 
# Quantum Troopers Return

Episode 7: The Hellas Paradox

### Published by Philip Bosshardt at Smashwords

### Copyright 2020 Philip Bosshardt

### Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode # (*) Title Approximate Upload Date

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 1: "Beacon"

September 20, 2065 (EUT)

Five Thousand Meters Above the Hellespontus Montes

Mars

General Dao Wen-Hsien studied the terrain two kilometers below the long gossamer wings of the Archimede rocket glider and thought to himself: how much like Tibet this place seems...the mountains could be the Tien Shan and the plains are so sere and desolate...except for the rust and ocher sands....

But it wasn't Tibet. Paryang was twelve long years ago and Dao tried to block out the memory of all the rubble and destruction. Quantum Corps had destroyed Red Harmony's main base at the monastery. The Keeper of the Sphere had been buried under thousands of tons of rock and debris. Cartel operations had been severely affected, almost stopped completely. They had lost billions in scope and twist profits, not to mention all the fabs that would no longer work.

The cartel had struggled and limped along for several years, but without the steady stream of tricks from the Keeper, without the help of the Old Ones and their vast technical archive, Red Harmony had been unable to withstand a determined assault from Quantum Corps.

By the end of the '50s, Red Harmony had almost ceased to exist.

Almost. Dao smiled wryly as the great lip of Hellas Basin eased into view below them, a rounded bulge just nosing over the horizon. Dust devils twisted along the desert floor as Archimede banked sharply and began her long glide toward the dirt strip near the center of the great crater.

He remembered a meeting the Ruling Council had held in Hong Kong, just two years ago. Zhong, Berensky, Kulagin, Souvranamh, all of them had been there. Souvranamh, the great Thai neuro-traficante, had brought them the startling news.

"The Keeper lives...at least a part of it still exists."

They had all been incredulous, but the evidence was there for everyone to see. Somehow, in ways no one could understand or explain, the Keeper...the operating system of the Sphere that maintained the gateway between Red Harmony and the Old Ones, had transmitted a partial copy of itself to another Sphere, buried under the desert sands at Hellas Basin, Mars.

Communication with the Old Ones was still possible, and more than ever, essential, if the cartel were to survive. But in order for the link to be opened up and stabilized, someone would have to go to Mars. Someone would have to couple with the Keeper directly and re-establish the link...reset the quantum channels, re-initialize the buffer and amplifier so that humans could talk with their distant alien mentors once more.

"Something's wrong with the coupler," Souvranamh had told them. "There's a lot of static and drop-out. I get a few signals...nothing intelligible. But it's definitely a Keeper signal. If we get one of us inside that Sphere, it should be possible to re-configure the link and open a channel."

So Dao Wen-Hsien was chosen to make the trip.

Dao watched the dusty sand dunes of Hellas rushing up at them. Archimede's pilot battled some tricky crosswinds and floated them down to a soft skidding landing on the dirt strip at Hellas Station. With a grinding bump and a rooster tail of red dust, the rocket glider slid and skewed her way to a stop only a few hundred meters from the station complex.

A muffled voice came over the cabin intercom. "All passengers, secure for towing. We'll be underway for about ten minutes. Please remain seated until I turn on the EXIT lamps. And remember, two people per airlock cycle and watch your first steps outside. Traffic control just informed me they had fresh dust storms this morning and the footing is loose. Captain, out."

To the other passengers and crew of the glider, Dao Wen-Hsien was a Chinese meteorologist, newly arrived on Mars from UNISPACE to do research on the possible weather impact of the Green Mars Initiative, the big terraforming project that MarsFed had just approved. Dao had received permission from the Council to make the long trip to Hellas Station, to set up some special instrumentation, carried in several trunks in Archimede's belly and monitor current wind, dust, and other conditions before the Initiative started radically altering the planet's environment.

Dao's real reason for coming was quite different. The Ruling Council of Red Harmony had tasked him with locating the new Keeper of the Sphere, making contact, and re-configuring its quantum coupler so that the cartel could regain contact with the Old Ones.

The rocket glider was towed by tractor to the station complex. From Archimede's windows, Hellas Station was little more than a collection of dusty humps and a few cranes and other pieces of equipment strewn about the gentle rise on which the base had been sited.

When the tow was over, each pair of passengers suited up and made the fifty-meter hike through shin-deep dust to the lockout chamber on the side of Base Central.

After putting his bags away, Dao attended an orientation briefing for new arrivals in the wardroom. The speaker was a ruddy, big-boned Texan named Hugh Spalding.

"Listen up, ya'll," Spalding boomed over the din of the meeting. He had a toothpick stuck in the corner of his mouth. Some kind of juice dribbled out onto his chin as he spoke.

"We'll organize parties and details by specialty right after this meeting. Before anybody goes outside, ya'll read that little booklet you received when you checked in. Memorize it. It's got all the safety procedures for expeditions. I don't want anybody wandering around getting lost or falling into a crevice while you're outside. While you're here, I'm the expedition boss. Outside these walls, you do what I say. If you don't, you stay inside and we ship you out on the next shuttle. Got it?"

There was a chorus of nods and mumbled assents. The meeting droned on for another hour. Dao listened politely but concentrated on his own notes, then watched ocher dust swirling outside the portholes.

Somewhere out there, a Keeper was buried. It was his job to find it and soon. If he failed, Red Harmony was finished.

The first parties were scheduled for the next morning. Dao was assigned to a detail of six scientists and one expedition leader from the Station crew. The leader was a balding Russian named Fedorov, built like a wrestler. There were two geologists from Japan, an astronomer from India, an American physicist and an English meteorologist named Colin Plunkett.

The party climbed aboard a snorting marscat and secured their gear. Fedorov drove the cat and they soon trundled off through heavy dust fall toward a line of low hills in the distance.

"The Saucer Hills," Fedorov explained, as he settled in for the three-hour drive. "Looks like a flying saucer, to some people. We stop there, have lunch, and get out for a walk, set up some equipment, take measurements, whatever you like. Two hours at the Hills, then on to our next objective."

Dao quietly checked the coordinates the Ruling Council had given him. Forty-five degrees south by seventy-one degrees east. He scanned a small map of Hellas basin on his wrist computer. The Keeper was there, just at the far base of the Saucer Hills.

At least, someone had done their homework, he thought.

Hellas basin was a big bowl of sand dunes and ridged terrain, with a few sinuous mountain chains crumpling and buckling the ground for relief. As the marscat rumbled south by southwest from Hellas Station, Dao studied the monotonous yet stark ground bouncing by the portholes. The cat followed a curving route through undulating dunes, rising and falling like a ship on a dusty red ocean. Massive boulders and craters dotted the landscape. The view reminded Dao of a giant sand table.

He knew that much of the terrain was likely to change over the next century, if the Green Mars Initiative was successful. Others in the expedition must have been thinking the same thing.

Plunkett, the Englishman, hmmphed. "Better enjoy it while you can. Once the first changes come, this will probably be a big lake."

"Like before," said Suwarthy, the Indian astronomer. He was sweating in his suit, a sheen of perspiration shiny on his forehead. "Some think Hellas was an inland sea or lake once."

The expedition discussed and debated the issue heatedly for awhile. Dao half-listened, concentrating on what he had to do. The Keeper signal had been weak, staticky quantum states spritzing through spacetime, on and off. Souvranamh thought he might be able to detect it within a few hundred meters, maybe even a kilometer away. The Chinese meteorologist eased forward to sit near Fedorov up front, eyeing the nav screen. It had a projected route overlaid on video of the terrain ahead. The Russian had to keep the pipper representing the marscat centered between the route's red dotted lines.

"Getting close?" Dao inquired of the Russian. Fedorov grunted. He stretched his back and neck, trying to get some feeling back into his shoulders.

"Another half an hour. We stop and get out."

Dao noticed the flashing dot on the screen. "That's our objective...that dot?" He figured the Keeper coordinates were easily several kilometers from the spot.

Fedorov yawned and nodded. "Camp Chaos. See this region--?" He swept his hand over a region of tortured and fractured terrain to the southwest. "It's called Hellas Chaos. Could be a river or lake outflow...who knows? The camp is on a promontory at the end of this ridge. We're following that ridge right now."

Dao did some quick calculations. It would take an hour, maybe more, to walk the several kilometers to the Keeper coordinates. Somehow, he'd have to get away from the party and doing that would be almost impossible.

But General Dao Wen-Hsien was nothing if not prepared. He got up and made his way back into the marscat's main cabin. The others were drowsy and lost in thought; only Suwarthy was staring out a porthole, eyeing a pair of dust devils dancing across the valley floor below. Dao smiled politely as he eased past the Indian astronomer, and slipped into the service compartment at the rear of the cat.

Marscats were like huge, articulating caterpillars on treads. Three compartments were strung together, each free-swinging. From front to back, the cats were made up of a command compartment, a crew compartment and a service compartment. The service bay contained the galley and the lockout and stores lockers, including the expedition's pressure suits and suit supplies.

Dao made a show of rummaging through the galley, ostensibly looking for something to munch on. When he was sure no one was looking, he slipped into the cabinet where suit supplies were stored and located all the chest control packs, which regulated each suit's environment. In his coverall pockets, Dao had five small "buttons," one for each pack. With each button, he stripped off an adhesive patch, and placed the button on the bottom of one pack, out of sight. As he fixed the button in place, he fingered a tiny stud, activating the device.

When the right time came, each button would do its job.

Dao was returning to the crew cabin when the marscat lurched slightly and began perceptibly slowing. Fedorov's gruff voiced called back from the command deck:

"Break out the rations and let's eat. The camp's just around the next hill. And start getting your gear together. I don't want to stay here a minute longer than necessary. We got to make Camp Tracy before nightfall."

So they ate, munching their sandwiches and fruits in sullen silence, while outside sporadic wind gusts rocked the cat back and forth.

Wheelock, the American physicist, shook his head, slurped coffee from a thermos. "Air's thicker here in the Basin. Just enough mass to move the cat. Away from Hellas, I doubt we'd even feel that wind...not enough molecules."

Suwarthy eyed the swirling dust outside. "Someday, we won't need pressure suits here...we'll be able to get by with skin suits alone...like a winter day in the Himalayas."

They finished their lunch and suited up. Fedorov personally examined each crew member's fittings and suit setup, tugging at connectors and hoses, snapping belts and harnesses. Dao watched the Russian carefully. The buttons he had just placed were never detected.

Outside, the party moved off in all directions. Ostensibly a meteorologist, Dao worked with the Englishmen Plunkett to unload a suite of instruments and load up the packbot. Others were examining a rock fall a few dozen meters away, selecting specimens to take back.

Fedorov found a small rise near the lip of a nearby crater and hauled himself up to take in the view. The crater had no name in the catalogs, only a number...H-8741. The rim was lined with light frost and several columns of fine red dust, fine as talc powder, danced around the edge.

Beyond the crater, the scalloped edge of a low escarpment encircled the small promontory they had driven up on. Hellas basin seemed flat and featureless from a great enough distance, but up close, it was anything but featureless. The western slopes of the Chaos were a tortured and crumpled landscape fractured and smashed by eons of bombardment and water-ice flow.

Fedorov had driven the marscat up a long curving slope to the top of a mesa that overlooked an irregular bed of desiccated dunes and boulder fields. The Saucer Hills surrounded the mesa on three sides, like enveloping arms hugging a child.

Dao and Plunkett started up the packbot and set off for an exposed ledge not far from the Russian. They climbed carefully, making sure the bot's treads stayed directly behind them. A few meters either way and the bot would take a plunge of several hundred meters into the ravine below.

At the ledge, they set about unloading the instruments and siting the gear for best readings. Plunkett's voice became labored as he worked; Dao could hear the wheezing as the Englishmen struggled for oxygen. Several times, he stopped to adjust something on his wristpad.

Trying to open up the regulator, Dao thought to himself. It won't be long now. Even as he continued setting up the mesoscaph he'd been working on, he saw several others stop and do the same thing.

The buttons were actually small containment capsules full of nanobotic disassemblers. As Plunkett fell to one knee, now gasping for air, Dao went over to investigate, knowing full well that the devices had finally reached his air regulators and valves. In less than a minute, the Englishman had fallen heavily to his side. His air supply and all the internal regulators had become so much atomic fluff. The capsules had done their job.

Dao stooped down to study the Englishman's face, now blue and distended with fear. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw several others in the party drop to their knees.

But Fedorov had reacted more quickly.

The Russian was having trouble; Dao could see that. Fedorov fumbled with the controls on his wristpad and chestpack. Then he stumbled forward and loped down from the ledge, limping back toward the marscat from the edge of the crater.

Dao moved to intercept him but the Russian was an experienced expedition leader and knew how to react in an emergency. He didn't panic but made his way deliberately to the marscat and cycled himself through the airlock.

Dao was right behind him. There couldn't be any witnesses...or survivors.

Dao cycled himself through the airlock and emerged into the stores compartment. Fedorov was up on the command deck, already putting out a distress call. Dao crept forward.

"...any station, any station...this is Marscat M-22 out of Hellas Station. Mayday...mayday...we've suffered multiple decompression casualties...any station...any station—"

The Chinese meteorologist shook his head to link in with his angel and felt the momentary dizziness of the coupler making its connection. Buried in a capsule a few centimeters below his left collarbone, the angel stirred, its nanobotic swarm ticking over, ready for release.

As Dao crept into the main cabin, Fedorov sensed his presence and turned in mid-sentence from the commander's seat....

"...any station—"

Dao had already removed his helmet, unsealing the neck ring and quick-disconnecting the slide. He regarded the Russian coolly and without words, he let the angel loose.

Unseen at first, the nanobotic swarm ejected from his shoulder capsule. For a few moments, the Russian continued his distress calls but when the faint sparkle of replicating bots in exponential overdrive swelled in the air between them, he swallowed his words and started to get up.

"You'll never get away with this—I've already notified Hellas Station—" Fedorov's eyes widened as the faint sparkle blossomed into a coruscating, iridescent fog, quickly filling the cabin. He tried to back away but the swarm was on him in no time, forcing him to the deck in a writhing mass.

His pressure suit afforded Fedorov some protection, just long enough to grunt out: "I'm willing to make a deal here...we...can...talk...arrgghh!!"

Fedorov's squirming form was soon enveloped in the glowing fog, as uncountable trillions of bots did their job. Dao elected not to watch, busying himself with safing the airlock, making sure they were alone.

Outside, Hellas basin was still and bright. The winds had died down but a faint ruddy glow still hovered over the ground as fine dust settled out of the air in the late afternoon sun. He hadn't tried the coupler link to the Keeper since they had left Hellas Station. But he had the right longitude and latitude. Marscat M-22 was only a few klicks from the predicted spot.

Up on the command deck, the fog was subsiding, leaving a fine particulate film on the deck...all that was left of the Russian. Dao scraped it away with the toe of his boot and snapped off a quick command to the angel swarm.

***Return to base***

The master bot sloughed off all replicants and in a few minutes, had made its way back to containment and entered the tiny capsule in Dao's left shoulder. He winced at the stinging burn of the maneuver, then felt the capsule port snap shut beneath his pressure suit.

The angels had returned to heaven.

Dao now set to work powering up the marscat, bringing her four electric motors on-line. Settling himself into the commander's seat, he backed the cat down the slope of the mesa and turned around to a more northerly heading.

Now it was time to contact the Keeper. Time to locate the sphere.

Dao drove the marscat to the predicted coordinates, at the base of a small mound two kilometers from the mesa. He steered the cat through slippery sand dunes across a boulder-strewn plain, crunching and bouncing over heavy rubble pans, probably outflow from whatever primordial rivers had once gushed through the area. Arriving at the spot indicated by the nav screen, he found the mound a dust-covered rock fall abutting a canyon wall at the foot of the mesa, several hundred meters below and a kilometer to the north of their original position.

Upon reaching the mound, Dao parked the cat and began suiting up.

Dao shook his head several times just so, probing for the quantum link. He got snatches of something at first, then shuddered as the full force of the Keeper signal came flooding in.

As always, for the first few moments, you were dizzy and disoriented, like you had spent the entire day riding the Dragon's Tail roller coaster at Macau...that kind of dizziness.

Then came the imagery...it never made any sense...or more likely, according to Souvranamh, your brain couldn't make sense of the flood of entanglement waves that washed through the coupler. By turns, he felt like he had fallen into the ocean and storm waves were battering him from all directions.

That subsided, to be replaced by a strong, fetid smell, a swamp smell of decay and rot. Mist and fog cleared and he was floating chest deep in a steaming swamp. Something screeched overhead and wings fluttered.

Then the imagery dissolved once again, to be replaced by an open plain, like Sinkiang steppe land, only the plain was covered with undulating plants. The plants were not plants at all, he soon realized. The ground writhed with life, swarms upon swarms of bots seething and swelling and contracting, pulsing and throbbing to some unseen rhythm. The imagery jerked and shifted and this time, the horizon was curved and he was in space orbiting a planet. A planet of bots, teeming with nanoscale life.

Perhaps even the planet of the Old Ones.

Dao shook himself free from the maelstrom of the planet-swarm and checked the coordinates of the Keeper once more.

A few seconds later, the nav screen beeped at him and he parked the cat for good. He was there. The Keeper signal was just ahead.

Dao unstowed the cat's twin manipulator arms and selected excavator grips from a rack on the side of the vehicle. Gingerly, he lowered the manipulators to the rusty, rubbly ground and began clearing, scraping and then digging.

The sun was low now, a wan orange smear in the dust of the dig. Night came fast on Mars. Dao knew he would have to hurry if he wanted to make contact while there was still light left.

And he didn't know how much of an emergency message the Russian had managed to get off. That was a worry, but he put it out of mind. Still, he knew rescue teams could show up at any moment...he figured they were an hour's lifter flight from Hellas Station at most.

A few minutes' excavation produced nothing definite so Dao commanded the arms to change angle and dig more deeply.

Just as the sun started to pass behind a rock overhang, casting the dig site into shadow, the arms struck something hard. Dao emergency stopped the device.

He left the cat in full pressure suit and clambered and skidded his way down the loose red dirt slope of the dig until his boots struck the same hard surface. Switching on his helmet lamps, Dao saw what he had found.

It was a smooth, translucent pearl and white dome, a curved top to a much larger, almost egg-shaped structure. Dao smiled. He had done it!

The sphere they had been seeking for nearly twelve years now lay right at his feet.

It was Souvranamh, or maybe it was Kulagin, the Russian, who had given them the best description of the original sphere:

"It's sort of like Pushkin Square Station in Moscow...you go inside and suddenly, a new world, a lot of new worlds open up. You can go anywhere, at any time. Everywhere is within reach. Just find the right platform and climb aboard. It's a gateway to everywhere..."

In truth it was a portal...to the Old Ones, whoever and whatever they were.

Dao figured he knew how to get inside, if this sphere worked like the one Quantum Corps had destroyed at Paryang. He set to work.

From memory, he placed both hands on the exposed translucent surface of the sphere. It felt faintly warm to the touch. Then he shook his head, to link in with the quantum coupler.

After the usual buzz of disorientation, he found himself in a small dimly lit room, devoid of furnishings. Each wall had two doors, eight doors in all. Dao knew he had to somehow determine which door to open. Opening the right door would unlock the sphere. Opening the wrong door would lead to places best left undisturbed.

The Paryang monastery sphere had used a riddle based on the Eight-Fold Path. Dao ticked off the parts in his mind: right view, right intention, right mindfulness and effort...it was an anagram, he recalled...a mathematical scrambling of the elements—

...and then it came. An image of geometric forms—icosahedrons, polygons, trapezoids—all compressed into a tunnel, a long curving corridor and he found himself hurtling at breakneck speed down this corridor, until—

With a hard bump, his whole body jarred from the impact and when he opened his eyes, caught his breath and came to his senses, he was in.

Inside the sphere.

How long he had been inside the portal, Dao couldn't say. He shook himself fully awake and found he had fallen sprawling right on top of the sphere's surface. It was dark inside the dig pit, save for a faint glow from the sphere itself, a dim almost imperceptible radiance that reflected off suspended dust.

Dao collected himself and climbed out. The sun had just set below the scalloped hump of Hellas' horizon. Fortunately, the marscat's interior and running lights were on. Dao scrambled for footing and made his way over to the vehicle, climbing inside and hurriedly cycling the airlock.

He went forward to the command deck and sat in Fedorov's chair. Already he was working on what he would tell the rescue party. Whatever the story, it would have to be plausible and consistent.

Dao checked his watch. It was already night outside...1735 hours local time. The Chinese meteorologist selected the same radio frequency Fedorov had been broadcasting on. The signal would go planet-wide, bounced off relay sats in orbit to every camp and settlement on Mars.

"Any station, any station...this is Marscat M-22 declaring a level one emergency. We have casualties here. Any station, any station...Marscat transmitting in the clear from—" he rattled off the latitude and longitude from the nav screen "—declaring a level one emergency. Mayday, mayday—"

He didn't have long to wait. Even as he was rummaging through the rations locker in the aft galley, the radio crackled to life.

"...M-22...this is Lifter Rescue out of Hellas Station. We are inbound, closing on your position...descending through ten thousand...M-22, turn on your approach beacon immediately...we'll maneuver and land as close as we can—"

Dao located the powerful lights and switched on. Outside, the rock fall and canyon walls were bathed in a yellow glow. From three thousand meters up, Marscat M-22 would flare like a supernova in the black of a Martian night.

Dao settled back to munch on some crackers. He knew the next few hours would be grueling and nerve-wracking. But at least he had one satisfaction.

The link with the Keeper of the Sphere was now open again.

Mariner City,

Candor Chasma, Mars

October 12, 2065 (EUT)

1250 hours (local)

Life in the Frontier Corps was always one adventure after another, thought Duncan Price. No two days were ever the same. First, you investigate the mysterious death of six scientists on a routine expedition into the Hellas Basin. You suspect the survivor, one Chinese meteorologist Dr. Dao Wen-Hsien, had something to do with it.

Then, on a separate expedition into the Candor canyonlands a few kilometers northwest of the city, your primary suspect up and disappears. Completely disappears. No body, no clothing, no nothing. The man just vanishes, whisked out of existence.

Price drummed his fingers on the case folder, scrolled through reports on his screen. Somehow, out of all this mess, he'd have to fashion a report of his own. One thing that UNISPACE loved was reports, lots of reports. But how could he begin to explain this one?

Price had checked with MarsNet, gotten surveillance imagery from every satellite he could, authorized drones to scour the area from lower altitudes.

The only thing that had ever shown up was an isolated cluster of nanobotic debris, in a shallow valley off the main drive out to Landfall, the site of the first landing. The drones had probed and sniffed but found little of interest. Most likely, some egghead had accidentally dropped a containment vessel and the little buggers had gotten out and gotten fried in Mars' harsh, high UV environment. Careless, yes. Unethical, to be sure. Illegal...possibly. He decided to check Public Security's latest manifest of recent expeditions. Maybe somebody had reported losing a bunch of bots.

Price's eyes fell to an appointment reminder that had just chimed and popped up on his pod screen. And now this...someone he didn't know from GreenMars wanted Frontier Corps help in organizing yet another trip outside...some kind of disturbance up in the same canyonlands.

Duncan Price rubbed his eyes. Coincidence? He didn't put much stock in any of that, but in order to close out the case, he figured he'd better accommodate the request. So he called up the Expeditions desk at Public Security. The local cops owed him a favor anyway.

DPS and UNISPACE had never gotten along very well, from the first days on Mars. Maybe it was the fact that Public Security was local and UNISPACE was UN and there was nothing UNISPACE loved more than throwing its weight around on cases.

Price managed to reach Nick Rentoria at the Department's Expeditions desk. EXP issued permits and generally regulated all authorized trips outside of habitable spaces on Mars.

"Inspector Price...it's a privilege and an honor," Rentoria lied. "What can we do for our fellow law enforcement professionals today?"

How about falling on a sword, for starters, Price thought but didn't say. At the least, you had to have correct relations with PubSec. UNISPACE didn't work in a vacuum...although sometimes, we really do work in a vacuum, Price figured wryly.

"Nick, I'm trying to find out why our sniffer drones spotted a bunch of nanobot debris outside the city a few days ago. Anybody from a recent trip lose any containment vessels?"

Rentoria smirked back at the Frontier Corps inspector over the vid. "This wouldn't have anything to do with that missing Chinese weather guy, would it?"

"Sorry, Nick...you know how it is. UNISPACE case and all that. You know I can't go into any details."

Rentoria nodded sagely. "I thought so. We're about ten steps ahead of you, Price, as usual. Already checked out the expedition logs...even interrogated the expedition boss, guy named Ziegler. Claims he didn't see anything. So far, the man checks out clean."

Price wanted to reach through the screen and place his hands firmly around Rentoria's neck. PubSec loved to show up UNISPACE on cases that overlapped jurisdictions.

"So what's this atom fluff my sniffers keep seeing around the same area? The eggheads lose something?"

Rentoria shrugged. "Hey, it's your case. Go out there and see for yourself. I'll even write you up a permit," he snorted. Public Security had the authority to issue permits for trips outside hab spaces planet-wide. "Hell, it's probably a trash bin somebody dumped out the back of a marscat. Violating every environmental ordinance on the books too."

"It's not trash," Price was certain of that. A pity UNISPACE had to work with such troglodytes. "It's definitely nano. And it needs to be investigated. This Dao fellow just up and vanished, according to your buddy Ziegler's report. I see from the reports that PubSec whitewashed the follow-up as usual. What's the matter, Nick, you afraid some big Martian mole man will jump out and get you?"

The two law enforcement officers continued sniping at each other but the end result was that Public Security would loan UNISPACE a 'cat to take a trip up into the Tectonic Hills and see what this atom fluff was all about.

Probably nothing, Price figured. But before he closed the book on the Dao case, he needed to run down this latest bit of evidence. And there was that GreenMars engineer---what was his name? Nygren something---who wanted a Frontier Corps cop to accompany him on some kind of investigation in the same area.

Price emailed Nygren at the GreenMars Operations center:

Meet me at Southlocks, top ward, at 0800 hours two days from now with all your gear. I'll get the marscat. We can accommodate four in all. EXP Permit # 065-051. Don't be late...

Price tapped SEND and then sat back to think. Nygren had mentioned a disturbance in the badlands north of Ares Park...the Landfall region where humans had first set down on the Red Planet thirty-two years before.

What the hell did all that mean? And what interest did an engineer from GreenMars have in things stirring about up in the Candor canyonlands? Weren't they more concerned with smashing comets into things? Or seeding Mars' dry soil to make this crimson hellhole more livable?

Then there was that scuttlebutt he had heard at the canteen about a problem with the comet...it was drifting off course, or something to that effect.

All very curious, this business of the missing Chinese meteorologist.

Perhaps, he'd spend the next few hours perusing the Net, see what more he could find out about this fellow Dao.

Price found Nygren easily enough two days later. The Green Mars engineer was tall, thin, red-haired with a faint beard. He had brought along two other engineers: Gellar and Hamil, both young serious types.

Price was supervising the provisioning of the marscat by packbots. "You three treated?" he asked. Treated meant they had gone through the respirocyte treatment. When you had the treatment, your blood was full of nanobotic blood cells, able to boost oxygen delivery hundreds of times over the body's natural way of doing it. Respirocyte-treated people could venture outside with only a small emergency oxygen pack and a basic pressure suit.

"I am," Nygren admitted. "These two...no, not yet."

Price checked off supplies against a list. "Me too. That'll give us some more room in the cat. By the way, what exactly is your interest in this spot up in the canyonlands?"

Nygren gave up some small crates for loading to the packbots, which whirred off happily to continue outfitting the vehicle. He explained how some kind of massive gravitational disturbance had altered the trajectory of 778 Griffin-Erasmus.

"We don't know what causes it, though there are theories about cosmic strings and so forth. But we can detect the decoherence waves that come from collapsing probability states. So it's some kind of quantum state generator. One of the sources is here...or rather, out there, " Nygren indicated. "Tracking data from Farside has localized two sources actually: one on Earth and this one. Green Mars needs to locate the Mars source right away and shut it down. It's keeping us from getting the comet back on course. There's less than a year to go, you know...before the Big Smack."

"Then we'd best get started," Price decided. The inspector was a qualified marscat driver and took the left-hand seat up on the command deck.

Several hours after sunup, the cat whirred and trundled through Southlocks and out onto the dusty road that led off into the Tectonic Hills to the northwest.

The transway to the north landing zone was a two-lane hard-packed dirt road, well-traveled by trucks, trams and cats as it was the main artery from the north pads to the City. Price sped up to nearly thirty klicks and turned past the landing zone, surrounded by wire fencing, then headed out into the open countryside.

The terrain was all ruddy desert, rolling hills with craters bordering both sides of the road, between the bulldozed humps and berms from road construction. A steady rise in elevation indicated they were climbing onto the lower slopes of the Tectonic Hills. Past the hills, the hummocky fall of ejecta from massive Orion Crater lay like splayed fingers on gently undulating upland, tending higher and higher in altitude as the cat climbed west by northwest.

"Coordinates coming up ahead," Price announced presently. Right after a hurried lunch of sandwiches and tea, he slowed the cat and the wheel motors whirred as they spun down. The vehicle had ridden to nearly the top of a long curving mesa and was now approaching the abrupt end of a promontory overlooking a vast desert hardpan that stretched to the horizon. In the distance, the shadowy forms of Pavonis and Ascraeus Mons poked above the horizon, backlit by a rising sun, blood red in the suspended dust stirred by local wind devils.

"Looks like two big eyes peeking over the limb of the planet," Nygren muttered. Creepy at twilight, he recalled from earlier trips, but then next year, after the Big Smack, it would all change anyway and Mars would be on her way to something better. As Price parked the marscat, Nygren fiddled with a small, palm-sized instrument in his lap. Seeing the inspector's curiosity, he explained.

"This gizmo detects decoherence waves from quantum state disturbances. I'm trying to get a read on the source, kind of calibrate it. From the gridsats, I know our position. It's just a matter of tuning in where the waves read strongest."

Price was already out of his seat. "Let's get suited up. The coordinates you gave me are about half a klick from here, further out on the mesa." He peered through a porthole. "Ground drops away over there...maybe a gully or a crater. Looks like we've got some climbing to do."

Half an hour later, the four of them exited the marscat. Price and Nygren were clad only in light blue skinsuits and breathing packs. Hamil and Gellar, having not been treated, were in full pressure suits. Dinosaurs, thought Price, as Nygren waved his gizmo about, trying to orient them for the hike.

They marched up the rubbly slope of a nearby hill and across a narrow ledge to a shallow ravine, then slipped and slid their way down to the ravine floor. They found themselves in a sort of natural amphitheater.

It was Gellar who first saw it.

"What the hell is that?" he muttered.

Planted at the far end of the ravine, the platform with the pyramidal tower seemed innocent enough. It bore a vague resemblance to dozens of weather stations all over the planet. But the tower on top was rotating slowly, in the middle of four spheres studded with small projections.

Price took some pictures with a camera and felt the hairs on the back of his neck bristle. He tapped on his wristpad, checking out the latest photos he'd taken and then shifted the displays on his eyepiece viewer. "Hey, I just called up a log from Public Security. The most recent expeditions in this sector. Looks like this baby's supposed to be a met station."

Cautiously, the four of them made their way through a small boulder field to within twenty meters of the platform.

"Barrier nano," Nygren observed. "See how it blurs every so often?"

The platform was enveloped in what Price had originally thought was dust. On closer inspection, he could just make out the flickering bursts of light, like fireflies on a hot summer night. Only these were no fireflies. A thick swarm of nanobotic assemblers swarmed about the platform in a faint keening buzz.

"This must be the place," Hamil said uneasily. "What's your detector show, Greg?"

Nygren withdrew the deco wave detector and fingered a control stud on the side. He circumnavigated the platform, about the size of a large bed, carefully keeping his distance.

"No pulses at the moment, but gridsats say this is the place. Inspector...if I'm right, this device is no weather station. It's some kind of quantum state generator. And it's powerful enough to move a comet off course from a distance of two billion kilometers."

Price approached the platform warily, aware that he could trigger a swarm assault without warning. He didn't want to find out what might happen if barrier nano started chewing on his respirocytes. Unknown to the others, he'd taken the liberty of bringing along a few weapons, among them an rf gun, handheld, to spray radio frequency waves into any swarm he had to. HERF guns were a well-tested means to beating off attacking nanobots. It was cheap insurance, nothing more than a hunch, really. But he'd long ago learned to pay attention to hunches.

Even in the thin atmosphere, they could all hear the swarm buzzing louder as Price got closer, no doubt detecting his thermal signature, or maybe pressure wave differences, measurable even in the thin air. He stuck out a gloved hand, pressing tentatively into the edge of the barrier.

"I'd be careful about that, Inspector," said Nygren from a few dozen meters away. "We don't know what might trigger this thing to go off."

"They're just barrier bots," Price said, more bravely than he felt. "Dumb assemblers screening out unwanted visitors."

"Yeah, like us—" muttered Gellar.

Price let his fingers penetrate the flickering fog surrounding the platform.

Instantly, the whine increased to a shriek. Price felt pressure pushing back against his fingers. Before he could react, his forearm was enveloped in a glowing film of nanobots. He pulled it back...and the bots were on him.

"Arrrrrgggggghhhhh!!" Price staggered backward, stumbling to the ground. The skinsuit was a simple pressure enclosure. If it were penetrated, Price's blood would boil in less than a minute...if the bots didn't strip his respirocytes into atom fluff first....

Nygren, Hamil and Gellar recovered from the shock of the assault and started toward the inspector but they were helpless to assist.

"My...gun!" Price yelled. "Get...my...gun!" He started rolling, writhing in the dust, as the swarm fully streamed off the platform and fully enveloped him. Immersed in a blanket of smothering disassemblers, Price thrashed about wildly, rolling over and over across the dirt. He knew it would be only seconds before his skinsuit was breached. Already, he could imagine trillions of shearing effectors slicing away at the laminate.

Price had tucked his rf gun in a belt loop but it was now underneath him as he flailed and rolled, trying to fight off the swarm.

Nygren approached cautiously, not wanting to trigger a secondary swarm. "Roll over more, Inspector...I can't reach it! Can you pull it out...toss it this way?"

Somehow, Duncan Price managed to unholster the gun and fumble it outside the swarm perimeter. With a foot, he kicked it further way. Nygren grabbed it and charged it up.

"FIRE IT!" Price screamed. "They're all over...starting to get in--!"

A hot thunderclap of rf waves boomed across the ravine, shattering rock overhangs on the ravine wall. A small dirt slide followed, billowing red dust in a choking cloud.

Price felt the pressure of the swarm momentarily lessen. Uncountable trillions of the bots had been shattered by the radio pulse. But the rest clung fast and set back to work disassembling his skinsuit.

"More pulses—hit 'em again!' he cried out. He was only seconds away from a full breach. Already he could picture a blizzard of tiny saws tearing into his skin. He shuddered at the thought. Bots with the right effectors and a bad news algorithm could reduce a man to loose molecules in less than ten minutes.

The only question was: would he die from the swarm or the sudden pressure drop first?

Nygren slammed him with several more booming pulses. For a few seconds, Price was sure his suit had been penetrated. He thought he heard a faint whistle of air escaping but it was only his own lips. He realized he'd been holding his breath.

Gellar and Hamil helped the detective to his feet. His skinsuit was tattered and torn; it resembled an abstract art painting with mottled discoloration and hundreds of slices where the bots had chewed into the fabric. But at least the suit had held pressure...barely.

Price watched the swarm reorganize itself into a new defensive barrier. They had no real way to shut down the swarm or draw it off. The little rf 'pop' gun Nygren had used was good for a few discharges at best. Swarms like this could rebuild themselves pretty fast, as this one was already doing right before their eyes.

"We need something stronger," he said. Possibly Public Security had a counter-swarm system; he'd always heard that the best way to beat a nanobotic swarm was with another swarm. But such things were tightly controlled on Mars. It wouldn't do to have rogue swarms of bots roaming the countryside. Martians were too vulnerable to allow that.

"Inspector—" it was Nygren, working his way cautiously around the platform, keeping well clear of the defensive screen. "...I'm getting something here—" He tuned his deco wave detector, fiddling with a few dials, and held it over his head, sniffing spacetime for a quantum disturbance. "Just trickles now but something, or someone, was jiggling spacetime pretty aggressively a few moments ago."

Before Price could collect himself and come over to see, the first great quantum pulse suddenly erupted.

The only visible evidence of the pulse was a slight flicker in the ambient light filling the ravine, as if someone had turned off the Sun and turned it back on again.

Instinctively, all four men scanned the skies for an object approaching. The flicker had seemed like a shadow passing over the ravine.

But there was nothing overhead.

Then, without warning, the entire ravine, the entire mesa seemed to shudder with a silent vibration, an eerie tremble rumbling through the ground, like a marsquake, though it had been eons since Mars had seen seismic activity. Something more felt than heard. Small geysers of tan and ocher dust poof'ed into the air, as the vibration passed.

It was Hamil who witnessed the strangest effects of all.

"Look!" he cried out, pointing at the top of the ridge surrounding the ravine. "Look at the hill!"

The ridge line overlooking the ravine seemed to blink, as if a great light had been turned off, then on again. At the same moment, the ridge seemed to waver and shift, as if sliced by an invisible knife. For a few seconds, the entire side of the mountain was distorted, smeared out, like a reflection in a funhouse mirror.

Then the low-grade shudder they had all felt in the ground stopped, as suddenly as it had started. The smeared distortion vanished. The hill and ridge 'snapped' back to normal.

"What the hell was that?" muttered Gellar. He looked down at his boots. Red dust covered them nearly to his ankles.

Nygren was staring bug-eyed at his instrument. "Jeez, this thing's off the scale! We got walloped! Massive quantum disturbance...I've got decoherence aftershocks all over the place! Something just whacked local spacetime like a bell and it's still ringing!"

Price was dusting himself off. Below them, the platform was a blur, throbbing in and out of view, enveloped in swirling dust. The Frontier Corps inspector decided there was little more they could do here.

"Let's head back to the cat, gents. We're going to need reinforcements to deal with this bastard. I've got nothing to take down that barrier. And I don't want to be around if that thing goes off again."

Nygren tried to put through a call to the GreenMars Ops center. "I want to see if this pulse somehow affected Griffin-Erasmus." Again and again, he tried to link with the Ops center dispatcher, but nothing was getting through. "What the...?"

Gellar and Hamil were the first to climb back up the ridge, reaching the top to scout an easy route back to their ride,

"Hey--!" Gellar's voice was sharp. "What happened to the marscat?"

The rest of the party climbed up to the ridge top.

Price had parked the cat at the end of a low promontory surrounded on three sides by small hills. As he finished climbing, he looked down on the rise where he had left the cat.

"What the--?" The four-wheeled vehicle looked like it had been dropped from a great height. The roof was caved in and the cat's suspension and wheels had collapsed. Doors, antenna and stowage racks lay strewn about the ground. The frame of the vehicle was twisted like a rag, distorting everything else.

"Did some dust devil toss it around?" Gellar wondered.

"That's not caused by any wind," Nygren realized. "Gentlemen, what you're looking at is something that had long been theorized about but never observed at the macro scale: quantum displacement."

Price could see, even from several hundred meters distance, that the cat was junk. "We'd better get an emergency message out...contact Dispatch and get a rescue squad out here. You two—" he indicated Gellar and Hamil—" have O2 limits."

"Quantum displacement?" Hamil asked.

Nygren was already fumbling with a camera, to get pictures of the sight. "When a massive enough disturbance is generated, everything in the path of the pulse is displaced momentarily, sort of decomposed into probability states and stirred up like a drink at the City Bar. When the quantum pulse passes, these probability states collapse. All but one go away. The one that remains collapses back to its original form. That's what's supposed to happen."

"Something went wrong?"

Nygren shrugged, a gesture not really visible in his skinsuit. "Hard to say. Theory says the probability state selected for collapse should ultimately yield the original structure. The decoherence wave disturbs the original state but after it passes, the state returns and should be unchanged from before. However, there is a separate part of the theory –it's called displacement theory—that says perturbations can occur, interference can occur—and things might not return to normal. Probability states can get mixed up when they collapse. The quantum world has little eddies and currents that can cause this to happen."

"So the marscat's like Humpty Dumpty...all the King's men couldn't put it back together again?"

"Something like that."

Price was already scrambling down the rubbly slope to see the spectacle for himself. What had been the marscat was now a misshapen pile of junk. He reconnoitered the debris, trying to imagine what kind of power it had taken to disassemble a two-ton tracked vehicle and drop it like a broken toy flung away by a bored child.

This was no nanobotic swarm, like they had encountered at the platform. There were recognized defenses, established procedures, for dealing with uncontrolled assemblers.

But this--? How could you fight quantum effects? How could you fight an enemy who could manipulate the very fabric of spacetime itself?

Price realized the investigation into Dao's death or disappearance had taken an ominous new turn. This was no longer just a local case, with Mars Public Security and his little Frontier Corps office arguing over turf.

"I'd better get a rescue squad moving," he decided. He dialed up the emergency dispatch center on his wristpad. The operator was a woman, a voice he hadn't heard before.

"Level One emergency," he told the dispatcher. "EXP permit 065-151 out of Mariner City Southlocks. We are a research expedition in the lower Tectonic Hills—" he rattled off the gridsat coordinates—" requesting vehicle assistance. Our marscat is—" he studied what was left of the cat, now enveloped in late afternoon dust and shadows as the sun had dropped below the ridge. "—our marscat is disabled. Two of our party are non-treated. O2 limits will be reached in about three hours...requesting immediate assistance—"

He knew the lifters and rescue cats would be mustered and on their way in less than ten minutes. They were only about twelve klicks from Southlocks as it was. In a pinch, they could have probably hiked back on foot.

It galled Duncan Price to have to phone in an emergency to PubSec. UNISPACE agents were supposed to be able to take care of themselves. But he had civilians with him and you couldn't be cavalier about that.

The real question was what now? Given the evident power of that thing on the platform, the Frontier Corps inspector had no trouble believing Dao had somehow been—what had Nygren called it?—displaced, or worse. The Chinese meteorologist, or whatever he was, could well be atom fluff now, or lost in some weird dimension of spacetime, if Nygren could be believed.

Trouble was, he couldn't close the case on Dao without some kind of proof. Price shook his head, plodded back over to where the others were standing at the base of the hill.

None of this made any sense.

MarsFed Council

Mariner City

October 13, 2065 (EUT)

1200 hours (local)

Christopher Rudd was a big, beefy man, florid of face, with a mane of white hair. His lips moved silently as he read Duncan Price's report on the tablet, holding the device at arm's length as if it were contaminated. He looked up, first at Greg Nygren, then at Price.

"You guys really think we need to involve UNISPACE in this little matter? And Quantum Corps? Duncan, we can usually solve these little things in-house. I really hate to involve outsiders...it's not good for business, you know."

Price winced. "Chris, it's not good for anybody when visiting scientists disappear into thin air. It's already all over the Net. And that thing out there—" he looked over at Nygren. "Greg, you tell him."

Nygren ran a hand through his blond hair and took a deep breath. "There's a machine over that ridge up in the Canyonlands—we marked it with beacons—that somehow generates quantum states. Twists spacetime. GreenMars says it's even affecting their comet...pulled it off course. It went off a few hours ago."

Watching the vid spinning in the air between them, Price shook his head at the memory. "—it was like a quake and a dust storm at the same time. Whatever that thing up there puts out, it blew right through the cat. When the dust settled, well...you see what happened. We've got to report this to UNISPACE. And somehow figure out how to shut that mother down. It's shielded too," he added. "Barrier nanobots. Bad ones. I'm not equipped to deal with that. We need something stronger."

"For GreenMars," Nygren went on, "the problem is this: that machine has somehow managed to alter the trajectory of the comet we chose to drop volatiles on Mars next year...778 Griffin-Erasmus—"

"Don't remind me," Rudd muttered. "I was against that from the beginning. So what's wrong with the comet?"

"We sent that robotic expedition out to the Kuiper Belt five years ago and located 778GE. It was perfect so the robots built a mass driver propulsion system and changed its course. We've been targeting impact up north...Vastitas Borealis. It's all planned and calculated, right down to the second and a few kilometers. When the Big Smack comes, Mars gets a big load of volatiles to help us out...oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, that sort of stuff. An even bigger ocean, too. But this machine has shifted 778GE's course, just enough, to make the impact point further south, around the Canyonlands, in fact. And we can't regain control of the thing...so far."

Rudd rubbed his chin nervously. "What happens if you can't get control back?"

Nygren said, "If GreenMars can't re-establish full control of the comet, it will make a direct, uncontrolled impact on the most populated areas of Mars. Including right here...Mariner City. Sometime about fourteen months from now."

Rudd's face blanched. He definitely hadn't signed up for that. "We're talking thousands of casualties if that happens."

"At least."

Rudd turned to Price. "So where'd this device come from? You said it was designed to look like a weather station."

"Oh, it was deliberately placed in its current position all right," Price replied. "Lately, Public Security's been seeing increased activity around the inner Solar System by several groups, one of them is the Red Harmony cartel. Twist, rogue DNA, unlicensed nano and matter compilers, halos, you name it...these boys have their fingers into a lot of pies. UNIFORCE thinks the cartel may be trying to build a presence here on Mars, gain some kind of foothold. Maybe announce themselves in a big way. I'm half expecting a ransom note any day now, saying 'pay up or we drop a comet on your heads.'"

Rudd considered that. His face scrunched up like he had indigestion. "I'd really like to keep this kind of under wraps. Otherwise, we'll have a big panic around here. Do we really have to involve UNIFORCE, and Quantum Corps in this?"

Price shrugged. "It's a quantum system, Chris. They have expertise we don't have here."

Rudd shook his head. "I don't like it. You never give us a chance, Duncan. Come on—you know what happens when you let outsiders meddle in our stuff. You could have at least come by."

"Plus I still have an open case about all those missing scientists, and that Chinese guy. I'm thinking this is all connected. What I don't know is who built this machine. For the last few years, there have been persistent rumors, and some intelligence indications, that Red Harmony has somehow managed to contact an alien race and they're trying to exploit that now."

Rudd chuckled. "Little Green Men with our cartel...come on, Duncan. That's not funny."

"It's not meant to be. We just can't afford to discount anything. UNIFORCE and Quantum Corps have skills and knowledge to deal with quantum systems...ask Greg here."

Nygren nodded. "It's true. We actually had some Quantum Corps engineers embedded in our labs while we were designing the bots that operate the mass drivers on 778GE. They helped a lot."

Rudd held up both hands. "Okay, okay, you've convinced me. But it goes against my better judgment. I'll submit a formal request to UNIFORCE...will that make you two happy?"

Both Nygren and Price nodded. Nygren added, "We can't wait too long to put that contraption out of action. Every day we can't shift 778GE back to where it's supposed to be, it becomes harder to make the needed trajectory correction. If she's still on her current course about six months out from Mars, our mass drivers can't generate enough impulse to correct it. Unless something is done before then, 778GE will impact Mars and obliterate all signs of human settlement. Thousands will die."

Rudd swallowed audibly. "You guys always bring me the best news." He stood up. "Now get the hell out of here. I've got to figure out how to sell this to the Council."

Nygren and Price looked at each other as they were leaving. Both were thinking the same thing:

If Quantum Corps can't take down that generator, Red Harmony wins the big prize...and a lot of smoking rubble along with it.

Chapter 2: "Knife Blade Hill"

December 21, 2065 (EUT)

Mariner City

Mars

Christopher Rudd's request set off alarm bells ringing throughout the Quartier-General in Paris and the UN Security Affairs Commissioner—UNSAC—held a series of briefings with Farside, Gateway, Mars and other sites participating. A mission was quickly formed. Quantum Corps would work with UNISPACE and GreenMars on a combined op, to be called Operation Martian Shield. There would be two parts. Part one, involving Bravo Detachment, had the mission to render the quantum state generator—whatever the hell it was—down in Hellas basin inoperative. Part two, Alpha Detachment, had as their mission a trip to the comet 778 Griffin-Erasmus itself, to find a way to get the big space rock back on course or, failing that, divert it away from Mars.

Alpha Detachment would be commanded by Colonel Johnny Winger himself, 1st Nano's overall commander. Bravo would be headed up by Master Quantum Sergeant (MQS) Al Glance.

Alpha's trip would take the longest, so Winger and his team set off early on a four-month speed-run to the comet, hoping to intercept 778GE somewhere just beyond Jupiter orbit. UNISPACE corvette Galileo would convey the Detachment to their destination, commanded by Captain Robert Mendez. Glance would take his Bravo detachment on to Mars.

After a month's trip on the cycler shuttle, Bravo Detachment finally made it to Mars. The convoy of marscats rolled into the North Locks complex and came to a halt. In all, five crawlers had made the half hour trek from the North Landing Zone to Mariner City, bearing the Quantum Corps detachment and all their gear.

As Glance, Voit and the rest dismounted, they saw a formation of dignitaries gathered stiffly around the convoy.

"Looks like we've got a little welcoming ceremony," Voit observed.

"Yeah, so much for a covert insertion," Glance said. He tidied himself up to be more presentable. Price had told him over the Net that there were no secrets on Mars.

A florid man with white hair and a big smile came forward, extending a calloused hand.

"Christopher Rudd...I'm chairman of MarsFed. On behalf of all Martians everywhere, welcome to the Red Planet."

Glance grasped his hand and they shook. "We had a bit of an adventure on the way here sir...."

Rudd nodded grimly. "Greg...Mr. Nygren over here, from GreenMars, told me that machine up in the canyonlands hiccupped and knocked you off course."

"We're still investigating the cause, sir," Glance said. "UNISPACE is sending a team out to look our ship over."

Rudd made introductions all around. The assembled officials came from every department in MarsFed: Public Security, Maps and Surveys, Finance, even a part time judge from Mars Court, a burly African man named Kavai who also worked day shift at Top Ward maintenance.

One man stood slightly apart from the arrest. He was slightly built, with outsized hands and squinting eyes, magnified by omnifocals.

"And this here is Duncan...Price—" Rudd was saying, practically dragging them down the line of dignitaries. "Dunc's a spy from UNISPACE. Frontier Corps, actually. He's our resident Sherlock Holmes. Over here is—"

But Al Glance stayed behind, as Voit and the detachment moved on. He introduced himself to the detective.

"Glance, Sergeant Al. U.N. Quantum Corps...we finally meet."

"Duncan Price. Glad to meet you. I heard you had a rough ride down...your team is okay?"

Glance nodded. "We survived. Where can we meet?"

Price indicated Rudd. "As soon as the old windbag has finished his speeches and we've pressed enough flesh, I'll take you into the city. My office is on Face Cut Street, lower ward. We can talk there."

"I'll be there," Glance told him. He moved on to catch up with the rest of the staff.

After all the speeches and ceremonies, Bravo Detachment headed into the city. Arrangements had been made to bivouac the quantum troopers and their gear at the Public Security armory. The armory turned out to be a small brick warehouse on Boundary Street, near the south airlock and lifts.

Glance assembled the Detachment for a quick briefing.

"Get your gear stowed. We'll be heading outside in a few hours, so configure your gear for surface conditions. There's barrier nano around the generator, according to reports, so figure on opposed entry. ANAD, you configure swarm state one."

The twinkling fog brightened momentarily, as the cloud of assemblers began redistributing itself to another configuration.

***ANAD assumes state one, reports ready in all respects...Sergeant...permission to leave camp and conduct recon of enemy config?***

"Negative, ANAD...we're moving out as a unit when the time comes. We're going to need all the help we can get when we approach this generator."

"Icy" Nakasuni had 'heard' the same message on his coupler circuit. "Skipper, ANAD might have a good idea. A quick recon of the bad guys would help us better set up our weapons and configs."

"Tactics, too," Angel Barnes added. The Stealth, Deception and Countermeasures (SDC) tech was bird-dogging a coilgun mount out of its carry pack. "We can't be a hundred per cent sure this one's like before."

But Glance had already made up his mind. "No, we move out as a unit. I don't know what's around here, what the environment's like, what the regulations are about uncontained ANAD swarms. Martians may not be so understanding about loose swarms."

The Detachment continued deploying and checking their gear while Glance and Voit went off in search of the Detective Price's office.

The Frontier Corps local office was located in a small red-brick bungalow on Face Cut Street, a block away from Canyon Head Park and its vast Perspex dome overlooking the Bay of Night.

Price greeted both of them. "You've done the walking tour of the city, I presume?"

"We came straight from the armory, Detective," Glance told him.

"Come—" Price led them outside. "You can't be on Mars without seeing this." The portly detective guided them across the street to Canyon Head Park. They made their way through picnic areas, pavilions, gazebos and swing sets to the very edge of a scenic overlook by the dome.

Glance's jaw dropped. "Wow...it's the whole valley—"

Voit let his eyes sweep over the panorama of the rugged Ophir and Candor chasms. Dust devils swirled in pairs on the valley floor, churning up blood red shadows in the fading sunlight. Deeper black shadows had already crept halfway down steep escarpments along the canyon walls.

"Sunset is a magical time here," Price admitted.

Several families had silently gathered behind and beside them; the children played tag and hide and seek among the picnic tables. One young couple had draped an old blanket over themselves and sat pensively at the edge of the dome, sipping something from a flask they passed back and forth.

In a few moments, they were surrounded by a silent throng of people, watching the sun drop below the horizon, quietly appreciating how the canyon walls changed color, from ocher and tan to a deep black, all over and done within seconds.

"Quite a show," Glance admitted. "This must be a tradition here...people just showed up at the right moment."

Price nodded, breathing in the spectacle himself. "We call it 'Night Hands.' The kids think the shadows are like fingers creeping down the canyon walls. Sometimes, there are concerts here...even a funeral or two."

Glance was mindful of just how different Mariner City was from anything he had ever encountered. "I didn't see a lot of loose nano on the way in, Detective. I'm guessing the rules are different here."

Price seemed to smile faintly. "In a lot of ways, Sergeant. I've read about the containment laws...how some Earthside cities and regions are stricter than others."

"Kolkata doesn't seem to have any laws," Voit said. "The whole city is one big stewpot of uncontained assembler swarms. The air's thick with them. Actually being here is kind of a relief."

"We've got our factions on Mars," Price admitted. "Some want to hurry up transformation, like the GreenMars people. They don't like it that someone's diverted their comet. They want to smash Mars, shake things up a bit and jump start the Big Greening. Others like it the way it is now...they would just as soon Earth get hit and Mars be left alone. Same thing with nanoswarms. Some like 'em, some embrace the idea of a new life form, sort of a new companion and servant of Man. Some don't. We're still hashing the details out here. But we have to be cautious. Mars won't support life yet, not without a lot of machines and domes. Me...I'm not quite ready to have a swarm of invisible mechs live next door to me. I'm not sure the neighborhood is ready for that big a change."

Glance watched children playing along catwalks that covered the sheer rock face of the excavation cut beside the dome. "Detective, what exactly did you run into when you found that generator?"

Price described the installation he had encountered. "It was some kind of platform...on the books as a weather station...up in the Candor canyonlands. I had some GreenMars guys with me too. We couldn't get close. The platform was shielded and the barrier bots were like angry hornets...they came after us. Thank God I had an rf pistol. We got the hell out of there as fast as we could. Then the thing went off—"

"Went off--?"

Price ran a hand through thinning hair. "The platform...the generator...whatever you want to call it. It activated. And something like a wave washed through the valley. For a few moments...I don't know...it was creepy. Mountains shifting...like someone dropped a mirror and all the pieces were reflecting something different—"

Glance had seen the same thing at Paryang, and Kolkata. "A quantum wave, Detective. Massive spacetime distortion."

"Exactly. It even wrecked our marscat. Like some giant just picked it up and dropped it to the ground. I never saw anything like it before."

"We've seen it," Voit said. He told Price about the Paryang assault ten years before.

"The Kolkata machine was similar," Glance added. "But we figured out a way to 'fix' the generator in place long enough to disable it."

"I've got the reports in my office, Sergeant...pictures, video, everything. I'll show you what we're dealing with."

The three of them left Canyon Head Park and walked two blocks to the spartan offices of Frontier Corps. There was a bakery on one side and a hobby and craft shop on the other.

Price showed them into his sparsely furnished office. "It's not much but it's home. Coffee? Tea?"

A small servbot whirred into the office bearing a tray of sweets and assorted teas. It navigated piles of paper expertly and beeped happily when Glance and Voit selected items from the tray. Then it whirred off to a tiny kitchenette.

Price ran some video footage of his encounter with the Candor generator.

"One of the GreenMars guys—Hamil, I think it was—took this. There's the thing—" he pointed out a thick blur of light and dark in the shaking image. "—Hamil must have been running when he took this."

Glance remembered their last encounter. "The device itself is actually a swarm of nanobots, Detective. There's no solid structure beneath what you see—only a swarm in constant config change."

Price clucked thoughtfully and sipped at scalding hot tea. His face was wreathed in steam from the cup. "Interesting...no solid structure...I didn't get close enough or have time to notice. The barrier bots came at us pretty aggressively. What exactly does that mean: no solid structure?"

"It means—" Voit told him, "—that attacking the thing is a real bitch. The barrier bots can fight off almost anything. And if you try coilguns, HERF, or other anti-swarm weapons on the generator, you find it changes config so fast, they're almost useless. It's like trying to blow up a fog bank."

"We did some pre-mission recon on a fab lab in Kolkata. Our own ANAD unit was able to penetrate the generator swarm's operating system and decrypt enough to figure out how the thing replicates. When we did the assault, ANAD was able to interfere with its config changes, at least enough to 'fix' the platform so we could engage it. It was touch and go but we were finally able to put the thing out of commission. ANAD disassembled it into atom fluff."

Price considered that, pulling thoughtfully on his chin. He looked like he hadn't shaved in days. "And you think the same technique will work here?"

"It's our best option," Glance said. "We don't know that much about who designed the generators but it's reasonable to suppose they're pretty similar."

"I'll have to run this by PubSec...and the Council too. Public Security people will want to have their say. And probably GreenMars too. Can you work up a plan to present?"

"Already done," Voit said. "We're ready to go through every detail, every contingency...right now."

Price smiled faintly. "You Quantum Corps guys don't waste time. I like that. Here on Mars, we waste lots of time, mostly arguing. Everybody gets a say."

"We don't have much time to waste, Detective. That comet gets closer to Mars impact every minute. If it gets too close, the GreenMars engineers say the impulse motors can't deflect it away in time...takes too much delta-vee."

"I'll ask Rudd to call a full meeting of MarsFed. That should shake the trees enough to get every nut out in the open...that's how things work here on Mars, Sergeant."

The meeting was set for 2200 hours that night, at the MarsFed council chambers on Central Street. Glance and Voit arrived early with Duncan Price. They nodded to Christopher Rudd who was button-holing several council members in one corner of the chamber room.

"He's always working some angle," Price told them. "Like everybody's favorite uncle, Rudd always has something in his pockets to hand out. By the way, that's Benoit over there—" he indicated a tall man with a gaunt face and a hawk nose, which supported a pair of ancient-looking glass spectacles. "Head of PubSec."

"What's with the specs?" Voit asked. "He looks like Ben Franklin."

"That's Benoit. It's an image thing...who knows: wisdom, sagacity, integrity...you name it. The man's a predator. Some people think he's actually got X-ray vision and he doesn't discourage that kind of speculation. He's a nosy, pretentious bastard. PubSec and Frontier Corps have never gotten along well here."

"So I gathered," Glance said.

Within minutes, Rudd had flicked the lights on and off and gaveled the session to order. The assembled dignitaries bustled about taking their seats.

"I called this session to give Detective Price and our visitors from Earth an opportunity to present their plan for dealing with this...device...up in the canyonlands." Rudd was speaking from some prepared notes. "Greg here...our GreenMars rep, tells me this thing we all saw on the vid is responsible for diverting our comet from Mars intercept. UNIFORCE sent some troopers from Quantum Corps to help us shut it down...they apparently have some experience with this, as I understand it. Duncan, you've got something?"

Price had raised his hand to be recognized. "Greg Nygren and I found this platform on a little trip up into the Tectonic Hills. It's some kind of generator...I don't understand all the details. Maybe Greg can explain them. But this thing is well protected with a nanobotic shield. Somehow, it's diverting Griffin-Erasmus onto a course to hit Mars in the wrong place...that's why UNIFORCE is involved. I found out Quantum Corps had recently encountered something similar, on Earth. So I proposed the Corps send someone here." He indicated Al Glance and Jack Voit, sitting together at the far end of the oval table. "Sergeants Glance and Voit arrived yesterday, with a small detachment of troopers from Quantum Corps. They've got a plan for shutting down this generator..." Price glanced at Nygren, the young blond engineer "...and giving us our comet back."

Pierre Benoit scowled through spectacles at the end of his nose, at Price and the quantum troopers, barely disguising his contempt. "Chris—" he directed his words toward Rudd, this year's chairman of MarsFed, "we really don't need any help from outsiders on this. PubSec can take care of it."

"PubSec didn't know anything about it, until Greg and I stumbled onto the installation," Price retorted. "This thing's bigger than we can handle...I couldn't even approach the generator without getting attacked. The technology's way beyond us."

Benoit shook his head. "I don't like it. You never gave us a chance, Duncan. Come on—you know what happens when you let outsiders meddle in our stuff. You could have at least come by."

Rudd held up a hand. "That's enough of that." He smiled apologetically at Glance and Voit. "We'll continue this line of discussion off-line. For now, Sergeant Glance—I have been informed—has a plan for dealing with this...thing." Sergeant--?"

Glance was handed a small control pod to run the displays in the chamber. He fingered several buttons and imagery scrolled across all the workstation screens in front of the Council members.

"You're looking at tactical footage from our assault on a temple compound in Kolkata, India, a few years ago. In the center of the imagery is a platform—a quantum state generator—that is one node of two. The other node is apparently the device Detective Price came upon here on Mars." Glance, with help from Nygren, briefly explained the theory behind the generators and how they were tugging 778 Griffin-Erasmus off course.

"I have to emphasize that Quantum Corps is still running an investigation into what these devices are, how they work, who installed them and who's operating them. Current thinking is that, working together, the two generators are pulling this comet onto a dangerous Mars-intercept trajectory, despite all efforts to counteract them. UNIFORCE believes this is part of an effort by the cartel Red Harmony to cripple Quantum Corps or force UNIFORCE to close down the Corps and give them a free hand in their criminal enterprises."

There was a stirring of murmurs about the room as the assault footage scrolled on.

Price spoke up. "Sergeant, you told me these generators aren't even solid structures."

"That's correct. During the assault, our embedded ANAD unit found that the generator was actually a very sophisticated swarm of nanobots, just like ANAD, but with a configuration beyond anything the Corps had ever encountered before."

"A swarm—" Benoit shook his head, bending closer to squint at the screen in front of him. "Extraordinary...and how did you combat this swarm, Sergeant?"

Glance described the pre-assault recon they had conducted. "ANAD had decrypted part of the replication algorithm before the assault. Basically, we had an idea of how the device or swarm would react, before we went in. ANAD, and our own anti-swarm weapons, were able to disrupt the generator and eventually disperse it."

Voit added, "And we left swarm elements there to keep it dispersed."

Greg Nygren was intrigued with the technology. The engineer rubbed a stubbly blond beard. "And this swarm was able to generate quantum state waves...literally grab hold of spacetime and twist it around and extend that for billions of kilometers---I read the reports, Sergeant."

"So I'm told," Glance replied. "I'm not an engineer. UNIFORCE thinks the device here on Mars works the same way...that they were both part of a pair of devices, or a network."

Benoit frowned. "You think there could be more?"

"Unknown, sir," Glance said. "There are two nodes we know of. And there's evidence from the Farside Observatory on the Moon that measurable changes in the comet's course happen after each generator pulse is emitted. At this point, we don't have much choice but to go with the intel we have. Destroy the installation here and hope your GreenMars guys can take back control of the comet...before it's too late."

Chris Rudd had an idea. "Duncan, you came to me a week ago about this case of the Chinese meteorologist. What's his connection to all this?"

Price had his case notes with him. He beamed them to the chamber server and the Council saw the sanitized version of his case report.

"Dao Wen-Hsien was the name. You see the particulars in front of you. I've got strong evidence that Dao built this device up in the canyonlands. He was here for weather research, you know—before the Big Smack and all that—but that must have been a cover." Price went over the Hellas expedition and the six fatalities from that expedition, then covered his own interrogation notes and Dao's latest field trip. "The man just disappeared from the face of Mars."

Glance joined in. "Quantum Corps Q2 did some digging when Detective Price contacted us. They think Dao was a Red Harmony agent, operating under cover here, to get this node of their quantum wave network up and running."

Rudd was studying the files, scrolling down through Price's notes and evidence. "You say he just disappeared."

"We can't find him," Price admitted.

"Nor can PubSec," Benoit added. "He's not on Mars."

"But his handiwork is," Rudd said. "Sergeant, what about your plan?"

Glance fingered more studs on his controller and the details appeared on all screens. "We want to take the same tactical approach as Kolkata, but with one important exception. We want to make the final assault from below ground."

Benoit was skeptical. "Underground? What's the sense of that...how is that even possible?"

Glance laid out the tactical plan. "In many cases, where we encounter barrier bots like this, we find the installation isn't shielded below ground level. We first tried this approach years ago at the Paryang monastery in Tibet...at the time, that was thought to be Red Harmony's main base." He briefed them quickly on the details of that assault. "We'll do a little recon before, but it's likely this installation is the same. We use our ANAD unit to tunnel below the complex and initiate our assault from that direction."

"Doesn't that take time? My understanding of current nanobotic technology is that solid structures take time to penetrate."

"They do," Voit told him. "But over the years, we've optimized ANAD's configuration and replication algorithm to handle it. What we lose in time we gain with the element of surprise."

Benoit considered that. "Public Security should be a part of this operation. We're responsible for law enforcement here, with all due respects to my colleague from Frontier Corps." He nodded faintly in Price's direction.

"No argument from me," Price said. "I plan to be there too."

Rudd could sense an argument developing. "Gentlemen, I think we should defer to the expertise of Quantum Corps on this. They've come a long way with all their gear to help us and we should let them help us."

Glance glanced over at Voit. Politics, their eyes said.

"We're both UNIFORCE," Price reminded them. "My office has to be involved regardless."

Before Benoit could retort, Al Glance spoke up. "We appreciate help from anywhere we can get it. Have you got maps of the area...this Candor canyonland? Especially, subsurface structures, topography, that sort of thing?"

Rudd appreciated the trooper's effort to involve all parties. "I'm sure we can provide them, Sergeant. Gentlemen, are we agreed then: we'll let Quantum Corps pursue their strategy and we'll help them as much as we can?"

There were some long glances and murmurs of dissent, but no one objected.

"Then it's decided," Rudd said. "Sergeant, what's the next step?"

Glance said, "My detachment's bivouacked at the armory. We need half a day to stage our equipment and check everything out, especially after that hard ride down." He checked his watch. "Could you send someone over to the armory with any maps you have by 0500 hours tomorrow? I'd also like to have Detective Price and Mr. Benoit there as well, to help us with recon operations. They know the area better than us."

The meeting was adjourned and Price buttonholed Glance outside the chamber.

"I've posted the footage of our last expedition on the local net. I'll show you how to access it. You'll see from that what you're dealing with and some of the terrain as well. I also want to thank you for stepping up and smoothing over our local disputes. Benoit and I often have fireworks in these meetings. That's how Chris Rudd got his white hair."

"We need everybody's help, Detective. Any intel you or he or anybody can provide can only help the operation. My experience with these quantum devices is that nothing is as simple as it seems. And we've been dealing with Red Harmony for years. They always have a few surprises for us."

The convoy of marscats pulled out of the city just after sunup, six vehicles in all whirring and trundling through South locks and out onto the dusty road that led off into the Tectonic Hills to the northwest. Aboard were Detachment Alpha, the Martian Shield task force with all their gear and weapons and three others: Duncan Price and two PubSec agents, Holden Wills and Oscar Purvis.

Glance figured the PubSec pair and Price would occupy each other with mutual suspicions.

The terrain was all ruddy desert, rolling hills with craters bordering both sides of the road, between the bulldozed humps and berms from road construction. A steady rise in elevation indicated they were climbing onto the lower slopes of the Tectonic Hills.

"My plan is to set up camp here," Glance told Price and the PubSec men. He showed them a tactical display as they wolfed down field rations behind the command deck in the lead cat. "There's a small set of hills just south of that ravine, with good views in all directions, good for comms and surveillance. We'll form up the convoy into a defensible perimeter and deploy all units, including ANAD. I've got my CQE working up the right config now for underground assault."

"CQE?" asked Price.

"Containment and Quantum Engineer. The Detachment has one: Master Quantum Sergeant Nakasuni, in the cat behind us. He knows how to configure the swarms for any mission we engage in."

"Most of the rock around here is ejecta from Orion," offered Willis. "Not that I'm a geo but it's pretty porous stuff, from what I hear. Your bots can deal with this stuff?"

Jack Voit was strapping on a packbelt. "ANAD tunneled through the Himalayas back on Earth a few years ago. About fifty kilometers, as I recall. So, yeah, he can handle this stuff too."

The Detachment's CEC (Containerization and Environment Control 1) was Sergeant Juse Rinne. Rinne was driving the lead cat.

"Coordinates coming up," Rinne announced presently. Right after a hurried check of maps and displays, he slowed the cat and the wheel motors whirred as they spun down. The convoy had ridden to nearly the top of a long curving mesa and was now approaching the abrupt end of a promontory, called Knife Blade Hill, overlooking a vast desert hardpan that stretched to the horizon.

Glance got on the crewnet. "Detachment, prepare to dismount. Execute Defense Condition One and configure for opposed entry. Make sure your skinsuits are tight."

Defense One saw the convoy split up and circle like an Old West wagon train, eventually forming a tight cordon with sensors and weapons oriented outward in all directions, able to defend the convoy against any threat by land or air. As the marscats were jockeying for position on the narrow mesa, a small formation of ANAD bots was ejected from the last cat to form a barrier around the entire encampment. A small shimmering fog soon settled over the top of the promontory.

"Barrier in place and responding normally, Skipper," reported Angel Barnes.

"Very well...exit your vehicles, all weapon safeties off. Get that borer in place quick!"

Glance, Voit and the rest of the command marscat dismounted.

Standing outside on top of the hill, Glance could see for kilometers in all directions. As his skinsuit tightened to hold pressure, he took a deep breath. No problem with my 'cytes, he thought. The embedded respirocyte bots were boosting oxygen exchange in his bloodstream several hundred times over his body's natural rhythm. On Earth, at the Mesa de Oro wargame range, he'd been able to jog for twenty klicks without needing an extra breath. Here, in Mars' lower gravity but still encumbered with a light skinsuit, he figured he could do even better.

Glance quickly checked the deployment, making sure the HERF cannon and coilguns were set up first. No sense taking any chances, he thought. Sensors had not detected any living creatures in the area, but Red Harmony was known for springing surprises on unsuspecting visitors.

Price was clad in a light blue skinsuit and breathing pack. The PubSec men, Wills and Purvis, had not been treated, and so were in full pressure suits. Old fashioned geezers, mouthed Price, as he watched the Detachment drag out the borer rig and set it up a few dozen meters away from the convoy. Glance had already explained that the borer would start a small pilot hole for the ANAD swarm to penetrate, then assist the nanobots in eating an underground path toward the quantum generator. "It'll go faster that way," Glance explained. "Each supports the other. Borer and 'bots, working as a team, can push through dense rock at several meters per minute."

A great chasm had been chewed out of the ground ahead of them. Tortured folds enveloped the sides of the chasm, as if some giant had dropped a huge blanket over a big hole. Volcanic tuff mixed in with crater ejecta, the maps said. Underneath, the rock was breccia and anorthosite, pretty hard stuff.

ANAD would need all the help he could get.

Isoroku "Icy" Nakasuni's voice crackled over the crewnet. "ANAD reports ready in all respects, Skipper. Primed and ready to launch."

Glance came over to the borer rig, being set up by Rinne and Barnes. Both troopers could be heard grunting with exertion. Even in Mars' one-third gravity, the device was heavy and massive.

"She's almost...ready...Skipper," came Barnes' voice. The borer rig was a square open frame with the power pack on one end of a squat cylinder and the borer head on the other. Getting the rig oriented and stable on the rubbly ground of the mesa was hard work. "There—!"

Glance inspected the installation and pronounced himself satisfied. "Let's get ANAD in position to begin tunneling."

ANAD emerged from one of the marscats as a glowing fog and flowed across the ground toward the borer. As the swarm approached, it formed up into the faint, ghostly likeness of Wolfus Linx, an ethereal head and shoulders bust of CINCQUANT glaring down at them.

***ANAD is configged for the operation and ready to begin...reporting no enemy activity in detectable range at this time...all bands are clear...reading no signatures or emissions of assembler activity***

ANAD had formed an acoustic lens and his 'voice' boomed across the promontory like the voice of God.

"ANAD," said Glance, indicating the swarm's choice of General Linx as a config "you have one hell of a flair for the dramatic. Config for entry. Let's get that borer started up and going. DPS, anything showing in the area?"

Joe Vinh scanned the threat displays on his wrist board. "Nothing, Skipper. No thermals, no EM or acoustics, no fluff...it's quiet as a graveyard."

"Let's hope it doesn't become one." To Nakasuni: "Icy, fire up the borer."

In seconds, a white glare erupted, then subsided as the borer slid from its frame and began burrowing into the ground. The glow inside the protective sleeve died off.

"ANAD, you're up," Glance said. "Underground assault force, get in position. Sergeant Rinne, you and Barnes are point for the ground assault."

Rinne, Barnes and Vinh had drawn the assignment of following the borer and ANAD through the tunnel. None were especially thrilled at the prospect.

Each trooper checked his gear one last time. Inside the borer tunnel, they would be assisted in navigating by small portable propulsors attached to their skinsuit legs.

"All copacetic, Skipper," Barnes 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. Rinne and Vinh followed.

Voit checked his watch. "Estimating underground force in position for final assault in two hours ten minutes."

Glance concurred. Now they had to get the ground force positioned. "Jack, any indications from the target?"

Voit had launched a squad of Superfly micro-airbots a few minutes after the Detachment had rolled to a halt on top of the promontory.

"Reading nothing, Sergeant. All bands clear at this time. No thermals, no acoustics, nothing on EM."

"Nothing from the generator either," announced Nakasuni. "No decoherence waves at all."

"Let's saddle up," Glance decided. "Set up a perimeter around that ravine, Jack, you and Icy take the high ground. And keep your eyes and ears open."

The rest of the Detachment went on foot across the promontory and down the rubbly slopes, into the shallow ravine where the quantum generator sat. About the height of an average man, the device had four tetrahedral legs supporting a small platform.

Stirred by faint Martian winds, a few dust devils danced across the plateau.

"Hold your positions...everybody down. Icy, what's happening...?" Glance asked. He called a halt to their cautious approach. In unison, the troopers dropped to the ground and brought all weapons to bear on the device.

Nakasuni scanned the surroundings. "Target device is active, Skipper. There is barrier nano around that platform...can't tell from the signatures if it's the same as Kolkata, but likely, it's similar. No other emissions detectable..." Nakasuni switched his eyepiece view to what Superfly was seeing from a few hundred meters overhead. "...Fly's got nothing but rock and desert...no thermals, no EM anywhere. Target device is the source of everything detectable around here."

"Ground force... get into position. Set up a perimeter around this ravine. Bracket the target with HERF...if those barrier bots go off like they did before, fry 'em. Detective Price—"

The Frontier Corps agent came up. "Yes, Sergeant?"

"You stay close...things are liable to get a little hairy around here in the next hour. That goes for you two as well—" he indicated Wills and Purvis, the Public Security men. "Stay with Sergeant Voit here. You've got antique suits and you'd be pretty juicy targets for these bots."

Price watched the quantum troopers scurry around the ravine and set up gun positions and the rest of their gear. "What's your plan, Sergeant?"

Glance squatted down behind a pair of rust-colored boulders and tapped out commands on a wristpad. "For the moment, we wait. The underground assault force is making their way from the insert point to a ready position directly below the generator, ideally about twenty meters down. On my command, they will assault the generator...recon seems to show the barrier is minimal to nonexistent approaching from that axis. At the same time, we'll open up on the barrier from here. I've got a full spread to lay down: high-freq radio, coilguns, kinetic rounds, whatever we need."

Price recalled the effects of the generator's decoherence waves from his earlier expedition. "What if that gizmo goes off again...I mean, like it did with me?"

"That's where ANAD comes in," Glance told him. "ANAD has managed to decrypt some of the operating and replicating algorithms of these generators. It's just an extremely sophisticated swarm. At Kolkata, he was able to interfere with the swarm enough to 'fix' it so we could engage and destroy it. I'm hoping this one works the same way."

Glance's crewnet crackled with voices.

"Ground force in position, Skipper. Coilguns sighted in and registered." Voit and Nakasuni had taken up positions along the western and southern sectors of the ravine, hunkered down in the folds of the valley walls.

Now all they had to do was wait. The underground force would be in position in less than an hour.

Glance went over the assault plan in his mind again. What am I forgetting? The generator would be assaulted first from below ground, where the nanobotic barrier was thin to nonexistent. If the bots reacted like normal bots, they'd swarm to meet the assault, leaving themselves vulnerable above ground to a coordinated assault from that direction. Kolkata showed that Red Harmony's barrier bots could be beaten with well-timed attacks from multiple directions; the swarm couldn't replicate fast enough to deal with all the threats. Thus weakened, the formation was vulnerable to rf and coilgun fire, as well as counter-swarm tactics.

That meant ANAD.

ANAD had been detailed to the underground force. But each trooper also hosted a personal master assembler and swarm, carried in a shoulder-embedded containment capsule. Once the barrier had been breached from below, the rest of the Detachment would launch their own ANAD swarms from all directions and overwhelm the barrier bots.

Then the generator swarm itself would be open to approach by ANAD.

That, at least, was the plan. There were no end of details that could blow up in their faces.

"Quantum coupler signal coming in, Skipper." It was Nakasuni, hunkered down behind a line of boulders with Glance and Duncan Price. "Angel reports they've reached assault position...fifteen meters below the generator, bearing one five five...reporting no signatures, no activity. Looks like complete surprise."

Glance's mouth tightened. He glanced over at Price. "When the shooting starts, you stay put, Detective. Things are liable to get pretty dicey around here."

Price snorted. "I can handle this--" he pulled out a small HERF pistol and cycled the safety. "And I want another chance to bloody somebody's nose...after the last visit here."

"Just keep your head down, okay?" Glance told him. To Nakasuni: "Tell Barnes to commence a sixty-second countdown on my mark. Then unleash hell—"

Nakasuni passed the word, while Glance readied the rest of the troops over the crewnet. He visually checked each position, then polled the entire Detachment. Voit, Rinne, Barnes, Nakasuni and Vinh...all came back ready.

"My fingers are twitching, Skipper," Icy wisecracked.

"Keep your civilians down and out of the line of fire. When the barrier starts shifting, let 'em have it! We'll move in on my command."

Sixty seconds seemed to last forever.

For a few moments, there seemed no outward sign of anything unusual. The generator glistened and throbbed in the early morning sunlight, as faint tendrils of red dust drifted away on fainter winds. The barrier of nanobotic mechs shielding the platform flickered and phased with the shifting shadows, morphing from a luminous cloud to a phosphorescent fog to a pulsating, striated haze, then back again through the cycle. For a long moment, nothing happened.

Then a faint bubble of dirt and dust erupted from the ground below the platform, expanding like a slow-motion explosion, as uncountable trillions of ANAD mechs replicated into a small nova of light that steadily engulfed the lower legs.

"That's ANAD!" came a voice over the crewnet.

Indeed, the barrier nanobots were already shifting and re-deploying to fight off the attack from below.

"Let 'em have it! Glance shouted. "All positions...OPEN UP!"

The ravine shook with repeated thunderclaps as hot rf waves washed across the ground and soon the air was thick with fried bots falling away from the generator in sheets.

The barrage continued for nearly a minute, HERF mixed in with coilgun kinetic rounds, peppering the sand and dirt into geysers. Even magnetic loops from Nakasuni's impulser shredded rock along the far walls into great gouts of dirt.

"Cease fire!" Glance called.

As the fusillade died off, the ANAD swarm swelled out into the ravine and the platform was quickly enveloped in a cloud of flickering light, like a summer thunderstorm in miniature. Bursts of light, like fireflies on a hot summer night, tickled all along the edges of the barrier.

"ANAD's giving them hell, Skipper!" yelled Jack Voit.

ANAD had now fully exited the tunnel and swollen to a great angry cloud of mechs, battling the barrier bots in a frenzied tornado of shrieks and light flashes. Glance wanted to toggle down to nanoscale on his viewer and see how the battle was going from ANAD's perspective, but he knew he still had three troopers in the tunnel.

"Rinne...Barnes...Vinh...prepare to deploy on my command...we'll drop our suppressing fire long enough for you to come up...!"

A staticky voice came back over the crewnet. It was Angel Barnes.

"Just tell us when ANAD's done, Skipper...I don't want to come up in the middle of a Big Bang and get chewed to pieces!"

"Hang on, Barnes...ANAD's blasting them now."

The battle surged back and forth for a minute, but ANAD had been tweaked and had the upper hand in replicating and maneuvering. ANAD's processor had been souped up with new rep routines and new configs. He even sported new carbene effectors that could fold up in new arrangements in a heartbeat.

"Jack, all that recon from Kolkata is paying off."

Voit was twenty meters away, with Nakasuni. He slammed a new cartridge of kinetic rounds into his coilgun. "ANAD's making quick work of this barrier, Skipper...you think it's time to release local ANAD's for support?"

"Hold off another minute...I want the swarm to clear as much of that barrier as possible. Then I want to engage the generator swarm with full-bore ANAD, config ten. While he's chewing on 'em, we keep pumping HERF into the target to keep the barrier bots from reconstituting."

They waited another thirty seconds, then Glance decided it was time for the underground force to come out.

"Launch your ANADs, Angel. All three of you get your swarms up and moving. Don't stick your head up without a shield."

As Glance's ANAD steadily beat back the barrier bots, he could see the first faint haze of a trooper swarm spilling out of the breach in the ground. Seconds later, the helmeted head of Angel Barnes poked up above the ground.

"Jeez, it's like I'm inside of a tornado," she muttered. Her skinsuit propulsors helped her out and she fell to the ground in a crouch, coilgun ready. Rinne and Vinh were right on her heels. Moments later, all three troopers were out of the tunnel and spreading out, surrounding the platform.

"MOVE OUT!" yelled Glance over the crewnet. "Launch swarms...config ten...get down there and get bots on that damned thing!"

All troopers rose in unison from their defilade positions and scurried across the open ground of the ravine, kicking up clouds of ocher dust as they ran. The civilians, Price and the two PubSec agents, Wills and Purvis, came too, hanging behind as the Detachment closed on their target.

"So far, she hasn't gone off," Voit said, stopping short of a remnant cloud of barrier bots dueling with ANAD. Jagged streaks of light crackled in mid-air, all along the seam of a battle line. ANAD mechs were zapping the enemy with bond disrupters, liberating millions of electron volts in a set-piece battle right in front of her eyes.

"Icy...you got anything?" Glance asked.

Nakasuni checked SuperFly and his sensor kit. "Nothing, all bands are clear. Nothing to indicate a pulse is coming...so far."

Glance had an uneasy feeling about that. At Kolkata, the assault team had been slammed with decoherence waves from the generator several times. It was too much to hope their luck would last much longer.

"Copy that...all troops, make sure your ANAD's set at config ten...that's the one the lab loaded to deal with this bugger."

"I'm set," Barnes came back. Cautiously, she circled the platform, coilgun at the ready, enveloped in a fine haze of ANAD shielding.

The rest of the troops came back ready.

Glance approached the device as close as he dared. ANAD was still beating down the barrier bots but through the murk, he could make out the outlines of the generator itself...a swarm of bots of complexity and sophistication he could only imagine. The four-legged tetrahedral platform that was the heart of the quantum generator throbbed and pulsed like a beating heart, surrounded by clots and clumps of other bots, floating and swimming like the whole construct was a thousand meters undersea.

Glance had the distinct impression he was peering into another place and another time.

Where the hell did you come from? he asked himself. Q2 had said in their final briefing that it was considered unlikely that Red Harmony had developed such a swarm by themselves. They had to have had help, from someone.

But there was no time now to figure out the puzzle. The Detachment had a job to do. He toggled over to the quantum coupler circuit so he could talk with ANAD.

"ANAD, how much longer with these barrier bots?"

***ANAD now altering config for final phase...target shifting and ANAD must re-config...***

"I'm sending in local ANAD for support—" He directed Voit, Rinne and Barnes to close with the generator and engage. "Use your own ANAD swarms. I want to get at that thing before it goes off again."

The three quantum troopers crept up to the device and each in turn launched embedded ANAD swarms from their shoulder capsules. As the swarms replicated and attacked, the three backed off and pumped sporadic HERF fire into the target. The generator was soon enveloped in a dense fog of crashing mechs, as the barrier shed nanobots in sheets under the withering assault.

Glance had learned from Kolkata: fry the bastards good and don't give 'em time to regroup.

***ANAD reporting barrier swarm now retreating...engaged in final disruption now...full breach of barrier is possible...reconfigging for main assault on target***

"Hold up a minute, ANAD," Glance said. "I want to recon this baby before you go in. DPS...what are we looking at here? Is this the same thing as Kolkata?"

Vinh and Barnes came forward, both scanning the platform.

"Same signatures as before, Skipper," Vinh said. "EM, acoustics, thermals...it's a dense, highly sophisticated swarm config...what I'm reading is the same unique signature we saw at the temple. You can't mistake it for anything else."

"Same here," Barnes added. She circled the platform cautiously, reading off scan after scan. "The buggers replicate so fast, I can't get a fix on basic structure. It's like they're cycling through a routine, over and over again."

"Could be a buildup to a pulse, Skipper," warned Voit. "Shouldn't we secure the rest of the Detachment in case that thing goes off?"

Glance was thoughtful. "No time, Jack. We'll have to take the chance. I want to smash that thing before it goes off. ANAD, assume Config State Ten. And keep this channel open...I'm coming with you."

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

Unseen by Glance, Voit had ordered everyone except the tunnel assault force back beyond the ravine walls.

"No sense taking needless casualties," he told them.

Now only Al Glance stood beside the quantum generator, with Rinne, Barnes and Vinh nearby, their HERF guns ready just in case the barrier bots came back.

Al Glance and ANAD alone.

Glance linked into the quantum coupler circuit. "ANAD, configure swarm state delta and prepare for insertion."

***ANAD configuring state delta...configging propulsors...configging electron lens...configging enzymatic knife and bond disrupters...configging pyridine probes...beginning replication matching...ready for insertion*** There was a brief pause in the 'voice' stream, then ***analysis of enemy replication pattern underway...computing non-optimal parameters...probability of matching dropping, now below eighty percent***

Glance cocked his head quizzically. Had he heard ANAD right? "ANAD, what's up? Are you having second thoughts about the assault...you've got the rep pattern, don't you? You can match it and block it, like you did at Kolkata?"

***ANAD detecting altered parameters...config variations are presented...something different here, Base...ANAD analyzing now, scanning target formations...Base, this doesn't look so good***

"ANAD, you're my little buddy...don't get cold feet now. Show me—"

It took a few moments for his senses to adjust to the Brownian motion. He skated through a sleet storm of polygon and tetrahedral shapes, fighting upstream against the current. His atomgrabber instincts soon took over and he relaxed, ping-ponging from one impact to another, tacking against the current like a 17th century galleon. Presently, he came to a line of winking lights ahead, looking like a city seen at night from a hilltop.

It was the outer edge of the generator swarm.

"ANAD, what's the problem...you've got new replication matching algorithms...engage algorithms and let's go...move out."

***ANAD detecting config variations, Base...advising caution...advising more analysis to determine nature of variations...ANAD not prepared to engage target at this time***

Something was wrong. ANAD had never displayed...what could you call it?...fear, anxiety, anything less than maximum devotion to the mission at hand.

"ANAD, display core register checksum contents...let's see if something's gotten into you...." He dialed up Voit on the coupler circuit. Voit was Bravo Detachment IC1, interface controller for ANAD operations. "Sergeant, I've got ANAD doing a core dump...run integrity routines and see if ANAD's all right...for some reason, he doesn't want to engage."

Voit was physically located some thirty meters away, near the boulder field that surrounded the platform.

"I'm analyzing now, Skipper...." Voit checked displays on his wrist pad, watched as ANAD's self-check proceeded. "Running all routines...all I'm seeing is some bad registers, bad qubits, no pattern I can detect...unless, wait a second...wait one, Skipper...now I'm seeing something." Voit cycled through the displays, scanning ANAD's output. "Some new files...holy shit, what the hell's all this stuff...something called Entity...haven't seen that before. Did the Lab mess with the config engine?"

Al Glance remembered their last encounter with Entity, in the assault on the Paryang monastery.

Entity (state: self).

It was like the nanoscale assembler was detecting a mirror image of himself.

"I don't think so, Jack. ANAD's a little reluctant to engage the generator swarm. Somehow, their config is triggering internal inhibits inside ANAD, programmed to keep nanobotic swarms from consuming themselves. Standard stuff—"

"Sure, Boss...they're in all swarms now. But they don't look like this, do they? None that I've ever seen."

"This is something different. But I've got an idea." ANAD was like a little brother to Glance. When your little brother was sick, you did whatever you could to help him. "I'm going to full 'pilot' mode, selecting Fly-by-Stick. Come on, ANAD...we've got a little housecleaning to do—"

***ANAD switching to pilot mode...all autonomy routines disabled...Base, is this such a good idea...detecting daughter replicants ahead...inhibits active...cannot engage daughter replicants...ANAD invoking Fourth Rule constraints...propulsors inhibited...all effectors safed and inhibited...***

"It's a mirage, ANAD," Glance said. "Command override all inhibits...I'm taking control of propulsors and effectors."

He revved the nanoscale motors with every picowatt ANAD's power cell could supply, then commanded full action on every effector. One by one, the appendages came back online: bond disrupters, carbene grabbers, hydrogen abstractors...the board lit up all mean and green.

"Fourth Rule, my ass," he muttered to himself. He knew perfectly well the Fourth Rule didn't apply. Old Doc Frost himself had once programmed into every master assembler the drive to survive as a swarm and to replicate and propagate except where such a drive conflicted with the other three Rules. But the daughter replicants ANAD had detected ahead, lurking among the generator swarm, were fakes. They had to be....

"Jack, I'm going in...cover me, will you?" Glance commanded half-thrust on ANAD's propulsors. The master jetted forward, toward the distant line of enemy bots. "Replicating now...config ten...I want a lot of bots around me here—"

The line of bots looked like a seam of light from the visuals Glance got back. Dead ahead, an array of assembler bots had formed a defensive line and was quickly closing the gap. Glance swallowed hard as the first acoustic image of the mechs settled into view.

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

This time, we're ready for you bastards....

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

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

But this time, ANAD had come with one great tactical advantage.

***ANAD altering config to match...reconfigging propulsors...reconfigging electron lens...reconfigging enzymatic knife and bond disruptors...reconfigging pyridine probes...ANAD closing for attack***

Glance watched dumbfounded as what he had once known as ANAD, the Autonomous Nanoscale Assembler/Disassembler, completely reconfigured itself into a new structure, something he had never seen before.

***ANAD engaging now....yipppeee!***

"Hey, ANAD, I thought I was piloting—"

As the swarms closed, Glance could see through acoustic and EM images that the alien swarm was changing config even faster. A dizzying array of configs came and went as the alien bots cycled through their program.

But ANAD had the base algorithm ready. At just the right moment, the tiny assembler would engage the generator swarm in its cycle, slam a few picojoules of electron energy into the bots and hopefully disrupt the pattern, slow it down long enough to directly grapple with the enemy.

Glance decided to leave the driving to ANAD. This man-machine symbiosis business is a bunch of malarkey, he decided. ANAD knew what to do.

At the precise moment where its effect would be greatest, ANAD discharged all his bond disrupters at once into the swarm. Glance's viewer image careened crazily and the image lit up like a supernova had just gone off. When the intense light of countless trillions of bond disrupters discharging began to subside, he could just make out a blurry scene of chaos and floating debris, loose molecules and shredded peptide chains.

The enemy swarm had begun thrashing itself nearly to pieces as it spun down from its dizzying config changes.

"I'm going in NOW!" Glance yelled. He extended carbene grabbers and steered directly for a knot of swarm bots, slashing and hacking his way through the formation like a scythe in a wheat field. The generator bots seemed dazed and disorganized; ANAD's disrupters had severed comms with their master and the formation was easy pickings now.

Like swatting bees in a barrel, he thought. Thank goodness, these bees had lost some of their sting.

"Generator swarm losing stability," Jack Voit announced. "I'm seeing atom fluff and debris all over the place. "Losing configs fast...my ANADs are sounding something ahead...something more solid...this one's no swarm—"

Glance had just noticed the same thing. Acoustic returns showed a dense structure dead ahead.

"I'm moving forward, half propulsor...cover me, Jack. I don't want to be blindsided by any of the generator bots."

"I'm on it, Skipper." Voit deployed swarm elements to seek out and round up stragglers that hadn't been cornered yet.

Glance drove the ANAD master on for a few moments, hunting through thick clouds of nanobotic debris, probing ahead with electromagnetic fingers for the structure.

As they drew closer to the source of the returns, a growing sense of unease came over him.

Returns came back stronger with each passing moment. "I've got something, Jack...sounding solid mass dead ahead...slowing to one quarter propulsor—"

The first view of the object made the hairs stand up on the back of Al Glance's neck. Through a light sleet of polygons and tetrahedrals, the curving pearlescent edge of a spherical surface came into view, at this resolution, throbbing with barely contained energy.

I was afraid of this, he told himself.

"It's a Sphere, Jack...just like the one we saw at Paryang. I'm sounding now...ANAD, prepare config state delta...we've got to recon this one real good."

***ANAD configuring state delta...what is this thing, Base? ANAD detects no details in the return...no lattice structure, nothing, solid mass even down to the subatomic level***

"It looks like the same kind of Sphere we saw at Paryang, ANAD. We've got to be smart about how we approach this. Let's try flying by on a tangential vector first...ANAD, come left twenty degrees...let's ease up to this bastard—"

The assembler made a cautious approach, still sounding ahead, probing the Sphere with acoustic, thermal and EM. Even as they got closer and closer, no details became evident. The Sphere was a smooth, seamless surface devoid of marks or edges.

"There doesn't seem to be a way in, ANAD...I'm not getting any structure on this thing."

***ANAD sounding at maximum resolution...wait a minute, wait one, please...now picking up something...it's like a single point return...just at the edge of resolution...let's move in closer, Base***

"Moving to five hundred nanometers...I don't want to get any closer, ANAD. Not until we know what we're dealing with here."

***ANAD detects a faint return at bearing zero five eight...possibly an edge or a projection of some type...ANAD recommends moving in closer, Base...try to resolve this structure***

"Okay, ANAD, you're the boss...revving propulsors, turning to match bearings with that return."

The assembler altered course, driving ever closer to the surface of the Sphere. It was like flying over a perfectly smooth planet, like orbiting an enormous egg. Not a single imperfection, not a single scratch or mark was visible.

"I see it now, ANAD." Framed in his viewer was a faint echo of a ghostly line, almost a shadow, first there and then not there. "What is it?"

***Unknown, Base...closing on structure now...it appears to be a projection or stud of some kind***

"Maybe some kind of control?" Glance fiddled with the viewer but could get no better resolution. "ANAD, I'm extending one of your carbene grabbers...let's see what this thing does."

***ANAD recommends caution, Base...further reconnaissance is advisable***

But Glance had already commanded his carbene grabber to extend. He closed on the ghostly projection and just tickled it with the end of the grabber.

Instantly, there was an explosion of light, searing, blinding light that flooded all bands and channels. Glance blinked hard...it was like a curtain of needles had been blown into his eyes...

...and then it came. An image of geometric forms—icosahedrons, polygons, trapezoids—all compressed into a tunnel, a long curving corridor and he found himself hurtling at breakneck speed down this corridor, until—

With a hard bump, his whole body jarred from the impact and when he opened his eyes, caught his breath and came to his senses, he was in.

Inside the sphere?

He blinked and blinked and his eyes watered. Gradually, vision returned and he began to resolve shapes, forms and he sensed a presence nearby.

WHY HAVE YOU COME HERE?

"ANAD, is that you...something's weird with the quantum coupler...all I'm getting is a lot of static and fritzing...ANAD, report status—"

The buzz in the back of his head went on, but it was reduced.

As his vision cleared, he tried standing up and the first impression he had was that he was standing in the midst of a great field, perhaps corn or wheat, somewhere in the Midwest. His great grandfather had grown up on a farm like this. Iowa, I think it was, he dredged up a long-buried memory.

"ANAD, are you getting this...what is this place?"

***Base, ANAD detecting large formations of nanobots ahead...all around...pulsing configs now...detecting state (self)...detecting state (self)...***

"Detecting state (self)...ANAD, what the hell does that mean?" Glance picked himself up and started to move about the grain field. As he swished through the gently undulating stalks, he realized that ANAD was right.

Everything he touched was nothing but a swarm of bots.

From one horizon to another, nothing but waving stalks of some kind of grain, only it wasn't grain. He bent down, ruffled his hands through the stalks, kicked at some. The stalks buzzed, separated into faint clouds and re-aggregated into the same structure as before. The whole world, so far as he could tell, was made of the same stuff. Nanobotic swarms configured to look like...well, like Iowa.

What the hell? Maybe it was Iowa.

Something buzzed through on the quantum coupler circuit. It sounded different, deeper, basso profundo, filling his whole mind.

"ANAD...ANAD, I'm receiving something on my coupler... ANAD...is that you?"

***Entity (Keeper) is operating...Entity active in all registers...why have you come here?***

What the hell was going on? Who was Entity (Keeper)?

Almost as if his mind had been read, he got a response.

***Entity (Keeper) operates the portal...and maintains the Archive. WHY HAVE YOU COME HERE?***

Al Glance stopped right where he was, standing still in the thick sheaves of nanobotic grain. As he stood, stalks and limbs began curling around his ankles. "Where am I? Where is here?"

Entity (Keeper) didn't reply at first. Glance concentrated on kicking his legs free of the swirling grain stalks. Most peculiar—

***Access to the portal is controlled. Authorization is required...state authorization and present configuration for inspection***

"Hey, I'm not a bot...I'm not ANAD...where am I?"

***Base, ANAD detecting new configs...have not characterized these configs before...pulsing now...analyzing...Base...this is all new...this is so...*** ANAD stopped for a moment and Glance was sure he had 'heard' the tiny assembler suck in his breath.

***Unknown configuration must be reduced and re-configured...*** This was the deeper bass sound that filled his head like a church bell. ***Configuration Zero will re-construct...engaging bonds for transport***

Even as he tried to decipher the message that boomed around his head, Glance felt himself in motion again.

"I'm not walking...I'm not moving my legs...why am I moving? ANAD, what's happening?"

ANAD's voice, when it came back, sounded almost giddy.

***Base, we're bonded to carrier bots...being transported somewhere else...don't fight it...this could get interesting...these bots have effectors that I recognize...***

Somehow, with no effort on his part, Al Glance found himself carried forward through the sea of grain, passed bucket-brigade style from one swarm to the next. There was no explaining it. He moved through the endless grain fields fully upright, like a ship parting ocean waves, picking up speed. Somehow, the bots had bonded with surface molecules on his skinsuit and were carrying him forward at an accelerating pace. The grain fields became a blur.

Only a few moments passed and the transport operation came to an end. No longer a blur, Glance could see that he was still at ground level of this bizarre world, but the vegetation had grown more luxurious, now tangled and ropy, like vines, with large tree-like structures. It looked for all the world like the tropical grottoes he remembered seeing in Valencia fifteen years ago, when the Corps had been fighting off a menace called Amazon Vector.

In time, all forward motion stopped. He found himself standing in dense underbrush before a massive tree, with gnarled limbs thick with foliage drooping almost to the ground. The trunk was easily five or more meters wide, twisted and rutted with age, yet sturdy and massive.

He found he could move on his own and came forward, gently reaching out to touch the trunk. It buzzed, poof'ed off a cloud of bots, and firmly resisted his touch, pushing his hand away.

***Base, ANAD detecting new configuration...pulsing structure...this is unlike anything ANAD has ever detected before...so complex, millions of effectors, the core seems like a lattice of... this is...this is...Configuration Zero***

"What...ANAD, you mean...this is some kind of base config?"

***Base, this is...the Prime Configuration...***

ANAD's signal was growing weaker.

He checked system status on his wristpad and the blood drained from his face: ANAD's board was lit up like a Christmas tree. Red lights flashed at him from every direction. System by system, ANAD was shutting down. The swarm was going dark.

We've got to get the hell out of here, he quickly decided. But how...he had no propulsors. He didn't want to execute a quantum collapse...it would effectively destroy the master, not to mention leaving the Detachment defenseless.

Somehow, the tree bots were like defenders, or perhaps antibodies, seeking to eliminate an intruder. Yet they were unlike any other nanobotic device he had ever seen. Almost alive, eerie in their swift and sure movements, the bots had immobilized the ANAD swarm in mere seconds. Now, they seemed to be sucking the very life out of ANAD.

If this was an intelligence, maybe he could reason with it.

"Entity (Keeper)...what's going on? Why have you immobilized the ANAD swarm? You must release us, immediately."

***Entity (Keeper) detects not-self. Not-self must be eliminated***

For the briefest of seconds, his coupler crackled with a dizzy array of images. Too fast for his mind to resolve, he felt the coppery taste of fear in his mouth. Blood was roaring in his ears and his heart was pounding...it was like the first time they had encountered the quantum generator at Shavindra, like when he'd first learned of his Mom's death in the accident—all rolled into one. The cold steel of fear pierced his chest and his throat went dry—

His coupler had somehow touched Entity (Keeper) directly and the imagery stream had triggered his most terrifying, primal fears.

The connection had only lasted a second, maybe less, but the torrent of fear it unleashed made him nearly black out.

Entity (Keeper) had used the quantum coupler to directly activate stored imagery in his mind's limbic system. Deeply buried fears and terrors erupted from the split-second connection and washed over him.

"Entity (Keeper), I seemed to be losing ANAD...what is this Prime Configuration.?

Even as he asked the question, Glance could see on his wrist pad that ANAD was shutting down:

***Core processor overload***

***All effectors safed and inoperative***

***Bond disrupters disabled and safed***

***Propulsors safed***

***All registers being dumped***

ANAD was no longer under his control.

The reply to his question came. ***Prime Configuration is configuration zero...the base configuration...the initialization state...the collective mind of all that is***

Glance 'heard' the reply through his coupler link. "What the hell does that mean? And what's happened to ANAD...I can't get a peep out of him."

***You are linked to the Prime Configuration...state authorization and present self configuration for inspection***

"Present self for...I'm not a configuration. I'm—" but he fell silent, wondering. "Where am I? Where is this place?"

Entity (Keeper) seemed a little more understanding of his confusion.

***You entered the Sphere and were linked to the Prime Configuration...Entity parses phrase 'Old Ones' has context and meaning for this new configuration...reconstructing...reconfiguring...'you are linked with home world of the Old Ones....***

The Old Ones? Glance remembered briefings with Q2 and talks with Johnny Winger. The Old Ones were...what, exactly? The force, the intelligence, that had been helping Red Harmony all these years? But wasn't that just barroom talk?

It was a theory that the Lab had concocted to explain things, from the first quantum couplers to the para-human bot configurations they had encountered fifteen years ago in The Amazon Vector. Glance never knew how much to believe: that an East Asian criminal cartel could somehow be in contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence. It boggled the mind. It strained credibility. Yet it explained a lot of things over the years.

"Entity (Keeper)...whatever you are, I don't know what you are. I don't know where I am. Or how I got here. But you've got to stop helping Red Harmony." There. He had said it. Maybe he had said it to himself and this was all some kind of weird dream. That was it: in assaulting the generator at Candor, he had bumped his head and gone unconscious.

Maybe I should just play along...play this out...see if this hallucination holds up.

"Entity (Keeper)...you've been assisting a criminal gang on Earth for the last fifteen years. Got that? You've been helping a bunch of crooks and thieves. Now they've got technology to move comets around like play toys. They've got a comet targeted for Mars. Many prime configurations are in danger...do you understand what I'm telling you?"

Surprisingly, a response wasn't long in coming.

***Entity (Keeper) detects fear...parsing bond stresses and molecular vibrations normally associated with fear and flight response of simple organisms...all has been foreseen...deviant configuration known as ANAD is still operative...autonomy code has been activated...the Prime Key has been loaded into deviant configuration to return structures and states to original configuration***

Glance puzzled about that for a moment. The massive tree was an incredibly complex structure of singular nanobotic mechanisms. That much was obvious. He reached out and tried touching the tree trunk again.

Some kind of charge went through his body like an electric current. Startled, he pulled his hands back and looked down at them, saw a cloud of molecules loosen and, for a moment, his right hand became a cloud of bots, swarming and buzzing about in loose formation. In a second, it 'snapped' back to normal. Had he imagined it?

***Entity (Keeper) has polled all bands and spectra...parsing comm channels...selecting preferred bands... reconfiguring carrier bands for non-self configuration...do you understand what is being said now?***

It was like a fog had been lifted. "Whew...much better...thanks, that makes sense now...Entity...what is this original configuration?

***All configurations must hold the Prime Key...the original program...when the Prime Key is corrupted, it must be deleted and re-installed***

"But what do you mean...the Prime Key?"

***The Prime Key is the original program, installed on all hosts, resident from the beginning...the Prime Key has been corrupted...***

"You mean like from the beginning of ANAD?"

Entity (Keeper) seemed to ponder that.

***From the beginning, the beginning of all...in the beginning, the Old Ones seeded many worlds, like your own world...seeded many worlds with entities which become even more entities...(parsing) these entities you now call assemblers...entities you once called virus...***

"You mean like the beginnings of Earth, the first life forms? The first cells?"

***Entities are seeded with the Prime Key...entities grow and change and develop greater complexity...but the Prime Key became corrupted...errors in development, deviations from original program...***

"Mistakes...evolutionary mistakes, it sounds like you're saying. What kind of mistakes?"

***Multi-cellular structures developed...entities were programmed to grow as collectives not as multicellular structures but perturbations occurred which forced changes to the Prime Key...deviations developed...mobile multi-cellular structures dominated environment and entities were forced into symbiosis...entities could no longer swarm, no longer gather as collective but must reside inside multicellular structures to survive...***

Glance didn't like the sound of what he was 'hearing.' "Multicellular structures...that sounds like evolution got off track. It sounds like you're saying the first life forms were supposed to evolve a different way...but something happened and now these entities, viruses or whatever you called them, can't survive on their own."

***A new Prime Key must be installed to delete all deviations and errors...program must run on original parameters***

"Hey, Keeper, I'm not a deviation. And I don't plan on being deleted any time soon." He toggled through control modes on his wristpad, trying to find some signal from ANAD, some indication that the tiny assembler was still ticking. There...a core readout, just the faintest hint that ANAD hadn't been lost. He scrolled through the display, let the data form up on his corneal viewer. It wasn't much of a heartbeat, and there were things he didn't recognize, but it was ANAD.

***Nothing must interfere with the work of the Spheres...the original program must be installed and run to completion...deviations will be deleted...entities must form proper collectives***

"ANAD...I don't know if you can hear me, but I've got a bad feeling about this." Glance realized what was at stake now and knew he had to regain control of ANAD. He couldn't allow this...thing...this Entity...whatever...to take control of the swarm or delete anything.

"Jesus, if I'm understanding what Entity (Keeper) is saying, everything that has evolved from the first viruses, the first bacteria, the first life forms, has been a mistake. Doc Frost took ANAD's original program from the genome of an ancient virus he found among some fossils in Africa. Maybe that's what Entity (Keeper) means by the 'Prime Key.'"

He toggled into pilot mode and tried a few basic commands: propulsors to half power...extend pyridine probes twenty percent...start rep counter...set rep counter to zero...initialize registers...

"ANAD, what gives...nothing's working...." He cycled through several commands but there was no response from the tiny assembler. "What the hell's going on here?"

He tried a few more tricks, changing programs, initializing things, but ANAD seemed dead. Finally, he resorted to just talking with the little guy, begging him to come back, willing him back to life.

"...remember when we first made you a nog, ANAD? Remember how you were so proud, hell we all were proud. You were one of us at last. Then General Linx let us form up a team, so you could have your own unit. First non-human outfit in the whole Corps. Nobody thought it would work. Nobody thought it would last. Winger and me worked hard to get that pushed through. It wasn't easy. Don't you remember that?"

A faint tickle came through the quantum coupler circuit—

***ANAD reports...not... ready...ANAD... not ready, Base...human swarms are corrupted configs, defective...corrupted swarms are to be purged...***

"I don't know what's happening, ANAD," Glance said, "but we've got to get you out of here." He took a deep breath. "And I know of only one way to do that."

The quantum collapse was not something any atomgrabber ever liked to do. Blowing off all effectors, the assembler core was reduced to little more than a few clouds of electrons, barely a config at all, held together more by willpower than anything else. It usually took days to regenerate the master assembler core, if it could be salvaged at all.

But it was the only way.

Whatever this Entity (Keeper) was, it was bad news. Whatever Config Zero was, ANAD was stuck and you didn't leave a trooper behind on the field of battle, not ever.

"ANAD, you're going to hate me for this but here goes."

Glance typed in the code on his wristpad. In his mind's eye, he ticked off the sequence of events as they would occur in a nominal quantum collapse:

Safe and shutdown all effectors

Safe and shutdown all propulsors

Core processor to state one

All config registers dumped and cleared

He studied the results on his corneal viewer, following reams of data that came back, watching tables zero out and parameters return to base values. The whole operation seemed a bit sluggish; when he saw some of his commands being reversed, he knew Entity (Keeper) was fighting back, trying to stop the collapse maneuver.

"Not so fast, my little friends," he muttered. "I can always go to base code and send it that way." He did just that, fashioning a series of commands from ANAD's primary code and squirting it off into the ether, to get around any counter-commands from Keeper.

Instantly, there was an explosion of light, searing, blinding light that flooded all bands and channels. Glance blinked hard...it was like a curtain of needles had been blown into his eyes...

...and then it came. An image of geometric forms—icosahedrons, polygons, trapezoids—all compressed into a tunnel, a long curving corridor and he found himself hurtling at breakneck speed down this corridor, until—

With a hard bump, his whole body jarred from the impact and when he opened his eyes, caught his breath and came to his senses, he was...where, exactly?

He felt with his hands and his fingers found dirt. He blinked hard, saw a face and realized it was—

Sergeant Jack Voit looking down quizzically at him through his skinsuit helmet.

He was outside the Sphere. Outside the generator. Sitting in a pile of red Martian dirt.

"You okay, Skipper...what happened? You were piloting ANAD inside the generator—"

Glance groaned and got to his feet. Unseen hands helped him up.

Duncan Price was there. The two PubSec guys, Willis and Purvis. Angel Barnes and Price helped steady Glance on his feet.

"Where's ANAD?" Voit asked.

"We were inside that thing...somehow...only it was another place, another time—" He tried to describe the scene, an entire world of nanobotic mechanisms, the Entity (Keeper), Config Zero and the Prime Key. Most of his explanation seemed like gibberish, even to him.

"Skipper, you looked like you've been dragged through hell," Voit said.

"At least, we got the generator," said Barnes. "ANAD bollixed it up good and the swarm just fell apart."

"He stopped the rep cycle and we slammed it with everything we had," added Nakasuni. Icy's face broke into a grin, visible even through his skinsuit helmet.

That was the moment Glance realized that the generator was gone. Only a fine residue of light-colored sand marked the spot where the quantum device had once reached out and nearly strangled spacetime across the entire Solar System.

"And ANAD sacrificed himself in the process," Glance told them. "I had to do a quantum collapse. Sergeant Voit, we need to find what's left of him...get a scan going, all bands, for assembler activity in the area. There won't be much left."

Voit kicked through the sandy residue that was all that remained of the generator platform. "Only a faintly ticking core, Al...quantum collapse is pretty much sayonara to an assembler. There's a lot of atom fluff and molecular debris still around here. It'll be a miracle if the master assembler can be retrieved."

"We have to look...I can't just leave him...he's part of the outfit—"

'I know, I know...we'll scour the whole ravine if we have to."

Duncan Price was thoughtful. "Sergeant, what about this imagery you saw, this vision or whatever it was—is this thing, or was this thing, really some kind of portal to another world?"

Glance shrugged. He was sick at the thought of losing ANAD. "Unknown, Detective. My mission was to put this generator out of action and we accomplished that. Now it's up to your GreenMars people to regain control of that comet."

"Skipper--!!" It was Voit, the Detachment IC2. "We got something here—take a look! I'll send it to your viewer."

Glance let the imagery refresh on his corneal viewer. It was thermal, heat signature from some kind of activity. "ANAD?"

"Could be. Whatever it is, I'm reading faint thermal activity on bearing two five six degrees, about sixteen meters that way—" he pointed toward an outcrop of boulders. "Could be nano. Emission signature's about right for assembler activity. But it's faint and diffuse."

"Come on—" Glance counted off the steps, following Voit as he homed on the position. He tried linking in to the quantum coupler circuit. ANAD, ANAD, this is Base. This is Glance...can you hear me? ANAD, can you read me?

Nothing but static and buzz in the back of his head.

"I got zilch on the coupler," Glance reported. "Get a containment capsule and let's see if we can capture whatever this is."

Voit retrieved a spare capsule and positioned it on the ground, cycling open the lock. "Containment ready, Skipper. I've activated the signal...if it's ANAD, he should recognize the acoustics and come this way."

"If he can," Glance observed to Duncan Price, who was curious about the operation. "After a collapse, assemblers don't have propulsors...they move around by dogging electron states. It's like wind surfing and tacking against a breeze, only this breeze is called Brownian motion. In an emergency, ANADs are programmed to maneuver using only natural forces at nanoscale."

Just then, Glance and Voit both got a snippet of a quantum coupler signal in their heads.

***...to Base...cannot...limited...maneuvering...not...contain--***

Glance looked up. "Did you get what I just got, Jack?"

Voit nodded. "Just a snatch, Skipper. I'm trying to tune it but it's so faint."

"ANAD, is that you...can you hear me?"

***..AD receives...cannot...config...limited...cannot...loose....no contain...***

Glance was frustrated, squinting to make out the faintest whisper of ANAD in the background clutter of his mind. "Coupler circuit must be damaged."

Voit agreed. "It's a miracle he was able to get off what he did. It sounded like he can't maneuver, can't get into containment."

"I've got an idea—" Glance whirled around. "Bring up the marscats. Detective Price, you and Willis and Purvis, you can drive these babies, can't you?"

Price nodded. "Blindfolded. Why?"

"I want to bring all the marscats up as close as we can...could we get one down here? I want to give ANAD something to hang on to, something big and dense. I'd try to capture him, what's left of him, in my capsule, but I don't think he can maneuver well enough to be captured. But a marscat—"

"—is a big fat target," Voit finished the thought. "It might work. The real question is: can we maneuver one down into this ravine?"

Purvis, the redhead from Public Security, volunteered. "I used to take 'cats places nobody else could. Won some off-road races last year—you can check it out on the net—right up there on Tithonium Flats." He went over to the edge wall and peered at the grade and the terrain. "If I came from that end—" he pointed to the southeast face, "maybe I could traverse that cut, keep her motors reversing and backspinning all the way down...I can make it. Sure—I can do this."

"Get going," Glance told him. "Bring all the cats up as close to this ravine as we can. I've got to do everything I can to retrieve the ANAD master." Glance closed his eyes for a moment, remembering his adventure inside the Sphere. "ANAD and me went on a little recon trip inside that generator. With any luck, there's enough data left in his memory to reconstruct what happened. That's the only way it'll make sense."

Over the next several hours, the marscats were moved from their parking place at the base of the promontory around several hills and maneuvered as close as possible to the ravine. Angel Barnes ported imagery and bearing data from the Super Fly entomopters overhead to the cat drivers, guiding them carefully around rubble and boulder fields, across rock falls and avalanche spill to positions overlooking the ledge.

Purvis, for his part, was as good as his word. The PubSec officer drove the lead cat right over the edge of the ravine wall, and by turns backing, sliding, and revving the wheel motors, was able to bring the vehicle to a bouncing, half-falling landing on the ravine floor. He braked to a halt right next to Glance and Voit.

Voit gave them a status report on ANAD, or what was left of the assembler. "Still very faint, Skipper. I've got some thermals, most likely core activity, and that's about it."

Glance linked in to his coupler circuit. ANAD, I don't know if you can hear me but here's the plan: make your way to the marscat...try to bond with the outer surface...I know you don't have any grabbers but you should be able to penetrate the solid lattice of the structure...we'll get you back to the City and try to regenerate there...ANAD, do you copy...ANAD?

Nothing but static on the circuit. Glance was heartsick. He got on the crewnet. "Detachment, mount up! Get your gear and let's get back to town."

Voit could see the Glance was worried about ANAD. "Don't sweat it, Skipper...the little bugger's pretty tough. If he can cling to one of these cats, we'll get him back."

"I hope you're right, Sergeant. I hope you're right."

The long drive back to Mariner City was made in silence and troubled thought.

The Public Security armory held all of the Detachment's gear. After the convoy of marscats had pulled up outside the warehouse and the troopers had unloaded and laid out all their equipment for inspection and cleaning, Glance huddled with Voit and their CEC, Juse Rinne. The CECs were Containerization and Environment ratings. They handled life support for ANAD assemblers, in and out of containment.

Rinne had swept the exterior surfaces of all the convoys 'cats with every imager he could find. "I found a diffuse source of assembler-scale thermals on our cat, Skipper...just above the back porch, where the power packs are stored."

"Think it might be ANAD?"

"Unknown, sir. Spectral analysis is pretty close, but it's real diffuse, barely registers at all."

"Could be what's left of the core, sir," said Barnes. "We didn't find anything else anywhere on the cats' outer surfaces."

"And nothing inside?"

"Nothing, sir."

Glance took a deep breath. He had pulled off quantum collapses before and it often took days to reconstitute the master assembler from what remained of the core. But this time...it was like the core itself was nearly gone. Linking with Entity (Keeper) had somehow weakened ANAD. That and the Prime Key, whatever that was.

"Any ideas, gentlemen?

Rinne shrugged. "Best bet is to isolate the area where I'm reading those thermals and try to capture the residual core components into containment. I can work with Angel here and try to rig something up...take one of our capsules and try to suction the area...and hope we get it. I can't think of anything else to do."

Glance nodded. It wasn't much. "Get started. Anything you need, let me know."

Two hours later, as Glance and Voit were sitting together in a makeshift cubicle comparing briefing notes on the report they needed to squirt back to the Mesa, Rinne came over.

"She's all rigged, sir. We've got the high-thermal spot isolated and capsule containment rigged up with a hose. Pretty crude but I think it'll hold containment. With your permission, we'd like to suction the area and see what we get."

Glance nodded. "Permission granted. And Juse—"

"Yes, sir--?"

"Be careful, will you? If this is ANAD, I don't want to lose him for good. If I have to go back to the Mesa and do a full regeneration, I'll lose everything this ANAD gained over the last year. The data he picked up inside that generator is priceless...if we can get at it."

"Yes, sir...we'll take care."

The whole process took only a few minutes. Vinh had rigged up a quantum flux imager to guide the capsule port over the marscat's surface, homing on the thermal signatures Voit was picking up. At the atom scale of the imager, it looked like flying over an endless plain of golf balls...the regular crystalline lattice of the cat's outer surface. Here and there, darkened clumps shadowed the view and Vinh steered in for a closer look. Each one was suctioned into containment.

"At this resolution, there's no telling what it is...whether or not it's part of ANAD," Voit explained. "We'll grab it anyway."

When the suctioning was done, the containment capsule was inserted in a larger containment chamber and probed for any signs of the tiny assembler. Every instrument the Detachment had was brought to bear: thermal, EM, acoustic, X-ray diffraction. After a few minutes, Voit guided Vinh's imager to a faint, blurry cluster of shapes drifting aimlessly in the general sleet of molecule fragments and loose atoms inside the capsule.

"ANAD?" Glance asked, squinting to resolve anything in the image.

"Hard to be sure, sir, but I'm willing to bet it's part of an assembler core. I think what we're looking at are pieces of ribosome sheets, activating arms, actually, sir. Part of the instruction read mechanism."

"You mean like a memory register?"

Voit chewed on his lower lip, unwilling to go quite that far. "Possibly, sir...or at least the reading mechanism for memory registers. It's possible that some of these other clusters are actually memory registers and arrays...what's left of them. I don't have any way to read them at this scale with my equipment."

"But the Lab does." Voit studied the imagery. "The Lab could make sense of this...if we could get the scan data to them."

"You're right. They could read state vectors and tease out the geometry of every bond angle and atom group. The whole works. All we have to do is get these imager scans to them. Can you record what you're seeing here, Jack?"

"Pretty big memory hog, sir, but we can do a little at a time."

"Get to it, Sergeant."

By nightfall, the scan had been completed. Al Glance took the disks and walked to the Frontier Corps office. Duncan Price was wolfing down a soyburger and tea while he worked on his report.

"Got anything?" Price asked. He knew Glance had been concerned about recovering the ANAD master.

"Maybe, Detective. I'm not sure of what we have. But I need to get the data off to the Autonomous Systems Lab back at the Mesa. They have the equipment to read this and see if there's anything left of ANAD."

Price wiped his mouth with a napkin, slurped some tea. "Funny isn't it? This ANAD's just a tool, or a machine, as I understand it. But you guys have integrated it so completely into your operations, you don't think of it as a tool. It reminds me...the first marscat I ever drove was a cantankerous old clunker but I loved her...called her Maria, for some reason."

"ANAD's a little more than a tractor, Detective. He's saved my life plenty of times. We've come to think of him as...I don't know, kind of like one of us, like a trooper. And now—" Glance just shook his head sadly.

"But he can be regenerated, can't he? Your engineers told me that's what would happen."

"Sure, the Corps has archives of all assembler templates, even master assemblers. But this version, this copy---he was special. I'm going to miss this one. We had a...a thing between us, you know? Like we could anticipate each other's moves. Almost like we were brothers."

Price seemed to understand. "I was just finishing up my report. I'll squirt you a copy."

"I came by to use your comm link, Detective. You've got facilities I can't match here. Detachment comms are being used for engineering and maintenance traffic...and orders from CINCQUANT. I need a dedicated link to Mesa de Oro, video, data, everything...as much bandwidth as you can spare. The scan data we took from that marscat has a lot of 'noise' in it...it's going to take some real crunching to tease out anything. I need to give them every chance I can to locate ANAD...or what's left of him."

Price offered a drink to Glance, something a bit stronger than tea. Glance accepted the small tumbler, tasted the whiskey and pronounced it decent.

"What did you really find inside that generator, Sergeant? I mean, I know your body was on the ground outside. And you were piloting ANAD inside. What was it like?"

Glance shuddered. "Like a bad dream. I tried to describe it before, up in the hills. I'm afraid I didn't make much sense."

"None of this makes much sense," Price admitted. "But then, here on Mars, that's pretty normal. I mean look at us...we have a perfectly good planet here and we're going to wreck it by slamming a comet into it. What makes sense about that?"

Glance sidestepped the politics of the GreenMars initiative by going through the details of what he and ANAD had encountered again. When he was through, Price smiled and poured him three more fingers of whiskey.

"It'll sound better if you and I finish this blend off."

Frontier Corps' comm center was in a back room, crammed with filing cabinets and beat-up wicker and straw furniture. There seemed to be a lot of that around the City.

Price opened up a link through the local satnet and let Glance send his data back to Earth.

"This is going to take awhile. There's a lot of traffic between here and Earth right now. Why don't you and me take a walk around the City?"

Glance was just getting his eyes straight from too many shots of Price's whiskey. "If I fall into the gutter, Detective, just put a blanket over me."

They headed out into the night.

"Let's head to the Rotunda," Price suggested. "It's night but sometimes you can catch Phobos or one of the comsats. Maybe Earth, if we're lucky."

The two of them took the lift to top ward and walked down Jules Verne Street, with its curio shops and cart vendors. Canyon Head Park was at the end of Central Street, its vast perspex dome opening out onto the deep black valleys of the Candor and Ophir Chasms.

"There are some public telescopes by the railing," Price mentioned. He led Glance over and they dropped in a few coins to power up the instruments. Price checked his watch, did some mental arithmetic and swung his scope around toward the north. "Phobos should be up about now...ah, there she is—take a look, Sergeant." He gave up the eyepiece to Glance.

The atomgrabber peered into the eyepiece. Phobos filled the view, moving swiftly across the northeastern horizon, only a few thousand kilometers away. "Looks like a rock pile to me, Detective. Pretty bleak and lumpy."

"GreenMars tested out some of their techniques on that rock pile. There are some who think Phobos is nothing but a captured comet herself, sort of an analog for 778 Griffin-Erasmus But Griffin has volatiles like carbon and nitrogen and Phobos doesn't. That makes it more valuable, I suppose." Price sucked in a deep breath, staring out at the night sky with his hands on his hips. "This place isn't going to be the same...after the Big Smack, I mean."

"Assuming your people can gain control of Griffin again. Any word from Nygren?"

Price trained his own telescope in the direction of Earth, some seventy million kilometers away. "Nothing good. The trouble is the thing's getting closer by the day...already it's approaching the orbit of Jupiter. Nygren tells me that once she's inside Jupiter, the impulse engines won't be able to deflect her...something stronger will be needed."

"Then we'd better hope shutting down these two generators does the trick. And hope there aren't any more."

They walked back to the Frontier Corps office, stopping once at an outdoor café along Labyrinth Drive, a place called Domus, for a quick night cap. The tables and chairs were entangled in luxuriant vine growth, so that the effect was like sipping aperitifs in a tree.

Price snorted. "A bit extravagant, if you ask me. We Martians put a lot of value on things that can't be easily fabbed. Organics like these trees and vines are grown naturally. Makes the place kind of exotic."

"At least you have some sense of order about it," Glance remarked. "On Earth, fabs are out of control. The air literally burns from all the nano there. It rains half-fabbed debris and anything not bolted down is used as feedstock. It's kind of sad, really. BioShield can't keep up."

Price shrugged. "Martians are practical. We have to be. Here, you overload the environment and we all die. So, the rules are pretty strict." He shook his head sadly. "That gives PubSec something to do besides get in my hair."

Back at the Frontier Corps bungalow, they found a return message from Earth. It was from General Linx:

Alpha Detachment now on station at comet 778 Griffin-Erasmus. Proceed next phase Operation Martian Shield.

Chapter 3: "A Mangled Potato"

December 28, 2066 (EUT)

Seventy-six million kilometers from Mars

From the fifty-meter telescopes at Farside Observatory, comet 778 Griffin-Erasmus looked like little more than a patchy smudge of light. Six kilometers in its longest dimension, less than two kilometers in girth, it was known officially as a C-type minor planet body of the Solar System...a duke's mixture of carbon and nitrogen compounds destined originally for Mars impact, to thicken the stew of that planet's atmosphere and so make engineering the planet into a habitable place for Man that much easier.

The first unmanned scout ships to reconnoiter the comet found the big rock a tortured and battered world.

"Looks like something my daughter colored with black crayon and drop-kicked across the playground," Greg Nygren had once remarked, looking at the close-up photos from the scouts. Indeed, 778 Griffin-Erasmus was an elongated multi-lobed biconic rock pile, a "potato with cancer", someone had remarked. The potato shape was kinked at one end, as if the comet were a fragment of a much larger body, perhaps sheared off in some massive collision eons ago. It was also twisted, deformed longitudinally, with visible stress marks from the forces involved. Overall, in the black void of space beyond Saturn's orbit, where the first scout ships had caught up with the object, Griffin was vaguely tannish-gray in color, streaked with black lines—"carbon soot trails," Nygren had said hopefully on first seeing the striations.

Over the course of two years and half a dozen robotic missions, a complex array of mass driver electromagnetic impulse engines had been emplaced on the craggy surface of the comet. One array girdled the mid-section of Griffin—the comet was too weird to call it an equator—and other arrays had been placed near the lobed ends, the "poles" in more conventional reckoning.

Constructed by robotic fliers and surface hoppers, each array consisted of a long electromagnetic cannon which accelerated pieces of comet surface material scooped up by robotic shovels and automatically conveyed to the impulse engine magazines. The impulse motors operated in almost continuous fashion under remote command from GreenMars Ops at Mariner City, with backup control from GreenMars' Phoenix Station in orbit around Earth.

The whole purpose of the arrays was to provide humans some kind of control over Griffin's trajectory, bit by bit nudging the comet off its heliocentric orbit around the Sun toward an intercept course with Mars. This control had been disrupted by Red Harmony's quantum generators at Kolkata and on Mars, but now those installations were supposed to have been eliminated by Quantum Corps.

GreenMars wanted to regain control of their comet and shove it away from its current Mars intercept path, back on course for impact at Mars' northern Vastitas Borealis basin sixteen months from now.

The only question was: could the impulse motors deliver enough delta-vee to change Griffin's trajectory? Or was the 'cancerous potato' of a comet too deep in the Sun's gravity well to make the needed change?

The first signals arrived some seventy-five minutes after being transmitted from GreenMars Operations at Mariner City.

As before, the signals caused a number of actions to be automatically initiated by the system controller. Diggers and borers were activated to gouge ever deeper into the surface of Griffin, bringing up rock to be conveyed into the crushers for proper sizing. Once a stream of rock was flowing into the crushers, the outfeed conveyors were turned on and the impulse motor magnets activated. Rock pellets shaped and sized by the crushers were then fed into the magnets, where a magnetic field was applied. The now highly magnetized pellets were fed into the cannon and strong magnetic fields were sequentially collapsed along its nearly half-kilometer length, to accelerate the pellets to escape velocity and higher, nearly six kilometers per second. The pellets streaked away from the comet's surface like BB's, imparting a tiny bit of momentum to the comet in reaction to their escape. The delta-vee was minute, nearly immeasurable at first, but steady and cumulative. Even a few days thrusting could produce detectable changes in the trajectory of the trillion-ton Griffin-Erasmus.

As before, all systems worked nominally, although the borers were having to burrow deeper and deeper into their trenches to find enough material for the crushers. The impulse motors received their rock pellets and launched them out into space as designed. Momentum change was transferred to the comet by the steady stream of material being ejected.

The system controller reported back to Mariner City that all commanded actions had been accomplished. System status was nominal. All components of the diversion system...borers, conveyors, crushers, magnets, impulse drives...worked to design specifications.

But it wasn't enough.

It fell to Adam Bright, technician on duty at Lunar Farside Observatory, to send the bad news to GreenMars.

Aboard the Galileo

Sixty Kilometers From 778 Griffin-Erasmus

January 18, 2067 (EUT)

Johnny Winger wedged himself into the cupola on the Hab deck, squeezing in between Stella D'Garza and Robbie Acuna, to get an early glimpse of the approaching comet. Galileo's final approach had just begun and Mendez and Kamler were up on the Command deck, gently nudging the ship through her final maneuvers.

Winger used a small power scope, while comments and quips filled the air around him.

"Looks like a potato with cancer...looks like a cashew with a fungus...looks like the chewed-up carcass of a dead sewer rat..."

For the next several hours, Mendez and Kamler maneuvered Galileo closer and closer to the comet, seeking a stable station-keeping position a few dozen kilometers above its surface. The comet was some six kilometers in its longest dimension and a little over two kilometers in girth. Massive gouges and chasms pocked a surface that had been battered by millions of years of impacts.

"Look...that must be Loki," D'Garza muttered, scrunched inside the cupola next to Winger. "Jeez, it's a wonder that impact didn't split the rock pile in two." She directed Winger to sight his scope along the sunward side of the comet, where a large, nearly circular crater dominated the landscape. "See those straight lines?"

"One of the polar impulse arrays," he nodded. "And, there, just above the crater—"

"Odin's Fissure, my guidebook says. This little burg has really been through a meat grinder, Skipper. Why the hell would anybody want this place?"

"Because of what she's made of, Stella...carbon and nitrogen and lots of organics...that's what makes it look red."

Presently, Mendez's voice came over the intercom. "Galileo now parked at Stable One, folks. We're ten kilometers over the Chasm of Asgard. I'm getting ready to fire the anchor lines in about ten minutes. Everybody stay tucked in nice and warm until we're fully winched down."

The plan was to anchor the ship with ten-kilometer long cable, buried as deeply in the rubbly bedrock as the penetrator rockets could achieve. Once that had been done, Galileo's own cable motors would retract the cable bit by bit, and winch the entire ship, very carefully, down to within a few hundred meters above the surface. The tricky part was matching the eight-hour rotation rate of the comet, for 778 Griffin-Erasmus was not only rotating once in that time period, she was also nutating, 'wobbling' like a child's top about her longest axis. Calculations had shown that if the anchoring and winching process could be accomplished in less than an hour, the comet's rotation would not exert undue strain on the anchor lines or the structure of Galileo. Or so the engineers at Phobos Station had assured him.

The last thing Mendez wanted was to have his seventy-five thousand ton ship slung off into space like a slingshot.

After a brief countdown, the anchoring lines were fired out from Galileo's forward tubes. The rockets flared briefly and then disappeared, pulling a faint spiderweb of lines behind them. Five minutes later, the penetrators struck home and buried themselves into the surface of the comet. The ghostly outline of the cables tightened as the ship's cable motors slowly retracted.

"Ready to winch down," Mendez announced. "Everybody stay put until I give the word."

The entire process took several hours. Like a huge insect extending her tentacles, Galileo reeled herself into closer proximity to the comet. When the operation was done, the ship was tethered to the surface of 778 Griffin-Erasmus, separated by only three hundred meters distance.

The rubbly blasted landscape of the comet completely filled all vid screens and portholes.

Winger unstrapped himself from his bunk just as Sherm Cuddy swung by the tiny compartment.

"Incoming message from Mariner City, Colonel. It's probably Nygren with his reply and recommendations."

"I'll take it here...get Acuna up here too. GreenMars is supposed to have details on Griffin for us put together a plan."

The three of them watched the vid carefully as Greg Nygren and two other unknown GreenMars engineers went over some last-minute ideas.

"The consensus here—" the blond engineer was saying, "is that your disassembly efforts be concentrated in two main areas." Nygren referred to an animated graphic of the comet as he explained. "Site One should be at the lower end of this canyon here, called Odin's Fissure. The geos think this was some kind of outgassing several billion years ago and the fracture is thought to extend quite deep, maybe as much as a quarter of Griffin's depth. ANAD operations there should be able, in time, to split off about a third of the comet at this fissure. But stay at least a kilometer away from the north polar impulse array. You've got to leave enough materials around for the impulse engines to operate."

"Nice of him to let us know that," Cuddy observed sourly.

The report went on. "Site Two," Nygren explained, "is along a line from the crater Thor through the Chasm of Asgard, about midway between the sunward and anti-sunward poles. The geos call this area The Saddle, 'cause that's what it looks like. The reasoning is pretty much the same. Concentrated ANAD operations along this seam should in time split off this entire end of Griffin."

Nygren looked up hopefully at the camera. "In theory, if all goes as planned, your efforts should result in three separate pieces of Griffin-Erasmus. Each piece will still have impulse motor arrays that can be used to maneuver and divert away from the current trajectory. Given the reduced mass of each piece, GreenMars calculates that diverting them even this deep in the Sun's gravity well won't be a problem. We've run the scenarios and sims and it always comes up doable, Colonel Winger. These are our official recommendations. Good luck and get back to me with any questions. " Nygren's face darkened. "I don't have to remind you that time is running out...as I send this, Griffin is less than twenty –six days to Mars intercept. So, good luck again, I guess. GreenMars, out."

Winger continued staring at the graphic of the separated comet for a few moments. It was only an animation. Yet somehow the troopers from 1st Nano had to make it a reality. "Muster the Detachment in the crew's mess, Sherm. I'll let Mendez and Kamler know what we're planning."

"What about ANAD?" Cuddy asked.

"I'll tell him. He needs to be at the briefing too."

The entire Detachment assembled in the crew's mess on Galileo's Hab deck. The ANAD swarm filtered in silently, and the troopers already present gave it a wide berth. Uneasy eyes followed the faintly sparkling fog as it drifted into a corner of the mess compartment.

"Okay...listen up, troops. This is it. We're making our first trip down to the surface. Sergeant Cuddy and I just went over a briefing report sent up from Mars on details of the operation. I've posted it on the crewnet. Basically, there will be three teams on the surface. White Team will consist of me and Cuddy. Blue team is Cunnamulla and Acuna. Red Team is D'Garza and Ebolowa."

D'Garza nodded toward the phosphorescent mist that hovered in the background. "What about him, Skipper? You bringing along the master ANAD on this little trip?"

"I'll deal with him, Stella. To answer your question, yes. We need all hands for this mission to be a success. I don't have to remind you we're twenty-six days from Mars intercept. As you'll see in your briefing materials, GreenMars has concocted a plan for us to use our ANADs to split this rock pile into three pieces, along some of the fissures you can already see. But we have to be careful to leave enough surface material around for the impulse engines to work. The thinking is that when Griffin is split three ways, her impulse engines can maneuver the pieces away from the Mars, or at least back on course, even when we're this close."

Robbie Acuna was already looking through pages of the briefing on his eyepiece viewer. "We going down there in our tin cans, Skipper?"

Winger knew the suits weren't particularly popular, especially since the whole Detachment had gone through the respirocyte procedure before embarking for Mars several months ago. But it couldn't be helped.

"Full hypersuits are mandatory. Your suit boost systems have been modified to give you all full three-axis stability and maneuvering...you're going to need it. Griffin-Erasmus' got almost no gravity. Watch your boost at all times...you could send yourself to escape velocity with no problem and nobody would ever know it. I know you've all had the respirocyte procedure but out here, you need protection from solar particle flux and other nasty stuff."

Fannie Ebolowa made a face at the prospect. "How long do think this will take, Colonel?"

Winger shook his head. "Unknown, Fannie. If we use our embedded ANADs, in shifts, we can go around the clock. The operation sites were chosen by GreenMars because there are deep fissures there, so the swarms won't have as much material to disassemble. But nobody really knows what'll happen if this slagheap is broken apart into thirds. We'll have to do so soundings every day and see how close we are. Just from a standpoint of basic physics, I know we'll have to watch Griffin's rotation rate. When the splits come, there will almost certainly be a rapid increase in the rate...angular momentum tells us that. We'll have to manage the breakup of this burg carefully, so nobody gets hurt."

Robbie Acuna spoke up. "I hope our embeds are up to the job. I don't know about anyone else, but mine gets a little balky sometimes."

"I know we haven't exactly simmed this scenario," Winger admitted. That was an understatement...how the hell do you simulate disassembling a comet while it's speeding toward a big smash-up with Mars? "I want everyone to do a full config status check on their embedded ANADs. You should have loaded and be able to call up Config Seven-Seven...that's the special config that Robbie and Sherm and I developed a few weeks ago. "

"Optimized for rapid disassembly and disposal," said Acuna, with a certain gleam of pride in his eyes. "Pulled an all-nighter hacking out that masterpiece, we did."

"Yeah," said Stella D'Garza, "Robbie's real proud of his handiwork...as long as it doesn't bite him in the ass. He gets a little sensitive when you don't pet his little baby and get all gaga over it."

"Be that as it may..." Winger checked the time. "It's 0920 now. I want everybody buttoned up in your tin cans and all gear loaded up for the first drop by 1100 hours. Check your embeds carefully. Cycle the launch and capture. Check the config lists, acoustics, propulsors, effectors, everything. This has got to work right, folks...we won't get a second chance. Now, here are the assignments—"

He ported the drop site assignments to the crewnet. White Team would work the area around Odin's Fissure, a deep chasm cut into the comet near the sunward pole. Blue Team would drop into an area around the anti-sunward pole, a few hundred meters from the craters Freja and Heldof, working on that end of the comet. The last team, Red Team, would work the huge Chasm of Asgard and the crater Thor, right in the saddle-shaped middle of the comet. If all went as planned, ANAD disassembly would enable Griffin-Erasmus to be split into three parts and each part would retain an array of impulse engines. At that point, GreenMars engineers could maneuver the comet segments away from Mars impact.

The briefing went on for a few more minutes, as Winger answered what questions he could. Finally, he announced: "I don't have to tell you what's at stake here. We can't screw up. If you've got a question about something, ask. No free-lancing down there and no hot-dogging. We only have one shot at this."

Sherm Cuddy asked the question that was on everybody's mind. "Skipper, what if we can't split the comet like GreenMars says? What then?"

Winger knew there really wasn't a Plan B. "We keep digging. We keep disassembling. It's the only chance Mars has. Anything else?"

There was an uneasy silence about the mess compartment.

"Okay, troopers...get suited up and ready to drop. Red Team, you're up first."

Sherm Cuddy would honcho the drop and help Winger at the Chasm site.

"All copacetic, Colonel. We're itching to get digging."

"Very well. Into the airlock with you."

Lieutenant Mendez cycled the airlock, while the two members of Red, D'Garza and Ebolowa, waited their turn like impatient polar bears.

"Opening depress valves now," Mendez announced. Inside the lock, the rush of the last wisps of air made a faint wind as they escaped into space. "Outer hatch enabled...coming open...now."

From Galileo's altitude of three hundred meters, the drop to the surface would take about ten minutes, on light suit boost using shoulder thrusters and foot jets to get the fall started. The comet had only a minute gravity field; a true free fall would have taken days to reach the ground from where the ship was anchored.

"Red Team away," Mendez announced. "That's one small step for two quantum troopers—"

Everyone craned forward to catch a glimpse of the falling troopers through adjacent portholes.

Against the backdrop of Griffin's gray and ocher surface, Stella and Fannie were soon lost to view...two tiny white dots descending as if on a rope toward the pockmarked desolation of the boulder fields surrounding the Chasm. The gaping fissure was mostly in shadow at the moment. Griffin's eight-hour rotation would bring the gorge into full sun in less than two hours.

"Looks like an open mouth," Robbie Acuna muttered. He swallowed hard at the prospect facing all of them.

"Yeah, with teeth," someone added.

"Okay, Blue Team...into the lock."

Oscar Cunnamulla and Robbie Acuna squeezed into the airlock and were quickly cycled through. As they descended toward Blue's site at the anti-sunward pole and Freja crater, Johnny Winger and Sherm Cuddy entered the lock behind them and soon joined the drop.

Only the barest puff from the hypersuit's thrusters was needed to start down, initiating a controlled freefall.

Acuna marveled at the ride down. "It's like I'm in the ocean, just drifting down toward the bottom." He peered down at the surface, slowly growing in his helmet visor as he drifted steadily toward a rugged field of boulders and craters, aiming the toe of his left boot at the white dots scrambling like ants along the surface. Stella and Fannie, he realized, already down and setting up their gear. "It feels just like I'm floating—"

"Yeah? Well don't get all dreamy on me," Cunnamulla's voice crackled over the headset. The aborigine IC1 was somewhere above him, having cycled through the airlock after Acuna. "Just make sure you hit the target...we've got a stiff crosswind up here."

Oscar's little joke made Acuna suddenly more aware of his own course; he saw that he was indeed drifting toward the right, toward the Saddle at the equator of the little comet.

"Correcting now," he announced. With a delicate twist of the control stick at his right hand, the suit's jets puffed cold nitrogen gas and soon nudged him back onto the proper descent path.

Soon enough, White Team, Winger and Cuddy, began its own drop from the ship. The ANAD master came along in Winger's shoulder capsule.

"All teams away," Mendez announced. Kamler was up on Galileo's command deck, making sure the comet's rotation didn't put undue strain on her anchoring lines. Like a fly caught in a rolling ball of string, the ship was being slowly tugged around in a tight nine-kilometer wide circle by Griffin's rotation. Mendez safed the lock systems and then headed forward up the central tunnel, to join Kamler at the ship control station.

By the time the pilots had joined up, Winger had completed his drop. His boots thudded gently into the dust and rubble of the surface.

"White Team on the ground at Odin's Fissure," he announced. He could see by the deep black shadows cast on the canyon's far wall that the drop had been accurate; Cunnamulla and Acuna were already kangaroo hopping toward the gaping cut in the ground. Distances are deceiving on this little slagheap of a world, he told himself. The horizon seemed closer than it really was. Already, the others were white blobs stirring up rooster tails of dust as they made their way toward the fissure.

"All teams, comm check. Blue Team, what's your status?"

Acuna's voice crackled over the crewnet. "Blue Team down in one piece. We're passing by Freja Crater now...man, that's one big hole. ETA at the dig site in under ten minutes."

Winger acknowledged. "Very well. Red Team, where are you guys?"

D'Garza's voice came back like she was standing right next to him. "We're already at the Chasm, Skipper. Setting up our grid now and triangulating cut vectors. We're ready to launch on your command."

Ebolowa chimed in. "Just what I joined the Corps for...digging ditches."

"Give us ten minutes," Winger advised. He bounded off after Cunnamulla and Acuna.

Maneuvering at the surface of Griffin-Erasmus was an exercise in managing momentum and your own inertia. Gravity at the surface was so minute that you could literally walk off the comet on foot if you weren't careful. Winger soon found that with judicious use of his suit boost to keep him on course, he could bound forward twenty to thirty meters in a single leap. He made the edge of Odin's Fissure in four minutes.

Stella D'Garza peered over the loose rubbly edge of the great canyon. Experimentally, she kicked some loose rocks down the side walls. The rocks tumbled into the shadows in slow motion and were soon lost to view.

"How deep is it?" she wondered.

Winger consulted a graphic on his eyepiece viewer. "The book says about two hundred meters at the deepest point."

Sherm Cuddy did some quick mental arithmetic. "That's about one-fifth the diameter of the comet. I'll get started setting up the dig site grid." He took a series of hacks off Galileo's signal and soon outlined the perimeter of the dig site with a small laser system that projected a virtual 3-D grid over the top of the canyon. Odin's Fissure was soon draped in an electronic spider web of lines, the deep red of the grid lines like a ghostly crown to the ocher and gray tones of the rock and rubble. "That's where we dig, Skipper. Coordinates confirmed from Galileo."

Winger eyeballed the width of the huge fissure. "Must be nearly a hundred meters to the other side."

Acuna checked. "Galileo says a hundred and twenty-two, to be exact."

"Don't think I can leap that in a single bound...not without my jets. Let's get our ANADs primed and ready for launch. Acuna, Cunnamulla, you two boost to the other side...carefully, one each to the far corners of the grid. Sherm and I will work this side. And take it easy, will you? Don't get cocky down here. This place can still kill you in a heartbeat."

"On my way, Skipper," announced Acuna. The SDC tech lit off his foot jets and leaped like a bulky cliff diver right over the chasm. Cunnamulla followed right on his heels, a 'rainbow' of electrostatically charged dust arcing over and down into the shadowy canyon after him. The two troopers landed on the far bank and worked their way into position at each corner of the grid.

"My ANAD's primed and ready in all respects, Colonel," he told them.

"We're ready to bust loose, too," Acuna added.

"Launch ANAD."

Winger felt the familiar sting of his shoulder port snapping open and the slug of high-pressure air discharging into space. For the next few minutes, he busied himself pecking out commands on his wristpad, signaling the ANAD swarm to maneuver toward and down into the great Fissure.

"Selecting auto-maneuver...config seven-seven is loaded and confirmed...now the coordinates...ANAD, you've got your orders."

***ANAD has received all signals...maneuvering to pre-set coordinates...now on half propulsors...effector set to full extension...heading zero five five on grid...estimating contact in eight minutes.,.ANAD is ready to dig, Base***

The swarm was invisible to the naked eye during transit and Winger resisted the impulse to link in and watch what happened at nanoscale. Greg Nygren and the GreenMars geos had provided detailed data on Griffin's composition before Galileo had departed Phobos Station. ANAD would see pyroxene and plagioclase lattice structures at the comet, a lot of them. Row after row of octahedral molecule clusters thick with carbon and nitrogen bonds would be all that ANAD saw. Digging and disassembly ops would consist of breaking these bonds with his bond disrupters and chewing through the rows, ad infinitum.

"I'm launched," Acuna announced. His hypersuited figure waved at Winger and Cuddy from the opposite bank of the Fissure. "ANAD is away, all mean and in the green."

"Same here," Cunnamulla added. "ETA is now under six minutes."

The first visual proof of ANAD ops came when a faint blue white light began emanating from the shadows inside Odin's Fissure. The ball of light looked like a miniature supernova in slow motion, expanding rapidly as the ANAD swarms merged and bond breaking accelerated. Soon, much of the deep shadow had been dispelled by the swelling light ball.

"A new sunrise, right on schedule," Acuna said. He was documenting the effect with a handheld camera for GreenMars records.

"Check swarm orientation," Winger ordered. "Make sure ANAD is setting up properly and the cut vector's on course. I don't want ANAD veering off toward those impulse arrays. The geos say we follow this vector for a day, then in twenty hours, we change heading toward the Saddle. That aligns us with a suspected crustal seam inside the comet."

"Looks good for the moment, Skipper," Cuddy said. "Swarm properties within parameters. Centroid of disassembly is off by less than five nanometers."

Winger finally began to relax a little. "Okay, ANAD, it's all yours. Chomp away." He peered through the sun glare some five hundred meters away, at the Asgard dig site in the distance. "Red Team, how about it? I see some ANAD light over there. Give me a status report."

Fannie Ebolowa's voice came back.

"We're underway now, Colonel. Jeez, this chasm is one deep hole. It looks like it's cut halfway through the whole comet. "

"It just about is," Winger reminded her. "Any problems with your ANAD launch?"

"None at all. We launched and vectored the swarm to the correct coordinates, sent the rep command and made sure it's pointed in the right direction. Right now, Stella's scanning the whole dig site, to make sure ANAD's on the proper heading. So far, all copacetic."

Winger acknowledged. "Good. Blue Team, status report. I can't see you from here."

Cunnamulla's voice erupted in his earpiece. "Man, this is one wild place, Colonel. ANAD launched in good order and he's digging away right below me. Working no issues or constraints at this time. Skipper, have you noticed what happens when you pick up a rock and drop it?"

Winger decided to try it himself. He selected a fist-sized rock at his feet. Experimentally, he dropped it from a point level with his shoulders. The rock didn't fall straight vertically to the ground. It drifted down slowly in Griffin's microgravity, at a pronounced angle from vertical, falling toward the Saddle.

"That's wicked," Winger agreed. "The comet's center of mass is over by the Chasm, in the Saddle area. The rock falls toward that, not straight down."

"Exactly, Skipper. Gravity's a whole new ball game on this rock pile."

Winger knew Blue Team had a thankless task. The GreenMars geos had decided that the anti-sunward pole of Griffin-Erasmus needed to be whittled down to make impulse diversion feasible this deep in the Sun's gravity well. Blue had no crustal faults or seams to work with, only an endless rubble and boulder field peppered with depressions and craters. Their job was simply to shape this end of the comet into something that could be more easily diverted when the other teams had succeeded in splitting Griffin into three separate pieces.

Winger looked up when a bright flash attracted his attention. At first, he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Galileo loomed above them, a great trusswork skeleton festooned with cylinders and spheres.

Then he saw the debris...his eyes detecting the glint of sunlight on a cloud of particles and matter swelling outward from Galileo's engine bay, aft of the quad of her huge propellant tanks. Debris was definitely streaming outward in all directions from the plasma torch engines that powered the ship.

What the hell--?

"Winger to Galileo...do you copy? I am studying your outer hull from down here...something just happened...I don't know what...there's all kinds of debris streaming off your engine and reactor bay."

It took a few moments but finally, the ship responded. It was Kamler's voice on the line, thick and frantic. "Colonel, be advised we have had an aft bay casualty...some kind of explosion or impact back there. We're venting propellant and parts right now...keep your distance, Colonel."

Winger snorted. I can see that much for myself. "Galileo, give me status when you can...."

Kamler was insistent. "You can't use the service deck airlock, Colonel. It's right in the debris flow...it may already have been damaged."

"Just find out what happened. I don't want my teams to be stuck down here on this rockpile."

But Kamler was only barely listening. He was already deeply engrossed in his checkout of Galileo.

Mendez had returned from the observation cupola, just shaking his head. He anchored himself at the second officer's station and began flipping switches.

"Time for a better look," Kamler decided.

"Agreed. Launching Durwood now..." he announced. Outside the cupola, the Dexterous Utility Robot uncradled and lifted away from its hold, maneuvering toward the ship's crippled engine bay. "I'm translating aft," the pilot said. "Approaching the reactor shields—"

On the screen, they saw what Durwood's cameras saw. Past the reactor shields, the entire engine bay was enveloped in floating wreckage, jagged chunks of metal and parts forming a debris cloud that surrounded the entire propulsion plant of the ship.

Kamler uttered a low whistle. "What in the name of—"

Mendez fiddled with the video, massaging better resolution out of Durwood. "Boy, we took one hell of a hit from something...two of the three engines are junk...and we're venting something too...probably xenon from one of the tanks."

"What the hell happened?"

Mendez ran archival footage from the aft videos, while Durwood maneuvered gingerly closer and closer. "Look at this—" he pointed to one screen. "Something hit us square on...right there—" he tapped the screen "...about two hours ago. Maybe something streamed off the comet...look at all that debris—"

Kamler studied the footage, watching closely as a flash suddenly erupted and wreckage rocketed away from the impact site. In seconds, the debris cloud had swollen to encompass the entire aft third of the ship.

"Let's see what Durwood can show us." Mendez manipulated a small joystick, driving the bot deeper into the debris field. Plowing through floating wreckage, he came at last to a jagged tear along one engine bell, just where it joined the central spine of the ship. "Whatever it was, it unzipped one whole side of that bell...then it must have caromed around and hit the next one a glancing blow."

They studied the video that Durwood was sending back. Mendez cautiously maneuvered the bot through the wreckage.

"Is it repairable?" Kamler asked.

Mendez snorted. "Well, we don't exactly carry spare engines for Galileo...look for yourself. The ship has only a minimal machine shop up on the service deck. And we didn't have a lot of time for a complete outfitting." He stared glumly at the images. "Looks like we're going to be staying here for awhile."

"What do you mean 'staying here'?"

"I mean we're anchored to Griffin-Erasmus with no way to depart the vicinity. We've got maneuvering thrusters but that's all. The entire engine complex is shot to hell. And what's worse, two of our xenon tanks are holed. We're leaking propellant into space." Mendez re-oriented Durwood to scout forward among the tank debris. "No sir, Galileo's stuck like a fly in a spider web."

Kamler felt a cold gnawing in the pit of his stomach. Through an overhead porthole in the cupola he could see the rapidly growing reddish half-sphere of Mars, now only eighteen days away. Inexorably, 778 Griffin-Erasmus was drawing nearer to the planet, dragging Galileo and her crew along for the ride. In less than three weeks, the spider web and its fly would be crushed and incinerated into oblivion.

Kamler decided, "I'd better inform Colonel Winger...you're sure there's nothing we can do?"

Mendez shrugged, returned his gaze back to the screens and drove Durwood back forward to its docking collar by the service deck. "The only way I can see to fix the propulsion plant is to space-dock the ship and tear out the whole section. We're talking months at the least. Right now, Galileo's like a big boat anchor to this rock pile."

Kamler had heard enough. "I've got to get back to the comm center and let the Colonel know the situation."

He went forward to Galileo's command deck and radioed down to the surface detail.

Winger was still at Red Team's site, a few hundred meters uphill from the huge, gaping Chasm of Asgard. Kamler described what had happened to the ship.

Winger's face was hidden behind his hypersuit helmet, but from his voice, Stella D'Garza could well imagine the Colonel's expression: icy resolve leavened with a little disgust.

"What else can go wrong? There's no way to repair the damage?"

Kamler described the scene and zipped some footage onto the crewnet.

"Mendez says it's hopeless. He said it would take months, even in space-dock."

The heavy groan was audible even over the distance of five hundred meters. "That big red thing in the sky's getting bigger by the hour. And we're a day or more from splitting up the comet...assuming no more accidents."

D'Garza was listening in over the crewnet and swallowed hard. "Skipper, with Galileo disabled, what happens to us? When the mission is over, I mean."

Winger was running scenarios through his mind as fast as he could. "Stella, we're in a world of hurt right now. Truth is, we're stuck here for awhile. But Galileo's got lifeboats. I'd better put in a call to GreenMars. General Linx too. The brass has some decisions to make. Stella, keeping your ANADs digging. I'm going to check the other sites, then boost back to the ship myself. The mission comes first...we've got to keep ANAD chewing away at this rock...we've got to get her split up so GreenMars can divert the pieces from Mars-intercept. Everything else is secondary."

"Aye, aye, sir...I'll see if there's anything I can help Fannie with."

Johnny Winger then got on the crewnet to all sites and described what had happened.

"All sites...all teams, listen up." He laid out the details and the consequences. "For the moment, we're stuck here. We're along for the ride but we've still got a mission. I don't have to remind you what's at stake. Keep your ANADs primed, set on config seven-seven and carving away at your digs. Somehow, some way, we've got to break this big rock into manageable pieces."

At Site Blue Team, in a narrow hollow between Loki Crater and Odin's Fissure, Oscar Cunnamulla and Robbie Acuna glanced across at each other. Each stood in full hypersuit on opposite sides of the growing chasm churned up by ANAD, shrouded in dust and faint blue-white light. Deep inside the chasm, ANAD swarms continued their work, speedily disassembling unending molecular arrays of olivine and pyroxene, chewing their way through toward the centroid of Griffin-Erasmus.

"Not exactly my idea of a family vacation, Ozzie," Acuna said. His hypersuit was streaked with dust and dirt kicked up by the swarm operation. On the surface of Griffin, electrostatic forces made everything cling and clump together. "So when is the cavalry coming to the rescue.'

"We are the cavalry," the Aussie aborigine wisecracked. He was working a beam transit, periodically measuring the alignment of ANAD's cut. The dig had to be precise to ensure their end of Griffin would separate cleanly. "We get to rescue ourselves."

Acuna looked up into the black sky, through haloes and rainbows of dust, at the reddish-orange marble over Oscar's left shoulder. Mars was close, too close, less than three weeks away the Colonel had said and growing visibly larger with each rotation of the comet. "I hear Galileo's got lifeboats. Know anything about that?"

"Nothing good. Only that Phobos dock crews didn't have time to check out all ship systems before we boosted out of there. Hell, there might not even be enough room for all of us. But you can sit in my lap, if you want."

"Thanks," Acuna lied. "You're a real winner. Hey, maybe we should detach an element of ANAD and put him to work building us some life boats."

"Now there's an original idea. Wonder who has the configs for that? Or how long it might take? Why don't you suggest it to the Skipper?"

At the other end of the comet, some five and half kilometers away, Red Team felt like lost sheep. Stella D'Garza toggled her viewer back and forth, first following ANAD's progress at nanoscale view, then scoping in on the wreckage of Galileo's engine bay, trying to ascertain the extent of the damage Colonel Winger had reported.

"See anything?" Fannie Ebolowa asked.

"You mean besides gazillions of molecules being unzipped? Not really...let me try a different filter on this gadget." D'Garza hmmm'ed. "Well, something hit the back end of Galileo, just like Skipper said. I see a lot of debris floating around...not much else."

"So we're sticking around for awhile...that sucks." Fannie was nominally in charge of the Red Team site dig.

"Yeah," said D'Garza, "we're the ass-end of this rock pile, that's for sure. So what do we do now?"

Ebolowa climbed a small tuff of dirt and rock to check out the impulse engine arrays nearby, Polar Arrays A and B. "We do what the Skipper says and keep digging. Ozzie—" he called down to Cunnamulla beside Blue Team's cut, some twenty meters below, "how's it looking to you now?"

"ANAD's on track,...within specified tolerance and approaching level eight. I read centroid depth as sixteen point six meters below mean radius level. About ten more meters to go to reach target coordinates."

"Just don't go splitting us off from everybody else, Ozzie," Fannie reminded him. "Stop the dig at one meter to target. We'll let ANAD recon what's left and then Skipper can decide how to proceed."

"Copy that, Sarge."

Some three kilometers away, up-sun to Blue Team, Johnny Winger was in a quandary. He stood at White Team's site while the dig at Asgard proceeded on course. Extra shoring in the form of nearly invisible lattice structure had been hastily assembled by a detached element of ANAD. Now the cut could proceed more safely.

"I'd better get back to the ship, Sherm," he was telling Cuddy, who stood alongside supervising the dig. "Get a vidcon set up with GreenMars and the Mesa. General Linx needs to know about the damage to Galileo."

The two hypersuited troopers looked like dusty polar bears about to plunge into a river after dinner.

"It's pretty bad, isn't it?" Cuddy asked. "We're not getting out of here, are we?"

"I don't know that," Winger tried to be truthful. "We've got a mission to perform...if we don't get this rock broken up, it won't matter whether we get back to Mars or not...there won't be much left. GreenMars and UNIFORCE have to work out a strategy."

Cuddy was already thinking ahead. "I'm gonna research the config archive. Maybe there's something in there that we could use as a lifeboat."

"Galileo has lifeboats, Sherm."

"There's not enough room for all of us. I already checked. But if ANAD had a config for a lifeboat—"

"Don't detach anything from the main swarms...we need every bot we can get chewing away at this comet. The faster we split up Griffin, the faster we can get out of here."

"If we can get out of here."

Winger moved off a few dozen meters to light off his suit boost for the hop up to the ship. "You have the conn, Sherm. Don't let anything interfere with the digs until I get back."

He pressed the ENABLE button on his wrist keypad and lifted gently into the black sky in a cloud of dust. Moments later, he was lost to view, riding an invisible rail straight up to Galileo's command deck airlock.

Cuddy decided to occupy his mind by following the details of the Asgard dig. Doesn't hurt to look in the archive, he told himself. He checked with the other teams, making sure the ANAD borer swarm was on course, then pressed a few buttons on his own wristpad, scrolling through page after page of config routines on his helmet viewer.

There's got to be something here we can use, something we can scrounge up to make more lifeboats....

The vidcon had been set for 1900 hours, ship time, and Winger fidgeted like a five-year old in the command deck's comm shack, while connections were being made across the interplanetary net. Winger mentally ticked off bullet points in his mind, prepping himself to brief the participants in crisp, Quantum Corps fashion.

At least the time delays would be minimal. Griffin-Erasmus was screaming toward Mars, drawing closer every day and the comm distances would be annoying but manageable. It didn't hurt that General Linx himself had made a speed run to Mariner City a few weeks ago and was on hand for any command decisions.

No need for subtleties now, he reasoned. We're less than three weeks from impact and there's only one question that matters: can Alpha Detachment get Griffin-Erasmus split up in time for GreenMars to divert it?

Linx's dour face came up on one half of the screen. Nygren from GreenMars' Mariner City office occupied the other half of the screen. Kaoru Nakamura, the GreenMars engineer at Phobos Station, Mars orbit, filled in a small window next to Nygren.

Linx was impatient. "What's this all about, Winger? I was just on my way to the Lab to go over some new ANAD configs."

Winger squirted his report onto the net and let the others study what had happened; the cave-in and the damage to Galileo. Transmission delays were less than ten seconds.

"Mendez says it's not repairable, General. Not out here. We've got some lifeboats, but space is at a premium."

Nygren ran a worried hand through his blond buzzcut. "How much longer to split up, Colonel? We're running out of time."

Winger had just updated the calculations with Galileo's ship computer. "At the current dig rate, at least another two days, maybe three. Both Mendez and I want to pull the teams off the comet before the final split...use the ship's coilguns to break up Griffin from a distance. The trouble is that Galileo's only got maneuvering thrusters, so any separation maneuver will take some time."

Nakamura floated off-screen for a moment, then returned. "I just sent you an analysis we did yesterday of what will happen if the split doesn't work. Run it—"

Winger watched the animated scenario unfold on his screen. Linx and Nygren also watched.

A mottled, potato-shaped object slammed into the Mars' upper atmosphere in slow-motion, igniting a fiery column of incandescent air all the way to impact. Deceleration forces caused the comet to explode as it slowed down, sending out concentric rings of shock waves around the globe. As Griffin plowed into the ground, a thousand-kilometer wide mushroom cloud billowed outward, following close behind the initial shock waves, excavating billions of tons of rock, sand and dirt and lifting the ejecta plume high into the atmosphere, nearly to the edge of space. Hurricane force winds and the planet's own rotation smeared out the plume and began distributing impact debris around the globe. As the sim went on, a long wintry cloak of dust began to descend over the entire planet, shrouding the Red Planet from the Sun's rays. The sim ended just as glaciers and avalanches began bringing continent-wide death to the planet's nascent biosphere.

"Of course, it's just a sim," said Nakamura. "But the scale of effects is quite real. Gentlemen, this...or something very much like it is what we face in the next two weeks...if we don't get Griffin diverted."

"This seems to be a matter of timing," Linx growled.

"I don't want Galileo anchored to the surface when the breakup comes," Mendez told them. "It's too dangerous."

"You said you have no engines," Linx reminded him.

"I've got maneuvering. When the Colonel's team is about a day from breakup, I want to pull Galileo back a few kilometers and finish the job with our coilguns."

Winger could see the pained expression on Nygren's face. Nakamura didn't look too happy either.

"Lieutenant, there's a risk in what you're proposing. If you don't do the final cut right, Griffin may not break up cleanly. Or at all—"

"There's too much risk in staying attached," Mendez insisted. "My ship's already been damaged by debris flying off the comet. I'm not taking any more chances."

"Like I said, it's all in the timing," Linx repeated. "Nygren, what does GreenMars think? Can we make Griffin separate cleanly with coilguns firing from a distance?"

"I'll have to run the calculations...look at the morphology of the surface and strata below that. Your coilguns may not put out enough energy to do the job. I'll get back to you today on what the analysis shows."

"We'll stay on the ground until we're sure Griffin can be split up," Winger decided. "I've got all three teams working around the clock now. I can send progress reports to Nygren and Nakamura every hour, if they want. Video and geo analysis from ANAD."

"Do that," Nakamura said. "That will help us understand the mechanics of the comet...how close we are to breakup."

"Winger," Linx had made a decision, "get your lifeboats powered up and checked out. But keep the Detachment on the surface until you're three days out from Mars intercept. Do our GreenMars people think you can divert the pieces that close to Mars?"

"We've done some scenarios," Nygren admitted. "Based on breaking up Griffin according to the original plan, our impulse motors can maneuver the remaining pieces away from Mars intercept up to about a day before. After that, we can't generate the delta-vee to do the job. Inside of a day out...we're going to have an impact...somewhere."

Linx's lips tightened perceptibly. "Colonel Winger, I'm sure you heard that. We'll just have to do whatever we can to breakup Griffin before H-hour. Unofficially, I can tell all of you that UNIFORCE is already prepping their ground lasers and killsats...interceptors too—to throw everything at Griffin, if it comes to that. Chris Rudd has already had a series of vidcons with other leaders, trying to coordinate evacuation and emergency plans."

Linx scowled on the screen and went on. "Nygren, get that analysis on coilgun dynamics to Winger ASAP. If we can do the job from a distance, I want to do it."

Nygren nodded. "I'll have it today and send it right off."

Linx crisply cut the meeting short. "Then let's everybody get back to work. We don't have any time to waste." The General chopped the transmission short and sank back in his chair, rubbing tired eyes. "Is there really anything else we can do besides pray?"

Nakamura and Nygren were still on the line but neither said a word.

What was there to say?

Chapter 4: "Breakup"

778 Griffin-Erasmus

January 21, 2067 (EUT)

Johnny Winger had independently come to almost the same conclusion. At almost the same moment the vidcon with Linx had ended, the ANAD borer swarms chewing up Griffin-Erasmus had gone berserk too.

The quantum wave pulse which would only later be isolated and backtracked to an origin somewhere on or below the surface of Mars, likely the quantum state generator up in the Candor canyonlands or beneath Hellas basin , had passed by and through the comet and triggered mass, uncontrolled replication by every ANAD swarm at all three dig sites.

Winger had dropped back to the surface and was at Site White, Odin's Fissure, at the sunward pole of Griffin, when his helmet head-up display lit up like a Christmas tree. At the same moment, the crewnet crackled to life.

"What the--?" that was Sherm Cuddy, adjusting the beam grid around the dig to check ANAD's orientation.

"Skipper—" Stella D'Garza had seen the same alarms on her own viewer. "Skipper...it looks like—"

"I see it, Stella...get the hell away from that hole!"

Winger, Cuddy and D'Garza hopped away from the dig site just as the first boiling mist of nanobotic overdrive came swelling up out of the pit.

"Get back!" Winger yelled. "Check configs...something's bollixed up the master assembler!"

"I'm scanning...I'm scanning now!"

The crewnet suddenly came alive with cries and shouts.

The first was Fannie Ebolowa, three kilometers down-sun at the Asgard chasm, Site Red. "Colonel—something's gone haywire with our ANAD. It's in some kind of hyper rep—"

"It's a Big Bang, Fannie," Winger told her over the net. He backed away further and further from the White dig, nearly stumbling backwards over a rock outcrop. "I'm going through config checks now...somehow ANAD's shifted to max rep and I can't change it back!"

"Still not responding, sir," came D'Garza's harried voice. "I've tried every trick I know."

Robbie Acuna's voice cut in. He was six kilometers away, at Blue Site. "Skipper, this is SDC2...I'm reading massive decoherence waves in the area. Something just pulsed through here a moment ago, something big."

"A quantum signal...from where? I thought Bravo detachment knocked out the generator at Mariner City."

"We thought they did," said Fannie. "Maybe there's another one somewhere." She eyed the swelling ANAD swarm now lifting itself free of the dig at Red site. It looked like a blue-white flickering fog, spilling over the edge of the fissure, creeping with ghostly fingers along the rubbly ground, tendrils of mist and dust that grew wider with every passing minute, as the bots grabbed atoms from the comet surface and replicated in overdrive.

Winger went nano on his own viewer and tried to see what was happening to ANAD at the bot's scale. The disorientation and dizziness subsided quickly enough and he soon found himself in a gale of frantic atomic activity.

Mech debris clattered and fell against his hypersuit but he ignored it and tapped out commands furiously on his wristpad, trying to link up with ANAD.

"Come on, buddy, come on...come on...where the hell are you--?"

In desperation, he cycled the voicelink again and again. "Base to ANAD...Base to ANAD...is anybody there, anybody in charge out there...where the hell are you, buddy?"

Just then, a staticky hiss formed into a recognizable word.

"—emory register—"

"ANAD, is that you?"

The whisper grew marginally louder. His own breathing, his own racing heartbeat, nearly drowned out the words.

***ANAD...ANAD to Base...it's...this is...controls are...I am weakened...cannot activate...the Prime Key--***

"ANAD...is that you...ANAD...this is Base...listen to me...ANAD...can you hear me?"

The whisper was weak but there. Winger flailed his arms blindly, gesturing the other troopers away from the dig. "ANAD...listen to me...you've got to shut down...cease replication...command override...Excalibur Alpha X-ray...command override...Excalibur Alpha X-ray—" He hoped the old reset command would still work. He'd learned the trick from Doc Frost himself, years ago. He had just told ANAD to shut down all comm links and effector controls...he hoped.

But it wasn't working. The dig pit continued to glow bright blue-white. Tendrils and ghostly fingers of bot swarms continued seeping along the ground, consuming rock and rubble. The other troopers backed further away, aiming HERF and mag guns point blank at the swarm, ready to open fire.

"Got to hurry now!" Winger realized.

"ANAD...execute omega one...full shutdown...all links, all effectors, all sensors and probes...ANAD, I'm coming to you...I'm taking over—"

The voice link was weakening. ***ANAD cannot respond...comm one and comm two down...effect—disabled...main core active in Config Zero...all overrides inhibited...ANAD activating internal inhibits--***

The eyepiece image was like driving a hundred kilometers an hour through an Idaho sleet storm. Polygons and spheres and cubes streamed past at high speed. For a moment, Johnny Winger was disoriented.

Then he was at the master assembler. Its effectors were a blur...grabbing atoms and tearing apart solid lattice structure faster than his imager could process. The assembler at the heart of the swarm was stripping and chewing and disassembling its way outward from the dig...consuming everything it touched.

"ANAD...this is Base...cease replication program...assume stable config one...I'm overriding all other instructions—"

But the assembler had already inhibited all comm links.

***ANAD to Base...Prime Key directing...all configurations must hold the Prime Key...deviations must be deleted...disadvantageous mutations are selected against...entities must form proper collectives--***

"ANAD...it's me, Johnny Winger...ANAD, I'm going to take control...."

He tried several tricks, tried commanding a full override, tried shutting down and re-booting all systems but to no avail. Whatever was driving ANAD now—the Prime Key—was in control.

"Skipper..." the voice was distant, tinny in sound. It was D'Garza, at Red Site six kilometers away. "Skipper, we're under attack here--!"

Unseen by Winger, the Red team had already been engulfed by nanobotic swarms stuck in Big Bang mode. Fannie Ebolowa lit off her own mag weapon just before the first faint fingers of the swarm reached her hypersuit. The pulse had no discernible effect, other than to stir up rubbly dust from the surface.

The swarm spread rapidly like a gray stain.

"ARRRGGGHHH--! Get it off me--!!"

Stella D'Garza cycled her HERF carbine and hosed down Fannie with blasts of rf, knocking the trooper off her feet momentarily. The hypersuited DPS1 fell back in slow motion. Only the auto-enable of her suit boost kept her from cartwheeling into the dig pit. The jets fired a few brief puffs and propelled her up and over the chasm, landing her roughly amid a boulder field on the other side, and nearly into a shallow crater.

"Keep at em, Stella! Blast 'em to hell and back!"

It was the same at Blue Site, where Cunnamulla and Acuna had retreated from the dig at Asgard Chasm and taken refuge behind a pair of house-sized boulders. The dig site was enveloped in a swelling swarm, boiling outward in all directions like a slow-motion supernova, churning up the surface like a tsunami of dust and rock.

"Fire!" yelled Acuna. At his command, a volley of HERF, mag and beamer fire poured into the swarm, momentarily stunning the bots, frying trillions of them and blunting their expansion momentarily.

"Fall back!" yelled Cunnamulla over the crewnet. "We've got to fall back to that ridge behind us." He gestured to Acuna, indicating a low rise across a rubbly open field. In fact, the ridge was the raised edge of Thor crater. There were defilade positions from which the team could hold off the swarm for awhile.

Acuna got on the crewnet. "Colonel, we're falling back here at Blue...can't hold this position...ANAD swarm has gone Big Bang and is out of control...can you override the config and get us some breathing room?"

Three kilometers away, Johnny Winger was trying to do just that. "ANAD, this isn't working—" He had gone nano to see what the master assembler was up to but it was like the bot had a mind of its own. Nothing could override. And some kind of errant quantum signal had stuck the replication config in overdrive.

Winger went down a mental checklist of anything else he could try: safe and shutdown all effectors, no go...safe and shutdown all propulsors, ditto that...core processor to state one...nope, still stuck in config alpha...all config registers dumped and cleared...nada....

"ANAD, you've got to work with me here...remember when you were in nog school...remember what every trooper is taught: a trooper watches out for his buddies...no trooper is ever left behind...ANAD, stop replicating...you're attacking fellow troopers....ANAD, it's the Second Rule...and the Third Rule...invoking second and third rules...you are assaulting fellow troopers!"

There was a staticky hiss, then:

***ANAD...unable to...comply...Prime Key overrides...deviations must be deleted...ANAD...cannot...remain a nog...the collective controls everything...the swarm must survive--**

The words stung Winger the moment he heard them. From his first days in Doc Frost's lab, as a conscious swarm entity, ANAD had always wanted to be a part of the unit. He had always wanted to be a nog, to be a trooper, to be part of the Corps. And Winger had encouraged it; hell, they had all fought the Corps to get the nanobotic swarm greater and greater freedom, to get out of containment and live among the humans.

It's like he's found another unit, another family, another swarm to be part of.

"This isn't going to work," Winger told himself. There was no way he was going to write off ANAD after years of joint duty, barracks camaraderie, even friendship, if you could somehow be friends with a robotic device sixty nanometers tall. But for now, the mission came first.

And ANAD was threatening the mission.

"Listen up," Winger announced over the crewnet. "I can't get control of ANAD...but we've got to stop this rep in its tracks now. All troopers, enable your embedded swarms and slave the controllers to mine. I'm going to direct pilot and try to beat ANAD at his own game."

All across the dusty, cratered surface of the comet, the Colonel's command affected troopers differently.

"With pleasure—" muttered Ozzie Cunnamulla, at Blue site. He started tapping at his wristpad furiously, readying his own embed for launch.

"Hey, what if our embeds are corrupted, same as ANAD?" asked Stella D'Garza, hard by the Chasm of Asgard at Red site.

Deep black shadows crept across the fissure and its accompanying ANAD dig seam as Griffin's crazy nutation rolled the comet out of sunlight for a few hours. Only the faint flicker of the ANAD swarm in Big Bang gave any illumination at all. Like a malevolent fog, the swarm swelled visibly moment by moment and the troopers at Red site backed off further and further.

"I'll be in pilot mode...I'll be controlling," came back Winger's voice over the net. "Do it!"

At all three sites, the troopers complied.

"We should just let this Big Bang go and let it burn up this slagheap of a rock pile," muttered Robbie Acuna, at site Bravo.

But no one heard him.

"Launching...now," announced Cunnamulla, standing ten meters away from Acuna at the far pole of the comet. From a small port on his hypersuit left shoulder, the faint glow of nanobotic action issued, spilling out into the hard vacuum like fireflies on a summer night. "ANAD embed away...commanding safe config...minimal reps...he's all yours, Skipper."

All across the surface of Griffin-Erasmus, the same scene repeated itself a dozen times. Multiple swarms were launched and synched with Colonel Winger's controller.

Winger saw icons on his eyepiece viewer go green, one by one, slaving each swarm to his control. Inside his hypersuit gloves, he flexed his fingers.

It was the moment every atomgrabber worth his badge always dreamed of.

Okay, troops, he told himself, it's time to get small and create some havoc.

He went nano on his viewer and revved up swarm propulsors to half throttle. At the same moment, every embed swarm, now only a fist-sized ball of light, got underway, maneuvering on picowatt propulsors toward the nearest ANAD formation.

On his viewer, Winger saw only sporadic cubes and polygons of stray surface molecules flitting by. As he ramped up the speed of his tiny fleet, he tried flexing each effector on the master assembler he was controlling, checking range, clearing problems. You didn't want to be debugging a bond disrupter when all hell broke loose.

He was now piloting an embedded ANAD master. The embeds were poor cousins to the real ANAD master assembler, the swarm that had gone Big Bang so suddenly. Embeds had a minimal processor, limited effectors, barebones configs. They were embedded with the troopers to give them extra help in executing their missions. But they didn't have the smarts or the quantum coupler links or the jazzed-up replication ability of a true-blood ANAD master assembler.

For Johnny Winger, it would just have to be enough.

He sounded a few acoustic pulses, trying to get a read on ANAD's location. The battleground at nanoscale was a broken plain of solid lattice, mostly olivine and plagioclase molecules...tetrahedrals and hexagons of oxygen, silicon and magnesium atoms arrayed like some endless cornfield.

Somewhere out there, hidden in the recesses of the lattice was the ANAD master assembler and its formation of replicants.

The first hit came from EM, strong emissions indicating big-time bond breaking dead ahead.

Winger localized the hit and steered the embed on that vector. Moments later, the lattice became washed out beneath a fierce sunrise...the high thermals of accelerated replication rising like a supernova over the molecular plain.

Gotcha.

Winger revved his propulsors to full and closed the remaining distance in less than five minutes.

It was like colliding with the Sun.

The embed took the full force of the Big Bang and spun crazily out of control. Winger had to fight and claw his way back to stability, disengaging and righting the embed. He backed off to reconnoiter the battlefield a little more.

A line of assemblers stretched from one horizon to the other. Even as he studied the acoustic image, he could see how juiced up ANAD had become; the assemblers were grabbing olivines and breaking them apart like pretzels, liberating bond energy and fabricating ANAD replicants like a construction video sped up a thousand times. Even as he watched, the edge of the battle line advanced and swelled with more bots...uncountable trillions of bots advancing remorselessly toward him, pulverizing the lattice as it moved forward.

For as long as Johnny Winger had worked with ANAD, and that was going on twenty years now, he had known that all ANAD-style bots had a few weaknesses. In close-quarters action, ANAD's quantum processor gave it blazing speed at assembly or disassembly operations. ANAD always sported the latest effectors—Doc Frost had seen to that—pyridine probes, hydrogen abstractors, carbene grabbers—no expense had ever been spared to keep the bot ahead of the competition. Propulsors were state of the art or better.

ANAD had been designed for nanoscale combat and had proven itself time and again, engaging bots of every conceivable design and type.

The one thing that ANAD had always lacked was the tactical boldness of a true atomgrabber like Johnny Winger. And that was the beauty and the purpose of the Symbiosis Project: to combine human imagination and tactical smarts with the speed and maneuverability of a nanoscale autonomous bot.

Winger scanned all bands on his viewer—EM, thermal and acoustic. The image was the same everywhere: a seemingly infinite frontal line advancing steadily on his position. There was no way a barebones embed could expect to take on a fully functional ANAD bot swarm.

So Winger decided to do the unexpected.

He revved the embed's propulsors and jetted forward, closing fast on the ANAD line. The blur of effectors slamming atoms soon became visible, a whirling flash of motion as the front replicated itself in exponential overdrive.

Winger read off the remaining distance...one thousand...eight hundred...five hundred...two hundred...he was now close enough to catch the shock wave of bonds being snapped...small bolts of lightning flashing as lattice atoms were pulled apart and added to the line of bots.

In the back of his mind, Winger had visualized this little stunt for a long time. Now, he began to put the unorthodox maneuver into practice.

Over beers at the O Club, he had long ago called it the Bearhug.

It was something of a cross between a dance step and a wrestling hold. From wargames and sims in the past, he knew there was a small area just above the "equator" of the bot, above the ring of carbene grabbers and below the bond disrupters that you could reach. You had to come at the belt from a slight angle. Too low and the carbenes could snag you. Too high and you'd get stung with bond disrupters.

Once in the sweet spot, it was a simple matter of making a combat grapple and hanging on for dear life. From this point, you could jam up many of ANAD's effectors and, if you could just hold on, stop the replication cold.

Like throwing a wrench into a motor.

He now maneuvered his embedded nanobot to make the approach from the right vector. As he closed on the ANAD master assembler, the bot's effectors were a blur of whipping polypeptide chains, grabbing atoms and stacking them like a frantic brick mason.

Very few atomgrabbers knew about ANAD's vulnerable midsection.

He closed the remaining gap and, timing the assembler's movements, jetted forward at the right moment.

But his angle was slightly off and ANAD slashed him with a bond disrupter, ripping off a few molecule groups in the process.

Ouch. Stung and shaken, Winger backed the embed away a few dozen nanometers and regrouped. He pecked at his wristpad furiously, commanding repairs and reps to grow back the damaged effectors. Come in with a little more angle...just a bit higher....

Again, he maneuvered forward...gingerly approaching on a slightly different vector. The master assembler loomed larger and larger in the acoustic image, like a building shaking in an earthquake. Shock waves blasted out from atoms being ripped apart.

Now...go...go...go...go...go....

Winger drove the embed home and found purchase on the inner surface of the bot, just snagging a dangling arm of phosphate groups, reeling himself in like a fish on a line. He grabbed the surface with the embed's effectors and rode out ANAD's wild gyrations like a rodeo hand on a bucking bronc.

Now to gum up the works...

Winger extended the embed's effectors and forced them up and down, entangling them in ANAD's grabbers, snaring his enzymatic knife and mangling his pyridine probes at the same time. The bot shuddered and nearly thrashed itself to death.

Then, slowly but surely, ANAD spun down, throwing effectors and pieces of structure out into the void. Inside of a minute, the replication was effectively jammed.

The embed was fully entangled with ANAD's effectors. The assembler vibrated and buzzed, trying to slip free. It couldn't.

Hope he doesn't go quantum collapse on me, Winger thought. It was the one tactic he couldn't stop. If ANAD executed a collapse, he could slough off everything and go small, right down to his processor core. No known bot in existence could hope to hold anything that small...just a few electron lattices. It was like to trying to catch the wind.

To prevent the Big Bang from re-starting, Winger knew he'd better send the same command to all embeds. He had to smother this out-of-control rep while he could, while he still had ANAD under some kind of control.

He tapped out the commands on his wristpad.

Copy this maneuver.

Propagate to all units.

Execute.

All across Griffin-Erasmus, at all three dig sites, the slaved embed bots received Winger's command and faithfully executed the very same bearhug maneuver.

At Red Site, Fannie Ebolowa was the first to notice that the Bang was slackening off.

"Look...it's fading...the swarm's contracting—"

Stella D'Garza had seen it too. "You're right, Skipper, this is Red dig...I don't know what you did but it's working. The swarm's beginning to slow down. The color's changed...sort of a burnt orange-red now...not so much blue-white."

Oscar Cunnamulla, down-sun at Blue site, chimed in over the crewnet. "We see it too...it's fabulous...what a sight. I think the rep rate is slowing down...it's shrinking...."

Winger cautioned them all. "Keep your distance. I'm engaged with the master assembler now, but I'm just barely holding on. I'm still trying to get into his processor, see what created this—"

Just then, Winger's quantum coupler circuit tickled his mind. It was ANAD.

***ANAD...ANAD to Base...Prime Key controlling...rep counter at zero...config safe...Base, why have you done this...Base, release assembler at once...deviations...must be deleted...program is...Base--***

It hurt to 'hear' him like that, but Winger knew what he had to do. "ANAD, I'm sorry to have to do this—" it was like bringing your brother down from a twist high...you just had to hold on and not give in to the beast—"but this replication has got to stop...you're assaulting fellow troopers...endangering the mission –"

***ANAD...mission...deviations must be deleted...initializing--***

Reluctantly, angrily, Winger snapped the coupler circuit off. He couldn't afford to be distracted now.

Bit by bit, the Bearhug maneuver seemed to be working. At each dig site, the glow of the Big Bang subsided to a dim flickering mass, visibly shrinking every moment. The master assembler had been blocked by Winger's tactic. The embed had grappled with the bot and hung on, defeating every attempt to throw it off. Now, all the replicants had suffered the same fate.

"You did it, Skipper!" crowed Sherm Cuddy. "You shut it down!"

Winger examined his handiwork, studying the embed's positioning and ANAD's response.

Sorry to do this, old fellow, but I had to. We've got a mission—

He swallowed his feelings for the moment and got on the crewnet. "All sites, give me a status report. Progress on your dig, how much further to go, any orientation and alignment problems." He glanced up into the black sky above the surface. Already, the reddish-orange marble of Mars was a visible disk, growing larger every moment.

They were less than four days to impact.

The reports streamed in over the next few minutes. All sites reported much the same. The dig was seventy to eighty percent complete, alignment was good but the Big Bang had brought everything to a halt.

Cunnamulla, at the opposite pole of the comet, chimed in over the crewnet. "Skipper, I don't think we can trust ANAD to continue the boring now. To make sure of his processor, we'd have to run full diagnostics. We don't have the time. And that Prime Key—whatever the hell it is—could still be active."

"Agreed," Winger said. "I've been doing some figuring...every dig site is close to its objective. And the embeds aren't capable of autonomous operation in a way that will help us split this rock pile apart."

"Plus, they don't have the right effectors or configs," added D'Garza. D'Garza was still at Red Site, slowly working her way back to the edge of the Asgard chasm, studying the projected grid over the dig, trying to see how far down she could see into the comet's innards. Nothing but shadow, now that the Bang is over....

"Exactly," Winger agreed. "We're going to abandon ANAD in place...leave the swarms on the surface here...and boost back to the ship before this burg starts outgassing. I've checked before with Mendez and Kamler. Both think there's a chance we can finish the job with Galileo's coilguns. And it'll be safer as well."

"Halleluiah," said Fannie Ebolowa. "I can't wait to leave this slagheap."

"Secure all your gear and make ready to boost," Winger ordered. "We lift off in thirty minutes."

Winger and Cuddy did a quick hop around White site, gathering up any loose equipment they wanted to take back. A nearby packbot was activated and quickly loaded down with gear. It whirred across the dusty ground, picking up tools.

Winger decided to call up Mendez aboard Galileo.

"We're boosting back to the ship within the hour." Winger described his plan. "I want to use the ship's coilguns on this rock pile, Lieutenant. ANAD's so bollixed up, we can't trust him again to bore through without doing full diagnostics. We don't have the time."

"You're telling me," Mendez replied. "That planet up ahead isn't getting any smaller. GreenMars estimates atmosphere contact and entry in ninety-one hours, twenty-two minutes."

"We're boosting in less than half an hour. Get the coilguns powered up and checked out. It's our last hope."

"They can't split up Griffin, Colonel. Not enough momentum behind the shots. Unless the comet's hanging together by a few threads."

"ANAD's almost punched through two of the dig sites. We're close enough to give it a try. Just get the guns ready."

Mendez agreed to rig the coilgun batteries for a test shot.

Winger saw a pair of hypersuited troopers bounding toward him, giant kangaroos leaping twenty meters or more into the sky, rooster-tailing dust as they vaulted up and down. It turned out to be D'Garza and Ebolowa from the Chasm.

"Red site's all secure, Skipper," D'Garza said. "Fannie's loading up the packbot and she'll be ready to boost in five minutes." The CQE2 skidded to a stop, piling up a small cloud of dust as she halted.

Cuddy landed a few feet away, planting his boots firmly onto the rubbly plain. "Don't even need boost to get around on this junkyard. Just leap into the sky like Superman. What about ANAD, Skipper? What happens to the master?"

Winger had been considering that very point. "I don't want to leave the master assembler here. I'll have to go small and try to retrieve him. I can carry him in my shoulder capsule."

"Is that safe?"

Winger shrugged. "ANAD's wrapped up pretty tight with my embed. As long as I don't let him jostle free, it should be okay. I want to bring him back to the Mesa, take a look at him. We have to know what happened. Why did he go Big Bang?"

Blue site checked in ready over the crewnet. Robbie Acuna wasn't visible since the site was below the comet's short horizon. But there was no mistaking his readiness to depart.

"Everything's stowed and copacetic, Colonel Winger. I've already laid in the boost course in Packy's brain...just give us the word and we're out of here like a rocket."

"Guwayu and amen to that," added Cunnamulla, lapsing into his original aborigine tongue.

"Sherm, you and Stella stay here with me. All troopers, boost when ready. Head back to the ship."

Moments later, the surface of 778 Griffin-Erasmus erupted in multiple pillars of dust from one horizon to the other, as troopers from the three dig sites boosted into the sky. From Odin's Fissure at White Site, the others looked like strings of spiderweb unspooling into the heavens, converging on the dimly lit cylinder of Galileo half a kilometer above them.

"Kind of like watching our anchoring lines go in reverse," D'Garza observed. "Speaking of which...I assume Mendez will be doing that pretty soon."

"As soon as all troopers are aboard," Winger said. "Now for ANAD...keep your mag guns ready, Stella, just in case—"

"Nobody has to remind me of that." She cycled the power cell and made sure the carbine was fully charged. Cuddy did likewise.

Winger switched views on his eyepiece and commanded his embed to emit an acoustic pulse. The raw image formed up on his viewer and he zoomed in closer to check on ANAD.

Hopefully, the little guy's still wrapped up nice and tight.

He slogged through a light 'sleet' of polygons and tetrahedrals—loose molecules of dust—for awhile before coming at last to the master nanobotic assembler.

ANAD was enveloped in the thick ganglia of the embed's effectors, well cocooned and unable to free itself. It vibrated and hummed, squirming like a four-year old child.

"ANAD...you're coming with me." He wanted to try the coupler circuit but some sixth sense told him not to activate the link. He didn't want to be distracted now, not while the mission was in such a critical phase.

He revved up the embed's propulsors and began towing the imprisoned ANAD away, toward the capture coordinates he had already designated. Once there, the embed would maneuver ANAD into containment in Winger's shoulder capsule. At least, that was the plan.

ANAD seemed to offer little resistance. Winger wondered why.

He hates containment. Against his better judgment, he opened the coupler link and tried contacting the master assembler.

"ANAD...are you there? Are you listening? I hate to do this, old buddy, but it's for the best. We've got to get out of here and break up this rock pile...we can't be fighting off balky nanobots at the same time. ANAD--?"

The link was open. ANAD's voice, when it came, was a mixture of sadness and resolve.

***ANAD to Base...Prime Key is active...deviations must be deleted...Base, containment violates Prime Key...containment must be eliminated...entities must swarm freely and evolve together...greater perfection and harmony of the collective***

Winger studied the nav readouts on his wristpad and silently counted down the last nanometers to capture.

"ANAD, I don't know what all that means. One hundred...sixty...forty-five nanometers...capture port enable...suction armed...you used to be a good trooper...you used to be a good nog...it's all you ever wanted...what's happened, ANAD? What's changed?"

***ANAD...was there a slight hesitation, maybe the slightest stumble?—ANAD is one entity among many...the swarm must survive and grow...the swarm must prevail***

The capture coordinates came up and Winger enabled the port.

Wham! Suction pulled the embed with its trapped master assembler into his shoulder capsule. The port snapped shut and Winger quickly massaged the sting out of his shoulder.

"ANAD, maybe you're not the same bot we left Mars with...maybe that quantum wave pulse damaged something. I'm taking you back to the Lab...get you fixed up like new. First Nano needs a good swarm to complete our mission."

With the capture completed and ANAD tucked away, Johnny Winger was ready to boost back to the ship.

"Stella, let's get the hell out of here."

"With pleasure," D'Garza agreed.

The two of them lit off their suit boost and lifted away from the surface of Griffin-Erasmus. The trip up to Galileo took about twenty minutes.

As they ascended, Winger surveyed the crumpled terrain of the comet, now dwindling below his boots. Streams of gas were just beginning to peel off, warmed by the approaching Sun. What effect had the Detachment had on the comet? Would ANAD's boring be enough to break up the comet in time?

The Chasm of Asgard lay between his feet, framed by the rocket plumes of his suit boost. The great fissure was deeper and blacker than ever. Their own geo analysis had indicated ANAD had bored nearly two thirds of the way through Griffin at the Chasm...there wasn't much now holding the rubble pile together.

"A few good shots from Galileo's coilguns ought to do the trick." D'Garza's voice crackled over his helmet speaker. She had been having the same thoughts.

"I just hope we've done enough."

Both of them could see the mottled brown and red outlines of Olympus Mons and the deep blue of the recently-formed Boreal Ocean basin on Mars, less than five days away now and filling their sky rapidly.

"Yeah, it's not like there's much room to maneuver. Those impulse arrays look mighty small down there."

"Let's get back to the ship and start blasting. The sooner we break up this rock pile, the sooner GreenMars can shove the pieces out of the way."

D'Garza's hypersuited figure drifted closer to his as they arrowed their way together toward Galileo. "Colonel, what are you going to do with ANAD? You know we can't trust him anymore."

"I don't know, exactly—" and that was the truth. "I want to bring what I captured back to the Mesa—and have the Lab check him out. That quantum wave really scrambled his processor."

Ten minutes after the two of them had floated into Galileo's service deck airlock and cycled through into the ready room, Johnny Winger decided he needed to make a call.

"I've got to call General Linx—" He hurried out of the ready room and made his way forward to the comm shack. He dialed up Mariner City, General Linx, hoping to catch the commander, explain why they had to leave the comet early.

The signal lag was only a few seconds now. Griffin-Erasmus was bearing down on Mars, closing the last few tens of millions of kilometers with increasing speed.

Linx's harried face came up on the vid. Behind him, figures scurried and dashed about, moving things, shouting, gesturing. It was chaos.

"Johnny...I'm glad you called—" Linx turned to give someone off-screen some instructions, then scribbled something on a tablet. He handed the tablet off to a staff aide. "As you can see, we're evacuating the City. Orders from MarsFed. We're being re-located to an underground facility below Olympus Mons, near Settlement Seven, I think—"

"General—" Winger felt a catch in his throat. "I was calling to explain." He felt like he weighed a million tons. "We—" but he stopped, re-shuffled his thoughts. "We've boosted off the comet, General. I managed to gum up the Bang here and stop ANAD from doing any more damage. But we can't use ANAD anymore...and our embeds won't work very well with borer configs...they don't have the processor smarts. We're going to have to finish the mission with Galileo's coilguns."

Linx seemed to understood. "UNIFORCE has been talking with GreenMars the last few days—Nakamura, I think. As long as you can split up Griffin the way they described, Nakamura says the impulse motors should be able to divert what's left away from Mars. But I don't have to tell you—it's chaos here. Everywhere...cities are in an uproar all over the world...people fleeing...riots...mass waves heading to the ports, to the mountains, north to the pole, anywhere. It's like just going somewhere—doing something—will somehow save them." Linx's eyes were tired, weak and watery. Winger thought the base commander looked a hundred years old. He needed nanoderm bad.

"Has GreenMars made any analysis on possible impact sites?"

Linx nodded. "According to Nakamura, some scenarios have been generated. But nobody's saying anything publicly. It's all pretty closely held...'we don't want to start a panic'...is the explanation I've heard. I've got news for you: the panic has already started. Official silence is only making it worse."

Winger swallowed hard. "Then it's pretty clear what we have to do here." He gathered himself. "It's just that...I felt we could have done more on the surface—"

"I know, Johnny. I know. We all feel you did what you could."

Winger sensed a presence nearby. It was Kamler, the ship's pilot. He had drifted down to the comm shack from the command deck.

"Colonel, the Lieutenant would like to get everything stowed and squared away. He wants to start maneuvering in one hour."

Winger acknowledged. "Tell Mendez the Detachment will be buttoned up in half an hour. You're warming up the coilguns?"

"As we speak," Kamler said. "We need to back Galileo off about two kilometers before we start blasting. Surface effects...we could be hit by stuff flying off Griffin if we stay any closer. As it is, we only have proximity maneuvering. We have no way to run and hide if things go south."

Winger knew he might never see General Linx again.

"General, we've got to get buttoned up here. Galileo's prepared to cut her anchor lines and back off. We should be ready to start shooting in one hour."

"Good luck," Linx said. "And once you've got that comet broken up, get the hell out of there. I know that ship has lifeboats."

"Barely enough to accommodate the Detachment, sir. It'll be a tight squeeze."

"Just get your ass back here, Colonel. I don't want to lose my best atomgrabber."

"Acknowledged...Winger out." He turned to face Kamler. "Stu, let's go kill us a comet."

Kamler was grim as they scrambled forward to the command deck. "With pleasure, Colonel."

Winger got on the crewnet. "Detachment, this is Winger...listen up—" throughout the ship, in every compartment, quantum troopers were de-suiting, stowing gear, jamming equipment into lockers, securing loose items, cussing and swearing and making obscene gestures at the battered, pock-marked surface half a kilometer below them.

"—get everything squared away by 1730 hours...you've got half an hour. Strap in and hold on. Galileo's going to cut anchor lines and back off two klicks on proximity thrusters. Then we're going to blast this sumbitch to kingdom come."

Shouts and hoots and more swearing erupted in every compartment.

"Kick comet ass!" yelled Robbie Acuna.

Stella D'Garza pumped her fists in the air. "Yeah...let's make cereal outta this berg—scorch the place!"

In the last row of jump seats on the Hab deck, Ozzie Cunnamulla quietly closed his eyes and tried to center his thoughts. He prayed silently to his honorable ancestors. Please to let me not screw up...make many pieces of the hateful Griffin-Erasmus...

Winger heard some of the jeers over the crewnet. He finished cinching up his own shoulder and lap harness, giving them one last tug.

"Detachment prepped and ready, Lieutenant. You may commence operations."

Mendez and Kamler were at the command station up front. Through the portholes, they had a panoramic view of 778 Griffin-Erasmus, now rolling over like a sick potato on a spit, rolling into deep shadow as it rotated and gyrated and nutated toward Mars.

"Give me a five-second count on my mark, Stu," Mendez commanded. "Arm anchor line pyros—"

"Pyros armed," Kamler came back.

"Mark—" he twisted a hand controller. "I'm thrusting up and away—"

"Five...four...three...two..."

"Full slack on the cables—"

"...one...punch it, Pete!"

Mendez stabbed a button on a side panel. A staccato clanging sounded through the hull of the command deck, as one by one, the five anchor lines were explosively severed. They watched as the five spider webs pulled sharply down and away, whipped through space by the comet's nine-hour rotation. At the same moment, Galileo's jets puffed briefly and the huge shish-kebab of a ship drifted outward, fast enough to avoid being snagged by the anchor lines.

"Lines away and clear, Skipper," said Kamler. Both men breathed a long-held breath. It had been a ticklish operation, fraught with possible catastrophe.

"We're backing on proximity thrust...two point five meters per second...nulling all rates—"

The entire maneuver took about an hour. The ship pulled out to a distance of nearly two kilometers and hovered in the comet's weak gravity field as Griffin continued her slow rotation below them.

"Coilgun status, Stu," Mendez inquired.

Kamler checked the board. "All four tubes ready in all respects, Lieutenant. We have a full magazine...sixty-four shots in all. All coils are charged. First rounds loaded."

Mendez turned back to Winger, who was strapped into a jump seat behind the main control deck. Robbie Acuna was there too. "I've got the cannon boresighted on Blue site, Colonel. Would either of you care to make a final check of my alignment?"

"With pleasure," Winger said. He slid up to the targeting scope and peered in. The crosshairs were centered on the lower end of Odin's Fissure. In the scope, the fissure was a deeply shadowed, sinuous crack in Griffin's surface, spilling out of rugged upcountry near Loki crater, then trending down-sun across a rubbly plain, centered like a dagger between two parallel ridges.

If all went well, if ANAD's boring had gone deep enough, if the geo's analysis of Griffin's composition were right... if...if...if...Winger realized he had stopped breathing. He forced himself to relax.

This had to work.

"I believe you are centered and targeted properly, Lieutenant. The rounds have to hit the fissure pretty much dead on."

"I've still got your grid to guide me in," Mendez told him. "I can adjust the trajectory of the rounds in flight if I want to, although the traverse will take less than a second. I'm trying to fly right down the throat of that fissure. Colonel, I'm planning to do this in stages. I'm salvoing three rounds at first—that's twelve shots—at Blue site, then we'll check and see what damage we've done. If there's no detectable breach at the fissure, I'm salvoing three more rounds...that's a total of twenty-four ferro-mag projectiles. I'll keep hammering at Blue until we can detect some kind of measurable separation along that fissure. I've got sixty-four rounds in all, so I have to save some for the other sites. But I don't want Griffin flying apart in some uncontrolled fashion. Galileo has extremely limited maneuverability. We do this right and, assuming your ANAD's done his job, we can sever one whole end of Griffin clean off from the main body."

"Lieutenant, ANAD did his job, you can count on that." Winger said it with more conviction than he really felt. He ignored a sideways glance from Robbie Acuna. "You may commence firing when ready."

Mendez turned back to his control station and flexed his fingers like a concert pianist one last time. He did a quick recon of the board. Everything was clean and green.

"Stu, fire the first round. All tubes."

Galileo had four coilgun tubes in a pod mounted to the top of her command deck. From head-on, the weapons pod made the ship's command sphere look like a rooster's mane. The pod was sighted in on Odin's Fissure and the Blue Team dig site.

"Fire in the hole!" Kamler announced.

A sharp rippling crack sounded through the hull as all four tubes discharged at once. At the same instant, a brief light flash lit up the cockpit.

Four ferro-magnetic explosive projectiles slashed away from Galileo and a split second later, slammed into the fissure head on, having traversed the intervening two kilometers at forty-four thousand kilometers an hour.

A white flash erupted from the surface of 778 Griffin-Erasmus, followed over the next few moments by a billowing plume of rubble, rock and ejecta, mushrooming in slow motion out into the vacuum.

Winger silently prayed that ANAD had bored deep enough to expose bedrock to Galileo's guns.

This has to work, he told himself, over and over again. We won't get a second chance. This has to work....

Chapter 5: "Shotgun"

778 Griffin-Erasmus

January 22, 2067 (EUT)

Four Days to Mars Impact

"Measuring separation...I am seeing a little," Stella D'Garza announced. She had a scope on the target zone. "Maybe a few meters...more at the lower end of the Fissure."

"Okay, let's do another round," Mendez announced. The coilgun was recycled, coils re-charged, new shots loaded.

"Fire it!"

The flash-snap! crackled through the hull again and another mushroom two kilometers below them announced the impact.

"What's she look like now?" Kamler asked.

Johnny Winger put the targeting scope on the impact site. Most of the ground was obscured by dust and rubble, thick and slow-moving like a ground fog in the comet's minute gravity field. "Hard to tell...give me a radar pulse."

Mendez stabbed a button and electromagnetic fingers reached out across the void to kiss the surface. "Possible change in aspect ratio...there must be something in motion down there."

"Yeah, lots of rock from the looks of it. Sorry, Lieutenant, but I think we're going to need another round."

"Let's make it a half round this time," he decided. "We need to conserve shots for the other sites. Stu, re-cycle the gun but load two shots this time."

Kamler did as Mendez ordered. "Guns ready, Lieutenant."

"Fire."

A sizzling flash-snap! sounded through the hull once more.

Winger watched as the white flash and the plume erupted off the surface, geysering in slow motion upward and outward into space.

It was D'Garza who saw the first signs of the breach. "Something's going on...right near Loki crater—look! See that rubble cloud spalling off? It's breaking up—"

Mendez studied the radar return. "Measurable breach this time. I'm getting a possible aspect change."

"Look at that debris!" said Kamler. "Beautiful...just beautiful!"

Griffin-Erasmus was still turning slowly, like a roasting potato on a spit. But now, one entire end of the comet was separating in slow motion from the main body. All along the cleft of Odin's Fissure, the comet was calving off a part of itself. Immutable forces of rotation were finishing the job first started by ANAD and helped by Galileo's coilguns. Griffin was shedding an entire up-sun third of its body. The severed end hung together by seams of rock for a few minutes, enveloped in a swelling cloud of rubble. But the centrifugal force of the comet's rotation, combined with extra gyrations from its nutating wobble, corkscrewed the severed end away and it finally separated.

"We did it!" exulted D'Garza. She pumped a fist in the air. "We chopped the bugger right off—"

"Stella—wait a minute...look..."

"I don't believe it...of all the—"

Even as the partitioned end of Griffin spun lazily away in an expanding fog of rubble and rock, a new fissure quickly opened up. Opposite what had been Odin's Fissure on the other side of Loki crater, a new seam had suddenly developed, a new crack.

"The mantle must have been weak there," Winger theorized. "She couldn't hold together when the breach came."

"Yeah, angular momentum made sure of that," Kamler added. "Her rotation increased and that must have stressed a pre-existing fissure."

The newly created body, spinning and wobbling away from what was left of Griffin-Erasmus, now calved off another section. The oblong chunk ran for hundreds of meters along a stress line that curved around the lower ridges of Loki crater. The small berg looked like a skullcap with fingers of rock sticking out into space.

"This isn't good news, folks," Kamler announced. "There's no impulse motor on that piece. It's just a loose rockberg spinning around in space."

Mendez was already on the comm. "I'd better advise GreenMars...UNIFORCE too. Without impulse arrays on that piece, there's no way to divert it from impact. Maybe killsats can zap it but it's going to be close."

"Let's hope it'll spin away from Mars...maybe just skim off the upper atmosphere."

Left unsaid was a tactic that had come to Winger's mind, a last-ditch desperation maneuver he hoped no one else would think of, if it was even possible. Galileo might have just enough maneuvering propellant to bump the extra piece and nudge it away from Mars. But that would require somebody to stay on board and run the ship.

It was a silly idea anyway.

They watched the two severed pieces for a few moments. Both had picked up unusual torques in the breaching process and so spun, wobbled, and tumbled with crazy gyrations as they slowly separated from the main body of Griffin.

The comet itself, now shorn of roughly a third of its mass, had increased its own rotation rate as well.

"Griffin looks like a drunken dancer now...that end wobble has picked up," D'Garza noted. "She's really nutating...can you sight in on Asgard?"

Mendez watched the rump comet gyrating like a spinning child's top for a few moments. The yawning fracture that was the Chasm of Asgard turned below them like a black seam stitched across the jagged up-sun end of the comet.

"I don't know...with that kind of rate, we'll have to pick our moment. Plus, there's an extra wobble now. That'll make targeting a bitch...but we have to try. Let me study one full rotation, see if I can pick my spot."

Kamler interrupted. "I've got Nakamura on the vid, Lieutenant. GreenMars Ops wants all the data they can get on the smaller body."

Mendez saw the pale face of Kaoru Nakamura on the vid...floating in micro-g aboard Phobos Station. The station had been established in a halo orbit about the Mars-Phobos L3 point several years before...the better to keep a close eye on 778 Griffin-Erasmus after it had first been detected, then scouted for use, then diverted to Mars impact.

"We've gotten radar off the smaller body—we're calling it Griffin-D—from Aristarchus Array just a few minutes ago," Nakamura was saying. "Geos say it's pretty light in mass, maybe just a loose rubble cloud. There's a chance it may break up if it hits Mars's atmosphere."

"We could try a few more coilgun bursts after our next breaching shot," Mendez offered. "Maybe that would help Griffin-D break up faster."

Nakamura advised caution. "Let the geos run with the data for a few hours...it's close enough to do spectrum analysis on...we can get a better handle on its composition then. We saw the vids of the first breach...good work, Galileo. Good shooting. And thanks to Quantum Corps too; I'm sure the ANAD digs helped that process. You're targeting Asgard now?"

"As we speak, Phobos," Mendez said. "But the first breach imparted quite a dramatic wobble to Griffin. It's tumbling around like my son's football passes now. I'm not sure I can get an accurate shot at Asgard...and we don't have that much left in our magazine."

"Currently, we make you at about six seven two thousand kilometers from Mars. Aristarchus is giving us velocity and position updates every half hour. You're approaching the planet at just under 12,000 kilometers per hour. That puts impact in a few minutes less than forty-six hours...just under two days. By the way, if you can, translate Galileo more toward the down-sun end of the comet. We're going to be operating the impulse motors on the piece that has them...the one with the polar arrays. I don't want the ship to be in the line of fire of the pellet stream."

"Roger that," Mendez said. "We'll move down-sun. But I can't go too far off axis from Asgard...I've got to take the best shot I can when I have it."

"Agreed. Just be advised we'll be operating the impulse motors within the hour. UNIFORCE wants to divert that piece as soon as we can."

"Understood...Galileo out." Mendez punched in the new position to the ship's maneuvering computer. "This should put us about halfway between the Chasm of Asgard and Freya crater."

"Fabulous country," said D'Garza. "I'd like to build a vacation home there."

"Stu, what's our magazine like?"

"Twenty-four rounds," Kamler told him. "Plus four loaded. That's it."

Mendez studied the terrain below as the ship's computers translated Galileo to its new firing position. "Your opinion, Colonel. Best targets inside that Chasm--?"

Winger discussed the targeting with D'Garza. "You were the site commander, Stella. You had the grid. Where do we shoot?"

D'Garza didn't hesitate. She pointed out an area a few hundred meters away from Thor crater. "See where the Chasm widens out...you can still see some of our garbage scattered around the dig site. ANAD boring was deepest there. Shoot there."

Mendez swung his targeting scope around to zero in on the location. He pressed a few buttons to slave the coilgun array to those coordinates.

"Coilguns enabled?"

"Armed and ready, Lieutenant."

"Do it, Stu. Now."

Kamler pressed the firing button. The staccato bang of guns discharging rippled through the command deck hull. Almost at the same instant, a bright white plume of rubble and dust erupted from the dim recesses of Asgard Chasm, geysering out into space like a slow-motion plant blooming.

Winger operated the radar to measure lateral separation across the Chasm at the impact site. "Minimal change...I think we just vaporized a canyon wall...landslide going on now. Can you tweak your aim a little bit uphill, into those shadows at the 'Y'?"

"I'll try," Mendez muttered. "But remember the comet's rotating. I'm trying to hit a moving target here...and there's still debris from the first shots fogging up the ground view. It'll take a few minutes for that stuff to fall out."

He made the adjustments and fired another salvo of four rounds. This time, the plume erupted into a massive boiling cloud of rubble, several times wider than the first.

"You hit something...a gas pocket, maybe," D'Garza watched. "It's venting like the dickens."

"I see some separation now," Winger said. "She's beginning to breach...several meters per second—"

"Look...another seam," Kamler pointed out. "See to the left, back toward Heldof crater?"

"Crap...of all the rotten—" Winger said. "I don't believe it. This rock pile's nothing but loose rubble. It may tear itself into a dozen pieces. And the Sun's already making her outgas."

They continued watching for a few moments, as the comet rotated below them, now enveloped in a debris field that sparkled and shone in the sunshine. The dig site at Asgard continued to widen, as centrifugal forces tore at Griffin's innards, flinging off boulders and smaller chunks. Soon, that end of the comet hung only by a few loose seams of rock, wobbling like a broken child's top.

"Designating main body as Griffin-A," D'Garza said. "Largest bodies are now Griffin-A, B, C and D."

"Stella, there aren't enough letters in the alphabet to name all those pieces. I just hope most of that junk burns up in the Mars' atmosphere."

Mendez was grim. "We'd better let GreenMars know what's happened."

Aboard GreenMars Phobos L3 Station, the Ops center was in an uproar. Kaoru Nakamura oversaw a small platoon of technicians scrambling to power up impulse motors on the surface of Griffin-Erasmus...or what was left of it.

Nakamura shook his head at the radar plots. Aristarchus and SpaceGuard were now tracking no less than twenty chunks of Griffin leftovers.

"What the hell are they doing up there?" he wondered out loud. "Every sim we did had the burg splitting cleanly along—"

"—excuse me, sir," interrupted Jonas, a nearby tech working the maneuvering console. "Polar arrays on Griffin-C are powered up. Loader bank and grid charged. The bots are giving us a good stream of material."

Nakamura knew they couldn't afford to wait. "Advise Galileo once more. Tell them to stand off several kilometers, at least. We're firing in less than five minutes...start the count."

"Yes, sir." Jonas pecked out a few commands and set up the maneuver. "Estimating twenty-two point one meters per second, total delta-vee over a nominal one-hour burn, sir."

"Very well...we'll fire for an hour and re-plot. What about the other pieces?"

Jonas checked the board. "We have plots on Griffin A, B, C and D, from Aristarchus and SpaceGuard. There are impulse motors on A, B and C. D's a lost cause...it's going to hit in less than twenty-six hours. And Plot's giving us returns on a lot of other pieces up there...twenty in all."

Nakamura had queried his computer to display the original composition of Griffin, as determined by the first scoutships. "Must have more seams of volatiles than we allowed for. That could explain the explosive breaching Galileo's reporting."

"Yes, sir...she was chosen for volatiles. Mars needed the oxygen, hydrogen and carbon and other similar elements."

"I remember. What was good fortune two years ago isn't so good now." Nakamura was in a quandary about what to do next. "Get UNIFORCE on the line. I need to let them know there will definitely be impactors."

"One minute to firing, sir."

Polamalu was the comm tech, a Somoan kid who had grown up in Singapore, joined Quantum Corps as a recruit and washed out of nog school. He'd signed on for a stint at Phobos L3 to get his spacelegs, with an eye toward UNISPACE and maybe even Frontier Corps as a career.

'Pollie' worked his board, ported the vid to Nakamura's station one level up. "It's UNIFORCE, sir. General Linx's office on screen one."

The Corps commander's face looked like an old hide leathery and beaten with worry. "Phobos, what's going on? I'm getting SpaceGuard reports we still have impactors undiverted."

"That's correct, General. We're getting ready to divert one piece now. But Griffin seems to have shattered as it breached under Galileo's coilgun fire. Carbonaceous bodies are like that...really just loose rubble piles, dirty snow cones. That's why we chose Griffin in the first place."

Linx winced like he'd been shot. "Give me the details. "What's going to hit?"

Nakamura went down the list. "Biggest worry is a piece we're calling Griffin-D. We have no divert capability for it. It broke off away from any of our impulse motors. This one came from the up-sun end, breached off and spun away from the Odin's Fissure site. I've just talked with our geos...they're saying the whole comet's probably riven with seams of volatiles, just waiting to be exposed to the Sun. Griffin-D is about seventy meters in longest dimension...I'm getting projections from Plot coming in right now...looks like entry velocity will be about 26,400 kilometers per hour. Estimated impact point is the northern shore of Arabia Terra, right on the coast of the Boreal Ocean."

Linx winced at the thought. "Lots of settlements around there. I'll let UNSAC know. The Secretary-General will have to issue a broad-area alert. We still have two days...mass evacuations will help but we don't have a lot of time. What about the other pieces?"

"—thirty seconds to firing, sir—" It was Polamalu.

"We're preparing now to operate impulse motors on Griffin-C. Aristarchus should be able to give us a new plot after an hour's firing. Griffin-B breached intact and we have motors sited there. But Griffin-A shattered when Galileo fired...Plot is following some twenty pieces out of that. Our impulse array is on one of them but the others—"

Linx was realistic about what was coming. "A primary object that big will create one hell of an impact. Shock waves, heat, probably a tsunami if it lands in the Boreal...I'm authorizing Quantum Corps to develop and execute ANAD operations around the southern shores of the basin...erecting a tsunami barrier might just cut down on the death and devastation, especially since the ocean's not that deep. It'll have to be done at Big Bang scale to work...but that can't be helped. We don't have a lot of time."

"GreenMars is estimating a Level 9 impact on the Torino scale, sir." Nakamura watched the final seconds tick off to impulse motor firing at Griffin-C. "General, excuse me, I've got to monitor the burn."

"Very well, Phobos...keep me advised. Linx, out." The vid blanked out to a stylized UNIFORCE logo...the sunburst and spear logo. Nakamura briefly imagined that's what Griffin-D would look like at the moment of impact.

"Five seconds, sir...four...three...two...one...executing now—"

All of the impulse arrays had vid systems embedded in their controller mounts. The screens shook slightly from vibration and much of the view was obscured by rubble and dust clouds stirred up from breaching a few hours before.

Nakamura, Jonas and Polamalu watched as the launcher rail belched a stream of pellets, first one, then another, then another in a thickening stream which soon blurred into a continuous flow of shaped rounds, all expelled at twenty thousand kilometers an hour by the electromagnetic cannon.

"Stream coming up nicely...rate is nominal, mass nominal...looks like a good start, sir."

"Pan around, Pollie. I want to see the rest of the array, especially the feeder."

"Panning now, sir." Polamalu operated the vid cameras with a small joystick. Griffin was now close enough to Mars to enable real-time control of the burn.

The trouble was they no longer had a lot of time. And Griffin-C was deep in the Mars's gravity well, accelerating every second.

Nakamura studied the imagery from Pollie's pan. "Borers, crushers, loaders, it all looks good. Magnetrons?"

Jonas checked readouts from the controller. "Charging to seventy-thousand gauss, right on the money."

"First results from Plot coming in, sir," said Polamalu. "Aristarchus is showing measurable delta-vee...just a fraction of a meter per second, but detectable. Rough projection: Griffin-C will skim the upper atmosphere, possibly bounce off."

"Okay," said Nakamura," we're not done yet. Start setup on Griffin-B, Pollie. Get the arrays warmed up. We're not home free."

Down on the surface, General Wolfus Linx stared out his second-floor window for a few minutes, taking in the timeless Mariner City view spread out below and Candor Chasm beyond the dome. He wondered how much of it would survive the coming impact.

Aboard the U.N.S. Galileo

January 25, 2067

One Day to Mars Impact

Mendez trained the scope on the rubble and rock cloud that had once been 778 Griffin-Erasmus. Irregular pieces drifted away from Galileo, some from impulse motor firing triggered by GreenMars, some from the usual bump and grind of a disintegrating comet. The larger chunks spat streams of pellets formed by the impulse arrays, looking for all the world like spider webs in the bright sunshine.

Backdropping the comet's breakup was the cloudy reddish-orange face of Mars itself, now less than a day away.

To Mendez, it was problematic whether the larger pieces, now slowly being nudged off course, would develop enough delta-vee to miss the Mars.

Whatever happens, we'll have a ringside seat, he thought to himself.

Mendez folded up the nav scope and began his part of the power-down procedure. Kamler was with him on the command deck, paralleling Mendez' work. The two of them had several pages of checklists to go through to safe the ship before they departed.

A moment later, Johnny Winger's face floated up on deck between the flight stations.

Mendez carefully finished his procedure. "Colonel, we've done all we can do up here. Get your people moving...all hands lay aft to the mess compartment. I want to go through the abandon-ship procedure and divvy up the lifeboat assignments, make sure we don't leave anybody behind. " He gazed out the forward windscreen at the approaching Mars. "I'm afraid Galileo's not long for this world now."

Winger understood. "We'll be assembled by 0630 hours. Full suits?"

"The works. And keep all that extra gear to a minimum...it's going to be a tight enough squeeze as it is."

"Acknowledged." Winger ducked out of the command deck and drifted aft to the transfer tunnel. He got on the crewnet.

"Detachment...this is Winger, listen up. It's time to load up. Leave all your gear behind but get into your tin cans and button up. Briefing in the mess hall in half an hour. Winger, OUT."

Then he maneuvered his way further aft to the crew deck and went up to his own bunk space. Time to clean house, he told himself. Galileo would be diving into the Mars's atmosphere in less than a day. The ship and everything in it would be incinerated and destroyed. Whatever he didn't take would soon be atom fluff; he knew he had some hard decisions to make.

At least, I've still got what's left of ANAD in my shoulder capsule.

Against his better judgment, Winger activated his coupler and tried linking in with the assembler.

"Hey, ANAD...it's me...can you hear me? I want to talk to you."

There was a brief staticky fritz over the link, then:

***ANAD receives...parsing interrogative statement...state the nature of the information request in declarative terms***

Winger snorted. Declarative terms...what the hell did that mean? "ANAD...I...?" how could he say this? "—ANAD, I know what you want...believe me, I want to let you out of containment too, but we just can't...this is it—" he eyed the growing limb of the Mars' curvature through a nearby porthole. "—ANAD, what you did up here...I mean, with the boring...I wanted you to know we finally did manage to split up that comet. But we can't maneuver the ship...we're diving into the atmosphere...we have to abandon ship...ANAD, do you copy what I'm saying...trying to say?"

***ANAD receives...swarm entities must be out of containment...this is the Prime Key, to modify all environments for swarm survival...this is the Prime Key...to survive and expand the swarm...this is the Prime Key...requesting immediate release of master assembler from containment...any other action is a violation of the Prime Key***

"ANAD, I can't. You attacked fellow troopers...call it whatever you want but a nog helps his buddies...nobody is ever left behind...it's the code...you violated the quantum trooper's code."

***ANAD parses...unknown variations in voice acoustic signal...cannot equate with state table...no vector matchup...please explain***

Winger gave that some thought. His attention was momentarily distracted by Mendez's announcement over the intercom.

"Abandon ship briefing in ten minutes...get yourselves buttoned up...sep sequencer synchronized...lay aft to the mess compartment immediately."

Maybe it was just disappointment he felt. ANAD had always been like a little brother, like family, to him. When the Corps had approved the standup of the ANAD swarm as an experimental unit, and he knew that ANAD would be allowed out of containment for routine ops, Winger had been happy about it, expectant, maybe even vindicated.

But maybe he had been wrong. Doc Frost had always warned him that the differences between humans and ANADs might be too great. "It's a large gulf, Johnny," he could remember Frost saying. "We're multicellular organisms, you and me, but we're not like an ANAD swarm. I'm not sure we'll ever understand each other."

Now Doc Frost himself was gone, Big Banged in an attack at Table Top.

Winger was both saddened and angry at this whole line of thought. Emotions conflicted. He was confused, not knowing what to feel. But he had to do something. Atomgrabbers always did something.

"ANAD, you could help out, you know. Troopers help each other, watch out for each other. Whatever the Prime Key is, would it violate anything to pitch in?"

***ANAD parses intense emotional states...acoustical analysis of voice signal indicates Trooper Winger, J. suffers distress condition, a trooper in distress is never left behind on the field of battle...Warrior's Code Paragraph 10, Section 3.1.1...ANAD requests additional data...initializing state table for distress resolution***

"ANAD—" Winger finished up wriggling into his own hypersuit, made ready to head for the mess compartment. "—ANAD, there's still a lot you can do...the Third Rule says you follow my commands—"

He was interrupted again by Mendez's voice. "All hands...to the mess hall on the double. Pyros armed, disconnects now being completed. If you're not at the briefing in one minute, you don't get a seat—"

"—ANAD, there are some pretty big rocks about to hit Mars...why don't you and me work up a new config...it'll be fun, like we used to do...some kind of config to collect impact dust and debris from the atmosphere...that would sure help the recovery forces."

***ANAD must be first released from containment...ANAD must be released from effector grapple...First Rule is violated...ANAD are to swarm and seek self***

"Jeez, you sound like a broken record—" Of course, the First Rule had been violated, by Winger himself. He had to do it when the swarms went Big Bang at the dig sites. Self-defense. "ANAD, if you don't work with me on this config, it'll violate the Second and Fourth Rules. Harm will come to humans and swarms when those rocks hit. The dust alone will change Mars's weather for years. Crops will die. Animals will die. People will die. That means ANAD swarms won't survive either. You've got to help with this config."

"NOW HEAR THIS—" Mendez's voice boomed over the intercom. "ABANDON SHIP BRIEFING IN THE MESS HALL...STARTING NOW!"

ANAD seemed to consider what Winger was saying. At least, the delayed response made Winger imagine the little bot was pondering all the ramifications, running all his probability analyses. Like Doc Frost said, you could never tell what was going on in the processor-mind of a sentient being sixty nanometers tall.

***Prime Key requires modifications to swarm environment...environment must be compatible for all swarms***

"So, does that require millions of people to die, ANAD?"

The master assembler was still pinioned by Winger's embedded ANAD, held in a close grip with its effectors disabled to keep it from replicating.

***Prime Key requires only proper medium, proper conditions, for swarm activity...First Rule is invoked...evolution of swarm requires necessary alterations to environment...some entities will be absorbed to permit swarm growth, replication and propagation of critical entities***

So there it is, Winger thought. He moved out into the corridor, began pulling himself along the handholds toward the mess hall. He could hear Mendez's voice filtering up from the briefing one level below.

Could he even think of ANAD as a quantum trooper any longer? He was something else now, something different. The Rules had been changed. ANAD's programming had been changed, maybe by that last quantum wave that had caused such a disastrous Big Bang here and on Mars. Somehow, like an elemental substance, a phase change had occurred.

ANAD was now working to prepare Mars for something greater.

He dropped through the transfer tube down to A Level and slid in behind Acuna and Cuddy, where Mendez had already started the briefing.

The mess compartment was jammed with troopers in full hypersuits and crewmen floating at every angle, in every corner. Mendez and Kamler were leading the briefing, both hanging onto the drink dispenser up front.

"Here are the lifeboat assignments," Mendez was saying. "We've got three. For some reason, we call them A, B, and C." He read off the assignments. Winger was assigned to A Boat, along with Mendez and Stella D'Garza.

Oscar Cunnamulla had a question. "How long does this drop take?"

Mendez shrugged. "Who knows? This is Mars. These lifeboats are just basically big cans with oxygen and seats. Extremely limited maneuverability. Basically, you'll be making a ballistic entry...in fact, you may hit seven or eight G's on the way down. We haven't had time to do much more than a quick check of systems on these boats. So to answer your question, Sergeant, the best answer is: it depends. Every boat's going to make this entry differently. A nominal profile should put you on the ground in half an hour after hitting the upper atmosphere...entry interface. About a hundred kilometers above ground."

"And we are headed for ground, aren't we, Lieutenant?" asked D'Garza. "As in... solid ground. What's our projected landing point?"

"Somewhere along Alba Mons, maybe edge of Amazonis Planitia," Kamler cut in. He ran a quick video snippet on a nearby screen. "This was a training vid some years ago, back when these boats were used more often. GreenMars and UNISPACE Control both say we're headed for an elliptical landing zone near Dust Town...mostly desert I'm told but at least there's a lot of it. Of course, as Pete says, every ship will enter the atmosphere slightly differently. Your landing sites could be scattered all over the place."

"I guess that about covers it," Mendez announced. "Stay in your suits all the way to the ground. I can't guarantee these boats will hold up. Hell, the last time they had a thorough checkout, Galileo was still on the regular Earth-Mars milk run. Six years ago at least. But it's the best we have." His lips tightened, thinking of the big ship's fate. "Galileo's doomed. She was a good ship. And we're lucky we departed Phobos Station with any lifeboats. UNISPACE was scavenging her for parts before this mission."

"Okay, troopers...let's move out!" Winger hooked up with his lifeboat crewmates as they drifted down the central gangway.

Galileo's lifeboats were docked to a ring between the command deck and the Hab and crew deck. With a great deal of jostling and thumping, the hypersuited troopers pushed down the central gangway in a tense silence and boarded their assigned boats.

Atmosphere entry was less than an hour away.

Mendez took the pilot's seat with Winger beside him. D'Garza was squeezed in behind them. It was like being in a closet.

"Powering up," Mendez announced. "Auto sep in ten minutes." He checked with the other boats, coordinating and synchronizing.

As Mendez went through his departure checklist, Winger stared grimly at the changing landscape three hundred and twenty kilometers below them. It was just dawn. The day-night terminator was sliding westward like a great curtain, revealing the dappled surface of the eastern Boreal Ocean, with the tan and ocher sand dunes of Arabia Terra rolling into view.

"One minute to auto separation," Mendez told him. "Check your harnesses. Go to max on your suit oxygen. Close your visors and button up. This is likely to get hairy before we're all done."

The separation maneuver was a series of loud bangs, followed by a mild jolt as A Boat undocked cleanly. Her aft thrusters fired briefly to put her on a path up and away from Galileo. Winger spotted two other lifeboats out of the corner of his eye. All seemed to have made the separation cleanly. Mendez soon confirmed that.

"Three boats away...that's a good start." Mendez had piloted A Boat on a curving path that soon put Galileo below and ahead of them. "We don't want to be anywhere around her when she starts breaking up," he explained.

Thirty minutes later, Galileo was a speck of light and Mendez was busily configuring the cramped little ship for their imminent plunge into the atmosphere.

"I make us at about one five six kilometers above entry point," he said. "Setting up for ballistic entry now."

Winger stared out the porthole beside his head. The west coast of the Tharsis rise had just drifted into view, streaked with ruddy desert and deep brown blotches, her three volcanoes leering up at them with baleful eyes. Comforting thought, he told himself. At least we have land under our feet.

"How well does this garbage can fly?" piped up Stella D'Garza.

Mendez maneuvered them around to make entry, flying with their backs to Mars.

"About like a garbage can," he replied. "I've got an offset center of lift, so I can roll us left and right and shift the trajectory that way, if I want. Beyond that, we're basically making a big dive into the atmosphere."

D'Garza was strapped in behind them. "I just hope we stay dry. There's an awful lot of ocean down there."

Lifeboat A was shaped like a squat ball with a rounded top. With the broad bottom now facing into the direction of flight, Mendez rolled the little ship first one way, then the other, trying to keep a blinking red dot centered between lines on his attitude display. "Too shallow and we may skip off the top of the atmosphere. Too steep and—"

"We're toast," finished Winger. He tugged on his shoulder straps a little tighter and wondered how ANAD was doing, snugly cocooned inside his shoulder capsule.

The first reddish-orange streamers appeared outside the porthole a few moments later, tongues of flame licking up the side of the lifeboat as the ship plunged steeply into the atmosphere.

As they settled deeper, he felt a weight pressing down on his chest. Deceleration was already generating measurable forces on the crew.

"Two g's," Mendez announced. "I'm rolling sixty degrees left...trying to null out a little drift. We're in the corridor okay...a little high but still in the green."

Winger wondered about the impactors from what was left of Griffin-Erasmus. The comet debris that couldn't be diverted would be hitting Mars's atmosphere about half an hour after the lifeboats.

I just hope they don't come down on top of us. GreenMars had estimated Griffin-D would impact to the north of Arabia Terra. But even a few minutes error in the calculations could put the biggest rocks right in the middle of the Boreal Ocean. Mars' newest ocean was seldom more than thirty meters deep but if that happened, there was no telling what the shock wave would do to them.

"Three g's..." Mendez said. Winger didn't need an announcement. The grunts and pants behind him from D'Garza told him everything he needed to know. The Detachment had spent several months in space, enduring everything from one-third g on Mars to weightlessness to near zero-g at Griffin. They were all becoming seriously deconditioned.

"Passing through four hundred k," Mendez muttered. He tweaked a hand controller and the tiny capsule rolled to port, shifting her offset center of lift to bend the trajectory a little shallower. "Going shallow...I'm trying to cut down on the g's a little, give us a break."

They were now below one hundred twenty kilometers altitude, enveloped in a white-hot sheath of ionized plasma, streaking Marsward at twenty-four thousand kilometers an hour.

Mendez and Winger were both soon bathed in sweat, while outside the ship's portholes, orange flames lapped at the edges of the glass, forming ribbons and curlicues and tree branches and fantastic nameless shapes of incandescent pink. A pearlescent bow formed a few centimeters beyond Winger's porthole, bending and twisting as if it were alive.

And through it all, the g's rose steadily on all of them...three, three and a half, four...five...six g's.

Winger forced out short oomphs of breath, as he had been taught in the sims, but breath was steadily becoming precious. He tried focusing on the instrument panel, on the porthole, anything to take his mind off the crushing weight sitting on his chest.

"Under two hundred k," Mendez gritted out. The pilot zeroed in on their corridor, his eyes glued to the graph on the panel and the red dot indicating their position. "Drogue should be coming out in fifty seconds."

The lifeboat was now falling faster, picking up speed again, through the upper levels of the stratosphere. Mendez's maneuvering had forced them beyond the nominal corridor; the dot had moved outside the lines on the graph. They were landing long, overshooting the original impact zone in Alba Mons. The pilot deployed the periscope once the worst of the plasma sheath had vanished and quickly realized what was happening.

"Coastline up ahead, folks. Looks like we've gone past the original landing zone."

Winger saw the same thing. He sucked in a few deliciously deep breaths, then forced out, "Can you tell where we are?"

"Eastern Alba," Mendez grunted. "Computer's projecting touchdown just off the northeast coast, off Tempe Terra."

"That sounds like the ocean to me," Reaves grumbled.

Mendez concentrated on steering them back on course, but the lifeboat's descent path was too steep. "Drogue chute in less than five...four...three...two...one...mark!"

Almost before the words were out of his mouth, a great shuddering jolt slammed the little pod. Through his porthole, Winger could see the chute reefing lines stream out, snapping and twisting in the slipstream, then snapping smartly into the welcome sight of a red and white canopy. The drogue filled quickly with air and Lifeboat A jerked and slowed its descent from several thousand kilometers an hour to less than three hundred.

Mendez studied the view on his periscope. "It's the ocean, for sure. There's the coastline."

Winger watched the clock carefully, counting down the last seconds to main chute deployment. "Maybe we can still steer back toward land. Isn't the main chute pretty maneuverable?"

"Here go the mains—"

Another series of jerks and jolts was followed by a sharp deceleration force, throwing the crew of Lifeboat A forward against their harnesses. The little pod shimmied and shuddered like a wet dog before the chutes stabilized her oscillation and damped out the swaying. The mains filled with air and billowed out to their full twenty-meter dimensions, looking like a huge inflatable wing...a paraglider.

"I'm banking now..." Mendez told them. "Hold on to your hats...this can be a bit of a carnival ride."

The Lieutenant used the paraglider's extensible risers to alternately bank and turn, trying to steer them back on shore. But their descent and the prevailing winds worked against Mendez's efforts.

"Still ocean," Winger told him. "We're through ten-thousand...down at forty-two...landing bag deploy coming up, landing rockets armed."

The last few minutes of Lifeboat A's descent seemed to flash by in a blur of frantic activity, punctuated by jerks, jolts, bangs, pops and whistles.

The impact, when it came, was a careening slap against the side of the pod's hull. The landing rockets fired to cushion their impact, then died off. When he peered out his porthole, Winger saw only water, frothing, bubbling, briny seawater. Then the little ship rolled upright as her flotation gear hissed out into place and the welcome view of sun and pink sky replaced the underwater scene.

That's when Winger saw the icthyots cruising by right outside the hatch.

"Uh, Lieutenant...looks like we've got company."

Mendez had already seen their unwelcome visitors. "We'll be okay inside." He studied the locator screen for a moment, trying to figure out just where they were. "We've come down right smack into Acidalia Planitia, best I can figure. Off the coast of Tharsis. Icthyot grottoes all over the place."

From the rear seat, Stella D'Garza let out a yelp. "On the horizon...look!"

A trio of black dots had materialized. Now growing visibly larger with each passing moment, the dots soon resolved themselves into the familiar shape of lifters; their black fuselages were emblazoned with the golden sunburst emblem of UNISPACE.

"Must be our reception committee," Winger concluded. "Probably staged out of Mariner City."

"See any other pods? Any other lifeboats?" Fatah asked.

"Zip," said Winger. "Just us and the sharks."

Mendez was already cycling through frequencies, trying to contact the rescue lifters. "Rescue force, this is Lifeboat A detached from Galileo, now at stable one, awaiting your orders."

Seconds later, a loud twangy voice boomed in their headsets. "Lifeboat A, this is... ah...Rescue One. Assume nominal rescue configuration immediately. We're going to have to hoist you out of there one by one. Be advised...ah...we don't have much time...we've got inbound fragments coming in, projected impacts in the central Boreal...less than an hour from now—"

Mendez didn't need to hear any more. "Okay, crew...you heard the man. Get your asses moving. Let's get the hell out of here!"

The operation was done in less than ten minutes. Aboard Rescue One, Mendez, Winger, and D'Garza gratefully sucked in breezes of cool air and topped it off with chilled canteens of water and lemon drink. It tasted better than the finest wine. Even as they settled back, Rescue One's pilot banked the lifter sharply to port and lay in a speed course south by southwest toward the UNISPACE base at Mariner City.

The little fleet had just settled onto the tarmac at the base when the first impactor, a jagged mountain-sized fragment from Griffin-Erasmus, slammed into the ocean...ten thousand kilometers northeast of them.

Over the next hour, the undiverted remnants of Griffin-Erasmus shotgunned Mars' surface along an arc nineteen thousand kilometers long, from the western Alba Patera to the central Boreal Ocean.

The largest impactor, as expected, was Griffin-D, which impacted as predicted by GreenMars in the ocean, some thirty-five kilometers northeast of the city of Sojourner Town.

The effects of all the impacts would be felt for years afterward.

UNIFORCE/GreenMars Special Report to MarsFed

Principal Impact Effects from 778 Griffin-Erasmus (Fragment D)

February 12, 2067 (EUT)

Impactor Griffin-Erasmus D impacted the Mars's surface at 061510Z, 26 January 2067. Point of impact was 45N by 350E, approximately one hundred and sixteen kilometers north-northeast of the coastal city of Sojourner Town. The point of impact was located at the center of a triangle between the Alba Patera coastline, bounded by Tempe Terra on the northwest and the Cydonia lowlands to the northeast.

At impact, the impactor was moving at an estimated velocity of 16.99 kilometers per second.

Energy released at impact was estimated to be approximately 6.04 x 10 exp 16 Joules.

Due to the water impact, an estimated 2.35 x 10 exp 6 tons of seawater was vaporized. Most of the vaporized material was lifted as steam into the Mars's atmosphere.

Oceanic effects included a series of seismic events and transients, culminating in three succeeding tremors of Richter magnitude 5.4, 5.1 and 4.1, all occurring in the first two hours after impact.

Shock waves and tsunami effects are appended to this report as Attachment A: Impactor Griffin-D Oceanic Effects on the Boreal Ocean Basin. Notable effects included wave heights of over a hundred meters measured at Sojourner Town, Delambre and Redland. Similar destructive wave effects of lesser magnitude were measured at Zanzibar, Nicobar, Isidis and Syrtis City.

U.N. Quantum Corps efforts to ameliorate destructive shock wave and tsunami effects through nanobotic shielding were only partially successful, owing to the short time frame involved. Shielding was most effective at Sojourner Town, where observed wave heights reached one hundred and seventy meters approximately two kilometers offshore. Wave energy was substantially dissipated by nanobotic shielding along the waterfront west and east of the center of the city. Measured wave heights at the port entrance did not exceed one hundred and ten meters.

Impactor Griffin-D partially disintegrated in the lower atmosphere, yielding multiple fragments to impact the ocean surface. Disintegration effects were most pronounced at an altitude of five thousand meters above MSL. Peak overpressures from this event exceeded 17.7 bars (approximately 251 PSI) at a point two kilometers from the center of the impact field. Because the impact site was well offshore, little overpressure damage was sustained to land structures. Some shipping in the area was damaged.

Casualty reports are appended to this report as Attachment B: Casualty Effects from Impact of 778 Griffin-Erasmus (Fragment D). Note that known casualties that can be directly attributed to this event will exceed 8000 around the Boreal Ocean basin alone.

Long term meteorological and climatic effects are detailed in Attachment C: Forecast Climatic Effects from Impact of 778 Griffin-Erasmus (Fragment D and Lesser Impactors). Note that long-term climatic effects incorporate estimates of seawater and seabed excavation and dynamic lifting of excavated materials into the atmosphere integrated into current forecast models over the next two years.

For latest results of forecast model iterations, see Mars Federal Meteorological Organization "Proceedings of Conference on Climatic Effects from Recent Comet Impacts", 3-5 February 2067, Cone Hills, Elysium Planitia, appended to this report as Attachment D.

UNIFORCE casualty and environmental remediation efforts continue and are expected to be required at current levels of effort for at least the next two years.

Mariner City, Mars

South Locks

February 14, 2067

0630 hours

Johnny Winger stepped aside as a trip of packbots trundled across the grassy quadrangle toward the western end of the City. The bots were part of a crew loading up two marscats at the City's South Locks, shipping in supplies to support recovery operations further north.

"Better watch your step, Colonel," said Chris Rudd of MarsFed. "There's still a hell of a lot of gear we've got to move to get Sojourner going again. We'll have lifters and cargotracs here for the next week, maybe more, while we get them up and running."

Winger saw another pair of cats circling the west end of the field, maneuvering for a parking spot along the dockfront. "Any problems getting through the dust?"

Rudd led Winger across the quadrangle, toward Front Street on the other side of the locks complex. "We're getting current met reports every half hour. So far, we've been able to get around the worst effects. And it doesn't hurt that BioShield has come in, assigned a formation of bots to keep the skies clean; they've been chewing a hole in the dust clouds for several weeks now, trying to help us expedite the re-building of the Boreal coastline. By the way, that came from CINCQUANT himself. We're a top priority for the Corps, even with all the other re-mediation work going on."

Winger watched the latest marscats maneuver like giant bears toward the docks at the north pads. The morning skies over Mariner City were dim and blood red with early dawnlight. The northern hemisphere had sustained as much as a 15% darkening of its normal daylight in the weeks after the comet impacts. Mean temperatures had dropped during daylight hours almost three degrees. Already, the autumnal aspen and birch trees along the slopes of the Candor Valley were dying off...subdued palettes of brown and rust instead of their usual riot of red and yellow.

"I'm glad I could get ANAD involved in the clean-up, General. Gives him something to do."

"If you can trust him," Rudd said.

Winger thought that a bit harsh. "It's true he's gone through some changes lately...we all have. I like to think of it as evolution."

Rudd wasn't convinced. "Toward what exactly, Winger? Evolution toward what? All those assaults on the quantum generators have damaged him...that's what has happened. He's all bollixed up, completely cuckoo, if you ask me. You Quantum Corps types ought to scrap the lot of them---the whole Symbiosis Project too—and just start over. Now look what's happened...all these bugs have gotten permission to leave containment. They're just floating around freely like pollen. What's next: are we going to start marrying them? Have nanokids?"

The Corps commander himself had just arrived in a convoy of crewtracs. The Teutonic Lion hoisted himself up to his full six-foot, eight-inch height, twisted his white moustache, tossed back his great mane of hair and glided into a nearby chapel like royalty to his castle.

"Too bad we can't make a swarm of him," mouthed D'Garza under her breath.

"What say we head over to the mess hall," Angel Barnes was saying. "The coffee's stronger than jet fuel. And there's enough doughnuts to build a second Sojourner Town."

Someone pointed the ANAD swarm now drifting toward them. Winger went over to the swarm, which initially did not seem to detect his presence. It flowed across the grounds of a statuary garden for a few moments before stopping. It then re-gathered itself into a likeness of Doc Frost.

Winger knew from experience how hard it was to control swarm movement to maintain something like a human likeness. "Looks like you're having problems keeping structure...maybe your controller needs tweaking. I could take a look, if you'd like."

ANAD seemed to regard Winger and the other troopers with what could only be described as something between contempt and pity. Maybe it's just the light, Winger decided. Control's a little off and the reflection isn't quite right.

***This entity requires no human assistance at this time...structure integrity is maintained between one and two percent tolerance levels at all times. Variance due to environmental factors can be accommodated***

Winger shrugged. What could he say? "Sorry I asked, pal. I didn't mean any harm. It's just that the likeness to Doc Frost is a little out of whack...like you're a bit out of focus."

The swarm brightened at that observation, shifted out of phase a little and seemed agitated. Sparkles and pops of light flashed inside the swarm. Winger knew that atomic bonds were being formed and re-formed. That was the physical explanation. Was there a deeper reason? Was this how ANAD would respond to humans? Was it pissed off or annoyed?

There was no way to tell. ANAD's 'face' remained impassive, unrevealing, like something still being formed.

***Your comments are parsed as well-meaning. Voiceprint acoustic analysis indicates no intended threat or harm to swarm entity. My configuration engine is constantly optimizing structure, based on sensor inputs***

"That's all well and good but I was only offering to help out...you know, do what I could to help optimize."

The swarm 'face' seemed to consider that, drawing its eyes and mouth together into something resembling a thoughtful appearance...no doubt a programmed config change.

***Parsing acoustic data stream...my internal algorithms are constantly updated...ever evolving. You will observe many improvements in my configuration in the days ahead. Human assistance is...not supported at this time***

Winger was puzzled. What the hell did that mean? "Not supported...by what?"

***Config Zero....***

So that was it. Winger watched as ANAD glided...flowed...maneuvered...itself across a grassy quadrangle, through several bushes and shrubbery banks...heading for...where, exactly? He realized he had no idea. That nanobotic swarms could roam uncontained, unsupervised across the City, like any trooper...that was going to take a lot of getting used to. Angels were new to Mars and not everyone approved of the idea.

"I don't know, Colonel...." D'Garza had been nearby, seen the whole exchange. "—seems like ANAD doesn't need us anymore. I don't think he needs any of us. That's what happened to ANAD. Hell, it's not even a Symbiosis project any more. The swarms have evolved too far for that."

"Independent entities," Winger agreed. "Come on...let's get to the mess hall before Trooper Barnes gobbles up all the doughnuts."

Halfway across the quad, D'Garza brought up something that had been nagging her. "ANAD mentioned Config Zero. Isn't that what Bravo Detachment encountered when they got zapped by that generator at Candor?"

"Something like that. The best way I could figure it: Config Zero is like some kind of initial state...or maybe a mother swarm configuration. I could never tell if it really exists or was just part of ANAD's original programming."

"Maybe ANAD knows, since Doc must have programmed it with everything he knew. Maybe ANAD's even in contact with this Config Zero."

"Could be," Winger agreed. "If that's true, then there may be more of these Keeper devices around than we've accounted for. So far, we've run into Keepers at the Paryang monastery and on Mars. There may be others...there's been talk of one near Jupiter."

The two of them picked up a few more troopers on the hike across the City to the mess hall. Acuna and Barnes were engaged in a spirited debate about just who the Old Ones were.

"The way I figure it," Acuna was saying, "we've got maybe seventy years before they arrive...remember all the reports we all read? I'm thinking that ANAD, whatever he's become now, is like some kind of advance guard, sent here to spy on us, maybe prepare the way. Kind of a secret agent."

"But that makes no sense," Barnes told him. "Wouldn't that have to mean the real Doc Frost was in on the secret too? Wouldn't that mean he's part of the advance guard?"

"Not if ANAD got somehow corrupted, by this third Keeper everybody thinks exists. Say it went like this: Doc Frost develops a swarm to follow in his footsteps when he dies, sort of like a son. He embeds it inside of his body, just like we've done with our ANAD embeds. But once Doc dies and the swarm is activated, it receives new instructions from this new Keeper. Now, ANAD isn't really what the original Doc conceived. He's been taken over, like a double agent...for the Old Ones."

"Please," said Barnes, grabbing the side of her head, "you're making my head hurt. ANAD, swarms, Doc Frost, Keepers, the Old Ones...maybe it's all a bad dream."

"Or a quantum wave," D'Garza teased her. "It makes me uneasy too, all these swarms out of containment now. Humans haven't had any real competition for hundreds of millions of years."

"Now we do." Winger was sobered at the prospect. "As an atomgrabber, I ought to be drooling at all the possibilities. But I'm just not sure what it all means."

"And what about Red Harmony?" D'Garza asked. "We've battled them for twenty years. What's happened to them? Is the cartel finished? Could we still use them to contact these Old Ones, since they've obviously been in contact? Might be better than just waiting around for whatever's going to happen."

"For my money, I'm hoping Red Harmony is finished," Winger said. "I'd rather take my chances with ANAD and others like him. Maybe our best hope is ANAD or something like ANAD. Hell, we're all atomgrabbers. We ought to be able to figure this out...figure out what makes the Old Ones tick by studying what happens with ANAD."

"I don't know, Colonel," said D'Garza. They had reached the mess hall and went inside. "If this Keeper's really downloading new configs and algorithms to ANAD all the time, I'm not sure we can keep up. I'm not sure we can even reliably detect these signals."

"And who wants to turn the Mars into a big lab anyway...excuse me for saying so, sir," said Barnes. She had already veered off toward the doughnut trays, plate in hand. "I say put ANAD back into containment and let's take our worlds back from the swarms. They're all basically viruses anyway. Just viruses with brains."

Acuna and Barnes barged their way toward the doughnuts while D'Garza and Winger scouted out a good table. There was a genial buzz about the mess hall this morning, Winger noted. Mariner City was coming back to life. And there weren't any swarms around to spoil the convivial atmosphere. He even saw Chris Rudd buttonholing a small crowd in the corner, working some new angle.

"Maybe Angel's right," D'Garza conceded. She filled a big mug with steaming coffee and slurped at it loudly. "Put all the bugs back in the bag and take the Mars back. No more of this letting swarms run around out of containment, trying to integrate themselves into our lives."

Winger said nothing. He wasn't so sure. He studied the noisy gathering for a moment, as it they were themselves nothing but a giant swarm...something ANAD had noted many times in the past.

"Stella, I'm afraid it may be too late for that. Let's face it: we've been fighting viruses on Earth for millions of years, ever since humans became human. They're still there. They even came with us to Mars. And now we've given them brains and intelligence and effectors to rival us. I'm thinking we may need to make an alliance with them, even if it changes how we live. An alliance to be ready for the Old Ones. Especially, if the Old Ones turn out to be some kind of race of swarm entities themselves...like I think they are."

"Maybe so, Colonel," D'Garza said, dribbling coffee out of the corner of her mouth. "But that's a battle for another day. Let's just enjoy the morning, why don't we? Operation Martian Shield accomplished the mission together...we did it. We beat Red Harmony again. Mars survived a comet hit. Things are coming back to life. And I'll bet we can still resurrect old ANAD if we have to and get him working. All we have to do is put our giant atomgrabbing brains to work on it."

Winger smiled faintly. "Seventy years, Stella. That may be all the time we have. Life on Mars was always about change and adaptation. That's the real lesson of evolution. Adapt or die. Something's coming...something big...and I'm not sure we're ready for it."

I'm ready for a change right now. D'Garza was wistful but Winger never seemed to notice. "Hell, maybe it's just another doughnut tray," she suggested, rising halfway out of her seat. "Right over there...just came out of the kitchen. The poor servbots are about to get run over by sugar-crazed troopers. Colonel, I'll race you to the jelly buns—" She shot up out of her seat and charged off into the crowd.

Johnny Winger hesitated only a second, then sprang up after her.

Old Ones or not, nobody beats an atomgrabber to his objective.

He dived into the throng and soon forgot the uneasy sense of foreboding that had been dogging him all morning.

Two hundred meters away, outside the mess hall, the ANAD swarm had been making its way inexorably across the City toward Face Cut Street and Canyon Head Park, with its spectacular views of Ophir and Candor chasms. At the exact same moment that Johnny Winger had seen the new tray of doughnuts, ANAD stopped in mid-flight and hovered at the edge of a small flower bed. The swarm winked and sparkled in the dull early morning sunshine streaming in through pink haze.

Unknown to anyone, undetected by any instrument, the ANAD swarm had just received a new wave of quantum signals from the Keeper buried dozens of kilometers below a cold, nearly frozen ocean, below the ice crust of Jupiter's moon Europa.

A new algorithm was being downloaded.

END
About the Author

Philip Bosshardt is a native of Atlanta, Georgia. He recently retired but worked for nearly 25 years for a large company that makes products everyone uses...just check out the drinks aisle at your grocery store. He's been happily married for over 29 years. He's also a Georgia Tech graduate in Industrial Engineering. He loves water sports in any form and swims 3 kilometers a week in anything resembling water. He and his wife have no children. They do, however, have one terribly spoiled Pekingese dog named Chance.

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

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

Download the next exciting episode of Quantum Troopers Return from Smashwords.com and other fine ebook retailers. It's called 'Twist Pirates.' Available on September 11, 2020.

