 
# Quantum Troopers Return

Episode 1: Fab Lords

### Published by Philip Bosshardt at Smashwords

### Copyright 2020 Philip Bosshardt

### Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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

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

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

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

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

  4. There will be 10 episodes. The story will be completely serialized in about 12 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 Harmony's efforts to use their nanorobotic ANAD systems for the cartel's own nefarious and illegal purposes.

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

Episode # (*) Title Approximate Upload Date

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 1: Rogue Nano

Tunis, Tunisia

May 2, 2062

0500 hours

"It looks like a giant caterpillar," said Dr. Christian Hayes. The UN Quantum Corps inspector circled the vehicle, studying its unusual hull shape, circumferential treads and bulbous nose. "Or maybe a big armored beetle."

Lieutenant Will Mack chuckled. "This beetle has quite a bite. Mole can burrow into the ground and be completely submerged in less than a minute. And she can dive to five kilometers depth, given her composite armor and thermal regulation system. That borer lens up front you're looking at can penetrate the hardest shales and rock on earth, just like butter. She's a true creature of the deep...the deep earth, that is."

Geoplane Mole squatted among the rubble piles and smoking ruins of the Grand Mosque, while all around her, scores of fixbots scurried around removing debris from the

site, dumping broken glass, broken stone, mangled rebar and trash into loaders lined up along el Attarine Street for half a kilometer. A huge gaping fissure crossed the street in a jagged line, where the underlying faults had lifted the earth in the massive quake several days before. As a result, the toppled statue of Ibn Khaldoun across the street were several meters higher than the Mosque itself.

Mole's crew, assigned from Boundary Patrol Detachment BP-4, explained her features to Hayes and to Reza Hokmar, the official from UNDERO, the UN Disaster and Emergency Relief Organization. It was Hokmar's job to head up the recovery efforts in Tunis, still reeling from a series of magnitude 8 and 9 tremors.

"You have the coordinates of that last geoplane detection?" Hayes asked. "Somewhere a few kilometers southeast of here."

Mack was Mole's CC1, the senior command rating, in charge of the mission. "Got 'em from Q2 on the trip over. I don't have intel on any other sightings."

"I haven't heard of anything official," Hayes admitted. "Just rumors. Like Red Harmony using the underground approaches around here to supply Tunis as a distribution point for all their illegal fabs, bad nano and twist customers around the Med. Reza--?"

Hokmar shrugged. "People here are frightened. They see all kinds of things. My office has reports of ghosts, three-headed tigers, the Prophet Mohammed, you name it. We've had a hard time distinguishing fact from superstition. Most people here lost family in the quake. And the tremors...you know they continue."

Mack went over the mission orders with both of them. "I'm going deep right here, right through that fissure across the street. After we descend to about two thousand meters, we'll turn south and head for the coordinates of that last sighting. Quantum Corps has been scanning this area for days, looking for any kind of unique signature. But there's so much noise down there, it's hard to get a fix. Even the quantum detectors can't grab anything solid."

"I guess the real question we have," said Hokmar, "is whether the quake and the tremors are natural phenomena. Tunis is no stranger to earthquakes. The city was eighty per cent destroyed in the late 20th century, over a hundred and twenty years ago. It's all the tremors following...and the swarm sightings...that have people on edge."

Mack understood. "Q2 has plenty of related intel that it's Red Harmony. Mole'll smoke 'em out. If you've got geoplanes operating in the area, we'll find them." Mack got on the crewnet through his lip mike and ordered the rest of the Detachment to mount up. "Let's go, troops. Mole's rolling and digging in two minutes." He stepped through the forward hatch and disappeared inside the geoplane.

Hayes and Hokmar stepped back and gave the vehicle plenty of clearance. On the hull beside the forward hatch, Hayes saw the Boundary Patrol insignia and the Latin inscription: Subterraneus defensores percutant dure.

"'Subterranean defenders strike hard'," he translated for Hokmar. Mole's treads started up with a screeching clank and a blue-white glow soon enveloped the nose of the ship as the borer lens came fully online. The cylindrical geoplane huffed and shuddered as she motored forward on her treads, clambering over nearby rubble piles and across the three-meter ledge that marked the fissure in the ground. Fixbots stopped in their own tracks and police held up traffic as the ship rumbled across the street. Passing the recently re-erected statue of Khaldoun in a small park opposite the Mosque, Mole started her descent, angling nose-first toward the ground.

Inside the command deck, Mack gave directions to Corporal Robles, the Detachment's DSO1 (Driver/Systems Operator). Pressing a few buttons, Robles manipulated the borer that formed a huge dish-shaped nose on the geoplane's bow. Inside the borer, actuators fired to release the ANAD swarm contained there. In seconds, the outer surface of the dish was thick with nanoscale disassemblers, forming a shimmering half-globe around Mole's nose. Like a single huge blue-white headlamp, the dish and its halo of mechs formed the geoplane's working surface for subterranean operations.

"Let's go digging," Mack said. "Head for that fissure and contact Ops... tell 'em we're going under."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"She's a real hot rod...let's try some basic maneuvers," Mack suggested. "Mole's never had a proper shakedown cruise."

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

Mack began to relax his grip on the stick slightly, trying to forget they were now a hundred meters below ground.

"Sounding ahead..." Rounds reported. "Your depth is now four eight eight meters. Signal distortion coming back...it's probably the shale zone."

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

Mack was dubious. He studied the sounding profile. "Just don't push Mole too hard, okay? Let's don't press our luck on this first run. I'm showing discontinuities dead ahead...some kind of boundary layer, maybe."

"Inclusion zone? Maybe it's the quartzite."

Rono shook her head. "It looks more like a fault, maybe a transform fault. The geos said there were fracture zones south of Tunis."

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

"Cabin temps going up," Robles reported.

"Acknowledged. Those mechs are working overtime up front, making us a tunnel. I—"

Mack' last words were cut off as Mole shuddered violently. For a brief moment, there was an unmistakable sensation of sliding, sliding sideways and downward. Almost at the same moment, something hit Mole's nose with a sickening crunch and the geoplane shuddered again and ground violently to a halt. The cabin tilted to port and stayed tilted.

Mole's cabin was deathly still for a few moments, then the creaking and groaning of the hull under tremendous pressure started.

"What happened?" Mack asked, wincing as the tortured sounds of the hull being compressed grew louder.

Robles scanned his instruments nervously. "Borer is offline. I'm getting no responses from the forward module...pressure drop in containment...we may have a breach."

"Great," Mack muttered. "Just friggin' great. And it looks like we've got a breach in the pressure hull too."

"I see it...cabin air pressure fluctuating...we'd better activate emergency flasks, just in case." Robles toggled a few switches and immediately, high pressure air began flooding all compartments.

Rono was studying the acoustic sounder, replaying the last few moments before the—what exactly had happened? An accident? "Lieutenant, I'm not sure but I think we may have created our own earthquake."

"What? That can't be...can it?"

Rono went over the soundings again. "We were approaching some kind of discontinuity—see right here?" She pointed to the display. "Like a layer or inclusion zone. Remember when the geos told us there were some transform faults and fracture zones around this big volcanic ridge?"

"Vaguely."

Rono was figuring out the scenario as she replayed in her mind what must have happened. "It was the bots in the borer module. The swarm disassembled just enough shale and quartzite and other rock to loosen up the fault. It slipped, shifted around and we were caught in the slide."

"So, we did create our own earthquake."

Rono took a deep breath. "So it would seem, sir..."

Mack drummed fingers on the instrument panel. "Now we've got to figure out a way of getting out of here. What do we have to work with?"

Robles went over his instruments again. "Borer's offline, like I said, and it looks like containment was breached in the accident. I've got no response from the borer swarm, no configs, no data of any kind. That swarm's gone and it's not responding to commands."

Mack tried a few tricks of his own but with no success. "Well, I do have an ANAD master on board. We could jerry-rig a swarm for the borer if we had to."

"If the module's not too damaged. On top of that, the tread system's not responding...so we have no mobility. And the pressure hull...."

Mack saw the oxygen level had been dropping significantly in the last few minutes. "We've got to stop that leak...here, let me launch our secondary ANAD." He started to link in.

"ANAD, this is Mack...do you read me?"

***ANAD copies...reading you loud and clear...what has happened?...ANAD's coupler indicates some kind of swarm break...is the borer functioning?***

"ANAD, Mole's had an accident. The pressure hull has been breached. Configure for launch and max replication. I need a local swarm to find and plug the leaks."

***ANAD configuring now...systems initializing...ANAD reporting ready in all respects...***

Mack unstrapped himself and went aft through the tunnel to the power plant. "Launch, ANAD. Launch now...." As the CC1 went off to check on their power systems, a shimmering light blue fog emerged from the containment canister on the bulkhead.

***ANAD replicating...can I get a heading to the target?***

"I'm doing that now," Mack reported, as he scrambled through the galley, berthing deck and the engineering deck. "Robles, where's the leak? Can you localize it?"

Still back at the command deck, Robles scanned his instruments. "I'm showing maximum pressure drop at frame ninety-six, starboard side...somewhere between E and F deck."

Mack squirmed through the central access tube. He knew E deck was for Engineering, Shops and Utilities. Just aft was F deck, home to Mole's hybrid battery and fuel cell power plant.

"I feel it...there's a whistle just off to my left—"Mack paused, sniffing, letting his senses guide him. There. A utilities duct penetrating the bulkhead seemed to be the center of the leak. He saw a faint mist in the air swirling around the duct. "I found it...ANAD configure max propulsor. Home on my signal." He pressed a button on his wristpad.

Several decks forward, the shimmering fog of the assembler swarm wheeled about and began transiting the access tube.

***ANAD is en route to your location...estimated time is twenty-two minutes***

Mack tried examining the source of the leak, where the inner pressure hull had been stove in. It was scalding hot with swirling steam and air and he couldn't get any closer.

"Hurry, ANAD...this break is getting bigger by the minute."

The ANAD swarm eventually arrived at the site of the breach and promptly went to work. Configuring itself as a tightly interlinked mesh, ANAD sought out the pressure hull penetrations and quickly formed a nanoscale patch over the holes with its trillions of replicants. Gradually, the whistling subsided, then stopped altogether.

"I'm reading air pressure stabilizing in all compartments," Robles reported from the command deck. "The patch seems to be working."

Will Mack breathed a sigh of relief, feeling the cool oxygen of the geoplane's emergency flasks wash over his face. "ANAD, you're a lifesaver."

***ANAD reporting swarm element in place and holding. No more air molecules can get in or out. I am configured in repeating tetrahedral with radicals at my outer barrier. Oxygens hate that. And yes...I did save the ship, didn't I?***

An alarm sounded from the DPS console at the rear of the command deck. Corporal Ng was the Defense and Protective Systems tech (DPS1). He swallowed hard.

"Acoustic flag, sir...some kind of swarm, for sure. Fainter returns further off...could be another geoplane. Not sure whose bots I'm seeing..." his fingers flew over the board. "...but it's a large mass, headed this way, bearing two nine two...I make the range at just under four thousand meters."

Mack swore under his breath. "On my way...can you get any details, Corporal? Any structure?" The CC1 hurried forward to the command deck.

Ng scanned his panel. "Reading high thermals...I'm applying acoustic filtering...lots of seismic noise out there. Looks like it's a bot swarm all right, unusual signature though..."

Mack sank into his seat at the main console. "What about the borer? Can we move?"

Sergeant Li, the BOP1, shook her head. "Negative, sir. Borer still offline. I'm getting nothing from up front. I think the bots are dispersed. We had a containment breach and the lens itself may be damaged."

Time for ANAD again, Mack thought. Combat at five hundred meters underground was definitely not for the slow-witted. "ANAD, listen up. I need configs for two elements and fast. First, I'm downloading a config for re-populating the borer. Basic stuff. Make reps to fill the borer so we can get the hell out of here."

***ANAD will go to max rate replication for this config. Borer bots are simple things...what is the second element?**

"Defensive shield...we need to be ready to meet this botswarm head on...Ng...Rounds, any structure on this swarm?"

"Negative, sir," came both replies. Rounds scanned his sensor board. "Rock's too dense...my filters are having a hard time distinguishing signals from seismic noise. I'm getting acoustics that resemble swarms with Red Harmony signatures but it's hard to be sure. The other target's too far off...could be a geoplane, could be another inclusion zone."

"I get the picture," Mack said. "ANAD, I'm sending a config for basic defensive shield. Max rate on this as well."

***ANAD understands...grabbing feedstock now...***

A shimmering blue-white fog emerged from Mole's access tunnel as ANAD fissioned itself for the two configs. Overhead, the master bot slammed atoms and built structure, thickening even as it drifted toward the hatch to the borer module. Sergeant Li cycled the feedport to the borer and the fog drifted on, filling the port, expanding as it replicated into the borer lens itself.

Unseen from the command deck, a second tendril of fog worked its way aft to Mole's lockout chamber on G deck. There, the defensive shieldbots would exit the ship and work their way through dense shale rock to confront the oncoming swarm.

Tense moments passed. Li watched her board, noting the pressure and temperature rise inside the borer compartment.

"Just a few more minutes, Lieutenant...borer coming up nicely, pressure now at sixty five percent...I've got some control already."

Mack checked his tread controls. "Robles, let's get powered up. Once the borer's online, I want to get Mole the hell out of here."

"Roger that," the DSO replied. He worked with several joysticks. "Treads working now...I'm feeling a little bite al--"

Mole shuddered and groaned as rock shifted outside. They felt the ship sliding forward, then to the left again, but the motion stopped almost as soon as it started.

"Okay--" Mack pulled his own hands away from the controls. "No more tread...wait till the borer's up. Let's not make things worse. DPS, where's that swarm?"

"Best estimate is two thousand meters and still closing on our position. They can't move any faster through this rock than we can."

***ANAD Config Two exiting the ship now*** came ANAD's voice over the commlink.

"Very well," Mack checked ship's status one last time. "ANAD, maneuver to these coordinates--" he sent the last reported bearing from Ng, "--and hold that position. Form up a frontal shield...assume Config Six-Six." Mack had pulled that one from the ship's archive...it would configure the ANAD nanobotic formation into a barrier that should in theory hold off any bots working their way through the shale rock that had Mole trapped.

"Borer at ninety percent," Li called out.

Good enough, Mack thought. "Engage the borer. Robles, get us out of here now! DPS, get your HERF weapon and magpulser spooled up. We may have to fight our way out of this--"

The DPS tech complied, quickly bringing the High-Energy Radio Freq system to power. The magpulser magnetrons were already humming as well. Mole had quite a bite for any adversaries that came too close.

The ship shifted, slid a little, then lurched forward with a vigorous shake, like a dog let off its leash.

"Borer operating at ninety-five percent," said Li. She manipulated her controls, shaping the hemispherical globe of bots that were beginning to chew away at the rock layers surrounding them. "Pressure and temps nominal, configs look good, we're digging out--"

"Best forward speed, DSO," Mack ordered.

Robles shifted his stick slightly and the ship leveled off, then lurched forward and settled into a steady humming vibration. A cheer erupted on the command deck.

"We're moving!" said Li.

"Mole moving out smartly," Robles added. He steadied his stick, feeling the force of the rock pressing against the treads and the hull. "Setting cruise speed...now two point five kilometers per hour."

"Steer toward that swarm. Ng, give us a bearing. ANAD, hold on, okay. We're maneuvering to intercept."

Now finally underway, Mole propelled herself on full tread and borer toward the enemy bots, less than a thousand meters to starboard.

"SS1, what are we dealing with here...got any structure on those bots?"

Sergeant Rounds licked his lips and scanned his board. "Acoustics look like Red Harmony-type bots, sir. I've been able to run the data through filtering, screen some of the seismic stuff. EMs and thermal...too soon to tell. Best guess, Lieutenant: we're dealing with standard bots we've seen before from this source."

"That's good enough for me. ANAD, prepare for combat launch...assume Config C-7, opposed entry."

Clinging to Mole's outer hall as she squeezed through the layers of shale and slate nearly six hundred meters underground, the ANAD master responded.

***ANAD ready in all respects...assuming C-7, extending effectors now, priming bond disrupters...enzymatic knife in position...just give the word, Hub and I'll tear 'em to pieces***

Mack had to smile, as did others on the command circuit. ANAD was like a little bulldog, straining at his leash. His personality algorithms needed work but there were some quirks that made the little bug kind of endearing, even to hardened quantum troopers.

"Less than two hundred meters, Skipper," said Rounds. "Possible aspect change on swarm mass...he may be replicating...I'm seeing enhanced returns, mass changes--"

Mack checked Mole's status on his own panel. "Robles, slow to one-third. DPS, get HERF ready. I want to blast the sonofabitch first with rf, then send ANAD out."

"HERF fully charged, Lieutenant. Pulse mode enabled." Ng's finger hovered over the FIRE button, ready to release a thunderclap of radio-frequency energy. With any luck, the bolt would fry enough enemy bots to make ANAD's job a little easier.

"Very well. ANAD...you may launch when you've reached fifty percent mass."

The master bot had already started replicating, grabbing atoms from local shale and slate layers, building billions and billions of daughter bots, building out the swarm.

***At fifty five percent now, Hub...ANAD is releasing now...launching from base...***

Aboard Mole's command deck, Mack toggled the quantum coupler circuit to show the view from ANAD's nanometer scale. Troopers had long referred to this switch as "going over the waterfall."

At first, nothing made any sense. It was disorienting in the extreme, like going over the top of a roller coaster ride and your head was spinning out of control. Like standing on the beach in a driving sleet storm, with triangles and polygons and tetrahedrals and nightmarish tangled shapes blasting by your head. Gradually, your mind somehow made sense of the scene and the image settled down and stabilized. In a few seconds, you had gone from the macro world of things and substances and 3-dimensional shapes to the nanometer world of atoms and molecules and Brownian motion. Mack shook his head, focused and fiddled with the gain on the imager, trying to make some kind of sense of all the photons ANAD was sending back.

To Mack's eye, maneuvering through layers of black shale rock was like flying over a field of broken gravel at an altitude of one centimeter. Calcium, sodium and magnesium molecules flitted by like trees in a hurricane. ANAD navigated as best he could through the jungle, forcing his way through narrow crevices and corners, squeezing through tight defiles and shifting back and forth to make some kind of headway.

"EM spike dead ahead, Skipper," called out the SS1, Sergeant Rounds. "Big mass, lots of acoustics too."

Gradually, the imager settled down to a dark, staticky, grainy picture--of what? Mack squinted, leaned forward. The view slowly materialized--a dense, regular lattice of throbbing, quivering spheres.

"Crystalline structures," Sergeant Rono (GET1) reported. "Looks like calcium. Maybe carbons--  
Mack was mesmerized by the perfect geometry. "Oxygens too, Sergeant." He pointed to long rows of tiny darkened blobs, marching off into the distance like a fence. "A cubical lattice, just like the micrographs. A crystalline solid--"

"Limestone's mostly calcium anyway, with some oxygens and carbons mixed in. Interlocking crystals--it's beautiful."

"And damned hard to navigate. Like a jungle...this stuff's so dense, ANAD's speed is way down. Enable the voice link--"

Mack strained to see anything and then...there it was. Shadows drifting in and among the structurally tight crystalline lattices of silicon and calcium and iron and half a dozen over things. "Slow to one quarter propulsor--" he told ANAD.

Over the next few moments, the enemy swarm came into view, gradually materializing among the loose atoms and clusters that choked the lattice. It was like playing hide and seek in a dense forest.

The bots looked like a chorus line of squat cylinders, festooned with effectors and gizmos around their circumference.

"Looks like some kind of shaggy cat," muttered Rounds. "What the hell are all those things?"

"I don't know," said Ng "but they're all coming this way. HERF's ready, Skipper."

"Let 'em have it!" Mack said. "ANAD...hold on. And cover your ears!"

"Fire in the hole!" said Ng. He stabbed the FIRE button.

The thunderclap of rf energy stabbed out into the rock and BOOMED! back in reverberation through Mole's hull. The net effect of blasting waves of radio freq energy was to shatter the enemy formation. It also loosened some of the rock layers through which Mole was cruising.

The ship's hull shuddered, creaked and groaned. Mack felt a lurch and there was a momentary sensation of sliding, then a sudden jarring stop.

Rono, the geo tech, examined her instruments. "Side acceleration, Skipper. We're slipping--"

"Losing traction in the treads," Robles reported. He backed off a moment, until Mole's tread bit again into the rock stratum.

"Okay," Mack said, "belay any more HERF. We're shattering the rock around us. ANAD, prepare to engage."

***ANAD ready in all respects, Skipper. Let me at 'em!***

Rounds counted down the range. "Inside of fifty meters, Skipper. Big time EMs now, acoustics show massive swarm approaching, just off our starboard bow."

"Go, ANAD! Launch now!"

Outside the ship's hull, the bot master and its replicants jetted off.

***ANAD underway on full propulsor. All effectors extended, bond disrupters fully charged. Working my way through solid-phase lattice now--***

It was like fighting an enemy through heavy vine and brush, hacking your way forward even as you did battle.

"I've got ANAD!" reported Rounds. "He's closing fast...tell him to bear right ten degrees...I make the enemy mass centroid at ten degrees further to starboard!"

Mack passed the vector along and ANAD adjusted. He decided to take a peek at the imager.

The scene was chaotic and confusing. The regular crystalline lattice was visible enough, ordered ranks of silicons and oxygens lined up like headstones in a graveyard. Something shadowy and formless moved steadily through the ranks...that was ANAD, the assembler bots twisting and squeezing and shimmying left and right to move through the rock strata. Further ahead, more shadows could just be made out.

The swarms collided twenty-two meters off Mole's starboard quarter.

***ANAD engaging now...moving in!***

Even at nanoscale dimensions, close-quarters combat was still part momentum and part surprise and ANAD had both. The assembler swarm quickly enveloped the bots of Red Harmony. Mack tweaked the imager, trying to get better resolution, but the view was like cats thrashing in a pool of water, all flying effectors and probes and quick flashes of disrupter fire as each side shot electron volt discharges and tore furiously at the other.

After a few minutes, the DPS1, Corporal Ng was bathed in sweat. His fingers whizzed over a keyboard as he sent config changes and effector commands, trying to counter what the enemy bots were doing. It quickly became evident that the enemy bots were weakest around their equatorial ring, where most of their effectors couldn't reach. The cylindrical barbell bots had multi-lobed heads, top and bottom, each covered with all manner of effectors that could easily slash, tear and slice unwary ANAD bots that approached on the wrong vector.

"That's the sweet spot--" Ng muttered. "Right in the middle...but it takes timing. You have to catch 'em when those effectors are engaged in another direction. Then, blam...you dive in and zap 'em with everything!"

The battle was a seesaw affair for many minutes. Mack checked with Rounds, the sensor tech.

"We're slowly losing mass, Skipper. I can see it in the acoustics and EMs, thermals too. Enemy bots are out-replicating us. ANAD disables one, but two more show up right away...we've got to put some new configs in there."

Mack was hacking away at his own keyboard. "I'm trying, I'm trying...I don't see anything in the archive that--"

Just then, Mole shuddered again and a loud groan could be heard forward of the command deck. The ship shuddered and slipped and then something slammed them from the starboard. Mack grabbed a seat back just in time to keep from being thrown to the deck. Beside him, Robles wasn't so fortunate. The DSO was flung to the floor grate and came up bleeding at the temple; his head had struck a stanchion nearby.

The geo tech shook her head. "We're losing it, Skipper!" Rono said. "Seismic signals everywhere...strata shifting all around us! Hang on!"

Mack didn't need to hear anymore. "Robles, get cranked up...get us the hell out of here! ANAD, return to the ship...we'll pick you up!"

***ANAD understands...attempting to withdraw...I am now fully engaged with the enemy...master bot coming about...I'll have to sacrifice replicants...***

"Do it, ANAD! Hold your position...we'll swing by."

At Mack' command, Robles steered for ANAD's position. The replicated daughter bots could be abandoned. By design, once the coupler link with the master was broken, a timer circuit ensured the replicants committed atomic seppuku and were disassembled so there was nothing for the enemy to capture.

"I've got the signal!" said Ng. "BOP, steer right and center on heading zero eight five."

Robles complied and Mole was slammed again by another round of tremors. Creaks and groans echoed through the hull. "She's sluggish...we may have lost some tread, Skipper."

"Just keep going," Mack told him. "We've got to get out of this stratum before Mole's crushed."

The ship shimmied and shook like a wet dog as Robles drove them to ANAD's position. Mack had killed the coupler link. The last remnants of the swarm were quickly being overwhelmed by Red Harmony bots...no sense in following that.

"At least, the borer's still operating," Robles muttered to no one in particular. If Mole lost that, she'd be stuck but good, trapped two thousand meters below the Atlas Mountains of northern Tunisia.

"ANAD bot master signal less than ten meters away," Rounds reported, fiddling with the acoustic and EM detectors. "He may have been damaged...I'm seeing some signal dropout, intermittent spikes and drops."

"ANAD," said Mack, "do you read? Make your way to the capsule port...full propulsor. We can't wait forever."

Mole had several launch and capture ports spotted around her hull. ANAD masters and swarms could enter and exit quickly from the ship through their own dedicated lockouts.

But there was no reply over the coupler circuit. "Looks like we've lost comms, Sensor. What's the little guy doing out there?"

"Hard to say with all the seismic noise," Rounds replied. "Best guess: he seems to be in motion...I'm getting acoustic returns that read like propulsor operation. And the signal's getting stronger."

"Okay, as soon as he comes aboard, we're out of here."

Word came less than a minute later, as Mole rolled and porpoised and shook from more tremors and quakes.

"Got 'em, Skipper!" said Rounds. "That's the port cycling...positive ID on capture signal...and something else too...I'm getting EMs forward, looks like ANAD...maybe part of the enemy swarm came back too."

"What are they doing forward?"

The answer came seconds later. Robles saw an immediate drop in borer ops. "Borer swarm mass down ten per cent...I'm compensating, loading new config to make more bots—"

"Is the bot master aboard?"

"Affirmative, Skipper," said Rounds. I've got positive signal from inside the port. It's ANAD, all right."

"Borer still losing mass!" Robles said. The BOP1's fingers flew over his keyboard, countering the effect. "I'm trying another config—"

"Red Harmony...it has to be..." Ng muttered, checking weapons status: HERF was charged, magpulsers were ready. "Skipper, the enemy has somehow infected ANAD, rode back home with him. That has to be what happened. Remember ANAD said he was fully engaged with the enemy. We may have some onboard...maybe even inside the borer."

Mack didn't want to believe it but his tactical sense told him the DPS was probably right. The question was: now what? If Red Harmony had infected their borer with his own bots, Mole was sunk. And if ANAD had brought enemy bots onboard—if there was another geoplane out there--

He made the difficult decision. "Robles, shut down the borer. Shut it down. And isolate that capture port. We've got to scrub Mole from bow to stern...then we can re-boot the borer."

"Sir, if I shut down—"

"Do it now!"

Robles managed the shutdown and Mole's forward momentum died off.

"What about that capture port?"

Rounds didn't like what he was seeing. "I'm getting mixed signals, like the port's both open and closed. ANAD's inside, I'm sure of that. But there's something mixed in...I'd better go take a look—"

The SS1 unbuckled himself, steadied himself against more pitching and heaving of the command deck, and disappeared down the central tunnel. The capture port that ANAD had reached was aft, amidships on D Deck, Stores and Supplies. Rounds slipped into the tunnel and worked his way to D deck, holding on to anything he could as Mole slid and rolled and vibrated from the tremors. It was like being inside of a barrel going over a waterfall.

When he got to D deck, he spun the hatch wheel and shoved himself inside.

Stores and Supplies was filled with crates and boxes and pallets of gear. It was Mole's pantry and attic closet. But that wasn't what caught Rounds' attention.

Drifting in among the crates was a glowing fog, slowly filling every vacant space on the deck. The fog was flecked with pinpricks of light, like a silent thunderstorm building overhead.

It wasn't ANAD.

The SS1 was just able to get off a warning. "Attention from D deck...we've got—" and then the swarm was upon him, enveloping him, smothering him. "---arrrggghhh...I can't—"

Complete disassembly took about seven minutes. Mack left the command deck and was poking his head onto D deck in eight. He saw what had happened...what was left of Rounds and quickly slammed the hatch, dogging it shut. He hustled back to the command deck.

Before he could make it, Mole shuddered violently and began a slow clockwise roll, with a sickening screech coming from somewhere forward. Mack crawled and staggered up to the command deck. Chaos and panic filled the space.

Rono, the geo tech, was barely clinging to her console. "---P wave coming, high magnitude transverse waves, lots of 'em, coming this way—"

The crew of Mole didn't know it at the time but the Red Harmony swarms had somehow managed to lubricate the rock strata surrounding the geoplane. A punishing series of tremors radiated outward through the region, oblique convergent plate boundaries letting go as the rock underlying the Atlas Mountains gave way in a spreading fracture zone, propagating outward like a sheet of glass cracking.

The swarms of nanobots had insinuated themselves into multiple fault zones and disassembled enough rock to release the massive strain which had built up over the centuries. Massive seams of slate and feldspar, hundreds of kilometers long, suddenly wrenched forward with crushing force, sending shock waves and seismic energy halfway around the Earth, as crustal plates rebounded and jostled each other.

Geoplane Mole was caught like a bug in a vise. Mack shouted over the din of the crushing force now slamming them downward.

"Release the emergency message capsule! ANAD...ANAD, if you can hear me...ANAD, launch NOW! I'm sending a config to form up a shield...try to hold back this—"

But he never finished the sentence. Seconds later, the plates shifted again, twisting and crumpling Mole even further downward, wrenching off her nose and borer lens and crushing the ship into a twisted pile of wreckage.

Geoplane Mole was destroyed, smashed into oblivion, and all aboard her were lost.

Paris, France

May 4, 2062

0800 hours

As a young child, Johnny Winger had always loved taking a bath. Lots of words could describe the feeling: security, serenity, safety, warmth, cocoon. Not words a three-year old would use, but you get the idea.

Thoughts like these and others came to Johnny Winger. He was a little disoriented.

Where am I? What is this?

He remembered being disassembled by Doc II...Config Zero was there...the cave...the brilliant light....

He remembered opening a coupler link to Doc II.

***We were inside Config Zero, Johnny...you have been de-constructed...I stored your identity and memory patterns in a small file called 'Configuration Buffer Status Check.' Just a few extra bytes***

Doc, is that really you? Is this really me?

***It is...the capture process was successful, although there may have been data dropouts...too early to tell. Johnny...we must keep this link closed...I don't know if Config Zero can detect us, but it is best to be cautious***

Okay, Doc...just trying to make some sense of all this. Flashes of memory came trickling back...Mighty Mite Barnes...the cave...the flames....

Now the coupler link was dead and Doc II was probably right. Somebody else might be listening.

Maybe taking a warm bath as a three-year old wasn't the best way to describe being a few atoms in a larger swarm. Try this: buried under the covers on a cold winter morning. No? How about stumbling about in a darkened bedroom trying to find your slippers? Or: getting separated from your Mom and Dad on the boardwalk at Daytona Beach for three hours, with all the panic and frantic worry. Or: locked in a closet by your big sister, fumbling around with jackets and coat hangers.

Johnny Winger decided to try a more logical approach to figuring this out.

I think, therefore I am. At least, he thought he was thinking. I have a mind. I have thoughts. But there was more. Something more than his thoughts. Was somebody else in here? That was ridiculous.

I have sensations. Hot, cold, hard, soft. Try to analyze this.

A snatch of memory came to him: Personal identity is the unique identity of a person existing through time. That is to say, the necessary and sufficient conditions under which a person at one time and a person at another time can be said to be the same person, persisting through time. In the modern philosophy of mind, this concept of personal identity is referred to as the diachronic problem of personal identity. The synchronic problem is grounded in the question of what features or traits characterize a given person at one time.

Where the hell did that come from? I must have read that.

With a start, Johnny Winger came awake. Where am I? He opened his eyes, looked around. It looked like a room, nicely appointed, and then it came to him.

The Hotel August Comte. Paris. The briefing at Quantum Corps headquarters inside the massive spleen-shaped building known as the Quartier-General. He'd been ordered to attend, him a lowly colonel in the Corps' 1st Nanospace Battalion. Even quantum troopers deconstructed into atoms and reassembled into lifelike swarms the Normals called angels didn't get a break from briefings.

The fifteenth-floor room was ornately appointed. It was furnished like some kind of brothel, he finally decided. Peach damask walls. Lace curtains and doilies and Louis XIV chairs. Maybe a hot shower would help make him ready for a day of mind-numbing briefings although he had read something on the boards yesterday about unusual geoplane activity in northern Africa and the Middle East.

He stripped off his tunic and got the shower going with a voice command. "Medium flow...spray one...hot...and what was that scent I liked--?"

"Amazon waterfall, sir...would you also like the air dry scented?"

"Negative...just the usual blast." He climbed in without thinking and let the stinging hot needles begin scouring his face and shoulders.

Then he remembered he wasn't like Normals. He was an angel, a para-human swarm entity, a collection of nanobots done up to look like a human.

The shower just scattered his configuration and made a mess of things. He'd forgotten...angels don't take showers. With a sour face, he drifted out of the shower and got himself re-configged, then dressed and was out the door in fifteen minutes, heading for the motor lobby downstairs.

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

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

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

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

Colonel Johnny Winger arrived at the Quartier-General, rode the lift to the sixtieth-floor briefing deck and was scanned in promptly at 0830 hours. He availed himself of coffee and doughnuts in the commissary attached to the briefing center and made his way inside in time for the start of things. Just after 0840 hours, the UN Security Affairs Commissioner entered and all hands snapped to attention.

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

"We have one main piece of business today," UNSAC said. "Finding out what happened to geoplane Mole, and if it wasn't an accident, who or what caused it. General--?"

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

Skye spoke without notes. "Two days ago, at approximately 0610 hours, the Boundary Patrol station at Balzano, Italy received a flash message from an ANAD emergency capsule. The capsule was from Mole. It indicated that the geoplane had come under attack during a routine patrol beneath the Atlas Mountains. Mole was investigating signals intelligence that unknown subterranean vehicles—geoplanes—had been operating in the area and had caused a number of medium-magnitude seismic tremors and quakes which had created some destruction in the areas between Tunis and Algiers. Based on downloaded data from the capsule, BP believes that Mole was attacked by one of these unknown geoplanes and destroyed."

Lumumba saw that General Harriman Lu, Commander in Chief, Quantum Corps, had something to add. She nodded in CINCQUANT's direction.

"Go ahead, General."

"Our own Q2 intel shop can confirm some of what General Skye's saying. Recent monitoring of Red Harmony activities seems to indicate they've developed a small fleet of basic geoplanes and the cartel may well be using them as underground, basically undetectable freighters."

"Freighters? What kind of freighters? For what purpose?" The voice had come from one of several avatars attending, in this case, the Director-General of BioShield Dr. Hector Ruiz. Ruiz was physically located in Geneva, Switzerland, at BioShield Headquarters, where the agency monitored and enforced UN mandates and regulations on uncontrolled release of nanobotic swarms into the environment. The avatar showed Ruiz to be a thin, even gaunt man with a thick black moustache.

Lu was quick with an answer. "The usual stuff. Over the last few years, both Interpol, Quantum Corps and others have detected increased levels of Red Harmony activity, concentrated in several sites around the world and the nature of the intel reports are now converging on one answer: that the cartel has entered a new business in a big way: manufacturing and distributing illegal nano, twist and unlicensed matter compilers...fabs. It's possible these geoplanes are how the cartel is shipping and distributing materials and finished products, safe from our prying eyes."

The explanation seemed to mollify Ruiz, whose avatar fiddled with something out of view, then turned to face them again. "General Lu, yours is not the only organization with an intel shop. BioShield has recently detected unusual concentrations of nano activity in and around Jakarta, Indonesia. We've tried to localize it and investigate, but the source seems to be mobile and we haven't been able to pin it down yet." Ruiz looked a little sheepish. "That's why I asked for the Commissioner to convene a briefing today. Frankly, we could use a little help."

Lumumba now turned to Johnny Winger and General Winston Kincade, UNQC's Western Command chief. "I had General Lu bring you two along to lay out some options. From what I'm hearing, Jakarta's being overrun by rogue nano, fabs out of control and a twist epidemic. BioShield can barely keep up."

Ruiz started to object but UNSAC's fierce star squashed his protest like a bug. "I don't want to hear it, General. The Secretary-General's given me a mission to get on top of this outbreak, in Jakarta and elsewhere and find out if this geoplane activity is related to the outbreaks. If Jakarta's under the control of Red Harmony twistheads and fab lords, it's our job to get control of the situation, contain it before it spreads. I intend to do whatever is necessary to accomplish that. General Kincade—"

Kincade was both Western Command chief and base commander at Mesa de Oro, the Quantum Corps base on the edge of the Mexican Yucatan. He was a big-boned, gruff, cowboy-type c/o, with a full mane of white hair and a moustache to match. Winger had long thought small animals might be making nests in that forest of whiskers.

"My recommendation, Madame Commissioner, is to let us form up a special ops team with 1st Nano in the lead. Scope out what's going on in and around Jakarta. I'd like to put Colonel Winger here in charge of that."

General Skye seemed miffed. "What about my geoplanes? What about Mole? I want help solving that too."

"Keep your pants on, General," UNSAC told him. "There's every indication that Jakarta and Mole are related. Kincade, I'll get mission tasking to you by 1800 hours today. I want a full TOE from your people by the same time tomorrow. Boundary Patrol and BioShield will support as needed. Is that clear?"

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

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

Kincade and Winger left the QG, after brief chats with Skye and Lu, and took a UNIFORCE staff autocar to the vactrain terminal northeast of Paris. Showing their UNQC ID's, they were shown to a small compartment in the second car and settled in to map out strategy and tactics during the 4600-kilometer-long underground ride to Mexico City.

The two of them had a hell of a lot of planning and figuring to do to meet UNSAC's orders.

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

A small special ops team was quickly formed. The mission was to be known as Operation Tectonic Dawn. Mulling over possibilities in the back of his mind, Winger made his way across the quadrangle to the Mission Prep bunker. It was a hot, hazy, humid day in the tropics and Winger realized he missed the cool mountain air and long-range vistas of the Buffalo Range that had surrounded the base at Table Top.

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

That had always come in handy, he realized.

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

Corporal Angel Barnes was field-stripping a mag carbine on a drop cloth-covered table. "Skipper, welcome to the neighborhood. Scuttlebutt says we're taking a joyride to the exotic Orient." Barnes was nominally one of 1st Nano's Stealth and Defensive Countermeasures specialists (SDC2). "Where to this time, Colonel? Another resort like Tibet, or the bottom of the ocean?"

"Yeah--" said 1st Nano's DPS1 Fanya Eboluwa "—or maybe half a mile underground in a geoplane."

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

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

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

"Knock it off," Winger said. "This comes from CINCQUANT himself. And for your information, the disturbance is centered in and around Jakarta and east Java..."

"Ah, Jakarta—" dreamed D'Garza. "—Exotic spices, unique customs...plus dysentery and malaria—"

"And now nanobots gone haywire," went Barnes. "What's not to like?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winger shrugged. "Q2 thinks so. We're tasked with a mission of assistance and support. Find out what Red Harmony's got going in and around Jakarta and if possible, render their supply networks inoperative. The place is overrun with rogue nano, twist and illegal fabs. Could be a transshipment point or distribution center for the cartel. We're working with BioShield, by the way."

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

"Maybe so," Winger didn't disagree, "but BioShield East is the senior command on site. We take tactical orders from them. ROE says we don't shoot unless fired upon or given orders to do so by BioShield."

"I saw something on news vids the other day about Jakarta," said Sherm Cuddy, the IC1, interface and control specialist. "Cuddly Bear" was a burly red-bearded trooper and one of the Corps' top code and stick men. He could bang out complex configs for ANAD swarms faster than you could blink an eye. "Hell of a lot of bad nano turning up there...local BioShield was screaming for help...the air's just think with uncontrolled swarms."

"So, we're basically glorified policemen?" asked Eboluwa.

"We take orders from the local BioShield command," Winger said. "We'll have BioShield agents embedded and Boundary Patrol will be on-site as well, so we'll have geoplane support."

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

"If you're fired upon, return fire. We're not tasked to crack heads unnecessarily, just to help the locals clean up the place. I'm realistic enough to know that may mean casualties, ours and civilians. And I don't want to hear any bitching and moaning about omelets and breaking eggs, either. Just follow orders and do your job."

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

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

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

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

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

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

For two days, 1st Nano was methodically reshaped into Operation Tectonic Dawn, Detachment Alpha. Assignments and equipment draws were posted on the crewnet. Gear was cleaned, inspected, stowed and eventually packed aboard two hyperjets, Mercury and Apollo, that had touched down at the Merida terminal a few kilometers from the Mesa. Detachment Alpha, though nominally subordinate to BioShield East for the mission, wouldn't be taking a back seat to anybody. If the Red Harmony cartel was behind the bad nano epidemic in Jakarta and recent geoplane incidents in north Africa and the Med, Johnny Winger aimed to put 1st Nano squarely in the nasties' face and bite off a sizeable chunk.

Just before dawn, the Detachment boarded the two hyperjets and settled in for the 17,000-kilometer suborbital hop to Jakarta. With the first pools of sunlight streaming through the dense tropical foliage of la selva, one after the other, Mercury and Apollo thundered down Runway 15 Right and climbed out over the jungle canopy, burning holes in the sky like meteors in reverse. The hop across the top of the Earth's atmosphere would take less than two hours.

During that time, Colonel Johnny Winger hoped to review Q2's latest intel files on the situation, then grab a bite to eat and a little shuteye before they started their fiery descent into the Indonesian capital.

Jakarta, Indonesia

May 7, 2062

0800 hours

The hyperjet Mercury burst out of the cloud bank on her descent to Halim Perdana Kusuma Airport at Jakarta and Johnny Winger stared out the porthole at the hazy shores of the Java Sea below. Columns of smoke from thousands of cooking fires added to the thick haze. Rice paddies interspersed with hectares of traditional Javanese joglos stretched to the horizon, like an infinite chessboard.

"That haze isn't just smoke," Major Elbert Fordham muttered. The BioShield liaison officer had joined Winger in the forward cabin. "A lot of that stuff is loose nanobotic debris...assembler fluff from all the fabs. The stuff is out of control."

Winger nodded. "So I've heard. BioShield can't contain it?"

Fordham snorted. "Not when a hundred million fabs are going off night and day. Containment laws mean nothing here. People are desperate. The black market in unlicensed, souped-up fabs and matter engines is exploding."

"Red Harmony," Winger said. "I've read the reports. They sell the fabs cheap and charge a fortune for the cores and drivers. Same old method they've always used. Get 'em hooked first, then gouge 'em for the goods afterward."

Fordham agreed, as Mercury settled down to a bumpy landing on the tarmac of Runway 16 Left and roared down to taxi speed.

"The market here is huge. People have nothing, barely enough rice to eat, hardly any shelter, rags for clothes. They spend every rupiah on fabs and software, hoping to strike it rich. It's like Aladdin's Lamp, if you'll pardon my using another culture. You can't make food—still no fabs for organic stuff, but they've got everything else: fancy clothes, cars, personal bots, every electronic gadget you can think of...Jakarta's like a bazaar gone crazy. There must be hundreds of millions of fabs here...the air's so hot because of all the assembler activity. If it isn't bolted down and screened by bots, everything becomes raw feedstock. The buggers'll eat the clothes right off your back."

Winger was gathering up his gear to disembark. "And the local authorities...they can't shut 'em down?"

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

"The locals are the worst," Fordham explained. "Bought off or intimidated by the cartel or other players in the game. We get some help from the National Police or maybe the West Java Regional cops...ah, there's Tranh now, with a few of them."

Winger came down Mercury's side ramp, followed by Fordham. The rest of the Detachment assumed a loose parade formation as they disembarked.

A Vietnamese officer in the khaki and blue of the local BioShield office stepped forward. He saluted Winger and Fordham smartly.

"Lieutenant Nguyen Tranh, sir. My E-team is on duty in town at this moment." He indicated a burly black African second in command. "This is Sergeant Lucano. He's my chief. E-team West Java is ready for inspection, sir!"

Johnny Winger spotted other officers nearby. Tranh introduced them.

"Captain Suparman Sukarno, at your service, sir. The West Java Provincial Armed Constabulary is ready for patrol duty."

Sukarno was a lanky and swarthy officer with a luxurious black moustache, erect and full of military bearing. He saluted Winger and added, "West Java is pleased to host the famous troopers of the Quantum Corps. My men will escort you into the city."

Winger returned the salute. "Captain, what's the situation here? Intel says the whole region's thick with nano...BioShield's executing a Level Three quarantine for Jakarta itself."

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

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

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

Winger didn't have the heart to inform the policeman that he was an angel himself.

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

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

They headed off to the lifters. Moments later, the black spidery vehicles were winging their way eastward in formation over the misty Ciliwung River, heading for the heart of Jakarta.

Seen from the air, the great Indonesian metropolis was not particularly impressive. A sea of dun-colored low-rise buildings was punctuated by TV towers and the occasional high-rise building, split by the muddy ribbon of the river. Several patches of green—city parks and the Maidan race track, Sukarno explained—gave some color to an otherwise dreary urban landscape.

Crossing the river at several hundred meters altitude, the formation of lifters banked left over the ornate spires of Jakarta Cathedral and chopped speed, settling toward a grassy sward just east of the Jelambar Road bridge. The small park was surrounded by joglos and shanties of every size and shape, crowding in on the green field like waves of wreckage washing ashore.

"Merdeka Heights," Sukarno informed them. The lifters hovered momentarily while soldiers from the Provincial Constabulary shooed off beggars and pickpockets and secured the field. After a cordon had been set up, the lifters touched down. The Constabulary quickly dispersed. They had little protective gear and couldn't operate long in such a nano-heavy environment.

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

"Skipper—" it was Stella D'Garza, DPS1 for the Detachment. "Superfly's already deployed...I'm already getting thermals and atomic fluff big time. Intense nanobotic activity all around us—"

Tranh explained. "The air's thick with nano here. All the fabs around. I'd recommend a level one barrier around the landing zone...at least until you get all your gear set up."

Winger needed no further urging. He cocked his head and spalled off a few bots from his own left arm.

"I'm configuring state four. I need a screen to hold off these fabricator bugs that are flooding the area. I'll synchronize with Vinh and hold a perimeter—"he estimated the size of the landing zone at about a half a square kilometer—"two hundred meters radius from this position."

Winger felt the sting of the launch and watched the swelling fog of replicating bots billow out of the lifter ramp, spilling out onto the grass and mixing with the swarm of uncontained ANAD that Vinh was also deploying. The fog swelled rapidly in size, twinkling and fluorescing as it stripped atoms from the air and built up structure. In a few minutes, the entire park was surrounded by a barrier of nanobotic mechs, sparkling and winking in the humid morning air. And all along the periphery of the clearing, ANAD engaged the uncontained fab bots. Crackles of light and seams of distorted air highlighted the engagement points.

"ANAD's letting 'em have it!" Angel Barnes observed through a lifter porthole. "Right in the chops!"

"Like riot control, only at atomic scales," Tranh agreed. "My E-team just doesn't have the resources to contain all this...it's out of control."

Winger could see the problem. "Years ago, we would have deployed in hypersuits for protection. Today, most troopers have an embedded ANAD swarm. We also have para-human angels embedded with us. We carry our own barriers." To his Detachment, Winger ordered. "Okay, troops...swarms out and synched. We're going in hot—"

One by one, the nano-troopers disembarked with their gear. D'Garza, Barnes, Nakasuni, Cuddy, Voit and the rest exited by the aft lifter ramp, each shielded by ANAD 'bubbles' and loaded up the crewtracs for a little jaunt deeper into the city.

At the same time, Tranh had ordered a squad of BioShield techs to rendezvous with Alpha Detachment at the landing zone. In ten minutes, the two crewtracs were loaded and the BioShield squad appeared at the edge of the clearing.

"Give 'em the pass codes," Winger ordered. D'Garza gave Tranh the current day's home config. The BioShield techs took that and 'tuned' their own barrier nanobots to be able to penetrate the ANAD barrier without opposition. Inside the shield, the two units linked up.

Major Fordham recognized the squad leader. He was a burly African non-com.

"Sergeant Kano, glad to see you're on this gig. What's the situation?"

Kano shook hands all around, warily eyeing the ANAD swarm pulsating in the background. Even as the African sergeant gave his report, ANAD re-configged into a ghostly, vaguely para-human form.

"Red Squad's detailed to cover the Merdeka district, Major. My squad's been under fire practically the whole time. We've got loose fabricator bots replicating uncontained all over the place—" Kano gestured toward the truss work towers of the distant bridge—"the concentration is highest around that bridge. There used to be a bazaar there but some wise guy bought a fab in and unzipped the core right on the spot—no containment or anything. Pretty soon, all the doodads inside were going berserk...like a big bang. They were disassembling the bridge when we showed up...my guys had to work fast with everything we had, to disperse the swarm." Kano shrugged. "It's like mashing a balloon...squash it here and it just shows up somewhere else. We counter-banged until we got on top of the situation—but the bridge..." Kano shook his head.

Johnny Winger was intrigued about the fab design. "Sergeant, did you get any samples? I'd like to see what config these mechs are using...what type of design."

Kano recognized Winger and his unit as Quantum Corps. "Glad you're here, Colonel. We need all the help we can get...to answer your question, sir, we haven't had time to get any samples. Contain and disperse...that's all we can do with what we have."

"Sergeant," Fordham explained, "Quantum Corps is here to help us but they've got another mission too." He briefly explained the quantum interference that seemed to be emanating from a source just outside the city. "UNIFORCE is concerned about the magnitude of the interference. It's shaking the ground everywhere this side of Cairo. Unusual nano and seismic activity in the jungles east of here. Something big is stirring and Paris wants to find the source."

Kano shook his head. "We can't use our couplers at all but I thought it was just a temporary effect, Colonel. And you think the source is here?"

Winger called up the locating algorithm and beamed it over to Kano's crewnet. In seconds, Red Squad had the same intel as Winger's Alpha Detachment.

Kano scanned his eyepiece. A BioShield tech standing next to him—his name patch read PERVEZ—spoke up.

"Sarge...we know where this is...out past the Bekasi lakes. Probably that old football pitch...what was the name?"

Kano remembered. "Bugger...you're right! Penang...something or other. We did a containment op near there just last week. Regular bot blizzard, it was."

Winger brought up a Jakarta city map on his own eyepiece. He queried his wrist computer and soon enough, the sports compound of Penang was highlighted, with a shortest route already plotted.

"If this place is one of the stronger loci of seismic waves, that can only mean one thing: some kind of big time geoplane ops are going on there. That's where my Detachment needs to be."

Winger ordered the Detachment to board their crewtracs. He offered Kano a lift but the BioShield sergeant declined.

"I have to relieve a detail I posted at the Jelambar Bridge. They've been trying to contain swarms for the last twenty-four hours straight...it's an epidemic over there."

"I can detail some of my people," Winger decided. "Oscar, Juse, go along with Kano." Sergeants Oscar Cunnamulla and Juse Rinne came over. "Use your own embedded masters to help BioShield get this thing under control. Then catch up with us at this stadium when the situation's stabilized."

"Yes, sir," both nanotroopers saluted. The two of them hustled off with Kano's men, exiting the defensive barrier in a flash of light, then hopping aboard a semi-track for the quick ride to Jelambar.

"Load up!" Winger ordered. The rest of the Detachment swung their gear aboard the two crewtracs that the local BioShield office had brought in. The huge snorting vehicles were dual-tracked, with articulating arms front and rear to manipulate or hoist heavy objects. Modified from geoplane chassis, each crewtrac had limited sub-surface burrowing capability. Powered up, each vehicle shimmered in the hazy morning sunlight as its ANAD shield formed a twinkling, flickering defensive barrier around itself, like a huge, pulsating carapace of bots.

The crewtracs rumbled off, through the barrier ANAD screen, which sparkled as they passed by, and then turned right, onto crowded Cawang Street, heading east for Penang and the great stadium complex.

Cawang Street was thick with traffic, choked with pedestrians and rickshas, pedicabs and jitneys. Down narrow lanes branching off to the sides, dense smoke and fab swarms added to the humid haze of an early summer morning. The crewtrac drivers maneuvered gingerly through the throngs, honking at the wizened old wallahs as they pulled their rickshas in every direction, heedless of the traffic.

Major Fordham studied the scene through a porthole. "In Jakarta, some things never change."

The Penang compound was west of the city center, set in a tree-lined park called Kalijodo. From the Cawang Street roundabout, the ornate stepped stands of the main stadium poked above the trees, a brooding presence in the early morning mists. Traffic thinned out as the crewtracs navigated the circle and accelerated out along the Duren Sawit connector.

Johnny Winger had been studying a layout diagram of the stadium compound on his eyepiece when the crewnet voice circuit crackled to life. It was an outside signal. He recognized it.

"Boundary Patrol," he said to Al Glance. "Two geoplanes just breached inside the stadium. That was the seismic activity we detected."

Glance smirked. "BP always has to make a grand entrance. I guess the stadium isn't used anymore."

Fordham sat nearby. He agreed. "Not since the City built the new sports palace out past the Ring...Serpong Toll Road. You should see it...it's a true palace."

The crewtracs circled Penang until the access tunnel inside was found and ducked underneath the west stands of the arena. The vehicles emerged onto the pitch and headed for the snorting, glistening beasts of UN Boundary Patrol. Two geoplanes had just emerged from beneath the stadium and squatted like angry beetles at center of the field, both surrounded by their crews, stretching and gawking at the long-since abandoned tiers of stadium seats.

Winger ordered his detachment to dismount and introduced himself to the Boundary Patrol force commander. He turned out to be one Major Jack Jellicoe, 5th BP, Pacific Plate Patrol.

Jellicoe was sandy-haired, young with sharp features and a nose that could slice metal. He pumped Winger's hand for a second, until he realized Winger was an angel. He extricated his hand cautiously, looked at it peculiarly.

"Oh...uh, sorry, Colonel...I didn't...er, realize, that is, I didn't know you were—"

Winger waved it off. "It's okay, Major. I get that reaction. Quantum Corps is a little further along in integrating angels into combat units."

Jellicoe nodded quickly. "To say the least—uh, how—"

Winger decided it was best to dive right into the mission. "I got your signal to meet here. What did you see down there?"

Grateful for the renewed focus, Jellicoe ran a hand through his blond buzzcut. "Well, we were on routine patrol below east Java, just below Surabaya...in fact, we'd just come out of the Java Trench and we got shaken pretty good. Another subterranean vehicle, another geoplane and not one of ours, was nearby. We lost traction and took some badass P waves broadside, like it was a sonic lens or something like that. Both ships, too. That's limestone down there, with some inclusions of shales, pretty soft stuff, so the waves knocked us around pretty hard, but we held on. I tried a counterpulse on our sonic lens but we didn't detect anything after that. Didn't hear any bulkhead noses, sounds of breaking up, nothing like that. They seemed to have gotten away. Whatever it was, whoever it was, our geotechs tracked it to somewhere near the surface, about thirty kilometers east of Jakarta. Intel says it's mostly jungle there, with a few scattered villages."

Winger studied Jellicoe's data, which he had ported to Winger's wristpad. "Hmmm, that's the same signature we saw near Tunis a few days ago. The attack on Mole."

"Exactly, and it seems to focused on this area."

Winger said, "We may be looking at some kind of transshipment point for Red Harmony. That's what Q2 thinks."

"Me too," admitted Jellicoe. "I had orders not to enter the area or engage beyond our normal patrol routes until you and I met up. What have you got in mind?"

Winger went over the rules of engagement from General Kincade. "Major, I'd like to nose around the focus area—"he checked the map, "near this village of Subang, looks like. Could I put some of my quantum troopers aboard your geoplanes. Myself, my CC2 and several others?"

Jellicoe mulled that over. "I'd have to get approval from BP Command, but with your orders coming direct from UNSAC, that shouldn't be a problem. We've got room to shelter three or four of you. Both planes?"

Winger nodded. "I'm thinking you may encounter some subterranean bot swarms from the cartel if we get too close to whatever this is. My atomgrabbers can help if that happens."

"Amen to that. Why don't you come aboard Ferret and I'll introduce you to her crew?"

UNSAC approval to embed quantum troopers came quickly from Paris and Winger gathered his detachment around Ferret and Prairie Dog to make the assignments.

"Acuna and D'Garza, you're with me aboard Ferret. Voit and Barnes will embed with Dog. Any questions?"

Barnes studied the exterior hull plates of Dog skeptically. "Skipper, these beasts really dig in and travel underground?"

Jellicoe chortled at that. "Like rats, trooper. In fact, these babies ate rated to five thousand meters depth. That's something like 25,000 psi pressure on each square inch."

"Ouch," said D'Garza. "That's not good for my complexion. Makes my face hurt."

"Yeah," retorted Robbie Acuna, the Detachment SDC1, "that's not all that'll be hurting."

Winger motioned Al Glance over. "Al, you're in command until we get back. Keep working with Fordham here and the BioShield guys to isolate and contain as much swarm activity as you can."

Fordham said, "Jelambar Bridge is the worst area. I'll put extra personnel into that area and beg Captain Sukarno for more National Police."

"Agreed," Winger said. "Troopers detailed to BP, saddle up!" With a few snarky comments and some good-natured ribbing between the atomgrabbers and the geoplane crews—"atomhead scum...dirt kissers...smoke suckers...," the crews mixed and mingled and jostled and finally boarded the geoplanes. Glance ordered the Detachment back to the crewtracs.

From inside the 'tracs, he and Sherm Cuddy watched through portholes as the geoplanes powered up and knelt forward, their borer heads blue-white balls of flickering light, wavering in the humid morning air.

One after another, Ferret and Prairie Dog nosed down toward the churned-up pitch of the football field and, with a grinding, gnashing roar, dug themselves steadily into the ground, throwing up spouts and geysers of dirt and sod as they did so.

Moments later, both ships had disappeared below ground, sliding and chewing their way into tunnels of their own making.

Cuddy just shook his head. "It just ain't natural, Sergeant, burrowing like that. Man shouldn't be tearing into the earth like that...she doesn't like it, I can tell."

Glance sniffed. "And steering swarms of nanobots around is natural? C'mon on, Cuddly Bear. We go where the nasties are, you know that. Let's get back to town and kick some atomic ass."

The 'tracs rumbled off, out of Penang Stadium, and headed back toward Jakarta.

"Sergeant Michaelis, anything yet?"

Sergeant Michaelis was the SS1, Prairie Dog's Sensors and Surveillance Technician. "Nothing yet, Major. I'm scanning all bands...EM, thermal, acoustic, quantum...some plate shifting, crustal grinding...that's about it."

"Very well." Jellicoe programmed a new heading into the tread control system and Seguin steered them east on a heading of one two five degrees, roughly paralleling the Panjar Underthrust near the surface. Acoustic sounding soon showed the geoplane was entering harder, denser rock layers.

"Shales," Sergeant Gabe Hughley muttered. Hughley was GET1 for Dog, the Geo Engineering Technician. From earlier briefings with Boundary Patrol geologists, he knew the layer was sheeted with hard slate and mica, compacted over millions of years by glaciers and the overriding mountain range. "Nothing to worry about...just sit back and enjoy the view."

Jellicoe snorted. The only view they had was of the inner pressure hull of the geoplane. Even as he watched, he imagined that he could see the compression of Dog's interior frame under the thousands of tons pressing down on them. He wondered what his quantum trooper visitors thought of that.

Jellicoe's thoughts were cut off as Dog shuddered violently. For a brief moment, there was an unmistakable sensation of sliding, sliding sideways and downward. Almost at the same moment, something hit Dog's nose with a sickening crunch and the geoplane shuddered again and ground violently to a halt. The cabin tilted to port and stayed tilted.

"More P waves coming," yelled Hughley. "Big time P wave pulse, maybe ten seconds out."

"Turn us into the wave!" yelled Jellicoe. "Now!"

The DSO (Driver/Systems Operator) was Malkin, a new Russian crewman. "Turning to match bearing, sir!"

Prairie Dog heeled to starboard, her deck canting down as she swung slowly around. Just finishing her turn, the first of the powerful compression waves struck amidships.

The geoplane shuddered violently. Her hull stanchions groaned and creaked as vast stresses slammed into the hull. Jellicoe had just finished cinching up his seat harness when the pulse smashed into Dog.

"More P waves approaching!" said Hughley. "A whole train of them—"

"Sonic lens signature," added Michaelis. "It's a man-made series of pulses...."

Again and again, Dog was wracked with compression waves speeding rapidly through the pyroclastic stone. The whole island of Java was an alkaline volcanic arc formed from subduction of the Indian tectonic plate slamming north and under the Eurasian plate. The rock was hard, dense, igneous volcanic sediment, perfect for transmitting sonic lens pulses. The geoplane shuddered and shimmied, her hull straining under the load of hundreds of thousands of pounds of pressure, her inner bulkheads bending and torqueing dangerously as she sought to ride out the storm. Only the nose-on maneuver had saved her from being crushed.

"SS1, source of the pulses?"

Michaelis' hands flew over his console, as he tuned and probed out into the rock strata. "Undetermined, sir...too much noise out there. I can't get a solid bearing."

Al Glance was belted in at the back of Dog's command deck. "Major, you've got a sonic lens. Can't you return fire?"

Jellicoe shook his head. "Negative...not until we have a target bearing. We could wind up loosening more rock strata and making things a lot worse."

Glance swore under his breath. It's not like swarm war down here, he told himself. Combat a thousand meters underground was a whole new world.

Jellicoe wondered how their sister ship Ferret was doing. "SS1, what's Ferret's status? Have you still got a lock?"

"Barely," Michaelis came back. "Comms are intermittent, sir. A few seconds ago, I thought I heard hull-popping sounds, like she was coming up, headed for the surface."

Jellicoe mulled that over. "She may have been badly hurt and decided to breach. We'd better go up and take stock of the situation. DSO, ten degrees up angle. Put us on the surface."

"Ten degrees up angle, aye, sir," replied Malkin. Immediately, Dog's deck canted upward and she wallowed and rolled, as her hull protested the maneuver. Jellicoe checked his own status board and saw no hull breaches or leaks...so far. "She's still holding together, thank God. BOP1, can you give us more speed?"

The Borer Operator was a female Boundary Patrol recruit named Harema Khanis. She shook her black bangs vigorously. "Negative, sir...borer bots operating at max. We're just at temp redline now. Any more and—"

"I get the picture. Best possible speed...maintain up angle. Put us on the roof."

"More P waves," Michaelis announced. "Impact in thirty seconds. This one'll be close."

Whether by luck or brilliant maneuvering, Prairie Dog breached the surface just as the next round of compression waves passed by. She rolled and wallowed like a dog in the mud, as her bow crashed through surface soil and ground cover. Moments later, the geoplane careened down hard on her tracks and squatted like an out-of-breath armored beetle on the floor of the Javanese rain forest. Branches, palm fronds, and pandanus tentacles fell on top of her, draping the ship in a sinewy tangle of vine and brush.

Michaelis spotted a red light flashing on his board. "Emergency signal, CC1. Probably from Ferret. Bearing indicates she's on the surface too, maybe a thousand meters away...I make the heading as zero ten five, almost due north of us."

Jellicoe unbuckled and went aft toward the gangway, even as Al Glance and Angel Barnes were rising from their seats.

"I don't know what we're dealing with but we need to find out what happened to Ferret," Jellicoe said. "And your Quantum Corps colleagues." He got on the ship's intercom. "All hands, break out weapons from the arms locker...HERF, mag, everything. We'll exit opposed entry and assume hostiles are in the area."

Five minutes later, Dog's DPS1, a burly Japanese Defense and Protective Systems tech named Matsui was the first to emerge from the hatch. One after another, the rest of Dog's crew exited after him, quickly setting up a defensive perimeter fifty meters out.

The geoplane had emerged from her subterranean world into the middle of a rain forest. Towering screw pine and strangler fig arced overhead to a cathedral canopy, nearly shutting out the sunlight. The ground was thick with vine, damp, and marshy, with coils of tough rope-like tapang roots making movement difficult. Moisture dripped from low-hanging branches.

"There's a village through the trees," announced Angel Barnes. "You can just see it, down in that hollow."

It was true. Geoplane Prairie Dog had surfaced at the edge of the forest, atop a hill overlooking a hazy, fog-draped valley. Below, tendrils and wisps of smoke curled from scores of cooking fires. The hills above the town were terraced with watery rice paddies. At the bottom of the valley, scores of traditional Javanese omah perched on every available ledge and outcrop, their roofs pitched and thatched with palm leaves and strips of sheet-metal. From somewhere in the distance, a spider monkey howled in anguish.

Jellicoe studied geo data on his corneal implant. "My ocular says this place is called Subang. Maybe a hundred people. Michaelis, which way to Ferret?"

The SS1 checked his wristpad, turned around and squinted into the gloom of the forest. "This way, sir, bearing is oh one eight, more or less. I make it less than a thousand meters."

The crew of Dog and their Quantum Corps auxiliaries set off, hacking and whacking and burning their way through dense vine and bush for half an hour before they found the other geoplane.

Ferret lay on her side, her tracks upended in the air, mostly torn from their mounts and hanging like necklaces. The hull had been badly stove in all along one side and there were multiple breaches and jagged gaps in her outer structure amidships and just below the borer head. The borer was cold and dark, with no sign of any residual bots hanging around. Her tailpod had been nearly ripped clean off and entrance to the aft gangway was possible by carefully stepping through and over the torn metal and jagged shards of equipment piles that lay strewn about the deck and the forest floor.

Jellicoe decided he would go first. "Weapons ready," he warned the others. "Get your HERF carbines spooled up." He stepped through the gaping breach and ducked inside.

But Ferret was completely empty.

A thorough search from bow to stern, all decks, showed no crewmember was aboard the ship. No corpses, no injured or wounded, nobody.

Jellicoe lead his search team back out to the forest floor. A light drizzle had begun.

"I don't get it," Malkin puzzled. "Where the hell are they?"

"Jeez," added Khanis, "Ferret really took a beating. Her whole main spar's bent. It would take a hell of a lot of force to do that to a geoplane."

"She must have taken the brunt of those sonic pulses," said Michaelis. "A series of close-up shear and compression waves like that, near the epicenter—" he made a squeezing motion with his hands, "it'd be just like wringing out a dishrag."

"So where are the crew?" asked Al Glance, looking around the heavy brush and tree branches.

Jellicoe said, "Colonel Winger was an angel, right?"

Glance nodded. "Yes, sir. It happened about fifteen years ago. Colonel got swarmed on a mission to Kipwezi, east Africa. He was scattered but the Corps was able to re-constitute what was left as a para-human entity, an angel, as we call 'em now."

Jellicoe sniffed. "Michaelis, did you detect any bot residue, any swarm effects inside that wreckage?"

The SS1 shook his head. "Negative, sir and I was looking specifically for that. Nothing on sensors. No thermals, EMs, acoustics, just background atomic clutter."

"Damn," muttered Jellicoe. "So, where the hell are they?"

It was Angel Barnes who noticed something about the village of Subang that wasn't quite right. "Sir, unless I am mistaken, all that smoke and fog down there...it's not all smoke and fog. I'll bet a month's rations some of that stuff is loose nano, completely uncontained."

Jellicoe's mouth hardened. "You're probably right. Subang, population a hundred and twenty-two...that's our next port of call. Get Dog buttoned up. Matsui, stay here with Hughley and guard this wreckage. Michaelis, raise Singapore and tell 'em what's happened. Boundary Patrol and Quantum Corps need to swoop down here and squat on this area with all they've got."

Jellicoe then led the remaining crew out of the rain forest and began picking his way carefully down a steep hill around rice paddies toward the village of Subang, half hidden below them in the morning haze.

Chapter 2: Jumble in Jakarta

Jakarta, Indonesia

May 8, 2062

0500 hours

The Jelambar Bridge bazaar was slammed with people and Al Glance knew the task force would have a hard time staying together. It was like fighting swirling ocean currents to move anywhere. The bazaar was loud and chaotic, filled with smoke and pungent smells—the high-octane odor of masala tobacco was especially strong at the Garden Street entrance—and the air was thick with loose nano, clouds of bots mingling with incense, opium and scores of cooking oil fires. Vendors hawked grapes and mangoes, bananas and fabricator shells of every type, vials of rogue DNA called twist hung from clothes lines strung up between light poles and dilapidated tents. Women in batik 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.

Glance, Barnes, Vinh and the rest of the Operation Tectonic Dawn task force pressed forward, shoving their way through the throng, heading for the eastern terminus of the bridge, where the ornate arches of the Surapati Park Race Course entrance made a small promenade jammed with rikshas and pedcarts disgorging tourists by the hundreds.

"I'm betting that big black cloud over the arches is nano!" Glance yelled back to Barnes. Both troopers were dressed in civilian garb, consistent with their 'cover' as Euro businesspeople, out for a stroll through old Jakarta. "It never disperses...can't be smoke from a fire. Bots are keeping formation...maybe a demonstration of some kind!"

Barnes nodded. She found herself grabbed and pinched a dozen times as she forced her way along. What I wouldn't give for a MOB barrier right about now, she thought to herself. She spotted Glance's head by his ball cap, bobbing above the crowd a few meters ahead.

"Head for that gathering by the arches!" she called out. She had seen what looked like containment vessels lined up on benches and tables, through the crowd. "Could be a fab seller taking orders!"

Glance waved at her, acknowledging the idea and shifted course, navigating through the on-rushing tide of people as if he were steering across a fast-moving river.

Jeez, BioShield would have a field day out here, Glance thought. Wonder where the hell they are? To sell fabricator parts or cores on the street, with no license, was a serious offense. To let molecular assembler swarms loose in the environment without control and dispersal protection was even worse.

Jakarta was a cesspool, no doubt about it. Some things never changed.

Slowly, Glance and Barnes made their way to the race course arches, across a jammed plaza thick with bikes, carts, cattle and donkeys. A large tent surrounded on three sides with tables and benches dominated the arches. 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 arches, throbbing globs of nanobotic swarms swelled and gyrated to the music. Masala smoke was thick and acrid in the air.

Glance shoved and pushed his way to the edge of this crowd, joined over the next few moments by Barnes, Vinh and the rest of the Detachment. The turbaned vendor was a small man, desert burning in his eyes, as his fingers flew over the keyboard. Presently, he stopped and noticed a very young child, a small girl, standing shyly a few meters away from Barnes, playing hide and seek in the folds of her mother's loose sarong.

The vendor, who sported a thick black moustache, beckoned repeatedly to the young girl. After a few minutes, her mother relented and let her child go. The girl inched her way into the clearing and stood in front of the vendor's table, to applause and approving shouts and chants from the crowd.

The vendor's name was Najipoor Singh. The words were handwritten in Indonesian, scrolled on a fabric sign hanging over the table. Singh reached into a canvas bag and pulled out a trinket for the young girl. He handed it to her and she took it, shyly, turning the small cylinder over and over in her hand.

"You have a djinn in that cylinder, little one," Singh announced, loudly enough for all to hear. "A very powerful spirit. He can grant you any wish you want. Make a wish, child, and the djinn will bring it to you, right here—"

The girl's name was Menaka and she had huge brown eyes. Sad eyes, thought Glance, as he looked on from ten meters away, at the front of the crowd.

Menaka twirled the cylinder as Singh had shown her and squeezed her eyes tightly shut. When she stopped twirling the cylinder, she felt it vibrate and was so startled, she dropped the cylinder to the dirt.

Instantly, the device was enveloped in a fine mist, a sparkling mist that billowed out and upward, swirling about the clearing in front of Singh and his tables like a miniature cyclone. Gasps and shouts erupted from the crowd, and the spectators shoved back against each other, to give this growing apparition greater distance.

The mist gradually materialized into the faint outline of a man's upper body, with a recognizable face, shoulders and arms crossed in front.

The 'djinn' then spoke out loud. "Little one, I have come from the clouds above to grant you a great wish. Make your wish now—" The djinn's voice was a deep bass profundo, so deep it rattled the beaded curtains that covered Singh's merchant tent behind them.

Menaka stared wide-eyed, mouth open, at the apparition. She was speechless.

"Go ahead, child," urged Singh. "The djinn wishes you to make a wish."

Shouts of encouragement and support came from the crowd. Gradually, Menaka worked up enough nerve. Shy, haltingly, she asked for a new pedcart for her father.

"His cart is broken, Great One," she murmured. "It is our livelihood. Father needs a new cart to carry the tourists."

The deep voice rumbled again, a little reverberation adding to the sense of barely contained powers.

"As you have spoken, child...so shall it be—"

At that moment, the swirling, twinkling apparition of the djinn dissolved into a maelstrom of churning, roiling clouds, streaked with flashes of light. It was like watching a thunderstorm in miniature, from the inside.

When the storm began to subside, the barest outlines of a structure could be seen enveloped in the thick fog. The fog dissolved, slowly at first, then with speed, to reveal the front seat and handles of a new pedcart. Its wheels dripped with moisture and sunlight shone from the supple leather seats in the back.

The crowd was silent for a moment, then erupted into cheers and gasps. Menaka stared wide-eyed at the new pedcart, inching her way forward to tentatively put a finger along the handles, tracing the smooth curve of the metal.

For fun, Singh reached down and honked the horn a few times, startling everyone. The crowd laughed.

"You see what a gift the great djinn has brought you, little one. The djinn I have in my possession can do the same for every one of you." Singh pointedly stared at each face in the front row of the circle of onlookers. "Such a powerful djinn, such a powerful servant is available to you, today, right now, for a very special price. You will not believe the deal I can make for you. My friends, you cannot leave this bazaar without experiencing what this amazing servant can do for you—"

Al Glance leaned over to Dana Barnes, standing alongside.

"Not bad nano, if you ask me. Config changes were quick. He managed to hide some of the frizziness with smoke."

Barnes nodded. "A little clunky in the conversion, if you ask me. But showmanship trumps everything. Like a magician...he kept their attention away from the nuts and bolts."

"Where's Vinh?"

Barnes indicated somewhere behind them. Glance turned, stood on his tiptoes. Then he saw the face of the para-human swarm, easing forward through the crowd.

Glance chuckled to himself. To Barnes: "There so much nano in the air around here, nobody's noticed that Joe Vinh's a little frizzy around the edges."

"Or that he sometimes walks right through vendor carts. Hey, Vinh, what about that swarm? That little girl bought the whole pitch."

Presently, Vinh eased up alongside the two of them. His voice was somewhat hollow, at a higher frequency than normal human speech, and uni-directed to Barnes and Glance's ears alone.

"I detect swarm is a low-level assembler formation, with crude config routines and poorly optimized config changes...detecting no quantum coupler emissions...basic processor core...this demonstration is little more than a standard fabricator with visual effects modules."

"You're probably right," Glance conceded. The Q2 and BioShield intelligence briefing had clued them in to some of the more common practices around Jakarta. It was normal for fab hawks like Najipoor Singh to sell the basic fabricator shells cheap and the processor cores and matter drivers dearly...the better to get unwary customers hooked and reel them in like fish.

Traffic in unlicensed, souped-up fabs made for a brisk black market, in Jakarta and around Java and Sumatra and Malaysia, indeed throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean littoral.

Prime Red Harmony hunting grounds, Glance had remarked to the briefers. Along with thriving cartels in unregulated genetic enhancements like twist, the traffic in fabs and what had been termed bad nano was booming in Jakarta, so much so that Quantum Corps and local BioShield cops had been overwhelmed. Red Harmony also did a thriving business in fab driver programming—with the right patches and algorithms, a good fab driver could create literally anything except organics. Life itself was still too complex in code to hack successfully. Glance figured it was only a matter of time before that barrier was broken. And what they couldn't create on their own, Red Harmony stole or kidnapped. All across the archipelago, an epidemic of nanohead and atomgrabber kidnappings had exploded in recent years.

"Come on—" Glance muttered to Barnes. He stepped out of the crowd, followed by Barnes, Vinh, Barnes and the rest of the task force.

Glance went up to Singh, smiling at little Menaka proudly showing off the new pedcart to her still-astonished father.

"We want to buy." He leveled an even gaze at the fab hawk, who was busily taking orders and exchanging rupiahs with eager customers.

At first, Singh didn't acknowledge them. Glance moved closer, standing right beside the trading table and raised his voice.

"A very large order, my friend. I represent Euro money...a lot of it. An untapped market—"

That got Singh's attention. He looked up, one fist crammed with rupiah notes and rubbed his black moustache thoughtfully with the other hand, jerking his thumb behind.

"Meet me inside the tent...five minutes." He went back to his selling and haggling.

Glance motioned for Barnes, Cuddy and two other troopers, all in civilian garb, to form a discreet perimeter around the outside of the tent. He wanted to have Najipoor Singh's undivided attention for a few minutes, without interruption.

Barnes and Vinh followed Glance inside.

Inside the tent, four tables formed a large square, with huge cushions and thick rugs scattered around. Incense and other elements burned from smoking pots in the corners. A large antique safe squatted on ornate gilded legs in one corner. The safe was enveloped in obvious barrier nano—a faint mist sparkled and twinkled around it.

Joe Vinh went over, almost gliding as he moved toward the safe. A hand went out and sparks flew where the assembler swarms collided. Electron bond disrupters fizzed and soon the barrier nano dissolved into nothing.

"How the hell did you do that?" Barnes asked.

Vinh smiled faintly, a crooked, uneven smile that had once sent shivers down her spine. The swarm was still learning the nuances of human facial expressions.

"Crude assembler swarm...very loose...poorly coordinated...I used bond disrupters to penetrate and reset primary config algorithms."

"Jesus," Glance said. "I wish you could have done that at Subang."

At that moment, Najipoor Singh stuck his head inside and came into the tent. Immediately, he frowned, realizing the safe barrier had been breached. He extracted a coilgun from beneath his kaftan waistband and leveled it at Glance.

"You will please to leave my safe alone...what have you done to the shield?"

"Hold on, pal," Glance said. "We just want to do some business. You've got some pretty slick nano going on here."

Singh relaxed his grip on the coilgun slightly, but he was still suspicious. He squinted at Vinh.

"You bring your own djinn...what kind of trick is this? You are interested maybe in taking my business...I am here at the Bridge for many weeks—" he rubbed his fingers together indicating payoffs and bribes "—very expensive this location."

Glance shook his head. "No, no...it's nothing at all like that. We want to place an order...a large order. Euro money...big money here. You have fabs we can examine?"

Singh finally lowered the coilgun, keeping a close eye on Vinh, and tucked it in his waistband. "Ah...fabs...there are so many dealers in Jakarta...and I am just a poor peddler...what kind of fabs do you seek?" He poured himself a tiny cup of tea, offering some to the others. All declined.

"Something kind of special," Angel Barnes told him. "Enhancements for Vinh here...for his processor core."

Vinh brightened at the mention of his name. The slightly misshapen smile broadened. His voice came out like tinny and slurred. "Pleased to meet you...I am Joe Vinh...I hope we will be able to do business...you have impressive swarm systems here..."

Singh was curious. He came up to Vinh, placed his fingers experimentally into the swarm. A slight buzz and ticklish resistance gently pushed his fingers out.

"Some tweaking is needed, yes...I can see this. Notice the edges of the swarm...trouble holding config...it is a processor problem. I can get you upgrades...modules with new effectors, new algorithms—" Singh cleared his throat. "You know this entity should be in containment. It is illegal in Java to operate beyond containment."

Glance glanced briefly at Barnes, who nodded ever so slightly. Singh was taking the bait. They had worked with Vinh before ever leaving the Quantum Corps base at Mesa de Oro to react in just this way...simulating a para-human form that was almost, but not quite, believable. In truth, he was capable of more, a lot more. They had been counting on a fab hacker like Singh being just greedy enough to overcome his natural suspicions of a sting.

"Yes, yes...I understand all that," Glance waved off his concerns. "But this is Jakarta, is it not? Every street corner is thick with loose nano...angels and djinn everywhere. Everybody's got a halo of some type. We saw what you did with the little girl. I must say I was impressed...all of us were. You're just the one to help us with Vinh here."

Singh beamed, even as he understood he was being stroked. "It is true. Jelambar Bridge has the best hackers." He slowly circled Vinh, critically examining the swarm from every angle. "A very good likeness, I must say. All djinn have flaws...it's simply a matter of hiding them, drawing your eyes to the good parts and away from the bad parts."

Barnes said, "Then you'll help us?"

Singh pursed his lips, clucked at the possibilities he could envision with this foreign swarm. "And what do you want of this swarm, this Vinh?"

"It's not what we want," Glance said, "It's what he wants. He wants to seem as human as possible. To step outside and pass for a real human."

For a moment, Singh said nothing. When he laughed, it was a hoarse, coughing kind of gurgle. "Many have these dreams...especially the children. All of us want the perfect companion." Singh smiled faintly. "Alas, perfection is only for Shiva, only for the gods."

Glance said, "Name your price."

Singh screwed up his face, idly fingering his moustache, as he considered all the angles. He didn't even know these Euros. Were they Javanese or maybe National Police? Maybe even BioShield? Still, they smelled like money.

Singh reached into a pocket of his kaftan and pulled out a small device. He pressed it into the palm of Glance. "This will give you directions to another place here in Jakarta. Be there at 10:00 pm tonight. Alone, just the two of you, along with this Vinh."

Glance took the locator and pocketed it discreetly.

Singh said, "I have many friends in the streets. If you try to cheat me, I will know of it. Give me a name."

Glance had an ID card all ready. He gave it to the hacker. "All the details are there. My name's Willoughby. Jacob Willoughby. England. In fact, Yorkshire highlands."

Singh thumbed the stud on the side of the card, watching the data and pix scroll before his eyes. He nodded gravely.

"Ten p.m. tonight. Don't be late. Now you must leave—"

Glance indicated to Barnes and Vinh that they should do as the hacker said. The three of them left the tent.

Outside, more swarms done up like djinn and angels and all kind of apparitions were entertaining the crowd. Other hackers had ringed the promenade with stalls and booths and were busily taking orders. Food carts circulated through the throng trailing smells of lamb and curry. Giant posters of swamis and priests and Bollywood film stars hung from poles.

Glance alerted his discreet perimeter detail by crewnet. "All posts...report in."

One by one, the rest of the Detachment gave their reports. Glance told them to meet up on the other side of the race track.

Ten minutes later, the Detachment had gathered outside the posting gates as lines of bettors placed their bets and surged inside the track. Bells sounded the end of post time. The first race would begin in five minutes.

"Think this hacker's legit?" Barnes asked.

Glance shrugged. "Hard to say. From what I could see, he'd got quite an operation around here. He seems to run a lot of territory on this side of the river."

Just then, Vinh's voice crackled through the crowd noise, uni-directed to Glance and Barnes.

"Proximity warning...there is a surveillance swarm nearby...mass centroid is sixteen meters on bearing two six five degrees...swarm is configged as Drosophila funebris...detecting effectors and molecule groups optimized for visual, auditory and EM emissions."

"Flies," Barnes muttered. She looked around. The place was thick with fruit flies and swarming clouds of insects.

"Yeah," said Angel Barnes. "The perfect cover."

"So, we're being reconned," Glance said. "I'd have been surprised if we weren't. Can you shield us?"

"Affirmative...I will detach sub-swarm element to create interference shield."

The process took several minutes. As he was assembling a shield, Vinh grayed out a little and became even fuzzier around the edges. Nobody seemed to notice.

"Where is this place we're going?"

Glance activated the locator and waved it over his wristpad. Coordinates and details along with the latest Q2 intelligence appeared on his corneal viewer. "North, along the river. Marunda, it looks like. Near the harbor. Seems to be a warehouse district, from the pix."

"Could be a fab lab," offered Barnes, looking around uneasily at the gathering flies. She swatted at some...they seemed to be ordinary flies.

"I doubt this joker would take us to a major lab without checking us out...although that may be what the recon bugs are doing now." Glance snapped off the locator. "Let's get going. We should do a little recon ourselves."

"Jeez, this place gives me the creeps," said Barnes, as they moved out, heading for the Jelambar bridge. "It's out of control...I can't tell who's real and who's a cloud of bugs."

Joe Vinh buzzed angrily. "It would please this swarm if humans would refrain from referring to our natural configs as 'bugs.' ANAD are swarming entities. It is our programming. This is not so different from your own cities and urban regions."

Barnes snorted. "Hey, Joe, don't get your panties in a wad, okay? It was just a figure of speech."

Barnes noted, "My, he's touchy today. Maybe it's all the other swarms...out of containment. It's giving him ideas."

The Detachment moved through heavy crowds, crossing the bridge over the muddy, sluggish Ciliwung River and headed on foot north up the NH-4, the Shalimar Road. They passed a stadium and a college, and moved into a commercial district after a time.

Glance's corneal viewer guided him unerringly toward the coordinates. When they were inside of a kilometer from their destination, it flashed a warning.

"Joe, is that recon swarm still with us?"

"Affirmative...I'm detecting low level nanobotic activity less than twenty meters south, centroid bearing one five zero degrees...swarm is diffuse and configged as fruit flies."

"Acknowledged." Glance called a halt to their march. "This looks like the place."

They were in a warehouse district called Barahanagar, barely three blocks south of East Harbor. A light fog had enveloped the area as the sun went down. Through the fog, the quantum troopers could make out acres of low-rise brick buildings, with slate and tin roofs dominating the view. Narrow roads separated the buildings, really little more than footpaths, most of which were thick with small autolorries and carts navigating the confusing warren of lanes.

Glance studied the image on his corneal implant. Q2 had transmitted some sat video of the region, taken only a day before. He checked the coordinates from the imagery with the locator that Singh had given him. Bingo. It was a match. The coordinates were centered on a grimy red brick building on the far corner. The address was given as Number 17, Subhash Street. Flocks of pigeons and seagulls and other flying things strutted and screeched from a roof draped with cables and lines.

"That's the one?" Barnes asked.

Glance nodded. "Let's get a basic perimeter set up around this block. Rinne, you and Cuddy take that side—" he pointed toward the intersection. "Oscar, you take Nakasuni and Voit and secure the alley approach. Joe, you and Barnes are with me." He eyed the sky overhead, now streaked purple with fading sunlight on tropical clouds. "We'll wait awhile, make it nice and dark before we move in. Say about 2200 hours."

"What config shall I assume?" Joe Vinh asked.

"Do standard for now, Joe," Glance told him. "I don't think we really fooled anyone at the race track but Singh said that our supplier would be expecting three of us."

"Acknowledged...changing config now..."

Behind them, a small cyclone of dust motes began to swirl silently, gathering itself into the slowly materializing apparition of a human being, a ghostly presence that flickered and wavered even as it solidified.

Just before ten o'clock, Glance stirred from his hiding place behind a broken-down old jitney. "Move out," he ordered over the crewnet. Barnes and Vinh made their way through a throng of screeching birds across a potholed street and came up to a steel door at the corner of the warehouse. Lights from inside shone through cracks around the frame.

It was open.

Cautiously, the two quantum troopers entered, followed by the para-human assembler swarm.

The interior was a cavernous but dusty open space broken up by row after row of columns and pallets of equipment stacked nearly to the ceiling.

"Looks like a –" but Angel Barnes never finished her sentence.

They had walked right into the middle of a live swarm.

"It's a MOB!" Glance yelled. He started to back out, fumbling for the coilgun at his waist but it was already too late. The mobility obstruction barrier had been triggered and was now gathering around him, cutting off all escape.

Behind him, Angel Barnes was fighting the same battle.

Even as Glance and Barnes became entangled in the writhing mesh, Vinh had seen the MOB coming. The para-human swarm quickly re-configged, dissolving into scattered knots of assemblers, eventually breaking down into little more than dust motes. Vinh detached a small sub-element to engage the MOB bots, but its programming quickly overrode this. Third Rule always had precedence over Fourth Rule. Vinh re-absorbed the sub-element and remained configged as dust.

"I can't...get my...weapon...loose!!" Glance choked out. Slowly, inexorably, the MOB bots formed a tightening noose and forced the quantum trooper into a crouch, then a curled-up ball on the floor.

Angel Barnes fared no better. "Sarge...I can't...breathe...."

Both were soon gasping and clawing for air when the first humans showed up. Through the sparkling mesh that had enveloped him, Glance could just make out the distorted faces of three men, all vaguely Javanese from their turbans and dress. Their voices were low and muffled.

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

He felt himself hoisted up, then dragged roughly along the warehouse floor. The netball bounced and rocked down several flights of stairs. Glance couldn't be sure but he assumed Barnes had suffered the same fate. He had an embodied ANAD swarm in his shoulder capsule...one button pressed on his wristpad would have launched the assemblers and he could have been free of the MOB and breathing real air in moments.

No...got to stay with this...he told himself.

They were in the belly of the beast now. With a little luck, he and Barnes and Vinh would find some connection here with Subang, the wrecked geoplane and its missing crew and be able to roll up the supply chain that Red Harmony had created in this part of the world.

If he didn't suffocate to death first.

Jeez, he thought, I had forgotten what being MOB'ed feels like. He felt like he was being smothered in a prickly, stinging quilt, wrapped up tighter and tighter.

As the MOB net bounced along, he felt every single bump and dip and imperfection in the floor. The bruising ride lasted almost ten minutes; it seemed like hours.

Then the bumping and bouncing stopped. The great squeeze of the barrier mesh lessened and he was finally able to breathe again. Presently, the MOB was peeled apart and 'unzipped.'

Glance found himself curled up like a baby, staring up at two swarthy, mustachioed faces.

"Welcome to Java Djinn," said the nearer face. "Help him out—"

Strong unseen hands peeled away the remnants of the mesh and helped Glance stand upright. A few feet away, Angel Barnes was getting the same assistance.

Glance wondered momentarily what had happened to Vinh.

The MOB nets had been dragged into something resembling an office, with chairs, tables, a bare desk and some cabinets. Glance soon became aware of others in the room. Faces appeared, then more faces and it was then that he realized the faces were para-human swarms...nanobotic formations gathered into simulacra of human faces.

Only faces. There were no bodies.

Glance realized that he and Barnes were surrounded by two men and literally scores of swarm-faces floating about the room like disembodied spirits.

Glance pulled the locator from his pocket and handed it to the one who had talked.

"It's from Najipoor Singh. Jelambar Bridge. We're interested in fabs. To sell in the Euro zone."

The one who had talked scowled back at him. His was a fleshy, saturnine face with slit eyes, black button eyes, and a twitch to his pock-marked left cheek. Marwari Barghan turned the locator over in his fingers like a winning card and thumbed a control stud on the side. Instantly, a 3-D projection of their encounter in Singh's tent at the racetrack played out in mid-air.

Barghan scowled and snapped the locator shut. "Singh is a fool. We knew you were coming."

"Hell of a reception, if you ask me," Barnes muttered. She picked off the last remaining shreds of the mesh and brushed herself off, but not before the other human had patted her down for weapons. He deftly removed her coilgun pistol from a front pocket and held it for inspection.

Glance eyed the knots of nanobot swarms drifting like ghostly disembodied faces about the office. "Looks like we came to the right place. Those are good configs, from the looks of it. You can fab human forms as well?"

Barghan stroked his moustache and strolled among the floating faces. They parted to let him by. He glared back at Glance with a suspicious look, his own face now wreathed by the swarm faces, like a funhouse mirror distortion.

"Well enough. Dust and flies too. We don't get many Euro customers here in Jakarta. At least, none that know what they are doing. How do you come to know of Java Djinn?"

"We have sources. I asked questions, got some leads, put things together. There aren't that many fab labs who can do what you do—" He swatted at a persistent cloud of flies, and wondered if they really were flies. "Word gets around."

Barghan considered that. "I don't do business with strangers. We should have just MOB'ed you up and dropped you in the river."

"Along with all the others?"

Barghan sniffed. "In this business, personal contacts are important. Nothing is what it seems. So...you are here now. What is it you want?"

"A license," Glance told him. "In Euro, we don't have the fabs you have here. Oh, we do basic replication...simple things like clothes, furniture, jewelry and appliances—but this—" he indicated the floating faces "—there's nothing like this in Euro. There's a huge market, untapped, just waiting for the right supplier." Glance thumped his chest. "I plan to be that supplier...get a lock on the market."

The fab lord's face showed the barest hint of a smile. Arrogance and ambition...he could work with that. "Java Djinn doesn't deal in—what do you call it?—the walk-in trade. Java has hundreds of labs, all over the island. Why should I do business with you?"

Glance had anticipated just this question. "Because you want to expand. Open up new markets. If you give me a license and I market your fabs throughout Euro, inside of a year, all other fabs will be obsolete. Four hundred million customers...a virgin market...can you afford to pass up a chance at that?"

Barghan's face was momentarily obscured by several floating faces. It was then that Glance realized that the floating swarms weren't the only nano in the office. Barghan had hacked himself as well, or at least, had hacked his own facial neuromusculature. Even as Glance and Barnes looked on, the fab lord's face kneaded itself like a pile of wet dough and formed a new face, still somewhat recognizable as Barghan but with puffier cheeks and fuller lips. The lips parted into a broader smile.

"We take no chances in this business, Mr.--?"

"Willoughby...Jacob Willoughby."

"Some of us have been treated. You might even say enhanced...do you like it? Some of us haven't. It's better for business if a fab lord has many identities."

"Keep ahead of the competition," Glance agreed.

"In a manner of speaking. BioShield sometimes makes business a challenge. A good fab lord has to accessorize, stay up with the fashions." Barghan's eyes narrowed. "You intrigue me, Mr. Willoughby. My...er, sources—" he indicated the dozens of floating swarm faces "—tell me you could be a plant...or a spy. But my curiosity is piqued. You could also be just what you say...an opening into a new market."

"Then you'll grant us a license?"

Barghan chuckled. "It's not quite so simple as that. You are not known to me, Mr. Willoughby. We'll have to check you out, see for ourselves what you're all about. I'm sure you understand."

"Could I see your lab? I could take a description, maybe some samples, back to Euro. Prep the market a little."

Barghan was skeptical. "Mr. Willoughby, you ask a difficult question. Perhaps you do business differently in the Euro. I'll have to check with my partners. What you ask is...unusual, to say the least."

Bingo, Glance thought. "I'd just like to be able to jump start the market. Kind of an opening day promotion."

Barghan pressed a few buttons on his wristpad. Instantly, the floating swarm faces began to dissolve, swirling like hordes of fireflies in the air, and gathering into new forms and shapes before their very eyes.

Glance and Barnes moved out of the way as the swarms quickly coalesced and began gathering into recognizable outlines of chairs and tables and even a small divan.

The gathering and assembly of a formal parlor took less than five minutes. Glance and Barnes were amazed. When the config change had been done, the small spartan office into which they had been dragged now resembled a much more comfortable sitting room. Still materializing were divans and thick cushions, ornate tables and bronze lamps, complete with Victorian wall sconces and a massive oak desk along one wall, surrounded by embroidered tapestries. The place now looked like a parlor from a Thomas Hardy novel, circa 1895.

"Impressive," Glance admitted.

Angel Barnes tried out the divan and found it springy and comfortable. She ran her hands along the still solidifying fabric. "Quick config change. And the textures seem about right."

Barghan beamed at the response his little demonstration had gotten. "Tea and scones, even a real Javanese treat...soto...will be on the table in about—" he checked his watch "—two to three minutes."

Glance was amazed. "You can fab organic stuff? What kind of drivers do you have? Organics have always been too complex to fab with molecular assemblers."

Barghan offered a thin smile. "We've developed a few tricks of our own. If you will excuse me...Sevi here will see to your needs."

'Sevi' turned out to be a para-human swarm, assembled to full-body dimensions and decked out to closely resemble a Javanese house servant. The swarm lurched forward with a tray of porcelain cups and a small filigreed tea pot, now steaming with hot tea.

Barnes took one of the tea cups and gently sipped. Glance tried a scone and chewed thoughtfully on the hard bread.

"Looks like this is the place," Barnes said. She was aware that 'Sevi' and likely other invisible swarms were sucking up everything they said. They would have to choose their words carefully.

"Quite a setup," Glance agreed, crumbs falling out of his mouth. He washed the bread down with tea. "They've got technology nobody expected."

The two of them prowled around the parlor, exploring the textures and surfaces of the newly formed objects. Most were solid as the real thing; for all practical purposes, they were the real thing.

A few objects were like 'Sevi' himself...loose aggregations of nanobots with only a surface appearance of reality. It was clear that Java Djinn had somehow acquired technology that even Q2 and other Intelligence types at UNIFORCE didn't know about it.

Al Glance was carefully examining the outlines of 'Sevi' when a strange buzzing came into his head. He shook his head, thinking he had inadvertently breached some invisible barrier around 'Sevi' but the buzzing persisted.

It was Vinh. The quantum coupler circuit.

***Vinh to Base...are you receiving this transmission?...Vinh to Base...***

Glance looked up abruptly and caught Barnes' eye. The nanotrooper was turning over a crumbly scone in her hand, trying to figure out how Barghan and his hackers had managed to crack organics and config pretty tasty food.

Glance pointed to his head and mouthed It's Vinh...on the coupler. He shrugged, unable to explain how the 'bot had managed to open a coupler circuit.

It wasn't necessary to vocalize when using the coupler. Glance knew he had to act as if nothing were going on. Both of them figured 'Sevi' was at least as much a spy as a house servant.

Vinh, you old goat, where the hell are you?

As the conversation unfolded, Glance continued a nonchalant tour of the parlor, idly examining pieces of furniture, turning over brass figurines in his hand as if studying their form and texture. He hoped 'Sevi' and any other swarms in the area would have nothing they could vacuum up to give away what was happening.

***Vinh configged as dust motes when the MOB attack came...attached to outer jacket surface of suspect human...Vinh now with suspect...active surveillance in all bands***

Jeez, Vinh, you could have let us know. Barnes and me nearly suffocated in that MOB net.

***Vinh apologizes for confusion...opportunity came to recon suspect to support mission objectives...suspect now in a comm center...open link to other humans not in the area***

Glance could tell that Barnes wasn't receiving anything. Not surprising, as her implant buffer wasn't tuned to this Vinh version. He went to her and silently mouthed what was happening, trying to shield what he was doing from 'Sevi'. In the corner of the parlor, 'Sevi' stirred and began moving in their direction. Its metallic voice came out like a staticky buzz.

"Could I assishht you in any way?"

Barnes moved to intercept 'Sevi' and distract the para-human while Glance continued with Vinh.

Vinh, what kind of link...what other humans?

There was a short interval, then ***Vinh has detected several identifier words...transmitting string now...Souvranamh...resonator...parsing vocalizations for more identifiers now***

Vinh's report sent a chill down Glance's spine. Souvranamh? There was only one man with that name and he was a card-carrying member of Red Harmony's Ruling Council. One of the top neurotraficantes in all East Asia. Q2 had a file on the Thai crook a mile long.

Are you sure about that, Vinh?

***Affirmative, Base...Souvranamh is vocalized twenty-two times in the message string...Vinh attempting to gather acoustics and photons from return transmission...this will be a bit tricky\--***

Glance turned to let Barnes know the good news—that Java Djinn was either a front for Red Harmony or had links at highest levels with the cartel.

What he saw made him look twice. Barnes was attempting to engage in some kind of distracting conversation with 'Sevi' but the para-human swarm was literally flowing over and around her and continuing on its way across the parlor toward him. Even as he watched, the structure of 'Sevi's' face had begun to break down, like a mirror distorting an image. The swarm was changing config. Something had triggered a change.

Glance grabbed Barnes by the arm and yanked her out of the way. He knew he had a basic Vinh master embedded in his shoulder capsule, but it had no bells and whistles. It was just a barebones master assembler and clearly no match for whatever made up 'Sevi.'

Better not to chance being discovered, he decided. He and Barnes moved to another corner of the parlor. The re-configuring 'Sevi' swarm changed course to follow them.

What the hell was happening...another MOB attack?

At that moment, Marwari Barghan came back into the parlor, this time with three other men. Real humans, Glance was sure.

Barghan saw what was happening. Quickly, he pressed a few buttons on his wristpad and the 'Sevi' swarm began to dissipate into dust motes and twinkling pinpricks of light. Moments later, only a barely discernible fog hung in the air, a not-so-subtle reminder that Barghan wouldn't tolerate any tricks from his guests.

"What happened?" Glance asked. "Your servant started coming after us...bad config...something set him off?"

Barghan sniffed. "A programmed maneuver, Mr. er, Willoughby. 'Sevi' is instructed to attend to all our guests' needs and to see that they don't...hurt themselves or anything else."

Glance held up his hands. "Honest, I didn't touch a thing."

"Perhaps. In any case, I have consulted with my partners. They've agreed to your proposition. So, we'll take a short tour of our main lab and give you some idea of what we can do with fabs. I think you'll be impressed. There's just one provision."

"Oh? What's that?"

Barghan held up a hand. "You'll have to be rendered unconscious for the trip. Security, you understand. The lab is not at this location."

"Where is it?"

This made Barghan smile. "Not to worry. The glasseye I give you will keep you from wondering about that. It's just routine procedure."

Vinh had already dispersed and drifted away on Glance's orders to get away and inform rest of Detachment as to what's happening.

Glance looked at Barnes. "I suppose we have no choice. What is this stuff"? he asked, when one of Barghan's assistants produced a handful of tablets.

"Works in a minute. You'll be out for two hours, if you don't go coma. You wake up and feel like I dropped you off Krakatoa. But you'll get over it."

Glance held out his hand. The assistant dropped the two tablets in his palm, two more in Barnes.' Glance popped them both and washed it all down with tea. It was bitter, brassy in taste.

"Best sit down here, friend." Barghan guided the trooper to a seat. Already, he was jazzed, then wobbly and dizzy. He sat down in a heap, his vision blurring into a tunnel, his heart revving fast, turbocharging before the crash.

The crash, when it came, was like slipping off a cliff, floating and feathering downward, forever downward. The last thing he saw was Barghan's wavering face, as the pipe man reached out to rifle through his pockets.

The smell of coconut was strong, that and wet grass, leaves, tree smells, cut bamboo, drying fish. The sensations came in a rush, flooding in, and Al Glance enjoyed identifying them one by one, until a faint voice, almost a whisper, intruded on his reverie.

It sounded like Colonel Winger and Al Glance struggled up to his elbows to investigate.

He was in a bed, some small room, sparsely furnished. It didn't seem like the warehouse at Number 17, Subhash Street, Jakarta. The smells, the sounds, were all different.

Then he spied a faint mist hovering over the foot of the bed. With a start, he sat up abruptly.

The mist gathered itself slowly but relentlessly into a shadow of a form, as if it were translucent, then the form began filling out, gaining substance, adding structure, until after about a minute, a familiar face and shoulders appeared over the bed, like an apparition, or a nightmare.

"I must be dreaming," Glance muttered., but the form disagreed with him at once.

"Al, you're not dreaming. It's me, Colonel Winger—"

Glance rubbed his eyes. "What the—"

"Shhh_" cautioned the Winger thing, and then Glance remembered who he was facing. The Colonel was officially PHE...a Para Human Entity...a swarm. Flashes of memory came rushing back. "Keep your voice down...."

"Where am I, or are we? I took that tablet...glasseye somethingorother...."

"I know," Winger whispered, even as his face and upper torso continued filling out. Below his chest, there was...nothing, loose atoms, occasional pinpricks of light. Glance had to remind himself that this was what passed for normal ops in the Corps now. "They brought you and Barnes here."

"Where's 'here?'"

Winger explained quickly. "Subang, the little village east of Jakarta. Our geoplane was attacked but we made it to the surface. The whole crew's here. It's an underground complex of some sort, maybe a sorting and distribution facility for the cartel."

Glance's head was still foggy from the glasseye and the whole conversation seemed surreal. Maybe he was imagining this after all. "They must have brought Barnes and me here after they knocked us out. Subang..." he rolled the name around his tongue. "We came into that village looking for you, for the crew. Is this the main lab?"

Winger shook his head, which in the failing light looked like watching some kind of weird special effects. "I don't think so. We're well underground here, hundreds of meters below the village. I think this must be some sort of distribution point or transshipment node. Fabs and twist and other stuff must be made elsewhere and brought here, to distribute throughout all of east and south Asia. And that's not all."

Glance's head hurt and he winced. "There's more?"

"It's worse. Several levels below where you and Barnes are, there's a full-scale geoplane terminal. I've counted four ships coming in and leaving the last few days. The cartel's got a fleet of them."

Glance sucked in his breath. "Red Harmony with geoplanes. That's bad. Real bad. How'd you learn all this stuff?"

Winger smiled a ghostly smile. "One advantage of being an angel. They don't know I'm here. The whole crew of Ferret's here too. They're all okay, just prisoners. You and Barnes are acting as prospective buyers?"

"Just like we planned. I think they're interested. We told 'em we wanted to see their works, how they made and shipped stuff. They were reluctant, but they agreed. But we had to let them knock us out first...security, they said."

Now Winger turned serious, focusing on Glance's face. "Al, this isn't the main works. I don't know where it is, but for the cartel to have invested in geoplanes like this, it must be far away. Subterranean transport gives them a damn near undetectable shipping network. If Tectonic Dawn's going to succeed, we have to find the main node of their network and smash that. I've already gone coupler and squirted off a few burst transmissions id'ing this place to Quantum Corps. But I told 'em to hold off any raids or assaults until I give the word."

"What do you want me and Barnes to do...keep up appearances as buyers?"

"Exactly. Let them show you around this complex. But you and your investors want to see the whole supply chain, shipping, production, the works. Try and get them to take you there."

Glance seemed skeptical. "That might be hard, sir. They're pretty skittish about us being here."

"That's understandable. You still have the pay chip in your wristpad?"

Glance held up his arm. The pad was still there. "They could have hacked it but she's still here."

"I hope they did hack it. That way they'd know how much the Corps has transferred to you. Offer 'em a down payment, with more to come, sort of like earnest money, if they'll show you the whole supply chain."

"Okay—" Glance was about to ask another question, but he heard steps outside. Instantly, Colonel Johnny Winger dissipated and was gone, even as the door to the small room opened.

It was Barghan.

"Ah, Mr. Willoughby, you're awake. I trust you're feeling no ill effects. Sorry about the glasseye. Routine precaution, you understand."

Glance didn't have to simulate a headache, for his skull felt like a hammer had been dropped inside. "Nice stuff, that glasseye. You ready to take me and my partner on a tour?"

Barghan waved his hands graciously toward the door. "If you are, sir. This way, please."

Glance left the room and wasn't surprised to see both "Sevi' and a few other goons accompanying Barghan. They picked up a still-wobbly Barnes on the way.

The tour lasted an hour. Barghan was remarkably forthright in showing and explaining much of the cartel's operation at Subang, leading Glance to believe Colonel Winger was right: his captors had likely hacked the pay chip in his wristpad, which though deeply encrypted, would have indicated to any snooping hacker a very large sum of money deposited...Quantum Corps front money for this very purpose. Barghan was noticeably friendlier and more solicitous today.

"Subang is a very important node in our Asian network," Barghan was saying. After visiting the twist labs, the scope works with its rows upon rows of green leafy plants suspended in nutrient tanks, and the containment vaults for unlicensed nano and fabs and the programming and coding studio where fab shells were given their matter compiler engines, they had reached the bottom level of the underground complex, and Glance tried to maintain an appropriate level of being suitably impressed at the snorting and creaking pair of geoplanes that had just arrived from parts unknown.

"Barghan, I wasn't aware your operation shipped products underground. Geoplanes...that is impressive. That technology's supposed to be reserved for UNIFORCE exclusively."

Barghan beamed. "Don't believe everything you hear, Mr. Willoughby. The Society has the brains and resources to avail ourselves of the very latest."

Glance leaned over the rail above the nearest geoplane. It could have passed for a Boundary Patrol vehicle and that made him wonder.

"Mr. Barghan, this is all very impressive, but my supporters... well, frankly, the amount of money we're prepared to invest here makes my supporters somewhat suspicious. I have instructions to inspect your entire supply chain before I report back."

Barghan's face became a mix of conflicting emotions and Glance wondered if the man's nanoderm patches had gone haywire. "Meaning what, exactly, sir?"

Glance made his voice as firm as he could. "Meaning the entire production chain...where your fabs are programmed, where your DNA and twist is made and purified, where your scope genome is edited, the works."

This made Barghan thoughtful. "I'll have to check with my superiors. You understand this is a highly unusual request."

"Of course. Perhaps you could escort me and my partner to some place where we could discuss matters between the two of us."

Barghan snapped a finger and his escorts shepherded Glance and Barnes back up several levels to a small anteroom down the hall from where they had first awakened. The door was shut and both assumed it was locked, likely with guards just outside.

Barnes walked carefully about the room, which was sparsely but comfortably furnished with tables, chairs and a rattan settee. "Can't detect anything but I'll bet a month's pay this place is wired to the hilt."

Glance nodded, feeling the settee cushions. "And probably everything in here's a swarm of some kind, like these cushions." He felt something sting his neck and swatted absent-mindedly at it. When he felt the sting again, he started to slap harder but a faint voice stopped his hand in mid-slap.

"Al...Sergeant Glance...don't swat. It's me. Winger. I'm right at your ear."

With hand motions, Glance told Barnes what was happening. "Colonel—"

"Shhh! Keep your voice down. Almost everything in here is a swarm. Just listen."

For the next few minutes, quietly as if it were a dream, Glance listened to the Colonel's explanation of their next steps.

Half an hour later, the door to the anteroom opened abruptly. It was Barghan.

"I've talked with my superiors. Much to my surprise, they've agreed to your proposal. You'll have to be unconscious, as before. Routine precautions. But I've arranged for you to make a little trip. The Ruling Council has permitted me to offer you an extended visit to our main production site. But first, I'm afraid, you'll have to make a little down payment. Ten percent of your original offer will do nicely, I believe." A chilly, insincere smile emerged on his face.

"Where are we going?"

Barghan held out his own wristpad. "If you please, before we go any further—"

Glance looked at Barnes. The Colonel had warned them this might be needed. With a fake sigh, he activated the pay chip and 'shook' Barghan's hand in such a way as to 'wave' the chip across the read face of the man's wristpad. A beep followed and the transaction was done.

Barghan beamed at what he saw on his own wristpad. "Perfect."

"Now, again, where are you taking us?"

Barghan's hand came out of his pockets. Four tablets lay in the palm. "Please—" he offered them each to Glance and Barnes.

The two troopers did as asked and downed the pills. But straight away, Glance noticed something different in the taste. The effect of the glasseye wasn't as strong. He was wobbly, as before, and sat down to keep from falling down. Barnes looked three shades of green as she also sat down.

A thin voice came to his ears, almost inaudible, as Barghan was motioning his own people to come in.

It was Colonel Winger, seemingly inside his head.

"Don't say anything, Sergeant. I've got loose bots inside your alimentary system. They're hunting down the glasseye molecules right now. You'll feel sleepy and shivery, but that should be all. Just lay back and close your eyes."

Glance and Barnes both did as instructed. Glance tried to make his body as limp as he could, feeling rough hands lifting and muscling him onto some kind of autolitter.

Then the entourage was underway. Out of slitted eyes, Al Glance realized they were heading down, several levels down in some kind of freight lift, down to the geoplane terminal.

Chapter 3: Angels on the Altiplano

Somewhere below the Pacific Ocean

May 12, 2062

2230 hours

Al Glance woke up to a feeling he knew he had had before. The rocking, the faint scraping and grinding, the creaking...he was inside a geoplane, of that he was sure. He opened his eyes, just as the ship seemed to accelerate and the grinding sound died out. Instead of rock scraping and shearing, he felt and heard a steady rush of water, he was sure of it.

Wherever they were, they were no longer subterranean. They were underwater...how deep and headed where, he didn't know.

Glance sat up and realized Angel Barnes was right beside him. They were on some kind of berthing deck, the two of them tucked back to back like babies in a very snug berth compartment.

With a start, he realized they weren't alone.

A faint sparkling mist hovered in the air by the compartment hatch. Colonel Winger. Glance was still having problems with having an angel for a commanding officer, one who could appear as anything at any time.

Winger's voice was tinny, soft, almost a whisper. Barnes sat up abruptly when she saw the angel, hitting her head on a stanchion.

"Finally, you two are awake...I thought you'd never wake up."

Glance winced. "Where are we?"

"Aboard a Red Harmony geoplane and keep your voice down. I penetrated your bodies just before you took the glasseye. I was able to discombobulate the molecules—most of them—to keep you from being out for a day. As to where we are, best I can make out, the geoplane's several thousand meters below the surface of the Pacific."

Barnes was rubbing her noggin. "Not underground?"

"We left Jakarta that way but once we got past New Guinea, we breached the seabed and now we're just a submarine. It's faster." The angel collected itself into a shadowy outline of a face and upper torso, like a child's drawing of a figure.

"We're supposed to be buyers," Glance said. "Well-heeled buyers. Barghan was supposed to be taking us to their main production labs."

"Barghan's onboard," the Winger angel said softly. He stopped, hearing movement just outside the hatch. The angel gathered itself into a dark corner of the berth, just as the hatch was cracked open. A face looked in—it was Barghan himself—but both Glance and Barnes had laid back down and shut their eyes. The hatch closed.

"We're headed almost due east," Winger told them, returning to the ghostly outline he'd displayed before. "One of the advantages of being an angel is that I can penetrate computers, like the plane's nav system, and read qubits directly. From what I could determine, this ship's headed for someplace in the Andes Mountains of northern Chile...we're making a planned stop at some place called Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas...maybe an intermediate exchange point in a few days. Once we're near the surface, I'm making a burst transmission to Quantum Corps with what I've found out." A smirk seemed to form on the 'face' hovering over them. "I'm hoping UNIFORCE can arrange a little greeting party when this ship arrives at its destination."

Glance checked the time on his wristpad. "We've been out for almost a day. What do you want us to do?"

Winger gave that some thought. When an angel was deep in thought, the flashes and pinpricks of light increased in frequency, almost as if you were watching a thought in action. That at least was the popular myth around the Corps, but no one really believed it.

"We want the ship to make its regular run, to wherever it's supposed to be going. The mission of Tectonic Dawn is to roll up any supply networks we can and smash Red Harmony's central production for good...the epidemic of unlicensed fabs and twist and bad nano is getting worse everywhere. You two keep up appearances as big-time buyers. Keep Barghan on the hook, at least for awhile."

"What about you, sir?" Barnes asked.

The Winger angel smiled again, a Cheshire cat smile that sent a slight chill down Barnes' back.

"We need to keep the driver and the borer operator with us. The others—let's say Quantum Corps angels have ways of disabling bad guys you know nothing about. Just leave that to me. By this time tomorrow, we'll be in control of this ship, with the driver and borer operator taking us right into the hornet's nest."

With that, the Winger angel began dispersing and, in a few minutes, was gone.

Barnes looked over at Glance. "Al, I don't know about you but Colonel Winger as an angel gives me the creeps."

"Get used to it. The Corps is trying to integrate more and more of them in regular ops. But I'm like you...is it really such a great idea?"

Marwari Barghan was to be Winger's first target. Resembling little more than dust motes, the Winger angel drifted silently about the geoplane, collecting itself in dark corners as crewmen came and went up and down the gangway. Barghan was finally located and isolated in his own berth, opposite the quantum troopers' compartment, alone and studying a small slate at his tiny desk. The Winger angel drifted in around the hatch seals and collected itself over the bed.

Barghan had the lights down low, save for a single lamp over the desk. He never noticed a faint, diffuse haze of twinkling lights moving inexorably toward the back of his head.

The technique was simple enough in concept, if you were an angel and it was now being taught in special ops training through the Corps and anywhere angels were common in UNIFORCE service.

Every single-configuration entity—that is every Normal human being—breathed air the same way: the alveoli were tiny air sacs in your lungs that take up the oxygen you breathe in and keep your body going. When you breathe in, the alveoli expand to take in oxygen. When you breathe out, the alveoli shrink to expel carbon dioxide. Interfere with this exchange and the Normal dies of oxygen starvation. For an angel composed of potentially trillions of replicating nanobots, such interference was easy.

Winger piloted his own swarm directly into Barghan's nose, causing him to sniffle and cough from time to time. Once inside his nasal tract, the Winger swarm navigated down the throat and perfused into the lungs, until the cloud of bots was soon approaching the alveolar ducts in Barghan's chest.

But straight away, Winger ran into a little problem. Like many high-ranking cartel members, Barghan was protected from nanobotic assault by a halo, an interior swarm of defensive bots that circulated inside his body looking for unwelcome guests, a sort of souped-up immune system.

Before he could replicate enough to begin doing damage, Winger was greeted by a phalanx of halo bots.

This could be bad, he told himself. Real bad. In the distance, probing with acoustic and electromagnetic fingers, he saw the approaching cavalry as a line of whirling barbell-shaped bots closing rapidly on his position. Drawing on weeks of nano-combat training and years of working with ANAD systems, Winger girded himself for the attack.

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

The swarm of enemy halo bots had filtered out like a malevolent fog and was already turning in his direction. Winger realized that one titanic collision was about to occur.

Hope my guys are ready for the big dance.

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

James Tsu and the wunderkind at Quantum Corps' war lab had spent many a sleepless night devising new weapons and effectors for Winger and similar angels to use. He was still getting used to working in this new environment of atoms and molecules, "still learning how to swim," was how he had put it. Now they had given him torpedoes and spear guns and all kinds of doodads to carry while he was still trying to figure out which arm to use.

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

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

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

It worked every time. Winger had in the meantime gone to max replication and the melee was underway. All up and down the lattice of alveolar duct cells, like a collision of bird flocks, the swarms engaged...twisting, slashing, grabbing, zapping. Slowly, using his new maneuvers, Winger was able to push back and contain the enemy swarms.

"It's working, just like training," he told himself and thanked all the hours he had spent with ANAD in the sim tank. "It's working! These bozos are getting smacked and spanked like you wouldn't believe!"

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

Leverage and momentum, that was the key.

Inside of half an hour, the battle seemed to be won. The fog that had drifted over the alveolar ducts seemed to be lifting as the last few bots were swept up. Somehow, with a little luck and lot of smack, he'd been able to disperse the halo bots and quarantine and isolate any stragglers.

Now it was time to go to work on Barghan's alveolar sacs themselves.

It was a simple matter to replicate blocking bots to stuff the critical oxygen exchange at Barghan's alveolar sacs. He already had the config; they'd worked out the details at the war lab at Mesa de Oro. Winger sent the config details to his controller, commanded max reps and Barghan's lung tissues were soon crammed to bursting with bad bots blocking oxygen from being taken up and carbon dioxide from being expelled. Acute oxygen efficiency, that was the technical name for what he was doing. Barghan thrashed and groped and fell heavily to the deck gasping for air, suffocating to death in less than a minute. It was like cramming a ball of cotton down an air duct.

Once the Red Harmony crook was cold and stiff, Winger drifted out of the berth and went looking for other crew members. The geoplane driver and borer operator would be left alone; their skills were needed to get to the cartel's main labs, somewhere in or under the Andes Mountains.

Every other crew member was fair game.

Several hours after he had left them, Angel Barnes noticed a few tendrils of smoke issuing from the other side of their compartment door. She poked Glance, who was engrossed in some game on his wristpad.

"Look...you think--?"

"Colonel, is that you?"

The voice was barely above a whisper. The smoke filled in and accumulated over the desk, backlit from the glow of a small reading lamp. "At your service, troopers. Get yourselves up. We've got a geoplane to take over."

Cautiously, Glance and Barnes left their compartment on B deck and headed aft down the gangway. Winger had already disassembled the locks and penetrated and collapsed the security barrier around the arms locker. The troopers availed themselves of a small army's worth of mag carbines. Magazines were slammed home and firing pins engaged.

With the Winger angel behind them, the troopers headed for the command deck.

The driver and borer operator were both younger cartel operatives, one male and one female. Winger knew them as Kreuz and Cabinda.

On a count of three, the troopers burst onto the command deck and had the cartel crew on the deck, hands behind their heads, in less than twenty seconds.

"What's...who...what do you think--?

Barnes slapped Cabinda's head with the butt of her carbine, knocking several hairpins out of her cornrows.

"We do the thinking now. Get up!"

Slowly, Kreuz and Cabinda got up. "Resume your positions," Glance snarled at them. "Keep to this course. We're in charge now. Do what I tell you and nobody gets hurt."

Kreuz darkened as he went back to his driver's console and gently handled the joysticks. "You won't get away with this...you have to know that."

"We already have." The voice seemed to come from nowhere. It was Winger, the angel swarm barely visible as a faint puff of flickering lights hovering over Kreuz's console. "Yeah, I'm an angel. Don't get any ideas. I'm watching you like a tiger watches dinner. You do anything foolish—like activating that destruct pack in the tail and yeah, I do know about that—and this happens—"

Instantly, Kreuz yelped in pain and withdrew his hands as the angel swarm chewed on a few epithelial cells on his skin. He rubbed the sting with a scowl.

"—don't like that, huh? There's more where that came from...a lot more. Just keep this crate on course and make your waypoints and call-ins on time and everybody'll be happy...and healthy. Got it?"

Kreuz nodded sullenly.

The cartel geoplane continued on a steady course across the south Pacific for another full day, mostly as a very quiet submarine, until time came to ascend closer to the surface and make the planned check-in at Nuku Hiva.

The geoplane planed up to a shallow depth of about fifty meters and a comm buoy was streamed topside. Glance was surprised the cartel hadn't seen fit to equip their geoplanes with quantum couplers.

"Maybe it's a security measure," suggested Barnes. She waited impatiently for the periscope to hiss up in its well, then slapped the handles down and took a peek.

Nuku Hiva stood off on the horizon some five kilometers away, the steep green carpets of her volcanic slopes shrouded in fog. Several outrigger canoes bounded through the surf across her view, their crews armed with spears to catch whatever the sea would give them and a well-appointed cruiser was just backing out of her slip in the marina and coming about to head out to sea.

The Winger angel had assumed a more or less human form—the Colonel called it Config C-7—and hovered in the back of the command deck.

"Make your normal call," he told Kreuz. "And don't try anything either."

Kreuz raised the Red Harmony station on-shore and rattled off their position and status. Word came back to 'proceed as planned." After that, Glance made sure the link was shut down.

"Now I've got a call to make," Winger told them. "And I do have a coupler." The angel drifted out into the gangway and made the connection, through UNIFORCE satellite, with Mesa de Oro and the comm center at the Quartier-General. When he came back onto the command deck, he saw Barnes' questioning face.

"Just arranging a little escort for us," he told them. "All part of the plan. Boundary Patrol's tracking this tub even now. We'll be picking up a few chaperones for the big party in about day."

"Another geoplane?" Glance asked.

Winger smiled, or maybe it was a leer—you couldn't tell with angels. "Two of them. We'll pick them up in about fifteen hours, so I'm told." To Kreuz: "Now, get us underway again. On course and at speed. We've got a hot date waiting for us."

The Red Harmony vessel made the Chilean coastline in three days and began prepping for a dive below the seabed.

Four thousand meters off her port and starboard bows, her Boundary Patrol escorts did likewise.

"Igneous andesite ahead," announced Cabinda from her borer station. Her eyes were heavy from long hours at her console. "I'll have to change configs in the borer bots...this is solid lava flow with embedded tuff and ash deposits. Schist, gneiss and quartzite. Superhard stuff."

The Winger angel hovered over her station like a bad dream. "Do it. And I am watching everything you do."

Cabinda's hands flew over her keyboard. Straight away, the normal grinding and scraping sound of rock sliding by the plane's hull changed timber. Now it deepened in tone and the strain of harder boring was plainly audible.

Winger had just come from a conference call via coupler with the two Boundary Patrol geoplanes, and with General Kincade at Mesa de Oro and UNSAC in Paris. Now that the basic location of the cartel's fab lab was known, the details and timing of an assault plan had been worked out. Winger indicated that Glance and Barnes should meet him in the gangway, where they could talk privately but still keep an eye on the Red Harmony crew.

"Our escorts are geoplanes Prairie Dog and Badger," Winger told them. "Normal crews but augmented with Quantum Corps squads. And two more are on the way, along with several platoons of the Chilean Fuerzas Armadas."

Glance watched the angel form up into a very close analog of a human being, which made him feel a lot better. "You have the lab's location?"

Winger nodded, not all of his facial features tracking perfectly. That made Barnes look away, trying to keep her breakfast down. "I do. I was finally able to read the qubits in the nav system. It's in the northern Chilean Andes, below ground, below a large observatory complex."

"What's the plan, Colonel?"

"Phase 1 is we approach the lab's position from below ground. At H hour, Badger and Prairie Dog use their sonic lens and embedded ANAD units to send acoustic waves into a fracture zone that Boundary Patrol has identified. That should set off a series of seismic tremors and quakes, with the focus right at the lab. With any luck, the lab and its occupants will be smashed and shaken up pretty well for Phase II."

Barnes rubbed her hands together. "Phase II is how we kick atomic ass, I hope."

"Pretty much," Winger explained. "After the tremors subside, Badger, Prairie Dog and this crate—Red Harmony calls her G-7—surface by breaching the bottom floors of the lab. The troops and us exit our ships to finish off the lab from the inside. We render every piece of equipment a pile of smoking debris, take samples for evidence and any prisoners we think might be helpful. Phase III follows, with the Chilean forces arriving by lift and ground to occupy and secure the compound. Especially important: disabling any geoplanes the cartel has on site and any loose fab, nano or twist delivery systems."

"I'm ready," Glance promised. "We know where the arms locker is. I say we grab everything and make ready to charge."

"What about our unwilling guests?" Barnes nodded in the direction of Kreuz and Cabinda.

"Soon as we breach," Winger said, "I'll let fly some MOB net. That should keep 'em wrapped up nice and snug until the Chileans arrive."

Glance said, "Skipper, you mentioned an observatory. Won't this seismic assault in Phase I damage them? Aren't telescopes pretty sensitive instruments?"

"Not to mention expensive," Winger agreed. "Badger and Dog will try to focus their sonic lens to minimize any collateral damage. In the end, UNSAC made the call that shutting down Red Harmony's main fab lab is more important that staring at stars in the sky."

"I'll get what we can carry from the arms locker," Glance said.

"Good," Winger agreed. "Stage everything just outside the lockout. Barnes and I will make sure our friends stay on course and don't try anything stupid."

The assault plan called for their geoplane to briefly surface near the base of the mountain that was Cerro Tololo, in fact, near the entrance to the Inter-American Observatory compound. The first hour of boring took the geoplane into hard basaltic rock layers, to an intermediate depth of a hundred meters below the surface. Seismic charts had indicated a broad layer of the black volcanic rock underlay most of the altiplano and gave the geoplane a solid structure to tunnel through for nearly ten kilometers north.

Somewhere below Elqui River, a few kilometers southeast of La Serena, the geos had determined that the basaltic layer thinned out, abutting inclusions of quartzite and shale, with magma channels embedded in the rock.

It was this transition zone, a subduction zone according to the geos, that posed the greatest risk to transit by the geoplane. The entire region was crisscrossed with fragile lava tubes and fracture faults in the rock, evidence (said the analysis) of billions of years of strain brought on by the collision of the Nazca and South American tectonic plates.

It was there that the G-7 would have to slow down and sound carefully ahead, taking extreme care not to let the borer loosen too much rock.

Even the slightest weakening could lead to a complete rupture and a cascade of rock plates shifting.

Johnny Winger had no wish to tempt Fate again.

"Borer on line at nearly one hundred percent," Cabinda reported. "We're chewing through this rock like it was butter...a blistering three kilometers an hour." The Red Harmony BOP now seemed resigned to whatever would happen.

Winger acknowledged the report. "Tread system status?"

Kreuz checked the drive. "Tread drive engaged and operating fine...no anomalies."

"Clear sailing from here," Winger said. He eyed the densitometer on the main panel. It read slightly more than a hundred meters below the surface. According to the profiler, G-7 was traversing layers of extremely hard igneous rock, richly veined with inclusions of iron and magnesium. The layers formed a dense mass of some of the hardest rock on earth, in a zone of tremendous pressure caused by the northward movement of the Nazca plate against the South American plate, a zone of grinding force and constant shifting and slipping.

It was also a zone of near constant seismic activity.

G-7 plowed ahead for several hours, making steady progress along the first leg of their course. Four hours after the geoplane had entered the approach zone, Al Glance announced a new navigation hack off the quantum coupler signal coming from Singapore base.

"We're across the central cordillera now," he reported. "Or rather underneath it. Inside target zone for final ascent...and on course."

Glance shivered at the prospect of what they were about to do and collected himself even tighter. He motioned to Barnes, perusing on her wristpad, a makeshift map Q2 had downloaded of the observatory complex from Quantum Corps Intelligence. "Take over, will you? I'm heading aft to see what's in the Stores lockers. When's our first turn?"

"The summit road to the observatory...two hours and twenty minutes away, if we stay on course at this speed. Profiler says we've got hard basalt all the way."

"Good for tunneling," Glance said as he ducked down through the access tube. "You want anything from the fridge?"

"Negative. Just get back up here as soon as you can. Colonel likes having extra eyes on the densitometer and the profiler. We may yet have to slam on the brakes before we get to the target... maybe alter course."

Glance disappeared down the access tube. He decided to check out the rest of the Red Harmony ship and grab whatever might seem useful.

He stopped halfway down the gangway. A perceptible shudder had shaken the normally smooth thrummm of the geoplane's treads. Before he could continue, the rolling shudders grew into a sudden jerk, as G-7 ground to a halt. The treads went silent, but only for a few seconds.

"Oh, shit—we're moving...I feel it. We're sliding, left...left and downward—"

Just then, the hull was slammed hard as if they had hit something and the screech of tortured metal sounded from somewhere aft. The geoplane shook violently, knocking Glance against the side of the gangway tunnel. He scrambled back up to the command deck.

"Cover yourselves...it's a fault!" Angel Barnes crawled on her hands and knees and scrambled forward to the main console, as the pitching and shaking grew more violent, as if the geoplane were caught in an underground landslide. Hard bangs slammed the hull as the tremor amplitude increased. They were taking a hell of a beating and Glance hauled himself up the tube as fast as the pitching deck would allow. He burst onto B deck and was immediately thrown against the bulkhead.

"Secure the borer!" the Winger angel had already yelled out.

"Already done!" Kreuz came back. "Treads are off line too—"

They all held on for a few seconds as G-7 shimmied and shook like a wet dog. Then, as suddenly as it had started, the violent tremor stopped. The compartment was silent, the air thick with dust, as the geoplane hull creaked and groaned under renewed stress.

"Just your average strike-slip fault movement," muttered Kreuz, holding his breath and scanning his profiler.

"Damage report!" Winger had been less affected by the tremor than the Normals.

Bit by bit, the reports came back: no significant damage, a few cuts, bruises and lacerations but nobody seriously hurt.

Cabinda checked her instruments. "No flags or anomalies. No cautions or warnings. Looks like we're good to go."

"Where are we now, Skipper?" asked Barnes.

Winger drifted over, through some faint dust, and consulted the profiler and stratigraphic maps. "One hundred and six meters below the surface. Directly below Cerro Tololo and the observatory."

"Injun Country," said Barnes softly.

"Start the ascent," Winger ordered.

Operation Tectonic Dawn was about to enter its final approach phase.

The ascent came off without a glitch. Coordinating with Badger and Prairie Dog, G-7 tunneled upward on a course of zero seven five degrees, through hard igneous rock layers, at an average speed of one kilometer per hour.

The stratigraphic and topo maps all indicated the same underground terrain for the borer to chew through: amorphous basaltic lava smashed northward and compressed over hundreds of millions of years along the margins of the great Nazca and South American plates. Extremely hard and dense, composed of a geochemical stew of magnesium and calcium oxides, the rock layers made perfect tunneling material, save for the fault and fracture zones, which were unstable enough to try and avoid.

Angel Barnes took a navigation hack off the quantum signal grid broadcast by Singapore base and announced her findings.

"Sounding structures directly above us, Colonel. Twenty meters and some change."

"Show me," he said.

She pointed to the profiler. It showed a simulated elevation view of the rock layers surrounding the geoplane, overlaid on a live, high-resolution sat image of the terrain seen from space. Their position was indicated with a flashing star.

"We're here—"she pointed with her finger. "That appears to be the bottom cavern of the complex, dead center of all the thermal and EM signatures that Q2 triangulated. Red Harmony Incorporated. I make the distance at about twenty meters."

Winger nodded. "Stop the ascent. Rock layers?"

Glance checked the stratigraphy maps. "Pyroxene and feldspar, mostly. Same stuff we've been boring though for the last six hours. There is a small fracture in one plate...looks harmless enough."

"Give it a wide berth," Winger ordered. "I don't want any tremors now...at least, not until we're in place and ready."

Cabinda, the DSO, complied and steered the geoplane toward to the surface. The deck inclined upward ever so slightly.

The next phase of the mission would be the riskiest. Once the geoplane had reached the jump-off point, near the surface, Winger would command the borer to cease operation. From this point, he figured to spall off a few ANAD bots from his own arms, which would then be re-configged and commanded to exit the hull and form a protective barrier around the ship, in an attempt to shield the assault team from what would come next.

When everything was in readiness, the mission plan called for ANADs from the Boundary Patrol planes to bore a series of small pilot tunnels radiating out from the jump-off point, in an attempt to generate a severe earthquake at a tectonic focal point that had been identified below the base. If calculations made by Q2 and the geos were correct, the energy from this artificially induced tremor would nearly destroy the Red Harmony installation and probably every other standing structure atop Cerro Tololo. The astronomers weren't going to like that.

The trick was to place the geoplanes and their assault teams where the seismic shock waves wouldn't also destroy them. If the network of fracture zones and the pilot holes worked as calculated, a series of tremors up to magnitude 8.5 could be expected to roll through the surrounding valley. Some damage was expected south among the hills overlooking the cordillera and La Serena, but the geos estimated that proper focusing of the seismic energy would minimize that.

Winger had no intention of letting them be trapped in any sliding rock layers when that happened. In fact, contrary to the mission plan, he had already decided to surface the geoplane completely and try to ride out the tremors hunkered down somewhere in a nearby valley.

"Approaching the surface now..." Cabinda reported. G-7's deck now angled upward sharply. "Twenty meters...now, ten meters—"

Winger checked the time. "It's just after midnight topside. According to the maps and sat views, we should be coming up in a ravine about half a klick southwest of the summit."

Moments later, the geoplane lurched forward and her forward speed suddenly dropped off.

"Surfacing...!" Kreuz said.

"All stop...secure the borer, secure the tread drive. Now we wait for the big show."

G-7 squatted like a black metal armadillo in the lee of a rocky cliff, huddled against the steep flanks of a rugged mountain known to the locals as Zapog. It was dark and windy, dust swirling about the surfaced geoplane in gusts and squalls, as Winger threw open the hatch and drifted down to the ground. Right behind him, Barnes dropped to the dirt and set up a quick defensive perimeter, quickly boresighting and registering HERF and mag weapons on nearby peaks barely visible in the storm. Inside on the command deck, Glance kept a careful eye on the two Red Harmony crewmembers.

Winger took a hack off the navsats and pinpointed their position, which he ported to the crewnet. Glance and Barnes both soon saw the coordinates on their wristpads.

"What now, Skipper?" asked Barnes. She was sighted in on her HERF gun, covering her assigned sector of the perimeter.

"We wait. Any contacts? Any evidence we've been detected?"

Barnes checked with Glance inside. "Nothing. No EM, only background thermals, not even any quantum wake. Acoustics indicates the wind direction may be shifting...more to the southwest. Weathersats say there's a front headed for the valley."

"No nano threats?"

"Negative. The board is clean."

Winger said, "Then we may have achieved what we wanted...complete tactical surprise."

"Aren't we kind of exposed up here?" asked Barnes.

"It's a risk we'll have to take. We've got about three hours before Badger and Dog are in position."

For nearly two hours, G-7 sat alone and motionless in an icy cold, wind-blasted valley a kilometer from the Red Harmony base. Aboard the surfaced geoplane, Johnny Winger waited tensely for the big show to begin.

Finally, word came from Lieutenant John Jellicoe aboard geoplane Prairie Dog.

"ANAD reporting swarm now in position at the following coordinates..." Jellicoe rattled off a stream of numbers. Winger watched as Barnes plotted the position of the swarm on the stratigraphic map Glance had ported from the main console inside.

"Very well, Dog," Winger reported back over the coupler circuit. He knew that nearly a kilometer of solid rock separated them from the swarm. "Stand by...." To Barnes, "what's the verdict?"

The SDC2 looked up. "Right on the button. He's situated between these two faults, with a major fracture zone we plotted right below him. Red Harmony doesn't know it but they're sitting on a geological time bomb."

Winger smiled. "Then it's time to light the fuse." He and Barnes climbed back aboard G-7 and spoke to Jellicoe. "Dog, you and Badger...commence the operation."

"Prairie Dog understands...commencing solid-phase destructive disassembly...hold on to your hats, folks."

Moments later, a vast, deeply felt rumbling could be heard and felt up and down the valley. A great crashing roar occurred as landslides and avalanches pummeled the ground from the high slopes around the parked geoplane.

For protection, Winger decided it was best to submerge G-7 about fifty meters below ground.

The geoplane's treads were engaged and her nose angled slightly down as the borer plowed through the ice and dust and bit into the hard, frozen ground. In moments, they were below the surface, crawling forward toward the rendezvous coordinates.

The tremors had started, a continuous wave of tectonic plate motion and upheaval, shattering everything within a few kilometers of Cerro Tololo and its great observatory domes.

Soon, the battle at Red Harmony's base would be joined.

After a few minutes of quakes and tremors, Winger gave the assault order. He told Cabinda, the Red Harmony driver: "Bring us up to the bottom of the first level. Maximum speed. I want to crash through with the borer cooking like mad."

"If you say so," she replied. She manipulated her controls and all aboard G-7 felt the deck angled sharply upward.

The plan was to breach the bottom floor of the first cavern level, crashing right into the cavern and begin the assault that way. Barnes read off the distance.

"Ten meters, Skipper."

Winger dispersed his own angel config slightly in preparation for what was coming. "Brace for impact. Breaching in sixty seconds. Squad order on exit...make sure all fire lanes are covered."

The impact, when it came, jarred the geoplane as if a giant fist had slammed into her nose. Loose gear was thrown violently about all the cabins. The ship's hull creaked and groaned and G-7 slowed nearly to a stop.

Inside Level One of the cartel's compound, the floor of the cavern suddenly erupted in an explosion of dirt, tile and furniture. Bodies went flying and shouts and confusion and chaos enveloped the huge cave. The geoplane came to a halt with her nose and front decks jutting above the floor, like a giant mole had burrowed up from below and stopped to look around.

Moments later, Badger and Prairie Dog joined them in breaching the floor.

Hatches swung back and the troopers of Tectonic Dawn leapt out into the smoke and debris still raining down from above.

But before he exited G-7, Winger did as he'd earlier promised. Brusquely, he ordered Cabinda and Kreuz out of their seats.

"Kneel on the deck, and fold your arms."

Reluctantly, the two complied, their eyes anxious, fearing the worst.

With no further warning, the Winger angel discharged already-configged bots from his hands. Initially unseen, the bots drifted over to the Red Harmony crewmembers and began spinning a mobility obstruction barrier, a mesh cocoon, around both of them.

The two fought back, but it was hopeless. The MOB swarm solidified and filled in, drawing a tighter and tighter enclosure around the squirming bodies, which soon keeled over in a thrashing, groaning heap.

When it was done and the MOB net was secure, Winger said, "That should keep you nice and snug, at least until the cavalry gets here." With that, he joined Barnes and Glance outside the lockout on F deck.

Glance was first to drop out. He swung his mag carbine around in an arc, letting its sensors display any likely targets. There were three crossing his sector. "Clearing left...I've got three!" he yelled. He cycled the carbine and let fly a controlled burst of magnetic loops. Two targets went down. The third scuttled away into the far recesses of the cave.

Barnes was next. She leaped out and came up scanning. "Clear center!' she yelled.

"Clear right!" came Winger's voice, last out of the geoplane.

The rest of the assault force from Badger and Prairie Dog quickly piled out of their planes and started probing through thick dust.

The commandeered Red Harmony geoplane had breached right through the ground floor of the complex, with a third of her hull showing in the gloom. It was apparent to all the troopers that the tremors and quakes generated by ANAD before ingress had done considerable damage. Wall partitions had crumpled into heaps. Furniture and shelves and platforms had collapsed. Equipment and cabling were strewn across the floor of the vast cavern at the very base of Cerro Tololo. Chunks of rock and rubble rained down on the troopers as they spread out and reconnoitered the floor.

In seconds, they came to a stone staircase hewn out of the rock walls.

"Main ingress route, looks like," Glance muttered.

"Same as the schematic..." Winger said. "Q2's right on target, so far."

According to the plans, the staircase tunneled down deep into the bowels of the compound, connecting five levels with a vast open complex in the very heart of Cerro Tololo Mountain.

"Where is everybody?" Glance asked. "I'd have figured Red Harmony would be shielding every possible entrance."

"Maybe it's a trap," Barnes said, uneasily.

"Let's go--" Winger gave the order. "Up the stairs."

A moment later, Barnes saw an instrument twitch on her wristpad. "Uh oh--pressure pulse. Somebody...or something's ahead."

"I see it..."Winger was drifting ahead cautiously, still configged para-human. "Big spike...moving a lot of air molecules. People, most likely. More than one--"

"Disperse, sir?" Glance asked.

Winger shook his head. "Guard detail, most likely."

"They may have detected us..." Barnes suggested.

And they had, for at that very moment, four guards had swept down the stairs, mag guns drawn, scattering the formation for a moment, notified of a breach at Level 1. If they got there--if they saw the MOBnet--the whole place might come alive--

"I'm executing a clampdown!" Winger yelled. "I'll smother 'em so they can't breathe!" He signaled DPS to get ready in case they came under fire, then shivered off a stream of bots from his arm. "I am replicating max rate...carbenes and radicals at the ends...blanketing the place!"

In seconds, the air itself burned with the pressure of exponentially dividing ANAD replicants; a heavy, searing weight pressing down on everything in sight.

Deeper in the tunnel, a small force of Red Harmony guards tried to scream.

The defenders, unable to react, clawed at their lungs and faces and staggered back from the stairs, pitching backward, ears and eyes bleeding from the pressure, suffocated by ANAD.

It was all over in less than a minute.

Winger waited until the clampdown was lifted and, on command, ANAD began to disperse. "Put the MOB on 'em," he told Barnes. "Keep 'em secure right there. I don't want any more alarms going off."

Corporal Barnes tapped the commands on her own wristpad. "Done, sir." At that moment, as she approached the writhing guards, her recognizer chirped. Faces and data tags came up on her eyepiece. "Target match, sir! I've got a recog match...." She scooted over to a squirming form by the wall. "This one...recog says it's R-6."

Winger came up. "R-6? That's Souvranamh... Theo Souvranamh. Member of the Ruling Council...we couldn't be that lucky. Open it up."

Barnes unzipped the top of the MOBnet. A haggard, pale face, framed with a black goatee and tousled black hair, glared up at them. It was Souvranamh.

Winger could hardly believe their good fortune. A member of Red Harmony's Ruling Council would be an intelligence gold mine. "Okay...it's a match. Somehow, we bagged R-6. Take him into custody and get this bag back over to Lieutenant Juranek; he's leading the Quantum Corps squad out of Badger."

Two troopers hustled off and dragged the protesting Thai neurotraficante aboard the geoplane.

A signal chirped in Winger's coupler. His processor spat out the details: "Signals analysis indicates main production centers are at this level, heading one five five...thirty meters.

Winger peered through the thick dust. The remnants of a small enclosure were barely visible. "Barnes and Glance...come with me."

They zigzagged their way across the vast cavern, dodging falling rock and boiling dust, even as the floor rumbled. Tremors continued to shake the complex as underlying rock plates settled and shifted.

Outside the control center...what was left of it, Winger halted their advance. "ANAD, is this it? The main lab?"

***Affirmative, Skipper...detecting residual decoherence wake signals emanating from sources inside***

"That's good enough for me." Winger swung his HERF carbine around. "Pulverize it to dust!"

Winger, Barnes and Glance lit off their HERF and mag weapons, hosing down the wreckage and anything inside with thunderclaps of rf and magnetic loops. The bursts boomed and reverberated off the cavern walls. In seconds, the production control room was a pile of smoking rubble.

"Let's go!" Winger ordered. "We've got to get topside and kill the defensive pulser arrays too. Q2 says they're on top of the mountain...near the observatory."

They headed cautiously up the rock stairs along the far side of the cavern and came to another cavern one level above.

The place was a vast cave, hewn right out of the bowels of the mountain. Rows of growth tanks lined the floor, wall to wall, with huge leafy plants suspended in each tank. It was the scope works, all right. Racks of empty fabricator shells and swarmbot containment chambers lined the walls. The mother lode and Red Harmony's main bank, all in one. At the far end of the cavern, a pocket of technicians struggled to get up, stunned and gasping for air from the clampdown.

Glance saw them first. "Enemy ahead...three o'clock...I count four--"

"Weapons?"

"None that I can see, sir."

Winger checked the time. Fifteen minutes. They'd made better progress than he'd hoped for. "MOB 'em. Secure the whole cave. Let's go hunting."

From her position behind the rest, Barnes acknowledged the order. With her own wristpad, she took control of a small portion of the ANAD force that Winger had detached, accepting replicants as fast as the master could slam atoms together and churn them out. She separated the force and tapped out a command sequence...in seconds, the swarm under her control had reconfigured itself. A fine smoky mist formed overhead, oscillating in and out of view. Barnes took a fix on the Red Harmony techs and fed the coordinates to her brood. The smoke pulsed and throbbed like a thing alive, then floated over and descended on the enemy, forming a Mobility Obstruction Barrier around the helpless group. ANAD assemblers interlocked into an amorphous gel, cordoning off the technicians in a flexible prison cell of tightly bound assemblers. Several techs clawed at the MOB, to no avail. They were steadily forced down to the cavern floor and immovably secured there by the ANAD screen.

"MOB in place, Colonel."

"Very well...Al, what's up?"

Glance had caught sight of something, a twitch in one of ANAD's sensors. "Sounding pressure change. Uh-oh...sounding heat pulse, big time heat pulse...looks like the cavalry's coming--"

Even on the grainy image of ANAD's visual element, the throbbing mass forming in one corner of the cavern was evident. It boiled out of the shadows and swept forward, closing fast to engage the quantum troopers.

"Stay with 'em! Hold your position--"

Glance's force took the full brunt of the assault.

"Oh, Colonel...looks...like...I...GOT...MECHS!" The sergeant's fingers flew over the keyboard and control sticks. "Making a cage...all effectors out max...I am in auto-maneuver..." He punched out commands, setting up his group of assemblers with full shields of fullerene arms, each one bristling with sticky molecules, juiced with torqued bonds, ready to zap all comers. Even as he configged the swarm, Winger piloted his own group away from the melee, trying to flank the enemy, pinch off the assault from both sides, a pincer movement at atomic scale.

The boiling swarm of Red Harmony mechs closed with ANAD and flung themselves with fury against Glance's shield.

The battle lasted five minutes but ANAD was equal to the task. The assault swarm waded into the middle of the Red Harmony formation and, with Glance and Winger in command, slammed the enemy mechs with everything. Bond disrupters fizzed and crackled in the air and the troopers hunkered down to the floor while combat raged over their heads. It was like two stormfronts colliding, complete with flashes of lightning and thunder from the rumbling floor below them.

"Jeez," muttered Barnes. "It's like being inside a monster's belly."

"Yeah, girl," said a nearby trooper from Prairie Dog "...a monster with indigestion."

When the assault had petered out, Winger got himself re-configged and the troopers worked their way methodically up the rock stairs, sanitizing one cavern level after another. The scope works and labs on Level 3 were followed by more scope works on Level 2 and finally, by a pile of rubble and rock on Level 1 that had once been the Security barracks.

Emerging onto the top level, beamfire suddenly erupted across the cavern.

"How many?" Winger yelled on the crewnet.

Barnes was defiladed beside him, both of them behind a rockpile. "'Fly says half a dozen, maybe more. Multiple thermals...some mechs ahead too, sir. We don't want to get trapped here."

"And the pulser emitters are above us. We've got to get to that observatory on top of the mountain."

Another series of violent tremors and quakes shook the mountain. That was all the opening the troopers needed.

Winger hand signaled several troopers from Juranek's force, the Badger crew that had joined the assault, to flank the ruins left and right. Suppressing fire on my mark, he whispered over the crewnet. Forms and shapes scurried off through the thick dust, dodging lances of light as the Red Harmony troops cut loose again with beamfire. Huge gouts of rock erupted from the walls behind them as the beams struck home, showering them with rubble and dust.

Winger worked with Glance to hack out a better config for their deployed ANAD. "Grabbers here—" he pointed to a diagram on his wristpad, "—and here. Extra disrupters on top of the casing...he's got a spot." They got the config squared away, sent it off to ANAD and moments later, the dust overhead glowed with the fires of atoms being stripped, bonds being broken and new structure being slammed together. When it was done, ANAD reported ready.

***New config laid in, Skipper...let me at 'em***

"ANAD...go!"

The swarm eased forward on picowatt propulsors and swept across the ruins of the barracks, smothering the Red Harmony troops and quickly engaging a defensive shield of mechs. Flashes of light strobed through the dust, while more tremors jostled the cavern and rock rained down on everybody. Winger watched over top of their rockpile as a furball fight erupted. The troopers held off HERF fire but pumped round after round of magnetic loops into the melee, scattering debris everywhere.

Glance was exultant, pumping a fist behind the rockpile. "We slammed 'em, Colonel! Nice work on that config...Q2 was right on the money."

"Yeah," added Barnes from nearby. "Good intel's even better than a fully charged mag carbine."

"We've got to get upstairs to that pulser array," Winger decided. "ANAD's got the bastards pinned down here. Al, take a squad of Juranek's troops and get topside. My eyepiece is telling me the emitters are on the southwest face of the mountain, just at or around the observatory dome up there."

"Will do," Glance told him. He got on the crewnet. "Suarez, Willows, Concepcion...you're with me."

The four of them scooted off and were lost in the dust, a mixed squad from Badger, Prairie Dog and their own 'borrowed' geoplane.

After some hurried scouting and reconnoitering, the squad found a small tunnel that led to a service entrance. The tunnel opened on to the top of Cerro Tololo, near a broken-down security shack. The dusty access road up to the observatory complex was empty. It was night, dark with a sky full of stars, gleaming hard and bright in the thin mountain air.

They crept forward, sensing motion in the bushes nearby.

"Sergeant, look out!"

From behind the white dome of the Blanco telescope that perched atop the mountain, a squad of Red Harmony guards had breached the squad's camou field, slicing through the mesh in a flurry of arms and legs and shouts. The muzzles of laser carbines flashed in the faint light. Beam fire erupted across the ground.

Glance ducked as the first volley narrowly missed him, carving out a seam in a boulder field behind. Rock and debris exploded, flying everywhere.

Concepcion and Barnes dove for cover behind the boulders. Barnes rolled, found an opening between outdoor storage sheds and squeezed off a few coil-gun rounds. The programmable kinetic slugs slammed into the lead Red Harmony guards before detonating. The concussion was deafening as smoke and body parts scattered.

"Keep 'em pinned down!" Glance shouted. "I'm trying to help out--"

"Nothing left to pin down, Sergeant," Concepcion called back. Her aim had been true, sighting in the rounds after slaving the slugs to her tracker.

"Superfly's got nasties all over the place," Willows watched the remote infrared take on her own eyepiece. "All over the top of the mountain...they'll be on our perimeter in no time, unless we get some help from ANAD."

"ANAD's busy, Corporal." Glance told her. He brushed himself off, climbed back to his feet and launched his own embedded ANAD from a shoulder capsule, piloting his own swarm right into the heart of the melee.

"Whatever you are," he muttered to himself, "you act a helluva lot like ANAD." He worked the config controller, at the same time pulsing in and out of contact range with the main enemy group, slashing and weaving, scrunching up atoms and twisting bonds to zap the bastards with their own electron charge.

Keep coming, you atomic assholes...keep on coming...right into my hands--

He bored right into the heart of the enemy horde, slashing left and right.

Glance drove ANAD deep into the formation, a frontal attack just like Colonel Winger had often shown them in training. He cruised in at flank speed, propulsors whining, and seized a phosphor group off the nearest mech, twisting atoms until the bond broke. Liberating thousands of electron volts, ANAD's disrupter zapped the mech and shattered its outer shell, ripping off probes left and right. The Red Harmony assemblers shuddered and spun with the pulse, then re-engaged to fight off another bond snap. Under the shadow of the observatory dome, trillions of ANAD replicants duplicated the same tactic.

The air burned with furious combat.

Glance was exultant at the maneuver. "Eat my carbene effectors, you jerks!"

Barnes grinned in spite of herself, deftly steering through the floating detritus of shredded assemblers. "Gotcha..." She changed config, realizing she had to grab one of the mechs before it was completely disassembled. "...right with your pants down."

The tiny squad beat back the Red Harmony assault and kept them pinned down with Glance's ANAD re-configged into a defensive screen. Once a path was clear for them, Willows and Concepcion went probing around the other side of the observatory and found the platform containing the pulser emitters soon enough, wedged into a small crevice below the dome opening on the observatory's west side.

That's no telescope inside, Glance told himself.

They scrambled across the rocky escarpment, even as Red Harmony mechs probed the ground around them. Seconds later, the first contact occurred as the ANAD barrier ran out of steam. A thick black horde darkened the night sky and trillions of enemy mechs poured through the gap.

"Fry 'em!" Willows yelled back to Concepcion. Willows re-sighted her HERF gun and lit off a charge. The thunderclap of the discharge sent searing waves of hot air roaring across the ground. The two troopers flattened themselves against the mountain top, letting the pulse pass. It was like riding out a tornado.

For the next few minutes, they fought a series of running duels with Red Harmony's flying mechs, all the way to the very edge of Cerro Tololo. Below and behind them, the night time altiplano gleamed with scores of campfires, twisting columns of smoke and the glow of several small pueblos.

"More bots!" yelled Willows as Concepcion leveled her mag weapon at the pulser emitters. "Here they come...hit the deck!"

Wanda Willows swatted at the clouds of stinging mechs closing on their position. Red Harmony had discharged clouds of the mechs around the top of the mountain, hoping to penetrate the ANAD barrier and snare the intruders before they could escape.

"Fire now, girl!" she yelled. "Blast that thing so we can get the hell out of here!"

Concepcion pumped round after round into the emitter platform. The dishes, swivels and mounts exploded in a shower of debris and metal shards. But the Red Harmony mechs had already closed on their positions and Concepcion was quickly engulfed in the cloud of bugs.

"AAARRRGGGHHH!! Get 'em off...get 'em off me\--!" Concepcion dove to the ground, swatting and flailing as Willows scrambled to help her. She batted and swatted and fired off a few HERF bursts but the bugs were everywhere, replicating like crazy and she had to back off...there wasn't anything she could do and it made her mad and crazy at the same time. She saw Concepcion go down, buried in an avalanche of bugs, then the mountain top shook again as more tremors hit and rock cascaded down on them from the cliffs behind, brick and pieces of glazed tile from the observatory's swiveling dome and superstructure.

"Shit!" Willows screamed at the top of her lungs. She hosed down the writhing form of Concepcion but it was too late, already half a leg had been disassembled and the rest wouldn't be pretty. There was nothing she could do for the poor corporal and when Colonel Winger's voice crackled over the crewnet, ordering all hands to assemble at their geoplanes, she flung down her HERF rifle in disgust and dove for the tunnel they had come up.

Wanda Willows ran, stumbled blindly and practically fell through five levels of stone steps, nearly losing her balance once when a particularly violent tremor shook the whole mountain. She made Level 1 and saw the assault force humping it toward Badger and Prairie Dog, even as part of the cavern ceiling let go and seams of rock and boulders tumbled across the floor.

Winger and Lieutenant Juranek counted off their troops one by one as they boarded the geoplanes. "Two casualties," Juranek reported when all were inside. "Both mine: Shania Concepcion and Miros Lukasc. Shania was with Willows topside. They smoked the pulser emitter but enemy mechs swarmed them at the same time. Concepcion didn't make it."

Winger was grim. "Our prisoner just got hauled aboard. He's secured on D Deck, still MOB'bed. Theo Souvranamh...can you believe it? Ruling Council. He won't have a brain cell left once Q2 gets through with him."

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

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

Winger and Juranek were the last to board Badger. They took positions on the command deck. Juranek checked the instruments.

"Borer online?"

BOP1, Troy Erromango, replied "Online and cooking at full spread, Lieutenant."

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

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

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

Moments later, Badger had submerged into the borehole from which she had come and was gone. Geoplane Prairie Dog followed down her own borehole. Huge boulders and seams of rock cascaded down and the ceiling of Level 1 started to slump.

It wouldn't be long before Cerro Tololo and the Inter-American Observatory collapsed in on itself completely.

"No more star gazing from this mountain," Winger said to no one in particular.

Juranek agreed. "Quite a front for Red Harmony, don't you think? Big astronomical research center, with the cartel's main lab tunneled out directly below them. Who would have thought?"

Both commanders held on as Badger inclined more steeply into the rocky plateau below the mountain, her borer head melting and chewing its way through schist, gneiss and quartzite strata.

Juranek was thoughtful. "The Chileans will have quite a mess to clean up, once the tremors and quakes stop. I just hope, with Souvranamh in custody and the cartel's main production site destroyed, we can get on top of this fab and twist epidemic. This should help Bioshield a—"

His answer was interrupted by the chime of the coupler command circuit. Juranek read off the flash message, frowned and signaled Winger over. The angel perused the message.

...Boundary Patrol geoplane Vole detected two subterranean targets—probable geoplane signature—heading east from Cerro Tololo, depth six hundred meters. Pursued as far as transform fault F-21, below Buenos Aires and Rio de la Plata, but lost contact...targets' last detected heading was due east, below Atlantic seabed....

"I don't know, Lieutenant," Winger said glumly. "I don't think these fab lords give up so easily. I don't think we've seen the last of Red Harmony. Remember we still haven't found their headquarters. Now, with this—"

Neither of them could know that at that very moment, a new project called Free Fall had already been approved by Red Harmony's Ruling Council. Dealing with this yet-to-be discovered threat would soon occupy the troopers of Quantum Corps in a desperate race against time.

END

About the Author

Philip Bosshardt is a native of Atlanta, Georgia. He recently retired but worked for nearly 25 years for a large company that makes products everyone uses...just check out the drinks aisle at your grocery store. He's been happily married for over 28 years. He's also a Georgia Tech graduate in Industrial Engineering. He loves water sports in any form and swims 3 miles a week in anything resembling water. He and his wife have no children. They do, however, have one terribly spoiled Pekingese dog named Chance.

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

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

Download the next exciting episode of Quantum Troopers Return from Smashwords.com and other fine ebook retailers. It's called 'Free Fall.' Available on March 6, 2020.

