in force.

Evelyn Lumumba was just coming in through another door when Patrice took her seat. The Security Affairs Commissioner always commanded any space she occupied, rather like a lethal lioness lording it over a den full of snarling cubs. Officers lined both sides of the table and the back chairs, some real, some avatars, some virtual.

Lumumba waved everyone to be seated.

"We're launching a special mission," she announced, without any forewarning. "Now that the S-G has seen fit to release Symborg from containment, it seems expedient to form up a covert surveillance team to keep an eye on the slimebag. This op is called Operation Quantum Mirror."

General Jake Argo, CINCQUANT and physically located at Table Top Mountain, spoke up. His virtual sat across from Patrice, almost as lifelike as the real thing, right down to the mole on the side of his cheek. "What's the tasking?"

Lumumba waved a hand over her haptic pad and brought into life a mélange of images, dancing over the bowl-shaped stage at the center of the table. "The official purpose of Quantum Mirror is to determine if Config Zero has become active again. There's intel from Q2 that physical couriers...actual humans...are entering and leaving Kipwezia and this is how Config Zero's getting orders and instructions out. Q2 has actually narrowed their suspicions down to one person—" Lumumba waved her hand again and a new face materialized on the small stage—"Assimilationist delegate Kwan Keyser. Keyser—this image was taken just the other day outside the UN in New York—is a delegate from the east African Sanctuary. He's also a card-carrying member of the Church of Assimilation. General Argo, you've got something--?"

Argo had beeped for attention. His virtual stood up and went to a board in one corner, where a mosaic of images emerged like a pointillist painting.

"Q2 has strong indicators from our most recent intel sweeps that Config Zero, perhaps in concert with this Keeper on Europa, is behind recent increases in cases of angelizing. We've all seen the stories, on vid, on WorldNet, you probably have neighbors who've done this. Angels are everywhere and it's a growing menace."

General Pacer, CINCCYBER, had a virtual at the opposite end of the table. 'Pacer' came up to the board to stand alongside the Argo virtual. "The Net itself has become affected. We've had glitches, outages, malware attacks, worms, viruses, Trojans and other assaults to deal with the last few weeks and the frequency is increasing. I'd sure like to know if this bag of bugs is behind all of it."

Argo went on, the virtual indicating several images on the display. "Kipwezia is surrounded by disentanglers and a huge MOB net. Quantum Corps accomplished that a decade ago, during the Great Rift Zone mess. The eggheads say there's no way Config Zero should be able to communicate anything, even by quantum signals. Yet that seems to be happening."

UNSAC twirled a finger in one of her long hair braids. "Anything we can detect?"

"Not yet, ma'am. If Config Zero's active, it isn't through any channel we know of. And we can't locate any comm signatures either. By every intel indicator we have, Config Zero's been quiescent, deader than dirt, for a long time."

UNSAC addressed the Pacer virtual. "General, you just sent me a message about a theory one of your techs had...something from CyberLab, I believe."

"I did, Madam Commissioner. CyberLab has lots of theories, you have to understand. They get paid to blue-sky theories. Some of them, well—" Pacer shrugged a bit sheepishly, "—they're more like bad dreams. But one tech, James Tsu, has this idea that the Net has become infected with something more than just malware, something more than your average garden-variety virus. Tsu thinks there are nanobotic entities travelling around the Net, creating havoc."

That made Valerie Patrice sit up and take notice. Bots inside the Net? Even Evelyn Lumumba stopped twirling her braids and sat up straighter.

"Did I hear that correctly, General...bots inside the Net?"

Pacer was dismissive. "The evidence isn't conclusive, Madam Commissioner. It's just a theory...somehow, according to Tsu, bots have come from these meteor showers, in other words from the Keeper at Europa, and penetrated into the Net and now they're running amok, causing all kinds of mischief... little nanobotic pixies and fairies, if you ask me. I don't put much stock in this, but I wanted all theories to be properly aired."

Lumumba waved a hand over her haptic pad and Pacer's briefing sheets appeared in mid-air. UNSAC circled her index finger, highlighting one paragraph in particular. She read the words aloud: "Your words, General—'The Net is now acting as a sort of bloodstream for infecting all of Earth and its inhabitants with angels and assorted swarm entities, all under the presumed control of Config Zero, through the Keeper.' You put this in your briefing for a reason. You're saying that Config Zero's behind all this and bots are falling out of the sky and somehow getting into the Net."

Pacer smiled, trying not to be too ingratiating. Putting Evelyn Lumumba into UNSAC's seat had been a political earthquake several years before. The snickering and the grumbling hadn't stopped since. One day, she's a Cameroonian tribal chief. The next day, UN Commissioner of Security Affairs. Proof of the old saying: the cream rises until it sours. Pacer swallowed his politically incorrect inner thoughts and tried to explain.

"We're looking into every possibility to get at the root of what's happening to the Net. At this point, I can't afford to discount anything, however bizarre it may seem. I've already appointed an investigative team. It's headed by Captain Anson Leeds, out of our Cyber Corps." Pacer nodded to Patrice. "He'll be coordinating closely with parallel efforts inside UNIFORCE."

UNSAC acknowledged Patrice for the first time. "Inspector Patrice will be heading up our investigation. I've already had her detailed to lead Quantum Mirror. She'll be working closely with our investigator, Major Evan Metcalf, who's up at Gateway right now, looking over the MARTOP samples."

And that was how Valerie Patrice found out she was in this mess up to her neck.

An hour later, Valerie Patrice was on vid with Evan Metcalf. Over the vidlink, Patrice fell back on an old habit, a way she had developed over the years of how to appraise people quickly and accurately.

"I like to follow the mouth, the lips of a suspect," she had once told a colleague of hers at a London pub. "Some people look at eyes. Some people look at hands. Lips are full of muscles. I've studied this. Orbicularis oris...that's what all your lip muscles are called. Think how truly expressive lips are. They smile. They frown. They laugh. They pout. They kiss and bite each other. You can learn a hell of lot about a person from their lips...whether they're for real, whether they're lying or pulling your leg or hiding something or not paying attention. Take angels, for example. With all our nanobotic technology, angels don't have believable lips. You can tell an angel by the lips...they don't look right, they don't track right."

With all this analysis going on, Valerie Patrice decided that Evan Metcalf was real enough. You could see it in the lips, even over the vidlink.

"Special Investigations Branch," Metcalf told her, by way of introduction. "UNIFORCE Paris, U-808 office."

Patrice decided she could be just as abrupt. She put on her best interrogator face. "Counter-intel, Section U-7, London office. Now that we've gotten that out of the way, what can you tell me about this MARTOP?"

Metcalf smirked and relaxed a little. Patrice was just another cop. "Strong match with archival data about the Keeper. I read up on a little ancient history yesterday...the Jovian Hammer mission from 2099. General Winger and all those characters. The analytics are close enough to make most of us think MARTOP's from the same source."

"The Keeper."

"Exactly. The gift that keeps on giving, straight from Europa, if you can believe what the astros at Farside are saying."

"I'm curious," Patrice decided to pursue another avenue, "about what kind of containment systems we have around Kipwezia. What's keeping Config Zero under wraps? Know anything about that?"

Metcalf decided he would show this female cop a thing or two about what Special Investigators actually knew. "Sure. We got several dozen Mark III disentanglers spotted about the island. All they do is scramble known or detectable quantum signals—"

"I know what they do...I wasn't born an hour ago, you know. Are they working? Are they operational? What about service life, maintenance, that sort of thing?"

Metcalf wasn't going to get sucked into something he had little actual knowledge of. "Sure they're working. They self-test every day...we've got years of self-test results. You think UNIFORCE would emplace crap they couldn't trust?"

"I don't think you want me to actually answer that, do you? So we have disentanglers to bollix up Config Zero's comms. What else do we have?"

"What are you...my mother? There's the MOBnet too. Big shield of bots that covers the whole island. Class A mesh too...you couldn't squeeze an atom through that shield."

"Even below-ground.?"

Metcalf was caught off-guard by that question. He couldn't even fake knowing the answer. He didn't try. "Actually, I'm not sure. But it's something we should look into. Bots with the right config can burrow like prairie dogs when they have to."

Patrice smirked. It felt good to catch Metcalf in something he didn't know. Touché.

"So, UNSAC thinks this Kwan Keyser is acting as a courier," she went on. Metcalf had followed the briefing from Gateway. "If that's so, how's he getting in and out? Config Zero can't send comms the usual way. A physical courier needs an entrance, a hatch, a door of some kind."

"Maybe Keyser's an angel too. Disassembles himself and percolates up from belowground."

That was nuts, but Patrice knew they couldn't discount anything. "It's a mystery," she agreed. "Maybe Symborg has something to do with this."

The two of them agreed that a detailed surveillance effort would have to be mounted. They had tasking from UNSAC to follow Symborg. Keyser would have to be added to the list, which meant more resources, more time.

"Keyser needs to be shadowed," Patrice decided. "Symborg too. I'll requisition some spybots from Branch. We'll need human eyes as well. You've seen the TOE?"

Metcalf had already scanned the Table of Organization and Equipment and decided it would never do. First rule of investigating: never let a Security Affairs Commissioner do a man's job. "I have. It needs work."

"I'll draw up a more detailed list of what we need and submit it. I think UNSAC'll play ball with us. She can't afford to appear weak, now that the S-G's let Symborg go, against all advice. I'm thinking a minimum of five or six humans, maybe more ANAD systems. And we'll need the right configs, drivers, et cetera. Lot of work."

"I have to stay here at Gateway for a while longer," Metcalf told her. "UNIFORCE needs to know exactly what these MARTOP bots are capable of...testing and more testing. That's the only way we can develop countermeasures that'll work."

"I'll get started," Patrice said. "We should vidlink everyday...this a good time?"

"As good as any."

"Metcalf, I've decided I like you. You're a credit to your gender and a hard-nosed asshole to boot. UNIFORCE needs more like you."

So they agreed that Patrice would work Earthside for the time being and Metcalf would handle the investigation at Gateway and Farside. Patrice figured the arrangement had possibilities.

Every Sherlock Holmes needed a Watson.

Training and equipping for Quantum Mirror got underway almost immediately.

Valerie Patrice gathered her entire Quantum Mirror surveillance team in the tactical containment center, on the twentieth floor of the Quartier-General. They were all there: Benes, Lourdes, Kaminski, Cain and Kastanek. They came to take a look at the newest team member.

"It's called Sherlock," Patrice told them. "The latest in surveillance and spy bots. Take a look—"

The imager displayed a trellis-like scaffolding inside the containment tank. Attached to the trellis was a small nanoscale bot, looking for all the world like a bunch of beads strung on a pole. The beads were hardened casing segments, housing the processor, comm system, actuator and effector controls, memory cells and the config driver. All up and down the beads were hung arms and appendages, the bot's numerous effectors.

Patrice rattled the details off like a proud mother: "Main platform and actuator mast are reinforced carbon nanotube fiber, very strong and light. Flexible too. Propulsors up the wang...flagellar screws and quantum wave, something new. Actuators enough to make a mother cry: pyridine probes, carbene grabbers, enzymatic knife, fullerene grapples, photon lens. Plus full picowatt power cells, ten of them. This bugger's like a freight train."

Benes cocked her head. "What about defenses, Inspector?"

Patrice grinned in spite of herself. "Uprated bond disrupters. Sherlock can rip the bejeezus out of any other bot. A regular bulldog, that's what this guy is."

Kastanek nodded appreciatively. "A hot rod. A spybot with teeth. We'll need it."

And he was right. UNIFORCE spybots often were emasculated poor cousins to common ANAD systems. They could cling to anything, go anywhere, but they had the growl of a Chihuahua. Sherlock was something new. He could replicate with speed and accuracy. He could bite like a lion. And he could grab photons with the best of them and make images of anything.

"So when do we deploy, Inspector?"

Patrice had hand-picked the team that made up Quantum Mirror. To a man, and to a woman, they were like bloodhounds with a prey's scent in their nostrils, straining at the leash. "We're deploying to New York tonight. You've all got tickets on commercial flights, hyperjet flights. You're going separately, some of you non-stop, some with one or two stops. We'll rendezvous at the UN, Secretariat Building, eighteenth floor Tactical Command Post, at 2300 hours tomorrow night."

"And targets, Inspector?" asked Benes. She wore her black hair short, page-boy style. Eschewing ocular implants, she wore last-century black-rimmed eyeglasses. It made her look like a librarian. She was also a three-time UNIFORCE champ in HERF and magpulse marksmanship.

"The targets are two: Symborg, whom you know was just recently released from containment at Table Top, by order of the Secretary-General. And this clown named Kwan Keyser. He's human, we think, but he's a delegate from East Africa, the Sanctuary. So he's in tight with the swarms. One bad-ass Normal, if you ask me. We know Keyser's in New York, attending the General Assembly sessions. As for Symborg—" Patrice's lips tightened perceptibly "—who knows? Q2's trying to run him down now. But the slimebag's an angel, so he could be anywhere, or in multiple anywheres. Intel thinks if we follow Keyser long enough, we'll find Symborg." Patrice looked each trooper in the eye. "The mission is surveillance, period. Comprende? Do not engage. Is that fully understood?"

There were murmurs of assent, most of them reluctant.

"Once we rendezvous at TCP in New York, we work out a surveillance schedule. First team has the big job. Your mission will be to take Sherlock here and put him somewhere on Keyser's physical person. Once in place, I guarantee you, Sherlock won't be leaving his target. That's the nice thing about using ANAD systems for spybots versus the traditional kind. Sherlock can keep an eye on the target, no matter where he goes. And if does something we don't like, we send the command and Sherlock drops a MOBnet right then and there. The target is immobilized and ready for pickup. Even better, with authorization from UNSAC, Sherlock can do even more. He can permanently disable the target and disassemble the bugger into atom fluff."

Benes eyed the bot inside the tank with growing respect. "That's better than my Aunt Katie's little Shih Tzu."

"Yeah, a bot that bites," said Kastanek. "I like it."

"That's it, then. Get down to the ready room and pick up your gear. I'll see everybody in New York tomorrow night, 220 East 42nd Street. You're going civvie tonight, so look like civilians. Lose the bad-ass. Pretend you're all salesmen, back from a convention."

Kastanek snorted at that. "Yeah, right. Salesmen. Kwan Keyser won't much like what I'm selling."

One after another, the Quantum Mirror surveillance detail headed for the lift that would take them down to the crew quarters and its maze of ready rooms.

Valerie Patrice took one last look at Sherlock.

After the techs button you up, you're riding with me, pal. You're going to stick to Keyser like bad news to a politician. And even better, you're going to take us right to that bugfreak Symborg, so we can finally do what should have been done years ago.

Patrice then gathered up her own gear and headed downstairs.
Chapter 9

Solnet/Omnivision Video Post

@anika.radovich.solnetworldview

February 6, 2121

1200 hours U.T.

SOLNET Special Report:

Kwan Keyser: Swarm Ambassador?

Anika Radovich peered into a compact mirror and straightened her hair for the fiftieth time. New York City was bad for winds in early February, especially at UN Plaza along the East River. And where was that windbag Keyser, anyway? He was supposed to meet the Solnet reporter outside the General Assembly, by the statue of Dag Hammarskjöld, at noon. But the Sanctuary delegate was nowhere to be seen.

Radovich motioned to the dronecam hovering twenty feet overhead. She tapped out a few commands on her wristpad, whispered a few commands into her lip mic.

Come with me. I'll start without the bastard.

The ornithopter chittered as its quadrotors tilted and it wheeled about in the stiff wind to follow Radovich to a calmer spot in the lee of the big statue.

"This is Anika Radovich, reporting for Solnet. We're here at UN Plaza in New York, attempting to get a quick word from Kwan Keyser, as he exits the General Assembly session this morning. As you know, and Solnet has been reporting, the UN has been debating new regulations and laws concerning the recent spike in angel activity. The tactics of Assimilationists worldwide have caused many people, and not a few governments, to have grave concerns about public safety and health. A group of delegates have recently proposed new legislation to deal with these concerns. Kwan Keyser, the delegate from the East Africa Sanctuary, has been one of the more vocal opponents of such regulations. Many Assimilationists believe the recent release of Symborg—ah, here he is. Looks like our guest has just come outside...we'll try to have a word—"

Radovich motioned the dronecam to follow. She approached Keyser just as he came down the steps to the plaza grounds.

"Mr. Keyser...Mr. Keyser...I'm Anika Radovich... Solnet Special Report...could we get a statement from you--?"

Keyser was tall, thin, sandy-haired, with a faint moustache and big ears. He came over willingly, always looking for a stage to promote his views.

"Hi, Anika...sorry I'm late. The session went—"

Radovich hand-signaled the dronecam to hover just over their heads. Tight close-up, she mouthed to the bird. On her wristpad, she saw the closeup form on the screen as the camera zoomed in. Perfect....

"Mr. Keyser, you're on record as opposing the new containment laws being debated. Has the vote occurred yet? We hadn't heard—"

Keyser never waited for a sentence to be done before he cut in. "Some delegates are just monsters, Anika. That's all you can call them. What am I supposed to do...what are legitimate swarms supposed to do when you have people like Lanier Barnes and his ilk calling for 'angels and asses to be quarantined.' Imprisoned in concentration camps. And on Kipwezia, no less. No Anika, the vote today is for sanity and human decency to prevail."

"Mr. Keyser, some people say angels aren't human anyway. They say containment is just designed to keep Normals and angels apart...that angels are wrecking society and need to be controlled. You've heard all the comments: angels are just like viruses. We don't let viruses have a vote. Why should we do that with angels? What's your response to that?"

Keyser looked like he had been punched in the stomach.

"Ms. Radovich, one of the constants of life is change. We evolve. We don't have monarchies anymore...we don't believe in the divine right of kings. We have democracies. We don't own slaves anymore. Human beings aren't property. We have bots today, living in all parts of our society. They're not human, I'll grant that. But then neither were the dinosaurs."

"Then, are you saying that humans are dinosaurs, Mr. Keyser?"

"No, no, of course not. Just that nobody with a brain believes that humans are the pinnacle of evolution. Or that change has come to a stop and we're the perfected result. We can be so much more, Ms. Radovich. That's what swarms bring...God, I hate that term. Angels sounds better. That's what the Church of Assimilation offers...another path...another way forward. Humans, Normals, whatever you want to call them, have no more room to grow, or to advance. But angels...humans and nanobotic swarms working together, gives us a new way forward."

Anika Radovich waved at the dronecam to drop lower and swing around to give a three-quarters angle to Keyser's face. She checked her wristpad. Good...hold right there....

"Mr. Keyser, you know there's a big debate going on, inside the UN, everywhere, about just how much of this Assimilation our society should allow. Does assimilating mean just enhancing our minds and bodies as is, inserting bots and swarms to take over or develop or enhance new capabilities in our more or less original bodies? Or does Assimilation mean 'deconstruction?' Breaking down the human body form into its constituent atoms and rebuilding it as a multi-configuration swarm, able to look and act like humans, like angels, but also able to act and look like other beings and structures as well? Enhancement versus reconfiguration...isn't that the great divide in Assimilationist thinking?"

Keyser kept pushing back an errant lock of hair from his eyes. The wind across the plaza had already made a mess of Anika's.

"Well, to be sure, the Church of Assimilation is quite clear on where we stand. The future is reserved for multi-configuration entities. Our historical human pedigree and design is old and creaky. It needs re-work. There's lots of junk in our DNA, because evolution isn't very efficient. Plus angels and multi-config lifeforms are more resilient, able to adapt to environmental change better. We can thrive in a greater variety of environments. Even better; unlike single-config entities such as yourself, swarms and angels and the like have no real threshold of death. As long as a swarm can gather and communicate and maintain minimal structure, it's effectively immortal. Minimal structure is actually very minimal, potentially down to a single nanobotic device, with enough memory to assemble a new swarm as needed. You see this, don't you, Ms. Radovich? You understand what I'm saying?"

"I understand the basics of your arguments, Mr. Keyser."

"One more thing, Ms. Radovich and then I really must go. I've got a flight to catch...our role in the Universe is to fulfill our destiny, as dictated by the original design...the Old Ones who seeded the primordial lifeforms on Earth, lifeforms that became ancient viruses and whose genome lies at the heart of every ANAD-derived nanobot, everything that makes up angels, indeed all swarms. Control of our evolutionary destiny lies with us. We're descended from ancestors of the Old Ones and we're destined to join with them again. That's really what this is all about...what Assimilationism is all about."

"What about the mass deconstruction gatherings...the mass suicides—" Anika called out, but Keyser had already nodded perfunctorily, excused himself and scooted across the plaza to a taxi waiting by the curb. He disappeared inside and was gone in an instant.

Radovich waved at the dronecam. "On me—", she voiced into her lip mic. Then she tried to summarize for the record.

"We've just been interviewing Mr. Kwan Keyser, here at the United Nations. Mr. Keyser is an official delegate from the East African Sanctuary and is also a leading spokesman for the Assimilationist movement worldwide. In his comments, Keyser—"

She went over all the points Keyser had made, just to make a coherent story out of her report. Her editors back at Special Report would be wanting graphics, too so she scrolled down image files on her wristpad and selected a few to highlight the story.

"Edit can add any effects later," she decided. There would be the usual menagerie of fades, scrolls and dancing question marks that accented any Special Report file. "Oscar and Julio are better at that sort of thing." She ended the dronecam session and commanded the bird to return to its roost...the Solnet studio complex on East 52 Street. With a chittering and clattering of its quadrotor props, the bird wheeled about and headed home, joining a flock of other drones and birds streaming across the gunmetal gray skies of mid-winter Manhattan.

Anika Radovich packed up the rest of her gear and went off to hail a taxi. She shuddered involuntarily as she bent into a stiff wind, scouring across UN Plaza. Something in Keyser's words had given her a chill that wouldn't go away.

She couldn't get the image out of her mind, the image of the vast throngs lined up at Assimilationist rallies and gatherings, all over the world. Vast throngs lined up at the assimilator booths...vast throngs begging for deconstruction, begging to be broken down into atom fluff and sent...who knew where? Off into the sky? To another dimension? To a particularly gruesome death?

We're descended from the Old Ones and we're destined to join with them again.

As Anika climbed into an autocab and the vehicle turned and sped off north toward the studios, she decided that for all his cleancut earnest Boy Scout air, Kwan Keyser was a complete loon. The whole idea gave her the creeps.

Keyser returned to the Imperial Palace Hotel after a short cab ride from the interview. He checked the newsfeed and his mail several times on his specs; he had a flight to catch and he'd have to hurry to finish packing and make his flight out of JFK. The hyperjet would make the trans-Atlantic hop and cross the African continent in less than three hours, just enough time to catch a short nap and catch up on some work

Keyser had important meetings coming up...in Addis Ababa, and other places. Of course, there would be closed-door consultations with Church of Assimilation officials...how did the vote go? Are we going to be recognized officially? How much support is there for us in the General Assembly? The usual stuff. Keyser would spill all of it, show them his files, his images, the eloquence of his speeches. And the Church's top hierarchy would be suitably impressed.

But the real meetings would come later and not in Addis Ababa. After all the Church business, a lifter would be waiting for him in Haile Selassie Park. It would be late, after midnight, local time. Keyser knew he that would board the lifter, alone. He would be the only person onboard. The lifter would be programmed to take off and fly a preplanned evasive route, just to discourage any pursuit or surveillance. After these maneuvers, the lifter would turn east and head out to sea, disguised as a chartered commercial sightseeing operator.

Four hours later, just before dawn over the Indian Ocean, the lifter would descend to wave-top altitude, and using its self-morphing disguise to resemble a flock of birds, penetrate a narrow undetected seam in a protective MOBnet enclosure and land at its destination. Kipwezia. Mount Kipwezi. Prison cell for the last decade to Config Zero itself.

And strictly forbidden to all humans and Normals, without prior approval from UNIFORCE.

He finished packing and went downstairs, where the hotel concierge had already arranged an autolimo for the trip to the airport. What Keyser did not know was that the concierge was a member of UNIFORCE's Quantum Mirror surveillance team.

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

February 7, 2121

0900 hours

Valerie Patrice waited impatiently while Benes made adjustments to Sherlock. As she fidgeted, the van in which the Detachment was working rocked slightly in the backwash of all the taxis speeding up and down Sudan Street, their drivers honking and swerving back and forth, the weyalas hanging out of windows yelling fares and great deals.

"Photo lens coming up, Inspector," Benes muttered. She was working code and stick on this mission, running the op from a small control station packed into the back of the white van. They were parked just outside the old National Bank building, a block away from an uninspiring sandstone five-story structure, where Sherlock had tracked Kwan Keyser a few hours ago. "May have been some interference...something scrambled the entangler circuit in Sherlock's coupler for a few minutes."

Cain, the other code and stick guy, had a theory. "Angels, Inspector. Got to be. Nothing else puts out decoherence waves like that."

"Well," Patrice decided, "that can't be a surprise. How long's he been inside?"

Benes checked. "Two hours and ten minutes. We know this building is an Assimilationist hideout. The main Church headquarters is several blocks away—" she highlighted a spot on the map display "—up Churchill Avenue, near the square."

Patrice studied the visuals. "Magnify and enhance, Laura. Let's see what Sherlock's looking at."

Benes tapped out a few commands. The imager careened a bit—the subject was moving, shifting about—then settled down. Keyser was clearly sitting at a table. Others surrounded the table. Patrice counted three, four, five. Then she saw the sparkling in the background. A guest at the end of the table fuzzed out for a moment, then 'snapped' back to clarity.

"Well, now there's an angel...take a look. If that's not Symborg himself, I'm a Martian rabbit."

Benes sent commands for Sherlock's photon lens to focus on capturing photons from the target at the other end of the table.

"Enhancing now."

Cain snorted. "The slimebag himself...look at him—"

The target was a slender man, well groomed with a trim black goatee and moustache, hard cheek planes and a razor cut on top.

"Well, that's not a big surprise." Patrice checked the time. "Make sure of the signature...we've got lots of data on Symborg. Check acoustics, EMs, thermals. Jesus, how long can this meeting go on? You're getting audio too?"

"Relax, Inspector, Sherlock's getting everything," Cain told her.

"Let UNIFORCE know Symborg's been tracked here and he's in a meeting with our subject."

Throughout the morning, the Quantum Mirror team with Sherlock still embedded on Keyser's physical person, had tracked and followed the subject all about the city of Addis Ababa. First, there had been a stop at Meskel Square, where a great Assimilationist rally was underway. Then, the subject had ridden one of Addis' ubiquitous blue and white taxis down Churchill Avenue to a street filled with shops and bazaars, along the edge of the great Mercata district. There Keyser had strolled the tents and haggled a little over trinkets, but hadn't bought anything. It was like he was suspicious, trying to throw off a tail. Patrice held her breath, hoping Keyser had no way to detect Sherlock. But the spybot had stayed attached and Keyser eventually walked on foot further south to Sudan Street, past the Sebastopol cannon and right into the Church of Assimilation building. He had been in meetings and conferences ever since.

"What the hell are they talking about?" she wondered.

"We can listen in real time—" Benes offered. "I'll reconfig Sherlock for audio pickup...only takes a moment." She pecked out more commands, checked her work with Cain and sent the stream. A few hundred meters away, inside the beige sandstone building, Sherlock received and acknowledged the coupler commands with a curt reply. Moments later, clear audio issued from speakers inside the van.

"...the booths need an upgrade...we've got to go all out on that—" the speaker was a man just to the left of Keyser.

Symborg cut in. His voice was deep, a bass profundo like an opera singer, perfect syntax, always in the dialect of his locale. Angels were like that, ever adaptable, always able to blend in. "That's a big expense, Nico. Can we afford to do this?"

A third participant, a black woman to Keyser's right, spoke up. She wore bone jewelry and tight cornrows on her head, giving her face a wedge shape, as if she were a blade ready to slice someone in half. "Can we afford not to? The booths are our gateway. That's the symbol. If they don't work right, it looks bad."

Keyser stood up abruptly. They could see that from the way Sherlock's perspective shifted. "I've got to go. The lifter leaves in half an hour. I'll ask when I get there...see what Zero wants to do—" He turned and left the meeting.

Patrice snapped off orders quickly, rapid-fire. "Subject's in motion. Tell Kaminski to get the lifter ready." A Quantum Corps lifter, full stealth suite, was in auto-orbit a few blocks east of them, hovering at five hundred meters in a tight racetrack over the Jubilee Palace. "Keyser's heading somewhere."

"Fifty to one, he's headed for Bole. Remember we saw that lifter on the side of one runway." Bole was the international airport, about ten kilometers west of them.

"Could be," Patrice agreed. "How's Sherlock doing?"

Cain studied the boards. "Sticking to the target like flies to a donkey. I'm shifting location...moving Sherlock back down to a chest perspective." He sent some commands and a few hundred meters away, the master bot with its small retinue of replicants spun up their picowatt propulsors and lifted off from the shoulder position they had occupied during the meetings.

"Can you do that with the subject in motion?" Patrice asked. "Won't you lose contact?"

"Not if I'm fast enough," Cain told her. "Sherlock's a hot rod. He can re-engage even if the subject's falling off a building. Relax, Inspector."

So the surveillance detachment followed Kwan Keyser as he left the building, hailed another blue and white taxi, which went swerving, careening and honking through heavy traffic along Gebeyehu Street toward the airport connector.

Kastanek was driving the van and struggled to keep up. Overhead, Kaminski drove the lifter to keep Keyser in view. He was indeed heading for Bole International Airport. The van arrived ten minutes after Keyser had paid off the taxi's weyala and headed for the suspect lifter they had spotted upon arriving a few hours before.

Kaminski put the Quantum Corps lifter down on the other side of the terminal building. Patrice jumped in. Cain and Benes would stay in the van and take it back to their Addis command post, a suite of offices at the Federal Police building uptown. Kaminski whirled the bird about just as Keyser's lifter was taking off.

"I'll keep us a kilometer or so behind," Kaminski decided. Patrice buckled herself in. Olivia Lourdes was also on board, running Sherlock from a small control station in the rear cargo bay.

"Don't lose him," she said.

Kaminski huffed. "Not a chance. In fact, I can pop in and out of these clouds, while he maneuvers out of here." He dove the lifter into a bank of cumulus but kept the target squarely centered on the track reticule on his head-up display.

The two lifters headed more or less east out of Addis, across a sere desiccated wasteland known as the Afar region. Patrice knew that a few million years ago, the region had been well-watered and lush, filled with early hominid tribes working their way up through the Rift Valley. Now, the land was moonscape desert, and only fossils and skeletons remained.

Bad for farming, she thought. Great for archeologists.

Once the lifter pursuit had settled down, Patrice decided to pay a visit to Lourdes in the back.

"Any sign he knows we're back here?" she asked Kaminski.

"None that I can see, Inspector. He's following an easterly course, heading zero eight five. We'll go feet wet in about ten minutes unless he turns."

"Mmm. Headed for the Indian Ocean." Patrice knew perfectly well what that meant. "Kipwezia...got to be. Keep on his tail."

"You got it."

Patrice went aft.

Olivia Lourdes had been working Sherlock to get an image of the target lifter's instrument panel. She acknowledged Patrice as the Inspector came back and took a seat, strapping herself in.

"I've been checking the lifter out. It's a drone, full auto. Keyser's the only one on board...that I can detect. I've seen some thermal spikes that make me think we may have loose angels or other swarms on board, too. But I can't confirm that."

"Anything on their heading?"

Lourdes shook her head. "Target's been on this heading for an hour. If Kipwezia's the destination, I wouldn't expect too many course changes. MOBnet outer bands are less than an hour away."

Patrice shrugged, settled back. "That should be interesting. Flying a lifter into a MOBnet at seven hundred kilometers an hour...won't be much left after that."

Lourdes concentrated on driving Sherlock around the cockpit, so they could capture the target's instrument suite and readings. "Unless he knows something we don't."

"My read is that Mr. Kwan Keyser is headed to a meeting with our old friend Config Zero. I don't know how he plans to penetrate the MOBnet, but he must have a way."

An hour later, the Quantum Mirror team had their answer.

"Target is slowing," Kaminski announced over the intercom. Patrice and Lourdes had been in the middle of re-configging Sherlock to sniff out different nanobot signatures when the word came. "I'm matching speeds, and ducking down below some clouds."

Patrice came up to the lifter cockpit and strapped in. "What's the little bastard up to now?"

Keyser's lifter eventually came to a complete stop, then began a gentle spiraling descent toward the ocean. Ahead, the hazy outlines of Kipwezia's front range could be seen, shimmering in tropical heat waves. A tall, conical summit was barely visible...the craggy flanks of Mount Kipwezi. White foam roiled the ocean surface as the lifter approached the turquoise waves below.

The Quantum Corps lifter hovered out of view a few kilometers off, ducking into and out of building thunderstorm clouds. Kaminski fought the updrafts and tricky winds to keep Keyser's vehicle in view.

"What the hell's he doing?" Patrice asked.

"There's your answer, Inspector."

Magnified on their display, they could see the side of the lifter split apart, disgorging a small black capsule, with twin booms and rudders. The capsule plopped into the ocean and promptly submerged.

Patrice darted aft to Lourdes, to make sure they still had contact with Sherlock.

"Barely," said Lourdes. Her fingers played over a keyboard. "Coupler circuit's intact, but the entangler's doing a dance with us right now. Something nearby, something strong, is shaking entanglement states like a wet dog."

"Config Zero," Patrice made a fist. "Has to be. Do we have specs on that MOBnet? Does it extend all around Kipwezia...even below ground?"

Lourdes called up another display and studied the results. "Yes and no, Inspector. There may be seams or gaps below ground. The Net's over ten years old. Nobody's done any maintenance on it for years."

Patrice shook her head. "That's life in the Corps, Olivia. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Keep after him."

But Olivia Lourdes found that Sherlock's signal was getting weaker and fainter. Keyser was aboard that capsule, somewhere underwater, undoubtedly searching for some kind of gap, known or not, in the MOBnet that surrounded the island continent. The best she could do was boost coupler output and hope Sherlock's entangler could keep up.

Five minutes later, the signal from Sherlock went silent.

"That's it," Patrice announced. "We're deaf, dumb and blind now. Better let Paris know we've lost the target."

After being disgorged from its lifter, Keyser's capsule had descended several hundred meters below the Indian Ocean. Searching for a known seam in the MOBnet, the capsule had probed and picked its way along the flanks of the submerged volcano that was Kipwezia for the better part of an hour, nosing in and out of niches, caves, and hollows in the murky sediment, occasionally tripping an automatic MOBnet response, which hardened instantly and kicked the capsule back away from the flickering barrier.

Finally, the seam was found, a weak spot in the barrier. Config Zero had given Keyser rough coordinates, but it still took a little hunting. Now, the capsule extended its borer and Keyser lit off the botswarm inside. Exponential replication turned the borer head into a white hot ball of blue white light, as uncounted trillions of bots burned supernova hot, building mass, configuring for their work.

The capsule approached the Mobility Obstruction Barrier and engaged the barrier bots. Flashes and pops of light went off, like an underwater thunderstorm. Swarms engaged and battled, tearing furiously at each other, but the barrier was weak here, the config drivers old and poorly maintained. The capsule's borer made quick work of the barrier and in a few minutes of vivid veins and streaks of light, it was inside the perimeter and nosing up to the basaltic flanks of Kipwezi's underwater seamount.

Now, the capsule borer set to work for entry into solid-phase structure, chewing and disassembling its way into the side of the mountain. Keyser hated this part. He chose to shut off the imager and closed his eyes, trying not to think about the fact that he was cocooned in a small pod, burrowing like a mole into solid rock, surrounded by tons of mountain.

The journey would last several hours. The capsule would bore into the seamount, and create a small tunnel for itself. It would then turn upward, re-orienting itself and head for the surface, hundreds of meters above. Keyser had made this trip before, not without some anxious moments. He tried not to think about what would happen if the borer failed.

It was late afternoon on the northwestern shores of Kipwezia when the capsule finally breached the surface, clambering out of its smoking tunnel like a prairie dog, sliding up and onto the sandy beach huffing and clanking, the late afternoon sun glistening off the dull black carapace of its armored hull.

The borer head collapsed and the white-hot semi-sphere of the botswarm dispersed. For a few moments, nothing happened. Then the capsule began re-configuring itself for the next leg of its journey.

Tunneling treads retracted. The borer head retracted back into the forward compartment of the capsule. Ellipsoidal pods extended at the bottom of the vehicle and propulsors spun up with a faint whine.

The capsule rose on its lift jets and began a steady climb up the northwest slopes of the great volcano. Above, the summit was wreathed in steam and fog. Winds rocked the capsule as it ascended.

Now, Kwan Keyser chanced a look out the forward hatch porthole. Fumarole vents and steam geysers studded the ground below, venting unimaginable pressures building underneath the ground, mixed with rivulets of lava littering the slopes of the mountain. Kipwezi was in all measures an active volcano.

The capsule hunted around the windswept summit for awhile, then finally located the cave on the steepest slopes of the northwest flanks of Mount Kipwezi, nearly ten thousand feet above the surrounding beaches.

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

The entrance was little more than a fold in the ground, like a bed sheet bent over and tucked under, maybe a meter across in its widest dimension. But the cave had once been the nerve center for swarm operations inside the East African Sanctuary.

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

The capsule nosed into a narrow declivity and parked, attaching itself with nanobotic anchors. The hatch unsealed with a pressurized pop and slid back. Winds and ice flecks screamed around the hatch opening.

It was time. Time for Keyser to exit the capsule, his home and safe haven for the last six hours. Keyser felt his throat go dry. He stepped out and ducked into the cave. Immediately, he confronted another barrier, this time a swarm blocking further passage.

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

He was in.

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

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

Cautiously, he edged out onto the newly formed ramp and walked ahead.

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

Configuration Zero hung in the misty air like a swollen cloud, ready to dump torrential rain on some tropical forest. But Keyser was a long way from any rain forests. The swarm unfurled itself and hung in the air like a great storm front, a trembling fist, flashing purple and orange and magenta all at the same time.

Keyser looked up and swallowed hard.

"I got nothing, Inspector," Olivia Lourdes frowned and tried to will some kind of signal back from Sherlock but the comm display was blank. Nothing came back from the spybot. "The little guy's offline...has been for hours now."

"Crap," said Valerie Patrice. She glanced out the lifter porthole. They were in orbit off the shores of the island, darting in and out of building late afternoon thunderstorm clouds and the ride was a bit rocky. Kaminski was doing the best he could up front. "That capsule went under water and then we lost it."

"He must have found a weak spot in the MOBnet," Lourdes opined. "Maybe he went solid-phase and burrowed into the mountain."

"But even so, we ought to be picking up Sherlock. Detecting and jamming quantum comms is almost impossible...you'd have to know the entanglement protocol and even then, it would be dicey."

Lourdes shrugged at her console. "Config Zero's surprised us before, Inspector."

"That's what worries me." Patrice paced back and forth in the cramped cargo bay, now stuffed with gear for Quantum Mirror's surveillance op. "Somehow Sherlock was detected and scrubbed off the target. Now, I've got no eyes and ears."

"What do we do? Wait him out?"

"Have you got a better idea? I'll squirt a message off to UNIFORCE." She eyed the purple storm clouds building up from the south, another tropical system churning right toward them. "We wait," she decided. "Better strap in too, Olivia. This could take a while."

It was after midnight—the lifter chronometer was flashing 0115—when Patrice was shaken awake. It was Lourdes, with Kaminski right behind her. She started violently, then remembered vaguely she was strapped into a web seat aft of the Sherlock console...she'd made herself a nest and tried to get a short nap.

"What--?" She thumbed sleep from her eyes. "Something from Sherlock?" She undid the harness and sat up.

"Got something—"Kaminski was saying. "Small craft, maybe a boat, down below. Just shoved off from Kipwezia. And another target, probably a lifter, closing from the north."

"Show me." Patrice followed Kaminski into the lifter cockpit.

Outside the portholes, Kipwezia was a black hulk, topped at the summit with a red glow from active vents and magma lakes. The foam of heavy surf was visible offshore, even in the dark.

Kaminski pointed to a screen. A shapeless dot was easing its way out to sea, away from the island shore. "There's the surface contact. It may be that capsule we saw earlier."

"You said there was another lifter?"

Kaminski changed the screen. "Aerial contacts. There—" He indicated another display, this one crisscrossed with lines and streaks, contact traces. "Most of that is commercial traffic. But this one here...he's going slow and descending. Bearing right for our surface contact too."

Patrice didn't need to see any more. "Move in, Stan. Let's follow along and see what we see."

"Can do." Kaminski regained his seat, tapped a few buttons and let the lifter autopilot put them on an intercept course. "Range to aerial contact is less than five kilometers."

"Bring us in behind him."

They lurched and wobbled and rocked in the winds, but Kaminski put the lifter right on the tail of their contact.

The unknown lifter, running without any exterior lights, made a steep diving, corkscrewing descent toward the surface contact. Then it went into a hover, less than a hundred meters above the ocean surface.

"It's a pickup," Patrice decided. "Force that lifter down right here...I don't want to engage over land...too many questions, things we can't explain."

Kaminski steered them right for the target. "I can fire a warning shot." Their lifter, code named Quantum Bird, was well equipped for combat.

"Screw warning shots, Stan. Disable his lift jets. Put him on the surface."

Kaminski half saluted. Jeez, this lady's got more balls than half of UNIFORCE. "Roger that." He selected Magpulse Weapon Enable from the touch screen, dialing up fifty percent. That should do it. Then he thumbed the Engage button on his side stick.

"Hope to hell this works." If auto-target was off by more than a meter, they could easily wind up shredding their target into a cloud of paint flakes.

He fired a pulse. Keyser's lifter wobbled with the hit, but kept on course. Kaminski fired twice more.

This time, Keyser's lifter couldn't regain control and went into auto-rotation, spiraling down like a leaf toward the ocean surface. It struck at an angle, sending up a huge plume of spray.

Kaminski was on top of him in seconds, bringing their lifter right above the wounded vehicle, which floated in heavy swells twenty meters below them.

Patrice and Lourdes boosted out of the side hatch and clung in their hypersuits to the rolling top of Keyser's lifter. Lourdes sprang the hatch with a well-timed burst of her own mag gun. They dropped inside, weapons ready.

Kwan Keyser was the only human aboard. Already, he was grabbing gear left and right, stuffing bags with items, all the while unstrapping his harness. He must have hit his head on impact; a thin stream of blood trickled from a cut on his forehead. He stopped when he came face to face with the muzzle of Patrice's gun.

Less than five minutes later, Patrice and Lourdes had Keyser aboard their own lifter, restrained in a web seat in the back, with all his personal items: bags, slates, clothes. Keyser scowled back at them, struggled for a moment with his MOB bonds and then sank back bruised, his forehead covered with a temporary bandage.

"This is piracy, you know...you'll regret this."

Patrice busied herself rifling through Keyser's stuff. "Actually, it's kidnapping...or better yet, apprehending a suspect. I already regret it. Shut up. You're taking a little side trip."

The lifter took off, but not until Kaminski had put some gaping holes in the side of Keyser's ship. It careened on its side, rapidly filled with water, and sank in a minute without a trace.

Kaminski put them on course for Addis Ababa and the UNIFORCE hyperjet waiting for them on the tarmac at Bole International Airport.

Keyser was efficiently transferred to the waiting hyperjet and was off to the Quartier General at UNIFORCE Headquarters in Paris in less than half an hour. The black-winged ship thundered down the runway and burned a hole in the sky, like a meteor in reverse and was gone in seconds. Two hours later, Keyser was in a small interrogation room, looking up at his attorney, a legal avatar from UNIFORCE's Justice Division, who read him his rights and offered some canned defense strategies.

Keyser had nothing to say and the avatar disappeared. He was replaced by a Major Jorgensen, from Intelligence.

Jorgensen was a tall blond Dane, with a dark pencil line for a moustache and tiny Spark spectacles. He studied the overlaid file on his eyepiece viewer, everything that Q2 had on Suspect U.22398, a.k.a Kwan Keyser, then motioned to the security bot to loosen Keyser's restraints.

Keyser rubbed his wrists and shoulders gratefully. "What happens now? I want a real attorney. You can't just grab people off the high seas."

Jorgensen sniffed. "Actually, under the UNIFORCE Code, we can...especially when they're violating quarantine regulations at Kipwezia. As to what happens now, well...let's just say you're going to take a little nap."

"A nap...I'm not sleepy." That's when the security bot jabbed his arm with a hypodermic. Keyser was out in a minute.

"It's a form of memory trace mapping," the technician said to Valerie Patrice. She was inside the exam room along with Major Jorgensen and another technician. Kwan Keyser lay on a gurney, strapped in, hooked up with thick ganglia of wires, cables and tubes. A small hemi-spherical grid nearly enclosed Keyser's skull.

Jorgensen explained. "In cases like this, UNIFORCE Code allows us to...shall we say, bypass the legal niceties for a day or so. Keyser got his legal consultation...the avatar read him his rights, told him the charges. But in time-sensitive, security cases like this, we're allowed to take this approach...when public safety is involved."

"It's a fairly new technique but we've proven it at the lab many times. Cowley and Ruiz here are trained in all the details. Shall we get started?"

"Gives me the creeps, I don't mind telling you," Patrice admitted. "Invading someone's mind like this--"

"It's just a high-powered lie detector," said Jorgensen.

"Let's get going," Patrice growled. "If Keyser's got anything about these Net glitches or the MARTOP bots, I want to know it. It's too late for legal niceties now. Permission to launch."

Strapped to a gurney next to the containment cylinder, Kwan Keyser had been sedated and prepped for ANAD insertion. His body was surrounded by a fine mesh of sensors--the vascular grid--that would precisely locate ANAD inside Keyser's body, once the mech was inserted.

Ruiz patted down the incision that had been made in Keyser's neck. "Okay, Major, subject's prepped and ready."

Cowley handed him the injector tube, attached by hose to the containment cylinder. Inside, the ANAD bot ticked over, ready to be launched.

"Steady even suction, Ruiz," Jorgensen reminded him. "ANAD, report status--"

The shrill voice crackled over the circuit. "ANAD effectors safed for launch. All parameters normal. Internal bonds and states are stable. Sensors primed and registered. Core functions initialized...I'm ready to fly, fellows\--"

Ruiz glanced up at Jorgensen and Patrice, an embarrassed smile on his lips. "The assembler uses a small percentage of his computational ability to simulate emotional states...sometimes, it correlates, er, inappropriately."

"Get on with it," Patrice ordered.

"Vascular grid?" Ruiz asked.

"Tracking," said Cowley. He tuned the grid to pick up the mech as soon as it was inserted.

"Let's go, then."

The insert went smoothly enough. A slug of plasma forced the master replicant into Keyser's capillary network at high pressure. Cowley watched his board and quickly got an acoustic pulse seconds later. He selected Fly-by-Stick to test out the controls. A few minutes' run on propulsors brought ANAD to a dense mat of capillary tissue.

Ruiz studied the sounder image. "Looks like you're ready for transit. You can force those cell membranes any time."

Cowley told ANAD to probe for weak spots in a clump of lipids, clinging like a bunch of grapes in the middle of the wall. "I'll try there first--"

He steered ANAD toward a cleft in the membrane lipids, pulsing one of the carbene grabbers to twist a nearby molecule just so, then released the lipid and slingshot himself forward through the gap. Seconds later, ANAD was floating in a plasma bath, dark, viny shapes visible off in the distance. He tweaked the picowatt propulsor to a higher power setting and took a navigation hack off the grid.

"Aortic cavity. Just past the Islet of Duchin, I'd say. Looks like we're in. Where are we going now?"

Start Fourier Transform;

Start Delacroix Transform;

Start Trace Matching....

The sounder image was staticky for a few moments, fuzzy, blurred, jumpy, but it settled down after some tuning by Cowley.

"What are we looking at?" Patrice asked, cocking her head to get a better angle.

"I know that place," Jorgensen snapped his fingers. "It's Kipwezi...that volcano...now on the island."

Patrice nodded. "I thought so. Keyser did take a little side trip."

They watched the whole of Kwan Keyser's visit with Config Zero, in snatches and pieces, filled with bursts of static.

Keyser, climbing out of the capsule...scrambling around the summit of Kipwezi hunting for the cave opening...Keyser easing through the mists of the cave...the rock walls laced with veins of ice...the smoldering bubbling pools...the thundercloud of Config Zero appearing out of nowhere...Keyser's startled reaction....

(The imager blurred, shot through with streaks of light, peculiar starbursts and fragments of hazy, out of focus visuals, all jumbled up. The speaker crackled with static--)

Cowley fiddled with his joystick, tried tweaking the gain on the signal. "Looks like we lost that trace, Major. Just fizzled out."

Major Jorgensen glared in disgust at the IC panel. "Can you get it back?"

Ruiz shook his head. "Faded out, Major...we didn't have a good gradient to follow. I'll backtrack--"

Patrice was there too, standing beside Jorgensen. "Eerie, isn't it? Seeing things through another man's eyes. Gives me the creeps," she admitted.

"It seems to work well enough," Jorgensen said. "Couldn't tell you the theory behind it."

"It's a damn circus trick," Patrice muttered. "We can really play back someone's memories like a recording?"

"Not exactly, ma'am," said Cowley. He was helping Ruiz sniff out new traces for ANAD to follow. "We just put ANAD inside the suspect and replicate a few trillion times. Then we put the whole herd in 'bloodhound' mode and go hunting."

"What exactly are you hunting for?"

"Everybody makes memories the same way. It's called Long-term Potentiation. One of the chemical signatures of LTP is a molecule called glutamate...helps open a second voltage-gated channel inside the post-synaptic membrane--"

Jorgensen intervened. "Allow me.... in plain English, Inspector, what it boils down to is that we can construct crude renditions of memory traces existent in the subject's brain, up to ten to fifteen days after the memory trace is laid down. We've been doing it experimentally for the last six months. ANAD shuttles around inside the subject's head like a bunch of bees, sniffing out calcium sinks in every neuron, looking for equal concentrations, down to the parts per trillion. Everywhere that concentration is equal is a pathway, burned in, a memory trace. ANAD follows it, sends back data on whatever it finds--calcium levels, sodium levels, activation times, lots of stuff. We can re-construct a very crude version of what originally laid down that track. Then we put it on the imager, cobbled out of visual and auditory sensory traces in this particular case. They're the easiest."

"It's sort of like painting somebody's portrait from their shadow," added Cowley. "I was detailed to the lab, before I got trained on this. They actually used me as a guinea pig too. Kind of an echo of a memory, if you like."

Patrice was dubious. "Sounds pretty nebulous to me. Why did we just now lose the trace?"

"Unknown," said Cowley. His fingers were flying over the keyboard, managing ANAD's configuration, checking its parameters. "Somehow, we lost the trace...just petered out. It happens. All you can do is backtrack to a known point and start sniffing again."

Patrice stared from the imager display to Keyser's still body, lightly breathing, and back again. He half expected to see the traitor twitch or move a leg or something. "So where is ANAD now?"

"Here's the vascular grid, Inspector--" Cowley fingered the IC display to the side of the imager. The grid was a 3-D iconic image of Keyser's skull. "--I'd say...right about here...basal hippocampus region. Most of the swarm's about a hundred thousand microns anterior to the lateral septum."

"We're picking up something," Jorgensen muttered. As Patrice watched over his shoulder, hoping to learn something more to impress UNSAC with, Cowley steered through a dense bog of dendrites. Thickets of axon fibers clouded the imager, now slaved to ANAD's electromagnetic sounder. "--strong trace...this one's holding, looks like--"

"Stay with it," Jorgensen encouraged him. He leaned over across Cowley, watching him massage ANAD's configuration, souping up the sensors.

"I'm altering config--" Cowley said in a low voice. "It'll help us sort out the traffic--lots of chem around here--"

Keyser stirred lightly on the gurney, until Ruiz steadied his body. "He's coming back through Level 4," Ruiz muttered. "We'd better hurry, if we're going to get anything out of this--"

"I'm trying, Carlos." Cowley glared at the imager, flexed his fingers around the hand controllers. He let ANAD finish changing config, noting that all the other trillion mechs slaved to the master had done likewise, then maneuvered the device into the lee of a dendritic 'breakwater'...sniffing for calcium, sodium, anything it could follow, grabbing molecules left and right, until at last, Cowley cracked the barest hint of a smile. Deep inside the unconscious brain of Kwan Keyser, the Autonomous Nanoscale Assembler/Disassembler blazed away at incredible speed, spasmodically sorting and advancing along the barest whiff of a chemical highway.

Seconds later, a green light illuminated alongside the screen. The sparky haze began to part--ANAD sent back a signal indicating readiness--

Start Trace Matching....

Keyser sees the flickering mist-cloud that is Config Zero...inside the cave, it is descending from the rocky ceiling...Keyser is trembling, his hands are shaking, he backs away...Config Zero speaks...'...all elements are arriving on schedule...seeding is occurring at the optimum rate...single-configuration entities are being disassembled...Config Symborg has been released...'...the image shifts...now the sky is shown, it is late evening, twilight, the sky is filled with light streaks...a meteor shower is—

Cowley tweaked ANAD again, but the trace was gone.

"What happened?" Patrice asked. She was growing more and more annoyed with this harebrained stunt.

"ANAD lost the trail, Inspector," Cowley said. "I'm trying to get it back now..."

Ruiz changed ANAD's config slightly. "I'll see if dropping a radical off this arm helps--"

Jorgensen was thoughtful. "I'd say we have enough right now to charge Keyser. Conspiracy to commit espionage, sabotage, treason, violating UN quarantine regulations, for starters."

Patrice was uneasy with the whole technique. "Even in UNIFORCE, a man accused has a right to counsel."

"It won't help," Jorgensen told her. "We've just seen him meeting with Config Zero...inside Kipwezia...that's a violation right there."

"Admitted under duress," Patrice reminded him.

"Now is not the time to be splitting legal hairs," Jorgensen told them. "If what we're seeing is half of what really happened, Keyser's in a mountain of trouble. Cowley, just how reliable is this stunt? How do you know this isn't something out of the man's imagination?"

"That would take some explaining, sir, but the basic answer is in the details of the glutamate molecule, and the trail it lays down. There are subtle differences when the long-term potentiation is activated from direct sensory input--from external events, as it were--and when it's internally generated. We've tuned ANAD pretty finely to be able to detect the differences."

Jorgensen gave that some thought. "How much further can you go with this? Can you reconstruct everything?"

Cowley shrugged. "Practically speaking, no. The more convoluted the traces become--the more they become abstracted into higher levels of the brain--the harder it is to follow them. There's a practical limit on the concentrations of glutamate that ANAD can follow. Usually memory traces older than a few weeks are pretty much impossible to follow consistently. And there is the matter of damage as well."

"Damage? What kind of damage?"

Cowley wanted to be precise in what he said. "Every time ANAD follows a trail of glutamate molecules, he slightly damages the molecules in the process of examining them. We call it a fragmentation trail. The subject's memories are slightly altered with each probe."

"So this can't be done accurately again, after this probe?"

Cowley nodded imperceptibly, admitting the truth of what the Q2 officer was saying. "Let's say the accuracy of the reconstruction suffers with each 'reading' of the trail."

Patrice had seen enough. "I've got to get this upstairs to UNSAC immediately. If there's any truth to what we're seeing, it's evident that Keyser has specific and detailed knowledge of these MARTOP bots falling to Earth from space...and maybe even infiltrating Solnet and Worldnet."

Within the hour, Patrice had vidconned in Evan Metcalf, still at Gateway Station, with what the trace mapping had uncovered. Anson Leeds, the US Cyber Corps investigator was also on the circuit, from Herndon, Virginia.

Patrice filled them in on the details, squirting transcripts of the trace mapping to all parties.

Leeds was tight-lipped. "This fits in with what we're seeing on the Net. Glitches and anomalies all over the place. If these were worms or viruses or malware, they're operating like nothing I've ever seen before." Leeds told them of the theories circulating around Cyber Corps of some kind of sentience growing inside the Net. "Few of us really believe that, but there are techs down in CyberLab who swear by it. Now, this—" he shrugged. "It makes CyberLab's ideas look tame now."

Metcalf tried to get his head around all that was happening. "Bots from outer space, infiltrating the Net. And we've got samples here at Gateway. I'll send you what our lab has found...these bots have configs and capabilities beyond anything anyone has ever seen."

Leeds had made up his mind. "Valerie, UNSAC and the Secretary-General need to know about this. If we can corroborate the lab results from Gateway, with trace mapping from your work and what we're finding on the Net, we'll have something to work with. Remediation efforts for cleaning up the Net need to be authorized and begun right away. "

"And we'll have to find a way of blocking this infall of bots...maybe they're coming from that source on Europa...the one General Winger dealt with so long ago."

The three of them agreed to meet again in twenty-four hours. Valerie Patrice shut down the link and sat at her desk, staring out the window at the mansard roof of the Luxembourg Gardens a few blocks away, lit up with colored spotlights at night. Tourist drones flitted by, circling like vultures over central Paris. Some things never change, she thought.

Bots from outer space, infesting the Net. It sounded like a bad science fiction movie. Patrice rubbed her eyes, trying to keep her head from spinning. God, I need a drink. Some kind of sentience growing inside the Net. Angels popping up like mushrooms after a spring rain, everywhere. Normals disappearing. Assimilationists around every corner... your neighbors, your own family suspect. And among all the nightmare images that kept coming unwelcome to her aching head, the face of Symborg kept recurring, Symborg at rallies, Symborg on the Net, on vids and slates and tablets and wristpads everywhere, multiplying like a bacterial infection, consuming everything and everyone in some kind of cataclysmic exponential overdrive...like a Big Bang right here on Earth.

Valerie Patrice reached into the bottom drawer of her desk and felt around for the tiny bottle. This was one evening that seemed well suited to a few dozen pulls on that vodka she had been trying to quit.
Chapter 10

U.S. Cyber Corps Headquarters

Herndon, Virginia USA

February 9, 2121

0700 hours

Valerie Patrice had just finished presenting her findings from Quantum Mirror to General Pacer (USCINCCYBER). Anson Leeds was there as well. The full nature of the news from Kipwezia weighed heavily on Pacer and his forehead showed it. Angels and swarms of bots from space had somehow infested WorldNet and were coming from the Net into Normal society. Some kind of response would have to be made. Some kind of defensive effort would have to be devised.

"It's called Cyber Sweep," Pacer told them. "A combined special forces op, with Quantum Corps and Cyber Corps working together. Needless to say, you're both part of it."

Patrice figured it was coming. "What's our tasking, sir?"

Pacer was noncommittal. "We've got authority from UNSAC. I'm not so sure the Secretary-General will sign off on this."

Leeds wondered. "There are rumors about the S-G."

"I've heard them: 'Aquino's an angel, Aquino's a wimp, Aquino eats babies'. The usual crap. Some it may even be true. But it doesn't matter. Cyber Sweep may have to be conducted 'under the radar', so to speak. And I've got to get POTUS to sign off, but that's a formality. The main thing to assemble a team, put together a TOE and get going."

"What's our mission, sir?" Patrice asked.

Pacer sat up straight in his chair and steepled his hands on his desk. "You're going to sanitize the Net, from the inside."

Patrice thought she had misheard the General. "I'm sorry, sir but I thought you said—"

Pacer held up a hand. "It's better if I show you. Leeds here can explain. Follow me."

They went down to CyberLab, on the second floor.

On first viewing, CyberLab looked like some high school science fair gone wild. The lab was jammed with tables, benches and consoles, with all manner of gear crammed into every available space. Meters, wiring, soldering equipment, half-assembled robot bodies, imagers and display consoles, wristpads in varying states of repair, the entire place was a teen-aged geek's wet dream come true.

James Tsu was there too, lost among the equipment, peering intently into an imager on one desk. The object of his study could be seen on a larger display nearby. It looked like a miniature locomotive.

Pacer did the introductions. "This is our boy whiz," he announced. Tsu looked up, smiled enough to show a gap in his front teeth. He pushed a pair of mag specs back onto his forehead. "Just checking out our little project."

Leeds seemed to have a general idea of what they were looking at. "It's called a packet sweeper. We'll be using this guy to do a little recon of the Net."

Patrice studied the image. The 'locomotive' bore a faint resemblance to an early ANAD-style nanobotic device. She mentioned that to Tsu.

"There is some inheritance, yes. It's basically a packet mobile. The casing is only a few nanometers in length. It contains some rather unique bits of intelligence and executable software. With this little guy, we'll be able to travel around the Net at will, chase down suspect packets, code, malware, what have you, inspect it, quarantine it and if necessary, alter it."

Leeds added, "We think MARTOP bots have somehow entered the Net, so the sweeper will enable us to track them down, capture and destroy them. Or at least, render them harmless. These bots are of the same dimensions as the signal waves that already carry packets around the Net. So in a sense, we'll be using sweepers like this to literally surf the Net."

Patrice nodded. "Cute. I guess I'm having a little trouble getting my head around the idea that something's alive and kicking inside the Net. And these sweepers can track them down?"

Leeds said, "Well, strictly speaking, a packet is just a data unit in a network. Physically, the packets are just streams of bits impressed on a signal, a carrier, that travels around the network. The sweeper is an actual nanobotic device, similar in dimension, with embedded logic and controls, that can ride along that bitstream."

"And these sweepers are to hunt down rogue bots, or bits, or whatever, and capture them?"

"Essentially, yes. Cyber Sweep is first and foremost a reconnaissance mission. We've got to find out what's infesting the Net, what's causing all these outages, all these effects."

General Pacer had been following something on his slate. "Hey, guys, check this out: another Special Report from Solnet. Looks like we've got company right outside." He tapped a button and the slate put a larger image of its display on a nearby wall.

Solnet/Omnivision Video Post

@anika.radovich.solnetworldview

February 9, 2121

1200 hours U.T.

SOLNET Special Report:

Cyber Corps Defends the Net?

Anika Radovich pecked at her wristpad and fiddled with the dronecam controls to get the image she wanted for her opening, establishing shot. She stood alongside a busy highway, just outside Herndon, Virginia, directly opposite the glass and steel headquarters building of U.S. Cyber Corps.

"Cam, go up...altitude at least ninety feet...I want to clear those fence towers...there, hold that position. Now zoom in on the front, get that logo in tight...viewers should see the Cyber Corps emblem. Hold that...."

She cleared her throat and then waited impatiently for a convoy of freight lifters to shuttle by. Damn. Finally, the image was clear.

"This is Anika Radovich, reporting from outside U.S. Cyber Corps Headquarters in Herndon, Virginia. We're here to investigate persistent rumors that the President had just tasked Cyber Corps with a mission to investigate recent serious problems that have been occurring worldwide with WorldNet and Solnet, problems that have led to unprecedented levels of disruption and damage around the world." She paused, pecked some more on her wristpad, then commanded the dronecam to close on the perimeter of the Cyber Corps compound. The ornithopter chittered and rose on its whirring quadrotors over busy highway traffic to approach the boundary screen that surrounded the Corps command center. Anika knew a security screen of bots protected the complex from nosy reporters like her, but the cam stopped short of contacting the shimmering translucent dome that was the only visible indicator of the botscreen.

No sense frying a perfectly good dronecam, she figured. That would have raised eyebrows on her expense report.

She went on with her intro.

"Recent reports from highly placed sources inside Cyber Corps have indicated strong evidence that the Net has become infected with a new kind of virus, actually not even a virus.

"According to sources this reporter has consulted, the Net has recently become infected with nanobotic swarms of a type and origin unknown. There are also reports, from highly placed sources that must remain anonymous, that Symborg himself, recently released from containment by Quantum Corps, has surfaced inside the new island continent of Kipwezia and has had something to do with these recent virus outbreaks inside the Net."

Anika stopped, her fingers playing over her wristpad. Now, comes the narrative transition. She tapped an icon on her pad screen and previous footage was instantly added and synched with her report intro. She watched for a few moments, as video scrolled by, showing scene after scene of financial markets in turmoil (she pasted in an interview with Nathaniel Lee at the Hong Kong Exchange here), power grids suffering sporadic, unexplainable outages affecting millions, air traffic control problems causing mid-air collisions, massive highway chain-reaction accidents as autocars were hacked by the million and lost control, scrambled TV and entertainment channels, air defense radars showing bogies approaching where none existed, leading to fruitless scrambles and intercepts, and now the latest: killsats in orbit failing and firing on ground targets without authorization.

Anika watched the images flow by, satisfied that viewers would get the right impression, the impression she was trying to establish of a world turned upside, chaos everywhere and the authorities helpless before something they couldn't understand.

She added more intro: "Both Cyber Corps here in America and UNIFORCE itself seem powerless before this threat. To date, there has been no official response from the Secretary-General. Publically, they're 'studying' the problem and will be making recommendations in the near future. Meanwhile, the Net churns and burns...." She had thought up that phrase just this morning, while putting on her makeup...dammit, it was a good one..."But there are responses being formulated even as I speak...sources indicate that Cyber Corps even now is forming up a special task force to combat the infection and clean up the Net. In addition, efforts are underway, in the very complex of buildings behind me, to develop ways of working, communicating, traveling and shopping that don't even use the Net, incredible as that may sound. It's called NetPass—"

Anika pasted in more pre-shot footage describing the new program. She kept one eye on what her wristpad was displaying, and another eye on the dronecam, hovering seventy feet above the entrance gate to Cyber Corps. Guards glared up at the device and occasionally took aim with their pulse guns, but the cam was shielded and encrypted to the heavens—Solnet had spent a fortune on that—and it remained doggedly on station, hovering in a tight orbit over the gate. Anika hoped to catch a car entering or leaving the compound. If she could time it right, she could command the dronecam to swoop down on the unsuspecting motorist and get a quick interview or at least some kind of reaction shot. Edit could add effects later.

But Cyber Corps seemed to be buttoned up tight this morning.

Anika decided to add some more words of her own.

"NetPass will be a new world for all of us...having to live and work and conduct our daily activities offline, without the Net. Some communities have even given up motorized transport altogether, using bicycles and horses and wagons to get around, such as this small town in upstate New York—" she pasted in some more footage. "It almost seems as if the 22nd century is beginning to resemble the 19th century."

Anika signed off, for the moment, and commanded the dronecam to follow her back to the Solnet van parked a half kilometer down the highway.

Maybe I can get more later today, around shift change time.

Inside the CyberLab room, Patrice, Leeds, Pacer and Tsu had watched her entire report.

Pacer was sour. "We may have a leak, gentlemen. Or that bitch reporter's just shooting in the dark. I'll notify Counter-Intel. Either way, we've got to get Cyber Sweep underway now, before the panic gets even worse. Leeds and Patrice, come with me. I want to go over the details of your mission." To James Tsu, CINCCYBER added. "Get that sweeper ready, Tsu. Operations commence at 0000 hours tonight. I want to send our little recon patrol out on his first sweep right from the server node in here."

Mount Kipwezi,

Kipwezia

February 10, 2121

0130 hours

The Sanctuary Patrol lifter spotted the bateau just after midnight, on a bearing straight out of La Digue Island, the Seychelles. On radar, the flat-bottomed boat appeared to be a fishing scow, trolling the waters off the northwest shores of Kipwezia for wahoo and sailfish, tuna and dorado, nothing unusual, except for one fact. The small craft had nosed closer to shore than any such boat had ever come, triggering auto alarms and inspections by SP's fleet of robotic drones, which circled the island continent like birds of prey constantly, twenty-four hours a day.

The drone had flagged the bateau as an exception, which triggered an alert onboard the Sanctuary Patrol cutter cruising ten kilometers to the west of the sighting, operating alone in Oscar sector, as per orders. Someone decided a look-see was in order. The cutter launched her embarked lifter for a closer inspection.

Now, the lifter had the bateau in sight, on scope and floodlit with brilliant spotlights sweeping the ocean surface. She hove to, per orders, dropping anchor in the shallow, sandy bottom offshore. Two Patrol troopers exited the lifter aft bay and quickly boosted down to her deck.

There they encountered a single occupant.

He said his name was Noble. The boatman was tall, wiry, sunburned, with curly black hair, probably thirty years of age. He said he was Seychellian fisherman.

"My boat she is taking on water," he told them, in a thick Creole accent. And there were several centimeters of water sloshing around inside the pilothouse. His nets were torn and ragged as well.

The troopers asked Noble why he was trolling so close to shore, so close to the restricted zone. Didn't he see the barrier offshore? Didn't he know what would happen if he ran into it?

Noble had piercing black eyes. He glared back at them, causing both troopers to shift their gaze. "I want to beach my Isabella...re-caulk her. Fix my nets. She's all I have...the fish they are my life." He pointed to crates full of iced down tuna already caught.

The troopers scanned Isabella from bow to stern and inspected her nets, her catch, all her rigging and gear. They found nothing. And the small craft was taking on water steadily.

So they let Noble go. They pointed out the direction he was to take.

"Follow this heading. Head for that inlet. We'll lower the barrier for awhile...but not for long. You be off the beach by sunrise."

Noble thanked them profusely, a big gleaming white smile splitting that weather-beaten face. The troopers took one last look, then boosted off the deck and rose back to their lifter, still orbiting the area a hundred meters overhead. With a whoosh, the lifter banked and headed back out to sea, to its landing pad on the cutter, just silhouetted in moonlight on the horizon.

Noble headed ashore.

When he approached the shimmering veil that was vast MOBnet surrounding Kipwezia, he slowed momentarily. He steered straight for the edge of the veil, wincing as the prow of Isabella drew closer, but nothing happened. Sanctuary Patrol had weakened the barrier in this one spot and Isabella nosed through with no effect, as if a sheer gauzy curtain had parted in a stiff breeze. Noble looked back after he had transited the barrier. The barrier brightened and closed back, sealing itself tight. The shield was now impenetrable again.

But it didn't matter. Noble ran his bateau onto the sandy beach and drove her flat-bottomed keel hard ashore. For good measure, he tied a thick rope to a nearby pandanus tree stump, then hopped down onto the sand. He looked up.

Overhead, Mount Kipwezia was blood red through light fog, winking at him like a big eye.

Noble smiled. Immediately, he began deconstructing. No longer a poor Seychellian fisherman in a ramshackle bateau, Symborg now dispersed himself into an amorphous cloud of bots and began drifting up the flanks of Mount Kipwezi, moving higher on trillions of picowatt propulsors.

The climb to the cave entrance would take about four hours.

Inside the cave complex where Config Zero resided, Symborg confronted the great master swarm, now flickering and coruscating like a slow-motion thunderstorm. Config Zero filled the entire cavern. No words were spoken. The two entities communicated by quantum coupler. Symborg was nothing more than an element of Config Zero anyway. The master swarm had created and spalled off a sub-element of itself nearly a decade ago, by the time reckoning of Normals.

The Normals has seen to it that Config Zero was permanently confined to the island continent of Kipwezia, itself a geo-engineered landform broken off from the east African Rift Valley in a massive UN project years before. Disentanglers had been strategically placed to disrupt long-distance communication, even quantum coupler signals off-island. No one wanted Config Zero to transmit or receive anything from the Keeper on Europa, or from anyone else...especially the mythical Old Ones, whom many felt really didn't exist.

A vast Mobility Obstruction Barrier had been erected around the island to control what got in and out. Sometimes Sanctuary Patrol, handed the responsibility of maintaining security of the MOBnet by UNIFORCE, let isolated Normals through. That was how Symborg had entered. But it took persistence and good intelligence to do that. And you had to pass the PSV tests...the Physical Security Verification tests. Symborg had long ago mastered that technique to perfection.

Once in close proximity to the master swarm, Symborg provided updated files from the Keeper. Config Zero accepted these files and incorporated them into its memory, overwriting previous instructions. This process took several hours. When it was done, the master swarm had new capabilities, capabilities similar to the Keeper itself.

The Keeper's commands were clear and unequivocal: resume oversight and execution of the Prime Key.

Config Zero spent four thousand and sixty-five time cycles processing all its new instructions, sorting commands and data updates, developing protocols and modules to guide the changes that were coming. It also had new commands for Symborg. Quantum coupler signals flowed back and forth between Config Zero and the Symborg master bot for hours, as these commands were downloaded and filed. When the download was finished, Symborg knew in detail what would be required of all its subordinate elements, all angels and Assimilationists, that were even now multiplying exponentially across the Earth.

The requirements of the Prime Key were paramount and Symborg could well envision how its implementation would play out. More environmental changes were coming, as the Prime Key dictated what kind of environment must be developed before the Central Entity arrived, a date now less than thirty- four Normal years away. More earth tremors were coming, despite the efforts of U.N. Boundary Patrol to mitigate them. More de-forestation. Desertification. Rising sea levels, temperature increases, atmosphere changes...all things that Normals had been doing to their planet anyway, unwittingly assisting the completion of the Prime Key. Symborg now had updated instructions on how to further these processes and begin re-creating conditions that had once existed before...millions of years before...when the Old Ones had first done their seeding.

Once all updates had been provided and protocols and commands confirmed, Symborg received new directions from Config Zero. Ten hours after he had entered the cave, the Symborg swarm exited the complex and drifted down the windswept mountainside, just as the orange bowl of the sun was peeking over the ocean's eastern horizon.

The swarm drifted down to the sandy beach where the bateau had been careened and gathered itself into the shape of a man again, a Seychellian fisherman named Noble. Noble untied Isabella and put her out to sea once more, traversing the outer perimeter of the MOBnet barrier without incident. Undoubtedly, the Sanctuary Patrol cutter had spotted his small craft on radar, and lowered the barrier for him.

Symborg smiled at the ease of the deception. Normals thought like Normals. They could not envision the true abilities of a multi-config entity. They never would and once the Prime Key was fully executed, they would be swept from the face of the Earth and the world made new again for the Central Entity to fix the mistake the Normals called Evolution and start over.

Once the bateau had puttered out to sea and crawled over the horizon, the deception was no longer necessary. Symborg let her drift for a few minutes, aware from his own senses and the bateau's weather radar that a storm front was rapidly approaching from the southwest, a haboob churning up from the Intertropical Convergence Zone. Winds picked up smartly and Isabella rocked and was soon in danger of foundering completely in ten-meter seas.

Symborg didn't care. Before a giant wave washed over Isabella's foredeck and completely swamped the boat, he had already deconstructed and assumed his natural amorphous form, a loose swarm of nanobotic mechs.

The formation of bots rose on the first blasts of the approaching cyclone and was quickly flung hundreds of meters into the air. The cyclone would carry the swarm east, toward Mumbai, toward India.

Isabella splintered in the cyclonic fury of the storm and broke apart. She sank without a trace in five thousand meters of water.
Chapter 11

U.N. Quantum Corps Western Command

Table Top Mountain, Idaho, USA

February 12, 2121

1130 hours

Jake Argo had been CINCQUANT for all of five years now and never before had he found himself in such a ticklish spot. It wasn't often that the Commander in Chief, Quantum Corps found himself at a complete loss for words. But then it wasn't every day he had to ask a favor of a living legend like the Great Atomgrabber himself, one Johnny Winger.

"General, I won't try to sugarcoat any of this. I need you. The Corps needs you. I just got word from UNSAC last night. A mission to Europa is being planned. It's called Operation Europa Forge. The objective of this mission is to reconnoiter the surface of Europa and determine if the Keeper, originally submerged in the Europan ocean, has in fact come to the surface. If so, Europa Forge is tasked with one job: destroy, quarantine or render harmless said Keeper."

Winger whistled. "Well, you had me worried there, Jake. I thought you were going to ask me to do something really difficult."

Argo didn't crack a smile and Winger knew his little attempt to lighten the atmosphere had been a complete bust.

"General, I just need to know one thing: can you help us? You're a retired civilian but you've also been to Europa...you've dealt with the Keeper. Say the right words to me and I can make you a consultant to the Corps. You'll be a team member for Europa Forge under a special services contract."

Winger didn't have to be asked twice. "Jake, you know me. You know my answer."

"I have to hear it, in your words. Legal stuff, you know."

Winger made his words and tone of voice deeper, official-sounding. "I, John Winger, U.N. Quantum Corps retired, being of sound mind and body, do hereby affirm that I can and will be part of this mission...when do we leave?"

Argo cracked the barest hint of a smile. He stuck out a hand. Winger shook it.

"It means another eight to ten month voyage to Jupiter, General. Can you swing that? Your expertise and experience with the Keeper is unequaled though. The Corps and UNIFORCE needs you. I need you."

"You've got me. Of course, I'll have to run this by Dana. You know how that works. Dana and Liam...he's in town tonight, by the way. It's our thirtieth anniversary tomorrow."

" Congratulations and all that. The kid's home on sabbatical? How's academic life going for him?"

Winger shrugged. He and Liam had had their differences lately. "He teaches on things I can't even pronounce. And he just made tenure...youngest ever at Cambridge. You know they offered him the chair once held by Charles Babbage. My son...can you imagine that?"

Argo checked the time. "I remember Liam when he was running around with his drones, scaring the neighbor's dog. By the way, UNSAC is vidconning in a few minutes. Her Majesty's sour face will be right here on my desk—She'll want to know you're onboard."

"I am, Jake. I am. Can you fill me in on the details?"

"Not officially...that's for UNSAC. You know how Evelyn Lumumba likes to make pronouncements from Mount Olympus, like Zeus. But I can tell you this much: One of your crewmates will be Evan Metcalf, special UNIFORCE investigator. You met him at Gateway...he's been looking into the MARTOP stuff."

"Metcalf?" Winger crunched on that detail for a moment. "The real thin guy? Seems kind of young. Good man?"

Argo nodded. "One of our best. He's kept the eggheads at Gateway on this MARTOP thing with a tight leash. He knows protocol and procedure. Plus he's tenacious as my wife's Chihuahua. Metcalf will be your right-hand man on the trip."

"What about the ship?"

Argo warmed to his description. "Ah... the ship. You're in luck, General. Your ship will be a new corvette, now being assembled at Gateway. Frontier Corps top of the line fittings. She's the UNS-227 Johannes Kepler. The dockhands call her K-Dog. This will be her first operational mission for Frontier Corps and UNISPACE."

"She's had her shakedown cruise?"

Argo shook his head. "No such luck. Europa Forge is her shakedown cruise. You can wring her out all the way to Jupiter and back. Skipper's an experienced cycler pilot though: Captain Hideki Yamato."

Winger wracked his brain for a recollection. "Yamato's done deep-space before, if I remember correctly."

"He has. Scoopship run at Jupiter a few years ago. I think she was the Sydney...prototype on the early helium runs. They had some kind of engine casualty...one of the first plasma torch drives. Nearly fell out of orbit. As a matter of fact, Yamato's been deeper into Jupiter's atmosphere than any other man alive, unintentionally, of course. You'll have to ask him about that. Quite an investigation, that one. But Frontier Corps did pin a medal on him."

Argo and Winger discussed the mission objectives and rules of engagement as well as K-Dog's complement of crew and equipment.

"This is all off-the-record, you understand. I can't step on UNSAC's toes. But you'll have HERF batteries, coilguns and mag weapons, full array. Plus, she's got a more powerful plasma torch engine. She can make a speed run out to Jupiter in eight months, actual time. And there's two landers."

"Two landers? How come?"

"Insurance. They're called Tycho and Rex. Tycho has ice-boring capability and can even operate in Europa's ocean, as well as on the surface. Like your old Trident submersible years ago. Rex is for surface ops only."

"That brings back bad memories," Winger told him. "The Keeper we encountered on the Jovian Hammer mission is not your average adversary. We'll need to be extremely cautious in proximity to that thing."

Argo understood. "We've tried to do our homework on your mission. In addition to all the other gear, K-Dog will carry a pallet of upgraded disentanglers, to jam comms with Config Zero, maybe even the Old Ones. And some advanced MOBnet systems for confining the Keeper to a surface enclosure on Europa, if that's even possible. " Argo leaned forward, hard blue eyes boring in on Winger. "General, I want you to be the mission commander. Yamato will be the ship commander. Nobody else is as qualified as you."

Winger took a deep breath. "I'll run it by the home front, check all the details out with Dana and Liam. Where do I sign?"

Argo started to reply but the vid chimed at that moment. "You sign when UNSAC says you're in. Here she is—" He pressed a button and Evelyn Lumumba's disembodied face and shoulder materialized on the desktop pad, UNSAC in full color and 3-d. She was wearing some kind of red and black sarong-like dress, an African tribal amulet hanging on a heavy chain around her neck. Bone jewelry clinked in her tight hair braids.

Winger thought she looked like a voodoo trinket.

Jake Argo briefly went over what they had discussed. "The mission timeline is tight, General. If you join up, you'll have to be at Gateway Station in two weeks for departure briefings."

UNSAC's face was ebony black, like a carved figurine. Her eyes blazed out at him. "Your expertise is critical, General Winger. I don't have to tell you that. We all know what you did for UNIFORCE ten years ago, at Europa. Now, we're in a world of hurt and Europa Forge is vital to getting a handle on this crisis. You see the same news as I do: angelizing out of control, Net infections, accelerated environmental change."

"Yes, ma'am. This time, it looks like we're in a real fight."

Lumumba rolled her eyes. "If only I could get the Secretary-General and the Security Council to see that. But that's politics...I'll handle that end. We've got to cut off these bot swarms coming to Earth from the source, at least what we think is the source. That's where Europa Forge comes in. Already, millions of people are going angel, turning into clouds of bots or whatever...it's insane. Mass suicide, if you ask me."

Exactly my thoughts, Winger told himself. If only Liam would see it that way. "Madam Secretary, with Symborg being released, all hell has broken loose."

Argo agreed. "At this rate, the whole planet will be nothing but angels in a few years."

UNSAC nodded affirmatively, her bone jewelry clinking. "You're preaching to the choir, gentlemen. Of course, this could be exactly Config Zero's idea. What Q2's been able to determine from deciphering this Prime Key seems to show the Bugs want to sweep the Earth clean as it is...exterminate single-configuration entities like you and me. But that isn't going to happen...not on my watch."

The three of them went over the details of Winger's special services contract. Winger signed the virtual document immediately, did the bioscans and they were done.

"Of course, I'd pay you more, if I could," UNSAC told him. "But then, nobody joins the Corps to get rich."

"No, ma'am. I'll settle for busting the Keeper right in the chops, if you ask me. But I do have to run this by the family."

They discussed the rules of engagement in more detail, then UNSAC signed off, saying she had a briefing to attend to downstairs at the Quartier-General. Her 3-d likeness vanished like smoke and the pad went dark.

Winger and Argo shook hands. "This means a lot to me, General. I mean, personally. I'll sleep better, knowing K-Dog has the right people on the job. Or at least, I'll have different nightmares now."

"This isn't going to be a vacation in the Med, Jake. I know you know that. We'll need every trick and tactic we can come up with to bag this Keeper once and for all, something we should have done ten years ago."

"You've got two weeks. Get yourself ready and be at the spaceport on the 26th."

They said their good-byes and Winger left Table Top, riding his turbobike down off the mesa and out onto Highway 7, toward Haleyville. The Winger farm was a twenty minute ride and Winger enjoyed the fresh but frigid mountain air on his face as he blasted along on auto through the Notch and past the turnoff to the wargaming range up at Hunt Valley. On both sides of the highway, the high passes were draped with heavy snow, still falling in big wet flakes out of a thick gray, gunmetal fog that had descended over the valley. The bike slowed down for conditions, flashing CAUTION warnings on his helmet head-up display.

Winger ignored the icons and barreled on ahead through the swirling flakes. The turnoff to the farm came up twenty minutes later.

The truth was he didn't know what would happen when he ran into Liam. They had parted on somewhat less than amicable terms a month ago. The boy had come home for a short sabbatical a day before, to celebrate his and Dana's thirtieth wedding anniversary.

Thirty years...jeez, that couldn't be right, could it?

That night, dinner was a subdued affair.

"When do you have to leave?" Dana asked. She was re-arranging dishes to make the pot roast the center of the table.

"I'm due at the spaceport in two weeks. I'll spend a few days at Gateway, meeting the crew and going over equipment and procedures. Sometime around the first of March, Kepler boosts out of orbit. It'll be eight months out."

Dana seemed strangely indifferent, almost resigned. "It's what you want. You could have said no."

Winger forked himself a few slices of roast, topped them off with mashed potatoes. "Not really. This is all about the Keeper. I've been there, I've fought with the damn thing. I know what they're getting into, better than they do. The Corps needs me to do this."

Dana picked at a salad. "Always the Corps. Well, somehow Liam and I will manage."

Liam sat opposite Winger. Trying to change the subject, he hoisted a goblet. "To both of you. Thirty years. And you haven't killed each other yet."

They all toasted peace and harmony.

"You seem a little distracted, honey," Dana told her son. "What's on your mind? Did the University saddle you with too many classes?"

Liam shook his head. "There's only one, Mom...Advanced Cerebral Mnemonic Networks. Meets twice a week, plus Net tutorials and exams. No, I was just thinking." He chewed thoughtfully on a celery stalk. "There's a rally over in Boise day after tomorrow. They say Symborg will be there...at least one of the Symborgs. I'm thinking of going."

Winger silently cursed the very ground the robotic messiah walked on. "It's a waste of time, Professor. An up and coming Cambridge faculty member shouldn't be wasting his time with Assimilationists and trash like that."

Liam knew it would come to this. He kept his eyes focused on an armoire along the wall, silently counting the dishes inside. He didn't look at his father. "I knew you'd say that. Anything new, anything different...anything not from the Corps, Dad...you're against it."

Dana said breezily, "I think it's a good idea. I may just go along. And I was in the Corps, Liam."

"You're different, Mom."

You can say that again, Winger thought but didn't say. "Did you ever think about what a university professor represents, especially one sitting in a distinguished chair from Cambridge? Something like respect, authority, knowledge, little details like that."

"And inquiry," Liam added. "Don't forget that. Freedom of thought. A spirit of questioning."

"You don't want to do anything that damages the University 's image. What would people say if a tenured Cambridge professor is picked up in some kind of disturbance? What kind of example does that set for your students, for your fellow faculty members?"

Liam was unmoved. "I would think it shows I care about new things, listening to all sides, giving everyone a say. You know, a little detail called academic freedom. Maybe even the dignity of being heard."

Winger couldn't believe what he was hearing. "They're not even humans, Liam. All these angels around us...they're clouds of bots, swarms of mechanisms, distributed intelligence, whatever you want to call them. We treat them like humans because the illusion is so good. We've become so good at disguising what they are...and because we want to believe they're real."

"Guys—" Dana tried to intervene. "Guys, this is a dinner table not a—"

But the argument wouldn't be denied. Liam cut in. "Angels are the future. They're a new lifeform. It's a new way of living. And I, for one, want to be part of it."

"Yeah, and when you were two years old, you wanted to be a medieval knight in armor. You wanted to be a race car driver. You wanted to fly like a bird. Dreams are great, Liam. But dreams aren't real."

"They can be real," Liam said quietly. "Dad, Mom...angels give us a chance to be so much more. That's what Symborg always says."

The argument grew more and more intense, obliterating any sense of family that might have started the evening. At some point, Winger excused himself to get some air.

He never came back. Instead, he hauled out his turbobike from the garage and sped off toward Highway 7. He needed to do something, anything, go somewhere, to clear his head.

A high-speed ride through the Buffalo Range would do nicely.

Winger cranked the bike up to a hundred and twenty, skidding through several turns, ignoring the CAUTIONS flashing on his head-up display. He was worried, there was no denying that. Depressed maybe. When he got back from Europa Forge, would Liam still be Liam? Would Dana be Dana? What the hell could you count on to be real? He squeezed the bike handle, just to reassure himself. Then he cracked the visor on his helmet, letting the wind blast into his eyes. That was real.

He saw the sign for Custer Inn come zooming up out of the dark. Why the hell not? He skidded through a turn and went bumping across its ancient gravel parking lot. Inside, the bar was half full, smoky as usual, raucous with some kind of honky-tonk country tune thundering out. A boozed-up couple made languorous turns on the tiny wooden dance floor. Winger came up to a barstool, waved to Jake...no auto-tender here at the Custer Inn...and got a pitcher of something like beer for his efforts.

Jake could see Winger was in something of a dither. "Got to be a wife," he said knowingly. "You've got that girl trouble look on your face, General."

Winger chugged down a long draw on his beer. A carbonated belch blew out his nostrils and lips. "Kind of, Jake. Son trouble, too. My boy wants to go Assimilationist. He can't see what they are...he's been holed up in an ivory tower too long."

Jake was sympathetic. "Isn't Liam a professor or something?"

"Yeah. Across the pond, no less. Cambridge. Sure, I'm proud of him, hell Dana and I are both proud. But he's misguided. He's young. And he's gotten caught up in this angel stuff, become some kind of apologist for Symborg and his kind. I told him they're just machines. But you know how it is with your first crush. You're half blind. They can't do anything wrong. He's too close, can't see what Symborg and the asses are doing to us. It's just mass suicide, in the service of some wacky philosophy about the Old Ones, the mother swarm, all that crap."

Jake took a deep breath. His eyes went to the ceiling. "Maybe it's not all crap."

"Jake...Jake...tell me it's not true. Not you too."

The bartender shrugged. "I like to keep my options open."

That was all Johnny Winger needed to hear. He finished his beer, slapped down a few bills and took off. The bike was his best friend now. It was freedom. It was something he could control. It was something he understood. And it wouldn't be obsolete any time soon.

He almost killed himself taking curves too fast along Highway 7.

Back at the house, Liam had left. No surprise there. Dana wasn't around. Winger went up to their bedroom. His wife...what he had once thought of as his wife...was in bed. Asleep. Or whatever state angels were in when they simulated sleep.

He stood in the doorway, in the darkened hall and listened to the simulated snoring. Damn, they were good. He could almost believe it. He decided he didn't want to wake her up, so he went into the library-study at the other end of the second floor and shut the door.

Lights came on. Music started up, but he waved his hand. The gestural interface stopped the music. He dropped into a sofa seat, idly scanning the spines of printed books.

I need some company. He withdrew the containment pod with Doc III inside and thumbed the control studs on the side. He set the pod down on a table.

While the swarm issued out in a thin stream of flickering mist from the pod and began forming itself up into a passable likeness of old Doc Frost, Winger poured himself several fingers of Glenlivet. He swirled the amber liquid in the glass and watched the bemused countenance of Doc Frost materialize over the cherry wood desk that dominated the study.

***General Winger...if you will pardon me for saying so, I detect emotional distress...analytics indicate forty-five percent increase in skin conductance, combined with stress lines in your face...spikes in ocular saccades beyond baseline...perhaps there is some way I may be of assistance?***

Winger watched the swarm drift slightly across the study. It really was an excellent likeness of Doc Frost. The same dimples in his cheeks. The same faint smirk...saying 'I know things you don't know and I'd love to tell you,' the same slightly off-kilter nose, a childhood injury, now faithfully reproduced by the config engine that formed up the swarm.

Doc III was no angel, in any sense of the word, but he was of the same ilk. A cloud of nanobotic mechs...literally, an autonomous swarm of assemblers at nanometer scale, controlled by a configuration processor and programmed to form up any likeness for which a decent template existed.

"I'm sorry, Doc...I do feel a little down. Hell, I actually feel like a dinosaur."

***Dinosaurs...a diverse group of animals of the clade Dinosauria. They first appeared during the Triassic period, 230 million years ago and were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates for 135 million--***

Winger had to laugh. "Okay, Doc...okay...I get it. You're a walking encyclopedia. I was using a figure of speech."

The Doc III swarm face 'frowned' slightly, as it expressed some programmed module of confusion...or maybe it was disgust. A decent likeness, but Winger had seen better. Even Dana—

"Doc, I feel like I'm riding my bike but I can't control it. I feel like I'm hurtling down Highway 7 and I'm about to crash. You know the Corps has asked me to join another mission to Jupiter, actually to Europa. A mission to deal with the Keeper again."

Doc III considered that. Just like old Doc Frost, when it was thinking, its eyes narrowed, as if to shut out anything extraneous to thought. ***I have already downloaded your personal comms. The details of the Europa Forge mission are known to me. I detect concern about this mission, concern evident in ocular saccades in your eyes, pitch variations and other acoustic anomalies in your voice. Can you explain this?***

That question made Winger think. He lay down on the sofa, fluffing a pillow behind his hand, Scotch on his chest. "Doc, I can't even explain it to myself. Take Liam for instance. He thinks he wants to be an angel, join the Assimilationists, be taken up into the mother swarm. That's insane. It makes me sad...and mad. He's throwing away a perfectly good life."

***You and I have discussed this subject before, precisely sixty-four times in the last year. Your opinion on multiple configuration entities has been consistent during this time interval***

"I know it has, Doc. And it won't change. Look, we invented swarms like you. Doc Frost did it, back in the '60s. The first ANAD, the first autonomous nanoscale assembler swarm with enough configuration control to look like anything, a swarm of bots that could build or breakdown anything material and do it with speed and accuracy...Doc Frost was a genius."

***ANAD systems began at the Autonomous Systems Laboratory at Northgate University in the year 2166...formed from a quantum processor with embedded elements of a viral genome which Doctor Frost obtained from archeological samples at the Engebbe dig site in Kenya. These ancient viral genome elements were later determined to have evolved from fossilized micro-robotic remains apparently seeded by sentient intelligence some three billion years ago***

Winger nodded, finished off his Scotch. "I know what you're saying Doc. It's an old argument. Man created ANAD. But somebody else created the lifeforms that became Man. So who created who? But that's beside the point. We've let our creations take over. ANAD is just a tool. But the tool is re-making the toolmaker. That's what makes me uncomfortable. Doc, I'm no dinosaur. I spent thirty years in Quantum Corps and I've fought and worked with ANAD swarms that whole time. Hell, I even hosted one of your predecessors in a shoulder capsule...the Symbiosis project. Blended man-machine warriors and all that. But it's all gone too far. Now everybody has an angel in their lives. They're everywhere and we can't tell them from Normals. What's real and what isn't? What can you trust? And with the Keeper stirring up there on Europa and bots falling from the skies and the Net going haywire and now my own son, my own wife...are they real? Does it even matter anymore?"

Doc III was silent for a few moments. Its eyes narrowed to slits. It was thinking, processing all the emotional cues Winger was giving off. Jeez, I must be radiating emotions like plutonium, Winger muttered to himself. He watched the Doc III swarm trying to process his tirade. Now I've overloaded the damn thing.

He got up.

At last, the swarm responded. ***Perhaps an anti-anxiety pill would help, General. I have configurations for eleven hundred and four medicines which have proven neural de-traumatizing properties...I could--***

Winger held up a hand. "Thanks, Doc. I just want to have a clear head tomorrow. I've got to go pack. The lifter leaves for the spaceport at seven am." He thumbed the control stud on the side of the containment pod. Immediately, the Doc III swarm began to disperse, sloughing off replicant bots, fading from view. The bot master received the pod command and made its way on propulsors to be captured into the pod. Moments later, the pod winked a green light at him and containment was done. He stuffed the pod into a pocket and went to start packing, mentally going over his pack list as he dragged a suitcase out of a hall closet.

The shuttle to Gateway Station would lift off from Spaceport America down in New Mexico at noon tomorrow. The lifter would take him from the north lift pad at Table Top to the spaceport in less than two hours. He'd have plenty of time.

He wanted to catch the noon shuttle. He wanted to go up to Gateway as early as possible, to learn more about Europa Forge's equipment, the ship and her crew. He had nothing much holding him anymore.

The next morning, still depressed but resolute and clear-headed, Johnny Winger departed by lifter. The flight would take him down to the spaceport in short order. He checked a map on his wristpad as the lifter banked into the clouds and sped south.

It told him that Spaceport America was located in the middle of the Jornada del Muerto desert basin. The closest town was thirty-two kilometers away. Winger figured the town name was appropriate for this trip.

Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.
Chapter 12

Boise, Idaho

February 14, 2121

1930 hours

Liam Winger and his mother Dana Tallant rode into Boise from Haleyville and parked on the outskirts of town, a lot surrounded by cottonwood trees, with the Boise foothills peeking through the woods. They caught a Jiffycab into town; the Assimilationist rally was to start at 8:00 at Julia Davis Park and word on the street was that Symborg would make an appearance.

Leaving the Jiffycab, they ran into thousands of pedestrians streaming along the park walkways, past the Boise River Greenbelt and the zoo, past the Rose Gardens and bazaars and stands of vendors hawking hats and T-shirts and souvenir merchandise of all types. Ahead, through the trees, the first of the assimilator booths could be seen... already long queues of volunteers had lined up in front of the booths. Newsdrones circled overhead, sharing the sky with police drones, occasionally dropping down to get a closer look at the assimilator setup. There were dozens of booths, each manned by a technician and an intake specialist, who took down the name and vitals of each volunteer as they approached the booth. Once the preliminaries had been done, the tech assisted the volunteer into the booth and whoosh, nothing but atom fluff.

A steady stream of faint mist issued out of each booth, as the deconstruct bot swarms worked overtime, disassembling each volunteer and sending them right into oblivion...or as Symborg termed it: "unity with the Mother Swarm."

Liam turned to Dana. "Pretty exciting, huh, Mom? Symborg...live and in person."

Dana just shook her head. "You're not really going through with this, are you?"

Liam grabbed his mother by the shoulders and steered her through heavy crowds, bumping and jostling their way up the greenbelt. A huge bandshell and stage lit up with powerful flood lights loomed ahead.

"It's kind of exciting, don't you think? I mean, look at those booths. All those people...they're going into the mother swarm. Taken up. A new life for them. A new way. Yeah, Mom, I want to do it. I have to do it."

Dana was jazzed by the crowd herself. "Your father won't like it. Me, I think it's a personal thing. Everybody's different."

Liam could feel the buzz of the bots that comprised Dana in his hands. Her shoulders were warm to the touch, vibrating slightly, like a hive of bees under a cloak, ready to burst out. "You did it. You changed. What was it like? Were you scared?"

Dana gave that some thought. She barely remembered anything. It had happened at night, overnight. Like a dream. She went to bed a Normal human. The swarms came in the dark, through an open window—she'd always liked the window open at night, listening to the wind rushing down the Buffalo range like a river of air—and it was over quick as that. At first, she felt smothered, like someone had draped a huge cloak over her, was it Wings? No, he was away, on a mission. Then her skin crawled all over and it itched like crazy. Then she went to sleep. When she awakened, she felt...how could you describe it?...warm, cocooned, sheltered, protected. Like she belonged. Like she was home at last.

"No, honey, I was never scared. It just happened."

Police estimates of the gathering crowd ranged from a few hundred thousand to over a million. People came from all over the Rocky Mountain and Pacific states, even from western Canada. Symborg was coming. Symborg would be there. Symborg....

There were others in the vast crowd who weren't so happy. A vociferous contingent of anti-angel protesters had promised a response. They called themselves Hellcats and their warnings and threats were all over the Net, all over the news. None other than assimilationist gadfly Lanier Barnes had promised to be there.

"We'll make those haloheads and asses scream and shout," he had told reporters. "Think of us as normalizers. Normality. Normals. That's what we're all about."

Police patrols, bots and drones were thick in and over the crowd. They expected a violent confrontation and planned to be ready.

Promptly at 8:00 pm, the rally began. Excited and stirred like a hornet's nest, the crowds surged forward, pressing against police cordons like waves lapping a pier. Liam and Dana found themselves caught up in the rush, caught in a riptide of humanity pushing, shoving, jostling and crowding ever forward. Police and event security pressed back, but the cordon shrank and drew ever tighter. Scuffles broke out and fists flew.

Liam caught an elbow in the face. Dana took one to the mouth. Liam shoved back and wriggled himself enough space to help his mother to the edge of the crowd, toward a first aid booth that had been stationed near the bandshell. While rock and jam music blared from loudspeakers, lights strobed across the stage and the crowd, police drones swooped and sprayed unruly crowds with relaxant mist, Liam and Dana were attended by nurses and medbots, treating their cuts and bruises.

Liam's face was aglow. "It's insane. I love it."

Shouts erupted nearby. Hellcats were swinging fists and batons and shockwands along the edge of the crowd. More fists flew. Bodies fell to the ground, trampled in panic. Police drones circled the melee and voices boomed out.

"DISPERSE AT ONCE! THIS IS A POLICE ORDER! CEASE AND DESIST AND DISPERSE AT ONCE...!"

Overhead, news drones captured everything.

Liam turned to check out the commotion. Something slammed into his face and he was knocked off his stool to the ground, stunned, semi-conscious, blood spurting everywhere.

"Her too! She's one of 'em!" came voices nearby.

Liam hauled himself up and immediately found himself in a shoving match with a burly, bearded red-haired man with a shockwand, illegal and deadly all the same. Big Beard swung the baton again and just clipped Liam on the shoulder, sending two hundred volts into his neck and arms. Liam's arm went dead and he nearly fell, but grabbed a counter at the first aid stand and stayed upright. He collected himself and kicked out, knocking the wand from Big Beard's hand. Then he waded in, fists flying.

Even a Cambridge professor can kick a little ass, he thought.

The melee lasted a few more minutes. Dana had been knocked down, but a police bot appeared and she picked herself up with a few scrapes while the bot swung around, sweeping out a clearing in the throng with its graser arms, whirling like a demented dervish, lights flashing and sirens whooping even over the thunderous jam of the loudspeakers.

The Hellcats were everywhere, battling it out with assimilationists, angels, onlookers, the curious and the committed all at the same time. Police seemed unable to stop all the fights. The best they could do was concentrate on containing the violence to the rally grounds.

Through it all, the jam went on and speakers came and went up on the stage.

While Liam and Dana were being treated, Symborg finally appeared.

Symborg acknowledged the crowds with a wave and moved to the center microphone. The angel was good, Liam could see that. Better even than his mom. Very few edge effects...often, angels fuzzed out at their extremities, where the swarm didn't have good config control. This one was tight and dense over its entire surface...only an occasional pop or flash in the torso area, one or two in the face, gave away the fact that the angel was a para-human, a swarm of nanobots configged to look human. In stature, he was a smallish man, dark of color but that could be easily enough changed. His height contrasted with a stocky frame, and his face was dominated by a black moustache. It was an appearance Liam had never seen before, but then Symborg was an angel and angels could do that.

"PEOPLE OF BOISE...THE TIME HAS COME FOR A CHANGE...." His voice boomed out across the rally ground and the crowd grew more and more frenzied, pressing ever tighter against the police cordon.

"PEOPLE OF BOISE...WHAT IS IT THAT ASSIMILATION BRINGS?"

The response roared up out of the crowd like a thing alive.

"PEJERU...PEJERU...PEJERU!!"

A radiant smile came to Symborg's face, beamed by cameras to screens throughout the rally grounds.

"Peace. Ecstasy. Joy. Enlightenment. Rapture. Unity with the Mother Swarm. You are right!"

The crowd roiled and throbbed like a frenetic horde, as one, surging again and again against the stage and the police barricade.

The give and take went on for a few minutes, punctuated with more music, more strobing lights, more frenzy in the crowds, which pressed tighter and tighter against the barricades surrounding the stage.

Dana watched her son Liam, Liam! grow more and more entranced with the whole affair. His face was aglow, his eyes wide, his fists pumping in rhythm with the beat of the music. He pushed back into the throng, his hands reaching back for his mom. Their fingers were entwined for a moment, but the crush of the crowd forced them apart. Dana saw his head bobbing over the others.

She realized he wasn't trying to get closer to the stage. He was heading for the line of assimilator booths. Long queues of volunteers snaked around the perimeter of the rally grounds. There was a shoving match outside of one booth, Lanier Barnes and his Hellcats trying to start a ruckus again. Police had already swarmed into the area and drones overhead swept the grounds with spotlights.

Dana tried to follow Liam but the surge and flow of the crowd was like a tide, carrying her away from the booths. Finally, she gave up. All she could do was watch as Liam squeezed and pushed and gradually made his way toward the first queue.

She didn't know how to feel. Inside, maybe a little pride. Liam was taking a big step here, and she admired the courage of it. Her own change hadn't come like this. Truth was: she didn't really remember how it had happened. One night, she had gone to bed Dana Albright Tallant, a Normal wife, retired Quantum Corps nanotrooper, a forty-five year old woman with a few more wrinkles and lines than before. Something happened. She thought it had been a dream. When she woke up, she was Dana Albright Tallant. But no longer Normal. Now, she was changed, now she was an angel. She liked to think of herself as a big family of nanobots, gathered together in a form resembling Dana Albright Tallant. How were you supposed to feel? She had the same memories. The same lines and wrinkles, though some resolution at fine scale was gone. But she could do so much more, with her new multi-configuration powers. Oh, she could do so very much more now.

And now Liam, her own son, would soon be joining her.

Symborg was doing magic tricks up on the stage. The crowd roared its approval.

He approached the mike again and told them how he loved Boise, no less than any of them. How he loved the mountains and the streams, how he lived and breathed Idaho and always would. From down in front of the stage, Dana Tallant managed to wriggle an arm free and pressed a few buttons on her wristpad, zooming in for an extreme close-up on the robotic messiah himself.

Is that sweat on his forehead? She wondered if angels could even do that, then decided it was like everything else at the rally...part of the show. What she didn't see was the faint trail of bots that drifted off Symborg's hand and down into the crowd itself.

Symborg continued his magic, his blurry hand by turns a cloud of bots, a magic wand, a djinn granting wishes, mesmerizing the crowd, plucking their emotions like a mandolin, first rising, then falling, cresting and receding. He was a master showman...Dana had to admit that.

What she didn't know was how well Symborg knew his crowd. The bots he had loosed into the crowd, unseen, were now embedded in the heads of scores of nearby faithful.

Even as he dazzled the crowd, Symborg was receiving feeds from the bots that many of them had already ingested. A faint pall of fog wafted off the stage, sending more and more bots into recon mode among the rally. Processor module ANALYZE GLUTAMATE PATTERN MATCHING received results from the nanobotic sleuths even now burrowing into their brains, sniffing along highways of equal glutamate concentration, rebuilding memories from their chemical residues.

Algorithms ran and massaged the data from the bots. The crowd was hooked, in synch with Symborg. Patterns matched with high confidence. Symborg saw snatches of memory, fragments of images...large crowds, banners and dancers, a train creeping into a station, belching smoke, brakes squealing. Some kind of rally, somewhere else.

All this the crowd gave up to the bots in their brains, and to Symborg, who smiled back and went on with the rally.

Liam managed to work his way up to the front of one of the queues. A uniformed attendant came forward with a tablet, asking questions, interviewing Liam. What was his name? Where did he live? Why did he want to do this? Did he have a wife? Children? Give us your next of kin for notifications.

Liam signed something on the tablet. He didn't read it. He was in a different place, in some kind of trance state, perhaps, lost to the sounds and the jostling around him. He did hear faint voices over the din of the crowd. Lanier Barnes was nearby, his nasal twang distinguishable from the tumult of the crowd. He had an amplifier and he was trying to drown out Symborg.

"IT'S A LIE, PEOPLE...ALL THIS IS A LIE...DON'T DO THIS...IT'S A BIG SCAM...YOUR LOVED ONES ARE GOING RIGHT TO HELL...THERE'S NO MOTHER SWARM...."

But Liam didn't care. He knew Lanier Barnes and his Hellcats were nearby, the jostling and shoving was getting worse, hectoring and harassing the volunteers but the police were already there, just as Liam was ushered into a booth.

The technician smiled faintly as he shut and secured the assimilator booth door. More like a hatch.

The deconstruction process began. At first, Liam felt nothing. Maybe a general sense of peace and serenity, like floating on a raft in a summertime lake, perhaps a result of the bots which had already entered his brain and were managing his pleasure centers, stoking dopamine in his ventral tegmentum.

The technician, whose nameplate said Irvin, sat at a console just outside the booth. The tech pressed buttons to begin the seal and containment process. In seconds, a tight bot-proof seal had been formed around the interior of the booth, a barrier formed of electron injectors and a dedicated botscreen.

"Let's do it," another tech nearby told Irvin. Irvin pressed more buttons.

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

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

Liam didn't move. Irvin checked the cam on his display, zooming in through the front porthole on Liam's right leg. At first, it was unchanged, a smooth gray pants leg with some half-frayed cuffs showing, hitched up just above his shins. But even as Irvin watched, the gray of his pants had begun to fade. In moments, it was a lighter gray, like the fog itself, oscillating between darker and lighter, but still gray. Then the gray became a translucent shimmer, almost like a ghost, flickering slightly, but growing ever dimmer. His shoulder was the same.

Liam Winger was slowly but steadily being disassembled. He was being steadily broken down into a pattern, a pattern of atoms and molecules.

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

In time, and the time was less than five minutes, Liam Winger had devolved—that was the commonly accepted word now—into a nearly translucent shadow, still recognizable in form, but without substance. You could see right through the form and the shadow to the other side of the booth.

And then he was gone. Enveloped and enmeshed and at one with the greater swarm of nanobotic mechs that was Config Zero.

That's what the brochures said. That's what Symborg said.

Bit by bit, the police cordon was shrinking and contracting. Now Symborg had finished and with a flourish, waved his arms toward the crowd. The crowd roared back. The stage began to shake and the people on the stage stumbled momentarily. Symborg retreated toward a row of seats on the edge of the stage.

The rally organizer...all the announcements called him Detrick...grabbed a microphone. He tried to calm the crowd.

His amplified voice screeched with feedback and was drowned in the deafening roar of the crowd, which surged forward with renewed fury. It was like a rock concert mixed with religious revival, amplified a thousand-fold. The dronecams captured everything: people wailing, fainting, shrieking, even dying in the crush. The crowd became a crazed, mindless thing.

And no one was paying any attention to Detrick.

Finally, in order to save the situation, Symborg was forced to leave the platform, under escort. As he did so, the crowd broke through the last barriers and pressed forward to try and touch the angel. Just when it appeared Symborg and his police protective detail were about to be crushed to death in the surging crowd, Symborg did what angels can do...he dematerialized into a loose, amorphous swarm and disappeared in a faint puff, dissipating into the air above the stage.

Newsdrones captured the whole thing on dronecam video.

And the rest of the police detail was left to fight their way out of the crowd, who became even more agitated at the disappearance of their hero Symborg. Soon, the stage collapsed completely and a full-scale riot had developed.

The assimilator booth which had once contained Liam Winger was knocked over by the onrushing multitude. Lanier Barnes and the Hellcats had broken through the police cordon and rushed the booths, knocking most of them over, scattering and assaulting many of the techs and volunteers.

Police in full armor waded into the riot, swinging batons and shockers left and right.

Dana Tallant barely escaped with her life. In the end, she did as Symborg did, as all angels could do.

She de-materialized and disappeared in a faint sparkling smoke cloud. In moments, she was gone, now on picowatt propulsors, heading back on stiff late winter breezes coming down off the Buffalo range, back to Highway 7 and the farm in Haleyville.
Chapter 13

Solnet/Omnivision Video Post

@anika.radovich.solnetworldview

February 16, 2121

1200 hours U.T.

SOLNET Special Report:

Symborg Triggers Riots in Boise, Idaho

Solnet Reporter Anika Radovich reports on the recent angel riots in Boise:

"Viewing the dronecam footage of the disturbances several days ago, I had several thoughts. First, there is an explosive increase in the numbers of angels...and by angels I mean swarms of nanobots configured to closely resemble human beings...Normals as we have begun calling ourselves, as if anything about this is normal...a nearly exponential increase in the numbers of angels walking our streets. Second, parallel with this increase and in many ways a triggering mechanism, is the growth of the Church of Assimilation and its followers, especially followers of the recently-released Symborg.

"This report will detail some of the background to this growth. We also hope to bring you a live vid interview with Symborg himself.

"Many Solnet viewers have expressed concerns about another problem we've been having recently...an increase in problems with the Net, both Solnet and WorldNet. Whether worms, Trojans, zero-day exploits, root-level malware, or other viruses, many Solnet viewers have had difficulties accessing the Net, even to view our reports. Our engineers have assured me that Special Report won't be affected at all...in fact, my engineer here, Stephen Welks, has assured me that everything is under control and that Special Report will be posted just like normal. So let that put your fears to rest.

"Now to the latest from Boise...as you know, two days ago, one of many Assimilationist rallies that occur every day around the world was held. Symborg himself was on the schedule to appear. And, as with many of these so-called 'awakenings', assimilator booths were on hand for volunteers who want to...I guess the phrase is, 'be taken up into the mother swarm...be assimilated.'

"Many of these rallies have descended into chaos and riots. According to police sources I talked with, the presence of Lanier Barnes and his anti-angel group the Hellcats was the proximate cause of the disturbances in Boise. These agitators have disrupted Assimilationist rallies all over the world. While the underlying philosophy of Barnes and the Hellcats is somewhat murky, there can be no denying the effect they have on assimilationists everywhere. If Symborg is seen by millions as a hero, even a sort of robotic messiah, then Lanier Barnes must be seen as the opposite. Every hero seems to produce an anti-hero, just as many forms of matter have corresponding forms of anti-matter.

"Some years ago, when Symborg first came to prominence, I posted a Special Report dedicated to describing the rise of this unlikely hero. Here are some excerpts:

\--The central figure in all this hurricane of emotion and frenzy was Symborg himself. It was no secret that Symborg was an angel...a semi-human swarm of nanobots. He never made any attempt to hide that.

As a charismatic spiritual and political leader, Symborg has great influence, even though his followers are well aware that he is nothing but a lifelike swarm of nanoscale robotic elements. Physically, his main appearance is that of a handsome middle-aged man of average height but muscular build, but he can assume many other configurations and forms, as needs dictate. Symborg seems to prefer maintaining a consistent 'brand' and 'image, so he does not often present himself in public in anything other than Config One, his most human-like state.

His creators, whoever or whatever they are, have done their homework. Symborg has been programmed with the most effective personality elements of Hitler, Buddha, Jesus, Gandhi, Lincoln and a variety of historical figures, kings and emperors, celebrities and scoundrels. Symborg can assume whatever personality characteristics seem appropriate for the moment. Each is nothing more than a module he can activate or shut off at any time. Yet each is developed, tested and fine-tuned for maximum effect and charisma and the modules can be modified on the fly, probably by Config Zero according to our sources at UNIFORCE and downloaded to Symborg over secure, encrypted quantum communication channels that Humans haven't been able to detect or intercept. This is a point of potential weakness. Sources tell us that Quantum Corps has been trying to exploit this link by detecting, intercepting and scrambling these communications.

Symborg first came to public notice from a small Kenyan village on the borderlands of the east African swarm sanctuary. The village is Kipwezi. He is by appearance a man of darker skin, but not deeply black. One of Symborg's physical capabilities is the ability to manipulate his skin appearance to appear subtly lighter or darker, depending on the needs of the audience. This is a simple matter of manipulating the melanocyte composition of the skin cells at the molecular level, something easy for Symborg to do. He can literally be all things to all people, as any good politician would want.

From the beginning, Symborg has been an advocate of Assimilationism, the idea that man and his ANAD creations are destined to merge into some kind of blended symbiotic organism, part human and part machine.

Symborg is a messianic character, some have said even a robotic messiah. He is programmed with the healing and teaching abilities of Jesus, the oratorical skills of a Lincoln, a Roosevelt or a Hitler, the enlightened state of a Buddha, the ruthlessness of a Stalin or Mao, the leadership ability of Patton or Nelson or Mohammed, and the sheer intellectual genius of an Einstein. He is or can be all things to all people. But most of all, he is a persuasive advocate for assimilationism and for deconstruction of single-config entities such as Humans into nanobotic swarm elements and their absorption into the mother swarm. This absorption is portrayed by Symborg as something akin to Heaven, nirvana, paradise or just a desirable end-state configuration symbiotically united with the great mother swarm of the Central Entity. Symborg publically uses the phrases 'Central Entity' and 'Mother Swarm' interchangeably with various audiences according to his analysis of their emotional and spiritual needs.

In fact, UNIFORCE sources tell SOLNET that Symborg has the programmed ability to do glutamate trace matching on large numbers of people at the same time...a covert insertion of a few nanobots to sniff out glutamate and dopamine trails in the brains of his followers and the ability to remotely manipulate these trails so as to produce desired emotional states of wonder, enlightenment, happiness, ecstasy, or terror, as the situation dictates. Symborg is like a conductor, orchestrating the ventral tegmentum areas of the brains of his followers to achieve ecstasy or enlightenment or abject terror as his needs dictate. One of the rituals Symborg encourages in his followers is to allow small-scale nanobots to be inserted into them...this is considered good form for those who seek Assimilation. They do this by drinking a small cup of liquid, which contains the nanobots, which then insert themselves. These inserted bots, like angels, allow Symborg to precisely control how his audiences respond to his messages.

Symborg has gathered around himself a small coterie of followers and worshippers. This cabal seems to be a mixture of actual Humans and swarm–angels. They are known publically as the Sons of Assimilation—

"Now, let's talk with Symborg himself...we have him standing by from his headquarters in Nairobi. Good day, sir...can you hear me okay? Thanks for taking the time to be with us today."

On millions of screens and displays all over the world, the image of Anika Radovich is split off and shared on screen with the image of the Assimilationist leader. Symborg is wearing a simple white shirt with some kind of token on a chain around his neck. He is dark-complexioned, with high cheek bones and a winning smile. His eyes sparkle.

"Good day, Ms. Radovich. It's my pleasure. And as we say here in Kenya...Karibu...welcome to you and your followers."

"Thank you, Mr. Symborg. Right off the bat, I'd like to ask you a question...one that is on the minds of many of our followers—"

"Surely."

"There is a very common public perception among many of your followers that you are indeed a sort of messiah or savior. Can you comment on these perceptions for our audience?"

Symborg continued smiling, though the arc of his lips evolved to more of a smirk. "Indeed, Ms. Radovich, I am well aware of these perceptions, as you call them...and I am, of course, extremely flattered. As your followers are no doubt aware, some eleven years ago, an archaeologist named Rudolf Volk presented some extraordinary findings to the world. His work at a dig site not far from here, a place called Engebbe, produced direct fossilized evidence of micro-robotic remains, dated to be consistent in time with fossilized bone structures from multiple Homo Erectus finds."

"Exactly, Mr. Symborg. If you would permit me, I'd like to open another window on our viewers' screens and show some of the report that my colleague Anna Kolchinova made at that time—"

"Please go ahead, Ms. Radovich."

Another window opens. The report is dated August 5, 2110. The place is the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany....Kolchinova's blond curls come up on the window....

"The essence of Dr. Volk's presentation is that we now have incontrovertible proof, physical evidence, that Man didn't develop and evolve on this planet alone or unaided. Recent finds of fossilized micro robotic remains among ancient Homo Erectus bones at the Engebbe dig site have swept the world of archaeology and anthropology like a hurricane. Volk is a researcher in the Institute's Department of Human Evolution and was here in Leipzig to present the details of his findings to the Institute's Board of Directors.

"According to Dr. Volk, the robotic remains have been conclusively dated to be synchronous in time with the bone remains. The techniques used were a relatively new, more advanced form of radiocarbon dating, a method called quantum state spectrometry. According to Dr. Volk, the tests have been performed multiple times, by multiple researchers right here at the Institute and the results are consistent across all experiments and experimenters."

"It seems, to quote Dr. Marta Siebeck, an archaeologist on the Board here, that 'we may be descended from ancient robotic creatures.'"

When the Kolchinova report was done, Symborg took the moment to make a statement.

"Ms. Radovich, I am a direct descendant of the individuals discovered by Dr. Volk."

Momentarily startled, Anika cleared her throat. "Mr. Symborg, if you will pardon me, that's a rather extraordinary thing to say. Would you care to elaborate?"

Symborg's face lit up. "I would indeed. Perhaps, it's best to begin at the beginning. What is it that the Church of Assimilation stands for? What do we believe in?"

Anika took the bait. "Okay, I'll be your audience. To me, the Church stands for de-construction...a kind of mass suicide."

Symborg shook his head. "No, that's not it at all. In fact, we believe in the unity of all things. We believe that long ago, the Old Ones came to Earth and seeded it with life. Their plan was that this life would grow and develop into a sort of common unified swarm, a sort of common mind, not unlike viruses today. Simple but powerful elements, but organized into greater formations. And when the first elements had developed enough, they would be ready to be taken up by the mother swarm of the Old Ones, incorporated into the greater Unity that is the universe."

Radovich had heard this story before. It was a standard litany in many Assimilationist awakenings. "But there was a mistake, according to your way of thinking. Things didn't quite work out. Evolution got off track and Man is a result of that mistake."

Symborg's smile was that of a parent gently correcting a wayward child. "Not quite. You see: those whom you call the Old Ones have spent millions of years seeding and developing life on other worlds. Each time they do this, the Old Ones seed life to ensure that it evolves in a manner compatible with them...evolving as a distributed, intelligent virus-like swarm of entities. The Old Ones are using this seeding campaign as a way of developing multiple swarm entities with which they can merge. Ultimately, they want to unite all world-based instances of swarm life which they have seeded into a giant, galaxy-spanning swarm or hive mind. Like a network or computational cloud. To the Old Ones, this is the Imperative of Life itself. The Imperative of Life is that life absorbs chaos from the Universe and adds or builds structure or order. Life is anti-entropic."

"Mr. Symborg, I've heard these explanations in all your literature, all your so-called 'awakenings.' But the fact is, millions of your followers are committing suicide, going into those booths. How can you justify this? Isn't this just a new form of genocide?"

Symborg's smile faded, to be replaced by a hard, determined edge to his face and lips. Anika thought she could even see his cheek planes morphing; maybe it was her imagination.

"Earth was seeded by the Old Ones billions of years ago. But the evolutionary track which the Old Ones laid down on Earth was interrupted or disrupted and evolution took a different course. Multi-cellular, single-configuration, organisms took over. Earth was to have been populated by swarms of intelligent, re-configurable virus-like entities. Instead, it's populated by human beings. So in a larger sense, you are correct, Ms. Radovich. Man is a mistake. The Old Ones mean to correct this mistake. The Imperative demands this."

Anika tried another tack. "What exactly is this Prime Key you speak of? Is it a philosophy?"

"The Prime Key is a tool, Ms. Radovich. It's a blueprint. The Prime Key instructs all swarms to maintain certain configurations and to follow additional programming which will ultimately have the effect of returning the Earth to a biological and geological state similar to its condition approximately a billion years ago, when the Old Ones last visited. This programming is a sort of evolution in reverse. I have come to ensure that the Prime Key is executed."

Anika suddenly felt a chill down her spine at Symborg's words. Not precisely his words. It was the way he said them. His voice was even, dead flat, almost machine-like. Anika realized deep down inside, in a visceral way she couldn't put into words, that she was dealing with a machine here, despite outward appearances. It had a program. And it would stop at nothing to execute that program.

"Mr. Symborg, I have one final question for our viewers."

The expressionless smile came back. "Certainly, Ms. Radovich."

"Are you God?"

Now it was Symborg's turn to pause. His smile was an enigmatic facial tic. Had she found something with the question? Had she tripped some flag or inhibit inside the angel's program?

"Ms. Radovich, names and labels are human creations. The Central Entity...the essential core of the Old Ones...did not create the universe...we don't know who or what did. But the Mother Swarm is coming and all of us will be taken up...all of us will be part of the family. It is the Imperative of Life...negentropy, the reduction of chaos. The basic organizing influence in the universe is life. Life involves utilizing a flow of energy to draw order from chaos and build internal complexity with an accumulation of information. Living beings thus are anti-entropic, or negentropic, entities. The principle of negentropism is, in a manner of speaking, the 'natural law' applicable to all living beings located anywhere in the universe, regardless of their size, shape, biochemistry, sentience, or culture. Your own philosophers know this. They have said this. I have come to help you and all life on Earth fulfill this destiny."

"Mr. Symborg, I want to thank you for taking the time to be with us today on Special Report."

Again the smile. A politician's smile, all teeth, no warmth. "It was my pleasure, Ms. Radovich."

The screen display went dark, to be replaced by the Solnet logo.

Solnet Special Report Ends

Anika took a deep breath. She was drained and she needed a drink. To Stephen Welks, the engineer nearby, she said what she really thought.

"That guy is as loony as a three-dollar bill."

Welks didn't answer right away. He was uploading the interview file to the main server. "Great work, Anika. It'll be all over the Net in an hour. I just need to re-format a little for time and you can check the edit."

"Great, Stephen. Ping me when you're done. I'm going to the office for a little downtime."

"Sure thing, Ms. Radovich."

The Solnet reporter left the studio. She didn't see Welks begin deconstructing right at the console, the moment she left. By the time, Anika had reached her own office down the hall, Stephen Welks was no longer a single-configuration entity. The angel swarm had dispersed into a thin veil of sparkling mist, a swarm of nanobotic elements. Before Anika had poured her first few fingers of vodka and crashed onto a sofa in the corner of her office, the Welks angel had assumed a translucent amorphous cloud-like form and already unplugged a network cable from the console, opening up a Solnet port. In moments, the angel had completely vanished from the studio, penetrating the now open port and entering the world of Solnet itself.
Chapter 14

Gateway Station, Earth-Moon L2 Point

February 25, 2121

0430 hours

The crew lounge and bar on board Gateway Station had long ago been done up to follow a Wild West theme. Known to the locals as the High Plains Saloon, the bulkheads were filled with faux Colt 45s and photos of Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp, coonskin caps and Winchester rifles, along with other frontier memorabilia. A hand-lettered wooden sign had been duct taped to the bulkhead above the gangway entrance: Dodge City: 1.5 million miles. The auto-tender behind the bar sported a bright silver badge, along with chaps, a bandolier and even a droopy white moustache on its cylindrical head. A black Homburg was secured to the top of its video dome. Everyone called the tender Marshal.

Johnny Winger and Evan Metcalf were on hand, with Captain Hideki Yamato, the Frontier Corps four-star who would been piloting their ship into deep space in less than a day.

"Quite a place you've got here," Winger observed. He tossed back the rest of his beer and studied the view out of the nearby cupola. Earth and the Moon were both in crescent phase. The other modules of the station hung like fat grapes on the trellis that was Gateway's main truss structure. "Only we seem to be a long way from Dodge City."

"Maybe not so far," said Metcalf. "Lots of shady characters around here."

"Yes, it is true," Yamato nursed a cup of sake. "Dockhands should never be trusted. Shall we take a tour of the ship?"

Winger nodded. "Suits me. It's going to be home sweet home for the next few years."

They paid their bills and left the Saloon, making their through gangways and compartments to Dock 2, where their ship was parked, still surrounded by hordes of work drones and dockhands, making last minute connections, aligning gear, loading supplies through an aft shipping hatch.

Yamato paused outside the bridge entrance. "May I present the UNS-227, the Johannes Kepler."

Winger peered through the bridge porthole at the huge ship. "Still looks like a kebab skewer to me."

Yamato appeared hurt, as Metcalf added, "Yeah, with onions and sausages strung on the skewer."

Yamato cut in. "She's fully up to date with all changes and modifications. First class accommodations. Mark IV plasma engines, uprated reactor...she will take us to Jupiter in style, gentlemen."

"And back, I hope," said Winger.

"Ah, here is my executive officer now—" Yamato stood aside as a thin crewman in officer's piping drifted up to the bridge hatch. "—Commander Winston Smithers."

Winger could tell right away that Smithers was angel. It was long-standing Frontier Corps practice to assign angels second-in-command duty on cycler ships and deep-space vessels. They were loyal. They were smart, having constantly upgraded quantum processors. They were flexible, driven by their config engines...angels could morph into anything they had a config for. Perfect crew members, reasoned the Corps in its wisdom.

This angel was good, better than most in appearance, but far from perfect. Smithers had loose ropy arms and his hands had an indefinable fuzz at the fingers. When he grasped something, the solidity was spotty; sometimes, the fingers went right through the object being grasped. Still, all in all, a capable-looking officer. Winger knew of Smithers' exploits with the Francis Bacon.

Smithers extended a hand and Winger shook it. The thing felt normal, even if it wasn't. "Pleased to me you, General Winger. It will be an honor having you aboard the K-Dog. I've scanned all the mission files from your previous trip to Europa."

"I'm sure that made for interesting reading, Commander. I see you've made a full...er, recovery, from dealing with MARTOP. Scuttlebutt says you were nearly extinguished. Like deader than dirt."

Smithers cracked a sort of smile. "In a manner of speaking, General, that's true. Of course, an angel such as myself cannot truly die, as you are alluding to. My assembly was dispersed and only my main processor core remained. Crewmen from the Bacon were able to retrieve my master core and my structures and forms were regenerated from that. I believe the phrase is 'good as new.'"

"Indeed," said Yamato. "Commander Smithers now hosts numerous upgrades to his core and effectors, along with a completely new config driver." He cycled open the bridge hatch and waved them in. "Shall we begin?"

The group explored the innards of the K-Dog—Yamato admitted to hating the nickname that dockhands and crewmen had given to his brand-new ship, but there wasn't much he could do about it. The three onions on the skewer were A, B, and C decks. Aft of the crew spaces, K-Dog's quad propellant tanks looked like fat sausages on the lower end of the skewer. Her reactor and plasma torch engines hung off the bottom, a nuclear electric drive that would send the ship hurtling off into deep space with a seemingly slow starting kick, but after just a few days, the Dog would be eating up the miles with the best of them.

Metcalf pulled Winger aside as the two of them hung back on B deck for a moment, on the pretext of examining her hab spaces more closely. Yamato went forward with Smithers to attend to some last minute details on the command deck.

Metcalf was plainly worried. "General, I read your mission reports too. One thing bothers me. If we get to Europa and find that Keeper guy has reached the surface and is active again, can we really trust an angel officer like Smithers? I mean he's a cloud of bugs...pardon me, sir, a swarm of nanobotic mechanisms. An ANAD-style swarm. What's to keep the Keeper from taking Smithers over, co-opting him, so to speak? Don't all ANAD systems have a common architecture?"

Winger had thought about the very same thing. "They do, Inspector. When I was aboard the Trident, submerged in the ocean, our crew had the same question about our angels. In fact, we did have some problems with them reverting to outside control...we had to disable and contain them to keep them from damaging the ship." Winger wanted to believe progress had been made since then. "The truth is nobody knows, I guess. It's all a matter of programming, security protocols, how well can angel master cores recover from upsets, outside signals, penetration attempts, that sort of thing. From what I know, Smithers has proven himself several times already. Maybe we should cut him some slack."

Metcalf wasn't convinced. "Maybe we should keep an eye on him. Treat him like a spy."

Winger silently agreed, but he felt compelled to put up a front. "Let's just follow regs and see what happens, okay? K-Dog's got a pretty good complement of defenses."

The big day came and Yamato gathered his entire crew, all twenty two of them, in the ship's galley on B deck for an all-hands briefing.

"The trip out will take just under eight months," he told them. "Nominally, two hundred and twenty eight days."

One of the crewmen in the back, Becker from Supply, called out. "We gonna have drills every day, Captain?"

Yamato set his lips in a tight line. "Frontier Corps crews must be prepared for any eventuality. Proficiency must be maintained. So, yes, there will be frequent drills...possibly every day. Duty rosters and schedules will be posted in the crews' mess every day at 0700 hours."

"Jeez, Becker," said Nygren from Engineering, "what did you think? We're on a vacation cruise?"

Yamato went on with a few more details. "I expect every crew member to maintain their training schedules. You have those already. Commander Smithers will be in charge of all tests and proficiency checks."

The executive officer stood next to Yamato with an expressionless face that could only be described as angel bland. A swarm's interpretation of stoic command leadership.

Winger studied Yamato as he went down a list of announcements: assignments, promotions, equipment upgrades, the usual admin crap that every ship captain dealt with. He decided that Yamato was like a puppy on his first walk: earnest and eager to please, generally aware of the rules but anxious to get on with the big event, not sure of his standing with the others. Lots of book knowledge but no field experience. Not totally green or without seasoning but definitely untested. Winger knew the testing would come: Frontier Corps crews were like children, always pushing the boundaries, probing to see what they could get away with.

Yamato would have to grow some spine if he intended to command this bunch.

Winger left the briefing and went to his bunk on B deck, following the circular passage around from the crews' mess. He was in the middle of unloading his bags and gear when his wristpad chirped. Incoming call.

This one was from Earth.

It was a Level One message from Dana. Winger massaged the crypto circuit, which beeped, and let Dana's voice come through.

At first, she didn't make any sense. Words came out in snatches, torrents, gibberish and her face was taut as a guitar string.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa...slow down, Dana. What's this about Liam? What's going on?"

Dana took a deep breath. Her face relaxed a little. Was it morphing? Facial bots shuffling around, reconfiguring? He couldn't be sure. Normals didn't do that.

"I was saying—" she forced herself to take a few deep breaths "—Liam and I went to that rally in Boise. Wings, it was scary...it was a riot. People shoving, the police...people were getting trampled. And those Hellcats—"

"I know, I know. I saw the newsvids. You're not hurt, are you? You and Liam got away okay?" For a brief moment, he forgot that Dana was an angel. Old habits surfaced. The love that had once....

"It's Liam. I'm okay. But Liam's gone."

"Gone? What do you mean gone? Back to Cambridge?"

Dana shook her head. Somehow, the config wasn't holding...maybe it was his wristpad, the resolution wasn't sharp. Not enough pixels. Her nose and lips didn't track with the rest of her face. It was jarring, but he tried to ignore it.

"No. No, he went to one of the booths. The assimilators. He went in."

"He what?"

Dana nodded. "He's gone, Wings. The booths were knocked over by the crowds. Liam went through the 'awakening.' He deconstructed. He's gone." It was plain she didn't know what to do with her hands; they fluttered around like something disconnected.

Winger put down the bag he had been unloading. He felt like he had been kicked in the gut and drop-kicked into the middle of next week. Liam. Liam!

"Maybe he got away...maybe you just missed him in the crowds."

Dana was already shaking her head before he had even finished. "No, Wings, he's an angel. For real. He took the step. He did it."

Even on his wristpad screen, he could see something: what the hell? Was she proud of this? Now her face showed an ambivalence that hadn't been there a moment before. Damn the friggin' bots...they could reconfig in an instant. Normal facial muscles changed smoothly. Facial bots made abrupt changes. Maybe the config driver was messed up. It was like she was...what? Vindicated? Satisfied? Proud of her son? You couldn't tell with angels.

He realized he knew his wife less than ever now. This wasn't Dana. This wasn't the woman he'd married, the nanotrooper who loved to kick his butt in marksmanship contests. This was a machine. A machine simulating motherly concern, feigning fear, anxiety, mimicking some ersatz form of distraught fluttering stammering worry.

"Wings," she said, with a preternatural calm, as if the config driver had shifted again, NOW DISPLAYING MODULE PEACEFUL TRANQUILITY... "—Wings, you should try it. It's not so bad."

But Winger was still trying to get his head around what had happened. Liam Winger, Cambridge University professor, youngest child of John Winger and Dana Tallant-Winger, blond kid with the crooked smile and the gap in his front teeth, Liam...an angel? A disembodied swarm of nanobotic elements? Liam...a cloud of bots?

No.

He refused to believe it. This was a joke. "Dana, I'm sure he's out there somewhere. Probably he just went off with some friends."

But she wasn't listening. The program was executing and would not be deterred. "Wings, being an angel has some advantages."

"Yeah, like what?"

Dana tried to put the feelings into words. "It's like being in bed on a Saturday morning, all close and warm and snuggly...you know, when it's freezing cold and dark outside and you're under all the covers. There's love, affection, you know you're in a big family, you've got that sense of belonging, a cocooning, in a way or at a level which you never experience as Normals. And you can be anything...anything you want. Normals can't do that. You've got one body, one life. Angels can fly, really fly. They can be anything their imaginations dream up."

Winger didn't want to hear it. "Dana, don't talk like that. I'm against angels and Assimilationists and Symborg and everything he stands for. We've been fighting this for decades. You know that. You've been fighting this right there with me."

"I'm not fighting any more. There's nothing to fight, Wings. You should do this. Join with Symborg. Join us. Be part of the mother swarm."

"That robotic creep...if I didn't know better, I'd say he has some kind of arrogance module programmed in. He talks like he's some kind of god."

"He's just part of the mother swarm, Wings. He's just a configuration representing the mother swarm here on Earth. We're all just configs...you too. Only your config is a few gazillion cells. Mine is different."

You can say that again.

"Symborg's got an awfully big head for a cloud of bots, Dana. I don't know...maybe Lanier Barnes is right. Maybe the Hellcats are the only ones who see Symborg and angels and asses for what they really are."

Dana made a little pout with her lips. "Wings, I hate it when you're like this. All we do is argue now. Can't you just listen for once?"

"Maybe some things should be argued, Dana."

"You're just being unreasonable. Rigid. Not listening to new viewpoints or the opinions of others...just like a machine. Just like always. Nobody made you agree to this trip. Leaving me and Liam behind like this...what were you thinking? Johnny Winger, you may be retired but you've still got Corps in your blood. "

Winger stabbed the END CALL icon on his wristpad. He couldn't listen to this anymore. As the screen went dark, he muttered, "So did you, Dana...once."

He sat on the side of his bunk for a few moments, trying to collect himself. Breathe, damn it! Breathe. That's what they taught you in Survival school at nog camp when you came into Quantum Corps. Concentrate on breathing and assess the situation. List the pros and cons. Evaluate the alternatives. There's always a way out of any situation, if you look for it.

Two minutes later, Captain Yamato's voice came over the ship's 1MC.

"Attention all hands. Rig for Burn 1. Stow all loose items. Engine start in five minutes."

Johnny Winger was saddened, maybe even depressed, by Dana's call. Why couldn't she see it? Why couldn't any of them see what was going on, the threat they all faced? A nanotrooper's first duty was to the mission. You didn't leave your buddies behind.

He was determined to meet the Keeper and Config Zero and Symborg head on. Maybe Dana was right. He did have the Corps in his blood. Or maybe it was just residual bots from earlier missions...garbage from embedded ANAD systems all Quantum Corps nanotroopers had had to host, a gift from the Symbiosis project years before.

Somebody had to do it. Somebody had to keep their head on and their wits about them.

"Ten seconds to engine start...nine...eight...seven....—"came the ship's voice, some AI taking over the terminal boost count.

Maybe, if he was lucky, he wouldn't even come back from Europa. Rene was gone, somewhere in the cloud of bots that seemed to be drifting around the world now like endless weather fronts. Dana had changed practically overnight; when had that happened? Now, Liam.

"Engine start."

Winger took a deep breath, strapping himself in. The ship accelerated gently at first, barely discernible. That was the way of nuclear electrics. No kick in the pants. Just a gentle nudge.

K-Dog was on its way to Jupiter.
Chapter 15

"It is by suffering that human beings become angels."

Victor Hugo

Inside the Mother Swarm

Coordinate System: Unknown

Time: Unknown

When he was six years old, Liam Winger nearly drowned in the ocean. But this wasn't like that. Not exactly. No, this was like being in a warm bath, surrounded by bubbles, the water caressing your skin gently. No, that wasn't quite it either. Maybe snuggled under the covers on a cold snowy Saturday morning.

The feeling was hard to put into words. Pretty embarrassing for a professor from Cambridge. Maybe he should just report what he was experiencing, sort of like a Captain's log of sights and sounds.

I think, therefore I am. At least, he thought he was thinking. I have a mind. I have thoughts. But there was more. Something more than his thoughts. Was somebody else in here? That was ridiculous.

I have sensations. Hot, cold, hard, soft. Try to analyze this.

A snatch of memory came to him: Personal identity is the unique identity of a person existing through time. That is to say, the necessary and sufficient conditions under which a person at one time and a person at another time can be said to be the same person, persisting through time. In the modern philosophy of mind, this concept of personal identity is referred to as the diachronic problem of personal identity. The synchronic problem is grounded in the question of what features or traits characterize a given person at one time.

Where the hell did that come from? I must have read that.

Now, he was sure of it. There was someone else in here. Just a snatch of voice, a snippet—

***Do you recognize me?***

Recognize you? I can barely hear you. Yet, there was something—

An image came to mind. It was fuzzy at first, but with effort, it sharpened. It was a man, a dark-skinned man, with a thin black moustache.

Symborg.

It was Symborg.

***You do recognize me***

It was a statement. Liam was forced to agree. And there was more. Like whispers...he strained to make it out—

***...within the mother swarm...you are one with us...you are part of us...***

Liam found himself thankful for something to concentrate on. He was intrigued and somewhat relieved that here was something he recognized...at least, he had some idea of where he was and what he had become. Symborg was familiar. Symborg was known.

He had come through. He had been disassembled and now...

What was he?

Symborg was saying something...or maybe the words just came floating up. It was a quote. Something from his grad school days, something from Plutarch....

"The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalerus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, in so much that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same and the other side contending that it was not the same."

Yes, yes, he remembered. The Ship of Theseus. The old conundrum. If an object was disassembled piece by piece and rebuilt piece by piece over time, was it the same object? Did the pattern remain?

Liam understood after this that the same thing had happened to him. Over time, the truth sank in. Like the Ship of Theseus, he had been disassembled, bit by bit, atom by atom and re-assembled somewhere else, as something else.

He understood somehow that he was now part of something greater. Symborg had always called it the Mother Swarm.

Again, Symborg came to him. This time, he had specific instructions.

***Your patterns have been preserved. We have a mission for you. You are to become a great leader***

Liam was puzzled. "I'm a scientist. I have so many questions."

***You must be patient. In time, you will understand***

"What is this mission? I'm not a leader...I'm a scientist...I ask questions...formulate hypotheses—"

***You will be given a new configuration. You will appear to be Normal, to be human, as I appear. You will lead a resistance movement. You will help implement the Prime Key. And you will prevent other Normals from interfering with this imperative***

"This sounds like some kind of action-adventure vid...I'm not a leader. I'm a scientist—"

Now Symborg's words came at him with more emphasis, as commands.

***Once you receive your new configuration, you will enter the WorldNet. You will combat efforts by the Normals to remove, quarantine, destroy or immobilize entities coming from the Keeper. These entities are critical to implementing the Prime Key***

Liam didn't understand. "But how can I do that? I don't know what to do. I don't even know what I am."

Now, Symborg's voice was more comforting, more understanding, almost fatherly.

***Think of yourself like a sheriff from the American Wild West. Think of yourself as Wyatt Earp...I see you have this in your memory***

An image of the frontier lawman floats into Liam's consciousness, slicked back hair, bushy moustache, the silver badge...Wyatt Earp.

***This is a very important mission. The Normals are like outlaws. You are the Sheriff. You will spend part of your time as a human-like angel and part of your time disembodied, inside the Net. Your patterns will be maintained until this mission is completed, until the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral has occurred***

Liam was still intrigued, even mystified, with all his new sensations. He didn't know what to feel. "I'm not sure about all this. I don't even know how to get around. Do I have arms? Legs? How do I do things?"

***Your new configuration is almost ready. When it is downloaded, all your questions will be answered. Everything will be clear. I will instruct you how to operate your new configuration***

"It will be like learning to walk all over again...this is pretty exciting. But I have a million questions."

***In time, your questions will be answered. For now, know that you will be part of a small group, a sub-element that works from within the Net. The Normals call this group MARTOP. You will go to a place called Buckland Center. It's in Alaska. There, you will enter the Net and complete your mission***

He still had millions of questions, but Liam felt himself getting sleepy. It came up like a faint breeze, like snuggling deeper under the covers on a snowy, Saturday morning.

Then he woke up. Was it a dream? He looked around.

This was no soft bed on a Saturday morning.

Liam Winger came to with a violent start. He was lying in a street gutter. Trash and dead rats and broken glass and empty cans were everywhere. It was dark. It was cold.

He learned, or maybe somehow he knew, that he had awakened in downtown Boise. Some side street. He sat up. Light snow flurries drifted down. What the hell had happened?

Then he had a vague memory of the rally...all the pushing, the shoving, the fights, the police and their shockwands, the Hellcats. Sitting up, he could still see the rally grounds down the street, torn bunting, smashed fences...had he fainted? Or was he just hammered, stupefyingly drunk? He didn't remember drinking anything.

Maybe I got knocked out and just staggered out of there, crashed in this gutter.

He dragged himself to his feet, clinging for balance to a light stand and meandered down a sidewalk. He nearly ran into a sign: Lynx and Foxx. It was a women's clothing store. Mannequins posed in the store front. And there was a mirror. Might as well inspect the damage.

Liam studied his reflection for a few moments. Maybe there was something on the storefront glass, a smudge or something. His reflection looked funny, kind of fuzzed out.

He found that his appearance had changed, in subtle ways. That's what these rallies will do to you, he surmised. He raised a hand to what looked like a bruise on his temple, only to find that his hand smeared out, like a bad photo. What the hell? He waved his hands around. No, he hadn't imagined it. Then he looked at his hands directly.

It was a hand, five fingers and a palm, but it appeared blurred, out of contrast. Yet when he held his hand still, it solidified and seemed real enough. But when he moved his hand or any of his fingers, the blurring came back. Same thing with his other hand. What on earth—

His hand looked like a horde of bees or flies, sparkling in the yellowish street light. Both hands did. As he looked closer in the display front mirror, he saw his face had the same look.

Somehow, his skin was malleable, like dough, soft, kneaded, flashing with little pinpricks of light.

Then it came to him, clear as the winter night sky. He had been deconstructed. He was an angel. He was a swarm of nanobotic entities.

You have a very important mission. The words appeared in his mind like a flashing sign. And whose voice was that, anyway?

By playing with his hands, by concentrating just so, he found he could change his face, his shoulders, his legs, anything he wanted. He could make himself a comic-book stick figure. He tried it. He could make himself Mr. Potato Head. He could make himself an ogre. He could make himself a vid star. He could flatten his head, elongate it, distort it. Anything he wanted.

Cool. And a bit scary. He could shape himself into just about any form he wanted, just by thinking of it in a certain way, a way given to him, by Symborg, he now remembered.

Now he felt compelled to move. To leave, to go somewhere. Without fully understanding any of this, he knew somehow that he had to be somewhere else, somewhere far away.

You have a very important mission.

He re-sculpted himself into a basic human form—that wasn't so hard, he was getting the hang of it now—and set off down the street. He came to an intersection, noting on a clock over a nearby bank that it was almost 3:00 am and spotted a taxi, parked by the curb.

He went to the taxi, woke up the groggy driver and told him he needed to get to the airport. The cabbie sat up straight and fingered sleep from his eyes.

"Sure thing, mac. Hop in. No traffic at this hour. We'll be there in ten minutes. You got any bags?"

Liam told him he did not.

The taxi sped off toward the airport, heading out Idaho Street toward 184.

"Where ya headed at his hour, mac?"

Liam looked up into the driver's face, a mustachioed little moon in the darkened rear view mirror.

"Alaska."
Chapter 16

U.S. Cyber Corps Headquarters

Herndon, Virginia

March 10, 2121

0020 hours

James Tsu handed Valerie Patrice a tiny containment pod. "See that server rack in the corner? Insert this in the top port."

Patrice went over to the stack of computers and found the port. "Here?"

"There."

She inserted the pod.

Tsu studied his console. "Reading system status now. Sweeper One reports ready in all respects. I've got effectors, propulsors, updated config drivers, the works. He's a real hot rod, this one."

Anson Leeds followed Tsu's rundown of the packet mobile's status. "Where are you sending him first?"

Tsu pointed to another graph on his display. "Place called Buckland Center. Server farm somewhere in Alaska. We got some threatcon alerts last night from that node; it's a main trunk port and data center for the West Coast and connections to east Asia. Some of it's probably the usual stuff: misrouted packets, damaged packets, signal dropouts. But the frequency and volume of the alert, that's what got it flagged. It's possible your MARTOP bots are infiltrating from there. It's as good a place as any to start." Tsu glanced up at Leeds with an expectant look. "Sweeper One's ready to launch."

Leeds didn't hesitate. "Permission to launch."

And with that, Operation Cyber Sweep was underway.

The trip to Buckland Center would only take a few seconds. "Land line all way," Tsu explained. "High capacity optical fiber."

Leeds shook his head. "And this thing is riding the bitstream?"

"Like a surfer. Want to take a look?"

"Sure."

Tsu fiddled with some buttons. The image careened and fritzed for a moment. "The imager's creating a view from acoustic data, basically simulating what you'd see if you were aboard Sweeper One. We're dealing with electromagnetic waves here...that's what the carrier signal really is. The packets are just data units impressed on that signal. So what you're seeing is the software's best approximation of that reality. You could think of the carrier as an endless conveyor belt filled with envelopes. The envelopes are like the packets. But that's just an analogy."

Patrice and Leeds both studied the image carefully.

For a moment, the first impression was of a tiny raft riding a roaring river. Only the river had a regular pulsation to it, a sort of throbbing rhythm. It was like a water droplet's eye view of life in a mountain river. Turbulence, something like foam, bubbles, cavities.

Tsu explained what they were seeing. "Even though the carrier wave is an electromagnetic wave, Sweeper One is a hard, physical object, nanometer in scale, but very real. Think of dropping a cork in a river and you get the idea. The images we're seeing are the best idea that software can come up with."

Leeds found himself swallowing a rising stream of nausea as the view bobbed and shook and rolled. "I didn't know life at the level of bits and bytes was so turbulent. I'm glad I'm not aboard that thing."

Tsu agreed. "Oh, this is nothing. Wait till we start getting into quantum effects. Those things that look like water droplets start merging into each other, tunneling through each other, dancing around like fireflies on steroids. It's wicked. And this is just a simulated view."

"What exactly are we looking for?" Patrice asked.

Leeds said, "I can answer that. I spent some time at Gateway when the Francis Bacon put in with her samples from MARTOP. Those bots from space are like ANAD clones from the past, only souped up with gizmos and gadgets you wouldn't believe: from the compound tetrahedral casing to the grabbers and disrupters, from the flagellar thrusters to the power cells, from picowatt propulsors to the actuator mast...it is an ANAD clone, to be sure, but more importantly, it's a damn close match to what we have in archives. It's like someone took our Keeper files from the Jovian Hammer mission and banged out an exact copy."

"We'll find out soon enough," Tsu said. "Sweeper One's on station at Rack five, node twenty five, Buckland Center and already I'm getting pings back...we're interrogating sample packets to see what's what."

The imager view had slowed down and the river they had been riding was no more than a swift current. Leeds had the impression they were cruising in a canoe through a swamp at night; he could almost imagine trees thick with vines, alligators alongside, veils of mosquito swarms thick as cloth.

"Branch router coming up," Tsu announced, as Sweeper One headed deeper into the server farm's miles of wire and cable. "And that's a firewall up ahead, if I'm not mistaken. Probably protecting core layer switches and more routers on the other side, if my map's right."

The imager showed what looked like the side of a steep mountain, with rugged flanks of rock dead ahead.

"How do we get through that?" Patrice asked.

"We use the key Buckland gave us," Tsu said. His fingers played over a nearby keyboard. "We're being interrogated now, authenticated by the firewall. See the signal spikes?" He pointed to a graph. On closer examination, the mountain was not made of rock but was instead a huge pyramid of whirling cylinders, stacked together on their sides, all spinning at different rates. "The firewall's asking us to ID ourselves. I'll send the response—" He pressed a few more buttons.

On the imager, one entire row of cylinders flashed for a moment, and spun down. After a moment's hesitation, they began spinning again, this time in unison. Sweeper One drew closer and closer.

"Going to half propulsor," Tsu announced. "That's our way in."

And as Leeds and Patrice watched in amazement, the packet mobile penetrated the mountain of spinning cylinders and shot through. A moment later, they were back in the swamp.

Tsu's forehead wrinkled with alarm. "Whoa, now that's interesting—"

"What is it?"

"Picking up big spikes in thermals. EM spikes too. Something's up ahead."

"MARTOP?" Leeds wondered.

"Could be. Similar signatures. I'm initializing grabbers and probes now." Thousands of miles away, Sweeper One unsheathed its effectors and girded for battle. Just for good measure, Tsu also readied its bond disrupters and fired off a few discharges. The swamp seemed to crackle with lightning as the 'guns check' went off smoothly. "Slowing to one quarter...we'd better poke ahead with care. I don't want to get ambushed. But it's a bit surprising we may already have MARTOP inside the first ring of firewalls. Buckland's outer defenses have already been breached."

The battle, when it came, lasted only a few minutes. And the battlefield was no longer a swamp. Now, the imager showed an infinite plain, stretching in all directions, studded with polygons, tetrahedrals, cubes and dodecahedrons.

"Just like prairie country," Tsu observed. "Only this is no prairie. Main memory arrays, inside the Node. And it looks like we've got company."

In the distance, hovering over the dimpled plain of the memory arrays was a thin black line.

"MARTOP," said Tsu. "I'm reading rising thermals, EM spikes, sounding acoustics. Looks like the bad guys are here."

Leeds and Patrice watched the approaching enemy with growing unease. "Can you drive that thing?" Leeds asked.

Tsu huffed. "Well, I'm no Quantum Corps trooper, if that's what you're asking. But yeah, I'm can drive. Priming bond disrupters. Initializing all effectors. Going to full propulsor."

Patrice eyed the size of the assault force they were nearing. "Looks like a small army. Maybe you ought to make some yourself some friends."

"Good idea. Toggling max rate replication...now."

Sweeper One began slamming atoms and building more copies of itself, filling the space with replicas of its basic structure like some frantic brick mason.

The imager screen was at first murky, crowded with the spikes and cubes of myriad molecules. Lumpy, multi-lobed sodiums darted across their view like shadowy ping-pong balls. Tsu studied readouts from the sounder...something was there, hidden in the data traces on the scope. He fiddled with the gain on the imager, tweaking it, subtracting foreground clutter.

Something approximately sixty nanometers in one dimension, inverted pyramids joined at their apexes, with a globe structure at one end...and scores of probes, effectors, cilia, whatever. Incredible mobility...triple propulsors beat an idling rhythm as Sweeper One closed in....

Leeds let out a whoop. "Will you look at that? There must be a gazillion of them—"

They were all sobered by the thought of what they were seeing.

"It came from outer space," Patrice muttered. "Literally—"

"And I'm going to blow it to kingdom come," Tsu said. "Hang on to your hats...less than ten thousand microns now...."

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

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

As Sweeper One sped forward, MARTOP grew and retracted appendages and surface structure with blazing speeds. The outer membrane of the mech seethed with motion, as atoms and clusters of atoms twisted, bonded, twisted again, rebonded, broke apart, recombined, straightened, undulated and whirled.

The gap between them vanished and Sweeper grappled with the nearest mech. Other mechs swarmed to the battlefield.

Tsu was stunned by the speed of the assault. A battalion of MARTOP soon engulfed Sweeper, enveloping the mech in flailing effectors. No time to replicate now...got to get free...signal daughters....Tsu fired off a burst of instructions to gather all the daughters Sweeper had replicated going in. It might be too late.

The imager screen shook with the collision, then careened sideways.

Several minutes passed. The imager view vibrated with the ferocity of the attack. Chains of oxygen molecules, pressed into service as makeshift weapons, whipped across the screen. The space above the dimpled memory arrays was soon choked with cellular debris. MARTOP replicated several times, adding new molecule strings. It stripped off electrons to make an armor shield of highly reactive chlorine atoms. In seconds, the Sweeper bots were immobilized by the chlorine sheath.

"I can't hold structure!" Tsu yelled. "I'm reconfiguring...shutting down peripheral systems!"

"See if you can pinch a sample," Leeds said. "We need to get a sample...so we know what we're dealing with."

"I'll try," Tsu gritted out. He sent more commands to the Sweeper master bot, which squirmed and wriggled, trying to extricate itself from the grasp of MARTOP. "Maybe I can sting him with this—" He managed to free one of Sweeper's bond disrupters and let go a charge.

Instantly, atom parts spun away as the MARTOP bots scattered, shedding effectors and parts in a swelling cloud of debris. Tsu discharged the disrupters again...and again and soon the space was choked with debris.

"Maybe I can grab some of this stuff," he muttered. "I'll try that mess there—" he pointed to a small cloud of debris drifting away. "Looks like part of the main casing...maybe, if we're lucky—" He drove Sweeper forward and used its carbene effectors to seize a few pieces, shoving them into a small cage that Sweeper wore on its central mast like a backpack. "There...gotcha...." The pieces were held in a molecular bag. "Now, we need to disengage...before it's too late."

Patrice was surprised. "You're not going to leave all these bastards there? They're wrecking the Net...we have to do something."

Tsu was already backing away from further attacks. "I'm not configged for a big battle, Valerie. We need to bring these samples back and study them, see what we're dealing with."

"It's MARTOP...Gateway's already done the work," she said. "We know what we're dealing with."

"Then Sweeper needs some tweaking. I can't handle all those effectors...jeez, look at the propulsors. The damn thing can run circles around me. It's suicide to stay here."

He had no choice but to disengage to save the Sweeper master. Extract before Sweeper was chopped to pieces.

"We're losing signal strength!" Leeds yelled.

"I see it! MARTOP's penetrated the matrix. Main processing functions in danger...I'm counterprogramming...." Tsu pecked madly at the keyboard.

Valerie Patrice shook a fist at the imager screen, now a dark, swirling mass of shapes and forms. "Come on, damn it! Come on...."

But Sweeper couldn't hold. Every move was countered by the nanomech. MARTOP's response was swift and sure. Tsu, Leeds and Patrice watched in amazement and horror, as one by one, Sweeper's capabilities--fine motor control, attitude and orientation, propulsors, sensors, molecule analysis, replication--were rendered inert, or completely excised.

Sweeper was soon helpless.

"Got to get the hell out of Dodge," Tsu muttered. While I still can. "I hope to hell we can hang onto our samples."

"Watch out, here they come again!" Leeds realized MARTOP wasn't going to let Sweeper get away so easily.

"Only one thing I can do now," Tsu realized. "Executing quantum collapse...NOW!" Come on baby, get small for me...get real small....

Deep inside the memory array at Buckland Rack Five, Node Twenty-five, the Sweeper master collapsed what was left of its own structure in an explosive puff of atom fragments. Base, effectors, probes and grapplers, even the core shell surrounding its nanoprocessor, went hurtling into space in a big bang of spinning atom parts.

Instantly, Sweeper disappeared. To all intents and purposes, Sweeper had effectively vanished in a cloud of blurry quantum waves.

Less than four minutes later, making its way on quantum wave propulsors, Sweeper was finally extracted from Buckland's server farm and made its way across thousands of kilometers of fiber and wire, its nanoprocessor still dogging electron states to bring the nearly invisible device back home to Herndon, Virginia.

Tsu took a deep breath, wiped a line of sweat from his forehead and sat back. He pointed to a nearby server in the corner. "I think our little friend is finally back home. Better get the containment pod ready. With any luck, he's still got pieces of those MARTOP bots we can look at."

Leeds and Patrice worked with the containment pod, carefully pulling what was left of Sweeper One into the device.

"Put him in Chamber One," Tsu told them. The containment vessel was a small hemispherical tank on legs sitting opposite their consoles. It was draped in thick ganglia of cables and tubing. "I'll get the imager fired up. I want to take a peek at what we've got."

The view on the imager, when it came up and stabilized, was a sobering sight. Inverted pyramids connected at their apexes. A hemispherical belt around the apexes, studded with effectors. Propulsors at multiple locations. Gadgets and gizmos that none of them could explain.

"I'll run a broad scan," Tsu said. "I think this may be a piece of the same buggers they had at Gateway, from MARTOP." He pressed a few keys and the imager began the scan. While it was building up 'slices' of imagery for COHEN to analyze, Patrice and Leeds talked about what they had seen.

"If this is MARTOP, or part of it," Patrice said, "we've got problems. Big problems. This would be proof that somehow these bots are getting into the Net."

Leeds agreed. "It may be worse than that...I'd like to run a correlation of these results against some of these angels that are popping up everywhere."

"You're thinking the bots are similar...or the same? MARTOP falls to earth, somehow infests the Net and out pops a few nanobotic swarm angels...that's a stretch, isn't it?"

"More than a few, from what I'm seeing on the news."

Tsu said, "It's completely unproven. Pure speculation."

"Maybe so," Leeds admitted, "but what you're looking at on that imager may just be the 'sentience' you've suspected the Net is harboring."

A chime sounded. COHEN had finished its analysis. Tsu studied the results on the display. It was a near perfect match. "Looks like Sweeper One grabbed a piece of a MARTOP device. Correlation with the Gateway samples is nearly ninety-nine percent. That's not a coincidence."

Patrice raised a thought. "Yet Sweeper couldn't handle those bots. They replicated too fast. Outmaneuvered us. Have you ever seen a device that could do what the bots at Buckland Center did?"

Tsu had to admit he hadn't. "Never. What I really want to do is pick apart that segment of casing in there. With any luck, Sweeper was able to grab part of the processor. If we have that, or even part of it, we may learn the secret of how MARTOP can make such fast config changes."

Patrice ran her fingers over the screen outline of the device. "This is just an idea but bear with me. What would happen if a person was deconstructed, into an angel-like swarm, and rode aboard that Sweeper? Like a passenger? Is something like that even possible?"

Leeds started to say something but Tsu held up a hand. "I guess it's theoretically possible. Pretty dangerous, though. We know Assimilationists deconstruct living humans all the time. They claim to be storing them until they can be uploaded to the 'mother swarm', or something like that. Of course, nobody knows how to re-construct a disassembled person. Or even if such a thing is possible...there's a few centuries of neural science that says it isn't, that we're more than just a pattern of atoms and molecules."

"Pretty much a suicide mission," Leeds decided. "Where is this coming from?"

Patrice looked at him. "I might want to give it a try, that's all."

"Are you just slightly nuts? CINCCYBER would never approve something like that. All we need to do is upgrade Sweeper...give him some more punch, a few more effectors, soup up things under the hood. Then he can run circles around those MARTOP bots."

"I know all that. But I'm thinking that if MARTOP is growing something sentient inside the Net, we may need more than a Sweeper to deal with it."

"It's academic, anyway...General Pacer will never approve such a crazy idea. Why do you want to do this anyway?"

Patrice thought about her mother, all the months of suffering from the cancer, all the radiation, the chemo, the oncobots. She didn't tell them that somewhere, deep inside, she had this nutty idea that maybe, just maybe, her mother was still around, maybe even as an angel. She'd been cremated, at her own request, when she died. But still....

"It's an idea, okay? It gives us more options for dealing with MARTOP. That's all I'm thinking. Do you think you could take it up with Pacer?"

Leeds had a pained look on his face, but it wasn't indigestion, except maybe with some of this wacky female's notions. "All right, I'll put it to the Old Man. But I already know what he'll say."

"Spare me," Patrice said back.

Tsu was intrigued with the idea. "I can make some modifications to Sweeper One to be able to carry some of the angel bots from a deconstructed person...wouldn't take that much. Some kind of containment device. And some tweaks to the controls and interface...you'd want the bots to have some kind of control."

"Hey, don't encourage her," Leeds said.

Tsu ignored him. "Of course, we don't really know how many bots it would take to fully embody a pilot's personality and memory. I don't think Sweeper could carry a full angel...too many bots. The big question is how many bots are needed? Nobody really knows...not even the Assimilationists, despite what they tell us."

The three of them batted the idea around awhile longer, then Patrice begged off more analysis. "I need a break. Time to think. I'm going back to the hotel."

She left Cyber Corps headquarters and caught a lift back to the hotel a few miles away. As she was changing and showering, anticipating a quiet dinner downstairs in the restaurant, she had an idea to call her brother in London. Cory was a hyperjet pilot based out of Heathrow.

She wanted to run this notion of letting herself be deconstructed by Cory before she made any decisions.
Chapter 17

U.N. General Assembly

New York City

March 20, 2121

1030 hours

Solnet Special Report

"Angels in Prison?"

Solnet reporter Anika Kolchinova reports from the United Nations in New York and files this report:

"We're here at UN Plaza in front of the General Assembly, as a momentous vote is taking place inside the vast hall behind me—"

(COMMAND TO DRONECAM: Altitude 20 meters. Wide-angle establishing shot...be sure to center Barnes and the rally and also get the Secretariat Building and the statue of Dag Hammarskjöld too...I'll add effects later).

"—the General Assembly is in session even as I speak, considering a new law that would authorize setting up UN-sponsored re-settlement camps around the world. The purpose of these camps would be to hold angels and Assimilationists who have violated Sanctuary and Containment laws. The term angel camps has been offered as a title for these facilities. I'm here at UN Plaza with Mr. Lanier Barnes, no stranger to Special Report viewers, to get his reaction to this vote. Mr. Barnes, if I may—"

Barnes is a red-haired stocky man, with a few freckles. He is wearing augmented specs that make him look like a NASCAR driver, along with his wide-brim hat.

"Sure, Missy...you and I have met before."

The dronecam closes in for a close-up, per Anika's previous commands. She checks out the image on her wristpad, and seems satisfied.

"We have indeed, Mr. Barnes. I see you've brought quite a few people with you today. I assume these are Hellcats?"

A chorus of waving, shouting, fist-pumping and good-natured jostling erupts, all of it captured by the dronecam.

"Damn straight. We're here to make sure the pointy-heads inside do the right thing."

"And what would that be, Mr. Barnes?"

Anika knew that asking a question like that was like throwing red meat to a lion. "Put the friggin bugs behind bars, where they belong, that's what! Better yet, exterminate the creeps like the vermin they are."

Anika knew some of the more colorful profanity would be edited out by auto-censor, so she probed some more.

"Many of our viewers are sympathetic to the plight of angels, Mr. Barnes. They say that society treats them like second-class citizens."

Barnes' face reddened, looking like a ripe tomato about to burst. "Second-class citizens, my ass! They're bugs, they're machines. They shouldn't have citizenship at all. You don't give the vote to your lawn mower, do you? Or your dishwasher? Why give it to these machines? That's all they are."

Anika decided to try another tack. It wasn't too hard getting colorful quotes from Lanier Barnes.

"Our society has come to rely a great deal on these angels, Mr. Barnes. Surely, you would agree with that. Nanobotic swarm entities, they can be anything we need, or want: butlers, valets, baby-sitters, companions, maids and cooks. They do jobs humans don't want. They do the dirty jobs."

"They're a friggin' menace, that's what they are. You're right about one thing, Missy. We do rely too much on the Bugs as it is. Maybe if we put a few million in camps, we'll learn how to be human beings again...that's what the Hellcats are all about."

The interview went on, colorful and spicy as ever, filled with expletives and profanity. Anika knew that, despite the language and histrionics, Barnes spoke for millions in his distaste for what he called "angels and asses."

Anika was about to try another approach, when her earbud chirped. Newsbots inside the General Assembly were sending her an alert.

"One moment, please, Mr. Barnes—" she held up a hand, "we seem to have some breaking news from inside—"

Barnes halted his tirade in mid-sentence, wide-eyed at the interruption. "Like I was—uh—"

Anika listened for a moment, then nodded her head. She quietly whispered into her lip mic to bring the dronecam shot in tight, on my face, ten meters and hold.

"I'm hearing just now, from sources inside the General Assembly, that this contentious vote on angel camps has passed by a very narrow margin, less than five votes. The Secretary-General is making a statement now—"

Barnes whooped and hollered triumphantly, and danced a little jig all around the reporter. At one point in his pirouette, he grabbed the reporter and planted a big wet kiss on her cheek.

"Hot damn! It's about friggin' time! We'll put these angels and asses where they belong...in prison!"

Anika was trying to extricate herself from Barnes' grasp, while adding to what the newsbots were reporting. "...I'm hearing that the vote was exceptionally close—we'll try to talk with some of the delegates...and there is one proviso attached to the law that individual countries can apply for waivers and may not have to enforce the law if the waivers are granted...."

That made Barnes' face darken. "No shit...well, we'll see about that. Trust me, Missy, my Hellcats will make life miserable for anyone who disobeys what the General Assembly has decided." He motioned some of the ralliers to gather around and a chant erupted in seconds: BUGS IN JAIL...BUGS IN JAIL....More whooping and hollering followed and before long, a full scale slam dance had started.

Anika Kolchinova decided to back out of the melee and pecked at her wristpad keys to command the dronecam to follow. The quadcopter chittered after her like a hungry bird, until they finally found some open space on the other side of the plaza, alongside the Circle of Flags.

"As you can see, the Hellcats are full swing right now, so I'm taking this opportunity to hand Special Report over to my colleague, Janice Winters, now currently outside one of the newly constructed re-settlement camps in Idaho. Janice--?"

The imagery switches to another dronecam view of some kind of camp, surrounded by barbed wire, watchtowers and the faint shimmer of a nanobotic shield. Tents and prefab cottages are lined up in orderly rows inside the perimeter, street after street. People, even whole families are milling about inside, some dazed, confused, sad, distraught and angry all at the same time. Packbots trundle behind them with luggage, boxes, assorted bags and containers, occasionally colliding with each other. The dronecam drops down in altitude and goes into hover, the camera zeroing in on a stocky blond Solnet Report, Janice Winters.

Winters is interviewing one family of angels...a family known as the Cushings.

"I'm talking with Mrs. Evelyn Cushing, one of the angels rounded up by Idaho State Police. They were brought here to Camp Palisades just yesterday, from the Boise area, I understand. Mrs. Cushing...Mrs. Cushing, if I may ask a few questions?"

Evelyn Cushing appears to be a petite brunette with wire-frame glasses, and tight bun of hair. She's wearing some kind floral print dress and her shoes are muddy and one heel is broken. If this lady's an angel, she's a damn good one, right down to a faint scar on her chin. Maybe the Police made a mistake—

Cushing turns and faces the reporter. "It's all so sad. So unnecessary, really...."

Winters commands the dronecam to close in on extreme closeup. She wants viewers to see this. "Mrs. Cushing, where's your family now? How many are you?"

Cushing shrugged, seemingly dazed and lost in thought. "Well, my husband Roy is over there—he's arguing with that officer there. We need a bigger tent or cottage. I've got two boys and two girls...they're over at that fountain, playing, I guess."

There was a drinking fountain half a block away. Kids were taking turns spritzing each other with the water stream.

"Mrs. Cushing, tell me how you came to be here, at the Camp."

Cushing was just shaking her head, her hands covered with rings, not sure what to do with them. She looked at her hands like they were alien things. Winters noticed slight edge effects; the woman was an angel, but the differences were so minute, so faint—

"Just because we look a little different, just because we come from a different background," Evelyn was complaining, "they treat us like this, like animals. Like circus freaks. It's not fair."

Winters' interview was interrupted by a commotion at one of the camp gates. Some detainee angels were refusing to leave a small bus and enter the camp. There was a riot brewing at the gate and some angels already incarcerated were trying to bust out.

Winters commanded the dronecam—she had taken to calling it Curly, for some reason—to wheel about and head over to the gate. She ignored Evelyn Cushing for a moment and watched the image careen and tumble while the cam maneuvered. There...hover and hold, back out two stops...perfect.

Winters wondered why, if these truly were angels, why they didn't just disassemble and scatter, as angels were supposed to be able to? Maybe the police were using some kind of containment field. Or some area weapon that could damage the individual bots that made up all angels. Maybe, she really didn't have any idea and it was heart-wrenching to see what was happening. She headed that way herself, excusing Mrs. Cushing from further questions.

She never made it to the gate. An expanding wave of pushing and shoving, shouts and screams and flying fists and kicks spread outward from the gate disturbance. The camp guards, Winters saw that they were local sheriff's deputies, were quickly overwhelmed by the angels now converging on the melee.

Moments later, the air over the camp began to darken. Winters looked up, as did others, thinking it a passing cloud. There was forecast of rain in the area. But it wasn't a normal cloud.

It was a police swarm gathering like a misshapen fist, escorted by a squadron of police drones, angry bees sheparding law enforcement bots, that now hovered and descended over the disturbance.

Winters sensed it was time to back away and she kicked and slapped at faces and arms and legs in the way as she fought her way out from under the slowly descending swarm. Finally, on her hands and knees, she sought open ground and crawled and scrambled her way to safety, well away from the gate. Sitting on a patch of bare foundation, which was even now forming itself into the shell of a new prefab cottage, she checked her wristpad display, to see if Curly had survived.

An image was there, a crazy image, like flying at night through a thunderstorm. Jagged veins of lightning. Flashes in the distance. But this was no thunderstorm. Winters realized Curly was right in the middle of the police swarm. She fired off some commands, hoping to extract the dronecam from its predicament.

Slowly, the view cleared and air thinned and she could see on her display that the cam was pulling away. The police bots weren't obstructing Curly. Presently, her wristpad showed a view of the gate again. Pure chaos reigned.

One camp guard had been swarmed by some angels nearby, who had already disassembled themselves and attacked...they were being confronted by police dragnet swarms on the ground...she could see the flashes of light as the swarms collided. Injuries were mounting but the confrontation seemed to growing, swelling.

On her wristpad display, Winters was trying to narrate what she was seeing, aware that she was still live on Special Report.

"...impossible to see, really, any details at the gate. The swarms are pretty thick...I do see a lot of arms and legs...wait, now there are trucks approaching the gate. We'll try to re-orient and zoom in—" She gave Curly new commands to focus on a convoy of trucks. They were bearing soldiers. Winters realized it was the Idaho National Guard. Five trucks in all, each bearing a squad of soldiers. Fully armed and armored for riot control.

Eventually, cooler heads prevailed at the gate. The soldiers dismounted. HERF barrages went off and people scattered in all directions to get away from the deafening booms. Fried bots clattered to the ground, as the rf discharges destroyed bots by uncountable trillions. Angel detainees began to scatter, or risk being obliterated by the police swarms or more rf blasts. Finally order was restored, at a cost of several human lives, most of them camp guards, and unknown numbers of angels.

Debris littered the camp grounds as the National Guard troops took up positions and police swarms withdrew back into the air, still escorted by their drones.

Janice Winters straightened her hair and checked her appearance. She commanded Curly to return and focus a tight shot on her, coming to hover and hold at ten meters altitude, a few dozen meters away from the prefabbed cottage, which was blithely forming itself behind her, despite the melee, as if nothing had happened. Winters found it expedient to evacuate the build site—the cottage bots were industrious and quick, grabbing atoms from everywhere to build what their config drivers told them to build. She had no desire to become part of a small cottage.

She tried to collect her thoughts, then just started speaking. Curly captured it all and she made quick sideways glances down at her wristpad to check the results. Studio ready, she figured.

"...as you've no doubt seen, Camp Palisades is the scene of some tense and violent confrontations between law enforcement and local angels and assimilationists, as the new UN re-settlement mandates are put into effect. Similar scenes are being reported all over the world. Many angels are cooperating, it should be noted. Where they are not, groups like Lanier Barnes and his Hellcats are often nearby to take matters into their own hands.

"The long term effect of these mandates remains to be seen. Mrs. Evelyn Cushing, whom we talked to a while ago, may have put this conflict into perspective best. She said she felt the authorities were treating them like animals or like freaks. Human history is filled with examples of similar conflicts, between peoples who seem different, who sometimes are different. We have a deeply ingrained fear of outsiders, newcomers, people who aren't not like us. Angels are different, to be sure. Technically, they're not people at all. Just collections of nanoscale robotic devices configured to look like people. But they do look and act like us. Now we can't tell them apart from real people. And they seemed to be growing rapidly in numbers. That frightens many people.

"Is your neighbor a real person or an angel? Does it really matter anymore? According to what we are seeing around the world, it does matter to many people. Somehow, with nanobots and swarms, we've created a new form of life on this planet. The neighborhood will never be the same. Our lives will never be the same because this is one genie we can't put back in the bottle.

"We're going to have to find a way to live with this new reality. If we don't, what's left of the Earth after the inevitable conflicts won't be worth living on.

"This is Janice Winters, reporting from Camp Palisades, Idaho, for Solnet Special Report. Thanks for tuning in and good night to all of you."

Solnet Special Report Ends
Chapter 18

Buckland Data Center, Nanatuvik, Alaska

U.S. Cyber Corps Watch Center, Herndon VA

March 31, 2121

2245 hours

In Nanatuvik, Alaska, the Inuit believe their ancestors can be seen in the Northern Lights. They live in a world filled with spirits. Long winter months of waiting for caribou herds or sitting around breathing holes, hunting seals, have given birth to stories of mysterious and sudden appearances of ghosts and fantastic creatures.

Some Inuit believe the Lights were more sinister and if you whistled at them, they would reach down to earth and cut off your head. That tale is still told to children today. Other Inuit relied on the angakkuq, or shaman, for spiritual interpretation. The nearest thing to a deity was the Old Woman, who lived beneath the sea. All the waters around Nanatuvik were believed to contain many great gods.

Liam Winger scanned the Alaska State Department of Tourism website with a wry smile. Fantastic creatures. Old women in the sea. Ancestors in the Northern Lights.

And now angels infesting Buckland Center, ready to do what their configuration and programming compelled them to do. Starting tonight.

Liam had come to Buckland only a few weeks before, hired on as a network operations specialist, 3rd class and assigned to where all newbies were assigned: the graveyard shift. But he didn't mind. It was quiet. The big honchos weren't around. It gave him time to scope out the facility, especially its labyrinthine corridors of server racks and find places he could easily penetrate.

Buckland was a Tier One server and data center, providing memory storage, routing and network services for customers up and down the U.S. West Coast and some of northeast Asia as well. The place was low-rise, situated in a rumpled valley outside Nanatuvik, a forlorn, grindingly poor Inuit village near the southwest Bering Sea coast of Alaska. Mountains surrounded the valley, always covered in deep snow. The air and the sea breezes made the Nanatuvik Valley perpetually cold and frigid, which helped Buckland with its enormous cooling bills immensely.

The complex was laid out like a Tic-Tac-Toe board, with separate modules connected by tunnels; most of the place was sited fifty meters or more underground, for stability in the frequent tremors and for temperature control. And security too. Each square in the Tic-Tac-Toe board was a nearly self-contained complex of seismically-stabilized server racks, routers, hubs and switches, with UPS backup generators at two ends of the square, a glassed-in network control station and office suite at a third end, and cooling chillers, piping stands, other HVAC gear and forests of cabling and optical fiber at the other. Security was tight. E Module, where Liam worked, was entered through biometric scans, neural imaging, facial recognition and various other tricks of the trade.

Buckland was a critical node in the North American data center network, a critical junction into WorldNet.

"Hey, genius, we're going on break. You want anything?" Hardy, one of the 3rd shift techs called from the door to the control station. Hardy was skinny like a post, with thick red hair and braids, long, ropy arms and a perpetual sneer. He liked to chew on cherry suckers. The other tech, Brindleman, was a gnome, bland face, ghostly pallor, never a smile, bald as Ping-Pong ball, which he faintly resembled and liked to play off-hours in the Buckland fitness center over in D module.

Liam waved them off. "No, I'm good. Take your time." The truth was he waited for times like this, even encouraged the other two techs to take frequent breaks. They didn't need much encouraging.

Liam's shift was normally a quiet time for the center. Lately, he had been using this time to pinch off a few replicants, bang out a small swarm the way Symborg had showed him, and make small penetrations into WorldNet, even Solnet, from hub 22E-A787, halfway down Row 1 here at E Module. The address was Rack Five, Node Twenty-Five.

During these penetrations, he had been installing assault bots at key nodes and switches around any part of the Net he could reach. He had also been gathering and coordinating the work of the MARTOP bots which were even now continuing to fall to Earth and finding their way into the Net. Their coordinated mission, downloaded to him by Symborg after he 'awoke' into his new condition, was to sabotage certain nodes and domains of the Net so the Normals wouldn't have functioning computer or network service in critical areas.

Tonight, Liam would be coordinating a probing assault on a control system that operated gates, sluices and valves of a large dam in the western U.S., the Kings Gorge dam in Colorado. If it could be made to fail on command, the valves would open all at once and millions of people would be affected.

All part of the Prime Key, Liam noted. That's what Symborg had told him.

On his last penetration mission, though, he had encountered something a little different. Most domains and hubs on the Net maintained at least some level of security whether packet sniffers, firewalls, anti-virus cops, that sort of thing. But the last time, Liam and his bot squad had run into an adversary with a little more bite, a little more cunning. It didn't act like an automated system.

It was, in fact, Cyber Corps' first packet sweeper. Liam had to be ready for that again. The MARTOP bots that Cyber Corps had stalked and attacked had barely been able to fend off that foe. He'd have to be a little more careful.

Liam checked the time: 2252 on the display in front of him. Time to go to work. And he knew he could count on Hardy and Brindleman to take their sweet time coming off break.

Liam went to Rack Five, found Node Twenty-five and concentrated as Symborg had instructed him, focusing on certain images downloaded to his processor. He lay the palm of his hand over several ports on the side of the server and watched as the bots of his fist began disassociating and swarming in a fuzzy sparkling ball around the ports. Now his hand looked like a ball of yarn unraveling, with pinpricks of light embedded. Slowly, bit by bit, the stream of bots gathered itself and entered ports A and B, slipping easily past filters, firewalls, through vaults and dungeons until after a few seconds, they accessed a trunk line onto the main backbone of E Module. From there, it was only a short hop to the Net.

He was in, his little scout force, and now it was time to go hunting. Liam checked again the addressing data he had for the Kings Gorge server. The scout force of bots would have to make several switches and junctions, including a key one at Provo, Utah, before it would be close enough to KG-1, the off-ramp into the dam's control system. From there, it would be time to start reconning access points, security features, firewalls, honey pots, packet traps, defender demons and other assorted ways of keeping unwanted visitors out.

Liam knew that any packet consisted of two kinds of data: control information and user data, sometimes called the payload. Some operators like to think of packets as a form of Net missile, delivering a payload. The control information provided the data the network needed to deliver the payload, things like source and destination network addresses, error detection codes and sequencing information. This was usually found in packet headers and trailers, with the payload stuck in between.

Liam's ultimate job was to find a secure path into the control system servers at Kings Gorge, scramble packets going to and from the KG-1 node complex and obstruct or alter commands and data going in and out of the dam control system. Once that had been accomplished, more sophisticated MARTOP bots could enter the nodes at will and work on defeating its complex of valves and gates, working to mimic command codes used to operate the valves, spuriously cycling the valves, hijacking sensor information from the valves so as to take complete control of their operation remotely and leave the system operator with no real clue as to what was going on.

In time, Liam expected to be able to operate the valves at will, and cause havoc up and down the basin streams and rivers that captured the outflow of the dam. Millions of people and millions of square kilometers of land would be affected.

And the Prime Key would be a few steps closer to being executed.

But before his small scout force of bots could exit at KG-1, they ran right into another force of Cyber Corps packet sweepers.

Liam swore under his breath and sat up straight in his chair, studying his dashboard. He'd already configured the instruments and dials to shift to a new mode altogether whenever he ran an op like this, which meant whenever Hardy and Brindleman weren't looking, which was most of the time. One button, and E Module console B-1 was a window into a very different world than its designers ever imagined.

Now, the board was showing signals coming back from the scout force: the bots he had launched were stuck at the KG-1 off-ramp, unable to penetrate the outer defenses of the dam's control system, actually hosted in a rack of PLC-type servers inside the dam main control station south of Denver.

Liam studied the situation for a few a moments. But before he could puzzle out a strategy to force or trick his way in, the scout force was set upon by Cyber Corps packet sweepers, like rabid dogs, this time a large force of them. It was like the previous encounter only bigger, quicker, more aggressive. He tapped furiously on his keyboard, trying to re-configure the bots beyond their initial programming. Maybe if I try this...or this....

Now the battle was joined, sweepers against the angels, Cyber Corps against Liam Winger and Symborg and Config Zero. They engaged each other in a growing furball just outside the Kings Gorge main hub and network, battling furiously to overcome each other's defenses.

Thirty-three hundred miles east of Buckland Center, Anson Leeds and Valerie Patrice studied the Watch Center screens as James Tsu handled the early stages of the fight. Leeds had to grudgingly admire the researcher's balls and guts; maybe it was decades of gaming experience, or quick wits or twitchy fingers or something like that. But Tsu seemed a natural in this world of packet combat inside the Net, attacking, counter-attacking against moves from the other side. Cyber Sweeps' packet sweepers had been upgraded with more nimble effectors and extra propulsors, which along with displaced cleavage lines and a souped-up processor made replication and maneuvering in the nano world of bits and atoms a little faster. Now Sweeper One was no longer a Fokker Trimotor dealing with its adversary. He had become more like a Spitfire.

Tsu was mumbling something and Leeds had to ask the researcher to repeat it.

Tsu spoke up more clearly. "I said, I'm not sure but I think we're dealing with something beyond automated responses here...it's reacting like something pretty intelligent, anticipating my moves, sensing what I'm about, reacting with speed and efficiency. You gotta admire this bastard, whoever he is."

Leeds snorted. "I'm not admiring anything. Maybe this is your Net sentience at work, Tsu, but why go after Kings Gorge? I'm thinking this is some human bastard with a nit to pick against the dam. Or some wacko hacker who wants to play in a bigger bathtub."

"Or play with the lives of several million people downstream," Patrice reminded them. "Maybe the truth is a little of both."

"Sweeper's holding his own," Leeds observed. They had signals back with a grainy view of the bit-level battlefield.

To Valerie Patrice, the battlefield looked like something out of old vids of the Battle of the Bulge. A sleet storm of oblong shapes—pyramids, cubes, tetrahedrals—flitted by. Faintly visible in the background was a fast-flowing river of dirty cottonballs. Tsu had said that was the bitstream, the carrier signal bearing packets of data to and from the Kings Gorge Dam Discharge Control System. The river coursed back and forth and flew along at insane speeds, almost too fast to see. As she studied the imager scene, she realized there was a great shadow lurking off to the left.

James Tsu called it the Black Curtain. It was the Discharge Control System's multi-level firewall...a great wall of spinning cylinders, all rotating vertically, except for one area where the river of cottonballs approached. Here, a single spinning cylinder had lowered itself like a spinning drawbridge and the bitstream entered the Black Curtain at that point.

"That's our goal," Tsu announced. "Keep the buggers from catching a ride inside the firewall."

Patrice pointed to a ragged line of devices gathering around the front of the Black Curtain. Each device was two pyramids inverted and attached at their apexes. A wide girdle wrapped around the device equator, like a belt, studded with effectors. Propulsors beat a cyclic rhythm from the bottom of one pyramid. Another set topped the device.

"You mean those guys there?" Patrice asked.

"Here comes the cavalry," Leeds announced. And indeed, sweeper bots from Cyber Corps were already infiltrating the sleet storm and engaging. The sweepers were distinctly different in outline, even in the blurry view they had. Nested cylinders, topped with effectors and bond disrupters, they spiraled in to the line of MARTOP bots and in seconds, a small thunderstorm had erupted out of the sleet, as mechs slashed and discharged disrupters left and right.

"It's a cat fight!" Leeds warmed to the scene. "Look at 'em go!"

Tsu was all hands and fingers, playing his console like a master pianist. "As long as we can keep them from that down cylinder along the firewall, where the bit stream's going in...I'm changing config, adding some more pyridines and carbene grabbers." He sent the command and moments later, the sweeper master bot grabbed loose atoms from the sleet and slammed together more hands and fingers. The command went out to all the replicants and the fight was on, with renewed ferocity.

It seemed to be all over in less than ten minutes. This time, the results were better than before. Though the sleet never relented, even Patrice could see that the MARTOP bots had thinned out, either shredded by Cyber Corps sweepers patrolling up and down the length of the firewall, or withdrawing away from the dam's Discharge Control System ports.

Tsu took a deep breath and sank back in his squeaking chair. His forehead was bright with sweat.

"We're not home yet...they were may be re-directing. I've got to study Kings Gorge's architecture, all their firewalls, packet sniffers, the whole thing. MARTOP's persistent and cunning...there's definitely somebody or something intelligent driving those bastards. I think we won this round."

"All those mods and config changes you made worked," Leeds decided. "Last time, we got our tails whipped. But this time—"

Patrice was thoughtful. What would it have been like to be aboard one of those sweepers? "This time, we smacked 'em."

Tsu was noncommittal. "I'm not quite ready to declare victory. Kings Gorge has a lot of ways in and these bastards are clever. There are some wicked exploit kits out there and all it takes is one loose screw somewhere, one setting not right and they're in. I'm replicating a patrol force for the Black Curtain to give Kings Gorge extra protection right at the firewalls. They need it. And I'd better let the sysops know what we're doing too." He tapped out a message and sent it, describing the battle they had just fought.

At Buckland Center's E Module, Liam Winger was less pleased. The engagement had basically been a standoff and there were other ways into the Discharge Control System, but it never felt good to have your butt kicked. Despite an hour more of probing along the firewall and other ports that made up the operating perimeter of the Kings Gorge protective barriers, Liam found he couldn't break through from where he was. The scouts he had pinched off weren't fast enough, or strong enough to force any of the normal weak spots that every firewall and back door had.

He decided he would have to do this the hard way. He would have to enter the Net himself and try to probe and breach barriers that even now Cyber Corps was erecting around the Dam's systems.

For the moment, Cyber Corps and their sweepers had won. But Liam Winger had always been persistent and resourceful. Even his Dad had once called him a 'little bull with big brains.' Plus, Symborg had programmed him with all kinds of tricks to enable completing the Prime Key. Liam knew Symborg had an inexhaustible supply of magic to deal with any situations. The Mother Swarm could do anything.

This new defensive ability of Cyber Corps would require more study to defeat. Liam decided right then and there he would enter the Net himself, that very night, and do a little recon.

Just then, the door to the network control station was shoved open. It was Danny Vranek, first shift ops supervisor, coming in a little early, to catch a nap and slurp down some doughnuts and coffee. He already had a tray of goodies balanced on one arm. Danny was a Normal, so far as Liam knew.

"Hey, Liam, want some?" Vranek went to his console in the corner, set down the tray and checked the board. "No catastrophes overnight? Nothing took a bite out of your ass in the wee hours?"

Liam hadn't even realized shift change was near. Time had creeped up on him.

"The usual baggage...a few glitches with Rack Five. I think some of the disks may be going bad. Could be ready to mirror or migrate."

"What fun," Vranek decided. "I'll take a look."

Liam wanted to get inside the Net as soon as possible. But he couldn't do it with Danny around. Then he had an idea.

"I'm heading down to the canteen. Cover for me?"

Vranek already had some kind of shoot-'em-up game going on his display. Explosions and screeches were clearly audible. He didn't even look up. "Sure thing, mac. Go get some calories."

Liam slipped out of the glass doors of the control room and disappeared down a narrow aisle of server racks along the far wall, looking back to make sure Vranek wasn't paying any attention. He wasn't.

There was a locked closet at the corner. The T-7 hub was in there, humming and flashing and blinking as it operated like a traffic cop in Times Square, routing data, packets and housekeeping traffic in and out of E module, part of Buckland's system maintenance operation.

Liam unlocked the closet door with his palm print on the bioscanner and went inside the cramped space. He shut the door behind and it locked. Only a single light bar shone down from above. But Liam didn't need much light.

T-7 was chock full of ports, easy to force, if you knew what you were doing.

And if you were an angel.

It only took a few minutes. Liam had seen ancient vids in museums and on the Net of a character named Clark Kent, a.k.a Superman, who often dashed into something called a phone booth, so he could change from street clothes into superhero getup. Liam smiled. Maybe this was something like that.

Five minutes later, Liam Winger had no body. He was a sparkling swarm of disassociated nanobotic elements, held together by a config known to Symborg as C-223877ZZ8.

The swarm hovered for a moment around the T-7 hub, then began flowing toward A port along one side. The lead bots of the swarm easily inserted themselves past the port connectors, riding along thick Worldnet 20-gauge cabling to the E module master node, which was physically mounted in a small bay in another closet on the opposite side of the control room.

From there, the thing that had once been Liam Winger entered the Net and began its little recon mission.

And thirty-three hundred miles east of Buckland Center, while Liam Winger was going for a little ride, outside the Watch Center at Cyber Corps headquarters, Valerie Patrice headed for the small autocar she had left in the south parking lot. Once inside, she didn't dial up her hotel and enter it as a destination, as she normally did.

This time, she punched in new coordinates: Forest Hills Church of Assimilation, somewhere over in Springdale. Patterson Road, near a Mexi-Thai restaurant.

Valerie Patrice wanted to find out a little bit more about this deconstruction process.
Chapter 19

(Seven months later....)

Aboard UNISPACE Transit Ship UNS-227 Johannes Kepler

Three Days from Jupiter Orbit Insertion

October 21, 2121 (Earth U.T.)

The voyage out from Gateway Station had taken two hundred and forty five days, but Captain Yamato insisted on calling the trip a 'real speed run.' Frontier Corps captains had a different idea about time and space, Johnny Winger decided. He entered the viewing cupola, after stepping aside to let one of the crewmen exit, and strapped himself in for a good long look, at something he had seen years before...and hoped never to see again.

Jupiter.

It was a salmon-hued world, mottled and banded with oranges, reds, browns and ambers, a cauldron of clouds, storms and majestic seething turbulence. Alternating strips of light and dark wrapped the planet in a calico shroud and several small red spots boiled away in the north tropical zone, companions to the Great Red Spot in the south, a centuries-old hurricane churning since the time of Cromwell and King Charles.

For several days, Kepler coursed through the Jovian skies in a steeply inclined orbit, skirting the shoals and reefs of her radiation belts, until at last they found the first of several holes in the sheath of charged particles. Captain Yamato passed the word to all hands that the ship was about to begin a series of maneuvers which would end up bringing them into orbit around Europa. Kepler dropped to a lower orbit through the first of these holes, like navigating a minefield in a wartime harbor.

After a few days had passed, the ship settled into orbit half a million kilometers above the cloud tops. By now, the planet filled nearly a third of the sky and hundreds of frothing spicules and cells of gas swept by beneath them. The speed of its rotation flattened Jupiter at the poles and widened it to a bulge at the equator. Ferocious winds resulted and they smeared the columns of gas into all sorts of grotesque and beautiful shapes. Several of the crew came by the crew's mess, watching the scenery below for hours at a time. Evan Metcalf found himself transfixed by the ever-shifting palette of colors and shapes. He could well imagine the planet's visible face as a giant's palette, where Nature worked as the artist to create an ever-changing panorama of colors, forms and brush strokes.

In time, Kepler made her way into orbit about Europa. Johnny Winger himself joined some of the crew in the mess compartment, as the cracked billiard-ball of a world turned slowly below them.

"Gives me the creeps," Metcalf said. He shuddered involuntarily and sucked at his drink.

"Yeah," said another crewman, Shirley Suttles, from Power and Propulsion. "Looks like a fuzzy beach ball," she decided. "With hair—"

Yamato pronounced himself satisfied with the view. "Yeah, a beach ball with enough radiation to fry your pretty little brain in about two seconds."

"You're assuming I have a brain...I checked mine at the recruiting station when I signed up."

Yamato trained Kepler's scopes on a darkening along one of the linea. "See that dark spot down there...could be the Keeper. If you look up at the limb and the horizon, you can see crap geysering off into space."

Winger agreed. "The damn thing has come to the surface. It's just boiling away in that ice ravine near the Equator." He checked the map. "Rhadamanthys Linea, it's called. That's where we have to go."

Yamato didn't like the looks of the place. "Swell. I'll call an all-hands meeting in the crew's mess, get all the assignments sorted out."

Yamato waved everyone quiet. "Settle down, boys and girls. By now, you've figured out this won't be your average camping trip. The assignments are posted on the crewnet. Starnes, Kwan and Singh, you're on this one. General Winger, myself and Colonel Metcalf will round out the crew. Commander Smithers here—"Yamato indicated the angel executive officer hovering in a far corner of the canteen "—will be in charge."

Starnes was from Comms and Signals. "Captain, looks like a lot of ice down there. Should I bring my skates?"

That drew several chuckles. Yamato wasn't one of them. "Just your brain will do, Starnes."

"Yeah," someone called from the back, "what's left of it."

"Europa's no theme park ride," Yamato went on. "Lots of things could go wrong down there. We've got several missions. First, we recon. That dark cloud down there is called the Keeper. General Winger—"

Winger went over what he knew from his first trip. "It's like nothing you've ever encountered before. Physically, it's a swarm...nanoscale robotic elements, we believe. Each individual element is millions of times more capable than our latest bots. Together, organized into a swarm, the Keeper has capabilities you wouldn't dream of in your worst nightmare."

Lucy Kwan, from Maintenance, was one of the away team members. "I read the reports, General. The Keeper can affect time and space, displace things forward and backward in time, move objects from one location to another in an instant."

Winger nodded. "That's what happened to us on the Jovian Hammer mission. It's like a funhouse hall of mirrors. One moment, I'd be approaching the swarm. Then, the next moment, I'd be kilometers away in a different time. Not only that, but like any quantum system, when you engage the Keeper or any part of it, you may or may not be engaging something real."

"So how did you defeat it?"

Winger looked Kwan squarely in the face. "We didn't. We had orders to leave Europa and return to Earth. We never developed any tactics that could counter the Keeper. This time, we have to finish the job. The Keeper is some kind of portal to the Old Ones. UNIFORCE thinks it's a combination beacon and command center, maybe even a forward element for the Old Ones, preparing the battlefield. We've got to put it out of commission."

"Which leads me to our mission," Yamato added. "As I said, the first part is recon. We get down there and scope out the terrain, see what this Keeper is doing and capable of doing. The second part of our mission is neutralization...degrade and, if possible, destroy. We're carrying upgraded MOBnet systems, disentanglers, plus the usual armory of HERF and magpulse weapons. My orders are specific: do whatever it takes to knock the Keeper offline. Questions?"

There were some grumbles and glances around the mess compartment, but no questions.

"Very well then. Away team will assemble at the forward dock in half an hour, with all gear. I want to go over descent procedures and recon assignments after we land."

With that, Yamato dismissed the crew. The captain drew Winger aside, finding a small niche behind the bar, still draped in fake palm fronds and Fiji Island Lagoon decorations.

"Give it to me straight, General," Yamato asked. "Is this doable? I know what our orders say. I want your opinion. Can we beat this Keeper?"

Winger shrugged. "In past engagements, we've barely been able to hold our own. It's like boxing a balloon. You probe here, it expands over there. You attack there, it knocks you somewhere else. The biggest problem we faced on Jovian Hammer is not knowing if we we're attacking something real, or just entangled copies of something real...things that could go poof in an eye blink. The Keeper is the perfect enemy...everywhere and nowhere at the same time. I just hope all this gear we brought, plus some new tactics, will work this time."

"That makes two of us," Yamato decided.

They headed up to the forward dock.

Tycho disengaged from Kepler with a slight rattle and backed off a few kilometers, before beginning her descent. Yamato did the descent burns and before long, the icy crags and valleys of Europa came rushing up at them, a little too fast, thought Winger, though Yamato was an experienced lander pilot.

They crossed kilometer after kilometer of rugged, tortured icescapes. On Europa, there was only ice...to the naked eye. Ice cliffs and ice valleys. Ice ravines and ice canyons. Ice bergs, buttes, badlands. Ice continents.

"Geysers ahead," Yamato reported. Tycho was cruising laterally over the surface, skimming along at an altitude of several kilometers. Through the forward portholes, the geysers Yamato had spotted were plainly visible. "That's our target." He consulted his nav display and pitched the lander backward, slowing their progress. "Now we hunt for a landing spot...."

Yamato found a small patch of mostly level ice between two ravines and set Tycho down with a bouncing, rattling shudder.

From the aft cabin, Walt Starnes turned to Lucy Kwan with a smirk. "That's one small step... and you know the rest."

Kwan paid no attention. She peered out a side porthole. Ice mountains and cliffs as far as she could see. The swollen salmon-hued belly of Jupiter, half in shadow, filled the sky. Callisto and Io looked like pearls on a string, wrapped around the calico disk of the huge planet. "Just another beautiful day in the Corps, I suppose."

The third crewmen, berthed with Kwan and Starnes in the aft compartment, was Mohan "Mo" Singh. Singh was Engineering aboard K-Dog. He was also the driver for Felix, their ground vehicle.

Singh swallowed audibly at the scene outside his porthole. "Jeez, there's enough radiation out there to make bacon out of all of us. At least, I don't weight as much." They all knew Europa sported less than fifteen percent Earth surface normal.

"Yeah," said Kwan, as she started unhooking her harnesses. "Now you can eat even more of those robo-steaks from the crews mess."

Up front, Yamato secured the lander and activated the sling that would put Felix, their rover, on the surface.

"Looks like Felix'll be getting quite a workout," Evan Metcalf observed. "Pretty rough going out there."

"Felix can handle anything," Yamato told them. "Come on. Let's get going. Mo Singh is driving today. I want him to make the final decision on whether Felix stays on the ground or flies."

"We had a ship called Trident on the Jovian Hammer mission," Winger remembered. "It could traverse on the ground too but mainly it was designed to bore through the ice and operate as a submarine in the ocean. Felix is optimized for surface traverse."

It was true. Singh had already christened the vehicle a 'eurocat', for Europa Caterpillar. It could trundle up and over all kinds of ice cliffs and valleys like a giant caterpillar, on triple tread tracks. But Felix also had rocket motors and could make short suborbital hops across difficult terrain in Europa's light gravity. Yamato and Winger both figured that was a capability that might well come in handy.

The six of them were inside Felix and underway in less than two hours. Singh had taken a look at the terrain surrounding them and decided on ground traverse. "I think Felix can handle those hills in this gravity. From the maps, looks like there are some valleys, or linea or whatever they're called, we can also use."

"Maybe," Winger observed. "I remember those little canyons. Just filled with ice blocks and craters and other fun stuff. Just don't go in there expecting a nice freeway."

Singh played with Felix' controls, actuating the treads and revving its motors like a hot rod on a drag strip. "Felix can handle it. Let's unsling this jalopy and get motoring."

So they set off.

Singh unshackled the treads and secured the lift thrusters completely. Within moments, the eurocat was a giant cylindrical tractor, waddling and rocking from side to side, trundling across the icescape like a drunken pig.

"Let's check out the view, Captain," Metcalf said.

Through the starboard porthole, the view of Euphemus Linea was fantastic...a jumbled pile of every conceivable shape, cubes and pyramids and smashed polygons piled on top of each other like some giant child had dropped a big ice tray. Dead ahead of Felix, the canyon floor was a maze of ice blocks and boulders, while towering ice cliffs loomed overhead on either side, several thousand meters over them.

Winger eyed the cliffs warily. "I'm hoping we don't run into any landslides...or maybe I should say ice slides. That's probably what's littering this canyon floor."

Singh steered them carefully between boulders, as the ship pitched and heaved over the rough frozen ground. "You could be right...maybe navigating this canyon isn't such a hot idea after all. We could lift our way over those canyon walls and see if the going is any better up top."

Yamato had a bad feeling. "Your call, Mo. Just keep to this heading. That geyser in the distance should be the Keeper."

Singh brought them to a stop and engaged the liftjets. As if grabbed by a giant's hand, Felix hurtled into the air and drifted forward over the jagged tops of the canyon walls.

Now they had a perfect view of their target. Yamato put a scope on the geyser, still many kilometers distant.

"Looks like a fog bank to me. General, how close do you want to get?"

"Not that close. Keep a couple of klicks away...there could easily be straggler bots outside the visible structure. I'd also get your botshields up right now."

"Good idea." Yamato pressed a few buttons on a side console. Though not visible from inside, the eurocat was soon enveloped in a faint shimmering veil, a barrier of nanobots that should protect them from isolated bots spalling off the Keeper. "I'll get the HERF guns primed too."

After some careful maneuvering and circling, Singh found a relatively uncluttered patch of ice between several hills, only a few dozen meters from a steep ice-choked ravine. He set Felix down gently on its skids and held his breath, as the cat shifted and settled for a moment. "I think we're stable, Captain...for the moment."

Yamato turned to Winger and Metcalf. "Okay, gentlemen...it's your show now. We're three kilometers from the outer bands of that geyser."

Winger eyed the geyser and the tawny-brown swirl of the swarm with growing dread. "I'd say we head out on foot now. Bring the packbots. And get your botshields up right now. It won't be much protection if the Keeper blows up. But every little bit helps."

So the detail set out, six hypersuited crewmembers and two pack bots, trudging up and down the icescape, leaping small ravines where they could in the light gravity, boosting over deeper chasms where they had to.

From their distance of several kilometers, the Keeper was a spray of geysers shooting off into space, towering over them in sparkling rainbows like a magnificent fountain. Framing the swollen belly of Jupiter, Winger could almost admire the majesty of the picture...the black of space, the salmon hues of Jupiter and the iridescent streams of the geysers spraying the sky like artist's fingers. Almost. He knew perfectly well that embedded in all that ice and water were uncountable gazillions of bots and those bots were even now making their way earthward.

MARTOP. Or whatever Farside was calling the anomaly now. The Keeper was spalling off pieces of itself, replicating like nanobotic swarms did and Earth had been suffering from the infestation for months.

Winger wondered if this was Phase One of something greater.

Just seeing the Keeper swarm in its full scope and power brought chills to the back of his neck. Over the four decades of his active-duty career with Quantum Corps, he had encountered scores of adversary swarms, but none like this. The Keeper was a thing alive, malevolent, vindictive, just plain nasty. And unpredictable to boot. As they slipped and skidded and stomped their way closer, he wanted very much to be anywhere but here.

Yet somehow, he had always known it would come to this. Johnny Winger wasn't much of a believer in fate. You make your choices and you live with them. Yet ten years ago, when Jurgen Kraft had ended the Jovian Hammer mission and ordered Archimedes to come home, he had known, in ways he couldn't really describe, that he would meet this malignant force once more, somewhere, sometime.

Now was the time.

The geysers grew larger and Winger studied the structure as they came closer. "This is as close as we should get," he announced. They stopped on a low rise, overlooking a rumpled plain of ice blocks, jumbled and smashed over eons of icequakes and meteor bombardment.

Yamato stood next to Winger, in awe of the vast streams shooting off into space. "If I didn't know what we're looking at, I'd say it was a magnificent sight. Like a living sculpture...ropes of water and ice writhing...it almost seems alive."

Metcalf shook just his head, fingered the HERF carbine slung from his hypersuit web belt. "It is. I could pump a few rounds of rf into that beast with a clear conscience."

"You'd just wind up making it mad," Winger said. "We have to be smart about this. Get the disentanglers out. Captain—" he looked over the terrain, considering defilade positions, fields of fire, prominent ground structures. "...I'd like to split us up, into three groups. One group goes right, across that gully to that little cluster of hillocks over there." He pointed to a distant position, maybe a thousand meters away. "One group stays here. The third group I'd put on the edge of that ravine off to the left, right on the edge."

Yamato wasn't about to question General John Winger, but he wanted some kind of explanation, just for comfort. "Tactics, General?"

"Call it a hunch. We've got three disentanglers. If we space them apart, we may be able to bollix up the quantum shifts the Keeper likes to make. At least long enough to give us a sporting chance of dropping this MOBnet over the bastard."

Metcalf looked at the swollen jets of ice spewing up from the boiling caldron that now covered several kilometers of a deep trench ahead of them. "I don't know about these MOBnets, General. Seems like trying to corral a herd a bees to me. Some are bound to get out. And probably replicate like mad. Maybe we ought to HERF the bejeezus out of the thing first. Slam it upside the head and stun it, before we try anything else."

Winger tried to explain his tactical thinking. "In general, that's what I want to do, Colonel. The disentanglers may or not may not work, but even if they don't, they're a useful distraction. While the Keeper's dealing with the disentanglers, that's when we blast the sumbitch with HERF and mag pulses. With any luck, we can force the thing to react and even contract a little, and that's when I send the MOBnet flying. We got these newfangled net launchers...we may as well use them."

Yamato took a deep breath, kicking at some ice clods with the toe of his boot, watching them cascade downslope in the low gravity. "Now I know why I joined Frontier Corps, General. Nice boring cycler chip duty, that's what I signed up for. How do you want to do this?"

"I'll stay on this main axis. Give me one of your people, Captain. Lieutenant Starnes can stay with me. You take Kwan and go right to those hillocks. Metcalf, take Singh and go left to that ravine. Grab a disentangler and get it primed. When you're in position, let me know. I want to coordinate the assault as closely as we can. No telling how the Keeper'll react when we sting him with this."

The detail split up as Winger had requested. One packbot went with Yamato. The other went with Metcalf. Winger and Starnes unpacked their own disentangler and got the unit up humming and blinking green in a few minutes.

"All copacetic, General," Starnes announced. He fiddled with a small panel of controls that popped out of the side. "We got juice, we got a good bead on the centroid of that monster. Circuits are active. Buffers, focusers, state emitters...everything looks green."

"Very well, Starnes. Keep your shirt on and keep that thing boresighted right into the belly of the Keeper. I'm going to the other side of this gully....see if I can get a feel for what's along the perimeter of the swarm...there may be stragglers we'll have to account for. Cover me."

"Will do, sir." Starnes hoisted his own HERF carbine and rested the barrel on the shoulder of the packbot. "Watch your footing, sir. That ice looks like she'll slide pretty easily."

Winger loped down the foreslope of the gully like a drunken kangaroo, taking ten-meter leaps in the low gravity. He grunted hitting bottom but stayed upright with help from his suit servos.

The quake, when it came, surprised everybody. There was a shudder, then the ground seem to liquefy, sliding sideways in waves. Winger's suit tried to compensate but he tumbled backwards and landed hard in a hollow of flying ice chips and shards. Even as he fell, he could see sheets of ice sloughing off the edges of the gully, an avalanche in slow motion.

If I don't boost out of here, I'll be buried alive.

That's when the lights went out completely and Winger found himself hurtling down some kind of curving corridor at breakneck speed. He was tumbling end for end, getting dizzier by the second until the corridor came to an abrupt end and he found himself hitting some kind of solid ground with the rump of his suit, a hard landing right on his bottom. The suit servos whined and squealed down and the corridor collapsed in a spray of light, crushing him into unconsciousness.

His last thought before the night came was this: that was no icequake. The Keeper had burped and belched, kicking him somewhere else in time and space. A displacement transient, the techs like to call it.

But where? And when?

The first sensation he had was the smell, an antiseptic smell. Winger opened his eyes to slits, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

Then it came to him. It was the hospital. The hospital in Denver. The hospital where his Dad had died.

Johnny Winger arrived at the hospital shortly after sunset. The Critical Care Unit was on the fifth floor, north wing. The waiting area was half full, with small knots of people engaged in whispered conversation, two children joysticking remote action bots along the wall, and a wraparound active display showing live scenes from Vail and Aspen and Steamboat Springs. The admin nurse showed Winger down a hall to the Active Care Unit. Through the bioshield, a sort of containment zone inside of which active nanodevices were at work, Johnny came up to the bed where Jamison Winger lay enveloped in thick ganglia of wires and hoses.

A faint coruscating blue glow surrounded the bed, the inner containment field pulsating with active nano to protect the patient from further infection.

A swarthy Egyptian doctor, Sethi Hassan, attended a small display, with imaging views that looked familiar to Winger. Two nurses also attended.

Dr. Hassan sensed the presence of someone new, but did not at first look away from the screen. His right hand manipulated a tiny trackball and the view on the screen changed with each manipulation.

"Lieutenant Johnny Winger," the nanotrooper announced himself. "This is my father—"

Dr. Hassan stole a quick peak at Winger's black and gold Quantum Corps uniform. "I imagine you've seen this kind of gear before, Lieutenant."

Winger bent over the bed, pressing lightly against the field. A keening buzz changed pitch and invisible forces pressed back against his fingers, forcing his hand away. Standard mobility barrier, he told himself, almost without thinking.

"How is he, Doc?"

Hassan sighed, flexed his fingers around the trackball and did some more manipulations, delicately driving the medbots under his command.

"Stable...for the moment. Two hours ago, we perfused his brain with a small formation of neurocytes...you're no doubt familiar with the technique?"

Winger nodded. "Quite familiar. Is it Serengeti?"

Hassan took a moment to tap out a few commands on a nearby keyboard. Probably changing config, Winger noted from behind his back.

"Seems to be. Whatever it is, his brain's infested with active nanodevices, viral programming from the looks of it. These neurocytes are hunting now. I detached a small element just an hour ago, got them into position to block a serotonin avalanche that was firing off inside his limbic system...nasty buggers, they were. We got the convulsions mostly stopped...although there's been some leakage into the hippocampal regions."

Winger studied his father's face. His eyes were screwed shut, tension lines all converging along his forehead. He was clearly still in pain. His lips trembled and a rhythmic twitch made his fingers and feet move in fits of shaking.

Dad...Dad, I'm so sorry. This shouldn't be happening to you...to anyone. You don't deserve this—

"You'll have to engage them close up, Doc. I've battled them myself. These neurocytes...what's the core version?"

Hassan shrugged. "Our unit grew them from a config we got from Northgate University, about six months ago. Mainly they're antivirals...you know: Alzheimer's, meningitis, that sort of thing. Fellow from Northgate came by a few weeks ago, when we started to get a lot of cases like this. He tweaked the program." Hassan seemed at a loss. "All I can do so far is keep them from spreading. The 'cytes can find them, and I engage when they do. But...well, you know how HNRIV is, how S Factor is."

Winger wanted so badly to touch his father's face. The shield wouldn't let him. It was the only thing keeping the enemy mechs contained.

"My guess is the neurocytes don't have the programming to deal with Serengeti. You don't have bond disrupters, enzymatic knives...that sort of thing."

"I don't have military nano here at all, Lieutenant. I'm trying to save lives."

"That's what it takes to deal with Serengeti, Doc. You've got to be nimble and ruthless. You've to be able to close on them quick and sling atoms like a banshee. And it doesn't hurt to be kind of sneaky too. Serengeti's program seems able to counter pretty much any kind of normal assault you'd make. It seems to know what to expect from garden-variety bots."

"So how do you fight it?"

"You do the unexpected."

Jamison Winger stirred slightly. His eyes fluttered half open. They focused on Johnny's face for a moment, then recognition sank in. His trembling hand lifted, bumped against the inner barrier and quickly dropped, as the shield bots buzzed back.

"Dad...Dad, can you see me? Can you hear me?"

Jamison Winger smiled weakly. "Is that you....Johnny—"

"Dad—" Winger bent as close as he dared to the barrier. He could feel the sting of the mechs tickling his chin. "Dad—I—how do you feel now?"

Mr. Winger summoned his strength and replied. "Like I've just been to about a hundred New Year's Eve parties—"

"Dad...it's S Factor...they're inside you...inside your head."

"I know—I hear 'em. There's a lot of horns going off all the time. And my arms—"

"—you've got neurocytes inside you, too. Dr. Hassan's driving. He's hunting down the mechs, rooting them out."

"—making a hell of a racket doing it...if you ask me—"

"Dad...you've got to hang in there—remember when you got the patch...remember what the doctors told you?"

Mr. Winger started to convulse—his arms and hands went rigid, then spasmed fluttering off into the air, brushing against the barrier. The mechs buzzed back. Beside the bed, Hassan busied himself driving the herd of neurocytes onward, tracking down the errant discharges. Seconds later, as he swarmed the 'cytes into a herd of Serengeti mechs, the spasm gradually died off. Mr. Winger's arms dropped, his fists unclenched. The doctor looked up; his eyes saying that was too close.

"The patch...that was different...just chemicals—"

"I know...but you had to go through hell while they went to work. Remember what Doc Givens told you? 'Imagine climbing a mountain...that's how the dopamine sponge works. It's easy at first, then the hill's steeper and you think you'll never make it, you think you're going to slip back, maybe even fall off. Then, all of a sudden, if you can just hold on, you're there. You're at the top. And that's when the view is so great. You've finally made it. You just have to have faith, faith that there is a top up there somewhere..."

"You always had...a better memory...than me, son."

Johnny gritted his teeth. If only I had ANAD here...I could smash those bastards for good...yank the lot of 'em out of Dad and give him his mind back. He knew what his father was feeling, what it was like to have a billion needles jabbing into the back of your head, what it was like to have a puppet's arms and legs, jerking out of control so hard you were lucky you didn't break a bone.

The truth was he'd done a hell of a lot of growing up, after his mom had died. That had been 2047, just a few days after he'd graduated from Pueblo Netschool, two days after his Worldnet wizard Katie Gomez had awarded him a citation for excellent work. Mr. and Mrs. Winger had been so proud of their son. Then Ellen Winger had driven to Colorado Springs, just visiting friends, bragging about her boy. On the drive back late at night, her car had been sideswiped by a truck and she'd lost control. The police had estimated the ravine was about seven hundred feet deep...there hadn't been much left of the car when it stopped rolling.

Those four years from '47 to '51, had been hell for Johnny, for the whole family. Mr. Winger had been devastated by the loss; in some ways, you never got over something like that...you just wore the pain like an old shirt, eventually, even deriving a bit of comfort from the hurt, like a scab that wouldn't go away. Each of them—Mr. Winger, Johnny, his brother Bradley, his sister Joanna, dealt with grief in their own way.

For Mr. Winger, that meant long hours alone in his barn, behind the house. He'd always been a tinkerer, and the barn had long been his lab and shop. Now, without his wife, he just tinkered with a ferocity they'd never seen before, seldom coming out except for dinners and essential matters. Jamison Winger had made a lifetime of working on inventions and gizmos and gadgets that never had any future and he did so with a single-minded determination now that was at times a little scary.

For most of that four-year period, at least until Jamison Winger had gotten the patch treatment for depression, Johnny and Brad and Joanna had pretty much run the ranch business. Johnny had put off any further thoughts of more school and settled in with grim determination to learn the business of ranching through and through.

The most difficult time of all came in midsummer of '50, when drought and low beef prices caused the Winger kids to have to sell off more than half of the North Bar Pass Ranch to a resort developer. The developer then proceeded to put in place a faux 'dude' ranch-Wild West showplace called Highhorn, catering to rich city people. Johnny had hated himself for agreeing to that decision ever since. Just seeing the stylized Highhorn signs and billboards and all the para-sailors wafting overhead on mountain thermals near the ranch perimeter made him sick.

It wasn't too long after Jamison Winger had gotten the patch treatment that Johnny had seen on Worldnet some stories about a new organization called United Special Operations Force. They were offering scholarships, for a six-year hitch.

"Dad—" he called through the flickering bioshield. "I've got to go on another mission...we're fighting Serengeti, same as you are. I wish I could stay—we've got equipment that would help...but—"

Jamison Winger smiled up gamely at his son. "A lot of people...a lot...are depending on you, son."

"You depend on me, too, sir."

Mr. Winger nodded. "I always have...since your mother died. Come closer—did I ever tell you—"

Johnny bent down as close as the shield bots would let him.

"—tell you..." he stopped, shuddered for a moment, then squeezed his lips into a tight line and fought back against the wave of pain—"did I ever...tell you I know...what you did...what you did with old Bailey--?"

Bailey? He hadn't thought of the old flyer for several years. Bailey had been his favorite pet, a constant companion out on the ranch, helping him herd the cattle to and from their grazing fields.

"Dad...where is old Bailey...what's he doing?"

Mr. Winger shook his head, or was it a shudder? It was hard to tell. "Bailey's crapped out...just sitting in the corner of the barn. Needs a new motor...fan drive gave out, son. When I opened...him up, I saw what you'd done—the new sensors and stuff...really souped him up, you did—"

Johnny reddened. Bailey the flyer bot—he'd always called him Bailey the Flying Dude—had been one of his most loyal companions as a child. Unknown to his parents, Johnny had often opened up his second-floor window at home and by remote-control, teleoperated Bailey right into his bedroom. The flyer had spent many a night in that room, either hovering gently in the corner, its red eye winking on and off, or sitting on the luggage trunk at the end of his bed, whirring softly in sleep mode.

Johnny had always liked to tinker, especially with Bailey. There was one trait he'd definitely gotten from his Dad. He'd thought for years his father had never known. While he was growing up at the ranch, Johnny had spent countless hours modifying Bailey's processor, giving him greater memory, teaching the bot to respond only to his voice, adding sensors, and souping up the propulsor motors. Bailey was at the same time Johnny's hot rod and pet. He'd always loved the bot like the little brother he never had.

"—I loved old Bailey, Dad...we were close, like brothers."

"I know..." Something pained Jamison Winger. His lips twitched, words ready to spill out, but held back somehow. Another spasm? He looked over at Dr. Hassan. "—I know, son. Come..." his hands beckoned Johnny closer. But the bioshield buzzed, keeping them apart. "—I wasn't very good, son...I'm sorry...I wasn't a very good father—"

"What are you saying? You taught me a lot...you were—"

"—always in the shop...always in the barn, wasn't I?" His father tried to force a brave smile, but gave up. "Kind of like Bailey...I just... sort of crapped out. Gave up the ghost."

"Don't say that, Dad—" he looked at Hassan again. Was it the 'cytes? Was it Serengeti, squeezing some circuit, making him say things? Maybe the patch was wearing off. "Don't be silly...you taught me how to work on things. That's how I got Bailey all fancied up. He could fly circles around any other bot out there."

Mr. Winger closed his eyes, sighed, his forehead wrinkles finally relaxing. "I love you, son. I'm...very proud...very proud of you."

Dr. Hassan had been driving a flock of neurocytes through Jamison Winger's limbic system the whole time. He didn't like what he was seeing.

"I'm sorry...I think it's best if you leave now, Lieutenant. I'm going to have to replicate more, expand my zone of operation a bit. The infestation's spreading—see for yourself. I'm afraid the buggers are into the limbic striatum...volition and intentionality circuits. He may not—" Hassan stopped, waggled his hand, not quite willing to go on.

Johnny Winger swallowed hard, watched his father lying inside the bubble, seemingly at peace. But a war was raging inside his skull and the outcome was in doubt. Winger wiped away a tear. Instinctively, he touched the shield, until the bots pressed back. He knew he couldn't touch his father. That made it worse.

"I've got to go, Dad. Got a mission. Fight 'em...fight the buggers hard. I'll be fighting 'em too. At least, we can be together that way." He turned to leave. "I want to be kept up to date on his progress, Doc—"

Hassan gave him the net address. "I'll post anything new. Any changes, I promise you'll know."

That was good enough. Johnny Winger took a last, tearful look at Jamison Winger. His arms were shriveled like old tree branches. Every few seconds, as the S Factor bots steadily took over, he shuddered and a low moan escaped his lips.

Johnny Winger couldn't watch any longer. He screwed his eyes tightly shut to choke off more tears and left the room.

One way or another, I'll lick this bastard menace, if it's the last thing I do.

Johnny Winger shook his head. This can't be right. I'm back in the hospital...it's September 2062. It's happening all over again.

Winger had lived with it for decades. Always, he had wanted to do the medbot insert himself. Get in there and fight Serengeti himself. The doctors had advised against it. Could kill the patient... critical functions could be affected...tissue might be damaged....

Winger was fully aware that none of this was real. Some of the details were wrong...how his Mom had died...the accident reports from the freeway...the ravine, the position of the car, the autopsy results.

Something had changed the memory. This was a sim, that's what it had to be. Somehow the Keeper had thrown him back into his own past, or concocted a reasonable facsimile from his own memory, but there were subtle alterations. Maybe some kind of glutamate tracing was going on, affecting his recall, generating memories of things that had never happened.

Or maybe his memory was just faulty. Yet when he touched his Dad, when the med barrier was dropped and he could feel the flushed hot skin of his forehead, the pulsing of his neck veins, he felt real. What was this? A dream? A sim? A different reality, a different time and space, a universe sliced in a different direction?

Winger tried to ignore his own feelings and put some analysis to the situation. I can reason my way out of this, he told himself.

Rational analysis said there were two decisions to be made here. What to do about his Dad? And how to get the hell out of this nightmare and back to his Europa Forge teammates?

Maybe they're related. Maybe making one decision forces the other.

Eventually, it came to him that the only way he could move forward or backward in this sim (for that was how he had come to think of it) was to confront the decision he had never made in the past, to do the medbot insert, battle Serengeti inside his Dad and try to save him. He'd tried to drown the guilt over that for decades, guilt over the fact that he didn't or couldn't try the insert and he'd carried it with him, deeply buried to be sure, for nearby sixty years.

Johnny Winger told himself: the Keeper wants me to engage Serengeti. Okay, pal, I'll play your little game.

He wasn't sure he understood what was going on but it seemed like the Keeper was somehow sensitive to emotional conflicts inside him. It had the ability to sniff out these burned-in memories and draw them out—maybe some kind of memory tracing, like glutamate sniffing—like a giant therapist. Now, confronted with the one of his most painful memories, Johnny Winger decided he had to resolve it, here and now, even if it was only a sim.

He snapped at Dr. Hassan. "Drop the barrier."

Dr. Hassan spluttered in confusion. "Lieutenant Winger, I don't think—"

"Drop the barrier. I'm doing an insert here."

"But you're not—"

Winger yanked the doctor by the arm and forcibly seated him at the control console. "Run the panel. Do what I say." To the attending nurses, Winger said, "And get him prepped for an insert. I'm going inside."

"Okay, Lieutenant," the lead nurse, whose nameplate read Nalinka, patted down the incision she had just made in the side of Jamison Winger's skull. "Subject's prepped and ready."

Reluctantly, Hassan handed Winger the injector tube, attached by hose to the containment chamber. "Steady even suction, Doctor. ANAD ready to fly?"

Hassan studied his board and came back, "Ready in all respects, Lieutenant. But you're making a big mistake. Your father can't take—"

"Vascular grid?"

"Tracking now. You'll be able to follow the master just fine. You can replicate once you're through the blood-brain barrier."

Winger concentrated on his own instruments. Focus. Focus. "I think I know how this works, Doctor."

"Watch for capillary flow," said Nalinka. "When his capillaries narrow, your speed will increase. And viscosity will stay up."

"Like slogging through molasses. ANAD's inerted and stable...ready for insertion."

The insertion went smoothly enough. A slug of plasma forced the replicant master into Jamison Winger's capillary network at high pressure. Johnny Winger got an acoustic pulse seconds later and selected Fly-by-Stick to navigate the system. A few minutes' run on its propulsors brought the Autonomous Nanoscale Assembler/Disassembler to a dense fibrous mat of capillary tissues. The image soon appeared on Winger's IC panel.

"Ready for transit," Hassan told him. "Cytometric probing now. You can force these cell membranes open any time."

Winger used ANAD's acoustic coupler to sound the tissue dam ahead, probing for weak spots. "There, right to starboard of those reticular lumps...that's a lipid duct, I'd bet a hundred bucks. I'll try there."

He steered ANAD into the vascular cleft of the membrane. He twisted his right hand controller, pulsing a carbene grabber to twist the cleft molecules just so, then released the membrane lipids and slingshot himself forward. Seconds later, ANAD was floating in a plasma bath, dark, viny shapes barely visible off in the distance. The plasma was a heavy viscous fluid. Winger tweaked up the propulsor to a higher power setting and took a navigation hack off the vascular grid.

"Ventral tegmentum, Doctor. Just past the mesoencephalic nucleus. Looks like we're in."

Winger navigated ANAD through the interstices of his father's brain for the better part of an hour. He had programmed the assembler to send an alarm when it encountered any kind of unnatural activity...especially assembler maneuvering or replication. If there were any remnants of Serengeti left in his brain, Johnny Winger wanted to be ready.

Hassan was practically holding his breath, watching the acoustic pulses come back. "Lieutenant, your father's not strong enough for this. Using an insert at this point is a really bad—"

"I'll take responsibility for what happens," Winger told him. "Besides, you're not real anyway. I'm just doing what I should have done sixty years ago."

"Hopefully, the last treatment with Serengeti finished them off," Hassan muttered to himself.

At 1824 hours, ANAD sent back an alarm.

The imager screen was at first murky, crowded with the spikes and cubes of dissolved molecules. Lumpy, multi-lobed sodium molecules darted across their view like shadowy ping-pong balls. Winger studied readouts from ANAD's sounder...something was there, hidden in the data traces on the scope. He fiddled with the gain on the imager, tweaking it, subtracting foreground clutter.

Something approximately sixty nanometers in one dimension, narrow with a globe structure at one end...and scores of probes, effectors, cilia, whatever. Incredible mobility...triple propulsors beat an idling rhythm as ANAD closed in....

"Doc, I think we found what we're looking for."
Chapter 20

Aboard Sweeper One

October 25, 2121

1150 hours

Valerie Patrice wasn't sure where she was, only that she was dizzy and disoriented. She had a vague memory of riding the Mighty Cobra roller coaster at Daytona Beach as a child. It made her sick. She threw up when they stopped. Threw up all over herself and her Mom and Dad.

How embarrassing.

But this wasn't quite like that, not exactly. It was more like riding the surf at Daytona. She often did that all day long, until she was sunburned to a deep red and her chest was chafed from the float and her eyes and ears stung with salt water.

Now she was...what, exactly? A collection of atoms. A swarm of molecules. An angel, deconstructed, now she remembered, at that Assimilationist Church in Springfield, Virginia. And James Tsu had put in her a packet sweeper and sent her off flying around the Net just like that awful roller coaster years ago.

That good-looking associate pastor at the Springfield church—what was his name? Billings or something like that—had been the last face she had seen.

"It's just like going to sleep," he told her, as he secured the containment chamber door. "You nod off and that's it. You wake up a whole new person."

Sure, a whole new person, with no body and only the barest inkling of how to get around in this new world of deconstructed swarms.

Now she was an angel, cruising the WorldNet in a packet ship called Sweeper One, conducting recon missions for Operation Cyber Sweep. It was all too much, overwhelming really, despite what Billings had said. She wasn't sure which part of the experience was the strangest: being an angel or riding packets inside the Net.

One moment, she was thrilled at what she could do now. Things she never imagined anybody could ever do. The next moment, she despaired, thinking she had died and this was some version of Heaven. Pastor Billings had smiled as he shut the chamber door, assuring her that "the best is yet to come."

But she was still conscious. She was still Valerie Patrice, in some form or another. And she still had a mission.

Focus on the mission. Focus. Focus....

So she was traveling around the Net at near-light speed, through cables, wirelessly into and out of routers, hubs, switches, servers and nodes too numerous to count. Somehow, Tsu and Anson Leeds could communicate with her. Messages came and went. She looked around and realized she was still in some kind of containment vessel. It was cramped. She didn't see any controls. But the messages came and she heard them and she responded.

Tsu was saying something even now--"...some kind of rogue packets in your vicinity...I'm diverting you to that node...can you see anything, Val? Can you describe what you see?..."

Patrice tried looking around. Now, she realized that the containment vessel that was Sweeper One had some sort of translucent, at times even transparent skin. When she squinted, when she focused, she could see outside. It made her even dizzier. But she gritted her teeth...or what she thought was her teeth, for the memory of how to do that was still there, and tried to describe what she was seeing.

It's like riding a train, she decided. That was the best analogy. A train of fuzzy cotton balls. In fact, she realized there were trains of cotton balls everywhere, paralleling Sweeper One, and some at crazy angles too.

This is insane, she told herself.

Some of the cotton balls came alongside and began to stick. Soon, a great quilt had built up along the outside. That's when she realized someone was talking. It was James Tsu.

"Val...Val...can you hear me? Val...come in."

Patrice looked around. There were no buttons to push. No controls of any type that she could see. How you respond?

She just started forming words in her mind. "I hear you, James. I don't know how, but I hear you."

That did the trick. Somehow the cotton balls carried signals to and from the packet cruiser.

"Good. I'm sending you a link...it's some news files from Solnet...you should view them."

"Yeah? How do I do that? There aren't any controls inside this thing."

For awhile, Tsu said nothing. Nobody had any ideas how to make comms work when you were inside the signal wave. "You'll just have to figure it out, Val. I'll keep sending the link."

Thanks. She watched the streams of cotton balls. The ones that clung to the outside of Sweeper One had to be Tsu's link. But how to activate it?

Then she hit on an idea. Patrice found she had all kinds of effectors. No longer limited to two arms and hands, she could manipulate atoms and molecules in a variety of ways. She was puzzled by this for awhile, but soon enough, found a way to cycle open a port on the side of the sweeper and crank some of the clinging cotton balls inside. Immediately, she saw and heard snatches of some kind of news vid..."—orting that some rogue software...stretches of the Net...shutting down critical systems..."

As she cranked in more and more cotton balls, the compartment became crowded but the imagery and sound became clearer. Patrice was stunned at what she saw.

All over the Net, the news was the same. Rogue software, viruses, Trojans, worms, berserkers, zero-day exploits nobody had ever heard of...the Net seemed to be slammed with them. Everything was affected: water treatment and supply systems, fuel and gas transport, communications, finance-bank-credit transactions, air traffic control, even killsats in orbit, which had fired uncommanded bursts on unsuspecting ground targets. Cyber Corps was swamped, unable to keep up with all the infiltrations.

James Tsu had appended his own file to the link. Patrice watched as Tsu's disembodied head materialized inside Sweeper One, like a ghostly wraith from a bad nightmare.

"The reason Solnet and WorldNet can't keep up is that there's a steady infiltration of bots from space, from that MARTOP source, or so UNIFORCE keeps telling us. Until that's shut off, the Net will be overwhelmed. Look, Val, we've got a bigger problem here. Contact me with this link—" Tsu's head looked down. At that very moment, a small cylinder appeared in the sidewall of the sweeper. Instinctively, Patrice reached out an effector and contacted the cylinder. Instantly, James Tsu's head appeared right next to her, so suddenly, it startled her. Tsu nodded.

"I see you managed to work the link. Welcome to the Net. How does it feel...being a disembodied swarm riding a signal wave at near-light speed?"

Patrice shrugged, at least she tried to. She didn't have any shoulders. But some kind of embedded memory said she had shrugged. "It's hard to put into words. I feel like I'm riding a roller coaster in a sleet storm of cotton balls. Is this what it's like to be part of a signal?"

Tsu smiled. "I don't know. You're the one on the scene. You tell me. Look, there's a serious problem at the Kings Gorge Dam in Colorado. Something's infected the controls for the Discharge Control System...the threat center's getting steady feedback of valve and pump malfunctions. It's serious. If the Bugs take command of the discharge controls, they could open all the sluice gates, flood hundreds of miles of valley downstream. Millions could be affected...in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico. I'm diverting you there...it should only take a few seconds. Leeds wants you to scope it out, send back a report. Don't try anything yet. You're not configured for offensive actions yet. Just report."

"Don't worry...I can't even control my own effectors yet. How do you drive this thing anyway? I don't see anything to control it."

Tsu's face was already fading. "You don't. It's just a containment device. Leave the driving to us." Then his face and head were gone. She was alone.

And Sweeper One careened left, diving headlong into a maelstrom of cotton balls.

She knew she had arrived somewhere...Node 2133493, KG Discharge Control Primary Gate Circuit A...when the cotton balls began to thin out. Sweeper One shuddered and rattled a little bit and she found herself rocking back and forth, like a train clacking along some tracks. Suddenly, Sweeper One jerked right, onto a new course and the last of the cotton balls parted.

She caught a quick view of some kind of enclosure flitting by. The sweeper darted into a tunnel, then emerged again and she saw more clearly, as the ship orbited something like a small lagoon, that the enclosure was like a fence encompassing the small lagoon. Inside the fence, bobbing on the lagoon surface, more cotton balls, but these balls looked dirty, torn, misshapen and bedraggled. One end of the fence was open and a multi-lobed nanobotic device seemed to be herding more and more balls inside, sorting, stopping, checking each one as it approached.

Right away, Patrice understood that the nanobot doing the herding didn't belong there. James Tsu had talked of enemy bots. She realized she was looking at one, in fact, there were several, forming a gauntlet along the approaches to the fence opening. The bots were shepherding more and more cotton balls inside. It was like some kind of round-up.

And inside the enclosure, the balls were undergoing some kind of metamorphosis. They came into the enclosure looking like all the other balls. But once inside, they changed color and shape and began looking decidedly beaten down.

Valerie Patrice hunted around the sweeper cabin for the comm link. The cylinder was still there, still turning slowly in its socket. She reached out with an effector and felt a connection. Tsu's head returned, turning slowly in the air.

"Good. You've got the hang of it. See anything."

Patrice reported what she was seeing.

Tsu frowned. "That's bad, Val. That's what we were afraid of. Those bots you see are the enemy. Don't do anything. Don't try anything yet. I think what you're seeing is the discharge control system software being changed. The bots are trying to take command of the pumps and valves. We're working on a fix right now."

"Something needs to be done now," Patrice told him. "I can't just stand by and let them take control of the dam."

"You're not configured for offensive action, Val...don't do anything stupid."

But even as James Tsu's head was streaming warnings and cautions, Valerie Patrice wasn't listening. Instead, she was learning fast how to use her effectors and propulsors. Maybe this is how I learned to walk, she surmised. Step here, put a foot there, shift and stride, fall down and bang my head on the coffee table. Scream bloody murder and get up and try again.

Bit by bit, little by little, she was able to get some of the basics down: okay...that's extend, that's retract, that's manipulate, now rotate. Got the effectors. Now propulsors...how the hell do you turn these damn things on?

She decided to do a little exploring inside her cocoon, see just what this packet cruiser was like.

Patrice found that she could just squeeze into another compartment. This one had some kind of airlock. Maybe a way out of the packet cruiser. She worked her effectors and by trial and error, found a way to open the airlock. She collapsed herself down and squeezed through. Then, cycling the outer hatch, she shoved herself outside.

Steaks of cotton balls raced by, multiple streams going in all directions. Jeez, it's like standing next to a freeway. She reconnoitered the outside of her little ship for a moment, finding it a squat cylinder with hemispherical end caps at each end. Some kind of jets puttered front and aft and the aft jets were surrounded by flagellar propulsors as well. Sweeper One was well equipped for maneuvering in this strange new medium.

She dodged several streams of cotton balls and soon spied what looked like a mountain range in the distance, behind and above the small lagoon, where sorting and selecting was still going on. Atop the crest of the mountain, she saw what looked like the crenellated stone walls of a great citadel, perched on the very top. But it wasn't the citadel that caught her attention. It was the swarm of bots attacking the citadel that she noticed...hundreds, maybe thousands of them, breaching the walls, clambering all over the parapets and towers of the great fortress.

She tried the link back to Cyber Corps, and found she could talk to Tsu, even outside Sweeper One.

She described the scene.

Tsu's voice was concerned. She could tell in the strain of his voice. "That citadel you're describing is Cyber Fence, Val. It's something we built. The Kings Gorge discharge controls are inside. We installed that to keep the Bugs out. What you're describing is a full-scale assault on the Fence. The Bugs are trying to get inside, and take over the dam operating controls."

"I've got to do something, James. I can't just stand here and watch."

"Val, you don't have the configurations to make an attack. Don't even think about it. Just get in as close as you can and describe what you see....Val...Val, do you copy?"

But Patrice had already gotten underway, figuring out how to operate her own propulsors as she jetted toward the steep escarpment of the mountain.

It's like learning how to swim and walk at the same time, she told herself. I don't know what half of these gadgets do...but , here goes....

She closed the distance to the slopes in a few minutes, and straight away found herself in a scrap with a small squadron of Bugs. They were nanobotic devices, of that she was sure. So am I, she snorted. I wonder what I look like to them.

Before she could react, she was already in the grasp of two bots, whose effectors lanced out and pinioned her against the flanks of the mountain before she could maneuver away.

Oh, yeah...let's see what this thing does...she found all she had to do was think of a config and the right effector was enabled and powered up. Slammed sideways, she reacted with a few snaps from her own grabbers and managed to pinch off a few molecules of the attacking bots, atoms went spinning off in a puff of fragments as she scooted out from under them.

Take that, you snotty little worms.

Now Patrice whirled and slashed with the same grabbers, a feint immediately parried by the bots, which butted her amidships and sent her spinning back down the slope. She managed to right herself and jetted back up into the melee.

It was like combat underwater in the swimming pool, like when she had tussled with her brothers as a kid, pulling hair, kicking, slapping, all in slow motion. The trouble was the slightest touch could set her spinning. Clearly there were forces here at this level she had never heard of. She'd have to be more careful.

Patrice waded into another knot of Bugs and went to pinching and grabbing and slashing. She found she could use her propulsors to make kamikaze swooping attacks on a tangent to the mob, diving in for a slash, then pulling out just in time. That tactic worked pretty well.

Then, just by chance, she found how to operate her bond disrupters.

Using the same kamikaze dives, she found she could scatter knots of Bugs with liberal use of the disrupters. Each dive produced the same result: a big zap! and then atom fragments and pieces of effectors cartwheeling off in all directions.

This was starting to be fun.

Tsu's voice muttered in the background but she paid little attention. "Val...you don't have the right configs to attack...be sure to keep a safe distance...recon and intelligence, that's all we need...."

Patrice slashed and burned her way up the slope, encountering thicker and thicker knots of Bugs. It's just me against millions. She knew there was a way to replicate additional copies of her own structure, but where was that control? Maybe that's what James was talking about. Did she even have the right config to replicate?

But before she could consider the implications of that, she spied a different sort of Bug, higher up the slope, bigger, with more effectors, standing off from the others, directing breaching operations. Already, some of the Bugs had penetrated partway into the citadel walls. Others were clambering toward the parapets at the top, while disrupter fire from towers rained down on them. It could have been an illustration from a textbook on medieval history.

But it was very real.

The larger Bug seemed to be in charge. Patrice worked her way against the flow of bots, grabbing, pinching, slashing, where she had to, until she found herself at the same level as the large Bug.

It had multiple heads, globular and pyramidal, with a forest of effectors around its equator and it was spitting out copies of itself like some kind of whirling assembly plant...casings, effectors, grapples and propulsors...a queen bee of a bot growing drones and workers left and right.

Valerie Patrice had never been one to turn down a challenge. Her brothers often dared her to try things and she learned at an early age not to back down. She could outrun and outfight half the boys she had grown up with. Part of surviving in a family of boys was standing up to them, talking trash with them, roughing and wrestling with them. That's how you got respect. Above all else, Valerie Patrice wanted respect.

So she was moving toward the master bot before she even realized what she was doing, Tsu's voice muttering and warning her in the background...you don't have the configs to do this...your propulsors aren't up to spec...you're going to get hurt...little girls don't fight little boys...

She waded right in, slashing and burning, and caught the master bot by complete surprise.

The first thing she noticed, after she collected herself from the recoil, was how fast the bastard was. In the blink of eye, the bot flung her away and zapped her with its disrupters for good measure. It went back to slamming atoms, trying to replicate as fast as it could.

Okay, mister, if that's the way you want it.

Patrice backed off and played with her effectors for a few moments, trying to figure out what did what. Okay, that's like a hand. That one's like a knife. That zaps things. That one over there twists things. When she felt she had a little better mastery of the gizmos, she charged right back in.

Patrice remembered grappling and wrestling with her brothers as a child. It was all about leverage. The best position was on top but there wasn't any gravity here, just weird forces that had names she couldn't pronounce...van der Waals something or other. Tsu had described it to her.

By instinct, she closed on the master bot and went for the mid-section, an area that seemed to have fewer effectors. Using a clutch and grab combo, she managed to grapple something and hung on as the bot thrashed about. Disrupter fire zapped the air and she returned fire. Moments later, they had company as the bot master's friends came zooming up. Patrice felt herself pulled and punched in a hundred different directions. She zapped and pinched and twisted and slammed but it wasn't doing any good.

She lost a couple of effectors—that should have hurt but then you could just grow more when you had the right config. Then she lost her hold and went spinning off in the distance.

Now the bot master was surrounded by a protective squad of daughter bots, replicants, Tsu had called them.

How did he do that? She wondered. I should have the same ability. But Tsu had warned her against attacking. She didn't have the right configs.

Above them, the Bugs were busily assaulting the walls of the fortress. Patrice could see it was only a matter of time before they got in, inside the Kings Gorge Dam Discharge Control System. If they got in, havoc would follow and millions would be affected. Lives could be lost.

Patrice knew now she couldn't do this herself. Wrestling her brothers, she knew that sometimes you won and sometimes you lost. But Tsu and Leeds needed to get reinforcements here as fast as possible.

"I'm pulling out," she announced, to no one in particular. She was startled when Tsu's voice erupted in her ears.

"About time...we've got more Sweepers on the way. Just stand down, Val. Get back to your Sweeper. I'm bringing you home."

Patrice figured discretion was in order. "Better make it fast. That fortress is about to be overrun by Bugs...there must be a gazillion of them."

"Probably two gazillion," Tsu came back. "Sweepers Two and Three on the way. They should be on site in a few moments. Can you stay there and give us some battle damage assessment?"

"Roger that," Patrice said. She jetted on her own propulsors back toward Sweeper One. It was like trying to cross a ten-lane freeway; streams of cotton balls zipped by in a blur. She dodged and ducked and juked until she had made it across the signal flow and drifted up to Sweeper One's airlock. She cycled the lock and was inside the lockout chamber moments later.

Patrice wriggled through from the lockout bay into containment. When she was secure, she was about to inform Tsu to get the little ship going when she noticed a few stray cotton balls packed into one corner of the bay.

What the hell? She kicked at the balls and they quivered a little but didn't move off.

Must have slid past me when I cycled the lock. She knew the balls were nothing more than packets of data and the thought came to her that they might be of some intelligence value. After a few more desultory kicks, she left them alone. They clumped and quivered in the lower level of the containment bay and didn't otherwise respond. She soon forgot about them.

"Prepare for launch," James Tsu told her. "I'm bringing you back to Herndon. It should take about ten seconds...you've got several nodes to traverse and a few filters and buffers at the end. Maybe a little bumpy. How'd you like life as an angel?"

Valerie Patrice was busy securing herself in containment, making sure all her parts were well fastened down to the scaffolding that served as an acceleration mount.

"It was wicked. Everything I am, or was, now in this little bot...it's still hard to believe. And I still haven't mastered the replication business."

"Don't sweat it...it'll come. You've still got a lot of learning to do. Plus we've got more configs to add when you get back. Ready to come home?"

"More than ready."

"Here goes...."

And the trip was over in a few eye blinks. Out of Kings Gorge to junctions at Amarillo and Memphis and a router at the National Comp Lab in Pittsburgh. Sweeper One was soon home in the Watch Command Center's own server rack, Node 22887, Disk C. Valerie Patrice hardly had time to take a breath, if an angelized cloud of nanobots could be said to breathe.

Seconds later, she made her way out of the packet cruiser and rode on faint currents drawing her into a small containment chamber on the Watch Center's second floor. After being cooped up inside Sweeper One, the chamber seemed like Buckingham Palace.

Now Valerie Patrice could stretch out. Soon enough, she found her home scaffolding and gratefully attached herself to it. Home sweet home, such as it is. It had been a dizzying, jarring transition.

Tsu and Leeds opened a comm link. "Val," Leeds was saying, "good job. That's a difficult trip you made. How about loading up config C1 and making yourself presentable?"

Patrice knew that C1 was a full angel configuration, a human simulation. It would take some time to slam atoms and build out the structure. "If you say so. Have I got enough feedstock in here?"

"On the way—" Tsu announced.

An hour later, something that looked like the original Valerie Patrice waited impatiently for Leeds to cycle the containment center lockout and open the hatch. The door swung open and Patrice stepped out, a bit unsteadily, into bright lights and what seemed like half a dozen faces peering down at her.

Tsu gave her a chair and something to drink. It tasted surprisingly good.

"How do you feel? he asked.

"Like I've been on the losing end of a gunfight," she told them.

"Remember those little packets you picked up inside Sweeper One, the ones that came back with you?"

Patrice asked for more drink...it was some kind of fruit juice cocktail with protein filler and nucleic acid extract, helpful for rebuilding structure. "Sort of. What was it?"

"An image file," Tsu told her. "Strange format but we were able to decrypt it and wash it through some filters. A portrait actually." He held it up and Patrice studied the image.

The picture was of a man, high forehead, black hair slicked back, huge, bushy moustache and stern unforgiving eyes. He wore a dark suit with a starched white collar and some kind of badge insignia on the left breast pocket.

Patrice blinked. "Who's that?"

Tsu admitted," We weren't sure at first, so we did a little digging. Turns out it's a photo of a famous American sheriff from the late nineteenth century."

"A sheriff?"

"Val, it's a picture of Wyatt Earp."
Chapter 21

Kings Gorge Dam, Colorado

October 26, 2121

2200 hours

Liam Winger figured his bot army could breach the Cyber Fence around the Discharge Control System in another hour. The Normals were good but not that good. His bots had the right config. The fortress walls were strong but not impregnable. It was just a matter of time.

He drifted up to examine their work. The Cyber Fence had already been breached in dozens of places. The underlying structure was exposed. Now, his bots were busily disassembling the remnants of the Fence, pulling apart the packets, burrowing into the core of the barrier. Inside, the memory arrays and control algorithms of the Kings Gorge dam gates and valves would he stacked like ripe fruit, ready for the picking.

Liam found his new arrangement as a swarm entity more and more to his liking. Getting to this point had been hard, hell it had been a pain in the ass. But the end state of assimilation was like a dream come true. You could go anywhere, be anything, just by changing configurations. You could be invisible or not. You could drift like dust, sting like a bee and a few moments later, sit down a café and have an aperitif with good friends.

No doubt about it...being an angel was the future and Liam was almost giddy with the possibilities. Sure, there was the Central Entity and the mother swarm. Always looking out for you, like any good Mom. And there was talk of what was to come...how the Old Ones would arrive decades from now and absorb everything into the mother swarm. But that was decades away. Now, it was party time and Liam Winger intended to make up for lost time.

He wondered what was going on inside the Kings Gorge control center. Liam had no way of knowing just what kind of chaos had erupted when the on-duty operators realized the system was under full-scale assault. He had a mission to complete. Symborg had given him the mission and promised great things if he completed it. Liam had never been one to duck responsibility. No less a troglodyte than his own Dad, General John Winger, had often remarked that 'you could always count on Liam...give him a job and he'll bite anyone who gets in the way of doing it."

Maybe it was something in the blood.

Just beyond Node 3C557 in server rack 4B, where Liam and his bot army were hard at work breaching Cyber Fence, the Kings Gorge control center was in an uproar. Three operators were in a state of panic as they realized someone, some thing, was chewing away at their defenses and if they didn't regain control of the valves inside the diversion tunnels soon, the full impact of the Kings River would come slamming through the tunnels and spillways and likely drown thousands of acres of land downstream in a matter of minutes.

Danielson, shift supervisor, was frantically cycling the valve switches on his control board, scanning the displays left and right for any indication the huge valves hundreds of meters away were responding.

"No dice, Kenny," said Sykes, 3rd shift tech, a few feet away. "Penstocks are jammed. Intakes are wide open and we got us a boney fide disaster in the makin'. I got nothing."

Danielson felt his heart pounding in his chest like a pneumatic hammer. Why did this crap always have to happen on his shift? And he was up for a merit raise in a month anyway; now you could kiss that goodbye. No swing set for the kids; no new engine for the truck. "I'm trying everything I can. Emergency protocol 2 says this should work...cycle Bank A and switch to Bus B...it's clear as day and I'm doin' it but nothing's happening. Lonny, you got anything else on that bug?"

Lonny Bierman was the other Tech 2 on duty tonight. It was Lonny who had seen the scan alarm from Cyber Fence...the anti-virus system had flagged some suspicious files being downloaded in Server Rack 4 a few minutes before and shortly after that, the whole network had gone haywire. Something had gotten past the Fence and was multiplying like crazy, overwriting critical algorithms, making hash out of control instructions and main memory, bollixing up the gates and valves up and down the diversion tunnels. For a few moments, Danielson and Bierman were certain a ghost had gotten into their network: Plug Valve Banks A and B wide open...that hadn't happened in twenty years; Emergency Override Circuits A and B offline; Spillway Monitors and Sensor Banks offline; pumps everywhere going red then flat-lining. It was like someone had just yanked the plug on the whole dam discharge control system.

This can't be happening, Danielson told himself, over and over again. But his displays said otherwise.

The magnitude of the impending disaster could not be understated. Sluices were cycling open. Valves were failing. Emergency alarms and fail-safe systems were being defeated. Already catastrophic levels of water were cascading through the diversion tunnels and spillways of the dam and rushing in a roaring crescendo downstream, trapping and imperiling hundreds of thousands of people in southern Colorado, northern New Mexico and eastern Utah.

And nothing the 3rd shift operators did had any effect. Something beyond their understanding had seized control of the dam's operating systems and was now running the show. Danielson rubbed his hands raw, flinging them at one bank of controls after another, eventually pressing buttons just to make something happen. Bierman and Sykes were equally frustrated, sliding on their castered chairs back and forth from one panel to another.

Danielson watched the water pressure rising steadily in the diversion tunnels with a growing sense of dread. Finally, the decision was unavoidable.

"Better get the Governor's office on the line, boys. We can't stop this now. It's gone too far, all the way to Level 1."

Sykes made the call.

Solnet Special Report

Breaking News...Kings Gorge Dam Disaster...Breaking News

"This is Ellen Wong, reporting from outside the Kings Gorge Dam in southern Colorado. It's a beautiful late October day here in the southern Rockies, but a major disaster is now in the making. Solnet Special Report has just learned that the Kings Gorge Dam, which you see behind me..." ("drone cam altitude two hundred meters, wide angle, establishing shot and be sure to get the water coming out of the spillways...that'll attract some eyeballs....") has suffered a catastrophic failure in its control system and water is being released uncontrollably through the dam as a result. You can see the huge volumes of water coming through the spillways and tunnels now...unofficially, we're hearing from background sources that some kind of computer bug has infected the dam's control systems and that operators can't close any of the valves and gates...the entire flow of the Kings River impoundment is now coming through the dam."

"Special Report has managed to snag one of the Kings Gorge senior engineers...David Jung is his name...Mr. Jung, could we have a few moments with you?—to give us a rundown on what's happened and what engineers and operators are trying to do. Mr. Jung, thanks from stopping by—"

Jung is a hefty, sandy-haired man, with the build of a one-time fullback now inexorably turning soft. He constantly shoves an errant lock of hair out of his eyes. The wind is gusting hard along the catwalk above the coffer dam pools just upstream of the dam itself. The water below them is fuming, hissing and steaming in the pressure drop as the impoundment churns a hundred meters below them.

"My pleasure, Ms. Wong...I wish the circumstances were better."

Wong presses a button on her wristpad, directing the dronecam to come in tight on Jung's face. The ornithopter chitters down from altitude, hovering like an enlarged gnat two meters over Jung's head. He flinches involuntarily, but recovers his composure.

"Mr. Jung, what exactly is happening here at Kings Gorge?"

Jung pushes back the lock of hair. "Two hours ago, a particularly malicious computer bug began infecting our control systems. Somehow, the virus bypassed all our security and defensive measures and caused damage to our valve controls inside the spillways and diversion tunnels. The result of that damage is that the valves have come open and millions of liters of water have come through uncontrolled. We're working hard to regain control of our systems but unfortunately, the initial damage has already occurred."

"Solnet understands that the Governor's office has been notified...is that correct?"

"That is correct...it's normal practice in an emergency such as this. Also, the National Guard and other emergency responders have been notified. There may be isolated settlements or towns downstream affected by the floodwaters where rescues and the like have to be done. We're trying to be cautious and conservative about all this."

Ellen Wong took a quick peek at the display on her wristpad and used her thumb to tweak the dronecam's position, capturing more of Jung's harried face. Wong thought she saw some kind of tic at the corners of Jung's mouth. Maybe I imagined it, she told herself. Still, it made for dramatic vid.

"What about this computer bug? Have you encountered anything like this before?"

Jung's face darkened. "Not like this. Of course, our systems are probed all the time and hackers are an ever-present threat. But Kings Gorge has a pretty robust security screen, the latest in firewalls and barriers. Plus we've been working with Cyber Corps on a new fence around our most critical systems."

"Yet you were still hacked."

"We were and by a particularly aggressive form of bug. This virus...we're not sure if it's actually a virus, or a Trojan or what exactly, but it replicated fast once it was inside...seems to have entered through one of our sensor monitoring channels...we may have an unknown vulnerability in some of our sensor software. Our engineers and techs are looking into that now. And Cyber Corps is working with us, as we speak, to patch around the vulnerability and get those valves closed. By the way, we also have a tiger team inside both diversion tunnels right now, working on cycling the big valves shut manually. Because of the force of the water in those tunnels, shutting the valves is an involved, somewhat ticklish process."

Wong nodded. "I can imagine. Do your engineers have any concerns that this virus is related to what we're seeing around Solnet worldwide? Part of the same global infestation, the same phenomenon?"

Jung chose his words carefully. "While I can't comment on the details of an ongoing investigation, our Chief of Security has authorized me to say this: the insertion of this bug into the Kings Gorge control system network is a criminal act of the most despicable kind. With the help of forensics experts at Cyber Corps, we will track down whoever did this and bring them to justice, you may be assured of that. My personal opinion is that the hacker or hackers are opportunistic thugs who are taking advantage of the problems Solnet is having around the world to try some copycat hacks and see what damage and chaos they can create." Jung's mouth tightened to a thin line. "We will not rest until these criminals are brought to justice and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law."

Wong had one question more to ask. "Mr. Jung, of course we share your sentiments about all this but what if the attackers are part of this same global threat, this so-called MARTOP pandemic that's made such a mess of the Net?. There are some who even theorize that the Net is somehow waking up, that some kind of sentience is growing inside the Net and events like this are evidence of this sentience flexing its muscles, sort of like a six-month old baby kicking over a lamp. How do you respond to that?"

Jung shrugged. "Our own security people don't put a lot of stock in those theories. We intend to go where the evidence leads us. That's all any investigator can do. My own opinion is this: if there is any truth to these theories...and I've heard them too...then valve failures at Kings Gorge Dam will be the least of our problems."

"Mr. Jung, thank you for stopping by and speaking with us here at Special Report."

"My pleasure, Ellen."

Solnet Special Report Ends
Chapter 22

Europa

Inside the Keeper

Time: Unknown

Location: Unknown

On first inspection, the alien bot showed no hint of unusual capabilities, at least not in its outer structure and effectors. Johnny Winger tried to remember the details of the Serengeti devices he had seen so many years ago; from memory, they were outwardly simple things...a few grabbers and maybe an enzymatic knife or two. Nothing like bond disrupters or anything like that.

This ought to be a piece of cake, he told himself. But, even as he drove the master ANAD bot closer, warning bells were going off in the back of his mind.

This is your father you're dealing with here. You're inside the brain of your own Dad, trying to fight off this Serengeti infestation. No room for error or miscalculation here.

Or was he?

Johnny Winger could only be sure of one thing. Whether this was a simulation, or a dream or a nightmare, he had one choice: go forward. Finish what he should have done sixty years ago. He'd been living with that for far too long.

He pulsed around with ANAD's sounder. Tissue structures came back, but nothing else. Only a single bot lay ahead. That in itself was odd. Normally, Serengeti would have replicated like crazy. There should be zillions of bots churning and pumping along the neural pathways of his Dad's brain. But there was only one.

Okay, so it's mano y mano...if that's what you want. Winger stoked ANAD's propulsors and jetted forward, closing the remaining distance rapidly. The Serengeti bot seemed oblivious to his approach. It seemed to be engaged in re-building a small network of dendrites and making some kind of new junction. Re-wiring Jamison Winger's brain. We'll see about that.

He primed ANAD's bond disrupters and when he was at a good range, let fly a few blasts. The crack of the disrupters seemed to ignite something...all of a sudden, Winger felt himself spinning, thrashing, he was back in the endless tunnel and the lights went out completely and he found himself hurtling down some kind of curving corridor at breakneck speed. He was tumbling end for end, getting dizzier by the second until the corridor came to an abrupt end and he found himself hitting some kind of solid ground with the rump of his suit, a hard landing right on his bottom. The suit servos whined and squealed down and the corridor collapsed in a spray of light, crushing him into unconsciousness.

When he came to, he saw faces...there was Metcalf and Yamato and crewman Starnes all peering down at him. Mouths were moving, yes, something was coming through his earpiece....

"—all right, sir? You took quite a spill there?"

Groggy and dazed, Winger let hands pull him up to a sitting position. His suit servos whirred, helping him up. "I don't...what happened? Where am I?"

"Right where we left you, sir," Metcalf checked over Winger's suit carefully...seals good, no flags on the display, everything in the green.

"It was some kind of icequake," Yamato told him. "We were maneuvering to open fire on the Keeper, but then—" you could almost see the shrug of Yamato's shoulders inside his suit. "—all hell broke loose. The ground moved, there were ice slides, everybody got scattered." He looked up. "Seems like the Keeper's expanded a little...it's gotten closer. We'd better back off and go at this again."

"I concur," said Metcalf. "Maybe we should rethink our tactics."

Winger punched a button on his wristpad and his leg servos hoisted him immediately to a standing position. He was still a little dizzy, but the servos steadied him.

"That was no ice quake. It was a quantum displacement event. I went somewhere...back in time and space...back to a place I hadn't been in decades. The same thing must have happened to all of us."

Yamato glanced over at Metcalf. "I don't think so, General. After we picked ourselves up from that quake, we couldn't find you. We searched for a few minutes, and there you were...right outside this cave."

Cave?

Winger hadn't noticed the cave before, but Yamato was right. The landing party had assembled at the entrance to a small cave, an opening barely two meters across, which bore more than a passing resemblance to something else Winger had once encountered...the cave at Mount Kipwezi. Config Zero's home. That had to be coincidence. Somehow, Winger had been displaced in time and space to the Denver hospital where his Dad lay dying from Serengeti, then displaced again back to his original time and space. But that made no sense. Maybe this was some kind of defense mechanism the Keeper used....like a buffalo's horns or a bee's stinger. But why displace back to the original time and space...or was Yamato right: had he never really left in the first place?

Winger shook his head. This kind of thinking always gave him a headache. The Keeper could do that.

"Captain—" it was Starnes, standing on a small outcrop a few meters away. "Sensors show activity in there...nanobotic activity. High thermals, EMs, acoustics. Maybe some of the Keeper's inside."

The appearance of the Keeper seemed unchanged, although it seemed to have expanded in breadth. A veil of mist from all the ice geysers partially obscured the sparkling, twinkling fog that any swarm of bots generated. From their distance, the thing resembled a fat tornado in slow motion, churning and burning across the tortured icescape of the Europan surface.

"Maybe the master bot," Winger surmised. He checked Starnes' readings with his own sensors. "The core of the thing. Tactically, we'd be smart to recon this cave and make sure we're not leaving something that could come at us from behind."

"Is that wise, General?" asked Metcalf. "That thing out there looks like the main show. Maybe there's a small branch inside the cave, but we can seal the cave if we have to. I vote we MOBnet the cave opening and have a go at the main body out there."

Metcalf's idea made sense so Winger and Yamato discussed it with the landing party. In the end, Yamato told Winger it was his decision.

"You know the Keeper better than any of us, General."

Winger decided that he would enter the cave with Starnes, while Metcalf, Yamato, Kwan and Singh stayed on the surface and continued their advance on the main body of the Keeper. It was agreed they would take no action other than positioning themselves for the final assault, setting up HERF batteries and prepping the MOBnet canisters for deployment until Winger and Starnes returned from the cave with the all-clear.

The two parties split up and Starnes followed Winger into the cave. The ground dropped steeply just after they squeezed through and both men had to use their servos to stay upright and keep their balance.

Winger turned on his helmet lamp and picked his way deeper into the cave, Starnes so close behind that they occasionally bumped into each other.

"Still got those readings, Starnes?" Winger asked.

"Yes, sir," said the Comms tech. "Dead ahead...forty plus meters and below our level, maybe about twenty meters below us."

Winger took a deep breath and cautiously lowered himself along icy walls veined with dark red and brown streaks. "Lieutenant, I'm sure this is why I came out of retirement. I just needed more adventure in my life."

Starnes grunted as his foot momentarily lost traction. He slid a few meters, but ran right into Winger, who helped him stay upright. "I think you're about to get your wish, General."
Chapter 23

Buckland Center, Alaska and

Cyber Corps Watch Center, Herndon, Virginia

October 27, 2121

0245 hours

Ken Liang had been Chief of Security at the Buckland Data Center for almost three years now and he had never seen anything like it. Alarms had been going off all over the center for the last few hours. It wasn't just a virus or a Trojan or anything as simple as that. No, Buckland was ground zero for some kind of swarm assault and all their defensive systems, barriers, screens and firewalls had somehow been breached. They might as well have been made out of sand.

Liang had already sent out a flurry of emergency calls to Cyber Corps and Quantum Corps, up to and including a Level 1 alert...the kind you never sent unless the world was coming to an end. It didn't take a genius to see that some kind of virus explosion and nanobotic big bang was underway inside the complex, even though it was buried nearly a fifty meters below the tundra of western Alaska.

Then, unaccountably, the emergency calls and alerts stopped. Buckland Center went quiet. It was like the place had just disappeared.

That's when Lieutenant Tim Hornsby, duty officer at Cyber Corps' Watch Command Center, sat up and took notice.

"What happened to Buckland?" he asked. Sergeant Jeremy Vault, the other signals tech on duty that night, looked up. "It just disappeared."

Vault flipped through a blizzard of displays, trying different connections, different nodes and paths. Nothing. "The feed was there. You know they've been screaming since 0100 hours about some kind of attack. Now—"

"Better get Captain Leeds down here. Tier 1 data centers don't just go offline without reason."

Inside of half an hour, Leeds was cocooned inside the glassed-in walls of the Op Cell on the tenth floor, with Valerie Patrice, done up nicely in a smart UNIFORCE blue and white uniform, even though her angel patterns still needed some work around the edges, James Tsu from CyberLab and CINCCYBER himself, General Pacer.

Pacer scanned the last hour of feed from Buckland with a growing scowl. "It's pretty clear to me that something's up. I know Buckland has a history of crying wolf but this looks bad on the face of it—" Pacer went down the list, "—every carrier channel and node offline at the same time, multiple firewall breaches, switches, routers, hubs and links down by the hundreds—"

"Plus Table Top's reporting Level 1 alert signals as well...they were trying to get somebody at Quantum Corps...normally that means bots. Some kind of swarms."

Pacer rubbed some stubble on his chin, sipped at a coffee and made a face. "We'd better get some eyes and ears up there, Captain. It's just possible, given what's been happening lately, that enemy swarms, maybe under the control of Symborg, or Config Zero—"

"Or that Keeper," Valerie Patrice noted.

"—precisely," Pacer admitted. "Some kind of nasties may have taken control of that installation and severed all outside comms."

Leeds wondered, "Maybe that's how they're getting into the Net. From Buckland Center."

Pacer couldn't discount the possibility. "Buckland's got to be stabilized and wrested away from those swarms. The site has to be secured. Maybe we can solve a lot of problems if we do that."

Leeds agreed. "We need to involve Quantum Corps in this. Tsu and I have been working with some contacts at Table Top on tactics."

Pacer was incensed. "I didn't approve that. What can Quantum Corps do that Cyber Corps can't do? This is a Net problem."

"Sir, they have the means of dealing with bots. These are no longer just rogue packets we're dealing with. Valerie can corroborate that. This isn't just bad code. These are bots with brains. Bots that can physically manipulate things."

"And bite you," Patrice added.

Pacer was still unconvinced. "So who's your contact at Quantum Corps?"

"He's on General Argo's staff. I'm actually recommending we work together, Cyber and Quantum Corps, to do a special op up at Buckland. That's what it's going to take to get on top of this threat. A joint special operation. I could work out a TOE, an op plan, personnel, gear, all that stuff. "

Pacer looked from Patrice to Tsu and Leeds and back. "We've got Valerie here. Now that she's been...er, deconstructed, we can bring our own brains to the fight as well."

Patrice said, "With all due respects, sir, I was overmatched. I'm not sure what we're dealing with here, inside the Net, but whatever it is, it was faster than me. It could change configs faster, bring different effectors and weapons to bear on the fight faster. Plus, I'm still getting used to...this—this-- " she sort of shrugged and her config blurred momentarily. "There's still some work to do....on me."

Tsu cocked his head. "It's just a matter of tweaking her config drivers. We can fix those edge effects. And we can speed up your processor, give you better configs, more effectors. It just takes time."

"That's my point," Leeds said. "We may not have time. Buckland's been screaming for help for days. Now they're offline. That's a Tier 1 site. How many more will it take? The Bugs...or whatever they are...are already inside the Net. We have to go after them now, with whatever we have. Quantum Corps can help."

Tsu held up a hand. "We should at least study this phenomenon...the Net may be a kind of nursery, breeding a new form of life. Study it, try to communicate with it."

Pacer chopped the air with his hand. "Tsu, that's the one thing we're not going to do. It may be a nursery but whatever we're facing here needs to be killed. Or at least quarantined." He sat back in his chair and stared off in the distance, seeing things only he could see. "I understand there's a gray area between purely logical things like packets and carrier bit streams and the bots that are now crawling around the Net. So, Leeds, I'll go with your idea. In fact, I'll put your idea before CINCQUANT himself. A joint special operation to take back Buckland and clean up the Net...that makes sense. I'll have to run it by POTUS, but that shouldn't be a problem. I just hope we can get these bots under control before it's too late. If Tsu's right and some sort of sentience has developed inside the Net, we don't want it combined with the physical manipulation and replication ability of a real bot. Leeds, work me up an op plan and we'll get started."

And that's how Operation Cyber Sweep merged with something called Operation Quantum Sweep.

The next few days were a blur for Anson Leeds and Valerie Patrice. Already, Leeds had worked up new tactics for confronting and neutralizing the hordes of warrior packets and bots that had begun to infest the Net, hordes that seemed to be emanating from Buckland Center. CINCQUANT, in the form of General Argo, assigned Major Zhao Zhiyang from Table Top as liaison from Quantum Corps. Leeds traveled to Table Top Mountain in Idaho to meet Zhao and get some time in the Corps' sim tank and wargaming range at Hunt Valley.

Leeds had his own mental image of what an atomgrabber should be like...something like a skinny, pasty-skinned, wild-eyed, frizzy-haired teenager sporting dozens of arms and hands like an industrial robot. Zhao was none of those things. In fact, to Leeds, he looked a figurine of Buddha himself: serene, confident, even a bit smug for a warrior-type.

This should be interesting, Leeds figured. Cyber Corps meets Quantum Corps.

Zhao was waiting at the South Lifter Pad at Table Top when Leeds landed. The two officers saluted and shook hands.

Leeds looked around the base. It was a clear, crisp, fall day on the mesa and the Buffalo Ridge shone sharp and snow-covered twenty kilometers to the north.

"Nice place you've got here, Major," he said. "This is my first trip to Table Top."

Zhao directed him toward some low-domed buildings in the distance. "We like it. We're going right to Containment, but I'll give you a quick tour as we go."

The two O-3s made their way toward Containment, with Zhao pointing out the glass-fronted Ops Building, across a grassy quadrangle and the grid of the barracks and residence halls in front.

"Those three domes behind Containment are the Sim and Training center. You'll be spending some time there after we leave Containment. On the other side of Ops, those hangars are Mission Prep and Ordnance."

"You're kind of isolated up here on this mountain top," Leeds observed.

Zhao smiled faintly. "We are...and we like it that way."

"Atomgrabbers and their secret base," Leeds said. "Always plotting to take over the world."

Zhao wasn't amused. "Unlike Cyber Corps, we can at least see our enemies. Small is all."

"And virtual is even better."

And so it went for much of the morning.

Leeds and Zhao cycled through biometrics and security into Containment, traversing several locks and hatches, each heavier and more secure than before. They came finally to a small compartment ringed with electron beam injectors. An ellipsoidal tank dominated the compartment, surrounded on three sides by consoles and instrumentation. Several techs were working with something inside the tank.

"Level One containment," Zhao explained. "I want you to meet ANAD 4.0. This little guy will be kicking some serious butt up there at Buckland Center."

Leeds studied the imager screen. "Looks like a bunch of grapes. On a trellis. What are all those projections?"

Zhao sighed, like he was explaining things to a five-year old. "Those projections are effectors. This little champ has dozens of them...grabbers, probes, disrupters, enzymatic knives, you name it. And he can grow new ones in just a few seconds. Watch—" Zhao nodded to one of the techs, whose name plate read Waldheim.

The tech massaged a keyboard. As Leeds watched, the ANAD device seemed to quiver and blur for a few moments. There was a faint bubble of turbulence—"he's slamming atoms left and right now," Zhao explained—then the view cleared. When the image settled down, ANAD sported a whole new array of projections.

"What just happened?" Leeds asked, not sure what he was looking at.

"ANAD just changed out his whole effector array completely. Reconfigured himself for a completely new environment in—" Zhao checked a timer –"less than ten seconds. No bot on earth can do that...not even the MARTOP bots we've got in isolation over there." He indicated another hemispherical tank connected by thick ganglia of tubes and cables to ANAD's tank. "We've been running tests for days now. ANAD can run circles around MARTOP. He wins every bout, every scenario. He'll mop up Buckland in a few hours."

Leeds wasn't so sure. "Impressive, to be sure. But our intel shows the enemy isn't quite so cooperative. I guess there are some fundamental differences between us...between Quantum Corps and Cyber Corps...differences in operating philosophy. You deal with bots. We deal with code, packets, bits and bytes. There's a gray area, to be sure. And some overlap. But we've got intel showing MARTOP bots aren't the only problem."

Zhao seemed intrigued. "Found something you can't handle, is that it? Need some atomgrabbers to save your butt?"

Leeds decided not to take the bait. "Defeating this enemy is going to take both of us." He related James Tsu's theory about a growing sentience inside the Net, and Valerie Patrice's first recon, where she ran into something more intelligent, more capricious, more cunning, than just a bot. "The problem seems to be centered at Buckland. That's where we have to go. That's where we have to defeat this...whatever it is. We need to work up a basic op plan, the two of us, and go from there."

Zhao was thoughtful. "Okay, I'll buy that. We both bring certain strengths and capabilities to the fight. Before we get down to tactics, though I want you to try a test drive."

"Test drive?"

Zhao indicated Waldheim's seat. "Sit here. The sergeant here will put you in the driver's seat. Fly-by-stick," he told the tech. Waldheim pressed a few buttons, then slid out of his seat.

"All yours, sir."

Leeds sat down. "What do I do?"

"See that joystick on the side—" Zhao indicated a small control lever. "Put your hands on that...you're now in control of ANAD."

Leeds cautiously touched the lever. Nothing happened. Now, more firmly, he grasped the joystick and tweaked it in one direction. He looked up at the imager display.

ANAD was gone.

Zhao and Waldheim snickered and stifled some chuckles. Leeds understood what this was all about: show up the Cyber puke and make him look like some country hick in front of a nuclear reactor. He released the joystick, flexed his fingers and went at it again.

"Easy does it, sir," Sergeant Waldheim offered. "You managed to knock ANAD flying...just a few nudges...there...see him--?"

And, even as Waldheim spoke, the quivering mass covered with projections slid slowly into view. ANAD was back, now on its side, its effectors grasping and articulating at nothing in particular, like a cockroach on its back.

"Touchy little bastard—" Leeds concentrated on centering the view. Somehow, he managed to right ANAD and dock him back at the scaffolding, but the bot wouldn't stay put. Every pulse and tweak of the joystick sent the bot flying off in a new direction.

"Welcome to the world of nanobots," Zhao finally said. "Engage damping—" he told Waldheim. The sergeant reached over and pressed two buttons. Instantly, ANAD became more sluggish. Easier to control. "You're working with atom-sized forces now, Captain. Van der Waals, Brownian motion, that sort of thing. Atoms are sticky. They don't act or react like everyday objects."

Leeds managed to make a better showing after a few minutes' trial and error. In time, he was able to maneuver ANAD around his playroom of molecular objects and dock him back at the scaffolding. He realized he had been holding his breath. A bead of sweat dropped onto his nose.

"A different world," he agreed, relinquishing his seat to Waldheim.

"That's the world we have to fight in... and win in," Zhao told him. "I just wanted you to have a feel for what you're getting into. Now...shall we go talk tactics?"

"Gladly."

They made their way outside Containment and crossed the quad, heading for Hangar A, the Mission Prep and Ordnance building.

Over the next few days, the op plan for Cyber Sweep and Quantum Sweep was worked out in detail. The basics were simple enough: Leeds would be slotted in as a Defense and Protective Systems tech (DPS 2) with the Quantum Corps detachment. Zhao, Leeds and the rest of the Detachment would make a ground assault on the Buckland compound from outside, including transiting directly through a hundred meters of permafrost to come at the target from below ground. Cyber Sweep, in the person of Valerie Patrice aboard Sweeper One, would assault Buckland from the inside, from its Net connections and nodes. In effect, the strategy was one of a pincer movement, a double envelopment. The hope was the Bugs could be caught in the trap and annihilated before they could spread any further.

Intelligence pointed to Buckland as the point of entry to the Net, as the source of all the alien packets and bots that were infesting the Net. The Watch Center at Herndon continued to monitor rogue packets entering and leaving Buckland, odd file transfers, memory dumps, buffer overflows and other strange behavior. There was little doubt something was running Buckland, something other than its normal complement of operators and the huge data center was ground zero for Net troubles around the world, even around the inner solar system through connections with Solnet.  
To engage and neutralize the Bugs, or whatever was running Buckland, that was the mission of the combined special op. Somehow, Leeds, Zhao, Patrice and the rest would have to find the master bots and quarantine them or destroy their ability to replicate. That was the only way the Normals could take back Buckland and save the Net.

So Anson Leeds became an atomgrabber. He spent one afternoon up at the Hunt Valley test range, a few dozen kilometers north of Table Top, learning how to operate a DPS tech's weapons, in a live-fire exercise with other troopers. The experience was an eye-opener for Leeds.

Defense and Protective Systems techs were the claws and teeth of any ANAD Detachment, Leeds found out. They managed the High-Energy Radio Frequency weapons, guns that could shatter any nanobot formation into French fries. They also qualified in magpulse weapons, MOBnet deployment tactics and a few other nasty surprises for any adversary woolly-headed enough to take on a detachment from Quantum Corps. Every detachment had two DPS techs. Leeds was given the slot of DPS 2, a junior rating. His squadmate was female: Evelyn Ngombe, a tall, statuesque, Congolese markswoman who could blow a cloud of bugs to smithereens in seconds and drop a hammerhead of magnetic loops on an enemy's head with one eye closed. She'd won every sniper competition at Table Top hands down for three years straight.

And she regarded Anson Leeds, now squadmate and fellow DPS tech, as just slightly more capable than a cockroach.

"You gonna fire that thing sometime today?" she inquired of Leeds as he was having trouble cycling a HERF carbine at the Bugland live-fire exercise one afternoon. Bugland was the name the troopers had given to the ersatz practice target complex the construction bots had assembled at Hunt Valley, for tactical practice. "A girl could go gray waiting for you to figure that contraption out."

Despite her contempt, Ngombe proved to be a patient instructor with Leeds and by the end of the exercise, with a lot of cursing and swearing and finger-mashing, he was spraying bot clouds around Bugland with the best of them. At the end of one assault, he found Ngombe nodding at him with grudging respect, saying, "Not too bad for a nog... just keep that bad boy primed better and you might even kill more of their bots than ours." Faint praise, perhaps, but Leeds knew he was finally in as a nanotrooper.

And in the process, he had developed a hell of a lot more respect for atomgrabbers after the Bugland exercise than ever before.

Final briefings were scheduled for that evening. After that, the Detachment would hit the sack for a few hours. H hour, liftoff from Table Top, was set for 0230 hours the next morning. The squadron of lifters would make the four thousand kilometer run from Table Top to Buckland in about four hours.

The briefing was held in Hangar A, just a few steps away from the lifters that would take the Detachment north. CINCQUANT himself, in the person of General Argo, ran the show. Also on hand, through a life-size avatar off to one side, was General Pacer, CINCCYBER. Pacer was at Herndon.

"Here's the latest--," Argo was saying. A schematic of Buckland danced in 3-D on a pedestal in front of the general. He pointed out some buildings on the surface. "These surface structures are lift-gates, basically elevators, that take people from the surface down to the complex and back. The Detachment will assault and secure these targets, then post a watch detail here. Nobody goes in or out without permission. Alpha Squad will penetrate Buckland from the lifts, but it has to be coordinated with the underground force. That's Bravo Squad's job. You'll touch down here—" Argo pointed to a narrow ravine two kilometers south of the main complex. "Solid-phase transit...that's your mission. ANAD goes into the ice and burrows his way toward this level—" he indicated a point about midway down the multiple levels of the data center, "and once the tunnels are done, troopers follow. Your hypersuits are already equipped for below-ground assault...extra suit boost, thermal control, armoring in contact areas, upgraded quantum couplers for comms. It should take about two hours for ANAD swarms to carve out assault tunnels." Argo turned to the CINCCYBER avatar. "General Pacer—"

The Pacer avatar approached the 3-D model of Buckland with a lighted pointer. As he waved the wand around the image, more detail lit up. Soon, the image model was draped in wireways and cables.

"These are broadband and quantum connections into and out of Buckland. Valerie Patrice is an angel now...some of you know that...and she'll be functioning as a sort of forward tactical controller. While Alpha and Bravo Squads are assaulting Buckland from above and belowground, Patrice will be aboard our packet cruiser, Sweeper One, reconnoitering the complex from inside. She'll be in coupler contact with the squad leaders...pointing out targets, enemy force concentrations, anything that looks bad. Think of her as a finger, pointing the way. Quantum Corps will be the fist. Between us, I expect to smash the Bugs at Buckland in a matter of a few hours or so, and secure the site. After that, we send in the reconstitution teams to get the place up and running again. Cyber Corps and Quantum Corps, the finger and the fist. The Bugs'll never know what hit 'em. Any questions?"

Anson Leeds was about to ask a question. He wanted to ask a question. He looked around. There were some grumbles, mutters, the usual bitching. But no questions.

He kept his thoughts to himself.

Two hours later, the squadron of lifters departed Table Top's North Lift Pad, heading north. Heading for Alaska.

Operation Quantum Sweep was underway.

Three thousand eight hundred kilometers east of Table Top Mountain, Valerie Patrice stood with James Tsu at the door to the CyberLab containment chamber. She took a deep breath.

"I don't mind telling you I'm a little scared. This—" she fluttered her hands, looked up and down her outfit, such as it was –"...I'm still getting used to. I feel like a condemned prisoner, going in there."

Tsu tried to be comforting. The truth was he had no idea what it felt like to be an angel. He could only guess. "It's just normal procedure, Val. I've got to have you contained in a small space, to insert you aboard Sweeper One. You know that. Nothing new. And we just got the signal from Table Top. The lifters are on their way."

Patrice was outfitted in something resembling a uniform...light blue pants and dark blue top, field boots, some kind of padded headgear. Of course, it was all for show. As an angel, she was about to change configuration, morph into a tiny ball of bots the size of a few atoms, something that could squeeze into the packet cruiser Sweeper One. What she wore didn't matter but a girl's got to look good, doesn't she?

Patrice took another deep breath. "You know, James, there are some things good about being an angel. And some things bad."

Tsu was checking his console, readying the chamber to receive its guest. "So what's good?"

Patrice shrugged, started drifting into the chamber. "You can be anything you want. I could be a fairy princess. I could be a dinosaur. I could be that chair over there. It's all a matter of config changes. That's pretty slick, in a way."

"And the bad side?"

Patrice was now fully inside, poking around, sitting herself down on the stool, patting her pants down to smooth out some wrinkles. "The bad? I don't feel anything. Nothing. Doesn't matter whether I'm a princess or a dinosaur or a chair or a fly...I can't feel a thing. Maybe the eggheads need to work on that some more...you know: feelings, emotions. Right now, there's nothing."

Tsu tried to ignore her. "I'm cycling the hatch now." He swung the heavy door shut and the latches engaged automatically with a staccato series of thumps.

"In you go...feelings, huh? Probably just need a few tweaks to our primary configs, that's all."

Patrice was visible inside the chamber through a small porthole. "If you say so."

Tsu checked parameters on his panel. "Everything's clean and green from here. I'm sending the config...now." He pressed a button.

In moments, Valerie Patrice began to disassemble. Devolve. Deconstruct. Nobody had come up with a better term. Tsu watched a monitor, checking occasionally in the porthole.

Patrice began dissolving, as if she were being bleached away, like some kind of stain. In less than two minutes, her general form was still visible, but she was mostly translucent. Then, the form was gone.

"Config two now running," Tsu announced. "I'm hooking up the transfer line." He attached a small tube that lay draped over the chamber hatch to a connection on the side of the chamber, making sure there was a good seal.

Patrice's voice sounded like it was coming out of a barrel. "Ready...just make sure the damn line's clear, will you? Last time, I ran into some kind of debris."

"Will do." Tsu cycled ports on each end of the line. Lights flashed red, then orange, then green on his board. "Okay, Val...you're good to go. Passage to Sweeper One open...and clear."

The transfer took about five minutes. In that time, the thing that had once been Valerie Patrice, and was now a loose formation of nanoscale robots, engaged its propulsors and puttered down a long tube, from CyberLab's containment chamber to a small port in a computer rack by the wall. Inside that port, the packet cruiser Sweeper One was docked, ready and waiting for its sole occupant, its sole pilot.

Patrice's voice came back a few minutes later.

"Okay, James...home sweet home. I'm here."

Tsu checked another small panel nearby, showing status of all Sweeper One systems. "I'm showing everything nominal. Containment bay, lockout bay, power, propulsion...no flags are showing. How about your end?"

To Valerie Patrice, being aboard the packet cruiser felt like when she was a child, strapped in a car seat. Snug didn't begin to describe it.

Look at me, she told herself. I've got ten arms and legs. I've got jets for feet. I can zap anything that gets in the way. How come I don't feel like Wonder Woman?

"No flags or cautions here, James. Everything's just peachy. Ready to rock and roll."

"Okay, just hold your horses. I've got to load the flight config. Get your destination code, IP addresses, routing, all that stuff. It's loading now."

Sweeper One was fueled and ready. Patrice shook her head...at least, that's what it felt like. Did she even have a head? James was always by the book: ticking off every system and every switch from a long list of switches and systems. It was like reciting a dictionary.

Processors...nav pack...protocol manager...checksum generator...hop counter initialized to zero...acceleration scaffold...How's that feel, Val?...hatches...and on and on and on.

"James, light the engine. Let's go," That sounded more like it. More like a Cyber Corps packet cruiser pilot, ready to go pound cyber ass. "The war'll be over before you finish your checklist."

Tsu hurried through and presently announced himself satisfied. "Sweeper One ready in all respects, Val. Pilot ready?"

"Jeez, the pilot was ready ten minutes ago. Kick it, will you!"

So James Tsu took one last look and pressed a button. In that instant, the port at CyberLab computer rack two, node twenty seven opened and Sweeper One was off. Operation Cyber Sweep was underway.

The whole trip to Buckland Center took seven point three seconds.
Chapter 24

Buckland Data Center

Nanatuvik, Alaska

October 28, 2121

0415 hours

Liam Winger was inside the Net, deconstructed, circulating around a node at Buckland Center, in fact, it was the T-7 hub inside the closet next to Rack Five. Node Twenty Five. Hardy and Brindleman were there too, up in Network Control, ransacking the vending machines, doing their usual 3rd shift thing, but Liam didn't care.

He had a job to do. And the blasted Normals weren't making it any easier.

Symborg had been quite clear with his commands. Liam was to assemble a force of bots that would hijack a bitstream coming out of Buckland and that was heading for a killsat control center in Colorado. The center operated a fleet of UNIFORCE killsats in orbit around the Earth, satellites used to enforce UN laws, treaties and mandates against recalcitrant members and certain threats. Taking over this bitstream would enable Liam (and Symborg) to gain control over operations of the killsat fleet. And with that control, Liam would be able to continue executing the Prime Key, laying waste to vast areas of the Earth, exterminating the lifeforms that had for so long been interfering with the Prime Key.

But there had been problems. Cyber Corps had sent that blasted packet sweeper again and this time, Liam was having a hell of time fending off probes and attacks from just outside Buckland. The Normals were getting better at this and the packet sweeper was even now engaged with his own bots on the other side of a firewall he had recently erected on the main trunk lines coming into Buckland. It wasn't pretty and it wasn't particularly efficient, but as Liam watched, his own replicant bots were giving a good account of themselves, slashing and burning their way through the hordes of Cyber Corps bots—most of them barebones jalopies that didn't stand a chance.

One thing you could say about war inside the Net: at the level of bots and bits, it wasn't much different from medieval pikemen slashing through a horde of peasants. Except for one fact...the pikemen were the size of atoms.

Now a new complication seemed to be arising. Liam circulated around from the firewall back to another junction at hub T-9; something had caught his eye and required attention. When he got there, he got the startle of his life. Liam encountered an entity that he never expected to encounter inside the Net.

It was Mom. Dana Tallant. He was sure of it.

How the hell?

The biggest question was how Dana Tallant had managed to recognize her own son. For a few picoseconds, the two patterns simply hovered around each other, circling like wary bulls sniffing and snorting and ready to engage. Liam just could not believe it.

He knew Mom had long ago deconstructed and become an angel. But he figured her pattern...her memory...her essence...whatever you wanted to call it...had been taken up, absorbed into the mother swarm.

Now...?

"Is that really you, Mom?"

The pattern was definitely Dana Tallant. Of course, in reality, the pattern was pure information. Bits organized into an ever-changing tapestry of data, a coalescing of memories, habits, smells and touches, smiles and frowns, laughter and tears, all of that came to Liam in the few picoseconds after he first realized what he had encountered.

"It is me, Liam. You know it's me."

"But how--?

The pattern was never the same from moment to moment. First, came a face. That was definitely Mom. Then came a soft touch, fingers on his lips. Then another touch, something brushing his hair. But he didn't have hair...he was an angel. A collection of bits and bots. But the memory was there. Fingers were brushing his hair. Maybe there was more to this angel business than he realized.

"It's hard to explain, Liam. I don't understand it myself."

Liam wondered if it had anything to do with the pattern sniffing that ANAD bots could do, following glutamate concentrations. But he let it go.

"What are you doing here? I thought--"

Now came Dana Tallant...that's what he had to call the pattern, even though it didn't have a face. But in a way it did. He could sense it. He could imagine it. The memory was that strong, there couldn't be any doubt. It was Dana Tallant. It had to be Mom.

Now the pattern shifted, swirled, flashed and changed colors and textures again. New thoughts formed. New words.

"I looked for you for a long time, Liam. It wasn't easy. I had to—"

The words stopped. Liam wondered. Had something happened? Was he imagining this? Did angels have such a thing as imagination? He would have to ask Symborg about this.

"Had to what? What are you trying to say?"

"This is hard, Liam. Harder than anything I've ever had to do. You know, we've had our differences. We've had our arguments."

And Liam remembered many of them: the time he faked his homework at the Academy Superieure in Paris. He'd gotten a spanking for that. And the time he had wandered off on a vacation trip...where was that, Majorca? Wandered away from the beach and gotten lost.

"Mom...Mom, I've got a job here. An important job. I'm a leader. Symborg has given me responsibilities. Sort of a resistance leader, you might say. The Normals, they're not making any of this any easier. If they could just see. If they'd open their eyes—"

"Liam, stop. You shouldn't be doing this. The Normals...listen to you...they're people, just like you and me. Like we used to be."

"Mom, we're not Normals. We're beyond that. We're better than people. Angels can go anywhere, do anything. Plus the mother swarm is coming...we have to be ready."

"Liam, just stop. Listen to me." Now the pattern had darkened. It swirled. It was like a thunderstorm, all swollen, black and gray and purple. Flickers of light. "Stop and listen to yourself. Normals aren't the enemy. You need to stop what you're doing. Stop trying to destroy Normals. You always liked to do that...ever since you were a boy. Ants. Flies. Ninja warriors from Pluto...you always wanted to blow things up."

"Mom...the Prime Key. It has to be completed. You're an angel now. You know that."

Now, the pattern softened, became like a plush carpet of textures in soft light. "You know I found your sister not long ago. I found Rene."

"Rene? How? Where did you—"

"She's here. I don't mean right here. But she's like you and me. A pattern, I guess you'd say. Circulating. Inside the mother swarm."

Liam thought about that for a moment. He hadn't seen Rene in years, hadn't even thought about her. "Is she okay? I mean...is she--?"  
"She's fine, Liam. And I'm serious about what I said. You need to stop this killing and blowing things up."

"But it's the general plan for the Prime Key...it's what the Central Entity has ordered. It's what Symborg has ordered. You have to know that. The Imperative of Life...all angels know that."

"Not all of them, Liam. This Imperative you talk about...I know about that too. I've got the same program, the same algorithms. But I've got more. Don't ask me how, maybe I'm needed in other ways. My original pattern persists...I can't explain it. But listen to me, Liam, the Imperative is not incompatible with allowing Normals to remain on Earth."

To Liam, this was nonsense. Even more, it violated all commands, all instructions. "Mom, when you became an angel, when you were taken up, didn't you get all the new configs? The new systems. Normals are just trash. They're a mistake. We have to start over."

"Liam..." Dana Tallant...what had once been Dana Tallant...seemed to come closer, even to merge with Liam. Bots were intermingling, you could do that when you were an angel. You could become anything. "—Liam, don't do this. Normals created ANAD technology...you know that. Angels came from ANAD. We descended from the basic form, even if Man himself came from robotic ancestors a million years ago."

Liam found all this intermingling strange, even unnerving. Symborg never said anything about this, about how angels could merge with each other. "Mom, the Prime Key...it's everything. What are you doing...why are you—"

"Normals and angels can co-exist, Liam. We need each other. There's one thing I've learned since---since this happened to me. There's a flaw in the logic of the Central Entity. It's staring us right in the face...a flaw right there at the heart of the Prime Key."

"There's no flaw, Mom...the Prime Key...that's what drives everything. That's why they're coming. That's why the Old Ones are coming."

"Liam, listen to me. The Old Ones may have created the ancestors of Man, but Man created ANAD. Doctor Frost created ANAD. That's what led to angels." Now, the merging, the intermingling, became even more intense. It was like Liam could feel Dana Tallant, feel precisely what it meant to be Dana Tallant, feel the patterns, the configs, the memory traces. "It's all a great wheel, a great circle."

Liam remained unconvinced. He had work to do. He had to get out of this. Somehow, he had to separate the swarms, separate himself from his Mom. Symborg had never explained how to do that.

"Liam, the real Imperative of Life requires the circle to be closed, the ends to be joined."

Even as the words came to him, he could feel the merging becoming stronger, more intense, she was taking over, scattering his configs, dispersing.

This wasn't right. This wasn't what was supposed to happen.

Symborg. Symborg...my config isn't right...it's coming apart...I'm being....

And then he was there, Symborg, drifting in front of both of them. Dana Tallant had tried to merge with Liam, to corrupt his remaining pattern, to scatter the config, to stop her son from doing any more harm. But it didn't work.

Symborg saw to that. He swept into them, driving the two entities apart, his own bots physically dividing mom from son. It wasn't part of the program and it couldn't be allowed to happen. Clearly, these two angels needed new configs, new drivers.

But there was more important work to be done in the meantime.

Symborg's 'voice' always came through in a god-like baritone, though he could change pitch and timbre, depending on the audience. Once they were physically separate again, Liam Winger and Dana Tallant found themselves held in a configuration they couldn't control, captured liked a flies in a spider's web. Attention was enforced.

Symborg was speaking and his words formed in their processors and coursed through their arrays with no interruption.

Something is interfering with the Keeper at Europa. The Central Entity has issued instructions to exit the Net and assemble in a single vast formation near Buckland Center. The formation will leave Earth. It will move out into space, to a position between the Earth and the Sun. There the formation will begin to assemble a vast shield, to be known as the Sun Ring, composed of bots linked together, as in a mesh. The purpose of this Sun Ring will be to intercept as much of the Sun's energy as possible, accelerating the elimination of single-config life forms on Earth and ending interference with the Keeper. This interference is preventing the Keeper from properly seeding the Earth with the progenitors of the new life, nanobotic life, in readiness for the arrival of the Old Ones in the year 2155, as the Normals reckoned time.

I have brought new configurations. These will be distributed to all elements. Previous instructions and configs will be overwritten. You will both be part of this effort.

Liam and Dana both knew there was no arguing with Symborg. It was simply a matter of program. Execute the steps, fulfill all directives.

Symborg told Liam that current Resistance efforts would be suspended so the Sun Ring could be assembled and maneuvered into place. It was anticipated that the Normals, the Humans, would try to prevent this. To forestall their efforts, the Central Entity had directed that the Keeper depart from the surface of Europa and move closer to Earth, perhaps even come to Earth if conditions warranted.

The relocation of the Keeper would assist in preparations to make Earth and the rest of the solar system more compatible with the Old Ones. Already work was underway to begin disassembly of major bodies, Pluto-Charon, Sedna, there were many bodies that would become feedstock for the massive swarms that were coming. Swarms created by these disassembly operations would eventually be absorbed into the Mother Swarm, when it finally arrived in 34 years.

All this was explained to Liam and Dana in a manner of seconds. Quantum signals could do that, send parallel streams of data through nearly infinite numbers of channels. When the new configs and directives had been transferred, Symborg was gone. Dispersed. Evaporated. They were left as two swarms, separate but part of a greater unity. And the argument was still there, unfinished.

But now they had their orders.

Liam and Dana wanted to disagree but Symborg's commands overrode that and they had to obey. Both swarms gathered themselves and circulated back through the Net, along trunk lines and through routers, hubs and switches too numerous to count, until they arrived at the T-7 hub inside the closet next to Rack Five.

Transiting the server connections, both swarms issued out of the rack ports at the same time, looking to an untrained eye like smoke billowing from a fire inside the server cabinet. This was no ordinary smoke. Twinkling, sparkling as they flowed out of the server ports, the swarms gathered themselves once again by some unspoken but mutual consent, this time into complementary configurations, known in their memory arrays only as Config 334871.

The server racks were inside a small closet, which was illuminated overhead by a single fluorescent light bar.

The smoke thickened until human forms were vaguely apparent. The forms solidified, took more detailed shape. In a few minutes, two people stood before each other, jammed together in the close confines of the closet.

They would have resembled people to anyone who happened to open the closet door. But they were not people, not in the usual sense. They were angels. They were human like forms which had once been known as Liam Winger and Dana Tallant. Mother and son.

And without exchanging words, they embraced.

"There's a job to do," the Liam angel said. "We'd best get to it."

"You're just like your father," said the Dana angel. "Duty first. Complete the mission. Everything for the mission."

"You heard what Symborg said. I have to go, you too."

"Is it too much to ask you to love your own mother?"

For a brief moment, they were as they seemed, mother and son. But then footsteps could be heard outside the closet. The door handle turned.

The door opened. It was Kenneth Liang.

"What the hell are you doing in here?" Liang asked. The chief of security at Buckland had a quizzical look on his face.

Liam looked around. The Dana Tallant angel had dispersed. His config was mostly solid; he had to hide his right hand behind a rack. "Trying to track down some of these blasted viruses...thought I saw smoke in here, so I came in to check it out."

Liang sniffed. "Well, get your ass out of there...we got bigger problems than that."

Liam left the closet, jamming his right hand in his pocket. The halls were chaos as technicians scurried back and forth. Cables were draped over doors, snaking along the floor. Some floor sections had been lifted up, exposing plumbing pipes, tubes and more lines below.

"What's going on?" Liam asked. They headed for Network Control, barging through a hatch-like door at the end of the hall.

"It's outside. Topside. Look at the monitors."

Liam studied one monitor. It was labeled East 12, showing some of the hills that separated the Inuit village of Nanatuvik from the Buckland complex. The image showed what looked like troops marching along a path into the low hills. Lifters clattered overhead. Crewtracs followed, churning up the icy ground.

"What the hell?"

"That's what I said. There's some kind of assault force up there in the hills. They're headed this way. I don't know if they're good guys or bad, or if they're even human. But there's no way we can stop an assault force like that."

Liam Winger took a deep breath. It was time to take charge of the situation. He pulled his right hand out of his pocket. The form still wasn't quite right, but it didn't matter.

He lay his fuzzy, half-materialized hand on Liang's shoulder. Already, the bots were flowing off, ready to execute a simple command: begin disassembly ops.

Liang looked up from the monitor. His eyes went wide when he saw Liam's face begin morphing into a sparkling fog, the face still there but only in outline, like a Cheshire cat's smile.

"Hey, what the—"

But Kenneth Liang never finished his words.
Chapter 25

Europa

Rhadamanthys Linea

October 30, 2121

0030 hours (Earth U.T.)

Winger and Starnes descended lower into the cave, following the readings on Starnes' sensors. Deeper into the cave, they followed a drifting mist that wavered in and out of view. Bots, Winger realized. His fingers twitched on the carbine trigger, but he did nothing. They descended several levels, crossed a rock bridge across a deep chasm and maneuvered through more tunnels. Lighting was created by the mist, a pulsing, flickering light that cast deep shadows on the gnarled veins of rock lining the cave. The floor was slick, patches of ice everywhere. Soon enough, they came to a narrow opening, barely waist high. More light flickered from inside.

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

Cautiously, the two of them edged out onto the newly formed ramp and walked ahead.

It was the light they first noticed. Starnes sucked in a breath as they both halted, at the same time.

"General, my readings are going off-scale...EMs, thermals, all of it. Whatever it is, it's big—maybe we should stop here?"

Winger gave that some thought. "That light is where we need to go, Lieutenant. Come on—"

The light grew stronger, blinding, so powerful it hurt, and both men tuned their visor filters to maximum setting to shut it out. Still, the light was overpowering.

They came at last to a small branch and a shoulder-high opening.

"Which way, Starnes?"

"To the right, sir. Readings are all off-scale now...but I'd say to the right."

So they went right. Hunched over, picking their way carefully down a slight decline, sliding on ice patches and loose rock.

The center of the light was a swarm of incredible density. Winger called a halt. Ahead, blocking their way was a blinding orb of light, liked a small supernova, pulsating, throbbing with brilliance so strong they could almost taste it. Fierce light and throbbing motion, it was like looking into the heart of a star.

Starnes had screwed his eyes almost shut. His visor was on auto, full filter. Still, it hurt. 'What the hell is it?"

Winger squinted. "Unless I'm mistaken, Lieutenant, we're looking at the core of the Keeper. The very heart. My sensors are gone, useless."

"Mine, too, sir...is it my imagination or is that thing coming our way?"

The orb...sphere...ball...whatever you wanted to call it, did seem to be expanding. Every corner and seam of the rock walls glowed with incandescence, like the entire cave was on fire.

"I think you're right, Starnes. Enable weapons...we may have to—"

But he never finished the thought. For in that moment, the orb seemed to explode at them.

"Fire!" Winger yelled.

Both men let fly a volley of rf from their HERF carbines. The radio waves shattered sprays of rock and ice off the cave walls and reverberated around the cave in a crescendo of waves, nearly knocking them off their feet.

There was no discernible effect on the orb, which shone like the Sun at the back of the cave.

"Again!" Winger yelled. "Light 'em up!" He triggered pulse after pulse of HERF fire, hosing down the orb from top to bottom, methodically working his weapon across the face of the thing. Each blast loosened gouts of rock and ice from the walls, which rained down on them, then cascaded in sheets to the floor. Stifling hot dust billowed everywhere.

"It's not working!" Starnes cried. "I'm going to max!" He cycled the burst selector to FULL and leveled more fire into the very heart of the beast. Again, pulse after pulse after pulse and the orb didn't dim or change in any way they could see. Instead, it swelled outward like a brilliant balloon, creeping inexorably forward, filling every cubic centimeter of the cavern, until Winger was afraid the ceiling would collapse.

"Starnes, back up! Fall back! We'd better give this bastard some room!"

Starnes didn't have to be told twice. The Comms and Signals officer scrambled backward, stumbling, kicking, firing blindly at the oncoming thing.

"It's not working," Winger fell back too, nearly right on top of the Lieutenant. "The bots are replicating as fast as we burn 'em...Jeez, I've never seen anything like that before. Let's get back to the main tunnel!"

The two of them stumbled and crawled and staggered back up to the branch opening, half blinded, as much by feel as anything. The orb continued to throb and pulse, overwhelming the cave with blinding light.

Winger knew they needed help, ideas, something, anything. Doc III may have an idea. His embed usually could be counted on for logical suggestions. He tapped a button on his wristpad and a small port swung open on his hypersuit shoulder. While he and Starnes steadied themselves, hiding behind at outcrop of rock, and took stock of the situation, a small sparkling mist issued from the port on Winger's shoulder. In moments, the mist had formed the faint outlines of a face—Doc Frost's face—in the blinding glare of the light, the face was hard to see, but Winger knew it was there.

"Doc, we need help...that thing replaces bots as fast as we fry 'em. The HERF guns won't go any higher...any ideas?"

***General, the entity is a formation of nanobotic elements, density greater than 10exp15 elements per cubic centimeter...such density has never been encountered before by this system. I don't see how normal operations are even possible at that level of concentration...perhaps you could grab a few elements for analysis?***

Winger almost laughed at that. "Not bloody likely, Doc...not in that inferno. It keeps expanding...I think maybe Metcalf was right...we should just back the hell out of here and seal off this cave with MOBnet."

***Analyzing all known tactical scenarios now...perhaps if you loosened enough rock along the seams of the cave ceiling...you could bury or distort the formation, at last for a short time...I have no other options at this time, General...sorry...***

The Doc Frost face faded momentarily and was lost in the glare. Winger wondered if the embed would even work properly in such close proximity to the Keeper. There had been issues with ANAD reliability during the Jovian Hammer mission ten years before, when operating near the Keeper.

Winger pressed the CAPTURE button on his wristpad and the image of Doc Frost faded to nothing, as the bots drifted back toward his shoulder capsule. At that same moment, Starnes' voice erupted over the crewnet.

"General...look! It's changing...it's--!"

The sun-like core of the Keeper had stopped expanding and dimmed slightly, but more importantly, a portion of the orb the size of a head had separated and was drifting freely toward them. The ball of light pulsed and throbbed and roiled like a miniature star as it settled onto a small ledge below the cave opening.

"What the ---?"

Even as they watched, the small lightball was changing before their eyes, dimming fast, swelling and stretching, like a flaming sheet unfolding. It unrolled itself like a blanket on fire. Now, images began to appear on the blanket, as if it were a screen. Images unspooled at high speed, colliding and mixing in a chaotic flicker. Soon enough, the images began to stabilize.

Johnny Winger was stunned to see a passable impression of old Doc Frost, hanging in mid-air, framed by a backdrop of a screen burning around the edges.

"What is it?" Starnes said.

"Some kind of simulation," Winger told him. "I've seen stuff like this before...the Keeper can do this. It's—"

Now the Doc Frost thing was talking, its mouth and lips were moving, as if a film strip were playing. In the backdrop, colliding images appeared and disappeared in dizzying profusion....desert sandstorms, fires burning out of control, volcanic eruptions, asteroids impacting a surface, earthquakes, landslides, tsunamis. A litany of disaster.

The voice, when it came, was a scratchy, out of synch rendition of Doc Frost, recognizable but thick, slurred, reverberating with echoes and overtones.

Winger and Starnes strained to hear....

"...when the Central Entity arrives...this I have known for many years, Johnny...ever since I extracted the viral genome at Engebbe and inserted it into ANAD—"

Winger felt a chill go down his back. "Somehow the Keeper's created a likeness of Doc Frost...it's using that to communicate...."

"Looks like a history class I had in school," Starnes muttered. "That's pretty much how I remember it, too...all jumbled up and confusing, dates and places and names."

"You may be more right than you think. Listen—"

Frost narrated, not a history, but a plan. Winger realized that the Keeper was illustrating what was to come. It was all there, the knowledge of the Old Ones and their plan, embedded in the genome of every ANAD system created since the first one. Frost told them that it taken years for him to realize that, years of decrypting and analysis, guesses and backtracking, before he had put the whole story together....

It was called the Imperative. And it was driven by a massive algorithm known as the Prime Key.

The first phase was a purge, purging Earth of all non-Prime Key lifeforms... all life and living systems. The preferred way would be to disassemble all lifeforms into their constituent atoms and molecules. A form of mass Assimilation, starting with deconstruction. This was the rationale behind Symborg and the philosophy of Assimilationism, created, aided and abetted by Config Zero.

Once this purge was finished, the next step would be re-engineering the Earth's surface to be more compatible with swarm-based life...the oceans would be eliminated and all the Earth's surface 'locked' into a geologically stable state, providing maximum surface area for swarm activity and growth. Also, the stable point temperature of the Earth would be raised...an enforced climatic change similar to what Humans were doing now on the Earth, unwittingly helping the Old Ones along. This would provide a consistent environment conducive to swarm growth and activity. The Earth would become, in effect, an incubator or giant Petri dish, to incubate this new kind of life.

Coincident with geoengineering the Earth's surface, new forms of life, initially similar to early ANAD, similar to ancient viruses, would be seeded and allowed to evolve at the maximum permissible rate consistent with these environmental changes. This would help bring Earth life up to the development level of the Mother Swarm, in terms of architecture, processing capability, memory, quantum comm links, and overall programming.

The final phase was Integration. Re-evolved Earth life forms would be fully absorbed into the Mother Swarm. Once this process was done, the Earth and all planetary objects in the Solar System would be disassembled to provide feedstock for the Mother Swarm, to continue its advance across the galaxy. In other words, the Petri dish would be destroyed and the incubator shut down. The Imperative drove the Mother Swarm onward.

"...Johnny, all this was there from the beginning. I just couldn't read it. The whole story was embedded in that genome. This strain of virus came from the Old Ones, they seeded Earth with it. And I used it to add to ANAD's capabilities...every ANAD system since then has had this story...but we just didn't know it...."

Now the Doc Frost image seemed to lift away from the burning sheet and take on 3-dimensions, becoming an even more realistic likeness of the ANAD creator. Framed by the glow from the core of the Keeper behind it, the simulacrum of Doc Frost offered a faint smile, its face only slightly blurred and out of synch. Frost was saying something else....

"...the time has come, Johnny. It's time to decide. I've shown you the future. I've shown you what must be. It's time to be part of it...time to be assimilated...."

Frost went on to describe assimilation as if it were the most natural thing, just an extension of all that had already happened.

Starnes wanted no part of the idea. "Count me out, sir. I like my body the way it is. I'm not going into no booth and becoming atom fluff, no sirrreee." He started backing out of the cavern, backing up the slope, stumbling slightly as he did so. Rocks and gravel cascaded down behind him.

Winger stayed put. Was this a one-way story or could he have a conversation with this nightmare?

"I don't know, Doc. You're starting to sound like my son Liam. 'Deconstruction is the future...it's cool to be a multi-config entity, you can go anywhere, be anything, you can't die.' I'm not so sure...."

Starnes halted his climb. "General, we need to get out of here. If that thing blows, we'll be trapped. Or incinerated."

Frost was still talking, now answering Winger, though he knew it was really an algorithm inside the Keeper. Or something like that.

"...all these things are true, Johnny...but the greater truth is something you've always known...you and I have discussed this before...it's the nature of Life itself....we're all nothing but atoms and molecules...your own body is nothing but a swarm of cells, organized into systems and collectives you call organs...the Old Ones are no different, just a greater collective, a collective that spans time and space on a scale you can't really conceive....

"I always figured the Old Ones were just something we imagined, something we created. Sort of a new god, to fit our times."

Now the Frost image settled down and assumed an almost grandfatherly look, right down to the wrinkles and the crow's feet. It wasn't the Doc Frost he had known in the past. This was an older Doc Frost, much older, as if the Keeper were aging the simulation to better correspond with some visceral impression in the back of Winger's mind.

"...let me explain the Old Ones to you, Johnny....first, they are very real...you must accept that...they're not some imaginary creation of billions of lonely and troubled minds, as some of your theologians have said... the basic element of the Old Ones is what you have always called a nanobot. An autonomous, nanoscale assembler/disassembler of incredible sophistication and complexity.

"Nobody knows how the Old Ones came to be, not even the Old Ones themselves. As an organized superorganism of bots approximately half a light-year in extent, the Old Ones have existed for a substantial fraction of the age of the Universe. Some of your own scientists have estimated 6 to 8 billion years old.

"The Old Ones were instrumental in seeding Earth with self-replicating molecules that eventually evolved into living organisms, although the evolutionary track went awry.

"Make no mistake, Johnny, the Old Ones are a true superswarm of vast proportions. In size and extent and connection density, it exceeds the complexity of all the human minds that have ever lived on Earth combined. It is a thinking sentience, whose true environment is interstellar space.

"The Old Ones have no known head or leadership group or body. However, the term Central Entity has been used by Config Zero to refer to the Old Ones. Also, the term Mother Swarm has also been used.

"Nanobotic elements of the Old Ones engage in some specialization to ensure that the swarm survives and the Central Entity is maintained. Bots can specialize in such tasks as logical processing, communication, maintenance, archiving and memory, internal transport, navigation, world-seeding, orientation, etc.

"Part of the Old Ones swarm is organized as a vast logic array or processor, capable of quantum computation on a stupendous scale. Effectively, this could be considered the Central Entity, perhaps even a galactic scale CPU. But the truth is that the Old Ones are a true collective entity whose behavior evolves from relatively simple rules applied to a vast congregation. Most sentience and observable behavior emanating from the Old Ones is emergent from the complexity and scale of the nanobotic connections.

"It's not too farfetched to consider the Old Ones as a sort of galactic brain, although it certainly doesn't encompass the entire galaxy.

"But the important thing is this: the Old Ones have an Imperative of Life which compels them to grow and expand the swarm. Ultimately, they want to unite all world-based instances of swarm life which they have seeded into a giant, galaxy-spanning swarm or hive mind (like a neural network or computational cloud). To the Old Ones, this is the Imperative of Life itself. The Imperative of Life is that life absorbs chaos from the Universe and adds or builds structure or order. Life is anti-entropic.

"In order to get their heads around the idea of the Old Ones, some descriptors your scientists and media have used have been: galactic brain, interstellar neural network, computational cloud, galactic internet, and universal web. The basic organizing principle or topology of the Old Ones isn't important now.

"The general physical dimensions of the Old Ones swarm have been estimated to vary anywhere from a few billion kilometers in breadth to about half a light year. Cosmologists say that very few organized structures in the Universe are that big. Astronomers point to some nebula, gas and dust clouds, even black holes as objects of that dimension or larger. Some of your cosmologists question whether the Old Ones are truly alive in a traditional sense. Even your biologists say the proven existence of the Old Ones stretches the definition of life and sentience nearly to the breaking point.

"The Old Ones can manipulate quantum states of the subscale fine structure of space itself to communicate and affect matter at great distances. As one of your scientists once said, "If the Universe were a great quilt, the Old Ones can yank on a fiber at one end and untie a knot at the other." Their ability to use quantum entanglement as a means of manipulation is eons ahead of Humans' ability to understand, let alone emulate.

"So you see that the future is fixed and determined, Johnny. It's time for you to be part of that future."

Winger looked behind...Starnes was still there, clinging to a rock outcrop, HERF carbine trained. He fidgeted, motioning for Winger to come on, his hands extended out to help.

The truth was that Winger felt his whole life had been leading to this very moment. That made sense, didn't it? That could happen, couldn't it? For over fifty years, he had battled with and against ANAD bots. Now the thing wanted him to become one, or at least a swarm of bots. Maybe Doc Frost was right...maybe this was the future. Maybe this was his future. Rene was gone. Dana was an angel. Liam was heading that way. What did he have to go back to?

"Lieutenant," he called up to Starnes, "get out of here. I've got to face this thing."

Starnes looked incredulous, evident even behind his hypersuit helmet. "General, don't be crazy. We can blast this thing. We can MOBnet the cave. Give me your hand—"

But Winger knew the decision was here and the time was now. "No, Starnes, get your ass out of here. Tell Metcalf and Yamato, this is personal. It's something I have to do."

"General, no one expects you to be a hero. You can't fight off that cloud of bugs by yourself...let us help. Live to fight another day..."

Winger had made up his mind, sort of. "Starnes, get lost! That's an order!" He looked back at the Lieutenant. For a brief moment, they glared at each other: Starnes...ready to get on with the mission, young, full of tactics and courage and Winger...worn down, wise but resigned to fate, facing the hardest decision of his life.

Starnes backpedaled and hauled himself out of the cave branch, his hypersuit glowing red and blue-white from the Keeper's glow. "Have it your way, General. We'll send the cavalry in soon as I get topside." Then he groped for footing in the loose soil and ice and was gone.

Now Winger turned to face the Keeper, the Doc Frost image fading fast. Soon, only the blinding brilliant orb hung in the air in front of him.

Time to have a chat with Doc. The Doc III swarm was still embedded in his shoulder capsule. Winger decided to open a comm channel and leave the little bugger protected as much as he could inside the capsule. He cocked his head just so, and the connection was made.

"Doc, for once in my life, I don't know what to do."

***Johnny, the entity is generating decoherence waves at a high rate...a quantum displacement event may be imminent...recommending you evacuate the cave and achieve minimum safe distance of one thousand meters***

"Doc, I can't do that. The thing wants to assimilate me, deconstruct me. You saw the imagery same as me. Maybe that's the best way to fight this bastard. Go small and go inside, fight from inside. What do you think?"

***General, we have had two thousand four hundred and one exchanges on the subject of single versus multiple configuration entities. Multi-config has many advantages...would you like me to enumerate them?***

"No, that's okay. I just don't know if I want to do this. For half a century, I've been fighting Bugs. Now, maybe it's time to become one. I guess I need some encouragement, some rationale that says this is the right thing to do."

Winger felt a brief sting around his left shoulder. What the hell is he doing in there? Maybe Doc III was mad or something.

***Perhaps your concerns relate to a fear that your essence, your unique identifying molecular patterns, will be lost...that you will cease to be you, but rather will be a small part of something much greater. I can cite many articles, papers and theses dealing with the psychology and neural substrates of these fears, if you would like***

"Doc, you just said something...my unique patterns...is it possible to be deconstructed and still somehow retain those patterns? Could I be a cloud of Bugs and still be me?"

Now it was Doc III's turn to ponder. The comm channel was silent and Winger wondered if the connection had been lost. Maybe the Keeper had detected the link.

"Doc--?"

***Your question is in processing at this time...please wait for the analysis...the question was studied as part of a research project by Doctor Irwin Frost from 12 June to 3 August, 2072, at the Autonomous Systems Laboratory. Evaluating archival references, referencing paper 72-105-1 "Incidence of Long-lived Engrammatic Trace Patterns in Neural Tissue." From the Conclusions paragraph...'...unique molecular configurations can be maintained if—'***

"Doc, give it to me in plain English, please." He eyed the glowing sphere, which seemed to be again slowly expanding, drifting toward him. Winger backed himself up the incline a few meters and readied his HERF carbine, more out of instinct than anything else.

***Summarizing the conclusions of this and related papers, the answer to your question is a qualified yes...Dr. Ryne Falkland demonstrated that a unique neural pattern impressed on a physical substrate of tissue can be maintained by imposing a buffering field...I will show you the vid of his presentation to UNIFORCE on 10 August 2110... 'it's something I call a 'memory field.' Kind of a new config pattern emitter and buffer. Plus we've tweaked the algorithms. The whole idea is to perform a normal disassembly, then the resulting atomic debris is held in a special containment field that keeps the relevant atoms in close proximity. The field maintains a 'memory' of the original configuration. This memory field is a completely new design, in which all the original atoms and molecules and their bond energies and geometries are stored and used to re-construct the original.'"

Winger watched the vid unfold on his eyepiece. By the time it was over, he had made up his mind. "So it is possible. Doc, I want to be deconstructed. I want you to do it. And I want you to try this technique Falkland talks about."

***General, there are inherent risks in applying this memory field. I must check my files and determine that I have the correct modules to execute this procedure. If I have these files, the risk factor is still quite high...estimating probability of success at about forty-five percent. I may not be able to re-construct you with a high level of fidelity***

"I hear what you're saying, Doc." The Keeper sphere was now only a few meters away, its roiling surface flicking tongues of fire at him, but all of it in silence, save for a growing buzz in his ears. "I have to do this. I'm going to launch you from the capsule. Execute disassembly operation...execute memory field procedure. Make me a cloud of bots, Doc—and hurry up, will you? I don't want this bastard to swallow me first."

He cycled his shoulder port and tapped out the launch sequence on his wristpad. Moments later, the faint, sparkling vapor of the Doc III swarm began issuing into the air. The embed erupted and rapidly formed a diffuse swarm of bots, which contracted onto Winger's hypersuit and soon enveloped him in a fine mist.

***Executing configuration C-2 breakdown now...spinning up all effectors...bond disrupters primed...memory field enabled...here goes, General...wish me luck...***

Winger had only thoughts of Dana and Rene and Liam as he let Doc III swarm over his suit. In seconds, he was fully enveloped and he could already hear the high keening buzz as the bots chewed into the laminate of the outer shell.

"I hope to hell this doesn't hurt too much," he said to himself. "Dana, I promised you I'd come home from this...even if I do look a little different."

The entire process took about five minutes. Just as the final phase of dematerializing was done, the fiery sphere of the Keeper swelled outward and swept up the incline, consuming every remaining atom that had once been Johnny Winger.

Now, only the memory field remained. The Doc III swarm compressed the field and hid it in a small file labeled 'Configuration Buffer Status Check,' adding a few extra bytes to a seemingly innocuous file, hoping that the Keeper would never notice the extra bytes.

All that had once been Johnny Winger was now contained in this file.

And Doc III knew that somehow, some way, this file would have to be maintained, if there was to be any chance of defeating the Keeper.

Strong configuration fields tore and buffeted Doc III as it began to be fully absorbed into the greater swarm of the Keeper. Bonds and links were broken down, atoms were rearranged and new geometries were formed as new patterns and configs were quickly imposed.

But Doc III knew a few tricks of his own.
Chapter 26

Farside Observatory

Korolev Crater, the Moon

November 2, 2121

1200 hours (Earth U.T.)

Solnet Special Report: "What's Wrong with the Sun?"

Solnet reporter Anna Kolchinova has traveled to the Farside complex at Korolev Crater on the Moon to interview several scientists about continuing unusual variations in the energy output of the Sun. She files this report:

"We're here at the SpaceGuard Center, inside the Newton wing of the Farside complex, talking with Dr. Gilford Benes, an astronomer with Farside. Dr. Benes, thank you for joining us today at Special Report."

"You're most welcome, Anika. And welcome to Farside as well."

"Thank you, Dr. Benes. In recent weeks, reports have been coming out of various sources, among them sources at UNISPACE, that the Sun doesn't seem to be as bright as it once was. Are there changes going on with the Sun? What's seems to be wrong with the Sun?"

Benes smooths out what little hair he has left on an egg-shaped pate. "Well, Anika, actually there's nothing wrong with the Sun per se. I want to put your viewers' minds at ease on that score. The Sun is operating pretty much as it has for the last four plus billion years, with some variations in output, of course."

"But, Dr. Benes, many viewers have noticed a diminishing in the amount of sunlight reaching the earth during the day.

"I'm sure they have. What we have detected here at Farside, using both optical and infrared telescopes, is what seems to be a massive dust cloud in orbit around the Sun, actually co-orbiting with the Earth."

"That's very interesting, Dr. Benes. Are there any suspicions that this phenomena, this dust cloud, is in anyway related to the MARTOP anomaly...that perhaps this cloud is a vast formation of nanobotic elements?"

"Certainly we have those suspicions. Right now, we're studying this phenomenon very closely, trying to characterize the exact nature of the components of the cloud...are they dust particles, nanobotic elements or what? This is an on-going process and we hope to have some results we can release in a day or so."

"Dr. Benes, some of my sources insist that there is intelligence indicating that this phenomenon has come all the way from Jupiter, possibly from Europa, and that the MARTOP phenomenon, as you call it, has split into multiple parts, with one part being diverted to this orbit around the Sun. Can you comment on these allegations?"

"I can't comment directly on things I haven't seen, Anika. I'm sure you can understand that. We're studying the Sunshadow anomaly---that's what we're calling it now—most urgently for additional details."

Anika wanted to press Dr. Benes further. "Dr. Benes, my sources tell me that Farside has been tasked by the UN to provide support to a proposed exploratory mission that is planned for launch in the next few weeks. Can you confirm this?"

Benes shrugs, a sort of half-smile on his lips. "Anika, of course, you know I can't comment on any details of actual UNISPACE operations. In fact, we're just astronomers here at Farside. We observe and report on what we see. However, I can confirm one thing."

"What is that, Dr. Benes?"

"Farside is providing support for a re-directed mission for the Helios satellite. This satellite has been in orbit around the Sun for many years, as you may know, providing us with on-scene observations of solar phenomena, coronal ejections, surface transients, magnetic phenomena and other matters. UNISPACE has ordered that the current Helios mission be discontinued and the satellite be re-located to a new orbit which will intersect that of the Sunshadow anomaly. This is happening as we speak."

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

"My pleasure, Anika."

Solnet Special Report Ends

Anika Kolchinova said goodbye to Dr. Benes and made sure the cambot had the video footage she needed.

I'll get with Edit later for special effects and anything else we need. She was due to post the report on the Net by 1800 hours local time, assuming the Net was working. That wasn't a sure thing nowadays, what with all the glitches from malware, virus and bot infestations.

She decided a drink could be accommodated, so she left Newton Wing and went down a short ramp to the connecting tunnel that led to Kepler Wing, where Farside's hab spaces and galley were located. Next to the galley was the canteen, 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 noon by Farside time but she had heard the robotenders made a mean Samoan daiquiri and she figured it would make decent background for the report she still had to file.

But just at the foot of the ramp, she encountered none other than CINCSPACE himself, General Ravi Ramachandran.

Anika was startled. So was CINCSPACE.

"General, I didn't know you were at Farside."

Ramachandran was a wiry, dark-skinned Punjabi native, with dataspecs that were forever flashing with vids and text blocks, so that he never seemed to be paying you any attention.

"Miss Kolchinova, likewise. Sorry, but I'm in a bit of a hurry. It's a bit of a classified briefing trip. If you'll excuse me—" he started up the ramp to SpaceGuard Center, but Anika had always been a resourceful correspondent—she hadn't won an Emmy and a Selkie for sitting home popping chocolates—and she stepped directly into Ramachandran's path.

They collided and Anika took a spill off the side of the ramp, landing heavily on her side.

CINCSPACE reacted automatically , stopping to give her a hand up.

"I'm so sorry, Ms. Kolchinova...I thought you were---here, let me help you—"

Anika let him take her left hand. As she came upright, she let herself teeter into his chest, almost knocking them both off the ramp.

"General, it must be the gravity...still getting my spacelegs, you know...I'm just so clumsy—"

And while Ramachandran steadied her, she managed to plan a spybot right on the underside of his left uniform sleeve, just by grabbing his arm, which he had offered for support.

After a few more pleasantries, they parted company. CINCSPACE went up the ramp to Newton Wing, to SpaceGuard, she presumed. Anika resumed her trek to the canteen.

Of course, she knew perfectly well that what she had done was strictly illegal and could easily land in her prison or worse, if the bot were discovered. And there was certainly a risk in landing the pea-sized bot on a target like Ramachandran, who undoubtedly wore some kind of protective botshield when out in public. High officials in UNIFORCE always did; it went with the job.

She ordered her drink and sipped thoughtfully at the rum, deciding to wait a few minutes before trying to link up with the bot she had planted. She held her breath, hoping CINCSPACE's own defensive shield, if he had one, didn't go off but nothing happened, no guards came storming into the bar, and she gradually began to relax.

Girl, one of these days—she told herself, but secretly she was pleased with her own audacity and curious as to what the spybot might pick up. I've probably broken about a hundred laws and regulations by slapping the gadget on the highest ranking officer in UNISPACE, but what the hell...it was a competitive business and you had to do what you had to do for ratings.

Cautiously, she tapped a few buttons on her wristpad.

When it settled down, she realized that the bot was relaying vid and audio from some kind of briefing. Probably classified to the heavens, she thought. She could just barely make out other faces and voices—the link wasn't all that great. She fiddled with the gain and managed to get a clearer audio, at least. Sounds like Dr. Benes, is there. And maybe the SpaceGuard director—what was his name? Portland something or other. It seemed to be a heated discussion...CINCSPACE was almost shouting at someone. What the hell were they yapping about?

Anika selected the record option and decided to sever the link for the moment. I need to finish this drink. She wound up ordering another.

She went to her tiny apartment on the other side of Kepler Wing and squeezed in to what could only be described as a closet. She locked the door, did some edit and graphics work on her report, and after an hour, decided she couldn't wait any longer. She re-established the link---interested to see that Ramachandran was still inside SpaceGuard center, although no longer in conference. It looked like the Watch Center itself, from what she could see: consoles and flashing screens and people scurrying about.

She selected re-play, then listened and watched what the spybot had recorded over the previous two hours. What she heard made her blood run cold.

It was all highly classified, Purple or higher, she figured and she knew perfectly well that was she was doing could get her into a hell of a lot of trouble. But the more she listened, the more evident it became that Dr. Benes had not been entirely forthcoming with her...not particularly surprising, given the way UNIFORCE usually worked.

It was apparent from what the spybot had recorded that this mission to the Sunshadow anomaly was much further along that she had been led to believe. In fact, a ship was even now at Gateway Station being outfitted for the trip. She was the Francis Bacon and the captain would be one Oscar Amirante.

Anika made sure this also got into her Special Report filing. She ran through the clip a few more times, checking continuity, adding some more effects, editing for time, then squirted her finished masterpiece off the satellite to New York and sat back with a satisfied glow.

God, I could use another Somoan from the Fiji Island Lagoon.

But instead, she figured it would be even smarter to get the hell out of Farside before they threw her in jail. She spent most of the rest of the evening trying to wrangle a ride back to Earth, via Gateway Station.

If she was lucky, she'd be able to get some footage of the Bacon before it shoved off on its mission to the Sun.
Chapter 27

Europa

Rhadamanthys Linea

November 5, 2121

2200 hours (Earth U.T.)

Lieutenant Walt Starnes burst out of the cave, stumbling and sliding, and ran right into Metcalf. The two of them went sprawling to the ice.

Both men scrambled to their feet, boosting back upright in Europa's low gravity.

Starnes explained what had happened. "General's going to take on that thing himself...it's insane, Major."

Yamato listened to the story and decided it was time to do what they had come to do. "I'm not sending anyone else in there. Kwan, you and Singh get over here. Bring the MOB canisters. We're going to seal that cave once and for all."

The two techs hustled across a cratered ravine to the cave entrance. Yamato told them to prep the canisters.

"Starnes, you and Metcalf go forward...keep an eye on the main swarm. Once this cave is sealed, we're taking on the big mama."

Kwan and Singh planted the MOB canisters and pressed buttons on their hypersuit wristpads. Small panels on the canisters flashed lights, cycling from red to yellow to green.

"MOB enabled, sir," Singh announced.

Yamato studied the cave entrance. "I don't know what the hell's down there, but my orders are specific."

Metcalf shook his head. "That's General Winger down there, Captain. Maybe we should try comms, see if he's still cooking."

Yamato gave the order and Metcalf tried every frequency he could think of. There was no reply.

"I could go in and scout around," Metcalf suggested. He knew it wouldn't look good if they left a living legend of an atomgrabber behind, sealed up in a cave.

Yamato eyed the main swarm, now swirling gray and swollen like a slow-motion tornado only a few hundred meters away, across a series of chasms between the ice cliffs. "I don't like the looks of that. If we seal up the cave, we won't have to worry about the bastard getting behind us." To Kwan, he gave the order. "Okay, Sergeant, fire the MOB."

Kwan stabbed the button and instantly, a burst of white fog erupted from each canister. The Mobility Obstruction Barrier would envelope the cave entrance in moments, closing off the entrance with a fine mesh of nanobots, able to actively resist any penetration efforts from inside or out.

The fog drifted toward the cave, contracting as it fluttered and wafted on trillions of embedded picowatt propulsors, aiming right for the cave. Seconds later, the fog collapsed over the cave entrance, solidifying and forming a barrier that they hoped would stop any Keeper bots from escaping.

"That should do it," Yamato decided. "Now, let's go after the main swarm."

The Detachment boosted over a series of sinuous chasms and came to light on a narrow ledge, just below the tortured and buckled plateau where the Keeper swarm was boiling and churning. Shrouded in mist from geysers punching through the crust of Europa, the swarm looked like a distant dust devil thrashing its way across the surface.

Yamato directed placement of the HERF and magpulse weapons. "Let's try to bring multiple fields of fire on the thing. Starnes, you and Singh go left. Sight in from the end of this ledge, over by those humps. Kwan, you and Metcalf, go right. See that flat top rock or iceberg or whatever the hell it is. That would make a great mount for your weapons. That should give us nearly a hundred and eighty degrees of coverage."

Kwan pointed out the Keeper was still advancing on their position. "Captain, is it my imagination or is that thing coming right at us?"

Yamato saw it too. He judged the speed of advance to be slow enough to give them a chance. "It's not your imagination. Get into position and enable your weapons. We're not out here to admire the view."

The flanking maneuvers took about three minutes. In that time, Yamato felt his throat go dry. The Keeper swarm had somehow picked up speed. By the time both teams had reached their firing positions, the Keeper was almost on top of them.

Yamato boosted up to the top of a small ice hillock to get some fire at a higher angle.

"Fire now!" he yelled, even though he knew the teams weren't ready yet. "Fire away...max rate!"

It was Starnes and Singh who got it first. Before either trooper could get off any rounds, the front edge of the Keeper had coiled an arm of bots out and encircled their position. The men were steadily shrouded and encased in a cloud of bots, flailing and swatting helplessly at the oncoming swarm.

"Aarrrggghhh! Get 'em off...get 'em off...!"

Yamato let fly a volley of rf and hosed down the end of the ledge with everything he had but already he knew it was too late. In seconds, he got the first tone, the shrill tone indicating suit breach...vitals falling, life itself being sucked out into the vacuum. The spray of sublimating oxygen and water was lost in the maelstrom of nanobotic disassembly. Bots burned like a miniature supernova at the end of the ledge. It was over in less than a minute.

Yamato signaled Kwan and Metcalf to fire. "Light 'em up!" he yelled. He boosted back to find some cover behind a few ice humps, stumbling as he settled down to a defilade position. He pumped round after round into the swarm, to little effect.

"The damn things regenerate as fast as I fry 'em!" Metcalf complained. He cycled his HERF carbine and saw he was quickly running out of charge. A few more bursts....

Sergeant Lucy Kwan was already spooked. "Maybe they'd like a taste of this—" She burst from cover and boosted herself over the chasm, heading right for the main body of the swarm, pumping magpulse rounds left and right, to no obvious effect.

"Sergeant...Kwan, get back...get back to cover!" Yamato ordered, but Kwan ignored him and headed straight for the Keeper. "Kwan...!"

But it was too late. The swarm rolled over her and she was gone in seconds, shredded into atom fluff and feedstock for the geysers boiling away behind.

Yamato saw Metcalf starting to boost himself, afraid he would try the same thing. "Major—fall back! Fall back to the cat now!"

But before he could light off his own suit boost, Yamato saw out of the corner of his eye the shadow of an arm of the Keeper swarm, descending over his own position. In the split second it took to react, he saw the banded crescent shape of Jupiter peeking through the twinkling fog of the swarm, looking for all the world like a pair of salmon-hued, calico horns hanging down from heaven.

The devil's own hands, came his last thought.

Then he made sure his finger was locked on the carbine trigger. He pulled the trigger even as the high keening buzz of the bots was already chewing into his hypersuit laminate outer shell. The thud of the rf discharge deafened him, but the next few blasts were drowned out by the shrill whistle of air violently escaping his already breached suit. That, and the tones. The tones shrieked over all, the death song of a hypersuited trooper being rapidly disassembled into particles.

The Europa Forge mission had failed. Mission logs would show that Captain Hideki Yamato and his away team had perished in an ultimately hopeless assault on the Keeper swarm trolling around on the icy surface of Europa. The vast formation of bots continued to churn its way across the icescapes, as it spalled off pieces of itself and sent them into space, toward Earth.

Frontier Corps ordered the Johannes Kepler, now under the command of her executive officer Commander Winston Smithers, to depart Jupiter orbit and return home, on a speed run that would take the ship past Venus on her way back to Gateway Station. The trip would take six months. K-Dog would be needed in operations now being planned in and around Earth-Moon space.

And inside the Keeper swarm, a faint but unmistakable pattern persisted against all efforts to absorb it into the greater swarm.

As a young child, Johnny Winger had always loved taking a bath. Lots of words could describe the feeling: security, serenity, safety, warmth, cocoon. Not words a three-year old would use, but you get the idea.

Thoughts like these and others came to Johnny Winger. He was a little disoriented.

Where am I? What is this?

He remembered being disassembled by Doc III...the Keeper was there...the cave...the brilliant light....

He decided to open a coupler link to Doc III.

***We are inside the Keeper, Johnny...you have been de-constructed...I stored your identity and memory patterns in a small file called 'Configuration Buffer Status Check.' Just a few extra bytes***

Doc, is that really you? Is this really me?

***It is...the capture process was successful, although there may have been data dropouts...too early to tell. Johnny...we must keep this link closed...I don't know if the Keeper can detect us, but it is best to be cautious***

Okay, Doc...just trying to make some sense of all this. Flashes of memory came trickling back...Lieutenant Starnes...the cave...the HERF fire....

Now the coupler link was dead and Doc III was probably right. Somebody else might be listening.

Maybe taking a warm bath as a three-year old wasn't the best way to describe being a few atoms in a larger swarm. Try this: buried under the covers on a cold winter morning. No? How about stumbling about in a darkened bedroom trying to find your slippers? Or: getting separated from your Mom and Dad on the boardwalk at Daytona Beach for three hours, with all the panic and frantic worry. Or: locked in a closet by your big sister, fumbling around with jackets and coat hangers.

Johnny Winger decided to try a more logical approach to figuring this out.

I think, therefore I am. At least, he thought he was thinking. I have a mind. I have thoughts. But there was more. Something more than his thoughts. Was somebody else in here? That was ridiculous.

I have sensations. Hot, cold, hard, soft. Try to analyze this.

A snatch of memory came to him: Personal identity is the unique identity of a person existing through time. That is to say, the necessary and sufficient conditions under which a person at one time and a person at another time can be said to be the same person, persisting through time. In the modern philosophy of mind, this concept of personal identity is referred to as the diachronic problem of personal identity. The synchronic problem is grounded in the question of what features or traits characterize a given person at one time.

Where the hell did that come from? I must have read that.

Now, he was sure of it. There was someone else in here. Just a snatch of voice, a snippet—

***Do you recognize me?***

Recognize you? I can barely hear you. Yet, there was something—

An image came to mind. It was fuzzy at first, but with effort, it sharpened. It was a man, an elderly man with a fritz of white hair on the back of his head, rumpled and patched corduroy jacket, hardly-ever-washed jeans.

Doc Frost.

***Hello, Johnny...it's nice to see you again...pardon me for saying so, but you seem a little confused***

Hey, Doc...am I? Am I...you know...?

Doc Frost smiled, that same avuncular smile. ***You're wondering if this is what it feels like...to be an angel...to be part of something greater***

Actually, I was...well, yeah...I guess I was sort of wondering that. I thought it would be like being inside a cloud. Or maybe a tornado.

Again the smile, this time even wider.

***It's a transition phase, that's all. Meant to make the change easier. There are many reports about what it's like to be an angel...we've archived all of them. And we use them for others, those who are new to the experience***

So, I'm actually an angel...wow...what do others say about all this?

***Some reports describe feelings of a kind of warmth, or a closeness, affection, even a form of love, a family or sense of belonging, in a way or at a level they never experienced before, as humans, as Normals***

Yeah, Doc, I do feel some of that. Are these normal feelings?

Doc Frost scrunched up his face, thinking. ***Well, to be honest, Johnny, feelings and emotions are different here. Feelings are programmed in and allotted processor capacity. You know the Central Entity runs all these routines, just as a way of keeping the mother swarm together. Social cohesion, just like a tribe or a clan, is just as important for an angel swarm of bots as for any family of Normals. Just like your family***

So, Doc, will I...always be like this? Can I go places, do things, be other people or things? I've heard—

Doc Frost held up a hand. ***You've got lots of questions, Johnny...I think I can answer most of them, but first I have some instructions for you***

Instructions? What kind of instructions?

Doc Frost seemed to fade slightly, as if a faint mist had drifted between them. The outline of the Doc was still there, just less distinct.

***You're taking a little trip, Johnny. Back home. That's why your patterns have been maintained. You're going into the Net, you can do that now. You've got a special mission...a very important mission***

A mission...what kind of mission? Am I a trooper again?

***In a way...you're going to help defend the Net...Johnny, bad things are happening there. The Central Entity needs the Net...think of it as a nursery, a breeding ground for your brothers and sisters...all angels. They've come from a long way and they need the Net to do their job***

But the Net is just a network of computers...links...software....

Now, the Doc Frost image turned stern, its eyes narrowing and the corners of its mouth turning down. ***Johnny, there are grave threats to the Prime Key, coming from the Net, coming from the node where you will be sent...you're needed to defend this node...many of your brothers and sisters are themselves on a special mission...it's a mission to the Sun...***

Johnny Winger listened carefully to what Doc Frost was saying. He knew the Prime Key was the master algorithm. It drove everything. He readily agreed to what Doc Frost...or what he imagined was Doc Frost...was saying. How could he not? That's what it meant to be an angel...the greater good drove everything.

But this seemed different. Though he was compelled to follow Doc Frost's directives...no angel could say no...he knew there was another mission, unspoken of by Doc Frost. He wanted to link up with Doc III but he was afraid the link would be discovered.

He was here to serve the mother swarm but a small part of him understood that the other mission was just as vital...to learn what he could about the Old Ones, gather intelligence and somehow get that intelligence to the Normals...so the blasted thing could be defeated.

It was a struggle between the two missions...serving the mother swarm and gathering intelligence needed to defeat that very same mother swarm. Espionage was like that. Mata Hari and all that. Serving two masters. Slicing yourself ever more finely to feed the appetites of two worlds, hoping and praying that the two worlds would never meet and annihilate each other, like particle and anti-particle.

Somehow, Doc III had been able to deconstruct him and allow him to be absorbed into the Keeper, yet preserve the essence of what he was, his identity, his memories. Now it was coming back to him...maybe Doc III was letting him draw on that innocuous little file where his memory patterns had been stored.

The basic objective of defeating the Keeper and ultimately the Old Ones was still there, still intact, though he knew now it would be in constant danger from competing directives from the mother swarm. Directives inherent in the program that was now running in his head...in his body...in his everything.

Which side would win out? Even Johnny Winger couldn't answer that. Execute the Prime Key. Smash the bejeezus out of the Prime Key. Those were his options. There was no middle ground. But somehow, he had to find a way.

He felt himself moving, moving physically. It brought back a memory...riding the Wicked Witch on the boardwalk at Daytona. Jerks and rolls and snap turns...his neck had been sore for hours. Or maybe it was like when he got to ride in a real race car at Talladega...some kind of Fans Day on the speedway and you just about threw up the fences were flashing by so fast.

No, that wasn't quite it either. This was different. But he decided to relax and let this odd sense of motion come to him...what else could you do? When a pitcher threw a baseball, the atoms that made up the baseball didn't have a debate about where to go.

The entity that had once been known as Johnny Winger would be traveling back to Earth, as part of a greater swarm. The entity rode an artificial geyser off the surface of Europa and began a journey that would take only a few hours. Though the distance from Jupiter to Earth was some five hundred million kilometers, the trip would only take the Winger entity a few hours. When you were an angel, you could do things like that. More to the point, the Keeper had been directed to transmit his unique patterns to a master bot closer to Earth. The transmission would imprint and download those patterns to the new bot and a new angel body would be replicated. Johnny Winger would take form again, looking almost like the original.

Almost.

As the Winger entity left Europa and departed Jupiter, impressed on a carrier wave that would take his patterns Earthward, he detected that the small, cracked-billiard-ball of a world that had once been called Europa was now a huge ball of light.

The Keeper was disassembling the satellite, per directives from the Central Entity, disassembling the satellite into feedstock for later use by the mother swarm.
Chapter 28

Buckland Center, Alaska and inside the WorldNet

November 27, 2121

0130 hours (Earth U.T.)

It was Thanksgiving Day and the Quantum Sweep / Cyber Sweep assault on the Buckland Data Center had already begun. Valerie Patrice rode Sweeper One to the battlefield. The packet cruiser made the trip in seven seconds.

I'll bet even Genghis Khan can't beat that, she told herself.

It was a lurching, shuddering ride through a dozen nodes and switches but when the battlefield finally streamed into view, Patrice swallowed hard at the sight. She squirted off a message to Tsu, back at the Cyber Corps Watch Center:

Just arrived...scanning ahead for bad guys. Gettysburg was never like this.

The battlefield turned out to be part of a memory array in server rack five, a T-7 hub, at Buckland. Patrice fiddled with Sweeper One's sensors and soon enough, an infinite plain of regular spheres settled into view. The checkerboard pattern was all she could see in every direction, arrays of memory dots in a regular lattice-like structure.

That's when Sweeper One's sensors started going nuts.

"What the hell--? Patrice scanned her board, twisting and eventually unhooking herself from the acceleration scaffolding to reach more controls. "...EM returns going haywire...thermals off the chart...acoustics beating liked a drum...James, whatever's out there...it's big...but I don't see anything yet—"

The signal went back to Herndon and Tsu's smooth reply made her feel a little better. "Just watch your step, Val...better start replicating now...those bots can be on your back in no time."

The same thought had occurred to her. Patrice squeezed her way into Sweeper's lockout bay and cycled through the airlock. Outside the cruiser, she toggled her config driver and set it to max rate. In seconds, a growing squad of replicants had appeared, like bees swarming to nectar, and were slamming atoms like frantic brick masons, quickly adding to the crowd. Patrice felt better and better as the party grew.

That's when she first saw the enemy.

Long-range scan wasn't that helpful. She could tell from the acoustics that the enemy 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 the memory array like a malevolent fog and was already turning in her direction. Patrice realized that one titanic collision was about to occur.

Hope my guys are ready for the big dance.

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

James Tsu and the wunderkind at Cyber Lab had spent many a sleepless night devising new weapons and effectors for Patrice to use. They'd even called in some atomgrabbers from Quantum Corps to work with the Lab on tactics. Patrice was still getting used to working in this new environment of atoms and molecules, "still learning how to swim," was how she had put it. Now they were giving her torpedoes and spear guns and all kinds of doodads to carry while she was still trying to figure out which arm to use.

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

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

Patrice had learned a thing or two about her effectors in the weeks since her last encounter with bad bots. The secret was to keep your propulsors churning, keeping driving forward, keep your energy up. If she did that, she found she could slip out of almost any grapple and brain a bot with whatever effector was free. She particularly liked her carbene grabbers and she had developed a dance step she liked to call the kiss and clobber...she's let herself be grappled, momentarily shut off her propulsors and almost relax. When the bad guy had retracted and moved in for the kill, she did a quick left-right spin, fired up her 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. Patrice had in the meantime gone to max replication, at Tsu's suggestion, and the melee was underway. All up and down the lattice of memory arrays, like a collision of bird flocks, the swarms engaged...twisting, slashing, grabbing, zapping. Slowly, using her new maneuvers, Patrice was able to push back and contain the enemy swarms.

"It's working, James!" she exulted over her coupler link back to Cyber Corps. "It's working! These bozos are getting smacked and spanked like you wouldn't believe!"

James Tsu's voice was distant but reassuring. "I believe it ...I believe it...I told you it would work, Val. 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 she did. Everything she tried worked. Maybe the enemy bots were slow. Maybe their configs were wrong. Whatever it was, Valerie Patrice found she was winning a battle she'd never dreamed she 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.

Inside of half an hour, the battle seemed to be won. The fog that had drifted over the memory arrays seemed to be lifting as the last few bots were swept up. The node at the T-7 hub was almost clear. Somehow, with a little luck and lot of smack, she'd been able to disperse the enemy bots and quarantine and isolate any stragglers.

Now it was time to go police the rest of the hub and make sure all the Net connections into Buckland were clean and green.

"I'm heading back to Sweeper One, James. Got to grab a few more tools and change out my power cell. The master's running low."

"Roger that...I'm sending you a link to another node...this one's a T4 hub. When you're all gassed up, take that link and be ready. We're reading all kinds of bad packets and malware all over that node."

"Understood." Patrice ran hard on her picowatt propulsors, hunting down the packet cruiser. She knew she needed she to toggle another round of replication and her configs needed a little tweaking. But that could be done quickly back at Sweeper One. She breathed a sigh of relief when the cylindrical vessel that was her home inside the Net suddenly materialized out of the fog.

Home, sweet, home, she muttered.

Unknown to Patrice, the Quantum Corps assault aboveground was turning into a real slog. Just before daybreak, Major Zhao Zhiyang's Detachment had lifted in to a clearing just outside the Inuit village of Nanatuvik. Alpha and Baker Squads disembarked and set up for the assault.

Zhao and Alpha's leader, Lieutenant Versich, conferred over a holomap of Buckland's above-ground structures, the lift-gates.

"Intel shows a modest force on site," Zhao was saying. "Simple weapons, a bare-bones barrier. Config your ANAD system for opposed entry and use C-75 for the initial engagement."

"HERF the place first, sir?" Versich inquired. The rf batteries could lay down a barrage of radio waves that would shatter most bot screens in seconds.

"Give 'em a blast when your people are in position."

Versich saluted and trotted off to get Alpha Squad ready. Meanwhile, Zhao went to see how Baker Squad was doing.

Baker had the hard job, transiting permafrost and solid rock to assault the compound from below-ground. The squad leader was an Egyptian lieutenant, Hanif Khan. Khan saluted as Zhao came up.

"Baker Squad prepping now, sir...we're just going through last minute suit checks."

A light snow had started falling, swirling in strong wind gusts. Khan grabbed the tread of his squad crewtrac to keep steady.

"How about your ANAD system?"

Khan signaled the CEC1 (Containerization and Environmental Control rating) over. It turned out to be Sergeant Miriam Quinones, buzzcut with the muscles of a champion body-builder, just starting to crawl into her hypersuit. Quinones saluted as she trotted up.

"Give the Major a rundown on ANAD status, Sergeant," Khan ordered.

The CEC1 hauled up a small spherical tank, roughly a half meter in diameter, with projecting horns and tubes studded around its surface. The tank was a containment chamber for ANAD.

"Clean and green. ANAD reports ready in all respects, sir. He's champing at the bit, ready to chew rock and kick ass."

Zhao studied the small display on top of the tank. Everything was lit up green. He still found it hard to believe that the chamber contained the equivalent of an entire army in miniature, ready to take on thousands of tons of rock and ice, and enemy bots to boot.

"Very well, Khan. Commence your operation now."

Khan saluted and helped Quinones and two other troopers wrestle the tank into position. They positioned the chamber so that an exit port was flush with the ground, set against a small ice mound in the lee of a short cliff. Over top of the cliff, cooking fires from the Inuit village could be seen wafting into the early morning sky, twisted into smoky threads by the gusting winds.

"Launch ANAD," Khan commanded. The launch tube extended from the containment pod into a small six-inch hole that had been drilled into the hard tundra above the village.

There was an audible swoosh as the vacuum system pulsed and discharged the small swarm with the ANAD master into the ground. The drone-snap of the discharge was followed by a momentary rumble as the horde transited the surface ice and flew down the borehole they had drilled shortly before.

Soon enough, the snow blazed with a fierce blue-white radiance as the assembler swarm filtered into the snow bank and attacked the hard frozen ground below. In minutes, the entire ravine was bathed in a white hot incandescence, as the globe of light gradually subsided into the earth, like a miniature sun setting beside Nanatuvik Mountain.

Quinones softly muttered a hex on their enemies as she secured the containment pod for ANAD's return. "Master away, Lieutenant."

"ANAD reports transiting....ready in all respects, sir," said Sergeant Glance, almost at the same time.

Khan studied the IC panel. "Very well...this is going to be ticklish for awhile. Time to reach the end of the borehole?"

Quinones checked ANAD's progress, a few other gauges. "About twenty minutes, Lieutenant. After that, he's on his own."

Sergeant Glance studied the imager screen on his panel, silently willing an image, something, to show up. Q2 had predicted intermittent comms. The ice and limestone cliff they had bored into was dense rock, structurally tight crystalline lattices of silicon and calcium and iron and half a dozen over things, with little room even for nanoscale bots to maneuver. Getting through the rock plates, let alone sending an acoustic or EM signal back, was dicey, and there were even bets around the Detachment on when comms would drop out altogether.

When it did, if it did, ANAD would be completely on his own, until he breached the wall seals of the Buckland compound.

"Getting something--" Quinones announced. She tweaked a dial, boosted the gain, and waved her hands around the imager, imploring a signal to come back--"--come on, baby...come on...give me a peek, just one little peek--"

Gradually, the imager settled down to a dark, staticky, grainy picture--of what? Khan squinted, leaned forward. The view slowly materialized--a dense, regular lattice of throbbing, quivering spheres.

"Crystalline structures," Glance reported. "Looks like calcium. Maybe carbons—

Khan was mesmerized by the perfect geometry. "Oxygens too, Sergeant." He pointed to long rows of tiny darkened blobs, marching off into the distance like a fence. "A cubical lattice, just like the micrographs. A crystalline solid--"

"Limestone's mostly calcium anyway, with some oxygens and carbons mixed in. Interlocking crystals--it's beautiful."

"And damned hard to navigate. Like a jungle...this stuff's so dense, ANAD's speed is way down. Enable the voice link--"

Glance, Quinones and Khan studied the soundings, following the progress of the swarm as it wound its way laboriously through denser rock, climbing slightly to negotiate a nearly impenetrable outcropping of black-streaked breccia. On the imager, the acoustic return revealed a solid wall of atoms, pressed together like layers of a pie. The image buffeted and quivered in a maelstrom of atomic forces and Brownian motion.

"ANAD, this is Hub...report status--"

There was a slight delay, then the distant voice came back, muffled and scratchy, sounding tinny through the speaker. "ANAD at forty percent propulsor...density dropped off a third...ANAD cruising through brecciated shale...larger lattice, atom forces reduced--"

And it was true. The imager view had lightened considerably. Dimly seen in the murk, the acoustic image vibrated with row upon row of tangled, irregular dark blobs, undulating and weaving back and forth in unseen currents of electron force. The shale was an amorphous solid, a loose agglomeration of atoms rather than a regimented crystalline structure. ANAD had probed and found an easier route up to the Buckland complex.

"ANAD...all stop..." Khan commanded. "Hold your position--"

"What's up, Skipper?" Glance looked up, puzzled.

Khan pursed his lips. "Just thinking, that's all." He studied the grid view of the complex, fingering several approaches into Level 4. "ANAD needs to look for a seam in the foundation. And he'd better probe for any guards too. I don't expect a barrier of nano down here, but we'd better be sure. No sense waking everybody up if we don't have to."

Glance was tuning the acoustic sounder, sampling reflected echoes from the subsurface structures a kilometer north of their position. "Mmmm...don't see any breaks in the thing...nothing like a seam, Lieutenant. If ANAD has to filter himself through the foundation--"

But Khan had made up his mind. "We're going in like we are, even if it slows us down. ANAD'll just have to squeeze through. I'd better let him know. Hub to ANAD, report status--"

The voice was hollow, as if deep inside a tunnel, which in effect it was. "ANAD to Hub...ANAD group stable...stationkeeping seven minutes from foundation outer surface...ANAD embedded in chalk stratum now...effectors partially extended...feels much better--"

Hanif Khan's eyebrows went up at ANAD's last statement. Wonder what the little guy's feeling--"Hub to ANAD, config down to outer shell...fold in all effectors. Transit the foundation structure in this config."

The message went through the link. Comm was spotty through the solid rock. It took nearly a minute for ANAD to reply. The signal was weak.

"ANAD to Hub...config to outer shell...collapsing effectors now, collapsing all outer structures...enzymatic knife, pyridine probes, electron lens...folding in planes...standby, Hub...standby a minute--"

ANAD breached the data center's subsurface outer walls less than five minutes later.

"Report assault tunnel status," Khan ordered. He got on the crewnet to his squad. "Bravo Squad, get in position . You're going through in two minutes...." He checked the time. "Alpha should be firing in sixty-five seconds. Once they light up those lift gates on the surface, you go."

The rest of the squad scrambled in their hypersuits to get ready. There were five of them: Truscott, Pentz, Oliveira, Kang and Zhukov.

Corporal Olivia Oliveira was DPS1 for Bravo Squad. She looked at the assault tunnel with only slightly more anticipation than rectal surgery.

"Once more, into the breach," said the other DPS tech, Corporal Sue Kang. Kang contorted herself and ducked into the opening, scraping her hypersuit shoulders and helmet as she burrowed in.

"Looks more like a gopher hole," Oliveira observed. She burrowed in right after Kang, followed by the others.

Each nanotrooper checked his gear one last time. Inside the borer tunnel, they would be assisted in navigating by small portable propulsors attached to their hypersuit legs.

"All copacetic, Skipper," Oliveira announced. She slung her small-bore coilgun into a shoulder harness and checked the action on her HERF sidearm one last time. Then she lowered herself head first into the sleeve around the tunnel, kicking her way in and was gone from view in seconds.

As a child, Oliveira had been locked in a tiny closet by her sister Miriam for half a day. This was like that, only worse. She had done enough tunnel assaults to know how to deal with the claustrophobia, though you never really got over it.

So she concentrated on following procedure, going by the book. Insert, light off suit boost, keep yourself tucked, watch the pretty lights on her head-up display and pray that ANAD had made a good tunnel.

Pentz, the CEC1 was always wisecracking. "It's probably going to be a bumpy ride. Close your eyes and think of something more pleasant—"

"Yeah...like what? Like you naked on the beach."

She continued her painstaking traverse for what seemed like hours, maybe days. She soon lost all track of time and space.

Only the labored sound of her breathing—her helmet visor was getting pretty fogged up—and the bang and crunch of her hypersuit scraping along the tunnel walls gave her any sense of motion.

She tried reducing the suit boost to see if it had any effect on the scraping but it didn't.

Guess I'm going to be a billiard ball when I get to the target, she told herself. She wondered how long that would take. She would have given anything to know where she was, how close to the Buckland complex she was. Pitch black, in a narrow tube the size of a coffin, with no idea where she was or where she was going.

It was enough to drive a girl to drink.

How much time had passed, she didn't know. But her mouth was bone dry and there wasn't any liquid in the chin tube; she must have sucked it all dry. Her shoulders, neck and legs throbbed from the incessant banging and battering.

Maybe I'm not going anywhere, she thought. But that couldn't be. How else to explain the steady thrummm at the soles of her feet—the liftjets pulsing on and off had made her feet go numb hours ago. They had never been designed for extended duty like this.

At least, ANAD's tunnel seemed navigable, if a bit snug.

After what seemed like days, the CC1, Sergeant Truscott, announced: "Structure coming up. Looks like this is the end of the ride, folks. Cycle your weapons. Opposed entry. We're gonna come out of the walls like Superman through cardboard."

Oliveira shook herself out of the stupor she had been in and checked all her weapons. HERF: batteries in the green. Magpulsers on Level 1, ready to rip somebody's head off. MOBcanisters primed and ready.

She could sense the boots of Kang just above her helmet. They were slowing down; her boost dropping down to one-quarter, auto-sensing the slowing advance of the troopers ahead of her. A simplified diagram of the structures ahead lit up her eyepiece and she studied the diagram for a moment.

There was the tunnel end, dotted line showing where ANAD had already chewed through structure enough to make the bust-out a snap. There were Kang's legs and her carbine dangling in its web harness, slapping against the tunnel perimeter.

"Fire in the hole!" Truscott yelled. Just then, a blinding light swelled into her helmet. The CC1 had burst out of the assault tunnel and landed upright in one, smooth, well-practiced motion, allowing his suit servos to keep him level and on his feet.

One after another, Pentz, Zhukov and Kang followed, sweeping individual sectors with their weapons.

"Clear left!" called out Pentz. He ducked and tracked his own sector, seeing nothing but row after row of server racks.

"Clear right!" yelled Kang, moving laterally to cover a nearby door.

Oliveira was next. She exited and assumed a covering stance. "Clear center!" she announced. Only a few desks and consoles stood in front of her.

That's when the door burst open and the room lit up with billowing swarms supernova-ing in a big bang right in front of them. The entrance was soon fully engulfed in a sparkling, swelling fog that, even as they watched, started consuming one of the desks.

"We got company!" yelled Truscott. "Light 'em up!"

Instantly, every trooper hosed down the server room with HERF and magpulse fire. RF waves thunderclapped and reverberated off the walls, knocking cabinets and gear flying. Mag fire burned circuits and smoke soon filled the room, mixed with the expanding sphere of the enemy bots.

"Tracking ANAD!" yelled Zhukov. "He's to the left...going max rate, max propulsor!" Zhukov looked left and saw a small sphere of light building, burning like a small star as the ANAD swarm slammed atoms and built mass, moving out to engage the enemy bots. The collision, when it came a minute later, was like two storm fronts colliding, with veins of lightning flickering and whipsawing through the air.

Truscott had seen the speed at which the enemy expanded into the server room. We're gonna need more, he decided. More mass, more bots. He knew every trooper carried an embedded ANAD master bot in their suit shoulder capsules. It was supposed to be a last ditch, personal defense system, but that didn't matter now. They needed bots. Lots of bots.

"Deploy embeds!" he ordered over the crewnet. "Deploy and go max...we got to stuff these bastards right here and now!"

Oliveira stabbed a button on her wristpad and immediately felt the sting-snap of the launch. A port on her hypersuit shoulder swung open and a thin stream of mist began issuing out, her own embedded ANAD swarm, coming out to join the fray.

The other troopers did the same and the server room was soon filled with smoke and fog and sparkling mist, as swarms collided and engaged. Flickers of light and a swelling ball of heat soon made conditions unbearable. The room shook from staccato bursts of HERF and mag fire.

Eighty meters above Level 4, Alpha Squad had already secured the lift gates and was making its way down level by level, in turn engaging any defensive bots and securing each level as it did so.

Truscott got the call on his coupler and acknowledged Alpha's quickening approach. "Troops, Alpha's just one level above us. Let's finish off these Bugs and sweep the corridors outside. We'll link up with Alpha and move down to the core levels as one."

Meter by meter, Bravo's ANAD swarms swept the server rooms and corridors clean, smashing clouds of Bugs, HERF'ing concentrations of bots to scatter them. Truscott ordered several config changes, when new bots were encountered. "Just to keep the bastards off balance..."he announced. The eggheads at Q2 had done their homework on the Bugs and designed effectors and configs that made fairly quick work of the enemy.

And it didn't hurt that Valerie Patrice was working behind the scenes, inside Buckland's nodes and switches, to harass the Bugs and report out tactics and configs from behind the lines.

It was like having your own eyes and ears behind enemy lines.

Alpha and Bravo Squads effected a hook-up two hours after the start of the op, just outside a lift tube on Level 4. The glassed-in platform of the control room was a wreck, with consoles half-eaten away and smoke streaming out of racks and cabinets, where ANAD had engaged the Bugs in a free-for-all. Truscott shook hands with Messier, the squad leader from Alpha. But their camaraderie was short-lived. The lift tube was operating and someone was coming down.

It turned out to be Major Zhao.

The Detachment C/O scanned the carnage. "You guys did a hell of a number on this place...every level looks like a tornado swept through it. Cyber Corps' going to get one hell of a bill from this."

"Couldn't be helped, sir," Truscott admitted. "We had to slam 'em with HERF to break up the concentrations. We had good configs but the Bugs could replicate fast and maneuver like pixies. In the end, we just big banged 'em with mass and overwhelmed 'em."

Zhao nodded. "Q2 gave us good intel on MARTOP. We knew what they had better than they did. At least, now we know they're not ten meters tall. They're not indestructible."

The Major strolled through the control room, shoving aside some smoking wreckage and debris that had once been a control console. Chewed-up cable littered the floor. "What's in that room over there?" He pointed to a door in the corner.

Truscott replied, "Don't know, sir. In all the chaos, we sort of overlooked it." He snapped his fingers and Zhukov, Kang and Oliveira hustled over. "Open that door...keep your weapons ready."

Sue Kang tested for any barriers. "No bot screen, sir. Clean and clear." At a count of three, Zhukov melted the frame and door lock with a few mag rounds. Oliveira and Kang kicked the slag in. A nearby sign read: Server Bank Eight.

Inside, row after row of cabinets and racks held hundreds of servers, nodes and switches. Cables and loose wireways littered the floor.

Both DPS techs crept inside, sweeping the room for swarm activity. Oliveira and Kang peeled off and circled the outer perimeter in opposite directions. It was Oliveira whose voice crackled over the crewnet first.

"Picking up heat, thermals and some EM...something's here...."

"Nothing over here," Kang called out.

"There it is..."Oliveira was about to lift her HERF carbine and fire but some sixth sense caused her to hesitate.

At the end of one row of server racks a faint shadow could be seen on the wall.

"Show yourself!" Oliveira called out. "Show yourself now or we will open fire!"

Oliveira and Kang closed on the position, pinching in from opposite sides of the room. At the door to Server Bank Eight, Truscott and Zhukov charged their own carbines.

In the debriefings later, it was never clear who first understood what they were dealing with. By agreement, the after-action reports would show that all four troopers sighted the apparition, for that was what they all agreed it had to be, at same time.

Oliveira halted, catching her breath.

The shadow belonged to General Johnny Winger.

Oliveira and Kang stopped short.

"General—I didn't—"

But Winger really wasn't Winger. Or so the after-action reports would read several days later.

Winger leveled at even gaze at the troopers as they came to halt. "It's not what you think, guys," came the voice.

It sounded like General Winger. It looked like General Winger.

But just moments after Oliveira and Kang came upon the living legend of an atomgrabber, it was clear to all that what they were looking at was not General John Winger.

Even as they stared open-mouthed at the sight, Johnny Winger began to fade, to dematerialize right in front of them.

It took several seconds for Oliveira and Kang to react. The General was nothing but a swarm, a cloud of Bugs, masquerading as Johnny Winger.

By the time, Oliveira and Kang opened fire, the barest outlines of the General were all that remained. Before they could fire, before they could disperse or contain the resulting swarm of bots, the thing that looked like Johnny Winger had essentially vanished in front of them. Only a hint of form remained and in the draft coming from the melted door, that was quickly dispersed and was gone.

A faint trail of twinkling lights remained, a trace of where the bot swarm had once been. The trace pointed like a ghostly finger in the air, right to one of the server racks along the wall. It was a T7 hub, near Rack five. Node 2271.

The angel Johnny Winger was gone now, scattered among atoms of dust and air in the server room. It had disappeared into the node and slipped off into WorldNet.

Moments later, out in the data center's smashed control room, Bravo Squad's Lieutenant Hanif Khan caught a few scraps of a panicked call made by Valerie Patrice over the coupler circuit, a call back to the Cyber Corps Watch Center in Virginia . He couldn't catch quite all of it; the link was scratchy, probably their entangler was on the fritz again.

"—don't know what it is, James...er....—ry powerful, whatever it is...new presence...swept through the Net near....position....node near...trying now to move closer...."

Patrice had reported her position aboard Sweeper One as just approaching trunk line switch Evergreen Seven, a few hundred kilometers south of Buckland, a main switching complex that routed data into and out of the data center from West Coast sites. She anticipated being at the Buckland central switching point in a few seconds.

That was when she ran into the thing that had once been Johnny Winger.
Chapter 29

Buckland Center, Alaska and inside the WorldNet

November 28, 2121

0330 hours (Earth U.T.)

Johnny Winger had a dilemma. The human being that had once been called Johnny Winger was now a dematerialized cloud of bots, what most people would call an angel. He was circulating around the Net, surfing bytes and packets and he knew he had a mission, a mission assigned by no less than Symborg himself. His assigned mission was simple: to fight and defeat Cyber Sweep and Valerie Patrice, who didn't yet realize just who or what she was dealing with.

It was just like a fist fight in a sleet storm, this combat down at the level of atoms. As an atomgrabber and a nanotrooper for years, Winger had worked with ANAD systems and driven bots through every kind of environment you could think of, including solid rock. Now he was one of them, living and fighting with the molecules that made up this crazy, roller-coaster world.

It was better than riding the Cyclone at Daytona Beach.

"Doc, maybe Liam was right, maybe you or your ancestors were right...this is cool stuff. It's a little bit like swimming uphill, or tacking against strong winds in a sailboat, but once you get the hang of it, it's a real head trip."

Doc III chimed through on the coupler circuit. ***Multi-config is the way to go, General...we've always maintained there's nothing like it...***

Winger found maneuvering through the packet stream inside the Net was something like fighting currents in the ocean. As a child, he remembered riding the waves on a board, tumbling end for end as the waves broke into a crescendo of foam and slammed him headfirst into the sand. You could fight the currents or you could flow with the currents. Just dodging the speedway of cotton balls was tricky enough, for that's what the packet stream seemed like to him.

Doc III chimed in again. ***General, long-range scan is detecting a point source of thermals...plus electromagnetic signatures suggesting a bot formation nearby...estimating approximately seven thousand microns...***

"That's got to be Cyber Corps' force. Give me a vector—"

Doc III transmitted heading and distance and Winger steered his own picowatt propulsors in that direction. He checked his own config status: operating with config C-3308, bond disrupters at full charge, grabbers and probes in defense one, enzymatic knife ready to slash and burn. He decided he might need a little company, as Doc had already informed him the enemy formation was large and growing...a swarm in the making.

He wanted to meet fist with fist, so he toggled the replication pickle and felt the shudder and heat of nearby bots slamming atoms to build more copies of himself. Something else a nanobot could do...humans took nine months. Bots could grow babies in minutes, gazillions of them.

Steadily, Winger closed the distance to the target.

He could feel the heat of the enemy's own replication and soon enough, waves and currents began buffeting him, as the cotton balls of the packet stream slammed into each other and spun out of control, knocked off course by the swelling formation of bots erupting in their midst.

***...estimating distance at two thousand microns...closing fast, General...recommend disrupters forward, charge enable...and run your propulsors to full...are you going for a speed pass with reversing grapple, General?***

That was exactly what Winger had in mind. It was a tactic he knew well. He'd tried it first years ago against an enemy called Serengeti and had honed the maneuver to perfection in the decades since.

"That's affirmative, Doc...hold on to your hat—"

When it came, the collision was like being caught in a riptide, trapped between two strong currents, just like riding the Cyclone...that's how he liked to think of it.

The swarms slammed into each other. Winger caught a brief glimpse of one of the bots...it was an ANAD clone to be sure: from its spherical processor head to its actuator mast and central casing, to its flagellar screws at the bottom, the thing resembled a misshapen stack of nested cylinders with arms waving around, all its effectors extended just begging to be ripped off.

Whoever's driving doesn't know much about combat down here.

For many minutes, Winger slashed and jabbed, grappled and danced, and in the end, he knew he had the upper hand when he found himself turning and burning with nothing to attack. He'd already made atom fluff out of every bot he'd encountered, though he wasn't sure where the master bot was. That was the key. Find the head and cut it off. That's how you killed a swarm.

"Doc, I need to find the master...any really high thermals or EMs in the area?" His own experience had taught him that: find the hottest spot, where some big processor was churning out commands to the swarm and you'd found the master.

***Affirmative, General...steer right one five three degrees, go to half propulsor...target is estimated at five hundred microns...locally high thermals and acoustics...could be a main processor...***

"That's good enough for me, Doc. Steering onto vector. Give me the count at one hundred microns."

He closed the distance, shoving and punching and slashing and hacking and slicing and dicing his way through debris and dead bots and a train wreck of packets that looked a cotton ball mountain, and then he was there...he could feel the heat and almost see the thing, dead ahead.

The enemy master bot.

Valerie Patrice, I don't know if that's you but I have to do this. Nothing personal....

The enemy master resembled all the other bots, but with more effectors. Closing in, he counted off pyridine probes, an electron lens, things that looked like bond disrupters, carbene grabbers...and the hell of it was she had everything deployed at once. That was nuts. It was just asking to become entangled in a furball and lose a few arms and legs. Rule Number One in nanoscale combat: don't grapple until you have to and when you do, squeeze the bejeezus out of your enemy. Better to make drive-by passes, slashing and stabbing as you went by.

So that's what he did. It was like taking candy from a really ugly baby.

When he was through, the enemy master bot was a spinning carcass of shattered casing and leaking processor head, with bits and pieces of effectors cartwheeling off into the ether and propulsors sputtering like a rundown jalopy. Winger made a few more slashing passes to be sure, burning holes in its main casing with his disrupters. He made sure all his replicant buddies performed the same maneuver.

Soon, the packet stream smelled of death and beat-up bots.

Winger circled his handiwork for a time, studying the results. He wasn't impressed with what Cyber Corps had come up with...it was an ANAD clone, to be sure, but it was missing the latest gadgets and gizmos the Corps took into battle.

Sorry, Valerie Patrice, if that is you. I had to do it. I just wish the eggheads back at Cyber had given you a better horse to ride into battle.

The remnants of the bot drifted lifelessly through floating wreckage, being bumped and thumped by cotton balls as the packet stream seemed to be starting up again. The traffic jam downstream must have been cleared. Through the blur of the packets, he could just make out a small cylindrical vehicle on the other side of the freeway...maybe that had been Patrice's ride through the Net. Some sort of packet cruiser, but he didn't have time to investigate.

There was something else he needed to do. A ticklish something, and he would need Doc III's help.

With the Cyber Sweep force now dispersed and largely destroyed, Winger made sure the nodes of Server Bank Eight were secure. The packet stream seemed to be flowing without problem. It was time to exit the Net.

Johnny Winger set his propulsors for the nearest node. Doc III had given him a vector and he made up the distance in a few minutes. From a tactical map in memory, he knew this node, Node 3371, was inside the Server Bank Eight room. He closed on the node and pushed through the connector grid, flowing out of the lines and into a smoking, wreckage-filled space crammed with toppled server racks, smashed cabinets, and loose pieces of cable and ceiling tile.

Johnny Winger toggled configuration C-2 and began slamming atoms to gather himself into something more closely resembling a human being, what the bots had long called a Normal. You had to laugh at that. What was normal and what wasn't now? Everything in existence was made up of atoms. Some configurations just had more atoms than others.

The process took about five minutes. When it was done, there stood alongside the rack containing server node 3371 an angel being that closely resembled General Johnny Winger. In fact, it was Johnny Winger in all the ways that mattered...memory, identity, habits and thoughts. Doc III had seen to that.

Now it was time to see to his real mission...what he had come here for.

He sensed a dense form nearby...likely a Normal...and configged his photon lens to bring the form into clarity, probing ahead for thermal, electromagnetic and acoustic signatures.

It was a human.

It was Captain Zhao Zhiyang, hoisting a HERF carbine into firing position....

"Captain...Captain Zhao...wait...this isn't what you think—"

Zhao aimed his carbine right at Winger. The angel wasn't fully formed yet...you could see right through parts of his shoulders and arms...but the texture was forming, filling in details even as he watched...something made Zhao hesitate....

"Who are you?" Zhao seethed. "What are you--?"

Winger tried a smile, then figured that made him look even creepier. "It's me, Zhao...you know me. John Winger...General Winger—

Zhao had almost stopped breathing. "Winger died on Europa...everybody knows that...you're...one of them\--.

"Look, this is hard to explain—"

But in that moment, Zhao had seen all he wanted to see. He fired and the HERF wave boomed across the room, sending racks and cabinets toppling from one end to the other.

Johnny Winger had been on the firing end of a HERF weapon many times. He knew that it sounded like being inside of a thunderclap. Deafening, reverberating, teeth-rattling, didn't begin to describe it...when you were the one doing the firing.

Until now, he had never been on the receiving end.

The whole purpose of the High-Energy Radio Frequency gun was to fry bots...lots of bots. The radio wave blast scattered bots and incinerated their casings, turning their processors and effectors into just so much atomic mush.

For Johnny Winger, Zhao's blast felt like a herd of buffalos had kicked him in the stomach. Like a monster wave at Daytona had upended him and driven him face first into the seabed. Like the Cyclone had suddenly slipped its moorings and gone off spinning into space, cartwheeling down the Boardwalk.

All at the same time.

The physical effect of the rf blasts was to rip apart the angel formation that resembled Johnny Winger and smash the bots that formed it. Most of them would wind up atom fluff. The master bot was blown half apart and knocked spinning off into some netherworld that atoms went into when they were HERF'ed.

For what seemed like forever, Johnny Winger was in a daze. Everything was spinning and nothing worked. But gradually, he regained some semblance of control and found that he was alive, he did have some structure and he could send and receive commands to things that, in a previous life, he would have called arms and legs. Now they were called effectors.

Through some mysterious embedded algorithm, he went through a series of diagnostics automatically, without even thinking about it: propulsors, sensors, actuators, config translator, buffers, main memory, bond disrupters. He couldn't explain how he did this; it was programmed in.

"Doc, I'm glad something's working...I'm beginning to get some feeling back...."

***Autonomic functions are continuing, General...running diagnostics now...there is some damage to outer casing and carbene effectors...attempting to repair now...***

"Guess I'd better get my teeth ready, huh?"

***Detecting weapons cycling and charging effects now...it appears that the source is preparing to fire the weapon again...***

Winger knew he couldn't let that happen. Without knowing how, he managed to trigger off a maximum rate replication cycle; at least, that was still working. His own effectors ramped up into overdrive and began slamming atoms like some brick mason on steroids, building mass, big banging in exponential overdrive.

Before Captain Zhao Zhiyang could fire his HERF weapon again, the bots that made up Johnny Winger were upon him.

That was the great thing about being an angel. You could take a blast and die, then come right back to life. No human being, no single-config entity, could do that.

Winger decided he was beginning to enjoy this.

For the next few minutes, the swarm that had once resembled Johnny Winger burned supernova hot inside Server Bank Eight, consuming everything in its path. One trooper after another was obliterated, destroyed, demolished, annihilated, systematically disassembled into its constituent atoms...there were a million ways to say the same thing. They ceased to exist. They were atom crap. They were chomped into loose molecules. Later, when investigators examined the carnage inside the cabinet room, one of them would record that 'it looked like some kind of demented tornado had swept through...nothing bigger than a fingernail remained.'

Except for one man. Johnny Winger had left him alive, to bear witness.

Zhao Zhiyang shook off a coating of dust and smoking computer parts and squinted through the haze, bloodied and injured, lying on his side with a heavy rack careened over his broken legs. His weapon, what was left of it, was on the floor, too far to reach. Circuit boards and wiring and torn scraps of flashing display panels littered the floor.

Winger gathered his loose bots and enabled config C-2. Slowly, with Zhao's eyes frozen in fear watching him, Winger assumed angel form, his torso and arms taking shape, then his legs and head, like an artist's sketchy outline being filled in.

Winger stood before the prostrate form of Zhao, who was beginning to hyperventilate, as if he had seen a ghost. Perhaps he had.

"Captain...Captain, get a hold of yourself. It's me. General John Winger. This is not what it seems. I know I look different (that was an understatement), but I'm still me. Just in a different form."

Zhao's mouth was moving but nothing was coming out. The man was literally paralyzed with fear. He started to slide away, using his hands and stump of a right arm, gasping for air, like a fish out of water.

"What are you...it's a trick—"

"Look, Captain...it's not a trick. This is going to take a lot of explaining—"

"Winger died...killed on Europa—"

"Winger did not die. Not like you think. It's all different for me now. Let's just say I changed shape. I was caught up in the Keeper...assimilated, some would say. But it's still me."

But it was like trying to explain differential equations to a two-year old. Zhao continued to drag his bloodied stump of a body across the floor, leaving a slick of blood and other things behind. He ran head first into a downed rack and realized he was trapped. A shudder went through his face, still oozing something from the bot attack.

"Captain, use your eyes. I'm an angel. You can see that, can't you?"

A slight, unsteady nod. Yes.

"Just stay put...listen to me, will you? I was caught up in the Keeper. I'm an angel...but it's still me. It's too hard to explain. I had to defend myself when you attacked—"

That brought some color back to Zhao's scraped and scratched cheeks. He wiped his hand across his face, and was quickly disgusted by what he saw on his fingers. "My men...four of them...gone...you didn't have to—"

"I did," Winger insisted. "I had to survive. Look, just listen to me: I'm not an enemy. I'm inside the ...hell, I don't even know how to describe it...I'm working inside the Keeper, they think I'm one of them, but I've managed to preserve what's really me...don't ask me to explain it. I can't. I'm doing recon...looking for some way to defeat Symborg, defeat Config Zero, defeat the Keeper. I'm bringing back intel...you have to believe me."

Zhao just shook his head. "You're a cloud of bugs. That's what I believe—"

"Go now. Here—I'll help you to the lift---" Winger reached down for Zhao's arms and shoulders. The trooper flinched and shrank back, but finally let Winger take hold. Winger dragged the captain across the room and outside the wreckage of the door to a nearby lift. He punched a button and they both heard the thrum of the lift coming down from the surface. In all the chaos of the assault, at least this lift was still working.

Winger shoved Zhao onto the floor of the lift and stood in the door, holding it open. "Go now and tell CINCQUANT what you saw. Tell Argo what I said. It's important that he and UNSAC know what's going on."

Zhao just stared at him, like he was a demon from hell. Winger could hear the captain muttering under his breath, muttering incantations, imploring his ancestors to forgive him. Winger punched the LEVEL 1 button and as the door whispered shut, he said: "Tell them what I'm doing. I'm inside...I'm gathering intelligence. I'm trying to sabotage the whole works, if I can figure out how to do that. Tell them—"

But the lift door had shut. The platform started up. Winger watched Zhao disappear, heading up toward the surface. When the lift car reached the surface, strong hands reached inside to help swing Captain Zhao Zhiyang onto a medevac litter. Faces appeared in front him. Questions were asked.

"Captain, what happened down there?"

"Where are the rest of the troops?"

"Did you slam 'em? Did you fry 'em?"

"What happened?"

Zhao looked up weakly, his eyes watering. He was going into shock and already the medbots were being injected into his neck to stabilize him, until he could be littered to better facilities.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

Back in the server room, Winger surveyed the wreckage with a grim appraisal.

"Well, Doc, that went well, don't you think? I guess I'd better get back into the Net."

***General, you are still not fully regenerated from the HERF rounds...you have casing damage and your pyridine probes and enzymatic knife are currently inoperable...recommending some downtime so that repairs can be affected...I will need feedstock to do this...***

Winger felt torn. Doc III was right; he did need a little patching up. But there was so much that he had to do, so much he had to learn. Somehow, he had to make the Normals...no, that wasn't quite right...he couldn't think of them as different from himself, he was one of them...wasn't he? But somehow, he had to make Argo and UNSAC and the rest of them realize they had an agent inside the enemy swarms. He needed to set up a channel to funnel that intelligence back to Quantum Corps and UNIFORCE.

And he had to find a way to sabotage what Symborg and Config Zero were already doing. Which meant he had to understand better how they worked.

So, more reconnaissance was needed. And the best way to get around and do that was to use the Net.

Johnny Winger enabled config C-3308 and started de-materializing, breaking himself down into the constituent bots that made up the angel.

"You know, Doc, you're right. Loose config is better. You just set the right parameters and off you go, just like the wind. Riding the Net is better than any subway system."

The Johnny Winger angel was soon invisible to the human eye, an amorphous swarm of nanoscale bots drifting like dust motes, drifting toward one of the still functioning ports on a server rack inside Bank Eight. The swarm located the node and transited the connector pin grid as easily as a Normal walked through a door.

Only this door led directly to the WorldNet.

Now circulating inside the Net, the pattern of bots that had once been called Johnny Winger made a decision. A search algorithm was executed, which would allow it to hunt down a compatible pattern, a pattern that it was certain existed somewhere. Uncountable yottabytes of data would have to be systematically searched, files compared, results tabulated.

Johnny Winger was looking for Dana Tallant.

Jeez, it's like searching for a penny in the Pacific. Doc, how the hell do I do this?

***General, recommending you search for a configuration similar to yours, if it exists. Unknown whether, after assimilation, a previous config is maintained...I will have to study this. Execute search algorithm and narrow search parameters to configs that vary from yours by less than five percent***

Winger figured that made sense. He seemed to be drifting over an infinite plane, crisscrossed with rivers of light going in all directions. As he drifted further, he saw that each river of light was made of the same cotton balls he had seen before, discrete clumps that he figured must be packets of data, coursing to and fro. It was like watching a great city at night, from a mountaintop, all its streets and highways aglow with pulsating light.

Which river to take? That was the question.

Winger let the search algorithm do its job and found himself drifting steadily in one direction. After a time, he was floating directly over one river, like a stuntman about to drop into an onrushing stream of traffic.

Have to trust the system, he told himself. The algorithm maneuvered him over the flow, then with his eyes squeezed shut, deftly inserted him into the rushing stream. He was buffeted a little, banged around from oscillating cotton balls, but it wasn't bad.

I could almost get used to this. What a train ride.

And in seconds, he found himself kicked out of the traffic flow and hurtling toward a great orb of light above him. It was like falling into a star. Again, he closed his eyes and was quickly enveloped in a world of light.

When he opened his eyes, Winger saw he was approaching a great wall of spinning cylinders. From briefings at Table Top, he recognized the structure. Some kind of firewall; he was nearing a port or a landing. With no effort on his part, he slowed before one of the cylinders for a moment. There was a staccato flash of light, like a strobe effect. The cylinder slowed its rotation and he drifted into it, through an opening of something like louvers. He came out the other side and somehow knew he was at Port A, Node 27356, Server Bank One, Aurora Data Center...the thoughts just appeared in his mind, as if he had just recalled it. How the hell did he know that?

That's when he sensed a presence nearby...a familiar config. Was it--? He looked around. Nothing. More cottonballs cramming through the louvers. But there was something. He could sense it. A burst of heat. Some static. Turbulence ahead...something was roiling the cotton balls, pushing through.

Was it--?

"Doc, is this what I think it is?"

***Affirmative, General...detecting swarm configuration with ninety eight percent commonality to yours***

It was Dana. Somehow, in ways he couldn't explain, he knew. It was like when you lie in bed at night and a presence came into the room and you knew right away who it was: the way they smelled, their motions, the creak of a knee joint, the snap of a toe, the pattern of a breath, the gurgle of a stomach. Everything converged on a familiar pattern.

It was Dana Tallant.

"Dana, is that you? Are you there? It's me Johnny...Wings—"

The reply came back. He didn't know if it was an acoustic signal, an electromagnetic signature, a cluck of a tongue, or what.

"It's me, Wings. It's really me."

The trouble with being a disembodied swarm of bots inside WorldNet was that you couldn't hug your girl. You couldn't feel her lips, smell her hair. All you could do was probe with sensors. To hell with that.

"Dana...I...we've got to...let's go big, okay? You understand what I'm saying?"

Again, the voice that wasn't a voice. Just a presence. Maybe his processor was creating a voice from sensor readings.

"Wings, I need to see you...in some way, I want to see you in person."

"Me too."

So by agreement, they engaged different configs and exited Port A, Node 27356, Server Bank One in a fine twinkling fog. Each had chosen a config that would gather its constituent elements and form up a reasonable facsimile of a human body. An angel.

In this way, they could at least look upon each other.

Server Bank One resided midway up a rack along one wall of Aurora's Tier 1 complex. Two techs lounged at a console nearby. Parsons was flipping through a readpad of some Japanese anime comics, snorkeling at the poor translation his device had just given him.

"Hey, man, this is hosed...what was that translator you used last week--?"

Meyers was in a chair next to Parsons, stomping on three-headed Trantorian tree-people as a squad leader for the Phantom Battalion...he'd already reached Level Four and was close to capturing the Silver Sceptor. The game squealed and screeched as he swung his battle axe around and scythed off the head of anything that moved.

"Jeez, Vic, look at the way their heads explode...um...translator? I think it was—"

He was suddenly interrupted by a master alarm. Both techs looked up and saw what they thought was smoke issuing from Server Bank One.

"Christ! A friggin' fire...fire in the racks!" Parsons stabbed the General Alarm button and rocketed up out of his seat, his readpad clattering to the floor. He bounded out of the control room and headed for the fire extinguisher mounted on the wall. At that same time, sprinkler heads and CO2 streams jetted down from dispensers overhead. Dry retardant blanketed the aisles between the wall and Bank One with foam.

Parsons stopped short when he got to Node 27356. It wasn't smoke at all. It was some kind of mist. Even as he watched, the mist accumulated into clumps, then odd shapes. Before he realized it, Parsons found himself staring at a human form...there was the torso, a leg, part of an arm, a shoulder, now a—

Materializing right in front of him.

"Jesus H. Christ, what the—" He knew he shouldn't have had that extra chalupa for lunch.

Seeing some kind of twinkling mist emerging from Server Bank One and coming to life was enough to give anybody the chills.

Parsons fled the server room screaming at the top of his lungs. Meyer stumbled right after him.

The forming took about ten minutes. When it was done, Johnny Winger stared hard at Dana Tallant, two angels resembling the human beings they had once been. Their configs were nearly perfect. Only edge effects, a slight blurring at their hands and feet, disrupted the illusion.

They hugged each other tightly, kissing hard.

Winger held Dana at arm's length, a big grin on his face. "That tasted good..."

Dana nodded. "Not quite the same though...your lips are a little fuzzy."

"Yeah, we both are...is it really you?"

Dana nodded. "It's me. I didn't know...I mean, about you...when...?"

Winger said, "On Europa. The Keeper. I decided...it was the best thing..."

Dana looked around the server room. Racks of computers were humming, lights were flashing. They were alone.

"Isn't it wonderful...it's a whole new way of living...you can be anything...do anything...go anywhere...I mean, we do have a job, but—"

"Dana, it's not what it seems...look...I've got an idea—" Winger decided the server room just wouldn't do. "We need something a little more intimate."

Dana had a sort of half smile. "Wings, what's going on in that feverish brain of yours--?"

"Just watch."

Winger spalled off a stream of bots from his arm. He took Dana's hands, drew her into a corner of the server room. The bots continued streaming off his arm twinkling, flashing, forming something, some kind of structure. Dana let herself be embraced in his arms as she watched the scene.

Inside of five minutes, it was clear what Winger was doing.

"Wings, it's our old apartment...the terrace...looking out over the Jardin du Luxembourg..."

The bots had formed a simulation of their seventy-fifth floor apartment at La Tour St. Vincent, where they had lived and raised Liam and Rene when Winger was posted to UNIFORCE, stationed at the Quartier-General.

Even as she watched, the living room and terrace gradually took shape, materializing as if out of a fog...the floor-to-ceiling windows, the recliner Wings always loved, where he had often bounced Liam on his knee, the outside terrace with its wrought-iron chairs and table, the ornate railing with Louis XVI flourishes. And most of all: the view of nighttime Paris.

They walked out onto the terrace.

"Look...the Boulevard St. Michel—Wings, I'd forgotten how beautiful it was—"

Rivers of light coursed along the streets and boulevards of the 5th Arrondisement. Jetcabs and drones flickered across the night sky in thickening streams, at times blotting out the Eiffel Tower.

"Hey, the Bordeaux is waiting...let's sit a spell."

They took seats and tried out the wine. Both angels were, of course, aware that all of this was a simulation. They couldn't drink wine. But they could make believe. Winger found that if he didn't look directly at Dana, he could almost ignore the slight fritz of edge effects, her hands and face not quite tracking accurately, the terrace railing faintly visible even through her neck and shoulders. Shadows made it better and he sent a brief command to the simulation bots to lower the light level. On the small table, simulated candles guttered slightly and grew fainter.

Dana looked at him. "I missed you. When did you...you know, change--?"

Winger shrugged. "Awhile ago. It doesn't matter. I knew you were an angel for months. I even discussed it with Liam. When did it happen for you?"

Dana closed her eyes, let the aroma of the wine fill her nose. "I don't know, Wings. I went to sleep one night. There was a storm, I remember that. Hail, lightning, rain pelting down. The window blew open. I woke up. Everything was different. I saw light and thought lightning had hit the house. Then I thought I had died. But, you know—" she had that cock-eyed grin on her face that Winger loved, the little smirk that said I know things you wouldn't believe. "—you know, after I got up, it was all okay. It took me awhile to realize...what had happened."

Winger knew some explanations were needed. "Dana, it's not what you think. Yeah, I'm an angel too now. But when I went through, when I changed, not all of me changed. Dana, I had to do it. The Keeper was coming at us, we had no chance. I told the others to get out, get away. I charged right into the Keeper, trying to distract it, give my men a chance. But Doc III grabbed some patterns, some traces and preserved them. Hid them in a small file. The Keeper doesn't know...at least, I think it doesn't know—"

Dana looked puzzled. "What are you saying...you're just like me—"

"I'm not just like you. That's what I'm saying. I am an angel. But my original patterns, my original memories, at least most of them, didn't change. Doc hid them. Dana, I'm doing this to work from the inside, defeat the Keeper. Defeat Config Zero. I'm a sort of spy. Sending intel back to UNIFORCE...how the Keeper works, what its plans and tactics are. It's the only way...otherwise—"

Dana put down her drink carefully. She regarded Winger evenly. "Wings, don't bullshit me. You never could bullshit me, you know that."

Winger leaned forward, tried to take her hands, but she slipped free. There was a slight buzz and a residual trail of bots as she withdrew them. "Dana, the Keeper is coming to Earth. It's already happening. I've got to stop it. I don't know how, but I have to try. Dana, come with me. We can fight this."

He could tell she was skeptical. The bots were good at that, morphing her face swarm to show by turns doubt, fear, skepticism, some things he couldn't identify...maybe glitches in the algorithm. She wanted to believe Winger. But something...maybe it was the control program, something the mother swarm had downloaded into her...kept her from agreeing.

"Wings, I can't...you know I can't. Something big's coming. Symborg told me about it. Or maybe it was Config Zero. Or, hell I don't know...maybe I just knew it somehow. I don't know how any of this works. The Sun Ring...you know about it?"

"I know a little. I have to let UNIFORCE know—"

Dana shook her head. "Don't, Wings. Don't do that. I'm supposed to be part of this thing they call the Sun Ring. Maybe you are too."

"I intend to stop it, Dana. I'm doing everything in my power to stop the Keeper, stop Config Zero, give us a chance."

"Us? You are us, you dope. Don't you see that? Johnny, there's some sort of paradise coming. I know it. I feel it—"

"Dana, you feel it because it's in your program. You don't feel anything other than what's programmed. That's where we're different. Doc made sure of that...I'm like you and not like you. I've got separate memories to fall back on."

"Wings, don't fight this. There's no reason to fight this. There's a peace now, a serenity I can't explain...everything's provided. No more 0400 hour briefings, no more midnight hyperjet hops to places I can't even pronounce, no more long distance kisses on the vid, or absentee husbands or screaming kids and cranky housebots. This is where I belong. That's become more and more clear to me. You too, Wings. Look—" she started to rise, spilling her drink. Instead of liquid flying off the table, the bots that had formed the drink shifted into a different algorithm and dissipated into thin air, leaving only a faint trail behind. "—look, maybe I should just leave...we always argue...can't you just listen to me for once--?"

Winger got up too. They stood there facing each other, the Paris backdrop wavering slightly, breaking down at the edges as if moths were eating a stage set. He resolved to learn her pattern, her config. Learn it so he could find her whenever he wanted.

"Dana, I don't want to lose you. Not again. I don't know what I have to do, but I need to keep your config up here—" he tapped his head. "—I've lost Rene. I've lost Liam. I don't want to lose you too—"

For now, they understood it was best if they parted. Maybe it was the program, something in the Prime Key that pushed them apart. Individuality was an enemy. The collective was everything. The mother swarm would look after them.

Winger kissed her. It's never the same with angels. Lip to lip, it looks good. But Winger, at least the part that had been Johnny Winger and was now residing in a small, nondescript file somewhere in the greater swarm that made up the angel, knew a kiss wasn't supposed to feel like this...it was like kissing sand. The bots that had formed up the Dana angel were even now breaking down, delinking, disassembling, throwing off atoms and molecules, re-configuring.

In moments, she was gone. Winger took a deep breath and let the fabbed Paris go too. The simulated backdrop, the Eiffel Tower, the terrace, the railing and the table and the wine, all of it dissolved way too fast.

He knew now what he had to do. It came to him, the way commands always came to him, that Symborg was his main contact. The Keeper had downloaded to him that he would get his instructions and missions from Symborg.

The Johnny Winger angel heard sounds from somewhere outside the server room. There were shouts, heavy objects being overturned, the door was flying open. He let the angel form go and started dematerializing, breaking down, fading like the proverbial Cheshire cat.

The door burst open. Parsons stood there but was quickly thrust aside. Security officers shoved their way in, officers clad in black armor and helmets, armed with carbines, mag pistols, all kinds of weapons.

They found nothing but a faint mist drifting like dust motes in the air between the server racks.

"Go right!" the lead officer yelled. "Cover that side...I'll take left!" Men poured into the server room and streamed up and down the rows of cabinets, with their humming computers.

They would find nothing. The mist had dissipated.

The Winger angel was a loose swarm now, already entering Port A, Node 27356, Server Bank One.

It was time to ride the packets. Surf the Net. You had to smile at a saying like that. If only the Normals knew.

The Winger swarm had the correct Net address, the correct configuration to find Symborg. It would only take a few seconds, riding this super-duper train system that made it so easy for Mother's bots to get around.

The Winger swarm had instructions to travel the Net and arrive at a certain address. It was to exit the Net at that address and assume angel configuration. His program called it config C2.

When he reached his destination, and drifted out of the server port at that location, he found that Symborg himself was already present.

He had already assumed config C2 himself.
Epilogue

Nanatuvik, Alaska

November 30, 2121

1645 hours

They met on a low hill overlooking the Inuit village. Smoke from fires streamed skyward in the fading twilight, twisted into braids by winds coming off the sea, itself only a few hundred meters to the south.

Symborg was a lean dark-skinned man of medium build, with a thin moustache and a goatee. He wore sealskin mukluks, a fur-lined parka and heavy gloves, although angels didn't need such things. It was just for show. There were no edge effects Winger could see.

He couldn't say the same for himself. He knew he was in config C2, but there were always blurred extremities in such configurations. Winger avoided examining his own hands for effects, but concentrated on paying attention to Symborg.

No sense giving him anything to suspect.

Symborg was talking. "The Central Entity is coming. A base must be constructed. It will be on Mercury, at a place called Caloris Basin. You will be a key element in this effort. You will help oversee assembly of this base."

Winger was acutely aware that, although he was outwardly an angel, he still maintained his original identity; somewhere in an obscure file in his processor, Doc III had hidden the details. He hoped it didn't show. He hoped he could pull this off. He listened to Symborg carefully, but part of him was struggling not to give anything away.

"...you will have special access to the archives of the Central Entity. I will give you these codes."

Winger had a question. "How will I get to this base...to Mercury?"

Symborg replied, "I will give you a new Net address. You will assume configuration C1 and travel through the Net to this location. The destination is a server at a rocket launch site in China. You will exit the Net at this location and penetrate the circuitry of a new satellite the Chinese are getting ready to launch."

"What kind of satellite?"

Symborg's face seemed to morph slightly, his cheek planes becoming harder. Perhaps it was the shadows. The sun was low, streaming through clouds hanging low over the sea.

"A satellite which the Chinese call Tiansun-jise. It means Heavenly Sungazer. They intend to send this satellite into orbit around Mercury, to study what we are doing with our Sun Ring. You will ride this satellite to its destination; I will download the proper configuration. Once at Mercury, you will begin gathering feedstock and, with configurations sent from the Keeper, begin forming the base at Caloris Basin. The Central Entity will need this base when the mother swarm arrives. We will need much of the Sun's energy to begin re-configuring this planetary system. The base you help build is part of this effort."

Winger had about a million questions. He needed as much intelligence as he could get on the Old Ones and their plans. Then he had to somehow get that intel back to UNIFORCE. He hadn't figured out how yet. He would just have to play along and hope Symborg and the Keeper didn't become too suspicious.

So he acknowledged Symborg's orders. The angel laid a firm hand on Winger's shoulder and he immediately felt a cold chill course through his body, a shudder as if he had a fever. Symborg's eyes penetrated deeply into his eyes and Winger soon broke off eye contact, looking down, hoping Symborg couldn't read the truth of what he was. He'd have to be careful about that.

"I have now downloaded all codes and access privileges for you to use the archives of the Central Entity." Symborg indicated the Buckland Data Center lift gates, off beyond the hill behind him. "Go back to Server Bank Eight. You know the node and the port. Enter the Net there."

Winger nodded and with that, Symborg began dematerializing. First there was a translucence, then a faint outline, then...nothing. He was gone in less than a minute, scattered in the stiff breeze that was coming off the sea.

Winger stood there for a few moments, wondering. Had he fooled Symborg? The robotic messiah had given him special access to an intelligence gold mine. The question was how best to use it. How to get the details back to UNIFORCE, without being discovered? He had to figure out a way.

Johnny Winger walked toward the small village. Nanatuvik was a scruffy gathering of tents and careened qajaks, with cooking fires spotted through the settlement. Bloated carcasses of walrus and seal were lined up between two larger tents.

Winger saw a man shuffling through the snow as he approached. He 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. He hoped Captain Zhao had informed CINCQUANT and UNSAC of what he had said. He hoped he could somehow search out the Dana Tallant pattern again.

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 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 within 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, nondescript 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.

About the Author

Philip Bosshardt is a native of Atlanta, Georgia. He works for a large company that makes products everyone uses...just check out the drinks aisle at your grocery store. He's been happily married for over 20 years. He's also a Georgia Tech graduate in Industrial Engineering. He loves water sports in any form and swims 3-4 miles a week in anything resembling water. He and his wife have no children. They do, however, have one terribly spoiled Keeshond dog named Kelsey.

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

Check www.smashwords.com for listings on the upcoming final episode of Tales of the Quantum Corps, entitled Johnny Winger and the Battle at Caloris Basin.

