The Swarm Read Free Page B

of the blast would slam you back against the hull of the ship. Your legs would break. Think ugly, compound fractures.”
    â€œThat’s easy to fix,” said Rimas. “We program the Nan-Ooze to release all but one heel or all but one toe of the boot.”
    â€œFair enough,” said Kaufman, “but you’re still going to get your ass slammed against the ship like a rag doll. You might not break your legs, but you’re bound to break something. And anyway there are other problems. Steel would add a lot of mass. It would be hard to maneuver. Plus it would occupy one of your hands. Now you’re one-handed.”
    â€œBeats getting a doily to the chest,” said Sham.
    â€œWhat if the front of the shield were covered in a layer of Nan-Ooze?” Mazer said. “It could surround and smother the doily on impact, before it exploded.”
    â€œI’ve never seen Nan-Ooze move that fast,” said Rimas. “The doily would detonate before the Nan-Ooze surrounded it.”
    â€œMaybe the Nan-Ooze doesn’t have to move at all,” said Mazer. “It’s nanotech in a weightless environment. We can make it as thick as necessary, say, fifteen centimeters to give the projectile a deep enough surface to embed itself. And we control the consistency of the Nan-Ooze as well, soft enough so that the doily punches into it and yet not so soft that the Nan-Ooze splatters.”
    â€œLike lard,” said Rimas.
    â€œThe doily gets completely submerged before it detonates,” said Mazer. “It would dampen the explosion, take the brunt of the blast. It might even be enough to keep you on your feet.”
    â€œAnd even if the Nan-Ooze disperses violently,” said Sham, “it can self-propel and return to the shield.”
    â€œI still can’t shake the problem that now I’m one-handed,” said Kaufman. “I’ve got this unwieldy thing strapped to me, impeding my movements.”
    Mazer shrugged. “So maybe the Nan-Ooze doesn’t cover a shield. Or maybe it’s not even Nan-Ooze. But the idea of nanotech remains. So we get a semipermeable cloud of nanobots that loosely form a shield. Marines can see through it like thin haze. But as a doily approaches, the haze forms into a shield to enfold the doily and encase it, to make it nothing but a harmless thud against their bodies.”
    â€œSo the shield’s not strapped to me?” Kaufman asked.
    â€œNo,” said Mazer. “It’s a hovering cloud of nanobots. They only have to be flight-capable in zero atmosphere and zero G. They could hold themselves in place relative to each other by magnetics.”
    He flipped on the holotable, and began drawing up what he had in mind. It was a crude sketch—Mazer was no artist—but his team understood the basic design. They discussed it for several hours, tweaking the design as they went along until they had a concept that felt practical and addressed all their concerns. By then Shambhani had replaced Mazer’s original sketch with a detailed model.
    â€œYou know, this actually might work,” said Shambhani.
    â€œI have no idea how to build it,” said Rimas. “I’m no nano-engineer. But the idea seems solid. If nothing else, it gives the development guys a starting place. This could save a lot of lives.”
    â€œAgreed,” said Mazer. “Good work. I’ll post the design on the forum and see what everyone thinks.”
    The forum was an online community Mazer had created on the IF’s intranet. Junior officers from all over the solar system gathered there to share tactics, tech ideas, and new intel on the enemy, including academic papers and whatever the scientific community was publishing about the Formics.
    When the forum launched two years ago, Mazer had assumed he would get a few dozen participants at most. Now the site had over two thousand daily users.
    Mazer waited until he was in the