 
# Quantum Troopers

Episode 5: Table Top Mountain

### Published by Philip Bosshardt at Smashwords

### Copyright 2016 Philip Bosshardt

### Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode # Title Approximate Upload Date

1 'Atomgrabbers' 1-14-16

2 'Nog School' 2-8-16

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

4 'ANAD' 3-21-16

5 'Table Top Mountain' 4-11-16

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

7 'Hong Chui' 5-23-16

8 'Doc Frost' 6-13-16

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

10 'The Big Bang' 7-25-16

11 'Engebbe' 8-15-16

12 'The Symbiosis Project' 9-5-16

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

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

15 'A Black Hole' 11-7-16

16 'ANAD on Ice' 11-29-16

17 'Lions Rock' 12-19-16

18 'Geoplanes' 1-9-17

19 'Mount Kipwezi' 1-30-17

20 'Doc II' 2-20-17

21 'Paryang Monastery' 3-13-17

22 'Epilogue' 4-3-17
Chapter 1

"Quantum Shadows"

Singapore and Table Top Mountain,

Idaho, USA

October 30, 2048

6:00 pm

Inmate 287455 stood still for a moment, listening. The sound finally came...a heavy iron door clanging shut behind her. The sound brought a smile to her pale face. Changi Prison was behind her now. For good. Freedom...it tasted like salty air wafting up from the harbor. Like bougainvillea lining the manicured sidewalks of Tanah Merah Besar Street. Like spicy fish on a grill, from somewhere beyond the concertina wire and steel fencing that surrounded the white stone and pink facing of the prison.

Inmate 287455 started walking. She didn't have to look behind to see in her mind's eye the mustard yellow cinder block and blue cell doors she was leaving behind, after five years. She walked straight down the street, heading in the general direction of Queenstown and her goal.

They had released her, four years ahead of her parole date, for a reason. Swallow this, the parole officer had said, giving her a small blue capsule. It was nanoderm and some other things—she knew that much—and it would slightly change her facial appearance, the nanoscale bots morphing her epidermis and skin muscles to more closely resemble someone else. Sign this, they had told her, and pushed some papers she could barely read in front of her. She signed. Be at this location by six p.m. tonight, they had marked a map for her and plotted out a route. She was following that route right now.

Oh, they gave Inmate 287455 a whole new identity...new chip, new cards, new face, new voice.

And for agreeing to all that, she was set free slightly more than halfway through her sentence and given a job to do. A strange job, to be sure, but then when Parole Officer Jurang dangles a pass to the outside world, commutes all charges and slaps some spending money on the table, then orders her to head for Queenstown, Inmate 287455 was not going to argue.

She walked and inhaled the luxurious aroma of freedom, hearing ships' horns blaring down by the harbor, the delicious honking of cabs and limos scuttling up and down Bukit Panjang Road, and the bustle and chaos of a city in full, delirious motion.

Presently, she spied the upper towers of her target. It was Queensgate Hotel. She didn't hurry. In fact, she stopped at a roadside vendor and bought an ice cream. It tasted like heaven. She took her time. Why hurry? She didn't have to be at her goal until six p.m.

Inmate 287455 decided to walk a few blocks beyond the hotel, exploring a narrow warren of shops and carts, all jammed together in a seemingly endless bazaar, before finally turning back to the hotel grounds, set in an idyllic paradise of eucalyptus trees and azalea bushes and an amusing topiary of fanciful fairy-tale dragons and elephants and things that had no name.

She walked in and headed to the Registration desk promptly at six o'clock.

Sheila Reaves stood on the balcony of her hotel room, spying the funnels of container ships and naval frigates easing past each other along the Bedok South channel. The air was sweet with the cloying scent of tapang trees and the sunset visible over the tops of the trade center and the university and the masts of the sailing ships at the marina looked promising, swathed in the orange and maroon of late afternoon thunderclouds boiling up from the tropics.

She polished off the wine the room service bot had brought up an hour ago and went inside, flopping on the bed for a huge yawn and a stretch. The Corps had given her three days' liberty after being rescued from that stone coffin called Lions Rock in Hong Kong. Colonel Batu, Eastern Command base commander, issued the pass personally, with instructions from Major Kraft himself.

"We're putting you up for three days and nights at the Queensgate, on the Corps. Kraft figured it's the least he can do after all the bother with getting you exfiltrated from Lions Rock—did you really climb out through solid rock?"

"I did, sir," Reaves admitted. "Tunneled out by ANAD...not something I want to go through again."

Batu rubbed his chin, handed over her liberty chip. "Don't get too comfortable. Kraft wants you back at Table Top at 0700 hours, morning of the third. You'll be catching hyperjet Mercury right here. Two hours hopscotching across the Pacific and you'll be right back to work—rehab, re-training, probably a new assignment. Live it up while you can."

Reaves saluted, even though she was in civvies...a cute skirt and sarong number she'd gotten from the PX. "Yes, sir. I'm planning on maximum relaxation for seventy two hours."

"Very well, Sergeant Reaves...dismissed...and go have some fun."

She needed no further orders to do that.

As she lay awake tossing about in her king-sized bed, she noticed a faint light outside the window. The suite was on the fifth floor of the Queensgate, a special suite reserved for heads of state, dignitaries and celebrities. Reaves watched the light for a few minutes. It was diffuse, almost blue-white in color. And it was getting brighter, even as the sun had dropped below the horizon.

She got up to investigate.

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

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

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

There was nothing and she lost consciousness.

The flickering cloud descended over the prostrate body of Sergeant Sheila Reaves, fully engulfing her in a small supernova of incandescent brilliance.

Half an hour later, the ball of light began to dim and in a few minutes, the light died off and the cloud dispersed. The body of Sergeant Sheila Reaves, Defense and Protective Systems Specialist 1 for 1st Nano, had vanished...seemingly consumed by the cloud.

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

The Buffalo Range looked surprisingly appealing to Sheila Reaves as hyperjet Mercury banked hard left and lined up for her final approach to Runway 32 Left. There was a frosting of snow on the higher peaks. Probably the wind's blowing a gale, she told herself, as the jet bumped down, kissing the tarmac and she lurched forward against her shoulder harness in the hard braking. Some things never change. Sure doesn't look like Singapore, she sighed.

But a girl's gotta make a living.

She disembarked, dropped her gear off at the Barracks and headed for Major Kraft's office in the Ops center.

Kraft was at his desk, diligently pecking away at a commandpad. He waited a moment, as Reaves stood at attention, saluting.

"Come in, Sergeant. Be seated."

Reaves came in.

Kraft finally finished his hand pecking and looked up. "Reaves...it is good to see you whole and hearty. Sorry about Lions Rock. At least, ANAD was able to tunnel you out. I trust liberty in Singapore had the intended effect?"

Reaves said, "Yes, sir...it did. Most appreciated."

"You saw all the sights and did the typical tourist things, I presume."

"Sir," Reaves corrected the Major, "I drank myself into a stupor and passed out on my hotel bed for three days."

"Excellent. A true nanotrooper. I've got a new assignment for you. 1st Nano's going to be participating in a new wargame we're working up...this time as the OpFor. A little urban nano-combat, in fact. Assembly bots are working on the scenery right now up at Hunt Valley. We're calling the town Kraftville...imagine that. Your job—1st Nano's job—is to defend my little hamlet from any and all intruders. And just to make matters interesting, the intruders could take any form...birds, bees, dust, rain drops, anything the diabolical minds of the game referees can think up."

"Yes, sir. What kind of TOE are we going to have?"

Kraft massaged his Black Forest of a moustache, which seemed to have grown in the days since Reaves had last been at Table Top. "As you know, Lieutenant Winger has recently come from Northgate University with a new friend...an embedded ANAD master bot. Took him awhile to recover from that bad swarm he had inside of him....it was close. Red Hammer's getting cleverer every day...we have to be on our guard at all times, Sergeant. Now, Winger's part of the Symbiosis Project. The whole purpose of this wargame, Operation Quantum Shadow, is to see how that plays in in a combat sim. Can we get ANAD out and deployed faster, with better configs and effectors? Based on the results of this little kriegspiel, the next step is furnishing all of 1st Nano with embedded bots. Blended man-machine warriors, that's what I'm after, Reaves. Drawing nanotroopers and ANAD together so seamlessly, that you can't tell one from another. That's where warfare is going in this new medium."

Reaves considered that. "Major, from my experience at Lions Rock, I'd say that's where Red Hammer's going too. Anything we can do to stay a few steps ahead, I'm all for it."

"Good." Kraft detached a small memcube from his commandpad and shoved it across the desk. "Take this to Lieutenant Winger. It's got my instructions, commander's intent and some other goodies. We'll have a pre-op briefing tomorrow at 0700 hours. If he's following orders, the Lieutenant should be at Mission Prep this afternoon...with everybody else."

"Yes, sir." Reaves reached across the desk and retrieved the cube.

At first, Kraft hadn't noticed how Sergeant Reaves slightly fumbled with the cube. It could have been anything...maybe she was still feeling the effects of Lions Rock and climbing out through a solid rock mountain. When he thought about the incident later, Kraft told himself he had imagined the whole thing.

As Reaves reached for the memcube, her fingers seemed on first glance to be of different texture than the rest of her arm, almost translucent, fuzzy at the edges, even blurry.

Maybe I had one too many coffees, Kraft surmised.

Then when the red-haired sergeant and 1st Nano DPS tech tried to pick up the cube, the thing slipped through her fingers...or more accurately, her fingers slipped through the cube. Kraft shook his head to clear the cobwebs. Right through the cube, as if it was made of dust. A solid object he had just handled himself. And Reaves' fingers slipped, brushed, passed through the device as if it were made of—

No, I did not see that, Kraft told himself firmly, for when he looked again, Reaves had the cube in the palm of her hand and was pocketing it as if nothing had happened. Her hand and arms seemed completely normal.

She stood up, and saluted, like normal.

"Dismissed," Kraft said, snapping off a return salute. After the sergeant had left, Kraft took a deep breath. This job's driving me nuts. I guess I need a break.

Sheila Reaves left Ops and made her way across the wind-blown quadrangle to the Ordnance-Mission Preparation complex, a series of bunker-like buildings near the hangars for Table Top's lifters and hyperjets.

Inside, she scanned in and found the rest of 1st Nano in a squad ready room two floors down.

Lieutenant Winger was at a small console, examining some ANAD variant in a nearby containment tank.

Reaves saluted. "Reporting for duty, sir. I've been cleared for all ops." She handed Winger the memcube. "Just came from Major Kraft, sir. He said to give you this."

Deeno D'Nunzio and Mighty Mite Barnes were at a small table next to Winger, sorting and cleaning parts for several of the platoon's coilguns and HERF weapons. The table with strewn with generator casings, scopes and sights, trigger assemblies and magazines.

D'Nunzio piped up. "Well, well, well...welcome back, Sergeant Reaves. And how was your honeymoon in the exotic Far East? You're looking pretty fit in those barely regulation fatigues."

Reaves went to the table and started examining one of the carbines with a critical eye. "I lived like a queen...room service every day, luxurious sponge baths—had to get all that rock dust from Lions Rock out of my pores, mani-pedis every afternoon, shopping in the bazaars. Man, I never dreamed life in the Corps could be so good."

"Yeah," said An Nguyen, working on a hypersuit helmet, "that'll teach you to bury yourself inside a mountain. We wore little ANAD out just tunneling all over the place trying to find you."

"I'm glad you did," Reaves admitted. "Another day inside the mountain in that coffin of a cell and I would have gone bonkers. Compared to that, climbing out through ANAD's tunnel was a snap.'

Barnes tossed her a HERF coil. "Hey, DPS 1, see if you can figure out why that bastard won't energize—"

The coil came at Reaves in a lazy toss. She reached out and the thing passed right through her hands. Nobody seemed to have noticed--though Nguyen's eyes narrowed—when the coil fell clattering to the floor.

"Hey watch it, girl," said Mighty Mite. "That's expensive government property there."

Reaves picked up the coil immediately, fumbling it a moment, then placed the device back on the table. "Off hand, Buddha, I'd say your leads are all shot to hell." She pushed the coil back and again her fingers passed right through both the coil and part of the table.

Barnes and Nguyen both saw that. Reaves noticed too and immediately withdrew her hand, jamming it in her jacket pocket.

Mighty Mite was concerned. "Girl, are you sure you feel alright? You look a little pale to me."

"No, really...I'm okay."

Winger had seen what happened. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. "We've been hitting our gear pretty hard this afternoon. I'm calling a halt. Everybody to the commissary. Let's grab a bite and then we can come back to this."

"Suits me," said An Nguyen.

"Hey," said Mighty Mite, "I hear they've got slopburgers today."

The squad headed to the squat brick building attached to the PX, on the opposite side of the Barracks and Bachelor's Quarters.

It was early and the lines weren't too long. Gibbs secured a few tables in the corner, underneath an old Quantum Corps recruiting poster that some wag had decided was artsy enough to hang on the wall.

"Looks like the Lieutenant, doesn't it?" said D'Nunzio. "Notice the cheek planes, the alabaster skin, the rippling muscles...makes me want to sign up right now, all over again."

Winger ignored them all.

When Reaves had her tray, she balanced it precariously on her forearms, an odd way to carry a food tray. And when she was about to sit down, the tray slipped off. Actually, it slipped through her forearms. Only Nguyen noticed how the edge of the tray passed through her elbow. The others weren't looking.

"Trooper Reaves," Winger said, "you're relieved. Go back to the Barracks and get some rest. And check yourself in to the Infirmary. I want medic approval before you report back for duty...get some rest. That's an order."

Reaves seemed flustered. "Really, Skipper, I'm okay. I feel a little—"

D'Nunzio volunteered to escort her back to bed. "I'll make sure she takes her medicine, Lieutenant." She started to grab Reaves' shoulder and arm, but the trooper pulled away. "Come on, Sergeant Reaves. We need to get you horizontal."

The two of them stopped by the Infirmary, made an appointment for later that evening, then D'Nunzio firmly directed the DPS tech to her bunk in the Barracks. When she was finally in bed, D'Nunzio pronounced her own diagnosis.

"Girl, if I didn't know better, I'd say you've got a bad case of Singapore sling...too much fun in the sun. I don't know what happened after we released you on that unsuspecting city, but whatever it was, name if after me, okay?"

"Sure, Deeno...I'll just get some rest. Thanks. I'll be okay."

D'Nunzio blew her a fake kiss and disappeared.

That's when Reaves waited five minutes, then got up and re-dressed herself in fatigues and stepped outside.

Her programming directed her to turn south, toward the low dome of the Containment center. Reaves came to a small hedge forming a green perimeter around the outer security fence of the center. Nobody was around. She pulled a hand out of her jacket and waved it across the top of the hedges. They were moist, laden with early evening snow that had partially melted. Her hand had partially disassembled and now resembled a fuzzy tennis ball. Bots streamed off the fuzzy ball and drifted onto the top of the hedge. For a brief moment, the hedge lit up with the flaring of atomic bonds being broken, bots slamming atoms to change config, forming themselves up into an ersatz hedge. That lasted half a minute. When the glow had subsided, a new layer of hedge existed, where none had before.

But this hedge was not what it seemed.

Reaves wandered about the lower end of the Table Top complex for awhile, toward the Sim/Training building. She performed the same ritual with other routine objects: a trash receptacle, a small bench outside the entrance to the Drexler Field parade ground. Turning north along the eastern side of the mesa, she came to the grassy quadrangle of the Ops Center, now lightly dusted in snow. Here, Reaves came to a statue on a pedestal. It was a marble likeness of Sun Tzu, legendary Chinese warrior-philosopher and patron saint of the Quantum Corps. Reaves let several people pass by. She saluted a Captain, recognizing one of the hyperjet pilots. Bartello something or other, she seemed to remember.

When there seemed no one else in sight, she pressed her fuzzy hand against the statue for a moment. Bots streamed off like a cloud of fireflies. The statue was soon enveloped in a glowing cloud, as uncountable trillions of mechs chewed into the calcite and dolomite molecules of its carbonate structure. The fog lasted about five minutes, during which time Reaves scanned up and down the walkways for anyone approaching. She saw no one.

When the fog dissipated and the glow subsided, the statue of Sun Tzu was still there, seemingly to a casual observer to be unchanged. But it had changed. It was now a loose aggregate swarm of bots, resembling in almost every visible detail its previous form.

Reaves started to head toward the entrance to the Ops Center, when a voice erupted out of the darkness.

"Stop right there, trooper! Keep your hands where I can see them and don't move—"

The voice was male, a Quantum Corps Police officer whom Reaves hadn't seen. But the officer had seen what had happened to the statue. He emerged into the glare of a streetlamp and trained a small hand weapon—a HERF pistol—on Reaves.

Reaves froze. She heard the officer calling on his mike for backup. In seconds, two more officers had appeared.

Her programming was clear. Do not be taken prisoner. It was a Category One directive, to be implemented any time the master bot was threatened.

The threat was clear and the directive was implemented. At once, Reaves began disassembling, breaking down into the constituent bots of which she had been formed. Her skin became immediately fuzzy, blurry and indistinct. Bots sloughed off and streamed toward the stunned officers like a flickering, strobing snake of lights.

"Jesus Christ...It's a swarm! Get back!"

"Don't--!" Another officer pumped a few rounds of high-energy rf into the thing. The concussive boom rattled windows in the front of the Ops Center.

"I've got something---we can MOB it!" The third officer backpedaled, even as he was extracting a small canister from his belt. Mobility Obstruction Barrier mesh spewed out of the canister in his hand, expanding rapidly, colliding with the bots that had once been Trooper Sheila Reaves. The mesh swelled outward, sparking and flashing in the collision with the Reaves bots and eventually completely enveloping the rapidly disassembling form of the soldier.

Soon, the MOB mesh had pinned the Reaves-thing to the wet grass, writhing and thrashing about. Pops and bursts of light flickered where the bots and the MOB mechs fought each other.

MOB won the battle. In moments, the barrier had completely cloaked the buzzing form that now thrashed and twisted and squirmed on the ground to no avail.

For good measure, the QP officers pumped round after round of rf into the wriggling mass. Finally, the thing stopped squirming.

"Get it over to Containment!" an officer yelled.

It was like dragging a sack of bees. The MOB mesh twisted and buzzed but after a few minutes, the QP squad had managed to haul the bag into Containment and secure it inside the Level Four facility.

Electron beam guns were set to their highest setting. Engineers then set to work 'unzipping' the MOB screen.

Outside, across the mountain, more swarms were erupting. Chaos and confusion seized Table Top Mountain as uncontained swarms burst forth from hedges near the Containment center, from a trash receptacle near Sim/Training and a statue outside the Ops center.

"They're everywhere!" someone yelled, fleeing across the quadrangle. "All around us!"

Indeed, nobody could be sure what was real and what wasn't. Everyday objects seemed normal one minute and burst into swarms the next, menacing everything and everyone. Quantum Corps Police flooded onto the grounds, assisted by any available troopers. HERF guns and magpulse carbines were handed out and swarms were battled from one end of Table Top to another.

Two hours later, the worst of it seemed over. Johnny Winger had heard the commotion and run out of the BOQ, where he had been getting ready to bunk down. He had taken charge of a small contingent of troopers, some 1st Nano, some from other units, as they swept the northern end of the Mountain, poking and probing into every bush and corner, not assuming anything, sweeping the grounds from the lifter pads to the Ops center.

"Jeez, it's like you can't trust anything!" said one trooper.

And it was true: trash cans, benches, light poles, cars, assorted gear...nothing could be bypassed. Nothing could be ignored. Somehow, Red Hammer swarms had infiltrated onto the Mountain big time and it was a close run thing to get them contained.

Winger thought about launching his own embedded ANAD...they had done that in the Nathan Caden affair, when he'd been studying for his Atomgrabber's test. But the swarms were everywhere and he didn't know what they might be facing. Better to stick with the big guns...HERF worked, although it smashed everything else in the process.

By mid-morning, through some frantic mobilizing and liberal use of counter-swarm measures, along with high-energy radio frequency blasts across the Mountain, the worse of the infiltration had either been smashed or contained.

Winger checked on his charges. Some of the troopers had burns and lacerations from swarm assaults. There were cuts, bruises, abrasions and one broken leg. He helped the worst off to the Infirmary, where medbots and medics were working furiously to mend injuries and treat the most serious wounds.

Winger headed for the Containment center. On the way across the grounds, dodging pack bots and repair crews cleaning up debris and shattered clumps of mechs, he ran into Major Kraft.

"What the hell was it, Major? We haven't been slammed like this in...months, maybe never."

Kraft was scowling, moving at a surprisingly fast clip for a man of his girth. "Red Hammer, Winger. I met with Sergeant Reaves, one of your DPS techs, just a few hours ago. Apparently, she wasn't quite what she seemed."

They scanned into Containment and cycled through locks and hatches until they came at last to the Level Four chamber. Outside, two techs were preparing to analyze a faintly visible fog of bots, what had once been Sheila Reaves. Yardley was on the imager console, manipulating the view on screen. Kumoda was verifying containment and boresighting the electron beam injectors, in case something went wrong.

Kraft studied the image, looked through a tiny porthole into the tank and back. "So that's it? This is...or was Sheila Reaves?"

Yardley was a balding, former wrestler with well-developed pecs still straining at his uniform top. "Sir, this is a class 1 nanobotic swarm with one hell of a config manager. I don't know about Sheila Reaves. But this thing—" Yardley rubbed the top of his skull like it was a good luck charm—"sir, this is like nothing I've ever seen before. To be able to hold config tight enough to resemble a human being and to fool others—that takes some serious processor chops. I had no idea Red Hammer had this capability."

"Neither did we," Kraft scowled.

Winger was just shaking his head. "And to think we mistook this...thing...for Sheila. There were some edge effects...her hands sometimes went through solid objects, when she turned a corner, her shoulder would slice through the door jamb...but nobody seemed to notice it at first. Later, in the Commissary, I saw some looks---we had suspicions."

Kraft agreed. "If Red Hammer can pull off a stunt like this, what else can they do? Yardley, how do I even know you and Kumoda are real?"

"Agreed, sir," Yardley admitted. "You can pinch me if you like, sir. I'm disgustingly real."

"I'll pass," Kraft said. "QP and anybody else they can draft have been sweeping the mountain all night long, end to end, every square inch. If Red Hammer can do this, then we can't trust anybody...or anything. Your bunkmate could be a swarm. Hell, the bunk itself could be a swarm. Or your shoes. Or that file cabinet over there. We have to assume the worst of everything. I'm telling you, this infiltration is inspired. They've got us doubting each other and everything in between."

Kumoda was done with the injectors. "We were just about to start dissecting this little bastard...still haven't located the master bot, though. It's in there somewhere."

On the imager screen, the faint mist flickered like a horde of dying fireflies. It boiled and swirled with unseen energies, an angry thundercloud in miniature ready to envelop all of them if containment was lost. Kumoda felt a shudder roll through his chest. He wasn't a very religious man, not even a very good Buddhist. But he couldn't help thinking they were looking into the face of Hell itself.

Kraft said, "If this isn't Reaves...or what's left of the Sergeant, then where is Reaves?"

Winger reminded him, "Corporal Barnes and Sergeant D'Nunzio pulled Reaves out of Lions Rock just a week ago. She was real enough then...they all hugged her tight when she crawled out of that tunnel ANAD made."

"And I gave her liberty in Singapore," Kraft recalled. "It must have happened then. Somehow, Red Hammer located her and—" he realized he had no words for what they were facing. Was Sheila Reaves even alive anymore?

Johnny Winger began to wonder about his own ANAD embed. "Major, maybe I should run a full diagnostic on my guy. I haven't had any indications of anything but I'd like to be sure of what I'm carrying."

Kraft agreed. "Schedule it, Winger." To the technicians, he gave brusque orders. "Find out what makes this thing tick. How can Red Hammer hold swarm configuration so well, they can resemble human beings that pass even close inspection? What capabilities does the master have...maybe things we don't even know about? And what counter-measures can we take? We know HERF still works. But if every person and every object is potentially a swarm, there must be a way to detect that."

Kumoda and Yardley answered in unison, "Yes, sir...we'll pick this bugger apart atom by atom."

Kraft left but Winger stayed behind. For now, the wargame prep was put aside. He wanted to assist in the analysis. More than that, he wanted to find out what had happened to the real Sheila Reaves. Maybe ANAD could help....

Under Winger's guidance, ANAD maneuvered among the jostling molecules of chlorine and sodium and potassium. A huge kinked snakelike cluster of hematite molecules drifted by. Winger had an idea. He signaled ANAD to grab a few hematites as a shield. Seizing oxygen atoms with its effectors, ANAD clutched several molecules.

Gradually, the shape and size of the master bot that had once been Sheila Reaves became clearer. Bristling with effectors and arms, it looked like a miniature Apollo Lunar Module. The head was a multi-lobed cluster of spheres and hexagons; inside the churning electron cloud dimmed out any detail.

Below the head was a cylindrical sheath, covered with pyramidal facets and undulating beads of proteins - the assembler's probes and effectors. Winger was frankly awed at the sight.

"Hell of a lot of gear for this bastard," he said. "Wonder if this is the swarm's base template."

"So many different kinds of effectors," Yardley marveled.

Indeed, the horde of assemblers was rigged out like battleships, with devices for every conceivable mechanical or chemical action. A flatplane baseplate capped one end of the sheathed body. The tail structure was dense thicket of fibers, each tipped with penetrator clusters. The penetrators enabled the bot to attach to and enter any structure.

Winger brought ANAD to a complete stop. The hairs on the back of his neck bristled. Something wasn't quite right, but he couldn't put his finger on it. The data was all wrong...no nanobotic swarm was supposed to be like this at all. Maybe because it had once been Sheila....

"Yardley, Kumoda...what do you make of this?"

Both techs were amazed at the images ANAD was returning. "It's the basic semi-viral structure we've seen before with early ANAD. But it's enhanced, somehow. Changed or evolved. I've never seen so many effectors. Amazing. That probe for instance--" he fingered a dark, indistinct structure to one side of the nearest device--"looks just like a saw. And that--I believe I recognize...I'll be damned--"

Winger had seen it too. "Sorting rotor?"

"That's what it looks like." At Winger's request, Yardley fiddled with the resolution, managed to tweak the view even sharper. Dim outlines became clearer. "A segment of a sorting rotor. Cam-driven with carbene grabbers and--" he squinted down at the imager, adjusted his glasses "--looks like--yep, diamondoid follower rods. "Probably process upwards of several hundred thousand molecules per cycle." Yardley shook his head with grudging respect. "Neat workmanship. But I'd bet my aunt Emma's life savings that bugger's not part of the original template. This is new."

"That must be some kind of comm link...maybe an antenna," said Kumoda. He indicated a small structure on the side of the bot's actuator mast. "Wonder if it's putting out anything?"

"Try coupler channels," Winger suggested. "We stole that idea from Red Hammer anyway...sending signals in entangled quantum states. They've probably advanced light years beyond us by now—"

Kumoda pecked at some keys on a nearby keyboard. "I'll search for decoherence wakes...if Dexter here—" he patted the side of the panel "—picks up any, it's a sure sign we're dealing with coupler comms."

The analysis went on for a few minutes. Sure enough, Kumoda's Decoherence Examining and Troubleshooting System chirped with a hit.

Kumoda pumped a fist. "Gotcha, you little dirtbag. Faint but definitely there...see for yourself...decoherence wakes. Not that I can follow the signals...they're almost like ghosts or shadows."

Winger studied Dexter's output, studied the signal characteristics. "Any chance you've got enough to triangulate? If we could come up with some kind of bearing...that might lead us to a physical place we could investigate."

Kumoda shrugged, rubbed fingers through jet black hair that kept falling into his eyes. "Probably not but I can try. There are ways to boost the gain, backtrack some of the quantum states...it's dicey but worth a try."

"Do it," Winger said. His stomach growled. "I'm starved. You guys want anything from the Commissary?"

Yardley yawned, stretched. "I could do with something edible. Maybe a wrap and some tea."

"Done." Winger cycled himself out of the Level 4 Lab and summoned a nearby servbot. It whirred down the hall and stared with its single blinking red eye at him. If it had been a dog, it's tail would have wagged. Winger told the bot what they wanted, adding, "Light on the mayo and no chili on my dogs, okay?"

The servbot acknowledged the order and paused momentarily, just long enough to arouse a flicker of suspicion in Winger. Can I trust this thing? Is it compromised...a swarm itself?

But the servbot spat out a receipt, wheeled about and trundled off to its port, where the order would be put through. Winger watched the thing perform its programmed tasks and wondered. He decided it was just paranoia. But that same feeling had served him well before. Maybe, when the meals came, he'd check them over really well.

He went back to the Lab.

Kumoda was all smiles. "Got something here, Lieutenant. I was able to grab enough deco wake to do some calculating. Washed it through the state buffer a few times, and plotted what came out. I think we've got some kind of signal bearing here...a cluster of comm signals seem to be coming and going from these coordinates. And it's repeatable...maybe the master bot's downloading something or asking for instructions."

"So what have got?" Winger asked.

Kumoda displayed target latitude and longitude on the screen. "Best match is here...forty eight point eight five degrees north by two point three degrees east. Here, I'll show you—"

He called up a map display. The coordinates put the deco wake cluster squarely in the middle of Paris, France.

"Can you zoom in tighter, narrow it down?" Winger asked.

"I can try."

Kumoda finagled with the results. The map zoomed in to sharper resolution.

Winger now knew why the hairs on the back of his neck were standing up.

"It's UNIFORCE Headquarters. The Quartier-General—"

Yardley shook his head. "That can't be, Kenji...re-do your analysis. Wash it through Dexter once more."

Kumoda did that. "Running diagnostics now." The screen blinked and whirled for a few moments as the system crunched the faint decoherence wake signals and plotted intersecting radials of signal gain. The map settled back down to the same view. "Dexter checks out fine. These coordinates are the best match."

Winger sucked in a low breath. "This can't be. If Dexter's right, the master bot in that tank is executing comm sessions with a target inside UNIFORCE Headquarters...or nearby."

Kumoda agreed. "I don't see how that can be, but that's what Dexter's coming up with."

Yardley swallowed audibly. "I've got a bad feeling about this, gents."

Winger was already cycling through the lockout, pecking out a call on his wristpad. "I'd better let the Major know what we're dealing with here. A Red Hammer bot talking to UNIFORCE Headquarters.... it's nuts. It's insane."

He stepped outside the Containment Level Four chamber and made the call.

Chapter 2

"General Quarters"

UNIFORCE Headquarters

The Quartier-General, Paris

November 2, 2048

7:15 a.m.

To some wags, the seventy-five story tower located in Paris' 5th arrondisement, near the Luxembourg Gardens and just off the Boulevard St-Michel, resembled a flower stem with the petal half torn off at the top. To others, it looked like a twisted shovel blade. Or an elongated clam with its tongue sticking out. Or maybe a sword bent at the top.

To Major James Lofton and Lieutenant Johnny Winger, though, the tower was the Quartier-General, operations and command center, home and headquarters for UNIFORCE, the security and mandate enforcement arm of the United Nations.

Lofton had been ordered to report in person to General Salah Salim, head of UNIFORCE Security and Intelligence (U2). Lofton twisted Major Kraft's arm at Table Top hard enough to let him take Winger along for the ride. Lofton knew quite well that Winger had an embedded ANAD system in an implanted capsule in his shoulder. The Security chief figured that might well come in handy in the rat's maze that was UNIFORCE.

They made it to the Quartier-General in good order and after being scanned in, Lofton and Winger were escorted to a waiting room on the seventieth floor, outside the briefing deck. Word was that they would be meeting with U2 himself, General Salah Salim. Salim wanted to hear firsthand what had happened both at Lions Rock and subsequently, at Table Top. When Red Hammer managed to insert multiple agents inside Quantum Corps' most secure facility, upper management took notice.

The briefing deck was a circular theater-style facility, multi-level with screens and displays wrapped around the entire room. An oval of baize-covered tables held center stage with workstations at each location and a spherical display unit was mounted like a statue in the middle.

Lofton and Winger had only a few moments' wait before U2 came in, surrounded by staff aides, signing off directives and orders as he took his seat. He shooed the underlings out and greeted Lofton and Winger, returning all salutes briskly.

"At ease, gentlemen...sit, sit..." Salim pressed a few buttons on his keyboard and the screens at all stations flickered into life. "GENGHIS, would you bring UNSAC on-line, please?"

GENGHIS was the commandnet AI, running all displays and systems in the briefing deck. "Of course, General Salim. The Security Affairs Commissioner welcomes all participants and expresses his wishes for a productive and effective briefing. All stations are active and on-line."

Salim explained that the real UNSAC was in a separate meeting with the Secretary-General, in New York. His avatar on screen would stand in for the Commissioner.

Salim had an olive face, thick black moustache and bushy, nearly non-reg hair spilling over his tunic collar.

Lofton went over their findings from the incident at Table Top and the subsequent investigations.

"Sheila Reaves wasn't Sheila Reaves, sir. That's the bottom line. She was actually a para-human swarm entity, a plant from Red Hammer. But the swarm was so well configured, so tightly controlled, that most people couldn't tell the difference. She...it...was able to release daughter swarms around the base and these swarms configured to resemble ordinary structures—a trash can, a statue, a bench. At some pre-arranged signal, these swarms began to expand and before we knew it, the Mountain was being hit from all sides. It was dicey for awhile, General, but we managed to get them contained."

Salim sipped at a strong Turkish coffee, twirled and fiddled with his moustache. "So now, Red Hammer can produce and release swarms that look just like us? We've had intel on the boards for some time about this...now we have proof. Any results from the analysis?"

Winger spoke up. "The bots we captured are ANAD clones for sure, sir, but they're souped up under the hood. The analysis is on-going, but already we see structures and capabilities we haven't been able to figure out. This incident has caused quite an uproar at Table Top. Now, Red Hammer's got all of us wondering about each other, not really trusting each other, or what our own eyes see."

Salim hmmm'ed. "I'm sure that's part of their plan. Quite a technical achievement this is...to create a swarm that resembles a human. In fact, gentlemen, that's why I ordered you here. We may be facing the same situation within the Quartier-General."

That raised eyebrows on both Lofton and Winger. Lofton cleared his throat. "General, if I may, we know how to deal with this kind of threat. The Lieutenant here has an embedded ANAD system....it's part of the Symbiosis project."

Salim nodded. "I've read the reports. How does that feel, son, with a brainy bot inside you?"

Winger smiled ruefully. "Sir, with all due respects, it's like having a little brother whispering in your ear all the time. Or having your mother look over your shoulder."

Lofton put out his proposal. "Sir, we've used ANAD, the Lieutenant's embed, to create a modified bot we call TinyEye." He described what the bot could do, how it could be configured for up-close surveillance missions, planted like an errant dust mote right on the body of 'persons of interest.'

Salim was well aware that the UNSAC avatar was still on screen, taking in everything. He would have to be careful in what he said. "There are some persons of interest around here. I'll get with you about this after the briefing. For now, there's someone I want you to meet—" He pressed a button on his wristpad and a door behind the briefing tables opened.

In came Sheila Reaves.

Johnny Winger nearly fell out of his chair. Reaves saluted Salim smartly, then grinned at Winger and Lofton.

"Are you for real?" Winger asked.

Reaves' grin grew wider. "All too real, Lieutenant." The red-haired chatter box took a seat next to Salim.

U2 enjoyed their consternation. "This is the real one, you can be sure of that. And I can explain—"

Reaves stared right back at the officers. "You want to pinch me or what?"

Salim explained, "Sergeant Reaves is working for me. On a mission for U2, top secret, Priority One. Only the Secretary-General and CINCQUANT know about this."

Now it was Salim's turn to conduct the briefing. "Reaves has been TDY'ed to Paris for a little surveillance op. Her official purpose is serving as an Intelligence staff officer to the General Staff, kind of my right hand with the brass upstairs. Her real mission is to observe, gather intel, and ferret out spies and saboteurs inside the Quartier-General. You see, gentlemen, Table Top's not the only target. We're pretty sure Red Hammer's got eyes and ears and who knows what else inside this building too. Major Lofton, I am fully aware of your TinyEye program. That's why you're here. But I don't want to discuss the details of what I'm planning here---why don't you meet me in the Officers' canteen on the sixtieth floor in, say, half an hour?"

That was agreed to. The UNSAC avatar signed off and Salim called a formal end to the briefing.

Thirty minutes later on the dot, in an isolated corner of the Officers' mess ten floors below, Salim appeared at Lofton and Winger's table and sat down without ceremony. He let the servbot come by, ordered an espresso and croissant, and lowered his voice. Outside, the Eiffel Tower loomed in the distance, surrounded by an ever-present swirl of jetcabs and tourist lifters.

"I think both of you know about the suspicions some people have about UNSAC."

Winger started to remind both of them that he'd encountered the Security Affairs Commissioner at Lions Rock...or at least, someone who looked like UNSAC. But he said nothing.

"Yes, sir," Lofton admitted. "I've heard the rumors. Is there any proof that UNSAC's working for Red Hammer?"

Salim shrugged. "That's why you're here. Sheila Reaves was a plant by us...bait, if you will. We expected something to happen when she was set up on liberty in Singapore. We didn't know what exactly. We wanted Red Hammer to think they had turned Reaves and could use her as their own agent. Meanwhile, the real Reaves was here, working undercover for me."

"Pardon me for saying so, sir, but if Table Top had been let in on this little charade, it would have helped matters."

Salim said, "The deception was necessary, Major, believe me. Otherwise Red Hammer wouldn't have taken the bait. Now we've snagged some of their bots and we can take a closer look at them."

Lofton understood. "You mentioned TinyEye, sir. Am I correct in assuming we'll be using Eye inside the Quartier-General? May I ask who the target is?"

Salim's face turned deadly serious. "The entire General Staff. And UNSAC. And that information doesn't leave this table."

"So how exactly are we supposed to plant TinyEyes on an entire General Staff?"

Salim looked Lofton squarely in the face. "That's what we're here to discuss and this is where Sergeant Reaves comes in."

The next General Staff meeting was the following morning, 0700 hours in the staff room on the seventy-first floor.

Sheila Reaves had been designated staff support to General Salim. As such, she was given a console along the outer perimeter of the room, behind Salim. Other commanders had their own staff support, lining the circular walls of the theater-style room in similar fashion. But the other staff didn't have a small capsule in their jacket pockets like Reaves.

The night before, Winger, Reaves and Lofton had created a TinyEye station in one corner of Salim's office suite. Winger had launched ANAD from his shoulder capsule and replicated a small swarm, only a few hundred bots. They had hacked out a modified TinyEye configuration and commanded all the replicants into the new config. Then a small containment capsule had been loaded with the swarm.

Jiang Hao Bei was Security Affairs Commissioner of the United Nations, UNSAC. Jiang was short, rotund, balding on top with a thick black beard but no one called him Buddha, though he bore a passing resemblance to the Enlightened One. In his earlier years, he had been a world grandmaster in jujitsu (5th order) but those days were long gone. He had black button eyes—someone had once called them 'shark's eyes', and a scowl that could melt lead. Jiang brought the weekly General Staff meeting to order and proceedings were underway.

That's when Reaves, sitting at her staff support console, pulled out what looked like a lipstick case and thumbed a small control stud on the side of the device. Unseen by anyone else, the lipstick case discharged a faint, barely noticeable mist. The mist consisted of the TinyEye swarm that had been configured the night before. The mist dispersed in seconds and seemed to be gone.

One floor below, at the TinyEye station inside Salim's well-guarded office, Johnny Winger and James Lofton, were in control.

"TinyEye's away, Major," Winger reported. "Half propulsor...we're separating clean...I've got seven groups all reporting back."

In the air of the General Staff room, among all the cigar smoke and coffee fumes, an invisible horde of dust motes divided themselves into seven distinct formations and wheeled about, homing on their respective targets.

"Target One in sight," Winger reported. "I've got a good photon lens going...porting feed to the monitor—" On his console, the imager screen showed a grainy, streaky, but discernible image of Target One: General Safran Chekwarthy, also known as Commander in Chief of UNISPACE, CINCSPACE. Chekwarthy was puffing on a cigarette and sniffing at the rim of a steaming cup of tea.

"Major, Target One has a full head of hair. I think that might be our best bet to land TinyEye One."

"Do it," Lofton commanded. "We should be okay unless CINCSPACE decides to get a haircut."

"Steering for the head," Winger said. He pecked out a few commands on his keyboard and thumbed the joystick forward. Unnoticed by Chekwarthy, a few dust motes drifted down from above and planted themselves firmly in his coiffure.

"TinyEye One in place, sir."

Lofton checked the board. "Okay...now we're getting feed. There they are...visual, olfactory, audio, haptic, everything coming in. We're dialed in to CINCSPACE as long as TinyEye stays attached. Proceed with the rest."

One after another, Winger steered the remaining TinyEye swarms to their targets. Normal practice required him to put the Eyes on the physical person of the target. Clothes could be changed and contact might be lost. Even being implanted on their physical persons was a risk. Taking a shower or running through a heavy downpour could dislodge the bots. But that was risk Lofton and Salim were prepared to take.

The trickiest approach and landing was UNSAC himself. Once Jiang had taken a seat and reports were coming in from around the table, Lofton and Winger debated the best landing spot on the Commissioner. Finally, it was decided that TinyEye would seek out a spot on the beard.

Following the visual image fed back from TinyEye Seven's photo lens, Winger approached, reconnoitered and hovered as if he were putting a lifter down in a forest. Finally, he found an open clearing and deposited the bot swarm in place.

Then UNSAC scratched his beard briskly. It was like clinging to a tree in a hurricane. But TinyEye Seven stayed attached.

The General Staff meeting came to an end and the targets dispersed to their daily schedules. Winger had worked on the TinyEye command workstation so that the feed from all targets would come in at once and be displayed on a tiled display, visual, haptic, olfactory...every channel that TinyEye could sense and report. It was a lot of data. Lofton worked with Reaves and Winger to man the monitoring station around the clock...Winger and Reaves would each take eight-hour shifts and Salim's adjutant Lieutenant Micheletti the last shift.

Certain actions, behaviors and locations were set up to be flagged immediately. Torrents and petabytes of data poured in over the next day as each target went about his business.

CINCSPACE ate three baguettes at the Café Arronix a block east of UNIFORCE on the Boulevard St-Michel.

CINCBIO visited a small hotel after his duty shift that evening, where he had a rendezvous with a well-proportioned Parisian working girl. It was known from his curriculum vitae that CINCBIO had been married for thirty years and had seven children and three grandchildren. The girl was not his wife.

CINCCYBER groped a secretary in a booth in the Flag Officer's Mess right after sharing a nice Bordeaux and some cheese with the girl during a mid-afternoon break.

And CINCQUANT, who was well aware of the TinyEye operation, spent an inordinate amount of time in the men's room of the General Staff suite, examining his hair, eyebrows, face and hands, no doubt looking for some evidence of what he knew had to be there.

All this data and more poured into the TinyEye station. The first flag chimed late the following afternoon. It came from TinyEye Seven, the device planted on UNSAC.

UNSAC was trying to establish a comm link via quantum coupler.

"Where is he?" Lofton asked. Winger and Reaves were with the Major at the TinyEye station in Lofton's office.

Winger was manipulating the swarm's photon lens to get a visual. "Looks like he's in his office. We got an alert for quantum coupler operation. "He's trying to open a link...I'll see if I can get better audio. No bearings on the decoherence wakes yet....you know how hard that is."

UNSAC's voice came through in a scratchy monotone.

"Make sure this is recorded," Lofton ordered.

Over the next few minutes, it was clear that UNSAC was relaying the contents of recent General Staff briefings to someone. The snatches of voice were unmistakable...possible penetration op at Lions Rock...Red Hammer has bigger plans in mind...antidote to HNRIV that's more than an antidote—that made Lofton sit up and take notice—a programmable device could make millions of addicts...operations in Nairobi....

When UNSAC was done with his comm link, he shut it down and began reviewing staff notes and plans. TinyEye produced nothing else that morning even remotely suspicious. But Lofton was already satisfied with what they had.

"Ten to one that was a link to a Red Hammer site. This haul should raise some eyebrows with Internal Security."

Reaves was curious. "Major, what do you suppose this reference to Nairobi is all about? And some bigger operation. I haven't seen anything on the boards recently."

"Neither have I," Lofton said. "Lieutenant, I want to take a look at what's on UNSAC's workstation files. Don't worry about authorization...I've got all I need from the S-G. Pinch off an element of TinyEye and let's go hunting."

Winger knew it was possible for ANAD and, by extension, its TinyEye cousin, to probe computer memory files directly, right down to the level of molecule-sized bits on the hard drive disk. For several minutes, TinyEye read and copied the molecular dots of data on UNSAC's computer drives.

Lofton was pleased. "Internal Security will love this stuff. When this is all over, you two will get some kind of special commendation."

"Thank you, sir," Winger said. He would much rather have been driving ANAD somewhere else, like against a real adversary but that was the thing with assembler technology. There were always more applications that could be thought up, more shadowy corners to be investigated.

For several days, TinyEye followed the members of the General Staff and Reaves and Winger pulled long shifts, monitoring the status of the infinitesimal swarms, collecting the multiple feeds, advising Lofton of unusual discoveries and in general acting like atom-sized cops on a beat.

It wasn't exactly what Winger had signed up for. One evening during the hour-long shift handover, Winger and Reaves got permission to head down to the Officers' Mess on the seventieth floor. They found a small table by the windows and watched tourist jetcab traffic circling the Eiffel Tower.

Winger ran a finger around the rim of his beer mug, licking the frosting with a loud slurp. "I don't know about you, Sheila, but this sucks. Spying on senior officers, watching them take a crap in the head—I'm surprised Lofton doesn't want a sample of that."

"Hey, don't suggest it, Lieutenant. It could happen. Bad enough we're listening in on comms and reading computer files. I sure hope TinyEye is not the future for ANAD. You two still have heartfelt conversations late at night?"

"Yeah, it's like we're frat brothers. Here, let me show you...." Winger tapped his shoulder capsule the way Doc Frost had shown him. The port opened. "I'll launch ANAD now."

"Here?" Reaves looked around. The Mess wasn't crowded, only a few other patrons were inside and nobody was nearby.

"Sure...watch this—"

From underneath Winger's shirt, a faint glow emanated. Then a mist, flickering slightly as the swarm emerged, slamming atoms to build structure. As Reaves watched in amazement, the swarm issued out into the air, staying low at tabletop level and began forming up some kind of image. The process lasted three minutes. When it was done, a ghostly image of Doc Frost's face and shoulders, in outline, had emerged, floating like an apparition just beside the salt and pepper shakers.

Nobody seemed to notice.

"He looks just like Doc Frost," Reaves marveled.

"Yeah, I hacked out a special config a few weeks ago. Not a bad likeness, don't you think? I bring him out every now and then, late at night. We talk."

Reaves shook her head. "Boys and their toys. So what do you two talk about?"

"I'll show you—" Winger pecked at a few keys on his wristpad. "I'll put him in full audio...he's using some of his elements to form audible sounds....ANAD, this is Base, report status—"

The tiny swarm likeness flashed and popped and Reaves was sure that someone would notice but nobody did.

***ANAD to Base...reporting stable status...config C-22, all effectors inerted, propulsors idling...ready in all respects***

Reaves had a cockeyed sort of smile on her face. "Cool...sounds like a five-year old speaking out of a barrel...kind of tinny, but understandable."

"I'm working on the audibility configs...it'll get better. ANAD, Base...how many current configurations in your library?"

There was a slight fizzing and staticky scratching sound, then: ***ANAD currently maintains one hundred and twenty eight configuration templates...***

Winger said, "Listen to this—ANAD, Base has only one configuration. Analyze this disparity and report results."

***Single config entities are inherently limited in operational capability. Multiple configurations permit ANAD to effectively respond to all tactical situations more efficiently. Multiple config allows ANAD to engage adversaries in many forms, from many vectors, by changing configs. Configuration change is enhanced with new folding plane architecture, faster replication algorithms and hyper-entangled qubit design***

Reaves had to smile at that. "He sounds like a recruiter for Quantum Corps. You did all this yourself, Lieutenant?"

Winger shrugged. "Just a few hacks in my spare time. He's like another brother now...and this one doesn't beat on my head all the time."

Reaves knew about the terrible accident that had taken the life of Ellen Winger. "I'm sorry about your mother, Lieutenant. Nobody should have to go through that."

Winger shrugged. "It happened. I guess the best result of something like that is that it led me to Quantum Corps. I got tired of shoveling hay on the ranch. My Dad kind of withdrew...depression and all that. Everybody reacts differently. For me, I just decided to join the Corps...become an atomgrabber."

"So you two can now have meaningful talks any time you want?"

"We can and we do. I've even programmed ANAD to start recording and parsing into voicetext some of his internal analysis of what we talk about...listen to this...I'll download one file he did the other day—"

Winger tapped his wristpad. The swarm likeness of Doc Frost morphed slightly, grayed out as its processor recalled the file and played it. The voice was still that of a five-year old, but slightly changed in timber...more serious in tone....

Interactions Log

File No. 129315.8

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

Interaction Mode: Acoustic, voice synthetic V-22

Date: 11.3.48

Start Time: 065500

End Time: 065845

Output File (text analysis):

<<Subject: Configuration: Winger, J>>

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

<<I will extract and summarize Symbiogenesis theory developed by Frost and Murdoch and prepare a report for Config Winger. (ref: "Investigations into Methods for Symbiotic Congregation of Multi-cellular Organisms and Nanobotic Assembler Systems into Unitary Structures," Autonomous Systems Laboratory, Northgate University, January 2046, Proceedings of the Conference on Organic NanoSystems).

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

Output File Ends

Reaves was about to offer an opinion when Major Lofton suddenly showed up at their table.

"Get back upstairs, you two and get your gear together. You're taking a little trip, both of you."

Winger said, "No more TinyEye, Major?"

"Shut down TinyEye immediately. UNSAC's headed to east Africa, Nairobi, in fact. I've got authority from the S-G. You're now on a surveillance op in person. You're booked on separate commercial flights to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. Civilian clothes. And Winger, take ANAD and all his gear."

"What's up, Major?"

Lofton was serious. "It looks like our Security Affairs Commissioner may be making a few covert stops while he inspects UNIFORCE operations around Africa...keep your TinyEye configs handy. But for the time being, you two are working for Q2."

"Major Kraft won't like—"

Lofton held up a hand. "I've already had a few words with Kraft. CINCQUANT too. The Major's been told what he needs to know...and reminded to keep his mouth shut. This op takes priority over everything else. If UNSAC's in tight with Red Hammer, we've got a serious problem. It's your job to find out for sure...we're not sure exactly why he's interested in Nairobi, beyond inspecting UNIFORCE facilities. But something's there...and it must have something to do with Red Hammer. Lieutenant, you and Reaves have one mission: find out what that connection is."
Chapter 3

"The Old Ones"

Nairobi, Kenya

November 4, 2048

8:45 p.m.

The airliner touched down at Nairobi's airport a little after sunset local time, kissing the tarmac with a hard bump after a grueling five-thousand mile, ten-hour flight from Paris. From the top of the ramp, Winger found the capital of Kenya a sprawling, dun-colored metropolis perched on endless miles of grassland and scrub bush. Though the city was only a hundred and fifty miles south of the Equator, the air was surprisingly cool and dry. Through distant haze, snow-capped mountains rimmed the horizon.

Kilimanjaro is somewhere out there, Winger remembered from the maps. But there was no time for sightseeing.

Reaves was coming on a separate flight. It wasn't due to arrive for two more hours. Winger grabbed his baggage and wandered around the airport for awhile, checking shops, napping, ducking into a dark and smoky bar, where he found a corner booth and surreptitiously launched ANAD from his shoulder capsule for a chat and some company.

No one seemed to notice the faint shimmering outlines of a face hovering around the guttering candles that graced the booth table, no one except for Sheila Reaves, who appeared suddenly even as Winger was pouring out his heart to the tiny nano-friend.

Reaves stifled a chuckle. "You two solving all the world's problems, I suppose?" She already had her bag, slung over her shoulder, and sat down. The robowaiter trundled over and Reaves put in her order.

Winger checked the time. "I thought you weren't due in until 2230 hours."

Reaves accepted her drink from the waiter and sipped at the wine. "I took an earlier flight. Your buddy there...he looks a little peeked. Don't you think someone might notice this, Lieutenant?"

Winger looked around. "In here? Most of these people can't see two feet in front of them. Let's finish up and get the hell out of here. I want to get the TinyEye station set up and locate our target."

Reaves polished off her Merlot. "It's still hard to believe UNSAC himself might be in league with Red Hammer."

"Even though I saw the man myself at Lions Rock?"

"Even though you thought you saw UNSAC...remember there's more than one of me around too."

Winger had to admit, after what had happened with the Reaves angel at Table Top, that the red-haired DPS tech was right.

They left the terminal and grabbed a taxi, one of the colorful matatu vans that cruised the streets of Nairobi like the ever-present hordes of flies. Riding bumper to bumper through chaotic, horn-honking, late evening traffic, Reaves thought the city of Nairobi looked from the ground like the inside of her son Connor's cereal bowl. There was a grid of streets and trees in the middle, arranged like soggy corn flakes in her mind's eye. The bowl was a rim of mountains with the Ngong Hills to the west and Kilimanjaro and Kipwezi poking through the clouds to the south. The crack of the Great Rift Valley angled down from the northeast, right through the heart of the city...toast crumbs marching across the table. And to the east, the sere brown veldt country of east Kenya, scuff marks on the table from years of spoon and fork banging.

Minutes later, they were checking into the Hotel Soweto, just a block away from the green sward of Uhuru Park. The clerk assigned them adjoining rooms. After putting her bags up, Reaves joined Winger in his room, which looked out across Kenyatta Avenue to the park. Winger was already setting up the TinyEye station, trying to locate UNSAC's current position.

Even late at night, thousands of people were swarming the streets, bazaars and alleyways below them. From the air, the city was alive, like an ant nest that had been stirred into a frenzy.

Across the street, Reaves spied a bazaar, lit up like a carnival, crawling with people. The bazaar was loud and chaotic, filled with smoke and pungent smells—the high-octane odor of masala tobacco was especially strong at the Garden Street entrance—and the air was thick with loose nano, clouds of bots mingling with incense, opium and scores of cooking oil fires. Vendors hawked grapes and mangoes, bananas and fabricator shells of every type, vials of rogue DNA called twist hung from clothes lines strung up between light poles and dilapidated tents. Women in sarongs with black teeth from chewing betel nuts zipped and weaved through the labyrinth balancing huge baskets on their heads, baskets filled with everything from buffalo patties to rebuilt matter compilers for the fabs that were on sale everywhere.

With her eyes, Reaves followed a small gang of tourists ...across a jammed plaza thick with bikes, carts, cattle and donkeys. Flat screen displays hanging from poles flickered down on the crowd, with images of Bollywood action pics counterpointed by plaintive plucking from a mandolin player nearby. In the center of a knot of yelling, shoving, jeering customers, a swarthy man in a turban and dark green kaftan pecked at a keyboard. All around the park, throbbing globs of nanobotic swarms swelled and gyrated to the music. Masala smoke was thick and acrid in the air.

"Lively place," she told herself. Then a grunt from Winger drew her attention back to TinyEye.

"Got him!" Winger pumped the air with a fist. "Not too far from here, either. I'm checking the coordinates on my map...Kibera Fields. The big slum."

"What's the Security Affairs Commissioner doing in a slum?"

"I don't know...here, I'll config Eye for better audio...we can listen in—"

Winger punched out a few commands. Several miles away, in a small, ramshackle shantyhouse on a trash-strewn alley near the edge of the world's largest slum, TinyEye sloughed off a few bots and formed a receiver element that could grab voices and sounds better and relay them back to its control station.

The voices were scratchy, filled with static and extraneous sounds. Winger cleaned up some of the signal, filtering out everything he could but human voice frequencies.

It was clear that the subject of the conversation was a place called Engebbe.

Snatches and bursts of talk came through the speakers from TinyEye...Engebbe...the dig...excavation tools...the sphere...Minister of Antiquities....

Reaves shrugged. "Doesn't make much sense to me. Can you get us a visual, Lieutenant?"

"I can try." Winger massaged TinyEye's configs, until the infinitesimal swarm formed up a small photon lens. Moments later, a grainy image flickered into view on the imager screen on his station.

UNSAC was in a small, smoke-filled room, sitting at a table. Papers and equipment were strewn across the table. Two other people were there, both male. Beers and plates were scattered among the papers.

"You've got to move faster," UNSAC was saying. "Paryang wants that thing excavated by the end of the week—"

Another voice came through the TinyEye station. The speaker was a well-dressed black male to UNSAC's left. "The Ministry's concerned...the University wants to examine everything...you know how it is. We're after that sphere...they want to study bones, pots, every little dirt clod."

UNSAC's voice deepened. It was clear he was angry...and getting angrier. His voice cut in and out. "...be put off...Paryang....deadlines...the Keeper...you'll be well paid...."

The well-dressed man agreed. "It was good of Dr. Frost to publish his Engebbe findings...that led us right to the spot—"

His words made Johnny Winger sit up and take notice. "Doc Frost...Engebbe...Reaves, Engebbe's where the Doc found that ancient virus...it's what he used to program the earliest ANAD with."

"What does UNSAC...or for that matter, Red Hammer, want with Engebbe, Lieutenant? Is it still an ongoing dig site?"

"I don't know but I intend to find out."

Two days later, Reaves and Winger had managed to create a new set of identities for themselves. Q2 had advised them, after contacting Irwin Frost at Northgate, that Engebbe was still an active archeological site, but the dig had been shut down last year by order of the Ministry of Antiquities. There were political and tribal concerns. Disturbing ancient bones had stirred up a lot of animosity from local Masai leaders.

Inquiries around Nairobi, in bazaars, in cafes and among matatu drivers, had produced news of several ongoing digs outside the city, all of them looking for contract help to handle hauling, digging, sifting and light clerical duties. One effort, known to the taxi driver that mentioned it as the Liwale job, seemed to be focused on Engebbe.

Reaves and Winger signed on, in a small dingy office in the Embakasi district of town, as Australian students and interns, looking for a little spending money. After a brief test and interrogation, they were hired and told to show up for transport the following morning.

Their interrogator was a balding black man, with a heavy gold chain around his neck and a greasy T-shirt, torn at the right shoulder. He said his name was Nyere.

Nyere told them to wear light work clothes and sturdy shoes. "It's dusty, watoto. You'll be climbing, a lot, crawling through dirt. Lots of flies too. Bring repellant." Nyere gave them both an ID chip. "Wear this. Show it to the driver. No tools...you get those at the site. Be prompt too."

They left and headed back to their hotel. Winger squirted an encrypted message off to Lofton, who was still at the Quartier-General in Paris. Moments later, the Major's face appeared on the miniscule screen of Winger's wristpad.

"We checked with Dr. Frost, Winger. He advised us that Engebbe is where the fossilized virus came from...the one he took the genome sequence from. That alone has raised eyebrows here. Red Hammer may have some kind of bioweapon in mind...or worse. Get up there...your cover as students should work but be careful. Poke around and send back everything you can. UNIFORCE will have to tread lightly with the locals. And if UNSAC's involved, he's undoubtedly got eyes and ears all around this building. Any op we think of will have to be done outside normal channels."

Winger signed off and thought: yeah, just like everything else we're doing here.

He and Reaves decided to turn in and get some rest. It was going to be a long day tomorrow. After Reaves had left, Winger launched ANAD. The ghostly likeness of Doc Frost soon formed up over the bed, as he lay back against the pillow. Winger turned the lights down and studied the faint image hovering in mid-air.

"Your edges look sharper tonight," he said. "That little fix I did seems to have worked."

The Frost image managed something like a smile. ***I am detecting elevated stress frequencies in your voice, Base...this mission is a difficult one to accomplish?...perhaps you have concerns?***

Winger smiled back. "Yeah, you could say that. ANAD, you know you're almost like a little brother to me. Except for all the sensors, I mean."

***I am programmed to display appropriate emotional states and provide supportive responses when certain inputs are detected and received***

"You mean like when wrinkles line my face?"

***Correct...I can detect micro changes in facial musculature and measure galvanic skin response...this is correlated with stored emotional routines...these values are measured in real-time and my response sequences modified to match***

Winger closed his eyes. In his mind, he saw images of Sheila Reaves. The real Reaves, disassembling a coilgun by feel. The angel Reaves, charging up a HERF carbine. Or was it both? Or a strange hybrid?

"ANAD, I guess what bothers me most is what we don't know about Red Hammer. Clearly, they've taken our ANAD technology and gone further with it. But how much further? When a botswarm resembling Sheila Reaves walks into Table Top and nobody notices for several days, what does that say about Red Hammer's abilities? Hell, I don't know what's real in this room anymore. I'm real...I can pinch myself and make it hurt. This bed feels real. You're real. It's like living inside a hall of mirrors. We have to be suspicious of everybody and everything."

The Frost image seemed to consider that. Winger saw its 'face' cycle through a set of looks and expressions. He knew perfectly well it was a programmed response, but still—was there something there beyond the program?

***Base, Red Hammer uses the same basic technology as we do...perhaps they have access to different ideas on how to apply the technology...Q2 is always analyzing their bots, their configs, their designs..."effective intelligence is about not being surprised"...this is a quote from Major James Lofton***

"I've heard that saying before, ANAD...but I'm not sure how we do that in practice. That's what this mission is about...intelligence on Red Hammer. That and finding out just how deeply they've penetrated UNIFORCE. That's what worries me, ANAD. With Red Hammer able to create para-human swarm entities like Sheila Reaves, how can we ever know what's real and what isn't, who's real and who isn't? There could be dust motes in this very room now...taking in everything we say—"

***Base, I have scanned this room in all bands...acoustic, electromagnetic, thermal...no signatures of nanobotic activity detected...***

"Well, that's something, I guess. I can sleep better knowing that. But I wonder sometimes—"

***What questions come to your mind when you perform this 'wondering' sequence?***

"Just this: ANAD, you can actually become just about anything, can't you? A loose swarm of nanobotic devices. A dust mote, like you said. A chair. Sheila Reaves. A bed. It's all in the configs. Like you're always saying...multi-config is the way to go. Me, I'm just me. One configuration. What you see is what you get. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be able to become different things, different people, just by loading and replicating a new config. Does that make any sense?"

For a few moments, ANAD made no response and Winger wasn't sure if he heard or understood the sentence. Maybe he's parsing my words, matching frequencies, correlating and analyzing. Then—

***Base, it is true that my design allows for multiple configurations to be employed. Analysis of your words combined with semantic correlation indicates that single-config entities have limited functional uses...damage to the configuration can lead to a non-functional state...multiple configuration entities can change configs and continue operations in another form...***

"You're talking about dying again, aren't you, ANAD? I suppose that's true. In my wildest dreams, I sometimes imagine what it would be like to be you...able to 'change configs' just like that. But then, maybe I couldn't feel things like a single-config entity does...hot and cold, pain and joy, tacos and beer. I'm not sure I'd want to give that up."

Eventually, Winger drifted off to a restless doze, then to a deeper sleep. ANAD remained overnight in the 'Doc Frost" config, hovering like a wraith in the shadows of the hotel room, monitoring, analyzing, parsing, sensing. No commands were sent or received during this time. But its state decision matrix was updated with the contents of the conversation it had just had with Base: Winger, J. Stored emotional sequences were modified and weighted to account for the new data.

When the next conversational routine was launched, ANAD would employ its new state decision matrix to modify and enhance the exchange. In this manner, the tiny bot would gain new insight into the workings of single-config entities.

The next morning, a pair of hired commercial lifters carried Winger, Reaves and the rest of the contract diggers across the great Rift Valley, and after a short half-hour flight, began their descent across vast acacia woodlands and open grassland, thick with galloping herds of wildebeest and zebra. Through light chop surrounding the twin summits of Mawenzi and Kibo, the formation settled onto a dusty plateau rimmed with massive outcrops of rock, hillocks of lava known as kopjes, in the local dialect. As the lifters touched down, a few hyrax and a solitary leopard scuttled away into the grass.

"Welcome to Engebbe Valley," said Major Simon Dikesi. Dikesi was in command of a small contingent of soldiers guarding the dig site, the 1st Liwale Rifles. He ordered the detail to dismount and form up a perimeter around the excavation. "The birthplace of Man--" the Major proudly announced.

Engebbe was a dry, sere wasteland of ash fall and rock, desiccated as the bones that often turned up on its pockmarked ground. The Valley itself was little more than a wide spot in the meandering streambed of the Engebbe River, a waterway in name only for most of the year. As Johnny Winger stepped out onto the hardpan of the ravine, he saw only a sinuous ribbon of slightly damp soil marking the outlines of the river's course.

The dig site itself was situated on a sloping shelf of rock and solidified ash north of the riverbed, surrounded by rugged slopes of rock and crushed ash heaps. Roughly trapezoidal in layout, the dig site was a series of concentric trenches circling the outer, surface-level perimeter of a vast pit. Each trench was meticulously laid with grid lines of laser lights and rows of mobile mirrors and flood lamps arrayed in and among the grid lines. The entire pit bottomed out some twenty meters below the top surface of the ledge.

Just upstream of the dig, a small gathering of huts and trailers had grown up, given the name, so Major Dikesi said, of Camp Everest. Above the camp, a sheer cliff rose in a near vertical escarpment to a patch of level ground overhanging the valley. In the middle of this ground, the ruins of an old Arab trading fort, known locally as Al Mbuya, lay in piles of stone and broken wall. The riverbed coursed and undulated downstream to the southeast. Some kilometers away, a turnoff from the Nairobi Highway led to a small village called Longido, the closest thing resembling a town. The border with Tanzania was less than four miles north of the dig itself.

While the lifters were being unloaded and a secure post set up a few hundred meters from Camp Everest, Dikesi and the site paleontologist, a rotund balding man named Gartner, picked their way along the streambed toward the edge of the dig. Winger quietly launched ANAD from his shoulder capsule, then he and Reaves managed to work their way close by as they helped unload tools and supplies, close enough to hear what was being said. The swarm was well masked by swirls of dust in the air.

They were met there by several men and one woman. The tallest man was a sunburned Frenchman named Hugo Valdemore. He was the dig leader. A portly Indian grad student named Ruman Bhindi accompanied him, along with a tall young black woman named Lucy Sinkira, the dig interpreter from Longido, who was fluent in the local Masai dialect.

Dikesi brusquely told Valdemore that the Kenyan Army's 1st Liwale Rifles were on hand to occupy the Engebbe dig site for the time being.

"It is for the national security," Dikesi informed them. "Critical and sensitive operations must be protected here. The Minister insists."

Valdemore, not surprisingly, was thoroughly incensed. He ripped off his dingy bush hat, revealing a tuft of curly and sweaty black hair. "This is an outrage, Major. Mon Dieu, a complete outrage. I have permission from your government, written permission, for an entire season of digging here...we're right in the middle of finishing our excavation of D Level....that's two and a half million years back. Just this morning, we found teeth fragments and splinters of bone....it's very ticklish trying to get these out, and not damage the sphere--"

Gartner asked, "So how's that coming, Hugo?"

Valdemore calmed down a bit. "Slow. It's buried deeply and there are all kinds of skeletal remains around it...we're taking pictures, trying to fix the context, we're sifting very carefully, dirt clod by dirt clod...I had to hire more help last week." Valdemore spied Winger and Reaves moving an air-pallet into position. "There are two of them now. We have to be ultra-careful with that thing. I'm not sure how old it is...prelims say several hundred million years at least."

Gartner had a trim gray-white moustache, accenting his sun-burned face. "Just like Paryang. Older, maybe. And no emissions from the object?"

"None. We probed with radar, thermal, you name it. The thing's as opaque as rock. We did a surface zap with the laser, tried to get some spectrograms, but—" Valdemore put his bush hat back on, situating it at a slight angle. He shrugged. "Nothing."

"Okay," Gartner decided. "Major, get your men set up like we discussed. I brought the big cahuna with me this time—" he indicated a nearby trolley mounting some heavy lifting equipment. "We can't wait any longer. One way or another, that sphere's coming out tomorrow. The Keeper won't wait any longer."

The gathering split up. Winger glanced at Reaves as they continued unloading the pallet onto the hard ground.

I'll recall ANAD. We need to talk tonight, away from the tent.

It was two hours after sunset and the camp was drowsy and still after a late-day meal in the mess tent. A few porters and diggers meandered along the banks of the Engebbe River, now little more than a streambed. Lights burned bright in the operations tent, as Gartner, Valdemore and other scientists planned the next day.

Winger and Reaves slipped out of their tent and quietly made their way past guttering torches and rickety lamp stands toward the excavation pit, itself bathed in bright klieg lights, and now protected by a shimmering web of bots.

They ducked down beside a generator cart.

"I saw that barrier yesterday," Winger said. "I'll config ANAD for Tactical One for starters. That gives him bond disrupters and carbene grabbers. I'm thinking that shield's just a barebones fence to keep out intruders like us."

Reaves kept a watch. "Nobody around now, Skipper. I wish we could douse some of those lights."

"Maybe we can," Winger said. "I can config ANAD to detach a formation that'll look just like a dust storm."

He launched the master bot from his shoulder capsule, wincing at the sting as ANAD exited at full speed. Within moments, a small barely visible cloud had enveloped the two of them and the generator cart.

As promised, Winger commanded ANAD to replicate at max rate and segregate part of the swarm for concealment ops. "Here comes our dust cloud now—"The shimmering veil slowly cleaved off a part of itself. Even as Winger and Reaves watched, the new element thickened and boiled like a growing fist. Out on the Serengeti plain, clouds kicked up by wildebeest migrations were common. As the cloud swelled and began to envelop the excavation, no one seemed particularly alarmed. But nearby strollers began moving away toward clearer and higher ground.

Soon the air over the pit was thick and impenetrable.

"Engaging barrier now," Winger reported. "I'm going small—" He pressed a few buttons on his wristpad and up came ANAD's view of the impending collision. Winger always felt mildly dizzy, going from macro to nano, but he knew how to shake it off. Soon, he felt like he was flying through a sleetstorm, with beach balls and odd polygon shapes flitting by.

Up ahead, ANAD sounded the alarm. Just barely visible in the sleet, the first barrier bots were maneuvering to intercept. Like hibernating bears just emerging from a forest, the bots were multi-lobed structures, like two-headed worms, each globe festooned with effectors and grabbers. They spun and snapped and ANAD closed the distance quickly.

"Geronimo!" Winger whispered. Reaves had the same view on her own wristpad. "I'm going in!"

"Kick ass, Skipper! Watch your three o'clock...big gang of 'em to starboard--!"

The collision shook the imager screen and the melee was on. Winger quickly found the barrier bots were likely ANAD clones themselves. He did the hokey-pokey, spun around and joysticked ANAD right for the mid-section of the nearest bot. The same maneuvers were duplicated by trillions of daughters, up and down the line of engagement. The mid-section seemed mostly free of effectors...if he could just squirm and wriggle his way in, avoiding the grabbers, he could unleash a few bond-snaps and maybe unzip the whole carcass.

Winger had once told his 1st Nano troops that nano-combat was like ballroom dancing...with fists. You had to close to engage. You had to be lightning quick. You had to be as flexible as a gymnast. Stay clear of the enemy's effectors. Contort yourself like a pretzel and sneak in for a pop and a jab. It was Deeno D'Nunzio who had once observed that combat with ANAD was more like heavyweight boxing than ballroom dancing. Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.

Everyone had their own favorite analogy.

The engagement lasted five minutes. By using a combination of spin-o'rama moves, combined with sucker punches from his pyridine probes and grabbers, then a quick jab with his bond disrupters, Winger and ANAD were able to smack a hole in the barrier and get inside. Using a small force of replicants to hold open the gate, he pumped up ANAD's propulsors to max and jetted inside the barrier.

Moments later, ANAD was in auto-hover over the excavation pit, shrouded from view by the 'dust' storm and ready to descend.

The excavation was an elliptical pit some twenty meters deep, layered in concentric ledges, crisscrossed with a grid of laser light.

"I'm going down now," Winger announced. He manipulated the tiny trackball on his wristpad. "Descending at two fifty nanometers per second...."

"Scanning all bands," Reaves came back. She was patched in to Winger's pad. "Nothing yet, nada on thermals, EMs, acoustics. Just the lasers."

"We'll try to avoid those," Winger said.

ANAD's voice came back to Winger on his coupler circuit. Only he could 'hear' it.

***ANAD to Base....a little drafty down here...picking up some dust...recommend retract all effectors until dust layer is cleared...don't want to lose a grabber, Base***

"Yeah...do that," Winger replied. He let Reaves know what the tiny bot was encountering.

Reaves checked the air all around them. "I just hope this is only dust...and nothing more."

They both remembered wargames where ANAD swarms had masqueraded as dust motes.

The descent to the bottom took about twenty minutes.

"Activate photon lens," Winger said. "Let's see what ANAD sees."

Reaves pecked out the command. Moments later, as the swarm gathered all available photons and formed up a grainy image on their wristpads, a dim view of a small opening came into view.

"Looks like a small cave," Reaves remarked. A darkened cavity loomed ahead, mostly in shadow, but surrounding by instruments and scaffolding.

"This is where all the work has been concentrated lately," Winger realized. "TinyEye recorded a lot of chatter about a cave. There must be something pretty important inside."

Reaves was increasingly uneasy about their exposed position. "Skipper, this dust storm seems to be subsiding...we're kind of exposed up here. Maybe we ought to find some cover."

They decided to backpedal away from the excavation to an unoccupied tent fifty meters further away. It was filled with boxes and tables...a sorting and examining tent for the diggers as they systematically processed the dig for bones, tool and other implements. This late, nobody was in the tent. Winger and Reaves doused the lights inside and continued their probing of the dig from their new position.

"I assume we're going into that cave," Reaves said.

"Soon as I can get ANAD re-oriented. Reading anything--?"

"Just beginning to pick up a thermal, point source but it's intense. No acoustics. Maybe a tickle of EM...hard to say. I wish we could sense decoherence wakes here...I've got a feeling we may be approaching a quantum device of some type...just from these readings—"

"I'm steering ANAD right for center of that opening. Keep an eye on that thermal source."

It was a tense but quiet for the next few minutes as the master bot and its infinitesimal fleet maneuvered forward toward the cave opening.

"Not many photons," Reaves muttered. "The imager's almost black. But thermals are rising. It's not atomgrabbing...the signature's different. It's something else entirely...I've never seen anything like this."

"I'll slow down," Winger decided. "All effectors out...I'm priming bond disrupters. I don't want ANAD to be jumped from behind."

The heat source gradually became dimly visible as ANAD approached. 'Jeez, it's emitting in infrared like a supernova, but there's nothing visible—"

At first, he hadn't noticed the sphere. Some two meters around, slightly flattened on top, it wasn't a true sphere at all. More of an ovoid shape. It did seem to be quivering slightly, and pulsating with a pure white flicker, to some unknown rhythm. The frequency seemed to be quickening.

"ANAD, configure swarm state Charlie...let's sound and probe this thing first and see what it's made of."

***ANAD reconfiguring now...selecting swarm state Charlie...acoustic lens forming...ANAD will return data momentarily***

Along the rubble-strewn floor of the cave, the glowing pool of assemblers drifted like a fog toward the white ovoid object, itself embedded in a pile of rubble. Bones and other skeletal remains were scattered about. The assembler swarm probed the surface of the sphere with acoustic and EM fingers, forming an initial impression from the return pulses.

***ANAD detecting small-scale quantum decoherence at the surface...quantum state fluctuations...Base, this device is another emitter...but smaller. The waves are higher frequency and more focused***

Winger decided it was best to approach cautiously. He switched wristpad views to ANAD's probe, studied the returns. A small-scale quantum emitter....

"What do you make of it, Skipper?"

Winger just shook his head. "Transmitter of some kind. Chest of buried pirates' treasure. Who knows? I'm moving forward...I want to see what this bugger's made of."

"Careful...it is emitting now...it must be some kind of quantum device."

On his wristpad display, he could see the solid lattice of the sphere surface coming up. It seemed blurry, like a dense forest at night in a fog, as if ANAD were underwater. He was about to send a command for ANAD to try a zap from his bond disrupter, when all of a sudden, everything went haywire.

The master bot jetted forward, tumbling out of control, pulled inexorably toward the surface of the ovoid.

"Sheila...Sheila...I've lost control here. ANAD's moving and I didn't command anything—"

"Try reverse propulsor!"

"I'm trying...it's not working...I'm trying everything...all his effectors are out...I'm even firing disrupters...it's no use—"

They both watched helplessly as the master bot and its fleet was sucked toward the white ovoid. A brief flash flooded the imager screen and then....

Nothing.

"No signal, Sheila...I've got nothing. ANAD, do you copy? ANAD...come back...ANAD, report status immediately!"

Sheila pecked furiously at her own keypad, trying to grab any emissions she could from the bots still left, anything that could help, but it was useless. The entire fleet had vanished, right into the blank featureless surface of the sphere.

ANAD was gone.

For a few minutes, both of them tapped at their wristpads, trying in vain to recover anything, any signal, any indication that ANAD existed.

"What the hell happened down there?" Reaves said. Finally, exasperated, she threw up her hands.

Winger just couldn't figure it. "One minute, ANAD's reporting lattice atoms dead ahead, maybe a few thousand microns. He's approaching on a vector tangent to the outer lattice atoms...I thought I'd have him take a sample first, see what we're dealing with."

Reaves shook her head. "Then...poof! He's gone. The whole swarm's gone. Like they just winked out of existence."

Winger shuddered in spite of himself. "Remember Major Donegan back at Table Top. Quantum Systems?"

"Oh yeah...Professor Poofyhair...I thought small animals might come out of that hair someday."

'That's the one. Poofy always said quantum systems could manipulate space and time, entangle with each other across great distances, be in multiple places at once....all very spooky. Creepy stuff. Maybe that's what has happened here. This...sphere thing...maybe it's some kind of quantum state device."

"At the bottom of an archeological dig? What kind of fossils are these anyway?" Winger looked around the tent they had hidden in...studied the racks of sifting trays, brushes, picks and shovels, spectrometers, and other gear. What had ANAD found? "Sheila, you know what we have to do now?"

Reaves had a sinking feeling. "I was afraid you'd say that. Go down there ourselves? Find out what happened to ANAD in person?"

Winger checked the time. It was approaching midnight. Outside the tent, the lights burned as bright as ever. A stiff breeze had picked up, swirling more dust through the camp. They could hear voices---it sounded like singing from a distant tent. Diggers carousing into the early morning hours, Winger figured.

"We'll wait a few hours...see if anybody else comes by here. Major Dikesi's guards must have sacked out. I don't see anyone around. "

Reaves just thought of something. "Lieutenant, that hole's still surrounded by the barrier...what's left of it. How do we get through that...we don't have ANAD anymore."

"I've got a small HERF gun in my bag. We can burn a hole in the barrier...if we're lucky, maybe collapse the whole thing."

"Sir, a HERF gun will wake up half the countryside. We'll have the whole camp on top of us in two minutes."

Winger had seen flashes of light through the tent flap over the last few minutes. "Maybe not. Look out there—"

Reaves peered out. Beyond the tent and the low acacia trees that surrounded the camp, lightning rolled around the horizon of the veldt countryside. Veins and streaks of light lit up the sky; a Serengeti thunderstorm was moving in quickly.

"That's our ticket inside the barrier. I just have to get my gun without being noticed. Once that lightning comes over us and starts booming and crackling, nobody'll ever hear a HERF gun going off."

The storm advanced quickly and closed over Camp Everest in less than half an hour.

Once they had breached the nanobot barrier, Reaves and Winger crouched and scuttled along the spiraling ledges as they descended deeper into the pit. Both had covered themselves with ponchos and clung to each other to keep the wind gusts from pushing them off the ledge.

At the bottom, they found the cave opening. It was barely large enough to crawl through.

Winger went first, followed by Reaves. Straight away, even in the dim light inside, the ovoid shape of the sphere was visible, half buried in the dirt ahead of them. The cave was only tall enough for them to crawl so they crawled on hands and feet.

Halfway there, Reaves felt the ground tremble under her. "Uh oh, Skipper, something's happening...."

Winger had just started to turn around, when a deafening roar blasted through the cave and the ground and walls shook violently. Gouts of rock and dust geysered from the walls, stifling them with choking dust. Outside the cave entrance, shoring timbers and stones gave way and the excavation walls began slumping down into the pit. In seconds, the entrance was completely blocked by rubble and rock. Dust blanketed them and both troopers buried their heads in their arms as debris rained down.

When it was over, Reaves and Winger were both half buried in dirt.

"You okay?" Winger spat out rock chips and dust. He shook himself free and kicked his way out of the pile that had covered him. Ragged coughing greeted him.

"I think so...what the hell was that—an earthquake?"

"Maybe...the excavation walls gave way. I'm thinking when ANAD engaged the barrier bots, both swarms took feedstock atoms from the walls. The battle loosened everything and down it came."

Reaves blinked in the dust and stared at the blocked entrance. "Can we dig out?"

Winger squirmed and squeezed by the DPS tech and crawled on his belly up to the opening. "We can try." He started pawing and pulling, then kicking and pulling, but it was no use. The pile was too high, wedged into the opening with too much force. "No dice, Sheila. I need something stronger. If we had ANAD, we could let him burrow a tunnel for us."

"Right," said Reaves, remembering the fun they had had at Lions Rock. "How about your HERF gun? Blast it open."

Winger scanned their surroundings. They were, for the moment, entombed in a narrow space, barely a meter high, perhaps five meters wide. Rubble and rock littered the floor in jagged piles. The walls were still shedding dirt in small streams as the overlying structures settled.

"I don't want to use HERF in this enclosed space," Winger decided. "This doesn't look too stable...I could bring down the whole hillside on top of us."

Reaves sighed, rolled on her side, picking rock shards out of her face and neck. "Great...just friggin' great. Now what, Skipper?"

"I think our best bet is to find ANAD...ANAD, Base, report status...ANAD, report status immediately...ANAD, config C-1 and report...."

But nothing came back. The only light inside was the faint glow of the sphere, still twenty meters ahead and down a slight incline.

"He must be around here somewhere, Lieutenant." Reaves forced herself to sound more hopeful than she felt.

"Maybe...inside that sphere...he was maneuvering nearby when we lost contact." Without thinking, Winger started crawling down the incline, headed for the sphere.

After a moment's hesitation, Reaves followed. What the hell? There was nothing else to do at the moment.

The thing was like a giant egg, off-white, a faint, barely discernible glow to its smooth surface. It was hard to be sure, but a faint vibration could be felt, a nearly inaudible humming, as if great energies were inside, barely contained.

"Skipper, I don't think I'd touch that, if I were you."

Winger reached the sphere and stopped, his face barely half a meter away. "Well, you're not me. What the hell is this thing?"

Reaves squirmed her way alongside. "I don't know but whatever it is, Red Hammer's keen to get it excavated. Maybe it's buried gold, like pirates' treasure."

"Or one big-ass Easter egg," Winger suggested. Against Reaves' wishes, he reached out to place a fingertip on the surface....

First came the imagery...it never made any sense...or more likely, according to Doc Frost, your brain couldn't make sense of the flood of entanglement waves that washed through a quantum system like the coupler.

.......and then...a snap flash, like a camera going off. An image of geometric forms—icosahedrons, polygons, trapezoids—all compressed into a tunnel, a long curving corridor and he found himself hurtling at breakneck speed down this corridor, until—

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

But in where?

Johnny Winger shook the blur out of his eyes, which stilled rolled from the centrifugal force of the vortex spin. He was on his knees, on open ground, out in the open. No cave, no dust, no Sergeant Sheila Reaves.

It was an open, level plain, like a vast field of cornstalks feathered back and forth by a gentle breeze. With a grunt, he got to his feet, wondering where ANAD was. He tried the coupler circuit, made several calls. Then at one frequency, he caught a snatch and his receiver auto-tuned to grab the whole signal and bring it in.

It was ANAD. Somehow, unaccountably, the bot master was back in containment, back inside his shoulder capsule.

"How the hell did you get inside the capsule?" Winger checked the port. Shut tight. The capsule registered mass inside...it was the ANAD master bot for sure. He tried tuning the coupler a little more....

***....to understand what happened, Base...it was some kind of quantum effect...there were centrifugal forces...I lost structural integrity...like a quantum collapse--***

"Stow it, ANAD. Forget it. At least, you're safe. Verify all systems and give me a report."

The bot did that and came back a moment later.

***Reporting all systems nominal...effector damage on forward and lateral pyridine probes and grabbers, but that can be fixed...propulsors offline...seems to be a gear problem...will troubleshoot, executing auto-repair...master processor checks out...all registers, all qubits returning normal checksums...functions nominal and ready for action, Base***

"Good. " He got to his feet awkwardly, thankful he could now stand up...the claustrophobic cave was nowhere to be seen. "ANAD, I've got the strangest feeling I've been here before....I've seen this before."

***Scanning all memory cells...no match found, no correlation with visual, acoustic, EM inputs...probability that this bot has been in this environment before nearly zero...it looks new to me, ANAD. Are we in Kansas?***

"Very funny. No, I don't think so, ANAD. Let's do a little recon around the area—maybe we can find Reaves."

He tried to take a step forward. His feet wouldn't move. Then, almost before he realized it, he was on the ground again, on his side.

For the first few moments, he was dizzy and disoriented, like he had spent the entire day riding the Dragon's Tail roller coaster at Disney...that kind of dizziness.

Then the imagery around them shifted in an eye blink. He felt sick for a moment, but that subsided, to be replaced by a strong, fetid smell, a swamp smell of decay and rot. Mist and fog cleared and he was floating chest deep in a steaming swamp. Something screeched overhead and wings fluttered.

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

"ANAD...what is this place? Where the hell are we?"

***Recommending I be released into this environment for a full scan...there seems to be patterns here...***

"Not a bad idea, ANAD...make ready for launch." Winger agreed. He cycled open his shoulder port and moments later, felt the light sting of the launch sequence. A faint mist soon appeared in front of his face. Winger pressed a few buttons on his wristpad and ANAD's imagery settled into view on the tiny display. "This place can't be real...is it a sim... or am I just dreaming?"

The sparkling mist that was the ANAD swarm attenuated slightly to near invisibility and drifted away.

***I am detecting patterns in the way these stalks are moving. They are not plants...rather each stalk is a small swarm of nanobotic structures...the way they move back and forth seems to be a regular and repeating pattern***

"I want to explore this place, ANAD...I'm moving out a few dozen meters...there seems to be a small rise over there...maybe I can get a better view."

Winger tested his legs and found that he could move around, with some difficulty. The stalks parted before him, almost disintegrating in puffs of particles as he shuffled carefully along. At first, the stalks gave a little resistance and he decided that ANAD was right-- the stalks were actually conglomerations of nanobots held in plant-like patterns. As he pushed through, the plant bots tried to hold their patterns, giving a little resistance, but he found he could move nonetheless. As an experiment, he tried a little hop and found he could lift himself a meter or so above the ground as well. So movement was possible in that dimension too.

Some kind of rise in the ground was less than fifty meters away and Winger headed that way. The ANAD swarm was nearby, not visible, but sniffing through the field of bots and providing EM, thermal and acoustic background data on what they had encountered.

"ANAD, either this is a dream or maybe we went through some kind of wormhole. Maybe we're not inside the cave anymore...but somewhere else."

***Interesting theory...but this is supposition only. Cannot provide data to support this theory***

"What about these patterns?" He watched the stalks waving and pitching back and forth, as though a wind were blowing across the field. But he felt no wind, or any atmosphere either, for that matter. The sky above the field was an opaque salmon hue, no clouds, no visible signs of anything, almost like a thin fog. Yet he could see, if that was the proper term, for hundreds of meters in every direction....a nearly infinite featureless plain of endlessly waving and swaying cornstalks, a prairie view like something from Nebraska or Iowa back home.

***...am attempting to run correlations on these wave patterns, Base...it's possible that this is in fact a simulation...or some kind of re-created structure...a spherical structure almost like a small world...calculating radius at better than twenty-thousand kilometers based on visual angle to the nearest horizon line...***

"You mean like a planet...or a moon of some type?"

***Unknown at this time...if this is a re-creation of something, pattern analysis shows best match with data deeply embedded in my core memory...coded into my primary referential memory...Base, this pattern we see may be a re-creation or simulation of another planet***

Winger reached the small rise and climbed to the top. "What? How is that possible?"

***...unknown...pattern analysis is continuing...Base, best match to available data indicates this may all be an archive of some type...a collective memory of the past***

"I guess that's possible." He scanned around the long vista from the top of the small rise. In every direction, the view was the same: rippling fields of what looked like long-stalk plants but were in reality strings and knots of nanobotic mechanisms. A whole planet of bots.

"ANAD, if this is some kind of simulation, why would Red Hammer be involved? Maybe the sphere they're trying so hard to excavate is some kind of communication device, like a radio. You have something in your core memory about this?"

***Affirmative, Base...best pattern match to the waves you see flowing through these fields comes from a core memory sector, address 10111122113. This is protected memory in my core. Controlled access. It's deep and complicated to access, but there are records of patterns that match these waves very closely***

"What the hell does that mean, ANAD? Are you somehow related to these bot stalks? If this is a re-created memory, does that mean you have the same memory?"

***Not possible to answer these questions at this time. However, it does seem as if...***

The comm stream stopped in mid-sentence. Winger shook his head, tried cycling the coupler channel from his wristpad and was about to go to emergency comm when there was a great flash of light in the sky. Wincing, covering his face, Winger involuntarily ducked to shield his eyes.

"What the—" He tried looking up but the sky was filled with a painfully bright, diffuse light that flooded everything around, washed out all detail. It was like being inside of a light bulb.

***...all channels overload...shutting down main effectors...massive EMP pulse...could be a coronal mass ejection event...***

Winger noticed the rad monitor on his wristpad had gone active. He chanced a brief glimpse skyward and saw that, as the brilliance began to fade, a massive starburst had formed in the heavens...a supernova and nearby too, flooding space with violent energetic particles in all directions.

But this was supposed to be a sim. How had a sim made his rad monitor go active?

"Okay, ANAD...what the hell's happening around here?"

***Unknown at this time...but apparently we have just witnessed a simulated supernova event...a star erupting in catastrophic collapse...possibly a re-created event from the past ...that's what this place seems to be...I do have good correlation with patterns in my core memory which match this sequence...now the sim seems to be shifting...new patterns...***

ANAD was right and Winger shook his head, to make sure he wasn't dreaming all this.

Now, the planet of bots seemed to be breaking up right under their feet. Great chasms and cavities had developed in the field of waving plants, and the chasms soon became canyons. The light of the supernova faded rapidly and the ground beneath his feet fell away to nothing and before he realized it, he was drifting in open interstellar space and the planet and the fields and the light were gone.

In time, he came to realize they were inside a great swarm, a vast nomadic collection of nanobotic structures and mechanisms, drifting through space. They were enveloped in the swarm which was only slightly denser than the star field itself. He saw nothing he could recognize...no Big Dipper, no Orion, the constellations were all wrong.

"ANAD..." he whispered..."ANAD...you there...Reaves...anybody--?"

***I'm here, Base. I am not sure where here is. But structural integrity is maintained. All effectors are safed. Propulsors now operable. This simulation is taking us somewhere else, it would seem***

In fact, the very same thought had occurred to Winger. "ANAD, you know what this is? It's not just a sim. This is a story. It's a story or a narrative of what happened to some other race, some other intelligence. It has to be."

***No data to support or refute your analysis, Base. Sim may be a sequential stream of recorded time-stamped events, which you call a story***

It made sense. The sim went on for many minutes, or hours, Winger couldn't tell which. They were captive travelers, traveling in time and space with a story of how another race, a race not from Earth, had seen their home world destroyed in a supernova. As the story developed, Winger and ANAD made 'landings' on various worlds. They watched as knots and groups of nanobotic mechs descended and seeded one world after another, leaving behind small samples of themselves on each world.

Maybe they're trying to find a new home, Winger surmised. Maybe this is their story, like wandering in the desert of space for millennia, searching for their own version of the promised land.

Even worse, Red Hammer either was in contact with this race or trying to establish contact. Winger shuddered at the prospect of the criminal cartel linking up with some intelligence from beyond Earth. It was a nightmare, it couldn't be--

The sim unfolded and the great Mother Swarm came at last to a world Winger was sure he recognized...a world of blues and greens, a world of great oceans and steaming continents. He rode down with a detached element of the main swarm, descending through thick carbon dioxide rich air and purple, lightning-racked clouds to a hover over what looked like a primordial swamp.

It was Earth. Earth from millions of years ago.

"ANAD, this is like watching a vid—"

***Except that we seem to actually be on Earth, somewhere in the past...scanning all bands now...either this is one great sim or the aliens have mastered time travel...detecting high levels of carbon dioxide, thermals and EMs resemble archival data of ancient Earth environments...from detected CO2 levels and temperature data, estimating three point two two billion years BCE, plus or minus one hundred million years***

From within what seemed like a great swarmship hovering over the landscape, Winger saw a smaller swarm emerge and descend to the ground. The swarm had no discernible shape, resembling only an amorphous twinkling fog, nearly lost in the mists of the swamp. Only the twinkle of nanobotic action made it distinguishable.

The swarm settled on a rock outcrop at the edge of the swamp. As the mists cleared, Winger could see that the rock was covered in some kind of mossy growth, a gray-green mat darkening the rock up and down the edge of the sluggish pool.

The swarm formed some kind of instrument and hovered directly over the moss. Squinting to see through the mist, Winger realized that the swarm was injecting something directly into the mat.

"ANAD, do you see that? They're injecting something into that stuff. Maybe this is a re-creation of the original seeding of Earth. "

***Scanning emissions from injected material...mostly long-chain carbons, some sugars, phosphates...highly organized matter...now detecting helical backbone...Base, these are RNA molecules, variants of ancient replicating molecules. I should be released to sample that material, scan all bands in closer proximity***

"Good idea...let's do that."

***Going to half propulsor...detecting screening bots up ahead...looks like I'll have to force the swarm boundary...arming disrupters***

Winger wondered. Was this how life got jumpstarted on Earth? A cloud of nanobotic mechs from space came down and injected something into a patch of moss? Maybe what they were witnessing was the original creation. Did that make the aliens Red Hammer had somehow contacted a kind of god? ANAD had theorized that the material the swarm was injecting was the genome sequence that would be discovered by Doc Frost three billion years later at the Engebbe dig site. Maybe this was the Engebbe dig site or what it looked like a few billion years ago.

***I'm through the boundary layer, Base, transiting the swarm boundary, now in free flight...turning to heading two five five, now going to full propulsor***

All along the patch of moss that darkened the wet slopes of the rock, the detached swarm element translated and shifted like a maneuvering hypodermic needle, moving along, writing new code inside the cells of the moss. Winger wondered how long the process would last. Would the injecting swarm suddenly retract itself back into the swarmship? Would they depart for another world? Would the great sim, this ancient story of another people turn to a new chapter and send them flying off to the opposite side of the galaxy?

And, most importantly, would ANAD be able to pinch off some of that moss and analyze it, even though the whole scene was supposed to be a giant sim of something that happened billions of years ago?

Winger's head hurt from thinking about all the possibilities and he tried to concentrate on what was happening now.

***Approaching target boundary, Base...new vector being computed...these bots are more complex...structurally sophisticated...detecting long-chain carbons, never seen effectors like these before...multi-axis control ...diamondoid arrays...the whole core is one big processor***

"Can you grab a pinch of that stuff, ANAD?"

***I can try...now ten thousand microns from rock boundary...detecting feldspar structures, dense lattice...has to be the rock, closing on this vector***

The grab was pretty much invisible to Winger, obscured by mists rising from the swamp. He listened in on the acoustic channel.

***Now at contact surface...this place looks like a jungle...amorphous structure, polyhedral cross-linked molecules...mostly carbons, a few oxygens, some nitrogens...there's a benzene ring...don't want to get caught in that....extending carbene grabbers now***

Meanwhile the swarm that had been detached from the swarmship had returned to base. Winger realized that the sim would soon be taking them away from Earth, maybe to another world, another seeding somewhere halfway across the galaxy—

"ANAD, hurry up, will you...the ship's getting ready to depart—"

***Got it! On my way, Skipper...hold the door open for me***

Somehow the ANAD swarm made it back and Winger cycled the capture port. Already the great swarm was drifting higher in the sky, up through turbulent clouds and lightning racked thunderstorms, as ANAD made his way into containment and the port snapped shut.

Moments later, the swarmship had exited the atmosphere. They were in space again, enveloped in a strange elongated star field. Maybe relativistic effects, Winger surmised.

"ANAD, I'm not sure where this sim, if it is a sim, is taking us next. But we need to get out of here."

***I am scanning boundaries of this swarm...detecting high-energy transients nearby...not sure exactly what 'nearby' means...sounding ahead but no returns...Base, look to your right, past that diamond shaped cluster of stars...***

They seemed to be floating motionless in a black void but Winger immediately saw what ANAD had detected. Directly beyond an odd parallelogram of stars to his right was a faint spinning disk, a faint gauzy mass caught in something rotating, with bright jets of light spearing out into the heavens above and below the spinning disk.

"A black hole?" he wondered out loud. "A singularity...why would the sim show us something like that? Is it part of their story?"

***Accessing core memory 2...accessing...accessing...the singularity may be a way out of this place...Base, remember, we entered the Archives through that sphere. This may be the door, some kind of gateway***

"Maybe...but to where? And how the hell do we get there? If this is nothing but a simulation, can we have any effect on it?"

***I was able to descend out of the mother swarm and grab a pinch of that moss...accessing instructions in core memory 2...primary key data...new patterns...it looks like--***

All of a sudden, the coupler link went dead. For a moment, Winger didn't react. He just floated, like bobbing on ocean waves, while the swarm drifted where it would across interstellar space. After a few moments, he realized he had heard nothing from ANAD.

"ANAD...ANAD, are you there---ANAD? Reaves?"

He cycled through every frequency he could on the coupler, but the link was dead. He checked containment capsule status...there was mass inside, so ANAD was still there. Quantum effects...that had to be it. Blasted superposition, entanglement...occupying multiple places at the same time...Schrodinger's Cat and all that. Maybe something had happened...maybe ANAD wasn't inside. But his wristpad sensors showed a mass equivalent to a nanobotic mech...it had to be ANAD. Somehow, they had lost comms....unless ANAD had suffered some kind of core processor failure.

He didn't want to think about that. Johnny Winger scanned all around...stars on top of stars, the void was thick with stars. But it was all a big sim and he was trapped inside.

This is just friggin' great. He started cycling through every comm link he could....

"Any station...any station...this is Lieutenant John Winger, United Nations Quantum Corps, 1st Nanospace Battalion...any station...can you hear me? Any station in range of my voice, please respond...this is an emergency...I'm calling in an emergency....any station—"

It seemed hopeless. Worse than hopeless.

Johnny Winger was trapped and he suddenly realized there was no way out. He fought back the rising coppery taste of fear in his mouth...telling himself to calm down. Follow your training, trooper...deal with the facts...what's working...what do you have that's working....

He went down a checklist on his wristpad, checking off system after system...comms, sensors, HERF control, containment systems....

But in the back of his mind, the little seed of panic had already been sown.

And now it was growing.

Maybe I should start a personal log, describe what's going on here. That seems like a good idea. At least, it would help him think...focus on what he could do. He tapped a key on his wristpad, opened up a blank log and began speaking....

"I, Lieutenant John Winger....personal log, first entry...."

END

About the Author

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

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

Download the next exciting episode of Quantum Troopers from www.smashwords.com. It's called "I, Lieutenant John Winger...." Available on May 2, 2016.

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