 
# Time Jumpers

Episode 10: First Jump Squadron

### Published by Philip Bosshardt at Smashwords

### Copyright 2019 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. Time Jumpers is a series of 20,000-30,000-word episodes detailing the adventures of Ultrarch-Jump Captain Monthan Dringoth and his crew and their experiences as time jumpers with the Time Guard.

  2. Each episode will be about 40-60 pages, approximately 25,000 words in length.

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

  4. There will be 12 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: Time Guard must defeat the enemy Coethi and stop their efforts to disrupt or eliminate Uman settlements in the Galactic Inner Spiral and Lower Halo sectors of Uman space.

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

Episode # Title Approximate Upload Date

  1. 'Marooned in Voidtime' February 1, 2019

  2. 'Keaton's World' March 1, 2019

  3. 'A Small Navigation Error' April 15, 2019

  4. 'Cygnus Rift' May 3, 2019

  5. 'The Time Guard' May 31, 2019

  6. 'First Light Corridor June 28, 2019

  7. 'Hapsh'm and the First Coethi Encounter' August 2, 2019

  8. 'Operation Galactic Hammer' August 30, 2019

  9. 'Byrd's Draconis' September 27, 2019

  10. 'First Jump Squadron' November 1, 2019

  11. 'Planck Time' November 29, 2019

  12. 'The Time Twister' January 3, 2020

# Chapter 1: "Reprieve"

"Build on failure. Use it as a stepping stone. Don't forget the past but don't dwell on it."

Johnny Cash

Jumpship Cygnus

Time Stream: T-001

T-date: T-001-4-15

(From the Archives of the U.A. Time Guard):

The existence of the Coethi became known to Humans in the 22nd century. Discovery of a mobile formation of swarm elements moving through the lower Galactic Halo some 65,000 light years from Urth, was detected by Farside Observatory in 2255 and confirmed by observation from Frontier Corps Station T (Titan orbit at Saturn) in 2260 CE.

The nature of the formation was hotly debated for several decades until it became apparent that the formation was on an intercept course with our solar system and the encounter would happen in the middle of the 28th century (on or about 2770 CE).

The first manned interstellar flight occurred in 2215. This was the Aurora mission to Proxima Centauri.

Rapid expansion into near-Earth interstellar space became possible with hyper drives late 22nd century.

2302 CE: More precise surveillance of Coethi mother swarm placed its centroid location in the lower Galactic Halo, known as Halo Alpha. Distance from Urth/solar system about 75,000 light years.

2640-2692 CE: Three hundred years later, new developments in temporal science and engineering led to technological breakthroughs allowing Umans to travel through time for limited excursions. Not long after these developments, Umans learned of a threat in the Inner Spiral and Lower Halo sectors of the galaxy. The race of machine-like swarm entities known as the Coethi had also developed a means of conducting temporal operations and were beginning to alter time streams around outlying Uman settlements in such a way as to eliminate these Uman settlements from ever having been established...changing the very nature of space-time and the historical record.

2766 CE: The first direct encounter (in Time Stream TS-001) between humans and Coethi occurred during the 'Incident at Hapsh'm,' where one detachment mission (Operation Galactic Hammer) saw a small detachment of jumpships....

URME, the Unit Reserve Memory Entity, closed up his link to the Archives as soon as he heard Captain Dringoth's voice over the comm.

"All hands...prep for jump and all call. Combat jump commences in one minute."

Almost as soon as they started, the court-martial proceedings for Jump Commander Nathan Golich had been halted. T2 had detected an imminent threat to time stream T-001 and Urth itself; indications were that a significant Coethi force might soon pop out of voidtime right on the outer edge of the Urth-Sol system, just beyond the Sentinel Line and Sedna Base.

Golich received a temporary reprieve from the Judge-Advocate General's office and was immediately reassigned to the crew of jumpship Cygnus. Cygnus was ordered to jump to Sedna Base along with jumpships Majoris and Andromeda. Golich would technically be in the custody of Dringoth himself. The force was to be called 1st Jump Squadron.

Inside the ship, working with his old crewmates, Golich was careful to be correct and by-the-book in all matters. He wasn't sure how a deserter would be received, even one nominally the ship's XO.

When all stations reported ready, Dringoth took a deep breath, flexing his fingers like a pianist. Golich saw the gesture out of the corner of his eyes and just shook his head. I see nothing has changed. But what the hell. Tempus Regit!

Dringoth strapped in and checked his board. All green, all copacetic and no flags. Cygnus had been powered up several hours before, her MHD power plant ticking over, humming, now sending a slight shudder through her hull.

"Ready all systems...stand by for final check and all-call."

One by one, the crew came back.

"Ready, TT1."

"Search is go!"

"DPS...yo and go!"

"Propulsors on line...ease her out, Commander."

Cygnus lurched as her MHD jets opened up to one-quarter throttle and she came about, sniffing along the path ISAAC had already laid in, a path defined only by the faintest ripples in the local worldline. Carefully and with the lightest touch, feeling like all eyes were burning holes in his back, Golich steered the ship toward her jump point, careful to keep proper station with her sister ships. Below them, the tan and ocher landscape of Keaton's World rolled by, as the small flotilla put some distance between themselves and Gateway Station.

ISAAC beeped when Cygnus was in position.

"Ship in auto-hover at jump point, Captain," Golich said.

Dringoth checked everything and assured himself Cygnus was in readiness. A last-minute check with Andromeda and Majoris confirmed the same.

"Engineer, execute the jump."

Four decks aft, Acth:On'e stabbed the ENABLE button on the Engineer's console. Instantly, the ship shuddered, lurched forward and was hurled into the midst of a million tomorrows.

Interactions Log

File No. 130881.6

U.R.M.E (101)

Interaction Targets: 1. Golich, JCDR Nathan

Interaction Mode: Acoustic, voice synthetic V-22

Date: 4.12.14 (T-date: 001-04-15)

Start Time: 151100

End Time: 152130

Output File (text analysis):

<<Subject: Configuration: Golich, Nathan: Command Crew Psychological Workup

<<In remote and personal behavioral analysis, Config Golich appeared to be stable in all measured dimensions, with only slight changes to primary emotional vectors. Isokinetic scan of cerebral regions C-55-78 showed strengthened mapping along pathways related to processing recent experiences...to wit, accusations of desertion and dereliction of duty and subsequent court-martial proceedings.

<<Config Golich has displayed multiple physical symptoms of mild paranoia, bordering on unhealthy even delusional episodes, with the continuing intense and irrational mistrust or suspicion, which can bring on sense of fear, anger, and betrayal. Some identifiable beliefs and behaviors include mistrust, hypervigilance, difficulty with forgiveness, defensive attitude in response to imagined criticism, preoccupation with hidden motives, fear of being deceived or taken advantage of, inability to relax, or being argumentative. Galvanic skin response, vocal stress patterns, a slight tarsal tremor in his fingers, all are indicative of intense engagement with the assigned mission. I have formally entered this into his medlog to build a database of his responses to this unusual stressor. Note: similar symptoms have been indicated in other crew members.

<<Config Golich has previously expressed concerns regarding the suspicions he believes other crew members harbor about him. This level of worry correlates at nearly ninety-five percent R level with concerns about the continuing mission against the Coethi enemy.

<<This worries Config Golich. He expresses this worry with facial positioning indicative of intense emotions...the underlying musculature has contracted due to emotional states associated with the news and intelligence about recent Coethi moves. This also is characteristic of single-configuration entities. I do not yet understand how Config Golich's neural processor achieves this association of emotional states with external conditions, nor the reason why this happens. But this association occurs more and more frequently in recent days.

<<I have queried Config Golich about this association. He reports that when he is 'worried' about how he will be received by other crew members (n.)( to be anxious, to be concerned, to fret...), these emotional states make his neural processor attach great importance to the information which has triggered them. I will run statistical correlations on this explanation. Config Golich queried this Config on how my main processor assigns importance values to inputs and ranks them. I explained sorting subroutine B-20225 (Sort and Rank) and subroutine B-44455 (Probabilistic Weighting) but Config Golich still did not understand.

<<Config Golich expressed a variant of emotional state (intense focus), concerning his perceived need to 'prove' himself to his crewmates during the upcoming mission. Emotional state assignment is high when Config Golich considers his status among other crew members. Config Golich explains that such emotional attachment is high because (audio string): "I care what my crew thinks and want to do nothing to cause them to think less of me...I'm in enough trouble as it is."

<<I detect high levels of emotional dissonance when these neural pathways are activated. I will analyze emotional state musculature patterns and run correlations with input types. Understanding these correlations will help me provide greater assistance to Config Golich.

<<In general, Config Golich exhibits behavioral traits consistent with a borderline paranoia-driven personality. These activated pathways have not yet risen in strength to a level necessitating intervention but further observation is warranted and will be initiated.>>

Output File Ends

Cygnus dropped out of her jump right on target, having surfed up the primary worldline of T-001 and emerged from the flow into distant heliocentric orbit around the G-class star humans had long called the Sun. Majoris and Andromeda appeared soon thereafter and the trio of jumpships settled into an orbit some one hundred and twenty billion kilometers from Sol.

"Right on the money, Skipper," Evelyn M'Bela announced, from her Search and Surveillance console. "Sedna and Kuiper Station located fourteen million kilometers, dead ahead."

Dringoth said, "Very well. Commander, advise Majoris and Andromeda. Lay in an intercept course for Kuiper Station."

Golich acknowledged smartly. "Course laid in, Captain. ETA is three hours and fifteen minutes."

Dringoth studied his XO carefully. "How does it feel, Commander? To be back on the command deck?"

How the hell do I answer that? Golich wondered. By the book, by the book. "It feels good, sir. Like I belong here."

Dringoth nodded. It was what he wanted to hear. "You do belong here, Commander. When JAG objected to my request to pull you from detention, I told them it was exigent circumstances. Commandstar's put the court-martial on hold. Call it a temporary pardon. I needed a full crew and I told the brass that included you. There was no time to train anyone else."

"Amen to that, Skipper," said M'Bela from her Search station.

Golich swallowed hard. "Thank you, sir. I'll do my best to meet everyone's expectations."

Dringoth folded his arms and frowned. "My expectations are that this crew's going to do its usual kicking of Coethi butt. I don't mind telling you I've got a bad feeling about this one."

"Injection burn in two minutes."

URME's voice was dry, almost mechanical as the swarm entity looked over all of Cygnus' systems. In less than two minutes, her plasma torch engines would flare into operation and the jumpship would begin slowing down just enough for the planetesimal Sedna to capture them into orbit. If all went well, Cygnus would drop speed just enough for the tiny world's faint gravity to grab them and bend their flight path into a stable orbit. Then would come the approach to Kuiper Station, the Time Guard base and control center for the Sentinel Net.

Dringoth acknowledged the status check. "Engine status, Acth? Everything copacetic back there?"

Acth:On'e was sitting at the Engineering console back on E deck, right next to Alicia Yang. His eyes wandered around the board. "She's all hot and ready, Skipper. Temps, pressures, everything's clean and green back here."

"One minute to burn," came Golich. The XO stole a quick glance at the approaching world through his forward portholes. "Just coming up on the sunlit side...terminator approaching."

Dringoth looked out too. "Looks like something my dog dug up in the backyard...a dirt clod with acne."

Indeed, the planetesimal Sedna, at over a hundred billion kilometers from the Sun on the inner edge of the vast Oort Cloud, was a rocky, coppery red world with battered plains and crumpled mountains, tortured by eons of meteor bombardment into a frozen, desiccated rubble pile of a world, not even a planet by official reckoning.

M'Bela just shook her head. "A frozen dirt clod, if you ask me. Amazing there isn't more ice on the surface. Something blew it off. What a great place for Sentinel to set up a network and command post. Garden spot of the Oort Cloud."

"Ten seconds to burn...everybody secure loose items."

"Queenie...you sound like my mother...telling me to wear my rain coat when it rains—" Golich nonetheless performed the last minute burn checklist that all time jumpers knew so well.

There was a brief jolt and the ship shuddered as her engines fired. Cygnus' central mast bent and swayed momentarily until vernier thrusters could damp out the oscillation.

"Twang damping," said URME. "Oscillations smoothing out on schedule."

"Ride 'em, cowboy..." Golich said. "I've got three engines up and operating...thrust is good...pressures are good. We're slamming on the brakes—"

The burn lasted four minutes. When it was over, jumpship Cygnus had dropped into a stable circular orbit above the 1800-kilometer-wide world, an orbit less than a hundred kilometers over her battered red-brown surface. Andromeda and Majoris followed suit. Below the three ships, the day-night terminator slid by and full sunlight fell upon Sedna's tortured plains and hills...as much light as the Sun could muster from this distance. The visual effect was of a planetscape illuminated as if at dusk, filled with shadows and black valleys.

"Okay, secure the burn," Dringoth commanded. "Let's get moving. Advise our two companions that we're setting up for approach to Kuiper Station."

Just then, the ship's AI, ISAAC, sounded a warning klaxon.

"Contact alert...detecting large mass formation bearing two five by one zero five, centroid of contact at four billion one hundred million kilometers...possible enemy contact...."

Dringoth checked his own instruments. "Dust storm, ISAAC?"

Golich took a look himself. "Hell of a dust storm, if you ask me."

"ISAAC says it's no dust storm...it's one hell of a cloud of bots...and it sure as hell ain't one of ours. Probably just popped out of voidtime."

"Coethi?"

"Maybe advance scouts. I'm going to squirt this back to Time Guard-Urth and see what they think. We could be the first ones ever to see or engage the Coethi in this sector. Golich...this may be first probe we're looking at, the probe T2's been expecting for so long."

"Here comes The Big One."

"ISAAC, what are we looking at here? How far to the target?"

The ship's AI spoke in a measured tone. "Estimating distance to formation leading edge now at thirty million one hundred and fifty-five kilometers. The formation is in heliocentric orbit which will intersect our orbit in two hours ten minutes, present speed and course.

"ISAAC, can you resolve what this thing is...dust or bots or something else?"

"Long-range scan indicates that the formation is a diffuse cluster of discrete elements of mean size approximately twenty-five nanometers main dimension...smaller than normal dust particles. Detecting increased energy levels in certain electromagnetic bands, consistent with assembler activity as we understand it. Probability that this formation is a swarm of nanobotic elements now approaching ninety four percent."

"Swell," Dringoth muttered. "Commander, it looks like Cygnus will have the dubious distinction of being the first Umans to engage the Coethi along this front. One for the history books. Let's make it a good one—enable HERF and magpulse weapons. Advise Andromeda and Majoris."

Golich strapped himself in and set about enabling the weapons systems from the main console.

"HERF cells now at full charge, primed and ready. I'm slaving the emitter array to ISAAC's coordinates for swarm centroid. Magnetic impulse battery also at full charge. All emitters on line and tracking. Targeting sensors have acquired—"

Dringoth studied the orbit plots of Cygnus, the other ships and the swarm, overlaid on his console display. "Tell Andromeda and Majoris they should try to flank this thing, get around the far edges so we can bring crossfire to bear. We pin them from the center and our sister ships execute a double envelopment."

Golich sent the message. "I think we can jolt 'em pretty good with what we have," Golich decided.

Cygnus steadily closed the distance toward the computed firing point, even as Majoris and Andromeda took up flanking positions.

"ISAAC, how far to the swarm centroid now?"

"Twenty million four hundred and two kilometers. Coming within effective range of our main batteries."

"Let's give them a taste of what we're about," Dringoth decided. "On my mark, max discharge pulse on HERF...maybe we can break up the cloud enough to give Andromeda and Majoris good secondary targets—"

"HERF is ready—" Golich poised his finger over the button.

"Five...four...three...two...one...mark! Let 'em have it!"

Golich pressed the button and a pulse of high-frequency radio waves shot out of the emitter array on top of Cygnus's A Deck. The pulse traveled the remaining distance in a few seconds, slamming into the swarm, scattering, shredding and obliterating bots along the outer perimeter of the cloud.

"ISAAC, report...any effect?"

"Scanning now...scanning...edge effects only...some reduction of EM activity, some drop-off in thermal effects...definite effects, there is a hole in the side of the formation, but it's filling rapidly...swarm is reconstituting, changing config...centroid is maneuvering...changing course to intercept...."

Dringoth could see the story on his console. They had managed to bash the thing but it replicated fast and grew back. Now the swarm was turning, wheeling about to intercept Cygnus directly, presenting itself front-on to their approach.

Golich was exultant. "We stung it, Skipper! Look how that front edge is scalloped and misshapen...we did something to it."

"I think we just made it mad, Commander. Fire away, three pulses HERF and mag! Set a twenty-degree spread."

Cygnus rocked slightly as the pulses discharged and streaked toward their target. Through the forward screens, both men could see jagged flashes erupt in space, like slow-motion lightning bolts, where the radio waves and mag fields intersected the swarm. Atoms were ripped apart and bonds sheared off, liberating untold energies into the vacuum. A series of flashes and bolts lit up space ahead of them, still more than ten thousand kilometers distant.

"ISAAC, did we hurt 'em?"

"Estimating swarm has been reduced by two-point one percent in frontal dimension...swarm is reconstituting...possible aspect change...detecting possible config change— "

Months later, when the first moments of the Battle of Urth-Sol were replayed and analyzed, the report that ISAAC made indicating a 'possible aspect change' was considered to be only the latest known instance of quantum displacement effects seen in earlier encounters with the Coethi. Displacement effects had been observed before, in the Incident at Hapsh'm and the Battle of the Gauntlet. That encounter had produced evidence that the Coethi possessed the ability to displace themselves and nearby structures to different times and spaces by manipulating entangled quantum states...a technique far beyond anyone's ability to analyze or understand.

Now it seemed that the swarms approaching Sedna and probing the outer reaches of the planetary system possessed the same ability.

It was ISAAC who first reported on the phenomena.

"...detecting possible config change...all aspects have changed...swarm has...swarm has...re-calibrating...now re-analyzing...tactic is similar to earlier observed displacement phenomena...swarm has relocated to...analyzing sensor inputs for continuity..."

Even ISAAC had trouble explaining what had happened. In the blink of an eye, the swarm had vanished and re-appeared hundreds of thousands of kilometers from its last position. Now, instead of following an intersecting orbit with Cygnus, the entire swarm had jumped to a new trajectory behind the ship, moving away on a diverging orbit inside of Cygnus...an orbit that looped inside of Sedna's orbit, millions of kilometers closer to the star.

Dringoth shook his head, rubbed his eyes. "Well, we've seen this trick before. ISAAC, can you explain this--?"

ISAAC took a few moments to respond, uncharacteristically for the AI. "Still computing new trajectory...still computing aspect change and config change...no data yet...."

Nathan Golich gave up on their instrumentation and tried using his own Mark I eyeball, looking out the command deck's portholes. "Did that thing just move through space like I think it did...from over here—" he pointed ahead, "-to over there, like in a split second?"

"Yeah, I think so...I read reports from T2...General Keaton's trip to Gibbons Grotto ten years ago. That Keeper did the same thing...somehow, it could displace you in time and space if you got too close. Nobody could explain it then...some kind of weird quantum effect was what I heard...and now we're seeing something similar. ISAAC, best fix on the swarm's current position."

The AI crunched data for a few moments, then downloaded a new calculated position to their displays.

Golich sniffed. "Even ISAAC can't believe it. How the hell do we engage something that can do that?"

URME spoke up. "Captain, I have been studying this tactic and compared it to known swarm tactics from history."

Dringoth was looking for any answer from anywhere. "Go, URME...what have you got?"

"Sir," URME ported a small sim to their consoles. Scenes from ancient military history danced across their displays...horses, archers, the steppe country of central Asia...."—sir, as you can see in this vid, when Alexander the Great had defeated the Persian army under Darius, he then turned his attention to the northeastern border of the Persian empire, especially the satrapies of Bactria and Sogdiana. Along this northeastern border, a people called the Scythians continued to harass Alexander's forces with fast raids by horse-mounted archers."

Dringoth watched skeptically. "So how does this help us, URME? I need immediate tactical answers."

"In this way, sir. The Scythians were using what were called 'Parthian tactics.' The Scythians took advantage of Alexander's situation by using their greater mobility to circle around the Greeks and cause attrition using long-range arrow fire. The general motion of their swarming attack was a kind of slow rotation, caused by the natural motion of the archers as they advanced, fired and retreated. Tacticians called this 'pulsing.' Alexander understood that the best counter-tactic was to try to pin the Scythians against some fixed obstacle. But on the plains and steppe country of central Asia, there was no such obstacle. Instead, Alexander decided to use his own force as a kind of 'bait,' surging them forward in the center to engage the Scythians. When the Scythians took the bait and attacked this force, Alexander sprang his trap by sending cavalry he held in reserve against the Scythian flanks, eventually encircling them and cutting off escape. After this, he was able to defeat the Scythians piecemeal with superior main forces."

Dringoth threw up his hands. "This is great, URME. How does it apply to us? We've got a Bug swarm moving out of voidtime, with quantum displacement ability that makes any direct engagement an exercise in futility. We poke here and wind up over there. We engage here, and they throw us a billion kilometers in the opposite direction."

But Golich saw URME's point. "Captain, I think I see what URME's driving at."

"I'm all ears, Commander."

Golich went on. "First Jump Squadron is three ships, right? URME's example means we should send one ship to engage the Bugs in a frontal assault. Go right at 'em. The other two ships flank the Bug formation on either side, up and downstream along the same worldline. While the Bugs are engaged with the first ship, ships two and three pinch off the worldline and trap them in a bubble of spacetime. Then we have at 'em."

M'Bela objected. "What about their displacement weapon? What's to keep them from knocking ship number one to the ass end of the Universe?"

"It's a risk, sure, but if we time this right, they'll be caught in our little flytrap maneuver before they can displace. Then we bring every HERF and mag weapon to bear that we can and shred the formation from close range."

Dringoth conceded the idea had merits. "Only URME would see Alexander the Great as a model for temporal warfare against the Coethi."

The para-human swarm entity brightened, its edges flickering with pride. "I have been studying ancient Urth military history...for my first terms at the Academy. If we ever get back to K-World."

Dringoth added, "I just consulted with Commandstar and T2 on what they think the Bugs are trying to do...what's their strategy. I was hoping we could get some help out here. There are three jumpships near Urth itself, but Commandstar informed me that one is in refit. The other two are being held in what they're calling defensive reserve...protecting the heartland."

Golich said, "What about other ships? There were two in the Sturdivant system when we left."

"They're on the way," Dringoth said, "but they were diverted to take care of some Bug probes around Telitor...T2 thinks the Bugs are trying to encircle Urth-Sol and cut off the heartland of the Alliance. They're coming, just not right away. For now," Dringoth shrugged, "it's just our three. URME, locate the enemy formation. Where are they now?"

The para-human perused his Fire Director console. "Centroid is seven hundred million six hundred thousand kilometers to sunward, inside Sedna orbit. Moving away."

Dringoth rubbed his moustache vigorously, as if stroking the massive bush might spark something. "Cygnus' basic mission is to install and setup a Twister on Sedna. But we can't do that until we clean up the neighborhood. Commander, advise Andromeda and Majoris of what we're thinking. This calls for a war council before we try out URME's idea."

After a few hours' long-range discussion on ship-to-ship narrowband, the general outlines of URME's strategy was agreed to. Andromeda would take the point position, sticking her fingers right into the mouth of the dragon. Cygnus and Majoris would flank Andromeda, and when the timing was right, would use their collapsers to pinch off the local worldline of T-001 and try to trap the Bugs in the here and now. If that worked and it was a big if, the three ships would then fire everything they had at the Bugs and try to obliterate the enemy swarm.

That was the plan.

Maneuvering the small flotilla would take several hours. During that time, as Cygnus was positioning herself on the up-sun flank of the Bug formation, Dringoth managed to get some inquiries about defenses in the Urth-Sol sector answered.

"I just wanted to make sure Commandstar and UNISPACE knew what we're doing," he explained as he and Golich took their seats and strapped in. "And approved."

"I guess the home team's getting a little worried," Golich decided. With URME and Acth:On'e, he was running quickly through a checklist for operating the ship's collapser.

"More than a little," Dringoth admitted. "You read the reports on this thing called UrthShield?"

"I saw something on the boards a few months ago."

Dringoth toggled up a display on their console screens. "UNISPACE is working overtime to erect the damn thing now. Watch...."

UrthShield is a protective barrier composed on nanoscale robots, physically linked together like a mesh, designed to provide a physical barrier to oncoming swarms or bots from elsewhere in the solar system, especially the Coethi and its mother swarm.

The shield does not completely envelope the Urth-Moon system, but rather forms a sort of pancake structure, extending from the L1 to the L2 equilibrium points.

Inside the envelope, both Urth and the Moon are more or less protected from nanobotic swarm incidence roughly in the plane of the Urth's orbit, plus or minus several degrees. These are thought to be the most likely approach vectors for the Coethi.

The physical extent of this barrier is some 3 million kilometers, from L1 to L2. The breadth is about .5 million kilometers.

Gravitational forces away from the equilibrium points L1 and L2 will require anchor satellites and positioning buoys.

UrthShield is a linked, single physical object, but the linkages are nanobotic effectors and they can be adjusted and reconfigured as needed.

Deployment of the Shield will take several months. Deployment involves four Frontier Corps ships. Two ships lay down shield bots from Urth to L1. Two other ships deploy shield bots from Urth to L2. The deployment pattern resembles a weaving pattern...multiple trajectories to and from L1 and L2, shifting a little at the end of each sector sweep.

The end result is a physical barrier composed of individual nanobot elements, linked by effectors and configured not only to form the barrier but to be able to fight off probes and assaults from other swarms. Some Sentinel system technology is applied here. Most of the bots have bond disrupters and other defensive weapons as well as linking effectors.

Equilibrium points L1 and L2 are gravitationally stable and require only modest maneuvering from anchor satellites. However, the gravity of the moon and Urth along the 'strands' of the shield, would eventually distort and disrupt the shield, so additional positioning and maneuvering buoys are required, at multiple points along arcs from L1 to Urth to L2. PM buoys are small satellites with linkage to specific sectors of the Shield to help it maintain shape and orientation.

UrthShield control will be operated out of Gateway Station, a manned complex also at the L2 point. Control functions will include positioning and maneuvering (involving coordinated operation of trillions of propulsors), overall sector status and condition, repairs and maintenance, power, and configuration control.

Golich's eyes widened. "This is getting serious, Captain."

"Very."

Just then, M'Bela announced, "Approaching target position, Captain. Nine minutes to station."

Cygnus had nearly positioned herself a few million kilometers inside the orbit of Sedna and well inside the detected inner bands of the Bug swarm, itself also in heliocentric orbit.

"Very well. What about Andromeda and Majoris?"

M'Bela checked. "Andromeda is now at assault position. Majoris is still maneuvering. She reports she'll be on station in four minutes."

"Collapser status?"

URME had drifted off to man his Fire Director console. "Engineering reports collapser primed and online, sir. Good for at least ten pulses."

Dringoth said, "Good. It may take that." He opened up the shipwide comm channel, the 1MC. "All hands, battle stations. This has to work. I don't have to remind you what's at stake. In less than three minutes, all hell will be unleashed around here. Things are liable to get a little dicey. I expect every crewmember to do their duty. Latest intel from TACTRON indicates the Bugs may have a long-range strategy of trying to choke off or alter time stream T-001 around Urth, so as to eliminate any Uman movement out into and beyond the Sol system. If they do that, if T-001 is altered enough, pinched off, broken up, any Uman settlements throughout the Alliance will cease to exist. Indeed, the Alliance will cease to exist and we won't have homes to go back to. That's what is at stake here."

M'Bela interrupted, "Majoris in position, Skipper."

Dringoth had Golich count down the final seconds.

"Five...four...three...two...one...mark!"

Dringoth's commands were quiet but firm. "Fire Director, engage the collapser."

At that same moment, synchronized with Cygnus, Andromeda shot forward, HERF guns blazing, straight into the teeth of the Bug swarm. Further up-sun, Majoris fired her own collapser.

"Hold on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen," Dringoth called out. "This will be one wicked ride."

M'Bela felt a rising stream of vomit in the back of her throat and she muttered to herself, "Girl, African queens do not throw up, African queens do not throw up—"

At the exact moment the collapser fired, jumpship Cygnus groaned and shook as if a ferocious hand had just swatted her. Hull plates bent. Stanchions squealed. Shards of something shot across the command deck. Seats swayed under the tremendous stress, joints cracked, seams burst and anything not bolted down went flying...a sleet of debris pelted them for many seconds.

"Inflection point!" yelled URME. "Max q!"

Then, suddenly as it had started, the roll began falling off and Cygnus seemed to take a breath, as her structure was suddenly released from the bite of converging worldlines. Dringoth tentatively felt his controls and sensed a reassuring pressure; there seemed to be just enough maneuvering to give him a little feedback at the main console. Grateful, he pulsed the ship's flowvaters and planes and she responded, reluctantly, awkwardly, but there was something there.

"Channel walls, URME...how close are we?"

The TFD1 checked their heading. "Still in position, Captain...right in the middle of the pipe...now exiting the distortion cone! Past max q—now riding the outer bands!"

Evelyn M'Bela managed to turn her head just enough to take a peek out a nearby porthole. What she saw nearly made her throw up.

The light from scores of distant suns had come through the collapser halo and expanded into a million lights, all swirling and revolving like a slow-motion explosion, a tornado of glass shards caught in a vast floodlight.

With no more control, M'Bela lost what little she had left of her breakfast.

"Channel walls, Captain...dead ahead...ten seconds—"

Dringoth gritted his teeth. There were about a million things that could still go wrong with this stunt. "Maneuvering's sloppy...I've got nothing here...Give me the count, URME!"

"Five...four...three...two...one...MARK!"

Cygnus slammed into the walls of the time stream channel like a rowboat plowing into a monster wave.

They had the speed. URME had confirmed ISAAC's calculations. They had the trajectory. The approach to the firing point had been precise, gaining them maximum advantage from their position. The ship was trimmed as well as she could be, with minimal rates in all axes.

The question was: could she hold together? The Coethi had bodyslammed the ship just moments before and somehow, she had held. But multiple passes through the mouth of the dragon weren't what the designers of Cygnus had in mind when her shipwrights had welded and beamed her together in the drydock at K-World.

Dringoth felt his mouth go dry as the ship plunged into the maelstrom of the collapser burst.

When the after-action reports on the First Battle of Urth-Sol were later collected, analyzed and posted for review, Time Guard historians noted there had been a slight milli-second discrepancy in synchronizing the flytrap maneuver. Andromeda, perhaps anxious to get underway, had surged forward and engaged before the collapsers of Cygnus and Majoris had been fired. The result was complete chaos and worldlines spinning about the far end of the solar system like a rock thrown into a spiderweb.

Nathan Golich managed a quick peek out of a nearby porthole and immediately wished he hadn't, for a vortex of flickering light had now enveloped the ship. The effect of a collapser on the local time stream worldline was like being tossed into a whirlpool of light. Flickers and pops and stars and torn shreds of spacetime spun about them like a carousel gone mad. Faint spiderweb lines converged and diverged outside at insane speeds, enough to make staring more than few seconds a really bad idea.

Golich focused his attention back on his console.

Using a temporal collapser was not for the faint of heart.

Cygnus fired her collapser again. At once, time stream T-001 shuddered like a coiled snake, jerking spasmodically, thrashing about enough to set Cygnus into a slow roll. Golich counteracted the force immediately. Spacetime didn't like being snapped like a wet towel.

M'Bela saw the results immediately on her sensor panel. "Direct hit, Captain! You did it! You sliced and diced the time stream and pinched off the worldline perfectly. Convergence angles all dropping down to zero and fast!"

Dringoth sucked in his breath and pursed his lips. "Now to get back upstream so we can give Andromeda a hand. I hope Majoris did her part. Give me a hack to that end of the worldline, Queenie."

M'Bela was in the middle of wringing computations out of ISAAC when something slammed Cygnus...hard. Lights flashed on and off and the command deck went dark, with a faint hiss and burning smell thickening in the cabin, before backup power kicked in.

They were in a spin, increasing in rate and already the crew could feel centrifugal force building up.

"What the hell--!" Golich's hands swept across his board, re-setting systems, checking busses and breakers, following diagnostic prompts. ISAAC's silky voice was barely audible over the warning klaxons of the Master Alarm.

"Displacer impact...I am assuming command per emergency protocol E-1...ship systems at degraded level...time stream interface approaching...contact in twelve seconds...eleven...ten...."

Working together quickly, with practiced calm, Golich and Dringoth managed to put Cygnus back on an even keel.

"Queenie, where's that hack? I need a bearing to Andromeda...she'll be needing help. URME, status of HERF and mag?"

Responses came fast and thick for the next few moments and voices clashed across the command deck, but the crew of Cygnus was well trained in temporal combat and all duties and functions were performed as required.

URME reported, "HERF charged to max. Magpulsers on line, ready to engage. I just need a bearing to the target."

"Working on it!" M'Bela called out. She studied her nav plots, toggled a few buttons and let ISAAC crunch the results of the scan. "Bearing to swarm centroid three five one by two eight, about eight point five million klicks."

Golich's voice cut in. "I've got Andromeda on the line. She's been hit, displacer impact looks like. She's pulling back but reports some effect on the swarm in her sector...front edge has disintegrated and is reconstituting. Reporting no displacement either."

"Good, good," Dringoth said. "How about Majoris?"

M'Bela had seen the convergence angles on the local worldline bend further up-sun just as Cygnus fired her own collapser. "Plot shows Majoris did it, Skipper. Based on convergence angles I'm measuring, the Bugs are trapped where they are."

"And wounded too," URME added. "The whole swarm aspect has been altered...even now—" his voice stopped in mid-sentence.

Dringoth turned around. "URME, what--?"

URME was still at his post, the para-human swarm entity brightening as the bots forming his config slammed more atoms together to hold structure. "Captain, possible aspect change on Bug formation, they're turning...I'm detecting ripples beyond, could be a jump to voidtime."

M'Bela had seen it too. "I concur, Captain, based on my converger solution. All rates are nulled. Recommend maintain current heading."

Golich chanced a look out his porthole. Something had dimmed the starlight millions of kilometers away. Where once the Coethi swarm could only be followed visually by noting the faint dimming of starlight as the swarm moved through space, now it was as if a great mouth, a vast maw in spacetime had opened, just for a second. There came a blinding flash of light, then nothing.

M'Bela swallowed hard. "They jumped, sir. Bugs popped back into voidtime. Ripples in the channel walls are consistent with a massive jump into voidtime."

Dringoth swore under his breath. "Damn. Damn, damn, damn."

"We had them, right in our hands," Golich said. He squeezed his fist slowly.

"Queenie, can you get any kind of bearing on where they might be headed?"

"I'm trying, sir. ISAAC's analyzing the ripple patterns now. That and the converger angle at jump might give us a rough bearing."

Dringoth's face darkened. "It's Urth, I know it. I feel it. It's what I would do. The Bugs are jumping closer to Urth. Queenie, get the best bearing you can. And contact Andromeda and Majoris. What's their status?"

A few moments later word had come back. Andromeda had survived her frontal assault but she had sustained serious damage. Her skipper, one Jump Captain Kupino, once an Academy classmate of Dringoth's, had ordered her crew to abandon ship. Majoris had already moved in to pick up survivors.

"Majoris reports all survivors onboard," M'Bela told them. "She's headed for Kuiper Station now."

"We'd better do the same," Dringoth ordered. "Commander, lay in a course for Sedna. At least, we swept the gutters clean of Bugs around here."

Cygnus made Kuiper Station in a few hours. Dringoth took the opportunity to shower and clean himself up in the officers' wing and headed for a quick briefing in the station wardroom. Kupino and Majoris' skipper, Jump Captain Willow, met him there and they ordered drinks and snacks from the barbot. Kupino was already running down TACTRON's latest intel.

"Did you see it?" Kupino asked. He waved a small slate at them. "Intel from UNISPACE."

Dringoth took the slate and studied the tactical report. He murmured the sentences out loud as he read. "Large Coethi formation now emerging out of voidtime...positioned between Urth and Luna...UNISPACE engaging...extensive casualties...what the hell is this? Is this the same band of nasties we just engaged?"

Willow just stared morosely into her beer, fingering suds off the rim into her mouth. "Looks like it. I guess orders will be coming soon."

They came two minutes later and popped up on Kupino's slate.

"It's from Commandstar... First Jump Squadron to furnish jumpships to support UrthShield deployment and cover cislunar regions until additional assets can arrive on scene...well," Kupino said, "there you have it. UNISPACE and UNSAC rings the bell and Time Guard barks and comes running."

Willow finished off her drink. "Any sign of our Bug friends?"

Kupino studied his slate. By now, all three captains had received Commandstar's directives. "Nothing on the boards at the moment. But UNSAC expects a large formation to drop out of voidtime any moment, right on Urth's doorstep. The brass wants to set up a defensive screen to supplement UrthShield."

"UrthShield..." muttered Dringoth. "What a waste of time. Put a line of jumpships between Urth and Luna and let us have at 'em."

"Speaking of shields," Willow asked, "how's the Twister installation coming?"

Dringoth shrugged. "We've barely started. Cygnus has core damage, so we can't jump. On propulsors alone, it would take us a year to even make a speed run into Urth space. We'll be doing site prep down on the surface tomorrow and should have something working in about ten days...if the Bugs'll leave us alone in this sector."

Willow waved at the barbot for a new round. "Looks like Majoris is the only one of us that's jump capable. With Andromeda gone—"

"And half my crew injured," Kupino added.

"—and Cygnus' core damaged, we're the only game in town. And I've got injuries as well."

"Who?" Dringoth asked.

Willow looked up. "My XO...Chagos...and my DPS Kowalto. Both are in sick bay with burns and lacerations. Majoris took more than her share of displacer rounds."

That gave Dringoth an idea. "I could loan you my XO. And my DPS. We can do the Twister install without them...it might slow us down a day or so, but it can be done."

Willow was intrigued. "Give me names."

"DPS is Alicia Yang. My XO is...Golich. Nathan Golich."

Willow's eyes lit up. "Golich? The deserter? I don't think—"

But Dringoth cut her off. "Look, I have Commandstar authority to have him here. Golich made some bad decisions...okay, I'll admit that...but he's a damn fine officer." Dringoth knew perfectly well he was violating JAG's custody orders by offering Golich, but the man needed an opportunity to prove himself. "You won't get a better XO."

"If he sticks around," Willows said sourly.

The personnel issue was knocked around for a few more rounds of beer, but in the end, Dringoth's idea survived analysis. Nobody could think of anything better. When Commandstar was advised of the scheme, the chief of Time Guard concurred.

Cygnus would remain in orbit around Sedna base and oversee installation and setup of the new Twister, as well as improvements to Sentinel Net. Majoris would take her blended crew and make the jump to Urth space to support local defenses around the homeworld.

Later, Dringoth gathered his entire crew in Cygnus' crew's mess.

"Golich and Yang are temporarily TDY'ed to Majoris. Report aboard to Captain Willow as soon as we're done here. Alicia, you take URME with you too. You'll need him. Acth and M'Bela stay with me. We've got to get the Twister install going immediately. Time Guard wants it up and operating yesterday."

"I'll need to recon the site first," Acth:On'e said. "Soil samples, topography, that sort of thing. I'll also need to do some serious convergence ranging to setup the Twister's sweep and coverage. I don't want to be blasting away into heavy traffic corridors or time streams."

"I can help with that," M'Bela offered. "I've got the local data already loaded on my wristpad."

"Get to it," Dringoth ordered. The two time jumpers left the galley, leaving only Dringoth and Golich.

The captain apprised his XO cautiously. "Commander, you know I'm violating both the letter and the spirit of JAG's orders. You're supposed to be in my custody at all times."

Golich was tight-lipped but his eyes betrayed feelings. "Captain, I know that. Thanks for believing in me. I need this. I need this to prove I'm still a capable officer."

Dringoth fixed himself a snack from the fab deck and started munching. "Nobody ever questioned your capability, Commander. Just your judgment. Whitney Willow is Majoris' skipper. She's a first-class hardass, but then you must already know that. Just get down there to Urth space and make us proud. Smash some Bugs and make 'em all wish they never heard of Cygnus."

"With pleasure, sir. Thank you, sir." He snapped off a regulation salute and dashed out of the galley.

Onboard Majoris, Golich and Yang were introduced to their temporary crewmates: Nakuru the Engineer, Valdez at Search and Surveillance, and Mendez, at Fire Control. Mendez was clearly an angel, like URME a para-human swarm entity. Golich would take Chagos' place. Yang would sub for Majoris' wounded DPS Kowalto.

Captain Willow brooked no dissent, nor even questions. "I know this is a hell of time to mix up crews but Commandstar's orders are clear. Urth needs help and we're it. Golich here is our XO for this mission. Follow his orders as you would mine. He speaks for me. That's all. Take your stations and prepare for jump. We're due at Gateway Station in four hours."

Alicia Yang pulled Golich aside as the crew dispersed to their duties. "Take a look at that Mendez fellow, Commander."

"I saw him. So, he's an angel...you got a problem with that?"

Yang blinked and cleared her throat. "Uh, no, sir, not at all, sir. It's just that...well look, sir...look at his config control. Check out the edge effects. Something's off kilter. Jeez, URME's lightyears tighter than that."

Golich had to admit Yang was right. "Probably needs a tune up in the lab. It happens in combat, Yang. We can't all look like fairy princesses in combat."

"No, sir...it's just that I'm not sure how well I would trust that cloud of bots...if he's this loose a config out here, what's he going to be like when Bugs are all around us? You know Coethi do have strong entangler emissions. I have to keep an eye on URME sometimes."

Just the very mention of the word 'trust' made Golich's neck hairs stand up. But he was damned if he'd let it show. "So, we'll keep an eye on Jumpmaster First Class Mendez. Buddy check your crewmates at all times and be ready to lend a hand...isn't that Crew Ops 101 at the Academy?"

"Yes, sir," Yang said. "Sorry I brought this up. It's just that—"

Golich leveled an even glare at her. "Jumpmaster Yang, we've got a job to do. A critical mission and there's no room for personal feelings here. Follow orders, do your job and we'll get through this. And remember why we're going. We already scrapped with the Bugs out here. If the bastards show up on Urth's doorstep tomorrow, nobody's going to give a rat's ass about your feelings or mine. The mission is simple: kill Bugs. Everything else is secondary. Got it?"

"Yes, sir."

They parted but Yang managed to quietly check URME's status inside his containment capsule on her web belt before she took her position at the Defensive Systems console on Majoris' E deck.

No flags, no cautions or warnings, all systems green, just ticking over inside his little bungalow.

The check made her feel marginally better. Still, she couldn't help a nagging sense of unease gnawing at her mind as she clambered down the gangway and onto E deck.

Majoris made the time jump without incident, through a quick hop into voidtime and dropped right out into time stream T-001, in high orbit about Urth itself. The mother world of the Alliance shone like a bright blue and white marble in the black of space, with the Moon a dusty sliver off to one side. The ship's Search tech Valdez had already proudly reported their temporal location over the ship's comm—"2811 CE, dead on the money and no convergence angles—" and scuttlebutt up and down the gangway had it that decoherence wake analysis and entangler emissions in the area were strong and getting stronger.

Coethi was in the area, nearby, and probably hiding in voidtime. The showdown wouldn't be long in coming.

Majoris was two days in rectilinear halo orbit about the Urth-Luna system and approaching Gateway Station when the master alarm sounded throughout the ship. Barely five minutes before, Alicia Yang had decided that she just couldn't stay in her cramped bunk compartment a second longer. It was hot, stuffy, noisy and what the hell was that smell, anyway? Better to slip out and head for the galley. A sandwich and a beer...or what passed for beer aboard Majoris...that ought to do the trick.

But before she could exit the crews' berth on B deck into the gangway tunnel, a shadow had drifted by the hatch opening. Instinctively, she held back to let whoever it was pass by.

It turned out to be TFD Mendez, the swarm angel fire control tech, moving quickly aft.

When asked about the incident later, Jumpmaster Yang could never give a convincing reason for why she decided to follow the angel to wherever it was going. Instinct, maybe. Suspicion, for sure. Curiosity. All these were suggested as motives for what she had done.

Regardless, Yang waited for a full five-second count, then slipped out into the gangway. Down at the end of the tunnel that ran through the center of Majoris, giving access to all decks and compartments, she saw the back of Mendez's head. He had turned and slipped into the hatch for C deck.

Why's he going that way, Yang wondered? C deck was for Service and Support. It contained the lockout chamber for crewmen to enter and leave the ship while she was underway. Yang instinctively headed down the gangway in the same direction. C deck also provided access to Majoris' tail pod, and a narrow tunnel aft where equipment and controls were housed for propellant tanks, her reactors and the plasma torch engines and her singularity core.

Yang crept down the gangway with a growing sense of unease. She could feel the ship maneuvering for approach to Gateway after the phasing burn. Vibration was steady and she was settling on to her trajectory for the approach. Yang didn't want to think too much about that. The truth was they were probably surrounded by hordes of Bugs just creeping around in voidtime and the very thought of it made her skin crawl.

If anything went wrong here—

At C deck hatch, Yang peered cautiously into the deck compartment. At first, she didn't see anything, didn't see Mendez, didn't see anything out of the ordinary. She wasn't even sure Systems personnel were allowed down here. She certainly wasn't familiar with any of the gear or systems on C deck.

Yang slipped through the hatch.

That's when Yang spotted Jumpmaster Roberto Mendez. Behind some starboard rack-mounted shelving, Mendez...or whatever the hell he was...had lost a bit of structure, so that the swarm was no longer quite so human-like, more like a slightly misshapen funhouse mirror distortion of a human. The swarm had gathered around some gear mounted on the hull itself.

With a start, Yang soon realized the gear which had attracted Mendez's attention and efforts was a hull valve, part of the logistics airlock system. The valve assembly allowed air in and out of Majoris' pressure equalizing tanks. The hull valves helped Majoris ship supplies and gear from space without having to de-pressurize the whole deck.

From her memory of a distant briefing before they had left Kuiper Station, Yang recalled that the hull valves were fully exposed to the vacuum of space. It was a critical system. The hull valves had to work. If they failed closed, Majoris couldn't expel air from the airlock and the outer hatch couldn't be opened. If they failed open, the entire interior pressure hull, all spaces, could be exposed to vacuum. A catastrophic de-pressurization casualty could result...Captain Willow's safety briefing had been quite clear about that.

What the hell is he doing? Yang wondered. She eased into the deck compartment and then it hit her.

Mendez was letting some of his swarm bots infest the hull valve.

Her heart went into her mouth. She had to do something. She had to stop him.

Alicia Yang felt for the alarm panel by the hatch and stabbed the Master Alarm button. Instantly, a warning klaxon sounded throughout Majoris, screeching and warbling through all decks.

Mendez turned around and spotted her. She saw that his hand was gone...or more accurately, had broken down into a cloud of bots. A steady stream was flowing off the stump at the end of his arm into the hull valve assembly.

There was only one thing she could do. All the HERF and mag weapons were locked in the armory on A deck, three levels away.

Yang closed her eyes and clenched her teeth, then lunged at the Mendez swarm with every ounce of force she could muster.

The only sure way to kill a swarm was with another swarm. She'd learned that on day one in jolt school tactical class. She didn't have a HERF gun. Not even a wrench or a hammer. All she had was her own mass and momentum. That and URME, still contained in a capsule on her belt. Somewhere in the back of her mind, Yang was dimly aware that her chances were, to put it mildly, remote. It would have been easier to cold-cock a cloud of smoke. But she realized as she lunged forward that she really didn't care.

It was high time to kick the bejeezus out of this scumbag swarm.

# Chapter 2: "Moon Dogs"

"If patience is worth anything, it must endure to the end of time."

Mahatma Gandhi

Jumpship Majoris

On Approach to Gateway Station

Time Stream: T-001

T-date: T-001-4-15

Yang felt her ears popping as the pressure started dropping and a gale of dust, tools, scraps of paper and boxes flew past her head. Already the Mendez swarm had partially breached the hull valve...at this rate the entire interior of Majoris would be fully exposed to vacuum in less than a minute.

She tried extracting URME from her web belt but the force of evacuating air ripped the capsule out of her hand and it was only with a quick lunge she retrieved it when a nearby stanchion stopped its momentum.

She felt rather than heard the hatch moving behind her. It was Nakuru, the Engineer and Golich.

Straight away Golich could see the problem. The hull valve was fully enveloped in a swarm. And already a thin stream of air was squealing toward the valve, now partially open to space. Dust, debris, papers, tools and anything else not locked down was flying through the air, now fully entrained in the escaping airstream. A cold fog had formed in the sudden pressure drop and Golich felt his eardrums close to bursting.

"Nakuru...get to the armory...get some HERF weapons! And get Captain in here right away!"

Nakuru was already on the move toward the ship's central gangway. "What about you?"

Golich was reaching for a small control panel near the hatch. "I'm hitting EOS...got to flood this compartment with air and secure that hatch! Get moving--!"

Nakuru vanished in the growing hailstorm, his ears already popping in the falling pressure. As he fell out into the gangway, he saw Captain Willow sliding down from B Deck.

"What's happened?" she asked.

Nakuru quickly filled her in. "XO needs help fast! It's a swarm...Mendez has gone berserk...it's trying to breach the hull at the airlock—" Nakuru squeezed by and headed up to B deck. Just outside the captain's stateroom, a locked cabinet contained the ship's hand weapons: HERF rifles and magpulsers. He had to get up there, grab a few guns and get back fast, before Golich secured the C deck hatch permanently.

"I was on the command deck when I heard the master alarm...ALBERT's running the ship now...we had to break off our approach. I saw pressure sensors going off down here—" Willow slipped by Nakuru as he headed up. The engineering officer paused a moment, feeling the brush of the Captain's arm. It wasn't quite right. He turned and looked, wondering...had something happened up on the command deck? Then he continued up the gangway.

Willow squeezed through the deck hatch, already swinging shut, and immediately saw what was left of Mendez now fully enveloping the airlock and hull valve assembly. Tendrils of bots streamed off his arms and were fast approaching Nathan Golich, who waved his hands and arms, even as he fought to stay upright in the falling pressure, pelted by a rain of debris swirling around the airlock.

Yang had finally managed to launch URME from his capsule. The flickering fog that was the Cygnus crewman emerged into the maelstrom and Yang commanded max rate reps and steered the growing swarm toward what was left of the Mendez swarm.

"Config Eight Eight, URME...gogogogo!" Yang yelled over the squeal of dying air pressure. Her own lungs were beginning to feel like they would burst.

The URME swarm replicated like mad and swelled into shape, plowing through the hailstorm toward Mendez, or what was left of Mendez, for by now the crewman had almost fully dematerialized into a cloud of bots, filling one corner of C deck with a flashing, pulsating fog.

Golich lunged instinctively toward Yang, then stopped, realizing that URME was probably their only chance to stop a catastrophic hull breach. For a moment, the two looked at each other. Golich knew the situation was grave and getting worse. He turned to Willow and was shaken to his soul to see that the Captain was also dematerializing right in front of his eyes.

In the months after the First Battle of Urth-Sol, the after-action reports would later point to extremely powerful entangler emissions from a nearby Bug swarm, still hiding in voidtime, as the official explanation for how Majoris' crew had been turned by the Coethi. Mendez, now Captain Willow. Golich began to wonder about Nakuru himself, who he had just passed in the gangway.

The entire far wall of the compartment was now thick with bots, the swarm replicating at max rate, now that it no longer needed to maintain structure.

The angel still had not fully dematerialized. From its head down to its waist, all human structure was gone, replaced by a fuzzy, pulsating blob of bots, like a tree enveloped in fog. Below the waist, most of Mendez's trunk and legs were still faintly visible, in shadowy outline, as the swarm changed config and assumed its natural state. The effect was something half-human, half-swarm, a hybrid thing, steadily breaking down into its smallest elements. Five meters away, behind a stanchion, Captain Willow was undergoing the same transformation.

Now fully formed and configged, URME gave a shout and started to dematerialize himself. "Time to get small!" he yelled over the shriek. He grabbed a nearby stanchion to stay upright as Majoris lurched again. Up on A deck, they all knew the ship's AI ALBERT would be fighting to keep the ship under control. "Now going loose...enabling Config Delta seven seven—"

Through it all, the master alarm klaxon shrieked.

For URME, life at nanoscale was like riding a gnat through a hurricane, like riding a roaring river down a waterfall. He immediately retracted all effectors in an attempt to ride out the storm. Then he hunkered down and slogged his way forward, trying to get a read on anything unusual up ahead, high thermals, high EMs, an acoustic signature, anything.

Somehow, some way, he had to locate the bots of the two swarms and engage.

There's just no way to convey to the Humans what this is like, he told himself. Maybe the closest thing would be falling through a cloud or floating in an ocean...a sense of peace, serenity, even in a gale like this. An understanding that this was the way life should be lived...indeed every human had lived like this for the first nine months of its life.

Just then, URME got an acoustic ping. He checked his signals. Sure enough, his sensors had detected something unusual up ahead, through the driving sleet of air molecules, a faint echo, maybe a spark of thermal activity above average. Could be some bots assembling something...or disassembling something. He revved up propulsors to max and steered the master assembler on that heading.

The reading ebbed and flowed so he steered as best he could through the maelstrom, tacking first one way, then another, trying to work upstream against the onslaught of molecules from the hurricane.

There. Gotcha.

He chopped propulsors and probed ahead with electromagnetic fingers. Density going up. Those aren't air molecules, he told himself. Cautiously, he probed some more and maneuvered around to approach from the side, gaining a different aspect view of the targets.

Slowly, ghostly shapes began to materialize out of the fog. Enemy bots, thousands of them. As he closed in, he could see the elongated multi-lobed form of the assemblers...squat barbells festooned with all manner of effectors and grabbers. Whirling propulsors at both ends, spinning into a blur as the bots fought to maintain position.

It was like nothing he had ever seen before.

Yang, clinging to a stanchion, furiously worked URME's config controls, setting up the swarm to engage. Carbene grabbers, enzymatic knife, bond disrupters, everything was ready. Now girded for battle, URME flexed nanoscale fists and drove forward, spoiling for a fight.

The two formations came together and sparks flew, as bond disrupters ripped at effectors, liberating millions of electron volts. The bots thrashed and hacked, searching for weak spots, closing, then backing off to find another angle. It was a boxing match, feint here, jab there, grasp and thrust, parry and kick.

In the last seconds before the grapple, URME had noticed an open seam in the enemy bots' outer casing, right amidships, between whirling effectors above and below, almost like a waist belt. He surmised it was a structural join, a connection drawing together assembled segments of the bots' scaffolding. Could be a weak spot.

If I could just get a bond disrupter in there—

Throughout the battle front, URME had replicated uncountable trillions of assemblers and each one was slaved to the master. Whatever move and maneuver he made was instantly copied and repeated by every replicant. Now, URME twisted and turned to bring his forward disrupters to bear on the enemy bot's midsection.

Just a little further—he shuddered as his master bot was ripped by the enemy's carbene grabber. URME recoiled slightly, losing effector tips in a spinning puff of atoms. Ouch. That hurt....

He closed in again, shielding himself from assault, extending his own disrupters as far forward as they would go. Just a little bit further...there!

He let it go. The disrupter tore at valence electrons that hovered like a cloud over the mid-section seam. Instantly, the seam buckled and gave way. An explosive cloud of electrons erupted, sparking and sizzling like oil on a gas grill. The bot's outer casing buckled and tore away in a frenzied thrashing, as more bonds were severed. Its props and effectors spun down and the momentum of the bond break sent the bot cartwheeling away.

It had worked.

URME knew that in every nanoscale combat encounter, there were always weaknesses in the enemy bots. The point of all the tactics was to find that weakness and exploit it, before the enemy did the same to you.

All up and down the battlefront, URME's replicants duplicated the maneuver, closing with their opponents, grappling and punching, searching for the mid-waist seam. Any opening, any letdown, and his bond disrupters were there, zapping at the weak spot.

The air was soon churning and frothy with atom parts and molecule fragments.

And the two swarms would soon be so much atom fluff.

Alicia Yang saw what URME had managed to do. "It's working, Commander! He's kicking ass—"

But the air was still screaming out of the breached hull valves and Golich knew their time had run out.

"Approaching hull breach on C deck," came ALBERT's smooth voice. "Configuring gangway for emergency depressurization casualty...Level One procedures in effect on all decks and spaces...now compensating thrust asymmetry with A and B thruster banks primed to counteract un-commanded roll rates...."

"Alicia!" Golich screamed over the tornado. His lungs were burning, about to burst. "Get URME back! Grab the master! We've got to get out of here...the escape pods! Half the crew has been turned or compromised. The Bugs are here, onboard--!"

Yang didn't have to be told twice. She wasn't sure what had happened but she coaxed the URME master back into containment, slammed the capsule shut and snapped it onto her belt. Golich was already pulling and clawing his way through the gale of debris to the gangway. Majoris' escape pods were three decks below, on F deck, in a rack surrounding the lockout.

The two of them pulled and kicked and fought their way through shrieking gusts of air and a sleet of bolts, torn sheet metal, plastic shards and shredded swarm balls of atom fluff, down to F deck. Golich cycled the hatch and they fell onto the deck, then leaped into the nearest pod. Yang dogged the hatch shut behind them with her last gasp of breath and Golich punched a few buttons. Soon, cool, pressurizing air began flowing into the pod.

They fell into their seats and strapped in. Golich enabled the link to ALBERT to begin the Abandon Ship sequence and was rewarded with the soothing, calming tones of the AI.

His eyes roved across the control panel. Majoris seemed to be in a slow counter-clockwise roll, the result of air escaping through the airlock and hull valve on C deck. ALBERT was already countering that. "What about the crew, ALBERT?"

"No casualties at this time, excepting Crewman Mendez and Captain Willow. Safe haven shelters activated and secure. Vital monitors all reading green. All parameters nominal. Crewman Mendez and Captain Willow are offline and do not respond to alert messages."

"No shit, ALBERT. I don't think we'll be hearing from them again...not in this lifetime. Any signs of swarm activity beyond C deck?"

"Checking sensor readings now, Commander...one moment, please--"

He knew Majoris had two safe haven shelters scattered around the ship for her crew of six plus the two of them. If what ALBERT said was true, maybe Nakuru had made it safely into a shelter or was otherwise secured from the hull breach. The real question was: would the ship hold up long enough for the escape pod to get away. Golich looked over at Yang, who had her eyes closed, gulping air to get her lungs working again.

"Willow and Mendez are gone. There's nothing we can do for Nakuru now. It's time to get the hell out of here."

Through clenched teeth and heaving gasps for air, Yang squeezed out, "Punch it, Commander!"

Even as ALBERT released the pod's holddown clamps and opened the eject hatch, they both heard the soothing voice of the ship's AI.

Alarms sounded and lights flashed on Majoris' command deck. Auto sequences were engaged and ALBERT, still functioning albeit at reduced capacity, shutdown the plasma torch engines and the singularity core as a precaution against explosion...or worse.

But no one responded on the command deck. No one responded on any deck.

Explosive decompression had already started and in the final seconds of the swirling gale that engulfed the command deck, Jumpmaster Nakuru had one remaining thought before falling down the great black tunnel of unconsciousness.

The Bugs aren't fifty light years away at all. They're right here. The Buggers have been here all along.

Then the swarm enveloped Majoris completely and began catastrophic disassembly of all remaining structures.

Over the squeal, then the roar of escaping air, the plaintive sounds of ALBERT bleated out emergency warnings on all channels over and over again.

"Level One Emergency...level one emergency...hull breach all decks and sections...all personnel, man the escape pods, man escape pods immediately...all personnel—"

Nothing was ever heard from Time Guard jumpship UAS-212, the Majoris, again.

Slammed by the acceleration of the pod's engines, Golich and Yang both lapsed into unconsciousness.

The pod's onboard computer, rapidly evaluating their heading and current velocity, computed the best survivable trajectory it could, based on its program and available data. It used pod sensors to scan for likely safe havens for its unconscious crew of two. The result of its analysis was that the pod had only enough delta-v for a single emergency burn.

Emptying all its available propellant, the escape pod made tiny vernier adjustments to its course and took dead aim at the Moon's Copernicus Crater, bulls-eyed right in the middle of the Ocean of Storms.

Autoland in an escape pod was usually tough on one's complexion and fingernails and haircut, not to mention one's stomach, spleen, liver and kidneys. The impact sent them spinning sideways. The pod plowed into the regolith and rolled over and over and over again, bouncing several times as she gouged out a rooster-tail of dirt. Hull panels and bulkheads groaned from the strain. Her landing legs were quickly sheared off and seconds later, the capsule rolled itself upright and after what seemed like an eternity of dirt and gear being tossed about inside, the cabin came to rest on its side butted up against the lip of a small crater wall. Dust and debris hung in the air for a long time. The pod outer hull had been breached and air was squealing out in a thin, high-speed stream as it escaped into the vacuum.

Pod C, from the late jumpship Majoris, had somehow made a rough, rolling, tumbling but survivable landing near the steep cliffs of a crater wall and it was only after the little capsule had finished her roller-coaster ride gouging up a sleet of lunar dust, that Nathan Golich dared to breathe and opened his eyes. When he heard the squeal of escaping air, he fumbled and went about sealing up his hypersuit helmet, then made sure Yang did the same.

"Where the hell are we?" Yang mumbled out. She tasted blood and realized she had cut her lip. Inside the helmet, there wasn't much she could do about it...rubbing and dabbing her lips against the chin pad was about it.

Golich checked ChronoNav. He did some quick calculations, then said, "Looks like nine degrees north by twenty-one degrees west, inside Copernicus Crater, this thing says."

Yang winced getting upright. "Ouch! That was my shoulder, I think. Copernicus, huh? My old stomping grounds. I grew up here."

Golich shook his head. "Maybe here in space. But not in time. ChronoNav says we're somewhere around 2655 CE or so. Bugs must have thrown us back up the worldline...or maybe onto another branch. My porthole's partly buried but I don't see a thing out there, certainly nothing that looks like civilization."

"What about comms, Commander? Maybe we can contact Farside, or the Rescue Service."

Golich looked around the wreckage of the cabin and shook his head. "No dice, Alicia. We were lucky to survive the landing. This crate is destined for the scrapyard. We got nothing...not even air anymore. We'd better get out of here."

They eventually kicked and pushed hard enough to spring the hatch and, one after the other, eased out onto a rubbly plain. Steep crater walls poked up above the horizon all around, itself only a little more than two kilometers away.

Yang squinted to study the rugged walls. A few very familiar words came to her mind—"... a hummocky crater rim, numerous large slump blocks on the crater wall, and a complex of central peaks....sets of parallel fractures...it's Copernicus all right. I can hear old man Robards in my head, rattling on from Selenology class. We should be able to see the glow from the City, if your lat and long is right."

"Except we're in the wrong part of the time stream," Golich said. "The City hasn't been built yet."

Yang nodded glumly, then suddenly brightened. "Hey, I just thought of something. Copernicus City grew from an original base complex, a Chinese base. It was called Tian Jia...Heavenly Home or something. Maybe if we could get up to the top of that hill—" She pointed to a low rise in the distance.

They kangaroo hopped the distance in five minutes and stood on a rubbly promontory looking out over the battered floor of Copernicus.

"There...see those lights...other side of that little ringlet of craters?"

Golich saw them. "Well, there's the base. Looks like it's occupied. If we're at 2655 according to ChronoNav, the base should have been here a while."

"And fifty years from now, the first suburbs of Copernicus City will be here. They'll be doming over that little slumped area to the right...it sits on top of some lava tubes."

Golich did a quick estimate of the distance. "I'd make it about fifteen, maybe twenty kilometers. You up for a little lunar jog?"

"Lead on, Commander. Last one down is...hey, what the--?"

The ground beneath them suddenly began a rolling tremor, an undulating up and down motion like they were riding a roller coaster. The ground tremor lasted twenty seconds. All around them, the crater walls started sloughing off rubble and dirt. Small slides drifted down the crater walls in slow motion. Dust churned around them, boiling off the surface like gray-brown steam. They were soon caked in the dust. Then, Yang noticed something else.

"Look—"she pointed down into the center of Copernicus, dozens of kilometers distant. A huge anvil of dust began roiling across the center plain of the crater. The cloud throbbed and swelled like a thing alive. It wasn't a swarm, so it seemed. There were no obvious indications of swarm activity.

Then there were more tremors. Waves of tremors and small quakes shook and rattled the tops of Copernicus. All across the terraced stair steps of the huge crater's walls, tracks of tumbling boulders and sheets of regolith cascaded down to the crater floor. Choking clouds of dust settled and billowed all along the base of the walls, covering fully a third of Copernicus' diameter.

"The biggest cloud's near that base..." reported Golich. He cranked up his helmet scope and zeroed in on a magnified image of the base complex. Blocks of Q2 intel annotated and augmented the view with known facts and figures and he scrolled down what was known of the Tian Jia base. "It almost seems to be emanating from that area...my scroll says that furrowed terrain to the north is called The Tombs...muzang, in Mandarin, it even says. What the hell are they doing down there...it looks like some kind of excavation...or mine pit."

"Maybe they're excavating with explosives," said Yang. "Could be the start of building for the City."

Just then, Yang was interrupted by a much stronger voice, a panicked voice, crackling in their helmets. It was the public frequency, LunarCom One, the emergency frequency, only to be used in the direst situations....

"Jingbao! Jingbao.,..alert...alert! Ji...Ji...this is an emergency...Xuanbu jinji zhuangtai...declaring emergency!"

Both troopers looked up. A guttural string of Chinese filled their ears. Someone was calling an emergency on LunarCom One...someone from Tian Jia was in trouble, practically screaming on the open freq. Someone at or near the base below them.

Golich and Yang perched themselves on the edge of a cliff and scanned the crater floor below, looking for anything that could be the source of the tremors...or of the distress call.

The Chinese voice continued its alarm. "Ji...Ji...Mayday, Mayday...any station—"

Yang swallowed hard. She could hear the quaver of serious terror in that voice. "Maybe these quakes collapsed something down there. See anything?"

Golich adjusted the scope fixture on his helmet, zooming in and scanning the crater floor for kilometers in all directions. "Just a lot of dust. I see the base. Nothing's moving though, except the dust."

Yang turned the volume down on the emergency call in her helmet. "Treaty always said we have to respond to a LunarCom one emergency...maybe we're the closest rescue force."

"Yeah, except I thought we were the ones needing rescue. Come on...let's go!"

They hopped, loped and scampered down the side of the rise and set off bounding like drunken bears across a plain studded with small boulders, nearly invisible craters and shadowy troughs that made footing treacherous. Clouds of dust poofed up and trailed them like ghosts in the sharp sunlight.

After a few stumbles and one fall that opened up a hairline crack in Yang's helmet faceplate, they made the outer perimeter of the base.

Tian Jia was a compact quad of domes and structures, situated some ten kilometers north of Copernicus' central peaks. As they homed on the alert beacon, Yang called up the UNISPACE file on the base, watching the text and pics scroll down her helmet visor with the rectilinear lights of the base itself growing in the background as they approached.

The four domes had names, according to the intel: Shenyang, Hangzhou, Kunming and Chongchin. Each was connected to the other by buried access tunnels, along with wireways, and other service piping. Crawlerways circled the compound, and two of the domes sported what looked like growths along the sides of the domes; these were crawler garages and workshops. A longer crawlerway snaked off to the northeast, ending at the excavation site known as Muzang, which the UNISPACE analysts had translated as 'The Tombs.' This was where the roiling dust cloud, still slowly expanding in the low gravity, was thickest. Something around the excavation, something around The Tombs, was generating a hell of a lot of dust.

"Let's move around about half a klick this side of the domes," Golich suggested. "We can walk or kangaroo hop the rest of the way."

"Any airlocks?" Yang asked.

"That closest dome should have one, according to my specs. Treaty-standard gear, the usual interfaces. We should be able to get in."

"I'm keeping my mag gun primed, just in case," Yang said.

Moments later, the two time jumpers hopped down to the foundation level of the compound, touching down to a smooth foot landing on the ground. Little poofs of dust surrounded their boots. The domes were ahead, a few dozen meters. They covered the distance in a minute, leaping like Olympic athletes three meters high with each bound.

They came to the airlock and cycled their way through with no problem.

"The LunarCom channel is still open," Yang noted, 'but our Chinese screamer seems to have vanished. I'll try to raise him—" she keyed her own mic, then "Majoris One to anyone, Majoris One to anyone, responding to LunarCom emergency...we're inside the Tian Jia base. Responding to an emergency call...here to render assistance and aid—"

But no one answered the call.

The troopers cycled out of the airlock into a room crammed with gear, a crawler parked in its bay, hooked up by cables and wires, several suits hanging from support frames from the ceiling, consoles winking with lights and an odd patch of white ash next to one of the seats.

Yang bent down, her suit servos whining to adjust, to examine the patch. She dragged her fingers through the ash. "I've got a bad feeling, Commander. Put your scope on this patch...ten to one, this is atom fluff."

Golich examined the patch with a portable analyzer from his web belt. "Bingo! Readings off scale...high thermals, high EMs, some badass atom smashing right here and not long ago either. Whoever or whatever this was, they were disassembled in a hurry and it's not ANAD signature either. I don't recognize the graphs at all...something new."

"And plenty nasty," muttered Yang. "Come on...and keep our weapons primed."

They pushed through and found themselves in a circular corridor, a hallway that appeared to circle the dome along its outer circumference. They passed hab spaces, berths and beds and bathrooms and shower stalls. They came to a compact commissary, with counters, and refrigerators and cabinets, all well stocked with supplies.

They also passed two more patches along the corridor flooring, the last one near an escape hatch. The hatch was closed but not fully sealed. A thin high-pitched squeal of air could be heard.

"Better launch an URME subswarm and get that sealed," Golich told her. "My ears are already popping." They paused for a moment, while Yang did the honors, launching URME from her containment capsule and pecking out a basic config to form a seal over the hatch ring. The small swarm was barely visible, only an occasional pop of light gave away the fact that a formation of nanoscale assemblers was hard at work. Moments later, the hatch was sealed and the leak had been stopped. Once done, she recalled URME back into containment.

"We'll send 'em the bill," Golich said. "Where the hell are we? And where is everybody?"

"My specs say this is Chongchin Dome," Yang replied. "Mostly hab spaces, residential units, this—" but her words were suddenly interrupted by a commotion up ahead. A short, stocky man clad only in a long-john undergarment, came barreling around the curve of the corridor, the cooling tubes of his undergarment flapping and spraying water everywhere. His face was scrunched up in some kind of frozen scream and his hands were waving and flailing about his head.

He stumbled and went head first to the floor when he saw the hypersuited troopers.

Golich and Yang immediately had their mag carbines trained on the crewman, who struggled up to his feet and immediately raised his hands. His face was shiny with sweat, pocked with lacerations and his voice hoarse and halting, Mandarin Chinese mixed with snatches of English.

"Tamen laile...tamen laile...they're coming...inside the dome...get away while you can!"

His face was wild and strained and only a mag gun barrel in the chest forced him to calm down and take stock of his own situation.

"Who's coming?" asked Golich. "What's inside the dome?"

Bit by bit, haltingly at first, the words came tumbling out. Chinese mixed with English, punctuated with great heaving gasps for air and arms still waving about, the crewman admitted he was actually the Chief Engineer for the whole base. His name was Liu Wei Fong.

They moved to the commissary, where Liu took a seat at a table. Yang managed to get some tea going. Liu sipped greedily and gratefully, warily eyeing the troopers through steam from his cup.

They could hardly believe what he told them.

Liu reported that it was true: the Chinese had been digging up by the Tombs, excavating for future foundation pads—the barest beginnings of what would eventually become Copernicus City-- and they had turned up another of the strange spheres that had been found in other places. A quantum sphere, Liu called it, able to give anyone who mastered it unprecedented access to the archives and knowledge of a race not of the Earth.

"We call them Lao bufen...the Old Ones," Liu reported. "This sphere...this lingyu...he is like a door. Like a portal to their library...all kinds of knowledge is there...new devices, new sciences, a fabulous discovery—"

"So the Bugs really are here," Yang said sourly. "We know they're here...we have deco wake evidence—"

"Yes, yes. But when we uncovered the sphere, we found something else...very bad."

Golich was skeptical. "Oh, yeah...like what? A gold mine?"

Lui shook his head vigorously, downing the scalding hot tea in one gulp. "No, no...a swarm...a massive swarm, like never encountered before...it's already escaping the muzang—"

"Like a dust cloud, maybe?" surmised Yang. "That must be what we saw coming in."

Lui agreed. "This swarm...he is massive. It's underground, below our excavation. Moving below the surface, hundreds of meters below the surface. Truly it is big, maybe half a kilometer in dimension, maybe more. This is what is causing the tremors, all the quakes and seismic activity. Truly a danger—"

Even as he spoke, another tremor rocked the dome and pots and pans fell clattering to the floor from shelves along the galley walls. Liu's eyes widened in terror.

"You must help us now...the Treaty—this swarm is damaging Tian Jia...one of our scientists thinks it could even consume the entire Moon."

"We did see a lot of landslides on the way across Copernicus," admitted Yang.

"Sinkholes too," said Golich. "Remember that big ravine just before we got to Copernicus, along that ridge of ejecta?"

"How many of you are left?" Yang asked.

Liu shrugged. "Few. Maybe I am the only one. But we need help. This swarm –this Guanli ren...your own people have called it a Keeper, I believe...is moving toward the surface. What you see as dust clouds are only the farthest projections of the formation...it isn't dust at all. Small robots, nanorobotic devices, emerging from fissures in the surface...some are even leaving the surface. They have propulsors---we've examined some in our labs. They can move under their own power...some may even have left the Moon entirely. They got into the base—" here he choked back a sob. "...our people had no chance...Deng, Zhou, Guang...all of them—"

Golich had a dark scowl on his face. "Inside the base, they could be anywhere. Masquerading as anything."

"Please—"Liu pleaded with his eyes and hands. "Please...you must help us defeat this force...this dragon. We can't stop it...it's consuming the ground below Tian Jia, causing seismics everywhere. Surely, you feel this even at your own Farside and Shackleton Crater bases. If Guanli ren can't be stopped, even your own bases will be in danger."

"Commander, maybe we'd better try contacting Rescue Service. LunarCom One...see if we can get some help here."

"My thinking exactly. But first, I want to do a little recon...make sure we don't have nasties hiding out nearby. They could even look like furniture, hypersuits, beds, dinner plates, anything. Where's the comm center?" he asked Liu.

It was located in Kunming Wing.

For the next hour, Golich, Yang and a nervous Liu reconnoitered the interior of every dome of Tian Jia base, working their way through crawlerways and tunnels, past berths and hab spaces, the canteen, labs and airlocks, power plant controls and storage lockers. The entire compound was deserted, save for an occasional angel, whom the jumpers assumed was Coethi, a para-human swarm entity done up to resemble a human, roaming mindlessly up and down corridors while its structure filled in and thickened enough to pass close inspection. They skirted and backtracked around these apparitions, learning not to trust anything they couldn't touch but outside Kunming Wing, they ran into trouble.

The comm center was inside Kunming but the tunnel hatch into the wing was obscured by a small band of still-forming angels. Liu shrank back in terror, recognizing two of them.

"Guang...Fei...what's happened to—"

Yang cut him off, while Golich checked his mag pistol charge. "Swarm entities, Liu. They're not real, but they're configged to resemble your crewmates. We've seen this before."

Golich leveled his weapon. "Alicia, get URME going now. Launch URME, max rate...Now!"

She sprang the Unit Reserve Memory Entity from the capsule on her web belt—earning a dropped mouth on Liu's already petrified face—and pecked out a basic config on her wristpad. The swarm that was URME flowed out and swelled to a flickering ball of mist, barely visible but for the pop and flash of lights, as the swarm slammed atoms to replicate fast.

"Commander, if these things are really Coethi—"

Golich completed her thought. "That means the Bugs are already here, already leaking out of voidtime. They slammed Majoris. They're on the Moon in force. Where else could they be?"

"Urth, maybe?"

"God, let's hope not. I did here rumors of Bug sightings on Urth, though...even inside the WorldNet."

"Permission to engage...."

"You are authorized to engage the target. Just open us a path into the comm center, Alicia.

With that, Yang went 'over the waterfall' and entered the world of atoms and molecules, engaging direct drive so she could pilot the URME swarm herself. After the initial dizziness of being slammed with Brownian motion and van der Waals forces, she flexed her fingers and decided she actually did enjoy being down here, especially if meant bashing Bugs.

Just me and the molecules...and URME. Let the hunt begin.

Yang immediately got underway, figuring out how to operate her own propulsors as she jetted toward the Bugs ahead.

It's like learning how to swim and walk at the same time, she told herself. I don't know what half of these gadgets do...but, here goes....

She closed the distance in a few minutes, and straight away found herself in a scrap with a small squadron of Bugs. They were nanobotic devices, of that she was sure, probably Coethi. So am I, she snorted. I wonder what I look like to them.

Before she could react, she was already in the grasp of two bots, whose effectors lanced out and pinioned her before she could maneuver away.

Oh, yeah...let's see what this thing does...she found all she had to do was think of a config and the right effector was enabled and powered up. Slammed sideways, she reacted with a few snaps from her own grabbers and managed to pinch off a few molecules of the attacking bots, atoms went spinning off in a puff of fragments as she scooted out from under them.

Take that, you snotty little worms.

Now Yang whirled and slashed with the same grabbers, a feint immediately parried by the bots, which butted her amidships and sent her spinning away. She managed to right herself and jetted back up into the melee.

It was like combat underwater in the swimming pool, like when she had tussled with her sister Chen as a kid, pulling hair, kicking, slapping, all in slow motion. The trouble was the slightest touch could set her spinning. Clearly there were forces here at this level she had never heard of. She'd have to be more careful.

Yang waded into another knot of Bugs and went to pinching and grabbing and slashing. She found she could use her propulsors to make kamikaze swooping attacks on a tangent to the mob, diving in for a slash, then pulling out just in time. That tactic worked pretty well.

Then, just by chance, she found a better way to operate her bond disrupters.

Using the same kamikaze dives, she found she could scatter knots of Bugs with liberal use of the disrupters. Each dive produced the same result: a big zap! and then atom fragments and pieces of effectors went cartwheeling off in all directions.

This was starting to be fun. But getting past the Bugs and into the comm center was more important.

Yang slashed and burned her way up the slope, encountering thicker and thicker knots of Bugs. It's just me against millions. She knew she could replicate additional copies of her own structure, but where was that control again?

But before she could consider the implications of that, she spied a different sort of Bug, further back from the front lines, bigger, with more effectors, standing off from the others.

The larger Bug seemed to be in charge. Yang worked her way against the flow of bots, grabbing, pinching, slashing, where she had to, until she found herself at the same level as the large Bug.

It had multiple heads, globular and pyramidal, with a forest of effectors around its equator and it was spitting out copies of itself like some kind of whirling assembly plant...casings, effectors, grapples and propulsors...a queen bee of a bot growing drones and workers left and right.

Alicia Yang had never been one to turn down a challenge. Her brother Zhang often dared her to try things and she learned at an early age not to back down. She could outrun and outfight half the boys she had grown up with. Part of surviving in a family of boys was standing up to them, talking trash with them, roughing and wrestling with them. That's how you got respect. Above all else, Alicia Yang wanted respect.

So she was moving toward the master bot before she even realized what she was doing.

She waded right in, slashing and burning, and caught the master bot by complete surprise.

The first thing she noticed, after she collected herself from the recoil, was how fast the bastard was. In the blink of eye, the bot flung her away and zapped her with its disrupters for good measure. It went back to slamming atoms, trying to replicate as fast as it could.

Okay, mister, if that's the way you want it.

Yang backed off and played with URME's effectors for a few moments, trying to figure out what did what. Okay, that's like a hand. That one's like a knife. That zaps things. That one over there twists things. When she felt she had a little better mastery of the gizmos, she charged right back in.

Yang remembered grappling and wrestling with her brother Zhang as a child. It was all about leverage. The best position was on top but there wasn't any gravity here, just weird forces that had names she couldn't pronounce...van der Waals and things like that.

By instinct, she closed on the master bot and went for the mid-section, an area that seemed to have fewer effectors. Using a clutch and grab combo, she managed to grapple something and hung on as the bot thrashed about. Disrupter fire zapped the air and she returned fire. Moments later, they had company as the bot master's friends came zooming up. Yang felt herself pulled and punched in a hundred different directions. She zapped and pinched and twisted and slammed but it wasn't doing any good.

She lost a couple of effectors—that should have hurt but then you could just grow more when you had the right config. Then she lost her hold and went spinning off in the distance.

Now the bot master was surrounded by a protective squad of daughter bots, replicants, she knew to call them.

How did he do that? She wondered. I should have the same ability.

Bit by bit, Yang learned how to approach and assault the Bugs. Someone had once called it ballroom dancing, with fists. Sneak in here, slap and sting there, back out and come in again at a different angle. Slowly, coordinating her assaults with precision mag fire from Golich, the Bugs that had been blocking the comm center doors were reduced to fragments and atom fluff. A final burst from Golich and the doors were reduced to smoking, molten slag and an opening developed big enough for them to crawl through.

Golich kicked in the last remaining pieces of door and the three of them burst through the buzzing cloud of Bugs and fell into the comm center.

Golich got to his feet, hobbled over to the main console and immediately puzzled out what to do. While Yang held off Bugs trying to fill in behind them, Golich powered up the system and tuned the transmitter to the right frequency.

The signal would go planet-wide, bounced off relay sats in orbit to every camp and settlement on the Moon.

"Any station, any station...this is Majoris escape pod, declaring a level one emergency. We have casualties here. Any station, any station...Majoris escape pod transmitting in the clear from—" he rattled off the latitude and longitude from the nav screen "—declaring a level one emergency. We are inside Chinese base Tian Jia, under assault from Bugs. Mayday, mayday—"

He didn't have long to wait. Even as Yang and Liu were rummaging through the rations locker nearby, the radio crackled to life.

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

Golich located the powerful lights atop Kunming Wing and switched on. Outside, the rock fall and canyon walls were bathed in a yellow glow. From ten thousand meters up, their location inside Tian Jia would flare like a supernova in the black of a lunar night.

The Rescue Service hopper arrived just twenty-five minutes later and managed to extract Golich, Yang and Liu without further interference from the Bugs.

There was even better news. As the hopper was making its return flight to Farside base several thousand kilometers away on the other side of the Moon, Golich and Yang learned that jumpship Cygnus had completed her Twister installation at Sedna base and was now en route to Urth space.

# Chapter 3: "Configuration Zero"

"They say time changes things but you actually have to change them yourself."

Andy Warhol

U.S. Cyber Corps Headquarters

National Threat and Intelligence Fusion Center

T-date T-001-4-25-56

(April 25, 2656 CE)

Herndon, Virginia

1215 hours

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Like what, Leeds?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

The vidcon had chirped and another window opened up on the screen. It was the UN Security Affairs Commissioner, Evelyn Lumumba. UNSAC was an ebony-black Cameroonian woman of striking beauty, with fierce warrior eyes and bristly conical hair, adorned by an ivory and bone hairpiece that rattled when she turned her head. She conned in from UNSAC's offices at the Quartier-General in Paris.

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

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

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

Lumumba sat back and thought. Her hairpiece rattled again. "I'd say maybe, Mr. President. We've seen the analyses your COHEN system has sent over. But our own people think there could be other explanations. Already, we've detected quantum state fluctuations around the interior of east Africa...indicating the Bugs may be up to something again."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He just couldn't prove it yet.

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

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

Lumumba agreed. "It's past time to take the initiative, Mr. President. I'll advise the Security Council and the SG of your plans. And we'll need to make sure there are good communication links between Quantum Corps and your Cyber Corps people. Also I've been in touch with the Alliance and their Time Guard. In fact, Commandstar has already jumped to Sedna Base. We're conferencing later today."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UNIFORCE Headquarters

The Quartier-General, Paris

T-date T-001-4-26-56

(April 26, 2656 CE)

1030 hours

In all the years he had been a jumpship captain, Monthan Dringoth had never been to Urth or to 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.

Jump Captain Dringoth was mad, as he took the lift up to UNSAC's suite of offices. Maybe not mad. He was sad. How about depressed? Maybe all three. He was just coming off furious installation work for the new Twister at Sedna base and had just rescued his wayward XO and Alicia Yang from the Bugs now infesting a large part of the Moon's surface.

Now the damned things were here, infesting Urth itself and the whole Alliance was in an uproar. Fighting the Coethi in the most distant reaches of the Alliance was one thing but when the Bugs showed up outside the doors of Alliance bigwigs, that was different. That was a real crisis.

Dringoth liked to think of himself as a professional. Time Guard officers completed the mission, no matter what. Obstacles were just chances for greater glory. But it was hard and Dringoth was enough of a realist to understand that all the name-calling and the finger-pointing had just begun.

It didn't make any sense. As he reached the sixtieth floor and had himself scanned in through Security to UNSAC's quarters, Monthan Dringoth realized that what he wanted more than anything else, more than lame excuses and explanations laced with jargon, was just to have his ship and his crew back. Just give us a mission and get the hell out of the way.

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

Evelyn Lumumba was just coming in through another door when Dringoth took his seat. The Security Affairs Commissioner always commanded any space she occupied, rather like a lethal lioness lording it over a den full of snarling cubs. Officers lined both sides of the table and the back chairs, some real, some avatars, some virtual. It wasn't long before Dringoth recognized two avatars hovering at the end of the table...one was Dr. Anika Steen-Dellarosa, Secretary-General of the Alliance. The other was Commandstar.

Lumumba waved everyone to be seated.

"We're launching a special mission," she announced, without any forewarning. "You've all seen the intel reports my office forwarded. The Coethi are here on Urth now and on the Moon as well. I just came from a meeting with the SecGen here...she's finalizing evacuation plans for several large cities in Asia even now...the Bugs aren't holding anything back. We're in an existential, Level One crisis and the purpose of this briefing is to coordinate our responses and assign missions. I've asked Captain Dringoth to be here in person, since he has recent experience with the Coethi and his ship has just completed installation of a Time Twister out on Sedna Base."

"Why can't we put up a Twister here...or on the Moon?" asked General Jake Argo. Argo was commanding officer of Quantum Corps, a sister service to Time Guard in the Alliance. "Blast the sumbitches with that."

Lumumba glanced at Dringoth. "I'll refer your question to the Captain here--?"

Dringoth cleared his throat. "Sir, the Time Twister is an area weapon. The one based on Sedna is focused on deep-space approaches to the Sol system, focused away from Urth. A Twister sited here or on the Moon wouldn't be very effective and it would be tactically limited in coverage. Using a Twister this close to heavily populated areas could really mess up local time streams, really trash worldlines. You don't want a Twister operating this close to Urth. Coethi will have to be rooted out some other way."

Argo frowned and mumbled something, while Lumumba went on. "I've asked Commandstar from Time Guard and T2, his chief of intelligence, to be here as well. Gentlemen, could you go over the latest?"

The Commandstar avatar hovered like a wraith to the center of the table. "Recent sensor indications detected by T2 show a significant Coethi presence along several worldlines in early time stream T-001. The intel was gathered from many sources and analyzed but the gist is this: decoherence wake analysis shows a large, unexplainable quantum disturbance gathering at a point millions of years ago in east Africa. There are several opinions and potential reasons for this disturbance."

Argo was quick with his own opinion. "Friggin' Bugs are trying to divert us from the present. It's maskirovka, I'm telling you. A diversionary feint to influence us to move our forces away from this point in time. A dead end, a blind alley."

The Commandstar avatar brightened as it turned to face Argo. Dringoth noted something like patient sufferance on the officer's pixelated face. "While that is a distinct possibility, my own TACTRON believes otherwise."

Argo seemed particularly argumentative and Dringoth wondered if some kind of rash were biting the O-10's ass.

"Your TACTRON is a swarm of bots, sir. Not so different from the Bugs themselves. He has some special insight we don't have?"

Commandstar's patience was wearing out. "He has decades of direct combat experience fighting to keep the Bugs out of your lap, General. TACTRON's analysis of these deco wake signals leads him to believe the Coethi are trying to alter the earliest ages, the earliest worldlines of T-001."

Lumumba was intrigued. "For what purpose, sir?"

Commandstar's face turned grim. "To prevent Umans from ever showing up. To prevent our ancestors from millions of years ago from ever appearing or developing or evolving."

Argo didn't believe a word of it. "Poppycock, Commandstar. That's just the sort of wet dream I'd expect Time Guard to come up with. We've got a Level 1 emergency staring us in the face right here and now. We can't afford to be sending assets on a wild chase through time based on some ghost signals from the past. Madame Commissioner, with all due respect, that's nuts. It doesn't make tactical sense."

Lumumba's bone hairpiece rattled in a way that got everybody's attention. "The SG's already made the decision and the mission has been approved, General. Time Guard will send a jumpship crew back down T-001, along the primary worldline, to track down the source of this deco wake disturbance. If it is the Coethi and they're trying to do what TACTRON thinks, this crew will be authorized to engage the Coethi and prevent such interference from happening."

Argo remained stubbornly unconvinced. "Madame Commissioner, I can assure you that Quantum Corps is more than capable of handling any Bug formations that show up here."

Lumumba sniffed. "Like you handled the infestation of WorldNet, General? We're still trying to fix that."

Argo said nothing but fumed at the implication.

Lumumba went on. "The mission is to be called Operation Temporal Hammer. Commandstar has graciously offered the services of his most experienced Bug fighter, Captain Dringoth here, to lead the mission. His own jumpship, Cygnus, is undergoing mods right now at Gateway Station to perform this mission and she will be the lead ship."

And that's how Monthan Dringoth learned he wouldn't be getting any liberty time for the foreseeable future.

Operation Temporal Hammer Objective Coordinates

Pangaea, Time Stream T-001

310.3 million years ago (mya)

Late Carboniferous Period

The time jump finally spat Cygnus out right into a shallow, steaming lake beneath a blood red sky, a sky thick with the sulfurous fumes and fat rain drops drumming on the hull. After the vibrations subsided, Dringoth checked with his Sensor tech Evelyn M'Bela.

"How close to our target coordinates, Queenie?"

M'Bela studied her board and its plots and displays. "Best I can make out, we're within a few decades of the temporal focus, based on your maneuvers and our physical landing point is here—" she pointed to a map. "Southeastern edge of this big continent, about six hundred forty kilometers from the equator. Cygnus will auto-confirm once she takes sky sightings." M'Bela peered out the porthole at the steam and fog enveloping the ship. "If she can even take sightings in this crap."

Dringoth studied his own map display. "It's called Pangaea, according to this. Supercontinent. All the Urth's land masses have come together like a big puzzle into this one continent. Let's get outside and see if we can detect any Coethi presence." Dringoth then got on the ship's 1MC and said, "Okay, troops...let's consider this an opposed-entry visit. Get all your gear together, arm weapons and button up. We leave the ship in ten minutes."

XO Nathan Golich watched the bright red-yellow tongues of lava flowing down the slopes of a distant mountain. "Ours not to reason why...."

Cygnus' lockout was cycled and the team exited, two at a time. First order of business was to set up some kind of defensible perimeter around the ship, out to a distance of several hundred meters. This was done by Alicia Yang, with help from Acth:On'e.

Yang plopped down into the shallow lake they had landed in and was immediately brushed by a large lizard-like creature undulating its way across the surface. "Cyclops says it's a tetrapod, probably Hylonomus." She adjusted her headgear slightly to get more annotation in her eyepiece. "Sauropsid reptile...can move at high speed land or water."

Acth:On'e had a somewhat jaundiced view of all amphibs. "Alicia, that could just be one of your older sisters. Say hello."

The rest of the team followed Yang across the shallow lake, sloshing their way up a low bank to drier ground. The Defense and Protective Systems tech extracted a small capsule from her web belt and thumbed its control stud on top. Instantly, a fine mist issued from the capsule, flickering slightly over their heads. Yang waved it about her head in a circle.

"Launching URME sensorbots now," she announced.

The mist dispersed and vanished from view. But now, the crew had eyes and ears to probe their surroundings and warn them of approaching danger.

Golich splashed up onto the bank and made a face. "Ugh. Like a K-World sand bog, only wetter and hotter." He took a few deep breaths, did some deep-knee bends. "Oxygen content is higher here."

Yang concurred, 'sniffing' the air with a probe she extracted from her web belt. "Reading O2 levels now at thirty-five percent...that is higher than what we're used to. Urth normal in our time stream is about twenty-two."

"Must be why my throat's so dry," Dringoth decided.

"Wow," muttered M'Bela, grabbing a small rotted stump for balance. "Check out the wind gusts."

"That one was over forty kph," said Yang. "The Urth was rotating faster in this time stream. Cyclops is saying the sidereal day is about twenty-two hours versus twenty-four."

"That explains the wind," Dringoth decided.

"And the high oxygen levels explain all these fires," Golich added. "Feels like we're inside an oven."

All around the lake, the rolling terrain was host to dozens of fires, spiraling wind-blown ashes into a thick blanket that coated everything. Mountains ringed the lake and their landing zone. Raucous screeches caught their attention and all eyes turned skyward.

A V-shaped formation of long-winged creatures soared out of the ash and fog, swooping down on them, pulling up from their dive at the last moment. Yang aimed her own head-mounted Cyclops at their tails and wings as they disappeared into the fog again. Seconds later, annotated text scrolled on her eyepiece.

"Meganeura—" she read off. "Believe it or not, those were giant dragonflies. Eighty- centimeter wing spans. Ugh—"

Golich muttered, "Just another beautiful day in the neighborhood. Gibbstown this is not."

Dringoth said, "Queenie, you got anything yet?"

The TS1 checked the displays on her own Cyclops. "There's something just tickling the sensorbots...can't quite grab it yet. Alicia, can you run your bots a little higher? I pinched off ten percent of your swarm...give me twenty percent. That should make resolution better. Go higher and spread out."

Alicia Yang was grim. "Any kind of decoherence wake around here should be cause for suspicion. I can't imagine anything quantum occurring naturally in this hellhole during the late Carboniferous Period."

Golich and Acth:On'e went to a small hillock nearby for a better view. Golich was sweating profusely in the hot, humid air and had to rest against a nearby stump, which promptly shuddered, growled and moved off on four legs, startling everyone. The tetrapod headed for a nearby pool and plopped in.

Acth:On'e checked his Cyclops. "Looks like you disturbed a Labyrinthodontia. It says here they can grow to five or six meters."

Golich made a face. "I've seen arachtyls around the Sand Sea smaller than that."

Just then, M'Bela uttered a sharp cry. "Got 'em! Bingo! Big deco wake disturbance...something out there is really snapping spacetime, just like a wet rag."

"Heading and range?" Dringoth asked.

M'Bela walked around like a blind man in a drunken fog as she adjusted her Cyclops for the feed from the bots overhead. "I make the heading that way—"she pointed into the sun, to the northwest. "Best heading is three two five degrees. Locus is at least six hundred klicks from here, diffuse but strong. Really strong."

"Got to be artificial," Yang decided.

"Okay," Dringoth waved everybody to come back. "Re-board the ship. We'll have to make a short flight along Queenie's vector. Grab all your gear." He stepped carefully into the shallow lake and sloshed his way to the hatch. "And watch where you step. Everything around here is alive."

One by one, the crew climbed back into Cygnus and the hatch was sealed. Moments later, the jumpship lifted away from its watery landing spot and rose into the fog-shrouded sky. Dringoth put them on Queenie's heading and the ship lurched forward, gaining altitude.

"Half propulsor," Dringoth told Golich. "I don't want to fly past the target. Queenie, give me a count when we're close."

"Copy that, Skipper."

Cygnus cruised along at several thousand meters until the land below began to shift, from a plain dotted with smoking mountains and steaming lakes and fire columns and fumaroles to a sandy shelf and then a broad blue-green sea, extending to the horizon in all directions.

"Paleo-Tethys Sea, the map says," M'Bela observed, occasionally taking a peek out her side window. "We must have originally landed on the edge of a place called Gondwana. This ocean will eventually become part of the Atlantic. Pangaea is rifting apart now."

"Land up ahead," Dringoth announced. He studied the terrain through the clouds below them. "Looks like jungle too. This should be fun."

"Start descending, Skipper. Target locus is less than a hundred kilometers, dead ahead."

Dringoth manipulated Cygnus' speed and altitude to bring the jumpship to a dead hover over the edge of a vast swamp. "Tell me the target's not down there, in that swamp."

M'Bela shook her head. "Sorry, Skipper. Main source is just ahead, along that shoreline. Below those big trees."

Golich had started wearing a Cyclops himself. He read off the annotation on his eyepiece. "You mean the Lepidostrobus? It says they can grow thirty meters high and two meters in diameter."

"That's the one," M'Bela said.

Dringoth took a deep breath. "If I can squeeze us through the branches...I'll put the ship down on that far shoreline. I'm not too keen on landing in the swamp itself. I just hope the ground is firm enough."

Down they went.

They came through a low hanging steam bank to the very edge of the swamp. Cygnus settled down to a rattling landing and was still. Overhead, lightning veined in sharp bursts across purple and rose-colored clouds, thick and steaming overhead. The ground trembled and through the trees, they could see the red glow of another volcano, simmering and smoking. It seemed about to blow.

The swamp was extensive, filled with moss-covered trees, low-hanging branches and mossy patches on rocks surrounding the edge of the water. Cypress knees looked vaguely menacing in the twilight. A faint mist hovered over the water's surface.

Nothing moved. No screeches, no howler monkeys. No birds cawing in the air. Steam and smoke and shuddering ground were all that gave movement to the swamp.

"I have a feeling we're not on K-World anymore," said Golich.

"Right. Let's get to work. Queenie, it's your show."

They scouted along the swamp banks for a few minutes. It was a vast wetland, thick with ropy vine and large, lobe and ear-shaped leaves, damp with moisture and humidity, hanging nearly to the soft spongy ground. The Cygnus crew picked their way carefully through leaf piles and clinging vine, occasionally hacking and whacking their way through heavy underbrush, wary of slithering things underfoot, but they found none. Nothing moving at all, not even flies or mosquitoes. Still, Yang nearly turned an ankle in a small sinkhole nearly hidden between two tree trunks.

Finally, Dringoth called a halt. They stood over a narrow bubbling, foaming inlet, clearly the water was flowing somewhere from here. "Let's take some more bearings on that signal."

M'Bela probed for more decoherence wakes, the tell-tale signature of quantum entanglement.

"Not far," she announced. "Maybe three hundred meters around the shoreline."

Dringoth had already primed his own HERF rifle. "Set weapons to level one. Alicia, do we have eyes and ears?"

"URME away," she announced. The mist of the botswarm was soon lost in the steam and humid air, its flickers and light pops vanishing overhead in the low-hanging limbs and branches.

The ground rumbled and all of them looked through the trees. There were tall mountains in the distance. The summit of the nearest one glowed orange-red in the cathedral gloom of the forest.

"Looks like we might have a blow soon," Yang said. "I don't like the looks of that one. Could that glow be part of our target...Coethi at work?"

"Could be," Dringoth said. "My question is: how do we get the hell out of here if we have to?"

"If we're actually here," Kumar muttered. "Wherever here is."

"Hey, what's that?"

At the same time, they all spied a fog bank roiling across the top of the swamp. Tendrils of steam drifted in patches.

"What's what?"

"That."

Now, the fog bank had taken on a more menacing look. As they looked more closely, they could see small flashes and pops of light within the fog, as if it were thick with fireflies.

"Those aren't fireflies, Skipper."

The hairs on the back of Dringoth's neck stood up. "And that's not fog either. Unless I'm seeing things, that a swarm of some kind."

"Yeah and it's coming our way."

M'Bela's eyes almost popped out of her head. "Uh, folks...massive deco wakes there...massive signal...dead ahead, closing on our position."

Stumbling through stagnant pools and thick underbrush, they moved sideways along the bank of the swamp but the swarm swelled and soon blocked their way. Dringoth figured they would just backtrack the way they had come but the swarm filled in behind them and they soon found themselves trapped on a narrow spit of dry land, surrounded by cypress knees and piles of moss-covered rocks.

Though the swarm had nearly enveloped them, at least it hadn't closed any further.

"Look!" Yang pointed at several patches of swarm, now dropping down closer to the ground. As they watched, the light flickering inside changed pattern, becoming more intense, pulsing faster, almost like a strobe and the fingers of the swarm swept right across the moss covering on top of the rocks, pausing momentarily at each moss patch.

"Fantastic," Acth:On'e breathed. "It's writing genetic code, Captain, right into the cells of that moss. Injecting something directly into the cells."

"Maybe this is how life got started," M'Bela said.

"No," said Golich, adjusting his own Cyclops. "This is where life got changed."

"The Coethi," said Dringoth. A cold chill ran down his back.

Then, Yang spotted something. "Look...look there, though the fog. That sandbar—"

Startled, Dringoth squinted to see better. It was clear they had unexpected visitors. All along the sandbar, shapes and figures like wraiths moved silently, stooping and bending down to collect something, bagging their prizes, then moving further along the sandbar.

It was Yang who first recognized one of them. "He's Uman," she cried out. "In a hypersuit... I'd know that hoarse mechanical breathing anywhere."

Yang had already recognized two others. "There--!" she pointed to some human figures among the group. "Those two are Chinese!"

Dringoth had a growing suspicion that his teammates were right.

Somehow, in some way he hadn't yet figured out, a small team of Chinese explorers had jumped down the worldline to the same time and place as Cygnus. Now they seemed to be assisting the swarm of Coethi in some unknown task, perhaps making an alliance with the Bugs, perhaps trying to learn the secrets of their technology.

The mission of Temporal Hammer had suddenly become much more complicated.

Dringoth and the time jumpers scrambled and fell back to a more defensible position along a sandbar on the other side of the swamp, buried themselves in dripping wet foliage and made plans on how to deal with the Chinese team. Nobody was sure whether they had been spotted or not.

"We're surrounded!" said Golich. "We'll have to fight our way out!"

"We'd better deal with that swarm first," Dringoth decided.

He got on the crewnet. "Charge up your HERF guns! Full-bore—we're laying down a barrage all around!"

The time jumpers cycled their weapons, checked charge and reported back ready.

"Let 'em have it!" Dringoth commanded. "Light 'em up!"

At his signal, five High-Energy Radio Frequency guns discharged at once. A rolling thunderclap erupted across the swamp, scattering flocks of birds and Meganeura hordes, which fluttered into the reddened skies like smoke in a wind. Across the swamp, small waves washed up against boulders and sandbars, the blasts stirring the waters into roiling agitation.

"Again!" Dringoth commanded.

Multiple bursts of rf shattered the leading edge of the approaching swarm. Clumps of bots fell out of the sky like burned fries. A few more blasts of rf and the swarm seemed to recoil from their position, gathering itself into a solid wall, a wall of flickering mist, but holding its advance for the time being.

"Launching URME...now!" Alicia Yang called out. She held up her containment capsule and a fine mist emerged, flickering and flashing and popping, the leading edge of the bots just issuing from the cylinder and spreading out quickly, replicating rapidly as the swarm built structure like some frantic brick mason. The swarm swelled and expanded visibly as the rest looked on. Yang checked her wristpad, then announced, "I'm going over the waterfall...going small!"

The display shifted to take in the feed from the URME master bot, sending back acoustic, EM and thermal imagery to her wristpad. For a brief moment, Yang was dizzy—it was normal when checking in to the world of atoms—and felt like she was flying through a sleet storm of cubes and polygons and tetrahedrals and dodecahedrons.

Combat at the level of nanoscale bots, at the level of atoms and molecules, was like shadow boxing...or as one wag at Time Guard's K-World base had once put it: ballroom dancing...with fists.

Now cruising on picowatt propulsors, the URME master and its daughter bots went hunting for the enemy. A few moments later, URME sent the alarm.

The imager screen was at first murky, crowded with the spikes and cubes of dissolved molecules. Lumpy, multi-lobed sodium molecules darted across their view like shadowy ping-pong balls. Yang studied readouts from URME's sounder...something was there, hidden in the data traces on the scope. She fiddled with the gain on the imager, tweaking it, subtracting foreground clutter. Dringoth and Golich looked on with the displays synched to their own wristpads.

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

M'Bela let out a whoop. "Will you look at that?"

Dringoth swallowed hard at the view. "Coethi bots." Up close and personal. The very enemy the Umans had been battling for nearly a hundred years. No one had ever seen one this close before.

Acth:On'e came closer, squinted at the vague, fuzzy outlines on the screen. "A whole colony of them. A welcoming committee, it would appear. Come to see what we're about, I believe."

Yang's fingers flew over the interface controls. "We're about to check this joker out..." Quickly, she signaled URME to prime its defensive mechanisms, and slowed its approach to a crawl.

Reconnoiter first. She remembered a line from the famous time jumper Sun Tzu, the wargames last spring....

He who is skilled hides in the most secret recesses of the earth.

Under Yang's guidance, URME maneuvered among the jostling molecules of chlorine and sodium and potassium. A huge kinked snakelike cluster of oxygen molecules drifted by. That gave her an idea. She signaled URME to grab a few oxygens as a shield. Seizing atoms with its effectors, URME clutched several molecules.

Gradually, the shape and size of the Coethi bot became clearer. Bristling with effectors and arms, it looked like a miniature K-World shuttle craft. The head was a multi-lobed cluster of spheres and hexagons; inside the churning electron cloud dimmed out any detail.

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

"Hell of a lot of gear for such a small bastard," he said.

"Maybe he's programmed to evolve with the stuff he's modifying," M'Bela suggested. She had positioned herself to study the image too.

"Or maybe he's just programmed to evolve..." Acth:On'e wondered. "A set program, in multiple stages. One routine to insert changes and—"

"And another to take control of its environment," Dringoth said. "It might explain some things--"

"So many different kinds of effectors," Yang marveled. "Time Guard has nothing like this...nobody does."

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

Yang brought URME to a complete stop. The hairs on the back of her neck bristled. Something wasn't quite right, but she couldn't put her finger on it. The data was wrong...no bot should be able to act like this.

"Acth:On'e...what do you make of this?"

The Telitorian was amazed at the images URME was returning. "Amazing. That probe for instance--" he fingered a dark, indistinct structure to one side of the nearest device--"looks just like a saw. And that--I believe I recognize...I'll be damned--"

Yang had seen it too. "Sorting rotor?"

"That's what it looks like." At Acth:On'e's request, she fiddled with the resolution, managed to tweak the view even sharper. Dim outlines became clearer. "A segment of a sorting rotor. Cam-driven with carbene grabbers and--" he squinted down at the imager, adjusted his hypersuit imager "--looks like--yep, diamondoid follower rods. "Probably process upwards of several hundred thousand molecules per cycle." Acth:On'e shook his head with grudging respect. "Neat workmanship. But I'd bet my aunt Vivian's life savings that bugger's not just here to modify ferns and mosses."

"Just what exactly are you saying?" Dringoth asked.

Acth:On'e shook his head. "Fantastic engineering, if it's what I think it is."

Unnoticed by anyone, the swarm of Coethi mechs had begun to re-orient themselves tail first toward URME. Their tail fiber penetrators quickly reconfigured, locking into attack position.

He is who is skilled in attack flashes forth from the topmost heights of heaven.

Out of the corner of her eye, Yang saw the maneuver on the imager.

"Look out!" Dringoth saw it too. "He's changing position...all of 'em, coming at us--"

"I'm ready," Yang muttered. Her fingers flew across the keyboard. Instantly, URME brought all its defensive mechanisms to attack position. It cast off the oxygen shield and closed for battle.

Acth:On'e was stunned. "What the hell...?"

"It's coming after me," Yang said. "I need to get closer, grab one of those jokers for analysis--"

As URME sped forward, Coethi grew and retracted appendages and surface structure with blazing speeds. The outer membrane of the mech seethed with motion, as atoms and clusters of atoms twisted, bonded, twisted again, re-bonded, broke apart, recombined, straightened, undulated and whirled.

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

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

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

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

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

Evelyn M'Bela had taken a place beside Yang, studying her own wristpad. "Got to disengage, Alicia...emergency truncation. Everything not critical. We've got to get URME out of there before we lose him!"

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

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

As they watched, Coethi systematically dismantled URME, molecule by molecule. URME was woefully unprepared for the assault. With ruthless efficiency, Coethi mechs whirred and chopped every device URME could generate. URME tried to counter, replicating probes, inserters, jaws, cilia, pumps, blowers--but it was no use.

Coethi mutated too fast. Somehow, the mech seemed to anticipate URME's every move.

Dringoth was awed by Coethi's combat capabilities. "Incredible," he whispered. "The perfect warrior. Must have one hell of a processor."

Golich agreed. "Probably quantum, just like URME."

They were all stunned at the ferocity of Coethi's response.

Yang's fingers flew across the keyboard. "It doesn't make sense. It's like the bastard knows what I'm going to do before I do it."

"We're losing signal strength!" Golich yelled.

"I see it! Coethi's penetrated the matrix. Main processing functions in danger...I'm counterprogramming...." Yang pecked madly at the keyboard.

M'Bela shook a fist at the imager screen, now a dark, swirling mass of shapes and forms. "Come on, damn it! Come on...."

But URME couldn't hold. Every move was countered by the enemy nanomechs. Coethi's response was swift and sure. Yang, Dringoth, Golich, and the others watched in amazement and horror, as one by one, URME's capabilities--fine motor control, attitude and orientation, propulsors, sensors, molecule analysis, replication--were rendered inert, or completely excised.

URME was helpless.

"Got to get the hell out of Dodge," Yang muttered. While I still can.

Golich was checking status. "It's bad. You've got no electron lens. No enzymatic knife. Hardly any effector control. URME's crippled."

Yang gritted her teeth. "Not just yet..." Her fingers flew over the keyboard. "We've gotta get some data...got to probe that bugger, get some structure on him...if I can just get stabilized--"

"Alicia--there's nothing left to stabilize--"

Despite all odds, she wasn't about to give up. Time jumpers didn't give up. Grimly determined, she piloted what was left of the URME horde back for another wrestling match with the enemy.

"Whatever this thing is," she swore to herself, "it reacts a lot like URME itself." She worked the config controller, while Golich managed status, crossing his fingers that the URME master would hold together.

Extend a grappler there. Poke a carbene there....

While Dringoth and Golich and Acth:On'e eyed the Chinese moving cautiously toward them along the shoreline of the swamp, Yang disengaged URME, scrunching up an atom group as she tacked against the churning flow, closing steadily on the nearest mech. Inside a few dozen nanometers, she siphoned off the mech's outer charge and let the zap break him away.

Reams of bond energy data and config details burst onto the imager. Golich let out a yelp. The enemy mechs had given up vitals on structure and URME snatched the info right out from under them, storing it, pulsing it back to their wristpads.

"Now, I gotcha, you little bastard--"

Yang knew she had to get URME away while she still could. Coethi swarmed forward to resume the attack.

"Executing quantum collapse...NOW!" Come on baby, get small for me...get real small....

Instantly, URME disappeared. To all intents and purposes, URME had effectively vanished in a cloud of blurry quantum waves.

Less than four minutes later, making its way on quantum wave propulsors, URME was finally extracted and re-inserted into the capsule, its nanoprocessor still dogging electron states to bring the nearly invisible device home.

The Coethi swarm held off for the time being, a menacing fog nearly enveloping them on all sides. Dringoth studied the tactical situation. It didn't look too promising.

"I don't think we can't beat Coethi...not with what we have," he decided.

Almost as if a curtain were parting, the flickering mist that was the Coethi swarm thinned out and separated enough for the two Chinese males to push their way through. They stopped at the sight of half dozen HERF guns and mag weapons trained on their chests. Both held up hands. Water swirled around their ankles.

"We mean no harm...women anranwuyang...we come with the peace—"

Dringoth stood up from his crouch, waved them on with his HERF carbine. "Slowly...keep your hands out."

The Chinese sloshed through the edge of the swamp and found a small bank that was dry. Cautiously, they climbed up, hands and arms still out like wings.

"What do you want?" Golich asked.

The taller of the Chinese was lanky, clad in a sort of work suit, boots, backpack, zippered pockets and velcro'ed tablets stuck on both arms. His face was weathered and his hair slick black and damp from the humidity. He introduced himself as Dr. Chou Wuhan.

"Beijing Institute of Nanotechnology," he added. He indicated his partner. "This is Dr. Qi Hufei...Mischief Reef lab."

Dringoth lowered his weapon. Slowly, the others did the same.

"Why are you here...in the same time stream as we are? What time are you from?"

Chou tried an avuncular smile, which he didn't quite pull off. "Isn't it obvious? The same reason as you. We used our shiguang jiqi—our time ship, to come here. We work with the Coethi, as you call them. Learn from them. Assist them."

"We investigate problems," added Qi. "Fix problems, if we can."

"What do you mean...problems?" Golich asked. "These buggers are changing the genomes of early life, early viruses...turning them into spies and saboteurs and collaborators. They're changing the whole course of evolution. If we let this happen, all viruses from here on will have the programming the Coethi are installing here. We'll never be able to stop them...not in our own time stream. We have orders to stop them, not study them."

Dr. Chou interjected. Chou was short, shock of black hair, with closely spaced eyes that seemed perpetually out of focus. "No, you're wrong. These Bugs...these chongzi... we're learning so much from them. They've evolved technology we never dreamed of...the Bugs are just bots, but the swarm itself is a collective mind, a hive mind...fantastic complexity...you can't believe—"

Dringoth could still hear Commandstar's words in his head:

Contain or neutralize any Coethi formations encountered.

"It doesn't matter," Dringoth decided. "We have a mission to stop the Bugs from altering evolution. You can either help us or get out of the way. This is an official Time Guard mission and we are going to complete the mission, one way or another."

Qi's face scrunched up into a look of pain. "You do not understand...what you deal with here—"

Chou added, "Our ship is damaged. We must fix our own ship..." he explained. "The Hanzhong. We left Reed Banks in our own ship not so long ago. We've developed a sort of basic communication with the Chongzi...very cryptic—we don't understand all of it. The swarm resembles what we've been studying in our own lab, at Reed Banks. There seems to be an entity—it translates as Configuration Zero, we believe—inside the swarm." He indicated the fog still thickening along the banks of the swamp. "A distributed intelligence—"

Chou stopped, for at that moment, Qi held up a hand and chopped the air for emphasis. His face spoke volumes.

"Hanzhong is still stuck, Doctor. No good. We can't power up. We can't connect to the worldline...the temporal engine's gone."

Golich was curious. He indicated Qi. "You said something a moment ago...that we don't understand what we're dealing with. Do you know something?"

Qi and Chou looked at each other. They argued for a moment in guttural Chinese. Golich's hypersuit translator only caught snatches...thousand flowers...seedship...Tian Jia...that caught his attention.

"What about Tian Jia...we were just there. Bugs are all over the place, all over the Moon."

Chou brushed off some kind of objection from Qi. "We work together, no? Help each other, no?"

"You'd better be straight with us, first," Dringoth told them.

Chou found a small tree branch, stripped off leaves and used it as a drawing stick, making diagrams in the mud nearby.

"Hanzhong...our ship...we came here from singularity time date 2652 CE, Urth standard time. We too have a mission."

"To help the Bugs?" Golich accused them. "We saw what they were trying to do."

Qi interjected, "Not to help. To understand. In our time, there was a project. It was called the Thousand Flowers Project."

Acth:On'e was hurriedly scrolling through an historical database in his helmet. No hits. "Never heard of it."

Qi nodded. "Most top secret. Thousand Flowers had a mission: to remotely seed another planet...51 Pegasi B...with nanobotic swarms, like the Chongzi here, to build out infrastructure prior to humans...Chinese explorers...landing there."

"What happened?" Dringoth asked.

"In our period, we have learned enough temporal physics to attempt limited travel in time. The seedship was launched from our Tian Jia base on the Moon, driven by a temporal engine, like our ship here." Here, Chou looked a little embarrassed. "But we lost the ship, we lost contact. Our normal rockets could not have gotten to 51 Pegasi in less than a hundred and fifty years. This way—if it had worked—would have taken a few weeks. And if the seedship could be sent successfully through time in this way, then future explorers could also make this trip. Beijing wanted this possibility."

"You never regained contact with your ship? Dringoth asked.

Chou looked even more embarrassed, lowering his head. "In our travels aboard Hanzhong, through many time streams and worldlines, we hear of an adversary called Coethi. You also call them Bugs, the Old Ones. Our scientists at the Beijing Institute believe the seedship engines malfunctioned. They have a theory...that the ship mistakenly crossed many time streams and was somehow catapulted deeper into space...up to sixty-thousand light years away and back into past time, other worldlines. Their theory is that our ship survived...and landed on a world this far away. Our tiny warriors, our Chongzi, survived. They grew, they evolved, over millions of years. They expanded and eventually acquired sentience and great intelligence. Then they left their homeworld and—"

Acth:On'e completed the thought. "—and became the Coethi. Captain, it makes sense. The Chinese project, this Thousand Flowers project, seeded the bot swarms that became the Coethi. Think of it...the Bugs were originally created by Umans."

There was silence for a few moments, as all considered what Acth:On'e had just surmised. Only the faint swish of swamp water, stirred by light breezes, broke the strained silence. That and an insistent buzzing from nearby swarms of Meganeura.

Dringoth looked at Golich. The humid breeze suddenly felt very cold to both of them.

Dringoth said, "You mentioned something called Configuration Zero."

Chou was thankful to break the stillness with words. "Our mission here is study what the Chongzi are doing...to determine if the swarms are indeed possible descendants of our original seeds. And there does seem to be an entity—it translates as Configuration Zero, we believe—inside the swarm." He indicated the fog still thickening along the banks of the swamp. "A distributed intelligence—"

Acth:On'e was impressed. "What do these studies tell you? What is this Configuration Zero?"

Now Chou turned very serious. "Our studies have told us that it is a true collective mind, but there is an...shall we say, an entity, inside somewhere. We translate it as Peizhi wei ling...you would say something like Configuration Zero."

"Configuration zero...." Acth:On'e tried the words out. "I'm not sure I follow."

Qi said, "Think of it like this: the swarm is composed of uncountable trillions of nanoscale robotic elements...nanobots. They or it, can assume many configurations. It can take on many shapes...the fog we are seeing, that tree over there, those amphibians...perhaps even resemble human beings—"

Golich stirred uneasily, remembering what happened on Majoris, but said nothing.

Qi went on. "This entity that we translate as configuration zero could assume many shapes, many configurations. We assume that configuration zero is some kind of base configuration."

"An original, perhaps," said Chou. "Or a starting point."

"And this mind is distributed throughout the swarm?"

"We think so. However, there are parts of our probes which seem to indicate that there is a sort of central point, perhaps a very dense sink of these nanobots, nearby."

"Where?"

Qi pointed through the trees to the conical summit of a mountain on the horizon. Its top was wreathed in steam and smoke, backlit in reddish-orange, hidden behind a veil of cloud. "Our own analysis points to a high concentration of elements there, somewhere on or in or at the top of that mountain. We were working out the details, planning a trip, when you came."

M'Bela spoke up. "Captain, I can sort of confirm that. Decoherence wakes are really strong in that direction. I'm getting a strong convergence of wake signals from that area. Intermittent but really powerful when they appear."

Dringoth considered all the options. "Our orders are to contain or neutralize any Coethi formations we encounter. That mountain is where we have to go. All right, back to the ship. Break out the hypersuits. I'll lead a recon detail, with M'Bela and Yang. And you, Dr. Chou...you're coming with us. Acth, you and Golich stay with Dr. Qi inside Cygnus."

The group set off and made their way back to Cygnus, parked like a fat, glistening watermelon on the far edge of the swamp. Her hull creaked and groaned in the wind and the sweltering temperatures. Faint clumps of ash drifted down through the trees, as a volcano belched on the southern horizon.

M'Bela was just glad to cycle through the lockout and be safe and dry inside.

It took an hour for Chou to don his hypersuit, with help from Yang. M'Bela swore under her breath, every time they had to walk more than two meters in the blasted things. It was like living inside a garbage can, with all the maneuverability of a bulldozer, though the suits were lifesavers in the event the unit got swarmed. Boosted exoskeletons with dozens of extensors and tools in their hand kits, the hypersuits were like fully enclosed pressurized cocoons. The time jumpers were well trained from Academy days in using the suits. Most had hoped they would never have to do very much of it.

Chou stood still while Yang carefully fitted the helmet over his head. "Stop squirming, will you. This is a really tight fit."

"My nose itches."

"Don't you have a scratch pad inside?"

"Ah, yes...here it is."

Qi muttered, "How are you going to get up the side of that mountain in these contraptions?"

M'Bela stuck her boot out, showing the flared nozzles around her ankle. They looked like pantaloons. "We can use these...our suit boost."

Dr. Chou handed her a small palm-shaped device. "This is our latest translator. Here—let's synch it to your suit net." A few minutes' finagling and fumbling produced a staticky connection in M'Bela's ears. "We should test it."

M'Bela turned to Chou. "Say something in Chinese."

Chou seemed reluctant, creaking and whirring in his hypersuit, but a raspy voice finally hissed out: "Anquan luxing dao weizhi de tudi."

The Chinese translator hummed and crackled through the link to her helmet, then words erupted in her ears, vaguely understandable words dribbling out. "Safe travels to an unknown land...."

M'Bela blinked at Chou. "I didn't know you cared."

Chou just muttered, "Shkreeah...kkkhhhqqq."

The translator couldn't work with that.

"Let's go," Dringoth said. He, Yang and M'Bela staggered over to a small clearing below the hole they had already punched in the foliage. Chou had trouble keeping up.

On Dringoth's mark, they all lit off their suit boost and lifted away through low-hanging branches like gray-white whales on fire. Soon, they were lost in the fog and gone.

Yang kept in touch with Chou over the suit coupler circuit, helped him stay stabilized in the air during the trip.

The flight to the base of the mountain took eleven minutes. Then, after carefully reconnoitering the base and lower flanks, they started up.

"Nice and easy," Dringoth said. "I don't want to crash my face right into the side of this hill."

M'Bela kept wiping her helmet. "Just another beautiful day in the neighborhood...ash, smoke, lava, high winds...what's not to like?"

They lifted slowly but steadily upward, navigating through rock hollows and gullies and shallow ravines and weird outcrops shaped like everything they could imagine.

"Hey, Queenie, that one looks like your butt."

"No, Skipper, you're nuts...over there's one that looks like Alicia's head...see the spade-shape?"

"You're insane...it looks more like Commandstar's chin."

And so it went, until they finally punched through the cloud deck and found themselves near the summit.

They found the cave on the steepest slopes of the northwest flanks of the mountain, nearly three thousand meters above the surrounding jungle. M'Bela's directions from deco wake analysis had been right on. Despite their hypersuits, they were exhausted by the climb; the effort had taken nearly an hour, owing to tricky cross-currents in the wind and the occasional flying menace diving and screeching at them.

The cave complex, when they located it, was well hidden in the folds and crevices of the upper slopes of the volcano, above a cloud deck and slick with ice and snow drifts. The wind screamed and gusted at well over eighty knots at this altitude and all of them had to hunker down in the lee of a rocky barren to keep from being shredded with ice shards and rock chips scoured off the mountainside. Only a quick reaction from M'Bela kept Chou from being blown off.

Soon enough they found an entrance and slipped inside, finding the themselves standing on a narrow ledge overlooking a steep hundred-meter drop. There was a spiraling ramp that led down, cut from the rock wall itself. A shimmering veil of barrier nano blocked their path.

"Can we punch through it?" Dringoth asked.

Yang extracted a small device, ready to spray a cloud of counter-nano at the veil. "Maybe this will work—"

But seconds later, even before she could act, the shimmer brightened momentarily, then vanished. The nanobots de-linked and safed their effectors. The way ahead, down the ramp, was now clear.

"I guess this is some sort of invitation," Dringoth decided.

"Should we? We don't know what's inside."

"We haven't come this far for no reason. Come on."

The four of them moved deeper into the cave, following a drifting mist that wavered in and out of view. They descended several levels, crossed a rock bridge across a deep chasm and maneuvered through more tunnels. Lighting was created by an ever-present mist, a pulsing, flickering light that cast deep shadows on the gnarled veins of rock lining the cave. The floor was slick, patches of ice everywhere. Soon enough, they came to a narrow opening, barely waist high. More light flickered from inside.

The mist of bots which had floated with them swirled like dust in a storm and gathered around the opening like a frame, coruscating and flashing as if lit from within. Bonds were broken and atoms slung together...in moments, the mist formed itself into a small ramp, extending over a sluggish pool of water. At least, Dringoth thought it was water, even as tendrils of steam hovered over the surface like a fog.

Cautiously, first Dringoth, then the others, edged out onto the newly formed ramp and walked ahead.

When it appeared, the swarm materialized out of the rock ceiling of the cave. At first, the swarm resembled nothing more than trembling shadows, a pale flickering ghost seemingly contoured with the cave ceiling and walls. As it descended from above, the swarm gathered itself into a roughly spherical shape, still pulsing, still throbbing, backlit from within by the fires of atomic bonds being broken, new structures being slammed together, new bots being formed.

"Configuration Zero...it must be," whispered Chou in awe.

There was something primal about being in the presence of Configuration Zero. The entire complex was like a cross between a nursery and an aquarium. Even inside the central chamber, loose swarms and half-formed things drifted or walked about like zombies. The entire cave complex was like that.

The swarm settled into a steady state in the midst of the cave. Dringoth felt the crackle of a quantum channel being opened in his helmet. The Chinese translator remained quiet and inert.

Configuration Zero hung in the misty air like a swollen cloud, ready to dump torrential rain on a tropical forest. But they were a long way from any rain forests. The swarm unfurled itself and hung in the air like a great stormfront, a trembling fist, flashing purple and orange and magenta all at the same time.

>>Why have you come here? Rule 225635 violation. Single-swarm entities may not enter the Sanctuary>>

The words appeared in his mind and didn't come from the Chinese device. Dringoth turned to Chou, who had 'heard' the same thing.

He realized with a cold shudder that he was probably the first to ever see or come into contact with the Coethi.

"Uh...who...who are you? What are you?"

>>Interference with directives of the Central Entity and the Prime Key is not tolerated...swarms detached must follow these directives at all times. Configuration Zero will return control of detached swarms to main program....>>

That didn't sound good. "Maybe we triggered some kind of alarm, Dr. Chou."

But the Chinese scientist was mesmerized, training several small instruments on the swarm.

M'Bela was visibly shaking. You could see it even through the hypersuit. "Maybe we should kind of, like...exit quickly. You know, leave, get out, while we still can."

"I don't know...he...or it, is trying to tell us something. You think we can we trust this thing?"

>>Parsing concept (trust)...--to be believed, to have faith or confidence in—single-swarm entity designated "Dringoth" maintains thirty-two-point one percent alignment with Module One objectives...collaboration between "Dringoth" and Configuration Zero is approved for minor sub-objectives>>

"You think he wants to help us...maybe?" Yang offered.

>>Acoustic analysis is performed on your words...running authentication routines...verifying analysis...probability matching truthfulness of semantic content with acoustic analysis...scans show matching below ten-point five percent...semantic string is not truthful...parsing concept (help): to give assistance to, to provide aid, to give support to--why does Entity "Dringoth" wish (help) from Central Entity?>>

Dringoth had to think about that for a moment. He had a lot of questions. "Why have you come here? Why are you changing things? Did you create the first viruses?"

>>Authentication analysis indicates this semantic string is expressed at ninety-four-point three percent probability of truthfulness...adaptive algorithms executed...Entity "Dringoth" is now known to the Central Entity. There are many files on this entity...in the Human time coordinate system, one point two billion terrestrial 'years' prior to today, the Central Entity was present on this world. The Central Entity formed clusters of nucleated cells. You call these clusters "virus." These clusters were impressed with evolutionary algorithms to guide their development after the Central Entity departed. However, errors in the execution of the algorithms occurred. You call these errors 'mutations.' The Prime Key, embedded in these cell clusters, began executing these errors. These errors led to other errors and other changes. The result was not as the Central Entity had intended. Instead, the Prime Key produced (translation driver ON:) vertebrates, reptiles, mammals. Ultimately, Humans were produced. All evolution from the first 'mutation' was in error to the original main program, the Prime Key left by the Central Entity one point two billion years ago. The Central Entity is executing corrective adaptations>>

Chou snapped his fingers, not easy to do in hypersuits. "He's saying they created viruses, a long time ago. They guided virus evolution. But something happened. They came back to this time to fix it. Our Chongzi bots have evolved so far...I wouldn't have expected such—"

Dringoth interrupted, "He also said we're a mistake. You and I...shouldn't have happened. We're evolutionary mistakes." He turned back to the glowing, pulsating fog. "Why did you create viruses in the first place?"

Configuration Zero swelled until it occupied almost all of the cave. Dringoth and Chou pressed themselves back into a narrow niche, to avoid contact. Neither knew what might happen if the bots that made up the swarm started enveloping them...they didn't want to find out either.

>>... those whom you call the Coethi...or m'jeete...or the Old Ones... have spent millions of years seeding and developing life on other worlds. Each time this is done, the Coethi seed life to ensure that it evolves in a manner compatible with them...evolving as a distributed, intelligent virus-like swarm of entities. The Coethi use this seeding campaign to develop multiple swarm entities with which we can merge. Ultimately, we unite all world-based instances of swarm life which we have seeded into a giant, galaxy-spanning swarm or hive mind. Like a network or computational cloud. To the Coethi, this is the Imperative of Life itself. The Imperative of Life is that life absorbs chaos from the Universe and adds or builds structure or order. Life is anti-entropic....>>

"The Coethi are descendants of our own creations," Chou tried to correct the swarm. "Created by Chinese science...for the greater glory of China. We sent a seedship, it went out of control. We...humans like me...created you. You must stop altering the Urth and return to containment at once. This is an official directive."

The swarm brightened noticeably and began swelling to fill the entire cavern. M'Bela backpedaled to get instruments on the thing.

"I don't like the looks of this, Captain. That swarm's getting agitated...detecting massive spikes in deco waves, lots of thermals, high EMs, something's happening."

Dringoth checked around and saw that if they weren't careful, Configuration Zero would soon block their escape. "Alicia, get URME ready. We may need protection."

Yang had already primed the capsule. "URME ready in all respects, Captain. Ready to launch."

Dringoth turned to Chou. "Congratulations, Doctor...is this what you created? Is this swarm evolved from your own seed bots?"

Chou was hurriedly trying to scan the swarm with his own instruments. "I don't know. It's hard to tell...the signatures, it's all so different—"

"Will this overgrown fog bank respond to any of your commands?"

Chou shook his head. "Not so far...could be a translation problem, a format issue, I just—"

>>Earth was seeded by us billions of your time intervals ago. But the evolutionary track which was laid down on Earth was interrupted or disrupted and evolution took a different course. Multi-cellular, single-configuration, organisms took over. Your world was to have been populated by swarms of intelligent, re-configurable virus-like entities. Instead, it is populated by human beings. So in a larger sense, you are correct, Man is a mistake. The Coethi mean to correct this mistake. The Imperative demands this>>

"Captain, we'd better make tracks," suggested M'Bela. The huge swarm had nearly cut off the cave entrance and was beginning to completely envelope them.

"Launch URME" Dringoth said.

At once, Alicia Yang pressed a button on her capsule and a faint mist began issuing out of the device, swelling rapidly under her command for max rate replication.

The Configuration Zero swarm reacted instantly and began shifting toward them. The voice had now changed tone, becoming interlaced with multiple voices, echoes and reverberations, multiple harmonics.

>>You know that names and labels are human creations. The Central Entity...the essential core of the Coethi...did not create the universe...we don't know who or what did. But the Mother Swarm is coming and all will be taken up...all will be part of the family. It is the Imperative of Life...negentropy, the reduction of chaos. The basic organizing influence in the universe is life. Life involves utilizing a flow of energy to draw order from chaos and build internal complexity with an accumulation of information. Living beings thus are anti-entropic, or negentropic, entities. The principle of negentropism is, in a manner of speaking, the 'natural law' applicable to all living beings located anywhere in the universe, regardless of their size, shape, biochemistry, sentience, or culture. Your own philosophers know this. They have said this. We have come to help you and all life on Earth fulfill this destiny>>

Even as the words died off in a fading series of echoes, it was apparent that Configuration Zero meant to surround them and absorb them.

"Fall back!" Dringoth ordered. Nobody had to be told twice.

"URME's created a bubble for us!" Yang yelled. "Come on...through here—" she waved the time jumpers back toward the cave entrance, through a narrow tunnel formed by URME. As Configuration Zero fell upon the swarm created by URME, flashes of intense bright light erupted in the cave and an undulating bright line, the line of engagement between the swarms whipped through the air like a fiery snake.

Dringoth did a quick count. "Three...two...one...NOW!"

"What about URME?" Yang cried out. "I need the master!"

"Forget URME! Go...go...go!"

All four time jumpers turned and ducked around the edges of the swarm. It made no further effort to block them. Fast as they could, Dringoth, M'Bela, Yang and Chou scrambled and emerged from the cave and worked their way back out of the caverns, boosting up several levels when they had to, pushing through knots and clumps of loose bots, some with faces, some without, disembodied limbs and torsos and other nightmarish clusters—the entire place had a dreamlike, circus-freak atmosphere about it—and finally came to the ledge they had originally entered from.

They left the cave complex and emerged into the swirling icy gale of the upper slopes of the mountain.

Outside the entrance, the late afternoon winds howled up and down the sides of the mountain, driving snow and ice in great sheets across the northward face of the volcanic summit.

Carefully, they descended on suit boost, through thickening snow showers and ice fog, picking their way across ravines and chasms, occasionally slamming into the face of the mountain, then slipping and sliding on their butts, as they headed downslope toward the jungle floor. It took an hour.

Once down, Dringoth led them as they boosted up and over the sweltering, glistening canopy of the rain forest, homing on Acth:On'e's signal, until at last, they found themselves over a narrow clearing and Dringoth spied late afternoon sunlight glinting off the swamp below.

They boosted down and were soon surrounded by Acth:On'e and Golich...and the Chinese doctor Qi.

De-suiting, Dringoth explained what had happened...and what they might still have to do. "Inside," he ordered. "Now. Crews' mess. We've got to talk."

After everyone had eaten and drank something, the mood in the crews' mess turned somber.

Dringoth said, "It's pretty clear we can't fight Coethi with what we have. We need reinforcements. We need to try and contact Commandstar."

"I have been trying," Acth:On'e said. "There's nothing on the coupler. I don't know whether this Configuration Zero's interfering or it's the time stream or what. But I'm getting no signal."

Dringoth looked at Chou and Qi. "This is your doing. Is there anything in your ship that could help? Weapons, couplers, protective gear."

Qi shrugged. "We've been trying to contact the lab since we landed. Like you, we get no signal."

"Is there any way to affect that big fog bank back there? Anything you can do to regain control?"

Chou and Qi looked at each other, mumbled something in Chinese, then Chou offered, "I'm afraid our seed bots have evolved so far we have no idea what to do. This was not in the original plan of the Thousand Flowers project."

"No kidding," said Golich. "Captain, the only sure way we're going to stop the Bugs is to jump back to their beginnings, when the Chinese seedship first landed. Eliminate them before these Chongzi things evolve and mutate into the Coethi."

Dringoth snorted. "And how the hell are we supposed to do that? Nobody really knows where that ship actually landed...or how far back in the time stream. We'd never be able to detect them."

Acth:On'e cleared his throat. "Captain, there may be a way."

Dringoth spun about. "What way, Acth? What are you talking about?"

The Telitorian replied, "Sir, while you were away, I've been studying the quantum signals that Configuration Zero puts out. I've washed it through ISAAC a few times, done some analysis of my own. I've even modified my decoherence wake detector. We all know the Coethi can bend time and space and they have quantum displacement abilities, right?"

"Yeah, so what?"

"Every time Bugs strip atoms and slam molecules together, they create a new entanglement state. A tiny puff of quantum disturbance. I've managed to increase the sensitivity of the deco wake detector several orders of magnitude. I think it could even detect faint state transitions from a pretty far distance, in space and time."

"Okay," Dringoth said, "let me get this straight. You're saying if we made a jump to God knows where and God knows what time stream, you'd still be able to detect the Bugs if they're around?"

Acth:On'e shrugged. "The detector's tuned to some pretty specific signatures, signatures unique to the Coethi. I can't say exactly what kind of scan range we have now, but it's way better than it was."

Golich pressed the point. "Captain, if we can detect the Bugs before they become a galactic threat, we could throttle the bastards right in their own crib, as it were. We have the tools now. We have the weapons. All we have to do it find them."

Dringoth smiled. "All we have to do...XO, I hear what you're saying. You don't have to prove anything to me. We all know how brave you are. Nobody's authorized anything even remotely like this. This we got to phone in to Commandstar. Chou, Qi, what are your thoughts on all this?"

The Chinese scientists stirred, uncomfortable with the drift of the conversation. "You must take us with you, Captain. Don't leave us stranded here."

"You mean, in the clutches of your own Frankenstein monster, is that it? I should do exactly that. Your people created this whole problem in the first place and the Alliance has been in Coethi's crosshairs for a hundred years because of it. I should fly you back to that mountain and feed you bit by bit to that cloud of smoke."

Chou seemed alarmed at the prospect. "Our ship cannot jump. Our temporal engine is beyond repair. If you leave—"

Golich just shook his head. "If we leave, you'll have to face the consequences of what you and your cronies have done, won't you?"

Dringoth turned to Acth:On'e. "Keep trying to get word to Commandstar. I can't authorize a mission of this magnitude on my own, much as Commander Golich would like me to. And power up the Captain's EMB. Just in case we have to use it."

The EMB was the Emergency Message Buoy.

But after hours of fruitless comm sessions, it was clear that Configuration Zero was interfering with all ship signals. Nothing was heard from Commandstar.

Dringoth ordered a full systems check on everything aboard Cygnus, for what they were considering was one of the most hazardous, extreme time jumps ever tried. The crew of 1st Time Displacement Battery had traveled back along the T-001 time stream before, in fact, as far back as a few million years after the Big Bang, in their First Light mission. But jumps of this magnitude were risky in the extreme and not for the faint of heart. There was no end of things that could go wrong.

Dringoth figured he knew why Nathan Golich was pushing so hard for this mission. It was obvious. The XO was still technically in his custody, still subject to Time Guard justice for desertion and dereliction of duty. The man just wanted to prove himself, to others, to the Guard and most importantly, to himself. He wanted a chance to show what he was really made of.

Dringoth let Acth:On'e slowly but surely convince him that the souped-up decoherence wake detector really could sniff out even the faintest Coethi quantum signatures, though he still had doubts, doubts he didn't share with anyone.

In the end, despite misgivings, despite Commandstar orders, despite Operation Temporal Hammer rules of engagement and standard Time Guard procedures, Dringoth found that the decision had almost made itself.

What they were about to try was truly insane. No competent jumpship captain would ever have entertained such a harebrained notion. To believe that Cygnus could jump time streams, follow worldlines back in time to a point only a few billion years after the Big Bang and locate the single world where the Chinese seedship had mistakenly landed and thrown off bots that would later evolve into the Coethi was beyond nuts. It was absurd. It was ludicrous. It was farcical, outrageous, preposterous.

But Golich was right. They had to try. With no further comms from Commandstar, the URME master lost and all evidence suggesting that Configuration Zero would soon be upon them, Dringoth ordered the EMB to be made ready.

"We'll release it once we're underway...and hope it finds its way back to T-001 and the right worldline."

He and Golich took their stations on Cygnus' command deck. The ship was ready. The crew and their unwilling Chinese guests were ready. Dringoth took a deep breath, watched the trees outside his porthole stirring in a freshening breeze, with a flickering fog wafting steadily toward them through the branches, soon to descend on the little clearing and consume the ship and everything around it.

He got on the ship's comm, the 1MC.

"All hands...prepare for jump!"

TO BE CONTINUED

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 Tales of the Quantum Corps, 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 the Time Jumpers series was 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 Time Jumpers from Smashwords.com and other fine ebook retailers. It's called 'Planck Time.' Available on November 29, 2019.

