Nanotroopers Episode 7: Hong Chui

Nanotroopers

  Episode 7: Hong Chui

  Copyright 2016 Philip Bosshardt

  A few words about this series….

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Episode #TitleApproximate Upload Date

  1‘Atomgrabbers’1-14-16

  2‘Nog School’2-8-16

  3‘Deeno and Mighty Mite’2-29-16

  4‘ANAD’3-21-16

  5‘Table Top Mountain’4-11-16

  6‘I, Lieutenant John Winger…’5-2-16

  7‘Hong Chui’5-23-16

  8‘Doc Frost’6-13-16

  9‘Demonios of Via Verde’7-5-16

  10‘The Big Bang’7-25-16

  11‘Engebbe’8-15-16

  12‘The Symbiosis Project’9-5-16

  13‘Small is All!’9-26-16

  14‘’The HNRIV Factor’10-17-16

  15‘A Black Hole’11-7-16

  16‘ANAD on Ice’11-29-16

  17‘Lions Rock’12-19-16

  18‘Geoplanes’1-9-17

  19‘Mount Kipwezi’1-30-17

  20‘Doc II’2-20-17

  21‘Paryang Monastery’3-13-17

  22‘Epilogue’4-3-17

  Chapter 1

  “Escape from Kipwezi”

  Mount Kipwezi, Kenya

  November 8, 2048

  19:30 hours

  The hot waves of rf boomed around the cavern, loosening spouts of rock and ice, which shattered and cascaded down from the ceilings and walls. Reaves, Barnes, Winger and the rest of the Detachment ducked, covering themselves as rubble rained down on them.

  Ahead, the Symborg swarm had been shredded, disintegrated. Loose bots twinkled in the dust, while Barnes pumped another few rounds of HERF fire into their enemy.

  “Fallback!” Winger yelled over the crewnet. He stabbed a preset button on his wristpad: Romeo Tango Bravo. “Fallback to the entrance!”

  Return to Base. The signal went out to the whole Detachment.

  Behind them, the HERF rounds had shredded the swarms that had started to engulf them. Winger felt for his shoulder capsule. The port felt loose; he wasn’t sure whether ANAD had ever exited the capsule.

  No time to worry about that now.

  Winger ducked and crawled, as he backtracked out of the cavern, feeling with his feet and hands to stay on course, back up the shallow decline they had followed in. They passed steaming pools of water, slick ice patches, all the while working their way back out the way they had come in.

  “Jesus H. Christ!’ muttered Nguyen, as he whirled around with his magpulse carbine, ready to let loose on anything that moved. “Look at that!”

  The pools and rock landings were thick with half-formed angel swarms, some legless, some without arms. Disembodied heads and parts of heads drifted like phantasmagoric nightmares through the dust.

  “That’s me!” cried out D’Nunzio. They passed a small knot of swarm globs, all of them bearing an uncanny resemblance to Deeno, all of them like half-eaten funhouse mirror distortions of the real thing.

  Deeno pumped a few rounds into the cloud and the swarms were quickly shattered and dispersed.

  Barnes shuddered, stumbling right behind her fellow troopers. “Gives me the creeps…what the hell is this place?”

  “A bad dream,” decided Nguyen, as he crept alongside.

  Detachment Alpha moved up and up, toward the cave entrance, feeling their way along, following a drifting mist of bots that wavered in and out of view. They ascended several levels, re-crossed the rock bridge across a deep chasm and maneuvered through more tunnels. Lighting was still created by a faint 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 the narrow opening, barely waist high.

  “Hold your fire!” Winger commanded. “Get your boost going! We’ll drop back to the ground that way!”

  “Look!” a voice cried out. More swarms had followed them. As the light flickered and wavered, Winger saw the swarms were still angels, this time replicas of UNSAC himself, Jiang Hao Bei…dozens of them, some half-finished, some nearly complete. It was like staring back into an infinity of mirrors.

  Winger wanted to unleash a barrage from his HERF rifle and scatter the bugs to hell and back but he resisted the impulse. Another round might well seal the cave and trap some of his own troopers.

  “Light off!” he yelled.

  One by one, the troopers of Detachment Alpha lit off their suit thrusters and leaped out into the air, flaring in the darkness as their boost lowered them several thousand meters, through fog and smoke, down to the ground below.

  Winger went last. “Sure hope ANAD’s okay”, he muttered to himself. Truth was, he wasn’t even sure the little trooper will still in containment, or that he was even functional. Somehow, Symborg had been able to command the capsule port open. There was no telling what else he might have done to ANAD.

  Winger stabbed a button on his wristpad and took a leap into the air. It was cold and windy but the boost guided him unerringly to the ground. Strong hands steadied him as he landed.

  The troopers gathered around, a few of them eyeing the blood-red glow from the top of Kipwezi uneasily.

  “What’s next, Skipper?”

  “Okay, here’s the deal. We’re going to recon the perimeter of this big rock for the next few hours. Out to one kilometer radius from the foot of the mountain. We’ve still got QPODs to plant. Q2 wants intel on Symborg, where he goes and what he does. Target coordinates for planting Q-PODs are about halfway around, the other side of the mountain. Kipwezi’s an active volcano…ya’ll can see that for yourselves, so watch your step. The geos say she won’t blow anytime in the next forty-eight hours, but she burps a lot…kind of like you guys at the canteen. So we keep Superfly up and keep sniffing, telltale gases, seismic shudders, that sort of thing. Procedure in a big blow is this: light off your suit boost and punch in ESCAPE 3…that’s been pre-programmed to lift you out of here in a hurry. Just make sure you’re configured for quick launch at all times. Any questions?”

  There were none.

  The Detachment went about their task with grim efficiency, always keeping a close eye on Kipwezi and any swarms that might be gathering. D’Nunzio and Reaves tested the environment every few minutes; nothing could be trusted when a bush, a rock, a dead jackal carcass could be a cloud of bugs ginned up to resemble normal stuff. But they got nothing back…no thermals indicating atomic bonds breaking, no electromagnetic signatures, no acoustics. Only Kipwezi rumbling and spewing ash overhead kept them on their toes.

  “I’m wondering where our guys are?” asked Mighty Mite Barnes, of no one in particular. They had planted two of the three QPOD devices—the things looked for quantum effects indicative of large ANAD-style swarms. “Glance, Webb, all those guys. I saw angels of ‘em up in that cave…but nothing I’d trust in bed.” />
  D’Nunzio was measuring distance to the installation point for the third QPOD. Overhead, they could hear the faint chittering of Superfly, sniffing the air for anything approaching.

  “Who knows? They may have already been assimilated…or whatever you want to call it. This whole place gives me the creeps. Here, help me with this gadget—“

  They placed the final QPOD and checked the instrument. An Nguyen bent down to make some adjustments, then uttered a hmmmm that caught everyone’s attention.

  “What’s up, Buddha? Thing not working right?”

  Nguyen fiddled with the box-shaped device for a moment. “No, I think it is…it’s showing a spike in decoherence wakes right now. And it’s not in test mode.”

  Winger came up. “Got something, trooper?”

  Nguyen shrugged. “I don’t know, sir . I dropped QPOD 3 out of test mode, but it’s still showing deco activity close by…something’s snapping spacetime around here like a wet rag.”

  Winger looked up at the summit of Kipwezi. It hadn’t changed. The wreath of fog still glowed crimson and amber, backlit from within by the active caldera of the volcano. Plumes of smoke vented into the dark night sky.

  “Maybe Symborg’s still around,” he surmised.

  Nguyen fiddled with the QPOD. “Whatever this source is, it seems to be moving, shifting. Best I can make out, the source is diffuse but the centroid is on an easterly heading, roughly zero eight degrees—that way—“ he pointed off toward the rolling hills of the Serengeti plain, now dark but for the sporadic lights of villages and cooking fires. The first purple of dawn was already smudging the horizon.

  Winger gave that some thought. “It could be Symborg—“

  It was Tsukota, the Detachment’s quantum engineer rating, who had an idea. “Lieutenant, there’s a spare QPOD back in the lifter. If Buddha could get it powered up and calibrated, we could follow this source.”

  Winger agreed. “Do it. Detachment, fall back to the lifter…on the double!”

  They were onboard in a matter of minutes. Winger told Menendez, the lifter jockey from Balzano, Italy, to get airborne and wait for directions.

  “We’ve got a trace reading on one of the QPODs and we’re going to follow it,” he explained.

  Menendez piloted the lifter back toward the reddish glow of Kipwezi.

  “Got it!” Nguyen exulted, pumping a fist in the air. “Still pretty diffuse, but it has to be the same source.”

  “Heading?”

  Nguyen fiddled with the device, aiming its detector element in different directions. “I’d say still east…maybe about two thousand meters altitude…anything visual?”

  Winger looked out the portholes as did other troopers. A ring of crimson smoke still circled the summit of the volcano. Other than a light mist, which seemed to be only a light mist, the sky seemed clear.

  “Nothing.”

  Menendez yelled back from the cockpit. “What heading, Lieutenant?”

  “East. Buddha’ll give you any changes. For now…we follow. If it is Symborg, maybe he’ll lead us to something important. I’ll call this in to Major Kraft, make sure he knows what we’re up to.” Winger got on the encrypted satlink and made the connection.

  They cruised on an easterly heading for many minutes.

  “Feet wet, Skipper,” Menendez announced.

  Below them, the surf line of the Indian Ocean coast passed by. They headed out over the ocean. Menendez eyed their fuel gauge a bit uneasily.

  Reaves was seated next to Winger in her webseat. “Lieutenant, what happened with ANAD back there in that cave? You never launched…we could’ve battered those bugs good with ANAD properly configged.”

  Winger felt absent-mindedly for the shoulder capsule. “Somehow, ANAD started coming out…this port was coming open and I never commanded anything. I wasn’t sure I could control him…I’d better see if he’s still inside. ANAD, Base to ANAD…do you copy? Base to ANAD, respond and report status….”

  Winger blinked and cocked his head, as Doc Frost had taught him, to make sure the coupler was engaged.

  Presently, a staticky fritz came back.

  ***ANAD enabled…reporting ready in all respects…Base, what took you so long? I thought this link was dead***

  Winger gave his troopers a smile. “It’s him. ANAD, all systems functioning normally? Everything in the green?”

  ***All copacetic, Base…there was a new link I detected…ANAD assumed it was a tactical response to the situation…detected new command string on this link***

  That made Winger sit up. “A new link? I never enabled a new link. What kind of command string?”