Free Nano by Sam Fisher

floor. Tears streamed down his cheeks, his sobs muffled by the carpet.
    He stayed in this position for at least a minute before a biting fear shot through him as he realised just how vulnerable he was, how much he wanted to survive, how much he did not want to end up like any of these people around him.

17
    Base One, Tintara Island, 8.03 am local time
    The whole team was gathered in the conference room. A large flat screen dominated one wall. It was lit up now with sparkling metal, flashes of silver and orange. The sound from the speakers was almost deafening. Mark Harrison, the leader of E-Force, was standing in front of the screen. To his left sat Maiko Buchanan, Stephanie Jacobs and Peter Sherringham, and to his right the two newest members of the team, Chloe Gavoine and Dimitri Godska.
    Chloe had been a pilot with the French Air Force and a member of a very rare breed: a female French Foreign Legionnaire. She was tall, a fraction under 1.8 metres, big-boned and super-fit, with very short brown hair, a long, shapely nose, high cheekbones and large brown eyes. When one of the original members of E-Force, Josh Thompson, had resigned six months ago, Chloe had been recruited to replace him.
    Dimitri Godska, a Ukrainian pilot, had been with E-Force from the beginning as part of one of the backup teams. In his civilian life he had been an experienced surgeon. Only 168 centimetres, he was slender but very muscular. He had long black hair in a ponytail, jet-black eyes and a strong jaw. He always seemed to have a five o’clock shadow, whatever the time of day. To his left, in the aisle, seated in his electric wheelchair, was Tom Erickson, E-Force’s resident computer genius.
    â€˜Well, this is the situation at 8.01 PST, 47 minutes into the operation to save Thor 1 ,’ Mark said. He clicked a remote in his right hand and the image on the wall froze. It showed the Aon Tower in Downtown LA and a cluster of aircraft close to the building, climbing vertically. It was the E-Force team struggling to rescue the three survivors aboard Thor 1 . The images had been taken by BigEye 4 over California, one of the team’s 32 satellites in geosynchronous orbit.
    â€˜You can see the nanonet is going into a cascade rip here.’ Mark moved the remote to produce a coloured circle on the frozen image, directly over the web of nanothreads. ‘Tom, you’ve done an analysis, yeah?’
    Tom’s wheelchair whirred as he came to the front of the conference room, stopping the opposite side of the huge screen from Mark. ‘At this point, just as the major rip begins, the nanonet is under a strain equivalent to 1.4 3 105 newtons per square metre,’ Tom said.
    Pete Sherringham whistled.
    â€˜Yeah, some serious shit,’ Tom went on.
    â€˜Can we improve the net’s strength for future operations?’ Mark asked. ‘We almost failed –’
    A loud screech of a siren filled the room. They knew immediately what it meant. Mark turned and they all filed out.
    Cyber Control was only 20 metres away along a wide corridor. ‘What’s happening?’ Mark said as he strode into the room ahead of the others.
    Cyber Control was a vast, circular space. Around the edges stood computer modules. Technicians in boiler suits sat at consoles, some staring at holographic displays floating above the controls, while others tapped at virtual keyboards – simply light projections on flat surfaces. The rear wall was taken up with a screen 15 metres long by 10 high.
    â€˜Projecting on screen now, sir,’ one of the techs said. ‘This is just in from BigEye 17 over the Persian Gulf.’
    The screen was filled completely with orange. But then some movement could be made out: an image from a camera high over the desert sweeping across the sand. The angle changed and in the centre of the screen they could all see a distant skyline – towers glistening in the morning sun, a backdrop of unblemished